Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Three years after October 7, evidence mounts that Israel had advance knowledge of attacks
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received repeated, detailed warnings about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, according to multiple reports published in Israeli and American media outlets over the past month.
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Based on Andre Damon's reporting in the WSWS — principally the December 2, 2023 perspective "Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack" and in this article "Three years after October 7, evidence mounts that Israel had advance knowledge of attacks"
— here are the claims indicating Israeli foreknowledge, with the denials and subsequent confirmations noted (Assisted with Socialism AI):
Claims of Israeli foreknowledge
1. The "Jericho Wall" battle plan. Israel's intelligence services held Hamas's approximately 40-page operational plan, code-named "Jericho Wall," for more than a year before the attack. The document "meticulously described the attack method, mirroring the actual events" — the rocket barrage, drones to knock out security cameras and automated machine guns, and gunmen entering by paraglider, motorcycle, and on foot. Hamas "followed the blueprint with shocking precision."
2. The July 2023 training exercise. A veteran analyst in Unit 8200 (the army's signals intelligence unit) warned in emails that Hamas had held an intensive, day-long exercise three months before the attack that rehearsed the plan — including a dry run of shooting down aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base. A colonel in the Gaza Division replied, "In short, let's wait patiently"; the analyst wrote back, "It is a plan designed to start a war."
3. The Emirati warning. Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed telephoned Netanyahu about a week and a half before the attack to warn him of a major Hamas move, and "urged Netanyahu to take the situation seriously." Netanyahu "reacted with relative calm." According to Haaretz, none of the heads of the army, Mossad, or Shin Bet knew of bin Zayed's warning.
4. The Egyptian warnings. Egypt's intelligence chief Abbas Kamel flew to Israel on September 26, 2023 — 11 days before the attack — with the message, "If you don't change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces." The Wall Street Journal reported that the Egyptians "continued to warn Israel up until 48 hours before the attack."
5. The Sinwar "earthquake" threat. Palestinian mediator Sufian Abu Zaida reported that Hamas's Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar dictated a message for Israel on September 14, 2023: "There will be an earthquake in the negotiations, and the Israelis should prepare to empty their prisons." Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu on the threat the next day.
6. The military stand-down. Four days after the attack, Seymour Hersh reported that, with Netanyahu's approval, two of the three army battalions guarding the Gaza border (about 1,600 soldiers) were shifted to the Sukkot festival near the West Bank, leaving only 800 soldiers to guard the 51-kilometer border. Separately, Unit 8200 was put off duty on weekends — meaning the unit that had detected the training exercise was not operational on the Saturday of the attack.
7. The Shin Bet's own conclusion. The Shin Bet's investigation, concluded in March 2025, found the massacre could have been prevented had the agency acted differently, and faulted a policy of "quiet" in Gaza that let Hamas build up its forces. A state ombudsman's report cited Netanyahu's order to keep Hamas in power as "an effective, restrained, and restraining governing authority."
Denied, then later confirmed:
The bin Zayed warning — denied, then effectively confirmed. Netanyahu's office called the Haaretz report an "absolute lie" on September 8, 2026. But the Associated Press then reported that Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi on September 27 and asked bin Zayed to deny the warning — a trip Netanyahu confirmed, even as he denied the request. That same week he sued Haaretz and other Israeli outlets for defamation, calling their reports "blood libels." The secret trip to persuade the very source to retract is itself confirmation that the warning was real.
The "Jericho Wall" plan — dismissed, then confirmed. Israeli military and intelligence officials initially dismissed the plan as "aspirational," claiming it was too difficult for Hamas to carry out. This dismissal functioned as a denial of the plan's significance. The October 7 attack then confirmed the plan's accuracy in detail — as Damon put it, "there were no dots to connect," because Israel possessed the entire operational plan and had witnessed the rehearsal for it.
Damon's central conclusion, restated in today's article, is that these revelations substantiate the WSWS's December 2023 assessment: Israeli officials "made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack," as part of a conspiracy "aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza."
2. SEP (Canada) Statement of Principles
Delegates to the Socialist Equality Party Canada’s founding congress held in Montreal from August 22 to 24 unanimously adopted a Statement of Principles summarized here with the assistance of Socialism AI:
The World Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
1. The SEP/PES is the Canadian section of the ICFI (founded by Trotsky, 1938); its principles embody the lessons of the 20th-century revolutionary epoch, which opened with WWI and the 1917 October Revolution.
2. The Fourth International arose from Trotsky's struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR; the substitution of nationalism for internationalism led to the USSR's 1991 dissolution.
3. The socialist revolution is international in scope (permanent revolution), forged against "socialism in one country"; national orientation must flow from world orientation.
4. Revolutionary struggles, wherever they break out, inevitably assume global dimensions and can only be completed on the world arena.
5. Canadian workers' strategy must proceed from world conditions; socialism in Canada requires the united struggle of Canadian, US, and Mexican workers for the United Socialist States of North America.
6. Canadian workers must make North American class unity a conscious strategy, reviving shared traditions of struggle; closest SEP (Canada)–SEP (US) collaboration under the ICFI is required.
7. The SEP expresses the interests of the working class, the decisive international revolutionary force; its central task is winning workers to international socialism and the conquest of power.The Crisis of Capitalism
8. Capitalism and imperialism are the fundamental cause of modern poverty, exploitation, and violence; the 20th century's wars and genocides indict the system.
9. Today's productive forces could abolish poverty, yet working-class conditions deteriorate and culture is in crisis—the contradiction stems from private ownership and rival nation-states.
10. AI, produced by collective human labor, has progressive potential but under capitalism is turned to exploitation, job-slashing, surveillance, and war; it must be wrested from the capitalist class.
11. COVID-19 showed the profit system is incompatible with safeguarding lives; "profits before lives" policies killed tens of millions while billionaires' wealth soared.
12. The climate crisis results not from overpopulation or technology but from their misuse by an obsolete social order; only socialist reorganization of the world economy can prevent civilizational collapse.
13. Capitalism is beyond reform; key resources must be transferred to society under democratic workers' control, replacing the law of value with democratic economic planning.Imperialism and War
14. Capitalism remains rooted in the nation-state system; the imperialist drive for dominance leads inevitably to war, now threatening nuclear annihilation.
15. Since the USSR's dissolution, US-led imperialist wars have expanded; the Ukraine and Iran wars mark stages of a third world war, stoppable only by the international working class.
16. Canada is a second-rank imperialist power, historically allied with Britain then the US; its "peacekeeping" image was always a lie, and it has joined every US war of aggression.
17. The SEP demands withdrawal of all Canadian troops, scrapping of NATO, Five Eyes, NORAD, and the Canada-US military partnership, and repudiates calls for a more "independent" Canadian military.
18. The SEP supports mass anti-war protest but rejects illusions in reforming governments; it adopts the 2016 ICFI principles for an anti-capitalist, independent, international anti-war movement.The Capitalist State and Parliamentarism
19. There is no parliamentary road to socialism; the state is an instrument of class rule, and the multi-party system is a mechanism of capitalist domination.
20. The Canadian bourgeoisie has no democratic-revolutionary tradition ("peace, order and good government"); Confederation was a business deal, and democratic rights have been eviscerated amid a turn to authoritarianism.Democracy and the Fight for Workers' Power
21. There is no democracy without socialism; fascism is capitalist counter-revolution, and "popular front" alliances paved the way for fascism by suppressing workers' struggles.
22. Workers' power requires new organs of participatory democracy—a workers' government—and the abolition of the monarchy, Senate, standing army, police, and security apparatus.The Political Independence of the Working Class
23. The working class must break from national reformism (the NDP), the union bureaucracy, and "left" nationalism; the NDP has always been a capitalist party, and "take back the party" efforts (Corbyn, Syriza) are mechanisms of disarming workers.
24. The corporatist unions enforce capital's monopoly over politics, suppress the class struggle, and support capitalist parties through "lesser-evilism" and nationalism.
25. Canadian and Quebec nationalism are ideological twins serving the same class function—obscuring the imperialist character of the bourgeoisie and dividing workers.Against Opportunism
26. The SEP opposes opportunism, which sacrifices long-term class interests for short-term gains and is invariably an adaptation to the national milieu.
27. Opportunism has socio-economic roots in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois pressure on the workers' movement (Bernstein, Stalin, Pablo/Mandel, the WRP); fighting it is the highest point of the fight for Marxism.Socialist Consciousness and the Crisis of Leadership
28. Socialist consciousness does not develop spontaneously; it must be introduced by the revolutionary party (Lenin's What Is To Be Done?); trade unionism is the "bourgeois consciousness" of the working class.
29. Socialism requires building the Fourth International; capitalism survived the 20th century because of the insufficiency of the workers' leadership, not immature objective conditions.
30. Capitalism exists today because of the betrayals of the social-democratic, Stalinist, and trade-union organizations—a "crisis of the leadership of the proletariat" (Trotsky).Marxist Theory and the Working Class
31. The SEP bases itself on dialectical materialism—the primacy of matter over consciousness and the understanding of reality as a complex of processes.
32. The SEP develops scientific understanding within the working class and rejects individual violence as a substitute for the collective mass struggle.
33. The SEP upholds the principle of telling the working class the truth; the program must express objective tasks, not the backwardness of the workers (Trotsky).The Working-Class Rebellion Against the Trade Unions and the Struggle for Rank-and-File Committees
34. The upsurge of workers' struggles takes the form of rebellion against the nationalist, pro-corporate unions, rooted in the global unification of production.
35. A vast gulf separates privileged union bureaucrats from workers; unions have collaborated in destroying industry, enforcing speedup, and exposing workers to COVID.
36. The SEP fights for rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatuses, built as embryonic organs of workers' power, organized through the IWA-RFC.Oppose Quebec Indépendantiste Nationalism and the Canadian Federal State
37. The SEP opposes Quebec separatism, which serves the Quebec bourgeoisie and upper-middle class; Québec Solidaire's function is to revive indépendantiste nationalism.
38. Opposition to separatism does not imply support for the federal state; workers must reject all nationalism and unite for workers' power.
39. The SEP opposes all language-based privileges and chauvinism, defending French-language minority rights while opposing Quebec's chauvinist language laws.For the United Socialist States of North America
40. Continental economic unification is an objective necessity, but only the united revolutionary struggle of North American workers can realize it as the United Socialist States of North America.
41. The SEP rejects both protectionism ("Team Canada") and "free trade" as strategies to augment capital's power, fighting instead for social ownership and a planned global economy.For the Rights of the First Nations, Inuit and Metis Peoples
42. Indigenous peoples' social position indicts Canadian capitalism; "reconciliation" is a sham, and the "white-settler colonial state" characterization deflects blame from capitalism and divides the working class.For the Defense of Immigrants, Refugees and "Temporary Foreign Workers"
43. The SEP opposes the entire "border protection" framework, rejects the classification of any human being as "illegal," and upholds the unconditional right of workers to live and work wherever they choose.Class Unity Versus Identity Politics
44. The SEP exposes identity politics as reactionary, opposes "multiculturalism" and "affirmative action," and fights for full equality and the abolition of all discrimination within the struggle for socialism.Democratic Centralism
45. The SEP is organized on democratic centralism—fullest democracy in formulating policy, strictest discipline in implementing democratically reached decisions.Class Consciousness, Culture and the World Socialist Web Site
46. The fight for socialism demands raising the workers' movement to the highest theoretical and cultural level; the WSWS and Socialism AI are the SEP's key instruments for developing socialist consciousness.Revolutionary Strategy and Transitional Demands
47. The SEP's aim is the overthrow of capitalism, guided by Trotsky's Transitional Program to bridge present demands and the socialist revolution.
48. Transitional demands include universal employment, wage indexation, shorter hours, free healthcare and education, housing, workplace democratization, progressive taxation, and public ownership under workers' control.
49. Transitional demands are not an à la carte menu; they must form part of the broader struggle for socialist consciousness, with the destination never kept secret.The Working Class and the Socialist Revolution
50. The SEP's work rests on confidence in the revolutionary role of the working class; the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself (Engels).
As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, no prominent Democratic politician—including “progressives” such as Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—has made a public statement on Freeman’s case, and no labor union has issued a statement of support. The Democratic Party helped construct and fund the deportation machine, and the union apparatuses, integrated into the state and the corporations, function to contain and demobilize the opposition that Freeman’s stand has inspired.
[Will] Lehman’s statement concludes with a call for the independent mobilization of the working class: “I call on UAW members and workers everywhere to come to Chloe Freeman’s defense. Healthcare workers at Trinity Health and hospitals everywhere should form rank-and-file committees to protect their patients and coworkers from ICE. Autoworkers, nurses and all workers must unite across every workplace to defend all immigrants and stop the deportations and ICE raids. Defend Chloe Freeman. Drop the charges now!”
Workers can contribute to Freeman’s defense fund here.
4. Eight Alawite workers massacred in armed attack in Syria
Eight people were killed on the evening of Wednesday, September 30, when gunmen attacked a bus carrying engineers and workers home from work in Syria’s Homs province. The victims were reportedly Arab Alawites from the villages of Fahel, Shaniyeh and Mahfoura in the western countryside of Homs.
According to Syria’s official news agency SANA and AFP, the attack took place as the vehicle belonging to the Al-Matin company was crossing the Masyaf Bridge. One of the wounded died the following day. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), masked gunmen disguised as security personnel stopped the vehicle, checked the passengers’ identity cards and then opened fire. That the killings followed an ID check points to the sectarian character of the attack.
Violence against minorities, including the Alawites, has not abated under the regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa. He is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni Islamist organization with roots in Al Qaeda that came to power when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December 2024.
5. UK North Sea offshore workers vote to strike against Apache
Offshore workers in the North Sea have voted for strike action in a major pay dispute with US-based oil and gas giant, Apache.
Unite has yet to announce a strike date after a mandate it described as “emphatic” by its 160 members in a ballot that closed on October 1. It stated in an October 5 press release that strike action “could begin this month”.
Workers including electrical experts, production technicians and radio operators rejected the company’s “final offer” of just 4 percent. APA Corporation, Apache’s US parent, reported $1.4 billion in after-tax profits and $9.2 billion in revenue last year. Unite says the 4 percent offer represents a real-terms cut for many workers. General Secretary Sharon Graham has denounced Apache for “raking in eye-watering profits” and treating highly skilled workers with contempt.
6. US makes bizarre claims of Iranian plot against UK’s RAF Fairford base
Summary of Robert Stevens' article produced by Socialism AI:
The article dismantles the Trump administration's claim that Iran was plotting a drone attack on RAF Fairford. Its central points are:
The claim is implausible on its face. The US alleges the supposed plot was "modeled on Operation Spiderweb" — Ukraine's June 2025 strike on Russian airbases deep inside Russia. But that operation took over 18 months of planning, used 117 drones smuggled in on lorries, and struck across a shared border. The US-Israeli war on Iran began barely seven months ago, and Iran has no shared border with Britain and no direct military involvement there. Repeating such an operation would be, as the article puts it, "impossible."
The arrests themselves undermine the narrative. The five men arrested on September 27 — all Britons from London in their twenties — were released on bail the next day, despite police powers to hold terror suspects for 14 days without charge. No explosives were found; only "a quantity of petrol." One of the five even called the police to the scene himself. A former head of the UK's National Counter Terrorism Security Office told Al Jazeera that if there had been any trace of explosives or genuine belief they were terrorists, "they would not have been released." Two further arrests (a British-Iranian dual national and a 22-year-old) have also produced no charges.
The claim rests entirely on anonymous sources. The "Spiderweb" narrative surfaced only on October 5–6, after the Pentagon pulled 12 B-1 bombers from Fairford on October 4. Every outlet relied on unnamed US officials — "one source close to the White House," per the BBC. No named official has backed it up. Trump himself, asked whether Iran had smuggled drones into Britain, said "I can't tell you that," and could only offer that the threat "would be linked to Iran."
The real explanation is a wider US redeployment. The most authoritative rebuttal comes from Air Marshal Greg Bagwell of RUSI, who argues the Pentagon "achieved the headlines they wanted" while masking "a wider US withdrawal of most strategic assets deployed for the Iran War." He notes the USAF's own statement speaks of a "routine redeployment," that other major US bases (Mildenhall, Lakenheath) are unchanged, and that there are reports of a much broader withdrawal of strategic assets across the Middle East. The security angle, he says, serves three purposes: backing up Trump's earlier unfounded claims, masking the wider withdrawal and the failure to achieve war aims, and pressuring a British government less sympathetic to MAGA objectives.
The British government is caught in the contradiction. Prime Minister Andy Burnham initially lent support to Trump's claims of Iranian involvement (eager, the article notes, "to prove his militarist credentials"), but is now distancing itself. UK sources cast doubt on Iran's capability to mount such an operation 2,700 miles away, and the Guardian suggests the withdrawal may presage "a scaling up of operations against Iran after the US midterm elections in November" — with Trump facing record-low approval and a deeply unpopular war.
The article's underlying point is that this is a fabrication in service of the US war on Iran — a pretext to justify escalation and to obscure a strategic withdrawal that signals the war's failure. Fairford has been used to bomb Iran since March, with the permission of the Labour government, and the "terror plot" narrative is being used to sustain that war politically.
7. India’s voter purge: The Modi government’s drive to disenfranchise the working class
Mass protests have erupted across India after an investigative report in one of India’s major dailies exposed the staggering scale of the illegal deletion of voters from the electoral rolls by the Hindu-supremacist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Pledged to a program of austerity, corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and a massive reduction in immigration, the incoming PQ government will quickly come into headlong conflict with the working class.
9. Supreme Court opens 2026 term amid deepening crisis of US democracy
Following tradition, the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court returned from summer recess on the first Monday of October, issued a slew of orders, mostly rejecting petitions for review of cases filed over the last several months, and ceremonially entertained the first oral arguments of the new term.
Promptly at 10:00 a.m., the court marshal announced: “Oyez, oyez, oyez, all persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”
Chief Justice John Roberts then added, “I have the honor to announce, on behalf of the court, that the October 2025 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States is now closed, and the October 2026 Term is now convened.”
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Beneath this pomp and air of normalcy, tens of millions in the US are wondering whether the six extreme right-wing justices that form the Supreme Court’s super-majority will interfere with the impending November 3 midterm elections, a projected debacle for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Twenty-six years ago, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 on bogus legal grounds to terminate the ongoing Florida vote count and install George W. Bush as president, an election theft to which Chief Justice John Roberts owes his position.
Roberts then maneuvered behind the scenes to engineer the extraordinary July 1, 2024 ruling granting then-private citizen Donald Trump immunity from prosecution for his role in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
As the Supreme Court engaged politely with counsel, picking through nuances of jurisprudence, Christa Gail Pike emerged from a phenobarbital-induced coma—bruised, burned, shackled and handcuffed to a Nashville hospital bed. Tennessee’s barbaric attempt to execute her based on a conviction 30 years ago proceeded on September 30 after the six right-wing justices overturned a lower court stay with no explanation, its most recent resort to the “shadow docket.” The latter was once a rarely used procedure where emergency orders, principally to maintain the status quo, could be issued without full briefing or argument, and frequently with only perfunctory explanations or, as in the case of Pike, no explanation at all.
Over the 20 months since Trump’s second inauguration, the court majority has repeatedly resorted to shadow docket rulings, along with its merits cases, to expand presidential powers under Article 2 of the Constitution, on the basis of the so-called “unitary executive” theory. At the same time, the Supreme Court is creating arbitrary loopholes for itself, such as the “substantial questions doctrine,” to justify its own future interventions to block executive actions that it does not like.
Shadow docket rulings have overruled lower court orders to give masked ICE agents authority to detain people based on apparent ethnicity, language or type of employment. They have stripped immigrants of “temporary protected status” and authorized their deportation to “third countries” with which they have no connection.
Other shadow docket orders have allowed Trump to impound foreign aid funds allocated by Congress, and to terminate supposedly “independent” regulatory agency commissioners. Last summer, the majority used the shadow docket to implement a Trump administration program that allows state election authorities to access a notoriously unreliable federal database, compiled from confidential sources, supposedly to verify US citizenship for voter registration.
A particularly petty shadow docket order issued August 31 overturned a lower court injunction so that Trump can proceed with the construction of his oversized, garish ballroom where the White House East Wing used to stand.
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These repeated, unwarranted and blatantly pro-Trump interventions are discrediting the Supreme Court in the eyes of millions. A recent Gallup poll measured public approval at the historic low of 33 percent. Various reforms, including term limits, an enforceable code of ethics and expansion of the number of justices to dilute the right-wing majority have broad support.
So far the Supreme Court has accepted 30 cases and scheduled arguments through the end of 2026. New cases will continue to be added over the next three months, likely bringing the total of merits cases to around 60, the annual average. Oral arguments will be scheduled through April. Many will relate to the flotsam and jetsam that inevitably arise in civil and criminal litigation, but there are already several “hot button” cases scheduled.
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Justice Alito made the rounds of various news shows last weekend to promote his new book So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, a conceit that judges are equipped to divine the “original intent” behind founding documents such as the US Constitution. In practice, Alito and his co-thinkers junk the clear language and intent of constitutional provisions, for example the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, whenever it conflicts with their reactionary political objectives.
Alito announced that he is toying with potential retirement, which usually occurs during the summer recess rather than during a term. If the Democrats took control of the Senate as a result of the mid-term elections next month, they could block Trump’s nominee for Alito’s successor, much as the Republicans blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland after the death of Antonin Scalia.
While Trump would be hard pressed to nominate a less principled and more fascistic justice than Alito, he could certainly nominate a younger one. Thus Alito could retire in time for his successor to be confirmed before the next Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, bringing the total number of Trump justices to four, potentially solidifying an extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority for decades.
10. Australia: Striking health workers speak out against Victorian Labor government’s real wage cuts
On October 1, thousands of allied health professionals and public sector doctors in the Australian state of Victoria walked off the job and rallied in Melbourne.
For allied health workers—including radiographers, physiotherapists, podiatrists, pharmacists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and other health professionals—it was the third 24-hour strike in an enterprise bargaining dispute that has been ongoing for more than a year.
Labor has offered allied health workers a meagre 19–21 percent nominal pay rise over four years, barely higher than the current official inflation rate of 4 percent. This would further entrench the losses incurred under the last union-Labor enterprise agreement, which slashed real wages for public sector allied health workers by 10 percent.
Moreover, Labor’s offer would do nothing to address workers’ concerns over excessive workload, burnout and unsafe staff-to-patient ratios, or the staffing shortages that underly them.
Prior to last week’s rally, Victorian doctors had not been presented with any offer from the state government at all, although their existing agreement expired in February.
The two sections of workers raised virtually identical concerns—understaffing, intolerable workloads and plummeting real wages amid a cost-of-living crisis. Doctors and allied health workers are up against a common enemy: the state Labor government and its austerity agenda. This objectively poses the need for a united struggle.
But the union bureaucracies covering them, the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA) and the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF), are doing all they can to divide the striking medical professionals.
The two rallies last Thursday were carefully timed not to overlap, and union speakers at each offered no more than token gestures of “solidarity” to the other. Just as significant as the physical division of striking workers is their political isolation. By covering over Labor’s responsibility for the meltdown of the public health system and the destruction of jobs, wages and conditions throughout the public sector, the VAHPA and ASMOF bureaucrats aimed to drive a wedge between allied health workers and doctors, and cut them off from the rest of the public sector.
VAHPA Secretary Aneta Menkinoska called for workers to be “optimistic” and continue pressuring the government for a better deal, adding, “I wish Premier Carroll would stand on this stage and look out to see what I can.”
This bankrupt perspective, that Labor will eventually see reason once alerted to the plight of health workers, is based on a distortion of reality. Labor is not only directly responsible for imposing dire conditions on health workers over decades, having ruled the state for 23 of the past 27 years. It is presiding over the breakdown of the public health system, as part of an offensive by state and federal Labor governments to inflict social austerity measures targeting health, education and other vital services.
11. Australia: Labor accuses schools of fraud to justify disability education cuts
New data has indicated the scale of the Albanese Labor government’s assault on disability funding in schools. More than 300 independent schools have been forced to repay $12 million in funding already, and this is just the start.
Schools with high numbers of students with complex needs are sacking learning support staff, cutting programs and receiving multi-million dollar repayment demands.
The government announced a $463 million “savings” measure for disability education funds in its May budget. Cuts that the government insists are a crackdown on “inaccurate claiming” and “inappropriate allocation” will have a serious impact on 2027 school budgets across the country.
Funding for students with disabilities in public schools is managed by state governments. Independent schools, including those that cater to students with extensive disabilities and vulnerable students who otherwise cannot access education, are funded by the federal government.
The claw back of funds has been presented in the corporate media as schools being caught rorting the system. But this obscures the real scandal: Labor is dismantling disability support for vulnerable children, using the language of “fraud” and “compliance” to do it.
12. Hundreds of AI chip workers strike in Taiwan
On Monday, approximately 500 workers belonging to the AGC Display Glass union in Taiwan launched a three-day strike over low pay and stagnant wages, an issue facing workers throughout the island. Workers at the company produce a glass substrate used in AI semiconductor chips.Workers formed a picket line outside the factory in Douliu, Yunlin County. The union, headed by Chairman Shen Chuan-cheng, has described the walkout as Yunlin County’s first ever strike, an indication of the growing anger and sentiment for a struggle among workers. In a vote to authorize the stoppage, 90 percent of the union’s approximately 1,000 members took part, with 96 percent voting in favor. There are around 1,600 workers at the plant in total.
Clashes broke out on the first day of the strike between the workers and management as the latter tried to force their way through the picket line at the factory. Video from local news agencies showed members of management and scabs brought in to break up the strike, pushing and shoving workers as they crossed the picket line. At least one union official was reportedly injured in the fighting and required medical treatment at a hospital.
The union has requested a 5 percent pay increase for workers. The Japanese-owned company opened the factory in Yunlin County 25 years ago and has never given a comprehensive pay raise to workers. According to the deputy head of the union, Huang Tzu-chien, this has led to “ridiculously” low salaries. Huang also stated that the company has been eliminating other forms of compensation, including different types of bonuses, while breaking pledges for salary increases.
The union stated that the three-day action constituted a “warning strike.” It previously staged a protest outside the Ministry of Labor (MOL) in Taipei on September 30, where officials implored the government to mediate the dispute between the company and the union. Officials from the Yunlin County General Federation of Industrial Unions, including deputy head Cheng Nai-wei, also took part in the protest.
The union called the strike to give workers the impression something is being done to fight on their behalf, while giving them a chance to let off steam, rather than develop a genuine struggle against the exploitative conditions in the factory. At the same time, union officials hope the government will step in to impose a solution that would inevitably be in the interests of the company.
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Workers throughout Taiwan face serious economic strain while business is booming for the wealthy, in part due to the semiconductor sector. GDP growth is expected to reach 11.05 percent in 2026, the highest in 39 years, according to figures released by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) in August.
However, the Taiwan Political Economy Collaborative thinktank reported that the share of GDP in 2023 going to workers was just 44.3 percent. As of the first quarter of 2026, this is estimated to have fallen to 35.1 percent.
The supposed real wage growth of 1.16 percent in the first half of this year is also illusory, created by high salaries for a relatively small number. The Collaborative reported that half of workers are seeing their real wages decline, forcing them to accept overtime. The DGBAS stated that overtime for workers in the electronics and component manufacturing sector reached their highest levels in the 47 years since recordkeeping began. For all workers across the island, the average monthly amount of overtime reached 17.8 hours per employee.
The DGBAS also reported that more than 70 percent of workers take home less than the average regular monthly wage. The median monthly wage was NT$39,283 ($US1,236) through the first six months of this year, or NT$10,000 less than the average. The agency’s statistics show that 1.26 million people or 16.8 percent of full-time employees classify as low-wage earners for annual income, earning less than NT$390,000 ($US12,290), or two-thirds of the median wage per OECD standards.
Given these overall conditions, workers in various industries throughout Taiwan are also going on strike or threatening to take strike action. Workers at Micron Technology in Taoyuan took part in a strike authorization vote over the first six days of October. Micron is a US-based company but its major production facilities for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips are in Taiwan. The company employs approximately 15,000 workers between plants at Taoyuan and Taichung.
13. US strengthens military ties with Sri Lanka against Iran and China
Recent US military and diplomatic visits are bound up with the transformation of Sri Lanka into a strategic outpost in the build-up to war against China.
Mexican Social Security Institute workers are in revolt against a union-imposed below-inflation raise, as the Sheinbaum government increases military and debt spending under pressure from Washington and the IMF.
The election shows how ever larger sections of the ruling class are relying on the AfD to push through the hated policies of war and cuts against the population with the utmost brutality.
A video appeal and a statement signed by 14 detainees expose medical neglect, sleep deprivation, prolonged imprisonment and abuse at the GEO Group’s Folkston concentration camp.
17. Build committees of action! Mobilize workers against war, in defense of France’s youth movement!
A message from the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (in full, and translated into French):
Nearly half a million youth and workers marched against austerity and militarism on the October 6 day of action in France, as high school protests entered their third week. Amid mass protests in more than 50 Spanish cities against evictions and unaffordable housing, public sector strikes in Portugal, and youth protests in Belgium and Germany, the scope of events is clear. A European mass movement is colliding with the police state and the diktat of the capitalist oligarchy.
In France, hundreds of high schools have been blockaded or closed. Police have responded with savage violence and mass arrests. More than 6,600 people, overwhelmingly youth and minors, have been arrested, with more than 5,000 placed in police custody in barely two weeks. Hundreds have been injured. In Lens, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after picking up a police stun grenade.
Protest signs invoking May-June 1968—when police repression of student protests triggered the greatest general strike in French history—are spreading across France. A growing layer of youth and workers is moving to the left, seeking fundamental social change.
The question is how the working class can intervene, mobilize its social power to halt police violence against the youth, and impose its own solution to the crisis in France and across Europe.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) advocates building independent committees of action in France and internationally, advancing the demands of rank-and-file workers and youth on every critical question. This is essential to freeing the class struggle from the grip of the union bureaucracies and capitalist politicians.
France’s main trade union federations are calling partial strikes and protests in the coming weeks but have delayed nationwide action until November 5.
But the working class cannot wait until November 5. The class struggle must develop freely, starting now. The explosive energy of the youth protests must be turned toward mobilizing the working class in France and across Europe.
The union leaderships seek to retain control over the movement, divide it into isolated protest days and sectoral actions, and ask the government for limited concessions while blocking a broader mobilization. This is the role they played in 2023, when they called strikes against Macron’s pension cuts that were joined by millions, only to shut down the struggle after he imposed the law.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise (LFI) seek, by different means, to contain the movement within the existing political order. Mélenchon has denounced police violence and backed the protests but explicitly tries to channel the movement toward the 2027 presidential election. He wrote that LFI must “accompany this period of mobilization and political awareness” by opening a perspective “toward 2027.”
This is the opposite of developing the political independence of workers and youth. Mélenchon seeks to transform an explosive movement developing against the capitalist state into support for his campaign to take control of that state through elections.
His perspective rests on the claim that fundamental social improvements can be achieved within French capitalism. But there is no national or reformist solution to an international crisis of capitalism.
France’s public debt has risen to almost €3.6 trillion, or 119 percent of GDP. Debt-service costs are rising sharply while financial markets demand deeper austerity. At the same time, the French state is pouring tens of billions into military rearmament and its nuclear arsenal.
The same pressures operate throughout Europe. Governments face huge debts, economic stagnation and growing demands from the financial oligarchy for attacks on social spending.
The far right exploits this crisis while offering an even more brutal program. National Rally leader Marine Le Pen is pledging €140 billion in budget cuts by 2032 while directing social anger against immigrants and demanding a stronger police and state apparatus.
The growth of the far right is not the expression of a population uniformly shifting to the right. It develops amid a mounting movement of workers and youth to the left, whose independent political expression is blocked by organizations that subordinate the class struggle to the capitalist state.
Bound up with this, the European bourgeoisie is turning with extraordinary aggressiveness to militarism and war against Russia.
Here international conflict and internal class crisis reinforce one another. The hundreds of billions required for European rearmament can only be extracted through deeper attacks on wages, pensions, education, healthcare and other social expenditures. The resulting social opposition intensifies the ruling class’s turn toward nationalism, militarism and authoritarian rule.
In the years before the First World War, Europe was shaken by mass strikes and growing revolutionary working-class struggle, while the imperialist powers accelerated an arms race and passed from one international crisis to another.
When war erupted in 1914, the ruling classes invoked national defense to demand that workers abandon the class struggle and subordinate themselves to their own bourgeoisie. In France, the Socialist Party and trade union bureaucracy joined the Union sacrée; in Germany, the Social Democratic Party supported the Burgfrieden and voted for war credits.
Governments do not launch wars simply because they confront domestic unrest. The fundamental causes of imperialist war lie in the contradictions of the capitalist world economy. But for ruling classes confronting mounting opposition, militarism provides a framework to demand “national unity,” impose immense sacrifices and strengthen the coercive powers of the state.
This link was graphically expressed on October 6. As hundreds of thousands marched through France, the French military conducted the first test launch of its latest M51.3 submarine-launched ballistic missile.
The launch came only days after Moscow issued an explicit nuclear warning over NATO threats against Kaliningrad. The NATO powers are proceeding on the reckless assumption that they can continuously intensify military pressure on Russia without triggering a catastrophic response.
But repeated survival of earlier crises does not make the next crisis safe. As 1914 demonstrates, it can create precisely the complacency and miscalculation that turn military brinkmanship into catastrophe.
The war escalation and the explosion of the class struggle are not separate questions. The same governments that tell workers there is no money for schools, hospitals, pensions and housing are spending hundreds of billions on armaments. And the military-police apparatus strengthened in the name of external security is being deployed against opposition at home.
A progressive solution requires socialist policies: the international mobilization of the working class to expropriate the vast wealth of the financial oligarchy, end its looting of society and stop the escalation toward war.
The high school and university protests can become a powerful lever for developing such a struggle. Youth must turn to the factories, workplaces and working-class neighborhoods and explain the common dangers posed by the growth of the military-police machine, the far right, the banks’ diktat over social life and the escalation of global war. Workers, in turn, must mobilize in defense of the youth independently of the timetable demanded by the union bureaucracies.
New organizations of struggle and a revolutionary political perspective are required. This is the meaning of the PES’s call to build committees of action throughout the French, European and international working class. Amid the explosive class struggles of the 1930s, Leon Trotsky called committees of action a means of breaking the “anti-revolutionary opposition of party and trade-union apparatus” via the “revolutionary representation of the struggling masses.”
Committees of action must be established in schools, universities and workplaces, elected and controlled by those engaged in struggle and independent of the union bureaucracies and capitalist parties. They can link school to school, university to university and workplace to workplace; organize opposition to police repression; prepare joint demonstrations and strikes; and break through the national and sectoral divisions imposed on the working class.
Nor can such a movement remain confined within France. Struggles in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and France express an international process driven by the same capitalist crisis. The whole continent is becoming a powder keg as its governments accelerate preparations for war.
The task today is to unify these movements across national borders and invest them with the greatest possible force. The alternative confronting workers and youth is not between Macron, Mélenchon and Le Pen. It is between the deepening descent into austerity, police-state repression and war under capitalism and the independent political mobilization of the international working class for socialism and the United Socialist States of Europe.
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Voici la traduction en français de la déclaration du PES (avec l'aide de Socialism AI) :
Près d'un demi-million de jeunes et de travailleurs ont manifesté contre l'austérité et le militarisme lors de la journée d'action du 6 octobre en France, alors que les protestations lycéennes entraient dans leur troisième semaine. Au milieu des manifestations de masse dans plus de 50 villes espagnoles contre les expulsions et le logement inabordable, des grèves du secteur public au Portugal et des protestations de la jeunesse en Belgique et en Allemagne, l'ampleur des événements est claire. Un mouvement de masse européen entre en collision avec l'État policier et le diktat de l'oligarchie capitaliste.En France, des centaines de lycées ont été bloqués ou fermés. La police a répondu par une violence sauvage et des arrestations massives. Plus de 6 600 personnes, en très grande majorité des jeunes et des mineurs, ont été arrêtées, et plus de 5 000 placées en garde à vue en à peine deux semaines. Des centaines ont été blessées. À Lens, un garçon de 15 ans a perdu une main après avoir ramassé une grenade assourdissante de la police.
Les pancartes invoquant mai-juin 1968 — lorsque la répression policière des protestations étudiantes déclencha la plus grande grève générale de l'histoire de France — se multiplient à travers la France. Une couche croissante de jeunes et de travailleurs se déplace vers la gauche, en quête d'un changement social fondamental.
La question est de savoir comment la classe ouvrière peut intervenir, mobiliser sa puissance sociale pour mettre fin à la violence policière contre la jeunesse et imposer sa propre solution à la crise en France et à travers l'Europe.
Le Parti de l'égalité socialiste (PES) préconise la construction de comités d'action indépendants en France et à l'international, en avançant les revendications des travailleurs de base et de la jeunesse sur chaque question décisive. Cela est essentiel pour libérer la lutte des classes de l'emprise des bureaucraties syndicales et des politiciens capitalistes.
Les principales fédérations syndicales françaises appellent à des grèves et manifestations partielles dans les semaines à venir, mais ont reporté l'action nationale au 5 novembre.
Mais la classe ouvrière ne peut pas attendre le 5 novembre. La lutte des classes doit se développer librement, dès maintenant. L'énergie explosive des protestations de la jeunesse doit être orientée vers la mobilisation de la classe ouvrière en France et à travers l'Europe.
Les directions syndicales cherchent à conserver le contrôle du mouvement, à le diviser en journées de protestation isolées et en actions sectorielles, et à demander au gouvernement des concessions limitées tout en bloquant une mobilisation plus large. C'est le rôle qu'elles ont joué en 2023, lorsqu'elles ont appelé à des grèves contre la réforme des retraites de Macron auxquelles des millions ont participé, pour ensuite mettre fin à la lutte après qu'il a imposé la loi.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon et La France Insoumise (LFI) cherchent, par d'autres moyens, à contenir le mouvement dans l'ordre politique existant. Mélenchon a dénoncé la violence policière et soutenu les protestations, mais tente explicitement de canaliser le mouvement vers l'élection présidentielle de 2027. Il a écrit que LFI devait « accompagner cette période de mobilisation et de prise de conscience politique » en ouvrant une perspective « vers 2027 ».
C'est l'opposé du développement de l'indépendance politique des travailleurs et des jeunes. Mélenchon cherche à transformer un mouvement explosif se développant contre l'État capitaliste en un soutien à sa campagne pour prendre le contrôle de cet État par les élections.
Sa perspective repose sur l'affirmation selon laquelle des améliorations sociales fondamentales peuvent être obtenues au sein du capitalisme français. Mais il n'existe pas de solution nationale ou réformiste à une crise internationale du capitalisme.
La dette publique de la France a atteint près de 3 600 milliards d'euros, soit 119 % du PIB. Les coûts du service de la dette augmentent fortement tandis que les marchés financiers exigent une austérité plus profonde. Dans le même temps, l'État français déverse des dizaines de milliards dans le réarmement militaire et son arsenal nucléaire.
Les mêmes pressions opèrent dans toute l'Europe. Les gouvernements font face à des dettes énormes, à la stagnation économique et à des exigences croissantes de l'oligarchie financière en faveur d'attaques contre les dépenses sociales.
L'extrême droite exploite cette crise tout en offrant un programme encore plus brutal. La dirigeante du Rassemblement national, Marine Le Pen, promet 140 milliards d'euros de coupes budgétaires d'ici 2032, tout en dirigeant la colère sociale contre les immigrés et en exigeant un appareil policier et étatique renforcé.
La croissance de l'extrême droite n'est pas l'expression d'une population se déplaçant uniformément vers la droite. Elle se développe au milieu d'un mouvement croissant de travailleurs et de jeunes vers la gauche, dont l'expression politique indépendante est bloquée par des organisations qui subordonnent la lutte des classes à l'État capitaliste.
Lié à cela, la bourgeoisie européenne se tourne avec une agressivité extraordinaire vers le militarisme et la guerre contre la Russie.
Ici, le conflit international et la crise de classe interne se renforcent mutuellement. Les centaines de milliards nécessaires au réarmement européen ne peuvent être extraites que par des attaques plus profondes contre les salaires, les retraites, l'éducation, la santé et les autres dépenses sociales. L'opposition sociale qui en résulte intensifie le tournant de la classe dirigeante vers le nationalisme, le militarisme et le régime autoritaire.
Dans les années précédant la Première Guerre mondiale, l'Europe fut secouée par des grèves de masse et une lutte révolutionnaire croissante de la classe ouvrière, tandis que les puissances impérialistes accéléraient une course aux armements et passaient d'une crise internationale à l'autre.
Lorsque la guerre éclata en 1914, les classes dirigeantes invoquèrent la défense nationale pour exiger que les travailleurs abandonnent la lutte des classes et se subordonnent à leur propre bourgeoisie. En France, le Parti socialiste et la bureaucratie syndicale rejoignirent l'Union sacrée ; en Allemagne, le Parti social-démocrate soutint le Burgfrieden et vota les crédits de guerre.
Les gouvernements ne lancent pas des guerres simplement parce qu'ils font face à des troubles intérieurs. Les causes fondamentales de la guerre impérialiste résident dans les contradictions de l'économie capitaliste mondiale. Mais pour les classes dirigeantes confrontées à une opposition croissante, le militarisme fournit un cadre pour exiger l'« unité nationale », imposer d'immenses sacrifices et renforcer les pouvoirs coercitifs de l'État.
Ce lien fut exprimé de manière frappante le 6 octobre. Alors que des centaines de milliers de personnes défilaient à travers la France, l'armée française procédait au premier tir d'essai de son dernier missile balistique mer-sol M51.3.
Ce tir intervenait quelques jours seulement après que Moscou eut émis un avertissement nucléaire explicite concernant les menaces de l'OTAN contre Kaliningrad. Les puissances de l'OTAN procèdent sur la présomption téméraire qu'elles peuvent intensifier continuellement la pression militaire sur la Russie sans déclencher une réponse catastrophique.
Mais la survie répétée de crises antérieures ne rend pas la prochaine crise sûre. Comme le démontre 1914, cela peut créer précisément la complaisance et l'erreur de calcul qui transforment la surenchère militaire en catastrophe.
L'escalade de la guerre et l'explosion de la lutte des classes ne sont pas des questions séparées. Les mêmes gouvernements qui disent aux travailleurs qu'il n'y a pas d'argent pour les écoles, les hôpitaux, les retraites et le logement dépensent des centaines de milliards en armements. Et l'appareil militaro-policier renforcé au nom de la sécurité extérieure est déployé contre l'opposition à l'intérieur.
Une solution progressiste exige des politiques socialistes : la mobilisation internationale de la classe ouvrière pour exproprier la vaste richesse de l'oligarchie financière, mettre fin à son pillage de la société et arrêter l'escalade vers la guerre.
Les protestations des lycéens et des étudiants peuvent devenir un puissant levier pour développer une telle lutte. La jeunesse doit se tourner vers les usines, les lieux de travail et les quartiers ouvriers et expliquer les dangers communs posés par la croissance de la machine militaro-policière, l'extrême droite, le diktat des banques sur la vie sociale et l'escalade de la guerre mondiale. Les travailleurs, à leur tour, doivent se mobiliser pour la défense de la jeunesse indépendamment du calendrier exigé par les bureaucraties syndicales.
De nouvelles organisations de lutte et une perspective politique révolutionnaire sont nécessaires. C'est le sens de l'appel du PES à construire des comités d'action dans toute la classe ouvrière française, européenne et internationale. Au milieu des luttes de classes explosives des années 1930, Léon Trotsky qualifia les comités d'action de moyen de briser l'« opposition anti-révolutionnaire de l'appareil des partis et des syndicats » par la « représentation révolutionnaire des masses en lutte ».
Les comités d'action doivent être établis dans les écoles, les universités et les lieux de travail, élus et contrôlés par ceux qui sont engagés dans la lutte et indépendants des bureaucraties syndicales et des partis capitalistes. Ils peuvent relier école à école, université à université et lieu de travail à lieu de travail ; organiser l'opposition à la répression policière ; préparer des manifestations et des grèves communes ; et briser les divisions nationales et sectorielles imposées à la classe ouvrière.
Un tel mouvement ne peut pas non plus rester confiné à la France. Les luttes en Espagne, au Portugal, en Belgique, en Allemagne et en France expriment un processus international porté par la même crise capitaliste. Le continent entier devient une poudrière alors que ses gouvernements accélèrent les préparatifs de guerre.
La tâche aujourd'hui est d'unifier ces mouvements par-delà les frontières nationales et de leur conférer la plus grande force possible. L'alternative qui confronte les travailleurs et les jeunes n'est pas entre Macron, Mélenchon et Le Pen. Elle est entre l'approfondissement de la descente dans l'austérité, la répression de l'État policier et la guerre sous le capitalisme, et la mobilisation politique indépendante de la classe ouvrière internationale pour le socialisme et les États-Unis socialistes d'Europe.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Libya:
Nigeria:
Senegal:
South Africa:
Belgium:
Students protest cuts and deteriorating conditions in education
Italy:
Workers in 24-hour strike over erosion of living standards
Portugal:
Public sector and health workers strike for improved pay and working conditions
Cabin crew for easyJet strike over poor working conditions
United Kingdom:
Strike by North Sea oil platform workers over pay cut and conditions
Airport workers at Leeds Bradford Airport set to walk out over pay
Drivers delivering NHS supplies in England to walk out over pay
Hospital theatre assistants in Leeds begin indefinite stoppage over pay grading dispute
Middle East
Strike by North Sea oil platform workers over pay cut and conditions
Airport workers at Leeds Bradford Airport set to walk out over payLebanon:
Lebanese public sector workers strike over transport allowances
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
