Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. A major episode of AI market turmoil
Over the past months there have been repeated warnings from major financial and regulatory bodies, including the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, the Bank of England, the Financial Stability Board and others, that the AI boom has the potential to set off a crisis.
Last week provided clear evidence that these warnings are by no means unfounded as AI-related firms experienced severe turbulence which, in one case, was likened to being hit by a tornado.
The company in question was CoreWeave, a firm which started as a crypto coin miner but then shifted its operations to become a so-called neocloud firm which buys up large amounts of computer chips from Nvidia financed by tens of billions of dollars of debt and which then rents out its compute capacity to train AI models.
It experienced a plunge of as much as 28 percent in its share price. Even more significant, the yield on its bonds rose to as high as 15 percent, well and truly into what is known as “junk bond” territory. The cost of insuring investors against it going bankrupt, via credit default swaps, rose rapidly.
According to a report in the New York Times, at one point “investors placed a more than 60 percent likelihood CoreWeave would fail to meet its obligations.” CoreWeave has at least $35 billion of debt on its balance sheet and is expected to use $80 billion in cash to finance its operations over the next three years.
As one analyst told the Wall Street Journal, the market reaction reflected growing concerns that CoreWeave had a higher default risk and that its “enormous borrowing requirements could overwhelm its ability to generate cash and refinance debt at reasonable rates.”
But CoreWeave’s travails are only a very sharp expression of developments in the market as a whole.
A report in the Financial Times (FT), based on an analysis by Morgan Stanley Research, noted that “more than $9 billion worth of CDS [credit default swaps] linked to bonds issued by Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Broadcom and Nvidia was traded on average each week in September, up from less than $2 billion in July.”
It is significant that the rise in CDS trading is now involving major AI firms.
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In last week’s upheaval the giant chip-making company Nvidia, the largest corporation in the world by market value, had $350 billion wiped off the value of its shares. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Sector fell 11 percent in the week, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index was down 5.5 percent.
There has been something of an upturn this week amid the issuing of reassuring statements that the boom will continue. But this is not an indication of any return to stability. In fact, as the head of Broadcom has commented, AI investors have “no clue what they are investing in” and the market had become a “casino.”
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Apart from the all-important question of where the revenue for this technological development is to come from, the AI buildout, which has become increasingly significant for US and global economic growth and stock markets around the world starting with Wall Street, is running into the more “normal” problems of capitalist development.
The rise in interest rates is one of these. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond, the benchmark for global markets, is now at more than 5 percent. This is not a particularly high rate by historical standards but for a period of 15 years following the global financial crisis of 2008 financial markets became increasingly addicted to ultra-low rates close to zero.
Another constriction is the delay in securing approvals for the building of AI data centers amid rising opposition from communities to their construction on various grounds including the increased cost of electricity which they will entail.
It has been estimated that this year at least 47 large projects have been delayed, withdrawn or blocked, that only 35 percent of planned US data centers are credible and that more than 1,000 communities have tried to introduce moratoria or restrictions on AI infrastructure, according to research carried out by the FT.
Far from the development of AI being some kind of smooth transition as depicted in the various prospectuses issued by its corporate proponents, it is becoming increasingly clear that the vast development of the productive forces it embodies is running headlong into all the irrationalities and contradictions of the capitalist system.
2. The two Elizabeth Gurley Flynns: A new biography of the “Rebel Girl”
There were, so to speak, two Elizabeth Gurley Flynns. The first was the young Flynn of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): the charismatic and beautiful “Rebel Girl” who became a celebrated organizer and soapbox orator in the IWW’s strikes and heroic free-speech fights before the First World War.
The second was the older Flynn who spent decades in the Communist Party USA and eventually became its national chair. By then the fiercely independent young Wobbly had become a highly visible—and unfailingly obedient—public defender of a party whose political line followed dictates passed down from the Kremlin to CP party headquarters in New York.
The evident distance between these two Flynns presents an obvious problem for the biographer. Was there a fundamental political break between the libertarian radicalism of the IWW years and Flynn’s later Stalinist loyalties? Or can an inner connection be found between the two?
Mary Anne Trasciatti’s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution addresses that question by placing civil liberties as the center of Flynn’s political life. The defense of democratic rights, Trasciatti suggests, formed a thread running from the IWW free-speech fights through Flynn’s work with the American Civil Liberties Union and ultimately to her own prosecution and imprisonment under the Smith Act during the Cold War.
Except when it did not. Flynn did nothing to oppose the Stalinist celebration of the 1941 Smith Act persecutions of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, including her old friend and comrade from their Wobbly days, James P. Cannon. To her credit, and unlike some biographies of the leaders of American Stalinism, Trasciatti does not deny Flynn’s lack of “consistency” when the democratic rights under attack were the opponents of Stalinism within the labor movement. But neither does she seek to explain.
Flynn never bothered either. She published a partial autobiography, I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of “The Rebel Girl” in 1955, after two decades in the CPUSA and while she was being prosecuted under the same Smith Act that she had earlier supported when it was aimed at the Trotskyists. Flynn prudently ended the account of her own life in 1926, thus preserving the image of the young IWW militant and defender of free speech while avoiding the period in which deference to the party’s Stalinist line required her to justify the persecution of political opponents.
Trasciatti, a labor historian at Hofstra University, has nonetheless written a valuable and honest study. The book is not an exploration of Flynn’s personal life and eschews pigeonholing her, in the style of identity politics, as a feminist icon or a “woman in history.” It is free of the trendy postmodernist jargon that weighs down many scholarly books.
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Flynn died in Moscow in September 1964 and was given a state funeral in Red Square by the bureaucracy that had murdered the generation of 1917. The Rebel Girl who once filled the jails of Spokane in defense of free speech ended her life honored by the regime whose crimes against socialists and workers she had spent nearly three decades excusing. Trasciatti’s civil liberties thread records that trajectory but does not explain it.
But is an explanation possible?
As an important passage of The World Economic-Political Crisis and the Death Agony of US Imperialism, published by the Workers League in 1979, notes, Stalinism did not have to invent its personnel in America:
[I]t would be mistaken to see the Communist Party only as an entity that has been artificially grafted onto the American labor movement by the Soviet bureaucracy. In the United States, Stalinism found a national base of support for policies that originated in the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy. Like the medieval plagues that originated in the East but flourished in the unsanitary conditions of life in Western Europe, Stalinism quite naturally hooked itself into the milieu of the trade union bureaucracy and middle class radicalism. Similarly, Stalinism found that the traditions of pragmatism and even populism provided a very hospitable political climate. In other words, the Stalinists have been able to utilize all that was backward in the political development of the American labor movement.
The key word is “backward,” in the sense of underdeveloped and unclarified. There is nothing in Trasciatti’s biography to suggest that the young Flynn, in spite of her courage and self-sacrifice, ever developed a worked-out understanding of capitalism or the state.
The syndicalism of the IWW, with its rejection of political struggle and its faith in industrial action, left the question of state power unresolved. By renouncing independent working-class politics, syndicalism left room for reliance on the very political forces it claimed to repudiate. Flynn’s labor militancy could thus coexist with the pragmatism and illusions of middle-class radicalism, her cooperation with liberals resting on no clear distinction between their outlook and the independent interests of the working class. This was indeed Flynn’s unique role in the IWW, as Trasciatti portrays it—to serve as a bridge between the liberals and the radical workers they inconsistently defended. Before the First World War, this weakness went untested. The war and the repression that followed exposed it. Flynn’s plea to Wilson, invoking patriotism and motherhood, showed how readily her militancy could give way to an appeal to the very state that was persecuting her comrades.
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These weaknesses did not lead inevitably to Stalinism. Cannon and others drew the lessons of the war and the Russian Revolution and moved from syndicalism to Bolshevism, and later to the struggle against its Stalinist degeneration. Trotsky assessed both the revolutionary promise and the political limitations of syndicalism in his 1929 essay “Communism and Syndicalism.” Describing revolutionary syndicalism as “an embryo of a revolutionary party as against opportunism ... a remarkable draft outline of revolutionary Communism,” he nevertheless identified its weaknesses as “a wrong understanding of the nature of the state and its role in the class struggle” and an inadequate conception of the revolutionary party. After the war, he wrote, syndicalism found its “refutation, its development and its completion” in communism.
Flynn’s eventual embrace of Stalinism represented a break with the revolutionary traditions of the IWW, but not with the political limitations that had accompanied her earlier militancy. When the Popular Front offered militancy in style and the defense of bourgeois democracy in program, Flynn found a political home, not in spite of Stalinism’s accommodation to liberalism but because of it.
This is not a happy story. There is something tragic in the life of a woman who devoted herself so completely to the struggles of the working class, only to end her days defending a bureaucracy hostile to the revolutionary aspirations that had animated her youth.
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Readers interested in the history of the American left will find much of value here, as well as an unstated lesson: courage and militancy, however genuine, cannot substitute for political understanding, without which even a devoted fighter for the working class can come to serve forces hostile to its interests.
3. French unions negotiate with Macron as mass protests explode across Europe
Yesterday, France’s union confederations met with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to discuss the one-day nationwide strike called for November 5. The result was a debacle for all those who argue that workers and youth can leave the leadership of strikes to these bureaucracies. They are doing everything they can to delay broader strikes, and workers must organize independently, in rank-and-file committees of action, to take control of the class struggle out of their hands.
The meeting came after weeks of high school protests that have been violently repressed, the mass October 17 protest in France, and protests for housing or against war spreading from Spain and Portugal to Belgium, Italy, Albania and Greece. By now it is clear that President Emmanuel Macron will not make concessions, but rely entirely on repression. Over 10,000 people have been arrested. Macron is imposing curfews in France’s major cities and is calling out the army, tactical military police squads, and armored vehicles to repress this weekend’s October 24 “yellow vest” protest.
Before meeting with the union confederations, Lecornu made clear they would discuss not wage or social demands, but police repression on November 5. His letter of invitation stated that the topic of discussion would be the “ways and means to guarantee the indispensable freedom to protest [that] some seek to corrupt” by using violence. Nevertheless, the union heads still decided to attend.
Before the meeting, Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) secretary Sophie Binet went on RTL radio to claim that she would focus the meeting on obtaining social concessions. “There is legitimate and enormous anger, and what I am going to tell the prime minister in a little while is how one responds to such a situation,” she said. “One does not respond to a social mobilization with repression, one responds politically.”
This is a charade, taking the working class for fools. After nearly 10 years of Macron’s presidency, it is well known that its only political response to protests is repression. The senior minister who attended the meeting with the union leaders, besides Lecornu, was Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez. Nuñez no doubt asked how union leaderships and security details would help police keep protest marches on October 24 and November 5 under control.
Nonetheless, after the meeting, Binet and other confederation heads play-acted as if they were surprised and disappointed that the government had made no concessions. None of them called for further strike action, however. Limiting themselves to a sole, one-day protest on November 5, over a month after the beginning of the mass high school protests, they are continuing to isolate protesting student youth and “yellow vests.”
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The working class can bring France and Europe to a halt, block the economy, and demonstrate its immense, revolutionary social power. But this requires independent, international organization of the rank and file. Binet’s idea that one-day protests can convince Macron of the error of his ways and to resolve the crisis in France via a national policy of social compromise is an illusion. A wave of strikes preparing a genuine general strike will massively intensify class conflict.
Writing in Whither France amid the escalating class struggle before the 1936 French general strike in the final years before World War II, Trotsky explained:
The general strike is not possible except at a time when the class struggle rises above particular and craft demands, and extends over all occupational and district divisions, and wipes away the lines between the parties, between legality and illegality, and mobilizes the majority of the proletariat in an active opposition to the bourgeoisie and the state. Nothing can be on a higher plane than the general strike, except the armed insurrection. The entire history of the working-class movement proves that every general strike, whatever may be the slogans under which it occurs, has an internal tendency to transform itself into an open revolutionary clash, into a direct struggle for power.
Class struggle is no less bitter today than in the 1930s. The refusal of every prime minister under Macron over the last decade to grant social concessions is not a product simply of personal stubbornness that workers can overcome with larger protests. It is objectively rooted in the international crisis of capitalism, especially the escalating global war and European financial crisis.
France, like countries across Europe, is escalating NATO’s war with Russia and plunging tens of billions of euros into increased military spending and militarization of industry, in a bid to secure as large a share as possible of the spoils from a new global war. Even as it competes with other countries for military power, France, like other European countries, devotes ever more income to servicing its massive, unviable €3.5 trillion debt.
This sets the ruling establishment on a collision course with workers and youth deeply opposed to austerity, war, police-state repression and neo-fascism. The task objectively posed to workers is to build organizations of struggle and articulate a political perspective capable of unifying struggles against austerity, war and repression now unfolding across Europe into a united movement of the working class.
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The political charade of the French unions’ meeting with Macron is a warning: workers cannot wait upon the timetables of these bureaucracies to struggle. As the Parti de l’égalité socialiste has explained, the alternative is
the building of committees of action in schools, universities, workplaces and neighborhoods, elected and controlled by those engaged in struggle and independent of the union bureaucracies and capitalist parties. These committees must take control of the struggle out of the hands of the bureaucracies. They must unite workers and youth in France with those now entering struggle across Europe and worldwide, to prepare a general strike against austerity, repression and war.
This requires a revolutionary political perspective: the fight for workers’ power and the United Socialist States of Europe, against fascism, war and capitalism.
4. Australian establishment exploits violent attack on MP to demonise political opposition
Yesterday it was confirmed that independent federal parliamentarian Helen Haines has tragically lost both of her legs after a violent assault on Monday. She remains in a critical but stable condition in hospital.The incident occurred outside Haines’ electoral office in Wangaratta, a town in northeast Victoria, around 3:30 p.m. on Monday. Haines had just parked her car and was standing at its boot when the alleged perpetrator Brendan Nugent reportedly made a U-turn in the middle of the street before driving his four-wheel drive into her twice.
The apparent targeting of a politician inevitably raises questions of a political motive, which must be investigated. Whatever those findings, the attack on Haines was horrific and reactionary.
Leading political, intelligence and media figures, however, have preempted the findings of such an investigation, immediately implying a political motive and linking the attack to far broader assertions about the dangers of social media, political protests and even political debate.
The campaign has continued despite police stating that the motive for the attack remains unknown, and emerging evidence of serious medical problems, mental health concerns and longstanding personal difficulties involving Nugent.
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Since the tragic deaths at Bondi Junction, the gutting of medical and mental health care has been accelerated. The Labor government’s forced removal of 160,000 National Disability Insurance Scheme participants and the slashing of supports from hundreds of thousands of others will only intensify the despair of those battling severe and complex health issues including with their mental health.
Yet the more evidence emerges about the complexity of Nugent’s personal circumstances, the more striking is the rush to draw political conclusions from the attack. Growing indications of his mental health problems have not stopped attempts by the political and media establishment to exploit Monday’s tragic incident to condemn political anger and dissent.
Calls for tougher measures against political harassment have accompanied Labor’s efforts to expand government regulation of social media. The government introduced its Digital Duty of Care legislation before the attack, but the incident is now being invoked in arguments for greater regulation of online platforms. The proposed legislation would impose new obligations on online services, backed by substantial financial penalties, and expand regulatory powers over online content.
Labor Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh made the argument particularly explicit in a speech on Wednesday, which began by claiming that early reports suggested the attack on Haines was “deliberate and politically motivated,” despite police having established no motive.
Leigh noted growing political anger internationally, declaring: “Various causes have been suggested, from inflation to inequality, housing to climate.” He dismissed them as inadequate explanations, asserting: “To explain a big global shift, you need a big global change. In my view, the most likely candidate is how people get our information.”
In other words, the principal source of mounting political anger was not the deepening social crisis or the policies of governments themselves, but social media.
Leigh’s remarks underscored the political purpose of the campaign surrounding the attack on Haines. Amid mounting opposition to war, austerity and the destruction of living standards, demands to “lower the temperature” are being used to portray political anger itself as dangerous and to justify further restrictions on democratic rights.
5. Canada: The Alberta independence referendum and the fight against Trump and the far right
The result of Monday’s referendum on the independence of Alberta—Canada’s oil-rich, fourth most-populous province—is a rebuke to the far right and the Trump administration.
With a voter turnout that far surpassed most recent federal and provincial elections in Alberta, 75.5 percent of Albertans voted to remain in Canada, while 24.5 percent voted for the holding of a “legally binding” referendum on independence.
In Edmonton, 86 percent voted to remain, and in Calgary, 83 percent—totals that would have been higher had recent immigrants been able to vote. Support for separation was concentrated in rural Alberta, including communities hit by Big Oil’s post-2014 drive to boost profits by slashing conventional drilling, which has eliminated some 50,000 oil-related jobs.
With polls showing the referendum was certain to fail, the White House did not formally endorse secession. But State Department officials and Republican Party operatives met repeatedly with separatist leaders. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta Washington’s “natural partner,” and Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, declared that Alberta “should separate.”
Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has refused to renew the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, imposed a barrage of tariffs on key sectors of Canada’s economy and repeatedly declared his intent to reduce Canada to a vassal state or annex it outright. This is part of a drive to establish unbridled US hegemony from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego and conscript the hemisphere’s resources for war with China and America’s other great-power rivals. Washington invaded Venezuela in January, has threatened to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal and has tightened its blockade of Cuba.
Trump’s trade war tariffs and annexation threats have provoked mass opposition across Canada. They were a major factor in the 2025 federal election defeat of the Pierre Poilievre-led Conservatives, who were viewed as too close to Trump and his MAGA movement. They were likewise a key determinant of the outcome of Alberta’s October 19 referendum.
The Alberta separatist leaders boasted of their ties with Trump and affinity for his fascistic views, while making their own pledges to expel immigrants, remove all restraints on capital, dramatically slash taxes on big business and the rich and prohibit elementary public health measures.
The separatists were encouraged at every step by Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party (UCP) government. This is the outcome of decades in which sections of the political establishment tied to Alberta’s oil barons have promoted “Alberta First” and western regionalism to drag Canadian politics to the right, from the Reform Party to Poilievre’s Conservatives and the UCP.
Smith, who seized the UCP leadership and Alberta premiership in 2022 by mobilizing the pro-separatist far right, slashed the numbers of signatures needed for a citizen-initiated referendum by more than two-thirds to assist them in forcing a referendum on secession. Then, when the courts ruled the referendum could not proceed in the form originally proposed, she herself placed the independence issue on the ballot.
To recognize the significance of this result is not to lend a shred of support to the pro-Canada campaign of the Carney Liberal government and the most powerful sections of Canadian capital, backed by the trade union bureaucracy and the New Democratic Party. These forces exploit popular outrage against the gangster Trump to whip up Canadian nationalism, suppress the class struggle and bind working people to the dominant faction of Canada’s imperialist bourgeoisie.
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Workers have every reason to oppose Trump and everything he represents—oligarchy, social reaction, dictatorship and war. But to do so they must separate themselves from all the rival factions of the bourgeoisie and all their various political representatives—from Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and other advocates of “Canada Strong,” to those like Smith pushing for greater power for the Alberta elite to the proponents of Quebec and Alberta separatism.
Insofar as the Canadian bourgeoisie opposes Trump, it is solely from the standpoint of defending its own profits and privileges. They are rankled and rattled by his refusal to recognize their “sovereign” right to the lion’s share of the profits to be derived from exploiting the workers of Canada and its abundant natural resources, and by his denying Canadian capital privileged access to the US market in return for its further integration into a Fortress North America.
Under the cover of opposing Trump, the Carney-led Liberal government is implementing Trumpian-type socio-economic policies on behalf of Canada’s own financial oligarchy. This includes massive military spending increases, “mega” corporate tax cuts, sweeping social spending cuts, deregulation and privatization. With the newly introduced “Building Canada Strong Act” (Bill C-39), it is “normalizing” the newly arrogated, authoritarian governmental power to criminalize strikes, without even the fig leaf of parliamentary consent, under a concocted “reinterpretation” of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.
To push back against Trump, Ottawa has forged a military-security alliance with the European powers on the basis of their shared aim of pursuing the NATO-instigated war with Russia to “victory,” no matter the cost in lives, and at developing their military capabilities independent of the US and American technology so they can pursue their own predatory imperialist interests and ambitions independent of Washington.
In the immediate aftermath of Monday’s referendum, which also included a series of loaded UCP government-drafted questions scapegoating immigrants for the deplorable state of public services and the high cost of living, Carney announced his government was ready to discuss with Smith Alberta’s proposals to restrict immigration and deny “non-Alberta approved” immigrants their right to public services.
The separatists’ defeat brought a sigh of relief from the dominant faction of Canadian capital. But the centrifugal pressures on the Canadian nation-state are rooted in the breakdown of the US-led world order and the contradiction between an integrated world economy and its division into rival nation-states.
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Workers in Canada must take advantage of the weakness of Canadian imperialism to assert their class interests through the intensification of class struggle and by reviving the traditions of joint struggle with their most proximate class allies, the workers in the United States.
This requires repudiating the nationalist-corporatist politics of the trade union bureaucracy—Team Canada and the Quebec nationalist-cemented tripartite alliance of the unions, business and the state in Canada’s lone majority French-speaking province—making socialist internationalism the axis of their struggle. To oppose austerity, war and reaction, workers in Canada must forge unity with workers in the US and Mexico in a common struggle for workers’ power and a socialist North America.
On Monday, the party leaderships of the Left Party, the Greens, and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) voted in Berlin to begin joint coalition negotiations. This was accompanied by a massive campaign in political circles and the media to demonize such a government. Chancellor Merz warned against “radical leftists,” while Defense Minister Pistorius (SPD) spoke of “a signal against the Bundeswehr” and opposed a “red-green-red” coalition.
This campaign can only be understood against the backdrop of the mass protests erupting across Europe. France, Belgium, Albania and Italy are all being shaken by a massive youth uprising. In Spain, hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets to protest the country’s housing crisis, and strikes are spreading among the working class across the continent. It is this enormous opposition—which also found a distorted expression in the Left Party’s record-breaking recent election result in Berlin—that is the real target of the campaign.
The Left Party itself is a proven pillar of the existing order and of the policies of war and austerity and is even actively participating in the campaign against its own members of parliament. On Tuesday, a meeting of the parliamentary group’s executive committee was scheduled to decide on the future of Neukölln district candidate Vanessa Emde. However, the decision was postponed by one week after Emde went on sick leave.
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The events in Berlin show that the “left-wing” members of parliament do not represent an alternative to the party’s fundamental line but rather use their left-wing rhetoric to cover up the right-wing course—regardless of whether they are ultimately expelled from the parliamentary group or not.
What is needed are not such fakers. What is needed is a break with this party. The only way to stop the official war policy and social cuts is through the international mobilization of the working class directed against the root of these policies: capitalism. The Socialist Equality Party is fighting for this socialist program. Register now as an active supporter and become a member of the SGP.
7. Spain’s pseudo-left launches Broad Front as electoral trap for workers and youth
Spain’s pseudo-left parties launched their new electoral coalition, the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), at a rally in Madrid on October 17, calling to tackle the housing crisis and prevent the far-right Vox party from coming to power with the right-wing Popular Party (PP) in the November 29 elections.
The launch of the Broad Front takes place amid an eruption of mass protests and strikes across Spain and Europe, from France to Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Albania. Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of workers and young people took to the streets in more than 50 Spanish cities against soaring rents, evictions and the housing crisis, with growing calls for a general strike. The protests led to the dissolution of parliament and the calling of snap elections.
The Broad Front, led by former Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, brings together Sumar, the Stalinist-led United Left (Izquierda Unida-IU), More Madrid (Más Madrid), Catalonia in Common (Catalunya en Comú) and smaller regional formations. It repackages the discredited political forces that have participated in successive pro-austerity, pro-war PSOE-led governments since 2018.
It seeks to divert the growing anger of workers and youth against austerity, militarism and the far right into a nationalist dead end of support for capitalist governments. It aims to prop up another PSOE-led capitalist government or, should the PP and Vox secure the victory predicted by opinion polls, present itself as a “left” opposition to Spain’s first far-right government since the fall of the regime of General Francisco Franco in 1978. In either case, its function is to block the emergence of an independent movement of the working class.
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The deepening crisis confronting workers in Spain cannot be resolved via national reforms. Spain’s public debt stood at approximately €1.76 trillion, or 101.5 percent of GDP, in June 2026. Across Europe, high indebtedness, economic stagnation and the enormous expansion of military expenditure are intensifying demands from the financial oligarchy for sweeping austerity. The hundreds of billions being diverted towards NATO rearmament must be paid for through mounting pressure on wages, pensions, healthcare, education and other social spending.
The PP and Vox are advancing an agenda of tax cuts for the rich and big business, mass deportations of migrants, cuts in education and healthcare and privatization of pensions. Their influence cannot be explained as the product of a uniform shift of Spanish society to the right. It takes place amid mass housing demonstrations, teachers’ strikes and widespread hostility to social inequality and militarism.
The struggle against austerity, war and the far right cannot be waged through an electoral strategy to pressure the PSOE for less reactionary policies. The deep social anger expressed in the housing protests and calls for a general strike must be transformed into a conscious political movement of the working class, independent of all the capitalist parties and the trade union bureaucracies tied to them. The same forces that have collaborated with successive governments cannot be entrusted with leading a struggle against the capitalist system.
Workers must build rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, schools and working-class neighborhoods, independent of the union bureaucracies and the pseudo-left. These committees can unite struggles over wages, housing, public services and democratic rights with opposition to the Gaza genocide, NATO militarism and the growth of the far right in Spain and across Europe. Above all, the working class must be politically prepared for the revolutionary confrontation with the capitalist oligarchy that will emerge from its struggles against austerity, fascism and war.
8. Philippine impeachment prosecutors withdraw some charges against Vice President Duterte
Prosecutors in the impeachment trial of Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte withdrew three of their four charges on October 13, abandoning the accusations that drove the campaign for her removal. Having presented evidence on the alleged misuse of confidential funds and threats to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., they secured the withdrawal of both articles before her legal defense could present its answering case. A bribery charge, on which evidence had not been presented, was also dropped.
The trial now rests exclusively on allegations of unexplained wealth and defective asset declarations. Lead prosecutor Gerville Luistro presented the maneuver as an expression of confidence: the financial evidence alone would suffice to remove Duterte.
However, the prosecution’s own explanation exposes a different calculation. Manila Representative Joel Chua, a member of the prosecution panel, warned that a lengthy defense presentation would erode the impact of the prosecution’s evidence. “People will forget the evidence we presented. People will lose interest,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The accused’s opportunity to answer is thus treated as a threat to the prosecution’s political objectives. The defense becomes an interruption during which the public might cease to accept its account.
The withdrawal constitutes a direct attack on due process. Prosecutors obtained the benefit of presenting accusations before the tribunal while preventing those accusations from undergoing a completed adversarial examination. Neither the confidential-funds charge nor the threats charge will receive a verdict.
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The impeachment is an instrument of the struggle between the Marcos and Duterte factions of the ruling class for control of the Philippine state. Their 2022 electoral alliance disintegrated and gave way to open political warfare. The approaching 2028 presidential election turns their rivalry into a conflict over succession. Removing and disqualifying Sara Duterte would eliminate her faction’s presidential leading candidate.
The rupture developed over the geopolitical orientation of the Philippines. Marcos and Duterte campaigned together promising continuity with the policies of the outgoing administration of Rodrigo Duterte, Sara Duterte’s father, pursuing improved relations with China. On taking office, Marcos reversed course, dramatically expanding American military access and placing the Philippines in the forefront of Washington’s confrontation with Beijing.
The Duterte faction represents sections of the bourgeoisie whose economic interests favor closer relations with China. The sharpening global crisis makes accommodation between these orientations impossible. Presidential succession concerns not merely patronage and offices, but the country’s position in a war with China for which Washington is actively preparing.
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A corruption scandal is a faction fight in the bourgeoisie; it does not address the systemic injustices of capitalism upon which their political rule rests. The Marcos administration conducting the impeachment presides over this system. Selective investigation does not challenge it. It equips one faction to destroy another.
The precedents are familiar. Renato Corona was removed as chief justice under Aquino over asset disclosure. Under Duterte, Aquino-appointed Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno was ousted through a different procedure that likewise turned on asset statements. Each faction discovers the sanctity of financial disclosure when opening its opponent’s records.
The financial investigation is acquiring a more openly political character. Accusations of unexplained wealth are being joined to allegations of disloyalty: the Duterte faction’s economic relations with China are presented as evidence of foreign penetration of the state.
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Duterte’s defense presentation begins November 9, shortly before Trump’s expected arrival for the November 15–17 ASEAN summit in Manila.
Marcos will receive the American president while working to eliminate his principal domestic rival. Integration into American war preparations is presented as national policy, and commercial relations with China as evidence of suspect loyalty.
Neither faction offers working people a way out of corruption, repression or war. Both defend the capitalist social order that produces these conditions. Behind the impeachment’s financial ledgers stands a struggle over control of a state that Washington is turning into a frontline position in its confrontation with China.
9. New Zealand SEG candidate presents socialist and anti-war perspective at election forum
Last Sunday, Tom Petterson from the Socialist Equality Group (SEG) participated in a “meet the candidates” forum hosted by the non-profit organisation It’s in the Ballot, for the upcoming New Zealand general election on November 7. Petterson is standing as a candidate for the SEG in Hutt South and is the first member of the Trotskyist movement to stand in a New Zealand election.
The only other candidate standing in Hutt South present at the event was Ben Wylie-van Eerd of the Opportunity Party (TOP), a right-wing, pro-business party founded by millionaire Gareth Morgan that fraudulently poses as a “centrist” alternative to the major parties. Also present was Nigel Elder, the candidate for the far-right ACT Party in the adjacent Remutaka electorate. ACT has played in prominent role in pushing the austerity agenda of the current National-led coalition government.
The candidates of the two major parties, Labour and National, as well as the Greens, did not attend and gave no explanation for their absence.
The format was highly restrictive. After one-minute opening statements, the candidates answered questions prepared by the organizers and randomly assigned to each, in a manner similar to a TV game show. There were no questions from the floor nor open discussion and debate.
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Throughout the forum, Petterson raised the necessity for workers of all ethnicities and nationalities to unite against capitalism. Responding to a question about whether the current immigration settings are “sustainable,” In opposition to every other party including ACT and TOP, Petterson called for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and opposed the anti-immigrant policies of both Labour and National-led governments.
In response to a question on the contemporary significance of the Treaty of Waitangi, he stressed that this was a colonial document that the British Empire used to deceive Māori tribes with false promises that they could keep their land. The Socialist Equality Group opposes the elevation of the 1840 Treaty and the use of Treaty settlements since the 1980s to elevate a narrow capitalist layer while Māori workers are living in poverty.
The working class faces a social crisis of historic dimensions. Real wages in New Zealand have fallen by 6.4 percent since 2021. One in five children lives in poverty, and half a million people—one in ten—now depend on food banks to survive.
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Petterson pointed to the fundamental change required when asked what bill he would introduce to parliament if elected: “To place the commanding heights of the economy under public ownership, under the democratic control of the working class.” He referred to the staggering inequality of New Zealand capitalism—$129 billion in the hands of just 150 families, and $39.5 billion in bank profits over the past five years.
“All of this wealth was created by the working class, and it should be the working class, the vast majority of the population, which decides how it is used.”
Petterson directly raised that these necessary steps would not be achieved by submitting a bill to parliament. “What is required is not the reform of capitalism, which is impossible. What is required is the overthrow of capitalism.”
In his closing statement Petterson explained: “I am standing in Hutt South not primarily to get into parliament but to raise that the working class must itself organise its own party,” he said. “Every demand for an increase in the living standards of workers collides with the profit system and all the parties that defend it. What is required is for workers to take their own political action.” That action, he explained, includes the building of rank-and-file committees in the workplaces, independent of the trade union bureaucracies that have functioned for decades to push through pay cuts for workers.
He concluded by raising the necessity of international unity. “Workers must unite across borders in the fight for world socialist revolution,” he said. “That is the only way forward, the only way to prevent a catastrophic world war, and dictatorship.”
Henry Antonio Marmol Martinez, a 52-year-old maintenance mechanic, was killed on Friday, October 9, while working on industrial machinery at the McWane Ductile iron foundry in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He was performing repairs during an overnight shift when he became trapped in the machinery and suffered fatal crushing injuries.
According to Phillipsburg Police Chief James McDonald, officers responded to the plant at about 4:40 a.m. after a report of an injured worker. Emergency medical personnel found Marmol unresponsive. He was transported to St. Luke’s Warren Campus, where he was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m.
Marmol, a resident of Easton, Pennsylvania, had worked at the plant for six years. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he had been married to Iris Marine for 34 years. He was the father of six and the grandfather of 10.
His family is demanding an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death.
Gabby Olivo, engaged to one of Marmol’s sons, told 69 News that Marmol was adjusting machinery when something went terribly wrong. According to the family’s account of the incident, his arm became caught in the equipment, which then crushed his body. A United Steelworkers representative told the family that his ribs and lungs had been crushed.
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The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has also opened an investigation, which the agency says could take up to six months.
The death occurred at a facility that OSHA has repeatedly recognized as having supposedly exemplary workplace safety practices.
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OSHA’s investigation may identify specific violations and result in additional penalties. Any serious investigation must establish whether the machinery had been shut down and isolated from hazardous energy, whether lockout/tagout procedures were followed, and who was responsible for enforcing them. These questions are central to determining the circumstances of Marmol’s death. Management controls machinery, maintenance schedules and working conditions, while workers bear the consequences when safety fails.
The United Steelworkers’ participation in the plant’s labor-management relations provides no protection to workers confronting dangerous equipment. The union’s concurrence with the VPP designation made it a direct participant in certifying the plant as safe.
These labor-management arrangements extend across the steel industry. Contracts covering tens of thousands of workers at US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs expired on September 1, but USW officials kept workers on the job under extensions while negotiating new agreements. In a September 30 bargaining update, the USW protested US Steel’s proposal to remove “partnership” language encouraging “communication, cooperation, and better labor-management relations.” At Cleveland-Cliffs, the union announced tentative agreements on safety and training, while negotiations over wages and health care continued.
Steelworkers have continued to die under these arrangements. On September 27, Jeffrey Smith, 53, was crushed between two door machines at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Monessen coke plant in Pennsylvania. The company said it was investigating his death jointly with USW representatives and that there were “no disruptions to the Monessen operation.” In July, electrician Mitcheal Nelson, 62, was electrocuted at US Steel’s Granite City Works in Illinois. In August 2025, an explosion at US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works killed Steven Menefee and Timothy Quinn.
Workers’ interests in preserving their lives cannot be reconciled with corporations’ drive to maintain production and profitability through official declarations of cooperation.
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Defending workers’ lives requires the working class to organize independently, including rank-and-file safety committees controlled by workers themselves, with the authority to halt dangerous operations and enforce safe working conditions, independent of management and the union apparatus.
General Motors announced Tuesday that it is authorizing another $20 billion in stock buybacks, on the same day that the closure of its Brownstown battery plant south of Detroit was confirmed. The announcement comes amid continuing layoffs and the dismantling of production capacity at facilities across North America.
The new multiyear authorization follows the completion of a $6 billion buyback program announced in January. GM reported $3.3 billion in net income for the third quarter and raised its estimate of cash generation for the year. The company has repurchased nearly $30 billion in shares over the previous five years. Its outstanding share count has fallen from roughly 1.2 billion at the end of 2023 to 849 million by September 30 of this year.
The bonanza for shareholders has coincided with mass layoffs to make workers pay for mounting costs and lower than expected sales of electric vehicles. GM eliminated some 1,145 positions when it reduced its Factory Zero electric vehicle complex in Detroit to a single shift this year. The company has also cut hundreds of jobs indefinitely at its joint-venture Ultium Cells battery plant in Ohio and temporarily idled many more in Ohio and Tennessee. At Fairfax Assembly in Kansas City, hundreds of workers have been laid off.
Earlier this year, one former Factory Zero worker told the World Socialist Web Site that he had worked 12-hour shifts before being laid off again and losing his health insurance. Watching GM’s share price rise, he remarked: “Stock prices are going up, and it’s not trickling down.”
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United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain responded to the buyback with a florid denunciation of “legalized mass looting.” This statement was designed to conceal the UAW bureaucracy’s role in imposing the concessions which have made this looting possible.
“When we bargained our UAW contract with GM in 2023, the media and the company acted like it was the end of the world for autoworkers to get a raise,” he claimed. In reality, the 2023 contract was entirely on management’s terms. On November 29, days after the GM contract was ratified, GM announced a $10 billion accelerated buyback. CEO Mary Barra assured investors that GM’s next budget would “fully offset the incremental costs” of the new labor agreements by reducing costs elsewhere. That was GM’s verdict on Fain’s “victory.”
The layoffs followed immediately. In December 2023, GM announced roughly 1,300 job cuts at Orion Assembly and Lansing Grand River. An October 24 notice concerning Orion—issued before the tentative national agreement was announced—stated that union representatives had already been notified of the planned layoffs. At Stellantis, meanwhile, thousands of supplemental workers whom the UAW had promised a path to permanent employment were instead fired in the months following ratification.
“Why don’t 80 percent of GM’s autoworkers have a pension and retirement healthcare, as they did for half a century?” Fain asked. “Why is GM nickel and diming their retirees while lavishing shareholders with billions?”
Because the UAW signed these rights away for new hires in the 2007 agreement, introducing the two-tier system and transferring retiree medical obligations to a separately administered trust, with the concessions subsequently entrenched in later contracts. Fain and other UAW bureaucrats supported that agreement.
Fain himself owes his position in large measure due to the fact that two of his predecessors in office, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, went to prison for embezzling union funds; other senior UAW officials were convicted in kickback schemes involving company-union programs.
“Who benefits?” Fain asked. “And just five Wall Street firms—companies like Blackrock and State Street—will get nearly $7 billion out of this scam.” But the UAW bureaucracy also benefited from stock buybacks for years when the union-controlled benefit trust held billions in company stock. The trust received substantial GM stock in the 2009 restructuring, following UAW-backed concessions that had slashed new-hire wages almost in half. It continued to hold a major stake while GM spent billions on repurchases, and the UAW also had a former union vice president on GM’s board. The trust sold its remaining directly held GM shares in February 2021.
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Hardly any autoworkers will believe Fain’s grandstanding. They already rendered their verdict in the recent union election, where more than 90 percent of eligible UAW members did not vote and Fain was returned to office with the votes of only about 6 percent of the eligible membership. This was a mass boycott of the apparatus. “Workers have no faith or trust in the UAW anymore,” a Nexteer worker told the WSWS.
The union and its federal monitor also enforced restrictions on socialist Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman’s opposition campaign for UAW president, which was centered on the abolition of the bureaucracy and putting rank-and-file workers back in control, while many members reported receiving no ballot or notice of the vote.
While Fain wags his finger today, in May 2025, he celebrated GM’s investment in V-8 engine production, declaring that Ford and Stellantis should “learn from GM.” A month later, the UAW hailed GM’s $4 billion plan to shift and expand production at three US plants as a triumph of Trump’s auto tariffs. As late as July this year, then-UAW GM department head Mike Booth boasted that the union had supposedly secured $16 billion in investment commitments, guaranteeing, he claimed, the future of its members.
The bureaucracy operates as a direct adjunct of management. Under its 2023 agreement, union officials participate in implementing GM’s Global Manufacturing System, joint competitiveness reviews, sourcing discussions and workforce-management programs. GM finances joint activities that employ or reimburse qualifying union personnel. The apparatus helps police productivity and costs while treating layoffs as inevitable.
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Modern auto production connects workers across continents in world supply chains. This creates immense possibilities for a common struggle by autoworkers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany and elsewhere. In Mexico, for example, Volkswagen workers at Puebla have twice rejected union-backed agreements; on October 15 they voted 3,135 to 2,452 against the latest deal, despite management’s threats over the plant’s future. In Canada, 9,000 Stellantis workers have voted overwhelmingly to strike.
But realizing this potential for joint international action requires a rebellion against nationalist union bureaucracies that pit workers in each country against one another. Such a struggle also requires independence from the corporate parties, with whom the UAW officials also have deep ties. Fain enjoyed deep ties with President Joe Biden, who made repeated public appearances with him and appointed him to the Export Council. Now Fain embraces Trump’s auto tariffs with only modest criticism as to its form and targets, and praises automakers for shifting production to the United States even when workers in other countries lose their jobs.
Last October Fain hailed Stellantis’s decision to cancel Jeep Compass production planned for Brampton, Ontario, and move it to Belvidere, Illinois, as a victory for American workers. A recent union white paper proposes one-to-one production-to-sales quotas backed by punitive tariffs, threatening sweeping cuts and layoffs to Mexico’s export-oriented auto industry, while offering union officials a role alongside governments and industry in reorganizing North American supply chains.
Years of betrayals have produced an immense accumulation of opposition among rank-and-file workers. The widespread abstention in the UAW election shows that this opposition is seeking a new outlet.
12. Ebola spreads to Nigeria and Kenya as epidemic expands beyond Congo (DRC)
Nigeria’s health ministry confirmed on October 20 that a woman in Abuja has Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease, making Nigeria the fifth country to detect the virus since the Congolese health ministry declared the outbreak on May 15. She arrived from Uganda, fell ill on October 7, and was admitted to a private hospital in the capital on October 11. Laboratory confirmation came nine days later.
Health authorities have identified 44 contacts, including health workers, other patients and fellow travelers, and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has activated its incident management system. Uganda’s health ministry says she only transited the country after a business trip to eastern Congo. “We are doing everything possible to contain this case,” Health Minister Muhammad Pate said. The NCDC had asked travelers from affected countries to fill out health declarations since September 22, and it is not yet clear whether any entry measure flagged her.
The confirmation came 12 years to the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Nigeria free of Ebola in 2014, when a single traveler from Liberia had seeded 19 confirmed cases and eight deaths in Lagos. Africa’s most populous country is now drawn into an epidemic centered about 2,600 kilometers away in eastern Congo.
Kenya, which confirmed its first imported case on October 6, now has nine cases. All belong to one cluster around the first patient, a Kenyan man who traveled by road from Beni in the Congo to Kampala and flew to Nairobi, where he died on October 5. At least three of those infected are health workers who cared for him, according to CIDRAP. The ninth, a 24-year-old relative, was already in quarantine when he fell ill. Of 135 contacts, 134 are in quarantine.
In Congo, the health ministry’s bulletin for October 18, day 156, records 9,552 confirmed cases and 4,602 confirmed deaths, a case fatality ratio of 48.2 percent. The epidemic has now reached 66 health zones in eight provinces, with Nord-Ubangi on the border with the Central African Republic the newest. The bulletin’s authors wrote that the 97 new cases that day, against 40 the day before, “point to a resurgence of transmission.” Thirty of the 41 deaths occurred in the community, outside any treatment center.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned that assuming the outbreak was under control “would be a mistake.” Anthony Kergosien, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Congo, said on September 18, “The outbreak is not shrinking, it is moving,” warning that undetected chains of transmission were taking hold in the response’s main hubs. MSF reported on October 6 new hotspots emerging every week in North Kivu and treatment capacity “stretched to its limit.” Stéphanie Hoffmann, who coordinates MSF’s treatment center in Butembo, said, “It is like fighting a megafire.” Speaking to Belgian broadcaster VRT this week, she warned, “If more help doesn’t arrive, I can’t see an end to this epidemic.”
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The current Ebola outbreak is expanding far more quickly than the worst previous epidemic, which ravaged parts of West Africa in 2014–2016, and briefly caused panic in the United States when some aid workers returned home from the affected areas.
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Children are dying at the highest rates of all. At MSF’s treatment center in Butembo, 24 of the 30 children admitted between June and September died, most of them under five. Children under five make up 24 percent of confirmed cases in North Kivu, and infants under one, 13 percent. “Children cannot continue to wait for data generated in adults,” MSF’s deputy director of operations, Dr. Guyguy Manangama, said, noting that the EBO-PEP prophylaxis trial excludes children under 20 kilograms. In Ituri, education officials reported that at least 10 schoolchildren have died among 25 infected since classes resumed.
The epidemic is also killing children indirectly. Reuters reported that routine vaccinations in Ituri’s hot spots fell by more than half between April and June, first-dose measles vaccination in Mongbwalu fell by 69 percent, and maternal deaths in Ituri rose nearly 70 percent. Congo has recorded 126,000 measles cases this year.
Health workers in Bunia have gone months without pay. Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya said on October 15 that donors had disbursed $962 million to the organizations running the response, but more than $700 million cannot be accounted for because most of them have not reported how it was spent. Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba said the government could trace only $220 million. “Such a situation is unacceptable and demands clarification,” Prince Bahati, a nurse in Bunia, told the Associated Press.
Global health security money that should be building treatment centers in North Kivu, paying the nurses of Bunia and developing new vaccines is deliberately withheld, as part of the policy of a ruling class that regards the lives of workers and the poor, in Africa and globally, as expendable.
13. Mexican health workers gather in second general assembly: Which way forward?
Rank-and-file workers of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) met in Mexico City on Sunday, October 18 for their second general assembly, voting to unify every current of their movement into “a single national front of struggle.” The assembly ratified a national march for Wednesday, October 21, from the Siglo XXI National Medical Center, and called a third assembly for Sunday, October 25.
Workers are organizing the “megamarch” to demand a 10 percent raise paid directly into their base wage, the hiring of staff, medicines and supplies, and the removal of the union leadership. They will march along Paseo de la Reforma to the Zócalo, joined by CNTE teachers and Pemex retirees.
The assembly and the march are the latest stage of a five-week rebellion against the union and the government. IMSS workers stormed the headquarters of their union on October 1, struck and organized demonstrations over its head on October 8–10, occupied union sections in at least seven states and, on October 14, voted down the union’s wage deal by a huge margin. Their revolt is in turn part of a major escalation of the class struggle internationally, including the mass protests against social cuts, the cost of living and war in France, Spain, Italy and other countries.
The assembly met as the leadership of the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS) and the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum work to keep the struggle out of the workers’ hands. Since the vote, SNTSS Secretary General Rafael Olivos and IMSS Director Zoé Robledo have held closed-door talks, and the union has asked the labor authorities to push back the deadline for a strike to November 15, “to continue negotiations, reach an agreement and prevent a strike from breaking out.”
At the assemblies, the question of a national strike has largely been avoided out of hopes that demonstrations and the No vote could pressure the bureaucracy into an extraordinary congress, attended by rank-and-file representatives, through which the movement could appeal to the government. However, continued intransigence from the bureaucracy and the government now signals that only decisive action will ensure that the movement heads toward victory.
Workers can impose their demands only through mass struggle, and that requires organizations of their own, independent of the union apparatus and all the political forces that defend it, and a conscious political leadership.
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The November 15 extension is a maneuver to buy time to demobilize the movement. But the rank and file have already struck on their own authority, and in Chihuahua workers kept emergency care running while they stopped outpatient services. The task is to prepare from below to generalize those stoppages into a national strike: electing rank-and-file committees in every hospital, clinic and department, with delegates subject to recall; building a strike fund and networks against reprisals; organizing emergency care; and winning the support of IMSS-Bienestar and ISSSTE workers (Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers), teachers, oil workers and patients. The delegates the assembly has called for should be elected to these tasks and answer to the workers who elect them.
The demands are 10 percent on the base wage indexed to inflation, full staffing and supplies, the restoration of the defined-benefit pension for every worker, and health spending of at least 7 percent of GDP paid for by halting payments to creditors. Workers can force concessions through mass struggle, but each demand collides with a budget and government beholden to the banks. In the fight for them, the committees must open the books of the IMSS and the union and, as the struggle develops, become the organs through which workers occupy the hospitals and run them under workers’ control, the beginning of workers’ own power.
The movement has correctly broken with the SNTSS bureaucracy, but this break must be carried through. Limiting it to a legal roadmap, no strike and a congress under the union’s statutes, reflects illusions Morena cultivated with its promise of union democracy in the 2019 labor reform.
The rank and file must remain in control of the struggle by building democratic committees, which must then link IMSS workers with the teachers and oil workers marching beside them and with health workers internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Most fundamental is the question of political leadership. The rebellion requires political leadership: a socialist program and a revolutionary party of the working class, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Mexico.
The World Socialist Web Site urges IMSS and IMSS-Bienestar workers who want to build these committees and a revolutionary political leadership to contact us.
14. Florida executes William Reaves Jr., 77, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD
Florida executed William Reaves Jr., a 77-year-old Army veteran of the Vietnam War rated 100 percent disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Tuesday evening at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. after a three-drug lethal injection, becoming the 18th person put to death in Florida this year and the 32nd in the United States. The US Supreme Court denied Reaves’ petition for a stay of execution.The curtain to the death chamber rose promptly at 6 p.m. Reaves was already strapped to a gurney with an IV in his arm. Asked if he had a final statement, he replied, “No, I do not.” The injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a heart-stopping drug began immediately. About 30 seconds later Reaves took several large breaths and stopped moving. After a few minutes the team warden shook his shoulders and shouted his name. A medic was then called in and pronounced him dead about a minute later.
This “consciousness check” was the subject of one of Reaves’ final appeals. His attorneys argued that his severe hearing loss meant he might not respond to verbal cues, so the state would not be able to reliably confirm he was unconscious before the second and third drugs were administered. They cited autopsies of executed Florida prisoners showing 33 had suffered flash pulmonary edema, which produces a sensation of drowning. The courts rejected the claim. The executioner, a private citizen by Florida law, is paid $200 for the grisly procedure and may remain anonymous.
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The case of William Reaves encapsulates the barbaric and reactionary character of capital punishment in America and in Florida in particular: the execution of an elderly man, a combat veteran whose service-related psychological injuries were never adequately presented to the jury.
At about 3 a.m. on September 23, 1986, Indian River County Deputy Richard Raczkoski, 29, responded to a 911 call from a pay phone outside a Zippy Mart near Vero Beach. Reaves, then 37 and recently released from prison, had placed the call. While the two men talked, a .38-caliber pistol fell from Reaves’ waistband. After a struggle Reaves regained the weapon, and as the deputy retreated, he fired seven times, hitting Raczkoski three times in the back and once in the arm. The deputy died later that morning. Reaves, who told police he had been high on cocaine, was arrested days later in Georgia.
Reaves was drafted and arrived in Vietnam in 1969 at age 20 as a member of Charlie Platoon in the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. His unit conducted “search and destroy” missions hunting North Vietnamese fighters and snipers in the jungle. His squad was once ambushed in an open field from three directions. When a close friend was shot in the back, Reaves disobeyed a direct order, jumped onto the evacuation helicopter and held him as he died.
By the end of his tour Reaves was using heroin. Older soldiers, his former attorney Chance Meyer wrote this month in Slate, taught him to use heroin and opium-laced marijuana to numb his terror. Family and friends said the once calm young man and model student came home from war overly anxious and distracted, unable to sit through family dinners. A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital denied him help, and his addiction deepened.
Mental health experts who later evaluated Reaves concluded that on the night of the shooting he was experiencing a flashback, reliving a firefight. “William’s flashbacks were triggered by men in uniform and the sight of guns,” Meyer wrote. “Even though Raczkoski only wanted to help him, William thought he was fighting for his life.”
Reaves’ first conviction and death sentence in 1987 were overturned because the prosecutor had previously represented him as a public defender. At his 1992 retrial his attorney, who had never tried a capital case, failed to have his mental health properly evaluated and never presented a PTSD diagnosis. Instead, a defense expert testified Reaves suffered from “Vietnam Syndrome,” which prosecutors told the jury had been invented.
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Only years later did the VA rate Reaves 100 percent disabled by service-related PTSD. In 2015 federal Judge Donald Middlebrooks vacated the death sentence, calling the prosecution’s testimony about Reaves’ military record “utterly intolerable” and “simply disgraceful.” In 2017 the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reinstated it on procedural grounds.
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According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Reaves was at least the 235th military veteran executed in the modern era and the 14th military veteran executed by order of DeSantis.
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On a single day, November 5, executions are scheduled in Indiana, Alabama and Florida, where Jesse Guardado would be the state’s 19th this year, tying last year’s record. Beyond Guardado, one additional active warrant remains, which would bring the death toll to 20, a new state record. That would be half the 40 executions carried out in Texas in 2000 under Governor George W. Bush, who took office as president the following January and launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A Lancet survey estimated that there had been 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq by mid-2006; the Costs of War Project estimated approximately 176,000 direct war deaths in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. The Afghanistan figure excludes indirect deaths caused by the destruction of food and water supplies, healthcare and other infrastructure.
The execution of William Reaves joins these two forms of state violence. The same state that drafted a young man, trained him to kill in a war that took millions of Vietnamese lives and abandoned him when he came home broken has now strapped him to a gurney and killed him. A ruling class that wages war abroad and executes at home will not abolish the death penalty. That task falls to the working class, as part of the struggle against war and the capitalist system that produces both.
15. Volkswagen plans worldwide pay freeze until 2030
The Volkswagen Group plans to freeze the salaries of its roughly 650,000 employees worldwide until 2030. This emerges from internal documents for the international top management, which were first reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). On Monday morning, the European and World Works Councils confirmed the plans on the group intranet. The freeze affects not only the workforce of the core VW brand but also the workforces of subsidiaries such as Audi, Porsche, Škoda, Seat, Cupra and Traton, among many others.For the 275,000 employees in Germany, a four-year pay freeze, with inflation remaining at the same rate, would mean a real wage loss of 12.5 percent. Inflation currently stands at 3.4 percent and is expected to rise further next year.
The plans are said to be part of the savings program, internally called “Group Target Picture,” drawn up by VW CEO Oliver Blume. It speaks of a “realignment” of international collective bargaining. The budget the group makes available to fund pay raises is to be slashed. The SZ reports a “pay freeze until 2030,” suspending pay raises until the start of the new decade.
From the fourth quarter of 2026—that is, with immediate effect—new guidelines are to apply worldwide that will push pay down even further: the reduction of variable pay elements, special payments and benefits; “higher productivity, more worktime flexibility and the reduction of overtime”; and further job cuts, especially outside production.
This sets the parameters for the pay negotiations that have only just begun for workers in Germany. Both in the in-house negotiations for the core VW brand and those for the wider metal and electrical industries, the IG Metall union has demanded just 5 percent more pay, making clear in advance that it is prepared to agree to cuts in real wages.
The current pay freeze is only the latest escalation of an all-out assault on the workforce that is already far advanced.
With the 2024 so-called “Christmas miracle,” the IG Metall and works council agreed with the company to eliminate 35,000 jobs and cut wages by up to 20 percent for the 130,000 employees of the core VW brand in Germany. In March 2026, group CEO Oliver Blume raised the job cuts to 50,000 across the group.
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And VW Group workers must be clear about one thing. The current pay freeze is not the end of the attacks. The group will respond to the continuing slump in sales in China—its most important market after Europe—with the next round of savings programs and debates about plant locations.
In the first nine months of 2026, Volkswagen delivered only around 1.38 million vehicles in China. That is 30.2 percent fewer than in the same period last year. In the third quarter alone, sales slumped by 38.5 percent to just under 406,000 vehicles. Extrapolating this trend over the full year, the China result would be well below 2 million vehicles, compared with around 2.69 million in 2025.
However, many of the investment plans that have already been cut still assume significantly higher sales in China, of around 2.7 million vehicles. Under current market conditions, this assumption appears hardly realistic any longer, since the crisis does not affect Volkswagen alone.
The Chinese passenger car market as a whole shrank by around 22 percent in the first nine months of 2026. Combustion-engine vehicles in particular are losing ground; the market for “New Energy Vehicles” (NEVs)—that is, battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids—has also recently been declining. At the same time, NEVs now account for well over half of new passenger car sales. While electrified drive-trains are dominating the market in China (80 percent expected in 2027), NEVs made up only around five percent of Volkswagen’s deliveries in China in 2025.
In other words, the slump in China will accelerate. Chinese workers will pay with the halting of production there, and European workers with the closure of numerous plants.
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VW workers can repel the worldwide attack by the VW executive board under Blume only by mobilizing worldwide. We call on workers in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Britain, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, China, India, South Africa and at all other VW sites to contact us... or send a message via WhatsApp to +491633378340.
16. Smart Solar fires over 80 after wildcat strike in Türkiye
Workers at the Smart Solar (Güneş) Technologies factory are completing the second week of their fight against the firing of over 80 of their coworkers. Smart Solar is one of Türkiye’s leading solar panel manufacturers, and the factory is in Aliağa, an industrial district of İzmir. The workers are fighting for their unpaid wages and for the right to choose their own union.
Workers resigned en masse from TES-İŞ, a union affiliated with the pro-government Türk-İş confederation that had collaborated with management for years, and joined DİSK-affiliated Enerji-Sen. They made the move after the company failed to pay the inflation raise that was due in July under the contract.
In September, the company fired seven workers who had led the break from the openly pro-company union, using the pretext of “departmental surplus.” Some 570 workers at the factory responded by halting production on September 11, and they refused to leave the factory for four days. The action ended after management told Enerji-Sen officials in a meeting that it would pay the accumulated wages and “seek a solution” for the fired workers. But Smart’s management broke its word. The seven workers were not reinstated and the back pay was not paid.
Enerji-Sen members then set up a protest tent in front of the factory on October 7, and the company responded with mass layoffs. According to a statement by Enerji-Sen, before the protest resumed the management had made the following offer: The seven fired workers would get two months’ gross wages on top of their severance and notice pay, and they would not be taken back. Other workers would be paid the inflation raise, withheld since July, in 12 installments starting in January, and the inflation raise due next January would be paid a year late. Workers rejected this offer. The company then declared a 10-day production stoppage to crush the struggle.
When the stoppage ended on October 19, workers who had not been fired returned to their jobs. The company then tried to force them to sign a pledge on “occupational health and safety” grounds, aimed at preventing wildcat strikes.
One worker told the daily Evrensel: “They’re forcing us to sign an agreement. They’re lying, saying it’s because we’re in the hazardous work category. But we all know their real concern is to block our right to refuse work and to stop us from halting production. Even this shows once again how afraid of us they are. We will not give up our struggle. Whatever they do, we will not back down from our decision.” However, they signed the pledge with the annotation, “All our legal rights are reserved,” and went back to work.
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The determined action of the Smart Solar workers is part of a growing wave of workers’ struggles in Türkiye against the soaring cost of living and attacks on economic and social rights. What is at stake is not an isolated onslaught by one company, Smart Solar. It is an intensifying social assault by the ruling classes and governments, in Türkiye and internationally, on the entire working class.
This assault has accelerated as the NATO powers, of which Türkiye is a member, finance imperialist war, which they are escalating from Russia to the Middle East, and their military spending through social cuts. The war is pushing up energy prices and deepening the cost-of-living crisis everywhere. Alongside this, the working class is being made to pay for the transfer of public resources to corporations and the financial markets.
This ruling class offensive is driven by the deepening crisis of the global capitalist system. Resistance to it can be carried forward only if workers unite and act as an independent social force across workplaces, industries and national borders. When the Smart Solar workers halted production in September, it was an important example of workers mobilizing their collective strength.
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This year Türkiye has seen a large number of workers’ struggles developing from below, above all those of Migros warehouse workers, miners and teachers. Throughout 2026, Doruk Mining workers have fought against layoffs and the theft of their wages and benefits. They marched to Ankara and defied police repression, putting the class struggle on the national agenda.
Mass protests and strikes are now spreading from France to Spain and Italy, and from Albania to Ireland, Portugal and Belgium. Alongside them are mass struggles against austerity and political repression in many places, from India to Tunisia and the countries of Latin America. In the United States, nearly 1 million members (over 90 percent) of the United Auto Workers (UAW) did not take part in the union’s national election. These developments show that masses of workers and young people everywhere are becoming increasingly alienated from the old political and trade union establishment and the socioeconomic system they defend. They are searching for an alternative.
The growing workers’ and social struggles demonstrate both the objective basis and the necessity for uniting them in an international movement. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) answers the need for the working class to unite across workplaces, industries and borders.
17. Flood disaster in Istanbul, at least 9 people dead
Torrential rain that struck Istanbul and the surrounding region on Wednesday, October 14, has once again turned the city of 16 million people into the scene of a major social catastrophe. According to the Istanbul Governor’s Office, seven people were killed in Istanbul and two more in neighboring Kocaeli.
The downpour, described as the most severe since records began in 1942, turned streets into rivers and flooded homes and workplaces. Torrent-swept cars piled up at the bottom of hills.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and the bourgeois media have presented the disaster as an unavoidable act of nature. But heavy rainfall turned into a deadly flood because decades of urban development, driven by real estate speculation and profit, have filled the city’s streambeds with concrete. At the same time, the capitalist system has produced an existential climate crisis.
According to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Disaster Coordination Centre (AKOM), between 130 and 277 millimeters of rain fell in a single day in the districts around the Bosphorus and in the northern and central parts of the European side. The 277 millimeters measured in Beykoz was more than four times the city’s average rainfall for the entire month of October.
The identities of those killed have laid bare the class divide in Turkey. In the Balat neighborhood of Fatih, 14-year-old child worker Mahmut Işıldak was killed when he stepped into a puddle electrified by exposed cables in a car park. It later emerged that the car park had been operated for years without any oversight. In Ayazağa, in the Sarıyer district, a 34-year-old man died after falling while trying to cross through the floodwaters. The body of Murat Babajanov, a migrant worker from Turkmenistan, was found days later in the Golden Horn.
In Beykoz, 53-year-old construction worker Faik Şentürk was killed when he fell into a well while being made to pump out water that had collected on a school construction site. This happened during the very days when the governor was telling the public, “Do not go out unless absolutely necessary.”
Despite warnings by meteorologists and token official appeals, millions of workers in the public and private sectors were forced to go to work. Schools closed only on October 15 and 16, after the disaster’s scale had already become clear. While the well-to-do waited it out in secure luxury residences or left the city altogether, working people—those living in basement flats and along the streams, and those forced to go to work—bore the real cost of the disaster.
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Over the past several decades, more than 100 of Istanbul’s streams and natural watercourses have been narrowed, covered over and used for construction. From Kâğıthane to Alibeyköy and the Cendere Valley in Ayazağa, shopping malls, office towers, and luxury housing projects have blocked the natural paths of water. Factories built along the banks have turned these streambeds into dumping grounds for untreated waste. As concrete and asphalt seal the land, rainwater can no longer soak into the ground. Instead, it becomes a fast-moving torrent on the city’s steep terrain.
Beginning in the late 1980s, a succession of zoning regulations transformed streambeds—already partially occupied by factories and informal housing—into legal construction plots. Stream protection zones were repeatedly narrowed. A 2013 regulatory change replaced the 100-metre no-build zone on either side of some stream sections with a mere 10-metre “maintenance strip.” This process has accelerated enormously since Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.
Of the roughly 470 emergency assembly areas designated after the 1999 Marmara earthquake, some 300 have been opened up for construction and turned into shopping malls, luxury residences and skyscrapers.
The Third Bosphorus Bridge, the new airport, and the construction that has sprung up around them have devastated the forests and water basins in the north of the city. The Istanbul Canal project—a planned artificial waterway running parallel to the Bosphorus and linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara—also threatens the remaining basins. Mass housing developments are already surrounding the city’s reservoirs.
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The Istanbul floods are part of a global climate catastrophe produced by the capitalist system. Fossil fuels have warmed the atmosphere, which holds more moisture, making extreme rainfall more frequent and intense. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that human-induced warming is generating extreme weather events in every region of the world.
In July, monsoon floods and landslides in Bangladesh killed more than 50 people and affected over a million. In the United States, flash floods struck West Virginia and Texas. As Europe endured its third major heatwave of the summer, Sicily’s temperatures reached 48.4 degrees Celsius. During June’s Northern Hemisphere heatwave, an estimated 14,000 excess deaths occurred across six countries. In late August, glacier-fed floods on the Nepal–Tibet border caused widespread devastation. In Türkiye, temperatures exceeded 50 degrees Celsius for the first time in the summer of 2025, while wildfires killed at least 17 people and reduced more than 81,000 hectares of forest to ash.
The February 6, 2023 earthquakes that struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria are among the most striking recent examples of what the official “natural disaster” narrative conceals. The earthquakes centered on Kahramanmaraş killed more than 53,000 people in Türkiye and more than 8,000 in Syria. While the earthquake was a natural event, mass deaths were the result of capitalist policies. Scientists’ warnings and countless official reports were ignored. Through measures such as the 2018 “zoning amnesty,” authorities legalized millions of poorly constructed buildings, prioritizing profits over safe housing. As the World Socialist Web Site explained, tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed by a capitalist oligarchy that rejects any long-term infrastructure planning and investment, in favor of short-term profit. More than 20 million people in the Marmara region, including Istanbul, still live under the threat of an expected major earthquake.
The problem is not a lack of scientific knowledge or technical capacity. The obstacle to rational policies based on social need is the capitalist nation-state system, which subordinates every aspect of social life to private profit and market competition against international rivals.
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Under these conditions, Türkiye will host the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya from November 9 to 20. Following a deal with Australia, the summit will be held in Türkiye, with Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen leading the negotiations. Türkiye’s “COP31 President” is Murat Kurum, Minister of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change. Kurum was the AKP’s candidate for mayor of Istanbul in the 2024 local elections and helped design the city’s speculation-driven zoning policies. He was appointed five years before the 2023 earthquakes. Yet he refused to resign despite the toll of preventable mass deaths.
The record of the COP summits speaks for itself. Over the thirty summits since 1995, global emissions and temperatures have broken record after record. The COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, was attended by 1,773 registered fossil fuel lobbyists—70 per cent more than the combined delegations of the ten countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis. The final text of COP30 in Brazil did not even mention fossil fuels by name, though they are the main cause of the crisis.
These summits are not convened to resolve the climate crisis. Their purpose is to give a “green” veneer to the horse-trading between the imperialist powers and energy monopolies, to open up new avenues for profit such as carbon markets, and to convince the public that something is being done.
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Decades of experience show that neither the flooding in Istanbul nor the danger posed by the next expected major earthquake in Turkey can be resolved through the empty promises of bourgeois parties, the central government, or the municipalities they control. No bourgeois party—including the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the New Party, which split from it—proposes to impinge on private property or profits on which the capitalist social order rests. As a result, millions of working people are abandoned to their fate as “individuals” in the face of disaster.
The construction monopolies, major real estate companies, banks and energy corporations must be expropriated and placed under the democratic control of the working class. Streambeds and assembly areas must be cleared of construction and reclaimed for society. Safe, free housing must be provided for all working people condemned to live in basement flats and unsafe buildings. The planning of cities, and of the economy as a whole, must be based on human need, not profit.
These demands can be realized only by mobilizing the working class as an international force, to seize power and reorganize the world economy. The climate crisis and the resulting natural disasters that end in catastrophe are a global problem. They can be resolved only on a global scale, through the planning of production on a socialist basis. We call on all workers and young people who want to fight for this perspective to join and build the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International).
Postal workers have spoken to the World Socialist Web Site about the impact of DM26, Royal Mail’s new delivery model, rolled out across 90 percent of its 1,250 delivery units since May. Their testimony exposes a service in collapse and a workforce driven to exhaustion by restructuring authorised by the Communication Workers Union (CWU) bureaucracy.
Dave Ward, general secretary of the CWU, and his deputy, Martin Walsh, have promoted DM26, a £250 million structural cost-cutting agenda. It reduces four delivery duties to three, ramps up workloads, and lays the groundwork for cutting one in four jobs
After months of denial, Walsh finally admitted on October 7 that the service was “collapsing.” But rather than face the membership, CWU officials entered crisis talks on Tuesday with Royal Mail’s owner, billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group, to salvage DM26 and forestall rank-and-file demands to scrap it.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) has outlined a strategy to fight back. Its statement, “Royal Mail workers must take charge: scrap DM26, end the two-tier workforce!”, calls on the 130,000-strong workforce to take control of the struggle and transfer power from the bureaucracy to the shop floor. It demands the abolition of gig-economy conditions and the two-tier workforce and opposes the profit-driven gutting of the mail service by EP Group’s private equity investors.
19. Irish union leaders call off second public sector strike to hold talks on government’s terms
Public sector union officials called off a second national strike by Ireland’s public sector workers, set to start today. The first national public sector stoppage in 17 years, held October 14, was over low pay and the spiraling cost of living, and brought out more than 300,000 workers. The previous public sector pay deal expired in June.
The struggle in Ireland is part of a growing European-wide movement of workers and young people, with strikes in Portugal and Italy, mass housing protests in Spain, and high school strikes and protests in France and Belgium.
Within two days of the first strike, the Public Services Committee (PSC) of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), covering 19 unions, agreed to “suspend” the second strike after discussions with government representatives. The decision came without the Fianna Fáil–Fine Gael coalition offering a single cent more on pay.
Teachers, hospital workers, refuse collectors, civil servants and ambulance staff were among those who walked out on October 14. Fórsa, the largest public-sector union, said over 100,000 members struck at more than 7,000 workplaces.
While sanctioning the strike as a safety valve for anger from below, the union bureaucracy pleaded for talks, asking only that pay be addressed first. The government refused, insisting on negotiating pay alongside productivity and “reform”. Fórsa General Secretary Kevin Callinan, who chairs the PSC, repeatedly called on Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin to intervene. The morning after the strike, he declared it “reasonable to allow a little bit of space” for the government, adding that the Taoiseach “know[s] how to contact me”.
The Irish Times reported the suspension was “brokered after back-channel communications between Government and unions”. A government source told the Business Post that a call on October 15 between Callinan and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers was “the key moment”. On October 16, Martin, while at a European Council summit in Brussels, phoned Callinan to sanction talks.
The unions presented the outcome as a government climbdown, with SIPTU’s Adrian Kane saying the strike had “concentrated minds”. Callinan told RTÉ, “I believe now that the Government have been listening. Obviously, we need to test that in practice in a talks process.”
This concealed the government’s hardline agenda as Martin set out the talks’ strict parameters on October 18: “Obviously there has to be value for money, there has to be productivity and all of that, and that has always been our position.” On Monday, Chambers said the government wanted to “drive productivity and reform through a pay agreement, and that’s understood by all sides”, describing the €1.2 billion set aside for pay in the October 6 budget as a starting point.
A three-person panel agreed the framework for talks at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC). Established in 2015, alongside the Labour Court, the WRC is part of the state machinery through which the union bureaucracy and employers police the working class.
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The ruling elite and trade union officials know they are sitting on a social powder keg. Pay has fallen behind inflation by 5 to 7 percent since 2021, with inflation at 4.1 percent in September, up from 3.7 percent in August. Housing prices in Ireland are the highest in the European Union, at 190 percent of the EU average. Housing costs and utilities, including rents, mortgage interest and energy, rose 9.5 percent in the year to September.
Michael Doherty, professor of law at Maynooth University, warned that “the Government may have got a shock by the number of young, enthusiastic people getting a first taste of industrial action on the pickets and anxious to be heard”. The unions, he said, “are going to have to be very careful because there is the possibility they [members] won’t want to accept some sort of fudge, that they’ll feel, ‘Hold on, you marched us up the hill here’.”
Irish Times Political Editor Pat Leahy stated that within the coalition, one position was that the union leaders needed a “day out” to show “their determination and their willingness to go all the way to strike action”. But “nobody, it seems, wanted two days out. Or at least, nobody at leadership level did.” Leahy warned, “A protracted period on the picket lines can harden attitudes and make the eventual compromise—if and when it comes—harder to sell.”
The PSC’s suspension of this week’s public sector strike is preparation for betrayal. The union bureaucracy is working with the government to impose a deal that will cut pay and boost productivity. Workers must take the initiative and form rank-and-file committees in every workplace. The resources for decent wages, healthcare, housing, and education exist, but they must be freed from the grip of the financial aristocracy. This means developing a unified struggle by workers across Europe against austerity and war, and for socialism.
20. 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.
