Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
The Zionist establishment and IDF officialdom have venomously attacked Naza and the filmmakers, accusing them of “treason” and tacitly encouraging right-wing and vigilante attacks on the co-directors Abraham and Szor, two of the four directors of the acclaimed documentary No Other Land.
The war criminal Netanyahu has called for an investigation into the sources featured in Naza. The government’s attacks on the film have continuously escalated.
On Saturday, Netanyahu wrote on social media:
I demand that the chief of general staff, the head of the Shin Bet [secret service], and the attorney general launch a comprehensive investigation into the participants in the film “Naza” and prosecute them for serious information security violations, criminal libel, and harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests.
The film presents a false, misleading, and biased narrative that defames the State of Israel and the [Israeli military] internationally, severely damaging Israel’s standing.
It is entirely to the film’s credit that it has produced this reaction from the fascist bandits responsible for the deaths and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Of course, the notion that Naza has “severely damaged” the Israeli government’s standing, when the latter is already, along with the Trump administration, the most despised and reviled regime on the planet, is absurd.
2. Dozens arrested ahead of the NATO summit in Türkiye remain in prison
The “evidence” cited by the court consists of nothing more than stickers and leaflets found at his home and posts on social media. [The 17-year-old high school student Ömer] Aksu’s real “crime” is that he took part in the work of the Revolutionary Youth Associations (DGD), a legal association registered with the Interior Ministry. The DGD campaigns against the exploitation of child labour in the Vocational Education Centers (MESEM), where school-age children are put to work as apprentices, and for free school meals.
Aksu was arrested as part of a broad wave of repression stepped up by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government ahead of the NATO summit, at which it hosted the leaders of the imperialist powers and war criminals, above all US President Donald Trump.
3. Alan Thornett, 1937-2026: A militant won to Trotskyism who later embraced Pabloism
In 1973, at the height of the mass anti-Tory movement of the working class, the SLL founded the WRP with the declared aim of throwing out the Heath government and replacing it with a Labour government. This was presented as an essentially electoral programme of “basic rights” (jobs, living standards, housing, an unspecified “change the system”) with the barest reference to the party’s Trotskyist character and the ICFI’s international perspective.
The WRP expected that the return of a Labour government in 1974 would bring workers rapidly into conflict with it. But at least initially, illusions in Labour were reinforced—especially as the government made significant initial concessions to workers.
To combat such illusions, the WRP placed renewed emphasis on the party’s Trotskyist identity and sharpened its opposition to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. But the concessions that had been made to centrism over the previous two years meant that the reorientation could not be carried through without creating friction within the leadership. Thornett came forward as the leading opponent of the left turn, arguing against what he termed a return to “sectarianism”.
His differences reflected the pressure of workers who had joined the party on an anti-Tory line and who had not been won to revolutionary policies. It was a relatively large constituency in the party, whose confusion the WRP was responsible for, and who needed to be politically educated and won to Trotskyism.
Thornett responded in an unprincipled fashion, by making secret contact with representatives of the OCI in Britain in August 1974 to formulate a factional critique of the WRP, seeking to remove Healy as party leader.
Rather than politically combatting Thornett’s positions, which would have entailed revisiting the OCI conflict and raising the ICFI’s fight against revisionism to a higher level, Healy and the WRP leadership moved by the Autumn to expel Thornett.
The WRP’s resort to organisational measures lost the party several hundred members and its most important faction in basic industry, while leaving unclarified all the crucial issues of the struggle against social-democracy and centrist adaptations to the labour and trade union bureaucracy.
The WRP paid an immediate price as the party’s social base was now tilted toward the middle class, with figures such as the actress Vanessa Redgrave and former Sunday Times journalist Alex Mitchell rising to prominence and facilitating an ongoing political disorientation.
The split freed Thornett to pursue his own syndicalist and centrist orientation. He worked within the Labour Party, in the milieu around Tony Benn, and in efforts to regroup splinters from the ICFI. His International Socialist Group was recognised as a sympathising section of the United Secretariat in 1991 and became its British section in 1995.
By 1990 he was describing Healy as a “degenerate political monster” and the “Ceausescu of the British Trotskyist movement”, and the ICFI as a fraud.
He championed a series of opportunist “mass left party” initiatives such as Respect and Respect Renewal alongside George Galloway, then Left Unity, then Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party.
But his later evolution does not alter the fact that his recruitment to the party, his leadership of the ATUA [All Trades Unions Alliance] and his work at Cowley were important products of the SLL’s fight for Trotskyism in the working class. The WRP leadership’s subsequent degeneration undermined those very achievements.
The World Socialist Web Site will publish a more thorough appraisal of Thornett and the central issues raised by his role in the SLL and subsequent break from the WRP to arm the party for the ongoing struggle to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class.
One doctor dies by suicide every three weeks in the UK. Healthcare workers overall take their own lives at a rate 24 percent above the national average— with the highest risk among female nurses, followed by male paramedics and female doctors according to the British Medical Association (BMA). The rate of suicides among healthcare workers between 2011 and 2020 was 2,500—4 every week—according to the Office for National Statistics.
Every one of these preventable deaths represents not merely a statistic, but a devastating human loss. They cannot be understood in isolation from the systematic dismantling of the National Health Service (NHS). Frontline staff are pushed to the limits of mental and physical exhaustion, routinely deprived of adequate rest and meaningful support, and then offered little more than a counseling helpline as evidence that a Trust “cares.”
5. Chile’s “National Reconstruction Plan”: A tax giveaway to the rich, dressed up as disaster relief
President José Antonio Kast signed the National Reconstruction and Economic and Social Development Act into law on October 9, completing the legislative process that began when the bill was introduced in April and passed through Congress in August. The first provisions take effect on November 1. The law has been promoted by the government as the centerpiece of its program to “get Chile back on its feet.” In reality, it is a fraud on two counts: its “reconstruction” provisions are a pittance that will leave the overwhelming majority of disaster victims homeless for years to come, while its core content is a sweeping program of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that will take effect in 2027.
The World Socialist Web Site has documented the real character of this legislation since it was first unveiled. As we wrote in July, the package constitutes the most ambitious restructuring of the Chilean state’s relationship to capital since the Pinochet dictatorship, a “Chicago Boys 2.0” that restores the fully integrated tax system of the dictatorship, slashes the corporate tax rate, and insulates investors from democratic accountability for up to two decades.
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The word “reconstruction” was attached to this bill to disguise its true purpose. The noun refers to the Transitory Emergency Fund for Fires, which finances housing for the victims of the catastrophic wildfires in Valparaíso in February 2024 and in the southern regions of Ñuble and Biobío in January 2026. The law extends this fund to December 2028 and increases it from 800 billion to 1.2 trillion Chilean pesos (approximately US $1.2 billion). The sums are miserable, and they cover only a fraction of the need.
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The subsidy system operates through a layered framework of eligibility conditions, severity tiers, and legal ownership status, and it has produced substantial exclusions in practice. The dominant filter is legal ownership. Thousands of families living in campamentos, or shantytown settlements, who lost everything, were excluded because their abodes were deemed “illegal.” The ministry itself acknowledged that the reconstruction process “from the start has been focused on owner-occupiers who lost their homes.”
The vast majority of the victims were from the working class, and many were immigrant families. Sixty-three percent of the households in the Valparaíso fire were at or below the 40th percentile of the social registry, placing them in the bottom two quintiles of Chile’s income distribution. Ninety-one percent had no home insurance. The fire zones were characterized by the strong growth of informal settlements, which feature more fire-vulnerable construction and populations that by definition sit outside formal housing markets. In Ñuble, a region with among the highest rates of multidimensional poverty, an official from the charity organization Hogar de Cristo noted the paradox that some families were so poor that the disaster, by triggering state reconstruction support, improved their material situation.
The contempt in which these families are held is shared across the entire political spectrum. The pseudo-left government of Boric presided over the slow-motion abandonment of the Valparaíso victims for two years. The far-right government of Kast has now formalized that abandonment in law, funding only a fraction of the need and excluding the poorest outright.
The catastrophic floods that struck the Coquimbo region last July, killing more than 13 people and leaving thousands homeless, are not covered by the “reconstruction” law at all. Kast rejected requests from senators and mayors to include Coquimbo, stating: “…we are not going to innovate in this bill, which is truly urgent for us, because it covers the funds still needed for Valparaíso and those to be applied to Biobío and Ñuble.”
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Much social media commentary has compared the massive delays in emergency aid to Coquimbo with the almost immediate help received in the flash flooding that struck the wealthy Santiago municipality of Las Condes on October 8. The comparison has merit. While the state of catastrophe for Coquimbo took six days to be decreed, “when we were already counting our dead,” as one deputy put it, the state of catastrophe for Las Condes was declared within hours. Public Works Minister Louis de Grange effectively admitted that Coquimbo had served as a rehearsal, saying “there is a learning process,” attributing the faster Las Condes response to the experience accumulated from the Coquimbo and Atacama emergencies. The implication was clear: the government needed to let a northern region suffer through a slow response before it knew how to react quickly for the affluent Santiago commune.
But the deeper truth is that both Boric and Kast were warned about the risk of flooding in Las Condes and did nothing. At least two official documents had warned of exactly this risk months before the event. The failure to act was not an accident. It was the product of a deliberate policy of starving the very agencies responsible for prevention and early warning. Kast is a climate change skeptic, and his government has proposed cuts to both the National Service for Disaster Prevention and Response (SENAPRED) and Sernageomin, which are run on a shoestring.
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This is the response of governments around the world to increasingly calamitous weather events that are displacing human populations on an unprecedented scale. From the floods in Valencia to the fires in Los Angeles to the storms battering Chile, the pattern is the same: the working class is left to bear the consequences of a climate crisis produced by the profit system, while the resources that could mitigate and prevent disaster are withheld because they do not yield a return for private capital.
The same institutional framework that allowed water rights to be privatized and hoarded during Chile’s 15-year megadrought is the framework that prevents the state from capturing and storing the floodwaters that now destroy working-class neighborhoods. The two phenomena—drought and flood—are products of the same failure to assert public control over an indispensable resource that was privatized under a dictatorship and never reclaimed.
6. Germany: Berlin Left Party commits to excluding critics of the genocide in Gaza
Eighty-eight percent of Die Linke (Left Party) voters and 60 percent of all Berlin voters approve of the party “voicing clear criticism of the Israeli government.” This emerged from a post-election survey by Infratest dimap. Yet during the campaign, lead candidate Elif Eralp had already attacked not Israel but members of her own party who called for resistance to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Even before the start of exploratory talks on forming a coalition for the state executive with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Eralp and the other negotiators went further and made unmistakably clear that Die Linke stands firmly on the side of the Israeli government and German imperialism. According to the will of all three prospective coalition partners, the massive opposition to the brutal genocide in Gaza that contributed to Die Linke’s electoral success is not to find the slightest expression in the actions of government.
In a joint statement, the negotiators of Die Linke, the Greens and the SPD affirmed Israel’s “right to exist,” announced campus bans for pro-Palestinian activists at Berlin universities and committed to strengthening “the police and the Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence agency) in their task of protecting Jewish life in Berlin.” All of these are familiar formulations that do not protect Jewish life but criminalise any criticism of the brutal genocide in Gaza and strengthen the police state.
The prospective coalition partners did not stop at declarations of intent. Die Linke, the Greens and SPD agreed that each parliamentary group will act independently against any dissenter who violates the agreement—“up to and including the expulsion of members.” If one of the three groups sees “antisemitic incidents” in another group, it can also refer the matter to an expert panel. The group concerned must then impose measures at its own discretion on the basis of the panel’s opinion. If the Greens and SPD disagree with individual statements by Die Linke deputies, they can thus press the group to expel those concerned.
A report in the Bild tabloid underscores what this means. According to the report, Vanessa Emde is not to be admitted to Die Linke’s parliamentary group in the state assembly at its inaugural session today. Emde received 46.2 percent of the vote, the third-highest result of all 78 of the party’s constituency candidates. In May this year, she stated, according to Morgenpost, “There is no right to exist for states—people have a right to exist.” The demand for a “democratic one-state solution” with equal rights for all people was politically legitimate and must not be criminalized, Emde said.
In Die Linke, such restrained, humanist considerations are evidently enough for someone to be slandered as an “antisemite” and excluded from the parliamentary group.
7. Corporate press, DSA falsify UAW election, invent “mandate” for “president 6 percent” Shawn Fain
The United Auto Workers (UAW) election, which ended last week, was a complete debacle for the apparatus. Ballots were counted for only 9.06 percent of an estimated 1.1 million eligible voters, the lowest turnout in a national union election in US history, below even the last UAW election in 2022. More than a million members did not vote.
Incumbent Shawn Fain won 68.1 percent of the votes cast for president, but given the total turnout, he was elected by only 6.1 percent of the estimated membership, about one member in 16. Even that figure includes the thousands of officials, staff and appointees whose positions depend on the apparatus.
Four years ago, a turnout of under 10 percent in the union’s first direct election was itself recognized as a crisis. Will Lehman, who ran for president then as well, documented that masses of workers never received ballots nor knew an election was taking place, and took the matter to federal court. Judge David Lawson, while dismissing the suit, conceded that the complaints “certainly are serious and should cause concern” and noted the “remarkably low turnout.”
Now, after three-and-a-half years of an administration hailed as the transformation of the union, turnout has fallen even further.
This was not simply a record low turnout. It was a mass boycott. Voting fell in seven of the union’s nine regions. From the auto plants of the Detroit area, the historic center of the union, to the academic locals that have been the base of the UAW’s recent growth, the overwhelming majority of members refused to take part.
One factor, as last time, was the failure to notify workers and their inability to get ballots.
A second factor was the onerous rules directed against Lehman, a socialist Mack Trucks worker running on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy and replacing it with rank-and-file committees. The rules were adopted at the UAW’s 2022 convention and enforced by the federal monitor. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) was prevented from endorsing and campaigning for him. Lehman’s campaigners were kicked out of plants with impunity while Fain and other officials campaigned openly, further reducing turnout among those looking for a way to fight the apparatus.
But the decisive factor was the hostility of workers to the apparatus itself. They voted with their feet. They gave their verdict on not just the Fain administration, but the entire apparatus, following three-and-a-half years of betrayals, thousands of layoffs and repeated sabotage of strikes.
The corporate press is now responding with a cover-up that reaches truly absurd proportions. It is turning this vote of no confidence in the apparatus into a massive “mandate” for Fain.
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The election shows something the apparatus and its defenders cannot hide. The overwhelming majority of workers regard the UAW bureaucracy not as their organization but as an instrument of management and the state. They have taken its measure. They know that nothing will change through it.
8. Democrats demand escalation against Russia after Trump announces “energy ceasefire”
The proclamation by President Donald Trump of an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine and his lifting of sanctions on Russian diesel have been met with scathing denunciations by broad factions of the US political establishment, led by the Democratic Party.
Trump, whose party is expected to suffer significant setbacks in the November 3 midterm elections, is attempting to calm the markets and improve his electoral chances by announcing a “ceasefire,” as he has done multiple times with Iran, each announcement presaging a new escalation.
The so-called “ceasefire” is one in which both sides continue to wage war on one another, US funding, arming and targeting support for Ukraine will continue, and the United States, alongside other NATO members, will continue to provide the weapons and intelligence used in strikes inside Russia’s borders.
On Saturday, Trump told reporters that the administration had told the Ukrainian government, “you could do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit the refineries,” adding, “Don’t hit refineries. There’s plenty of targets.”
In a statement issued Friday, leading Senate Democrats called Trump’s verbal “ceasefire” a “total betrayal of Ukraine, our European allies and American national security.” They added, “Putin only responds to strength, which means cracking down on Russia and the enablers of its war against Ukraine.”
The statement was signed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
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Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the six Republican signers of Tuesday’s letter, said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Russia is the aggressor. Russia is the one who can end this war by backing out of territory that they occupied.” He added that this “should go all the way back to Crimea.”
Russian nuclear doctrine, as revised by Russian President Vladimir Putin in November 2024, provides for the use of nuclear weapons against a conventional attack that threatens Russia’s “territorial integrity,” which Moscow holds to include Crimea.
In an editorial headlined “Trump’s Diesel Insult to Lindsey Graham,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Sunday that lifting the sanctions will “directly finance Mr. Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.”
The sanctions law named for Graham, which passed the Senate 86-11 in August, with the votes of Schumer and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, requires the president to impose tariffs as high as 100 percent on every import from the five countries that buy the most Russian oil and gas.
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The Democrats have been the most consistent party of war against Russia and have for years attacked Trump as insufficiently aggressive against Moscow.
House Democrats voted 210-0 on April 20, 2024 for a $60.8 billion package of weapons and aid for Ukraine. The bill passed 311-112 with most Republicans opposed. On June 4, 2026, House Democrats voted 207-1 for a new Ukraine military aid bill they had forced to the floor by discharge petition. Senate Democrats voted 36-9 on August 7 for the sanctions law, whose enforcement they now demand.
The Democrats are demanding an escalation of the war with Russia as the European powers rush headlong into a direct clash with Russia.
9. As Trump looks on, supporters beat woman protester at rally in Youngstown, Ohio
At a campaign rally Monday in Ohio, a young woman who has yet to be identified was violently assaulted by multiple Trump supporters. Video of the event, which has been viewed millions of times on social media, sparked outrage and calls for the perpetrators to be arrested.
The woman was wearing a shirt that read: “Release the Epstein files.” The Trump administration has yet to release over 3 million files associated with the late fixer, sex trafficker and friend to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
Video of the assault shows the woman’s hair being pulled by a bald man in a gray shirt. The man strikes the woman in the face multiple times while at least two other men push and shove her to the ground. Police are then seen grabbing and pulling the woman out of the arena as the crowd chants, “USA! USA! USA!”
Trump, approvingly viewing the assault, claimed without evidence that the person was a “paid protester.” He said, “He’s a paid protester. They are all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country. They are scum, but he is going back home to mom.”
Trump added, “Don’t we love our law enforcement?”
The crowd continued to chant “USA! USA! USA!” as the young protester was manhandled and assaulted by the crowd and police.
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The scenes recall the German American Bund’s Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. When Jewish worker Isadore Greenbaum rushed the stage to protest, Bund stormtroopers beat him as the crowd cheered. Police removed and arrested Greenbaum. The rally combined American flags and a portrait of George Washington with swastikas and denunciations of “Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”
In Youngstown, racist and anti-communist denunciations from the podium likewise accompanied physical attacks on dissenters, wrapped in patriotic chants. These are the political methods the Republican Party and its billionaire backers are cultivating.
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On the same day, Trump’s Homeland Security Investigations goons raided the Washington D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. In Ohio, Trump called immigrants “murderers, rapists, drug dealers.” He attacked Minnesota and Somali immigrants. Referring to Representative Omar, Trump said, “She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military. All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right.’”
He went on to call Somalia “one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet,” denounce “savage Somali gang members,” and added, “This is not what we want in this country.”
Trump’s grunts prompted the human dust attending the rally to begin chanting, “Deport! Deport! Deport!”
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Following the assault, Trump went back to attacking immigrants and Muslims. After claiming the Democrats want to turn the “Midwest into Mogadishu,” he denounced the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. “You look at the guy running in Michigan. He’s a jihadist,” he said. The crowd responded with loud boos.
Trump continued: “Somalia bandits ... third-world gangs and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they don’t belong in America. Going to get them the hell out of here.”
This led to another round of chants of “Deport! Deport! Deport!” from the crowd.
Trump then turned to Springfield, Ohio, which has been targeted by the immigration Gestapo following the termination of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitian immigrants, of whom roughly 12,000 called Springfield home. The president boasted that the “Haitian population” was “being taken out, and they’re almost going to be gone and we’re giving that town back.”
Trump added that the “things I said in the debate”—referring to his lies in 2024 that Haitians were stealing family pets and eating them—“I was right.”
Another woman protester was then ejected from the arena, prompting more chants of “USA!” Trump claimed the protester had a “Palestinian flag.”
10. IMF meets amid sovereign debt build-up
The rapid escalation of public debt in all the major economies is dominating the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund at its annual October meeting being held in Bangkok, Thailand, this week.
Over the course of decades, the IMF has had to deal with the sovereign debt crises of many countries, generally referred to as “emerging market economies,” imposing brutal “restructuring” programs which slash money for social facilities to pay debt and interest to global banks and financial institutions.
But today the global debt crisis is lodged firmly within the economies of the major capitalist and imperialist economies, starting with the United States with a debt of more than $40 trillion and an interest bill running at more than $1 trillion a year.
The US administration, along with governments in France, throughout the eurozone and Japan as well as countries such as Australia, are faced with a situation in which the interest rates on their bonds, having been close to zero for much of the period since the global financial crisis of 2008, have returned to levels of 5 percent and more, not seen in a quarter of a century.
Faced with soaring borrowing costs, governments must set aside more money just to pay for the interest bill on their debt. In the US, for example, this amounts to one dollar in every five which the government takes in the form of revenue, setting up a “vicious loop” in which more money must be borrowed just to pay the interest bill on past debts.
For the first time in history, the Trotskyist movement is standing a candidate in a New Zealand general election. The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) is fielding Tom Petterson because the working class confronts a crisis of historic proportions, and because no party contesting this election offers it any way forward.
Our campaign is not a bid for office within the existing order. It is an intervention to expose the bankruptcy of every party of the capitalist establishment, and to raise the necessity of a socialist and internationalist leadership of the working class.
We call on workers and young people to support this campaign, and to register to attend our public meeting on November 1, at 1:30 p.m. in the Dowse Art Museum (James Coe Centre), 45 Laings Road, Lower Hutt.
This election is taking place as world capitalism enters the most dangerous period since the Second World War. The economic crisis that erupted in 2008 was never resolved and has intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling classes of every country have responded with a relentless assault on the living standards of working people, the promotion of far-right and fascist forces, and the drive to violently redivide the world.
12. Australian workers and youth denounce Israel’s genocide and Labor’s complicity
Thousands of workers and young people joined rallies across Australia last weekend marking three years since the start of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. In all the state capitals, as well as regional centers and smaller towns, protesters expressed their furious opposition to the Zionist regime’s imperialist-backed onslaught and the ongoing complicity of the Labor government.
The demonstrations showed that while the regular mass protests supporting Palestine have been essentially liquidated by their organizers—especially since the December 2025 Bondi mass shooting was used as a pretext to tighten already harsh anti-protest laws—opposition to genocide and war has not diminished among Australian workers and youth.
As has been the case throughout three years of protest, the pseudo-left, Greens and Palestinian bourgeois nationalist speakers at the rallies had no perspective to offer beyond appeals to the same Labor governments that have denounced opposition to genocide as “antisemitism,” conflated peaceful protest with terrorism and continued to arm the Israeli war machine, and which have forthrightly supported the criminal US war on Iran.
Socialist Equality Party members and supporters attended the rallies in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle, speaking with workers and young people and raising the need to build an international anti-war movement in the working class, the only social force capable of ending war and genocide and defeating their common root cause, capitalism.
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In Melbourne, a Year 12 student explained why he continued to attend the demonstrations: “Just because the length of the genocide has increased, doesn’t mean it’s gotten any less morally reprehensible. They’re still carrying out the genocide in broad daylight and it’s clear for everyone to see.
“I’m happy that we’re still making an effort to come out and remind everyone that we’re still here, and the issue’s still ongoing,” he said, arguing that protests needed to be accompanied by “practical means” of pressure, including “sanctions.”
He said the Labor government’s position was “morally unjustifiable.” The treatment of Senator Fatima Payman [who was suspended from caucus and compelled to resign from the party in mid-2024] after she crossed the floor, and the blocking of debate at the Labor Party’s national conference in July, had convinced him the party could not be reformed from within.
“I used to think maybe that’s a decent strategy—internal pressure,” he said. “But then after that Ed Husic thing was like, ‘that’s it, that strategy doesn’t work.’
“I know the Socialist Equality Party does a lot of work around a more radical perspective, looking at the whole system as something that’s illegitimate, and that needs to be changed from a fundamental level as opposed to just reformed.”
Socialist Alternative (SA), one of Chavismo’s most persistent promoters in the United States, has now drawn up its own balance sheet. In “The Rise and Fall of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution,’” published September 20, its author, George Martin Fell Brown, writes that “Delcy Rodríguez rapidly transformed herself into the Trump administration’s lapdog.” SA dates a “counterrevolution by Maduro against the gains of a Bolivarian Revolution” to the privatizations and Chevron deals that followed the crisis of 2017-18. And it delivers its verdict on the Venezuelan workers: “In 2026, the masses kept quiet and many even welcomed the coup.”
Each of these claims is false. There was no revolution for Maduro to overturn. Rodríguez did not transform herself: her policies were the continuation of the direction Chavismo had been implementing. And the working class is not quiet. The article is not a reckoning with the past, but an attempt to rescue the illusions that delivered Venezuelan workers, bound hand and foot, to the present catastrophe, and to keep them available for the next “pink tide.”
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Long before the January invasion, Chavismo had carried out one of the most brutal shock therapies in Latin American history. The “counterrevolution” SA attributes to Maduro was the response of a capitalist government to the end of the boom, carried out by the same state, the same political party and largely the same personnel.
The purpose of SA’s “balance sheet” is to rescue the claim that there was a revolution in the first place and that it had a working-class character. However, even SA’s own evidence refutes it. After the masses defeated the US-backed coup of April 2002, it notes, Chávez called for “national reconciliation and for people to return to their homes.” The working class never held power. No soviets or workers’ councils ever existed. The communal councils were created by law and financed by the presidency. “Popular power” became merely a label with no real popular content: the same “Ministries of Popular Power” now administer the US protectorate.
SA builds its argument on a passage from Marx, repeated by Lenin: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” In The State and Revolution, Lenin explained that the passage means the working class must “smash the bureaucratic-military machine” and replace it with organs of its own rule, as the Paris Commune did.
The passage presupposes that the working class has taken power. In Venezuela, an army officer took office through elections at the head of the existing bourgeois state. Yet SA writes that Chávez “still failed because seizing the state machine ready-made is a fundamentally wrong strategy.” The bourgeois nationalist is presented as the leader of the working class, and his policy becomes an error in “strategy,” not the expression of its real class character.
Chávez did not smash the state. He strengthened it, placing officers at the head of ministries, PDVSA and the mining zones.
After Maduro’s abduction, Trump brushed aside María Corina Machado, whom Washington had sponsored for years, saying she lacked “the respect within the country,” and turned to Rodríguez. Chavismo controls the army, the SEBIN political police, the PNB, the PSUV and part of the trade unions, and has years of experience imposing austerity and repressing protests. A protectorate built on the handover of oil and minerals requires cheap labor and a population kept in desperation. Chavismo has delivered both.
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The theory of permanent revolution actually explains why Chavismo ended in directly overseeing the recolonization of Venezuela. For countries of belated capitalist development, Trotsky wrote, “the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation.” This must be part of an international socialist revolution that extends to the advanced capitalist countries.
The national bourgeoisie, tied to foreign capital and terrified of the workers, cannot carry out the anti-imperialist struggle. Trotsky described the regimes this produces in Latin America: “The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapartist character sui generis.”
That is Chavismo. It confronted Washington and the old oligarchy in words, while expanding the profits of US corporations. When Chávez “nationalized” the Orinoco oil belt in 2007, Chevron accepted minority stakes and stayed, later receiving the licenses negotiated with Maduro under Biden.
SA, for all its talk of smashing the capitalist state, paints a different picture: “each time, the masses carried Chávez a bit farther to the left.” This is Pabloite revisionism in a nutshell. The bourgeois nationalist is cast as the first stage of the revolution, the masses as the force that pushes him along, and the building of an independent revolutionary party becomes unnecessary. Promoting Chávez served to paint in “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” colors these tendencies’ own operations within the political establishment at home. In SA’s case, for instance, this meant campaigning for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party.
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Having credited the working class with pushing Chávez forward, SA now blames them for the outcome: they “kept quiet and many even welcomed the coup.” First the workers are made co-authors of a “revolution” that never was. Then they are made accomplices of the counterrevolution. Never does SA hold responsible the leadership that subordinated them to the capitalist state and imperialism or its own role in promoting it. Behind this lies the rejection of the working class as a revolutionary force that runs from Pablo through Grant to the present day. A tendency that sees in Chávez the motor of history sees capitalism as given and workers as only a passive mass to be exploited, praised when it follows and condemned when it does not.
Less than four months ago, Venezuelan workers buried more than 6,500 victims of the June 24 earthquakes, killed in a country whose hospitals and housing had been gutted by a decade of crisis. They live on base wages worth a few cents. And they are fighting. SA’s article was written while teachers and nurses were already joining protests that culminated in Tuesday’s march on Miraflores.
SA concludes that Venezuela is “at a political low point” and that the “struggle, organization, and historical memory of the working class need to be rebuilt from scratch.” To start “from scratch” means to wipe away the lessons of one of the great strategic experiences of the working class internationally. If nothing is to be learned, anything goes. SA already points to the “second pink tide” of Claudia Sheinbaum, Gustavo Petro and Lula, governments that are “facing the same tests” and “have been found wanting,” as if bourgeois governments might be pressured to pass such tests. The way is being prepared to promote the next Chávez.
The lesson of Venezuela is that bourgeois nationalism, however radical its rhetoric, cannot free an oppressed country from imperialism. The struggle of Venezuelan workers against hunger is a struggle against the US protectorate, its Chavista administrators and their pseudo-left apologists. It can be won only through the independent mobilization of the working class, united with workers across the Americas and in the United States itself, on the program of permanent revolution fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!The discussion between Mehring Verlag representative Katja Rippert and the book’s editor, Johannes Stern, editor-in-chief of the German-language edition of the World Socialist Web Site, is now available on video.
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15 years in prison for "high treason under martial law": This is the sentence a Ukrainian court handed down on August 10, 2026, against the young socialist and opponent of war Bogdan Syrotjuk. He has already been in detention for more than two years.
The only "evidence" consists of six articles for the World Socialist Web Site. In them, he rejects the war as an internationalist and advocates for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers – against the regimes in Kyiv and Moscow as well as against NATO. His persecution shows that this war is not about democracy, but about geopolitical and economic interests.
The new book "The Ukraine War and the Fight for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotjuk" documents Bogdan's case for the first time and analyzes the causes of the Ukraine war. Especially in Germany, where 85 years after the Nazi war of annihilation a war against Russia is once again being stoked, it provides orientation in the struggle against militarism and nationalism – and for a socialist future.
On the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Johannes Stern, editor-in-chief of the German-language WSWS, presented the book in Frankfurt on October 10. It can be ordered here as an e-book and paperback:
https://www.mehring-verlag.de/library…Sign the petition for the release of Bogdan Syrotjuk:
https://www.wsws.org/freebogdan
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"Peace for the world! Down with war!"