Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Part 5 Conclusion: Democratic Party runs more than 60 military-intelligence candidates for Congress
As we have already noted, the media coverage given to more than 60 Democratic congressional candidates coming from the military-intelligence apparatus is only a tiny fraction of the publicity given to the much smaller number of Democratic candidates posturing as “left” and even “democratic socialists.”
There are currently two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and two more with past membership, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Greg Casar of Texas. DSA members are running as Democratic candidates in New York’s 7th Congressional District (Claire Valdez) and 13th Congressional District (Darializa Aliza Chevalier), Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District (Chris Rabb) and Colorado’s 1st Congressional District (Melet Kiros). Other DSA-linked candidates include Brad Lander in New York’s 10th Congressional District and William Lawrence in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District.
The DSA-linked faction and the military-intelligence faction do not represent rival “wings” of the Democratic Party, to say nothing of the fact that the wings would be grossly lopsided in favor of the national-security apparatus. They are rather complementary.
The DSA-linked candidates provide a “left” political cover for the Democratic Party. Their emergence, particularly this summer in a series of primary defeats of Democratic incumbents, has served as an early-warning sign to the ruling class of the radicalization of broad masses of working people and youth.
The substance of the Democratic Party, however, is revealed in the massive influx of military-intelligence candidates, with backgrounds in the vast national-security apparatus which comprises the bulk of the federal government. Most of these candidates have either fought as volunteers in wars of aggression on behalf of American imperialism or helped direct and organize them. Some have played lesser roles in the same military machine.
There is no basic ideological division between the CIA Democrats and the DSA Democrats, since the political foundation of the DSA is anti-communism and the defense of the global interests of US imperialism against the threat of social revolution.
*****
One conclusion that should be drawn from this unavoidably lengthy dissection of the 2026 version of the CIA Democrats is that the Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, unalterably committed to the defense of the worldwide and domestic interests of the financial oligarchy. It cannot be pushed to the left, let alone transformed into a party of the working class.
Over the past five elections, the Democratic Party has nominated nearly 200 congressional candidates whose principal “qualification” has been their participation in the military-intelligence apparatus of American imperialism. In the current election, there are 67 such candidates, a marked increase over the previous four....
One of the foundations of dialectical materialist analysis is to recognize that quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes. The Democratic Party is being transformed qualitatively by this influx of new leading personnel. It has always been a capitalist party, but in much of the 20th century, certainly from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, it postured as a pro-working-class party that would use the power of the federal government to alleviate mass unemployment and poverty and extend democratic rights. This role, and consequent popular support, made it the choice of the ruling class to lead the country into wars.
The Democratic Party today offers no reforms, except the radical rhetoric of the DSA and a handful of other “lefts” like Bernie Sanders. But it remains, even more so, a party of imperialist war. Its critique of Trump focuses on demands for more aggressive military intervention in Ukraine against Russia, more effective waging of the criminal war against Iran, and a tougher line on China, which Wall Street regards as its greatest overseas adversary.
No one should be misled by the fife-and-drum corps of “democratic socialists” at the head of the column. The real content of the Democratic Party is indicated by the army of military-intelligence candidates marching behind them. The working class must break with the Democratic Party, establish its political independence of all forms of capitalist politics and fight for its own class interests, based on a socialist and internationalist program.
Here is a summary of the 67 "CIA Democrats" Patrick Martin has described in his Patrick Martin's series (generated with the assistance of Socialism AI):
Patrick Martin's series, "Democratic Party runs more than 60 military-intelligence candidates for Congress", ran October 1–6, 2026. The 67 candidates are on the list because their principal credential is service in the military-intelligence apparatus of American imperialism — the CIA, Pentagon, NSA, DIA, State Department, and National Security Council.
The 10 incumbents running for re-election
- Jason Crow (CO) — former Army Ranger who served as an impeachment manager against Trump.
- Chrissy Houlahan (PA) — former Air Force officer completing her fourth term.
- Sara Jacobs (CA) — State Department counter-terrorism official under Hillary Clinton and granddaughter of Qualcomm billionaire Irwin Jacobs.
- Jake Auchincloss (MA) — Marine Corps captain who led patrols in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
- Pat Ryan (NY) — West Point graduate and Army intelligence officer with two tours in Iraq.
- Chris DeLuzio (PA) — elected in 2022 with a military-intelligence background.
- Don Davis (NC) — elected in 2022 with a military-intelligence background.
- Maggie Goodlander (NH) — Navy Reserve military-intelligence officer and wife of Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
- Eugene Vindman (VA) — career Army officer who played a key role in the first Trump impeachment.
- Gil Cisneros (CA) — former Navy officer and later assistant Navy secretary.
The challenger seeking to regain a seat
- Elaine Luria (VA) — former Navy commander running to win back the seat she lost in 2022.
The 56 challengers profiled in the series
- Cait Conley (NY-17) — West Point graduate and Army special forces officer with six deployments who directed counterterrorism (including drone assassination targeting) on Biden's NSC.
- Frederick Wellman (MO-2) — West Point graduate and Army aviator who flew in Desert Storm and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
- Bale Dalton (FL-7) — career Navy helicopter pilot who commanded a special-operations-support squadron and served as NASA chief of staff.
- Eileen Laubacher (CO-4) — retired admiral and naval intelligence officer who was Biden's NSC Senior Director for South Asia.
- Nancy Lacore (SC-1) — retired three-star vice admiral purged from the Pentagon by Hegseth.
- Leela Gray (FL-13) — retired brigadier general who worked on counter-terrorism "narratives" at the State Department and advised Army Cyber Command.
- Shawn Harris (GA-14) — retired Army general whose final posting was as US defense attaché in Israel.
- Luke Bronin (CT-1) — Navy intelligence officer and Obama deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing.
- Alan Bradstock (PA-14) — FBI special agent who supervised terrorism-financing investigations at CIA headquarters.
- Ray Bilger (PA-15) — Air Force, NSA, and State Department intelligence analyst who was NSA Technical Director for Cyber Analysis.
- Lee McInnis (AL-3) — Army intelligence linguist with 28 years in the Defense Intelligence Community, ending as acting director of intelligence for NATO special operations in Afghanistan.
- Don Coover (KS-2) — West Point graduate and military intelligence officer.
- Caitlin Rourk (TX-10) — Army military intelligence officer who supported "civil unrest operations" and border mobilizations.
- Kevin Burge (TX-24) — Marine and DIA operative who worked in the White House Situation Room.
- Justin Early (TX-31) — Army paratrooper and DIA systems administrator in the Pentagon.
- Rachel Wallace (PA-9) — State Department official who became chief of staff of the Biden White House's Office of Management and Budget.
- Christopher Backemeyer (NE-1) — 20-year State Department official and national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris.
- Jessica Killin (CO-5) — Army paratrooper and adviser to Doug Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris.
- James Martin (FL-21) — Coast Guard officer who was chief of staff for national security affairs in the vice president's office.
- Michael Masuda (CA-5) — State Department foreign affairs officer who developed military technology at Johns Hopkins.
- Carmela Conroy (WA-5) — career Foreign Service officer who received the CIA's Agency Seal Award.
- JoAnna Mendoza (AZ-6) — Navy and Marine veteran with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
- John Duresky (WA-4) — Air Force cyberspace operations officer who worked with the NSA and CIA.
- Jonny Larsen (UT-4) — Marine with two Iraq deployments, including the initial push into Baghdad.
- Trygve Hammer (ND) — Naval Academy graduate and Marine helicopter pilot who deployed to Iraq in 2003.
- Christopher Reichard (MO-8) — Army veteran with three Iraq deployments including the Second Battle of Fallujah.
- Drew Cox (IN-4) — Marine deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan.
- Ben Ambrose (MI-2) — 20-year Marine Corps veteran with multiple combat tours.
- Jerrad Christian (OH-12) — Navy veteran who served on an aircraft carrier during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
- Tony Kozycki (GA-7) — Naval aviator who flew F/A-18 Super Hornets on three combat deployments.
- Richard Ojeda (NC-9) — Army Airborne officer with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of the original 2018 CIA Democrat wave.
- Evan Hunt (TX-3) — Air Force B-1 bomber weapons officer who dropped bombs on Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Mitchell Jacob (OK-4) — cryptologic linguist deployed to Syria in the war against ISIS.
- Robert People (FL-15) — 21-year Army veteran with three combat tours.
- Clyde Jones (AL-1) — Army veteran deployed in Desert Storm and the 2003 Iraq invasion.
- Jeffrey Hullum (MS-4) — 22-year Army veteran with six combat tours who retired as sergeant major.
- Justin Wagner (PA-16) — Army veteran deployed to Iraq in 2006.
- Christopher Gallant (NY-1) — Army National Guard pilot with multiple overseas deployments.
- Alissa Ellman (NY-24) — Air National Guard veteran deployed to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
- Rebecca Bennett (NJ-7) — Navy helicopter and experimental test pilot, the 18th female Navy test pilot in history.
- Zach Dembo (KY-6) — Navy JAG officer and federal prosecutor under both Trump and Biden.
- Jordan Herrera (MO-4) — 16-year Air Force biomedical equipment engineer and Missouri assistant attorney general.
- John Vincent (SC-7) — 20-year Navy command master chief in submarine operations.
- Philip Ehr (FL-28) — retired Navy commander who flew signals-intelligence missions during the Cold War and Desert Storm.
- Kyle Rable (TX-19) — Army ROTC-commissioned officer.
- Danielle Sterbinsky (AZ-9) — Navy operations specialist aboard the destroyer USS Bainbridge.
- Dwayne Romero (CO-3) — West Point graduate and Army engineer who served in the 1991 Gulf War.
- Mike Croley (TN-6) — Navy electronics technician and officer who later joined the Tennessee State Park Rangers.
- Rick Crosson (WI-8) — retired Army lieutenant colonel and master aviator who flew surveillance missions along the Iron Curtain.
- James Russell (AR-4) — National Guard chemical warfare specialist.
- Maura Keller (GA-3) — 26-year military police officer who retired as lieutenant colonel.
- Brad Meyer (IN-9) — Navy civilian engineer in electromagnetic warfare.
The four medical officers
- Adam Hamawy (NJ-12) — Army combat surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan, backed by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and the DSA.
- Kristina Knickerbocker (OH-12) — Air Force nurse who rose to the rank of major.
- Pamela DeLancy (GA-10) — 39-year Army medical officer who retired as colonel.
- Ceretta Smith (GA-12) — Army medic who became a statewide official of the AFGE union bureaucracy.
As Martin's concluding analysis makes clear, this influx is not a curiosity but a qualitative transformation: the Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, and the "democratic socialist" candidates promoted by the DSA serve as a "left" cover for this army of national-security operatives marching behind them.
2. California gubernatorial debate exposes two factions of the same ruling class
Last Wednesday, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton faced off for 60 minutes in the first head-to-head debate of the 2026 California gubernatorial general election at CNN’s studio in Burbank, California. Last June, the two candidates emerged as the top two vote-getters, although neither reached 30 percent of the vote. As of this writing, the three most recent independent polls give Becerra an average lead of roughly 58 percent to 35 percent.
The debate, notwithstanding the bitter insults and personal attacks, showed two factions of the same ruling class, ready to do anything to defend the profit system that has produced California’s social catastrophe.
The major issues facing workers and youth were not dealt with in any serious manner....
With help from Socialism AI, here is a summary of the candidates' views expressed in their debate juxtaposed with a genuine Marxist assessment and view:
Cost of living / taxes
- Hilton: Cut state income taxes on the first $150,000 and cut the gas tax — tax cuts ease the cost of living.
- Becerra: Hilton's plan is a "giveaway to the wealthy" (a "40 percent tax cut" for millionaires and billionaires) at the expense of schools, healthcare and housing — yet he himself would vote no on a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires.
- Marxist: Both defend the private ownership of wealth. The answer is the expropriation of the banks and corporations and the reorganization of production to meet social need — not tinkering with tax rates within a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few.
Housing
- Hilton: Cap government fees and regulations on a new home at $50,000 — "the quickest way to reduce the cost of housing is for the government to stop making it more expensive."
- Becerra: Double the rate of housing construction, expand down-payment assistance, and prevent Wall Street investors from outbidding workers.
- Marxist: Both leave housing within the market. The question neither asks is why access to a basic human necessity should depend on the ability to buy or rent at prices set by landlords, developers, banks and investors. Housing must be a social right, not a commodity.
Homelessness
- Becerra: Clear encampments and expand treatment and housing assistance — "We will make sure the encampments are cleared."
- Hilton: Becerra gave Newsom an "A" on homelessness; California needs "a plan to change policy on homelessness, not more of the same failed policy."
- Marxist: Neither addresses the social forces that continually reproduce homelessness — the enormous concentration of wealth alongside mass poverty. Homelessness is a product of the profit system, not a policy failure.
Immigration
- Becerra: Denounced mass deportations — "immigrants lift up our state" — yet insisted on "immigration reform" determining "who stays and who goes."
- Hilton: Called Becerra's "immigrants who look like you" remark "disgraceful," claimed to want to "lower the temperature," while advocating deportation of immigrants who commit dangerous crimes.
- Marxist: Both parties have deported millions and both exploit the vulnerability of immigrant labor. The working class is international; immigrant and native-born workers must unite against the ruling class, not be divided by citizenship status.
Artificial intelligence
- Hilton: Attract AI investment and reject excessive regulation.
- Becerra: Corporate accountability and "guardrails," citing his lawsuits against tech companies.
- Marxist: Neither addresses the fundamental social question — who owns and controls the technology, and who benefits from its productive potential. AI must be expropriated from the tech monopolies and used to meet social need, not to enrich shareholders while workers lose jobs.
Hollywood / film tax credits
- Becerra: "We've got to fight to keep Hollywood in Hollywood."
- Hilton: "Reduce the bureaucracy and the red tape."
- Marxist: Tax incentives are a boon for corporations, not workers. The 50,000 lost production jobs are a product of the profit drive, not of regulation or its absence.
Education
- Becerra: Reduce "overcompliance" and provide tutoring.
- Hilton: Phonics, greater accountability for teachers and schools, and attacks on the teacher unions.
- Marxist: Neither addresses the dismantlement of public education through decades of bipartisan austerity. Education must be fully funded as a social right, not managed for "accountability" or "efficiency."
The "California dream"
- Hilton: California is "the most amazing state in the most amazing country on Earth," while attacking "this bloated nanny-state bureaucratic government."
- Becerra: Invoked his parents' arrival with $12 in their pockets — "we fight to keep the California dream."
- Marxist: This is mythology. The "dream" is a cover for a system in which nearly 182,000 Californians are homeless on a single night while billionaires finance both campaigns.
The article's central point is that these are not opposing programs but two factions of the same ruling class — a professional capitalist state manager (Becerra) and a venture-capital-backed Trumpist (Hilton) — competing over how best to administer the exploitation of California's working class. Neither proposes expropriating a single dollar of the wealth workers produce. The working class must reject the entire capitalist political establishment and build its own party on a socialist program.
3. Who is responsible for the rise of Flávio Bolsonaro and the far right in Brazil?
Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-place finish against Lula is a devastating verdict on the Workers Party and the pseudo-left, whose “Broad Front” with the bankers and the right has strengthened the fascist forces it claimed to fight.
4. Vasily Grossman’s reporting on the Nazi-Soviet war
Although best-known for his major novels, Vasily Grossman's powerful social realism was rooted in his active involvement in the Red Army’s struggle against Nazism. His war-time writings are now presented in the most complete English edition to date.
The book does not make for easy reading. This is owing both to the subject matter and the complicated history of the writing itself. Grossman’s reports, written in the heat of battle, are at once a powerful testimony to both the greatest war crimes committed in history and a reflection of the impact of Stalinist censorship and policies on Soviet perceptions and reporting of the war.
When the Nazis invaded in 1941, it took the Soviet population and the Red Army entirely by surprise. Although German imperialism had prepared for this war for years and Nazi propaganda was replete with threats to annihilate communism, official Soviet propaganda lulled the population into false security after the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact. On the eve of the war, during the Great Terror, the Stalinist bureaucracy murdered large portions of the Red Army leadership and the political leadership of the Bolshevik Party, as well as its intransigent socialist opponents in the Left Opposition.
Nevertheless, the Soviet population rose up to defend the gains of the 1917 October Revolution. The war acquired, to a significant extent, the elements of a civil war. Yet unlike two decades prior, the Red Army was no longer headed by Leon Trotsky, who had been murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940, but by Stalin. His policies were determined by the interests not of the international working class, but of a bureaucracy that felt compelled both to defend the gains of the Revolution which formed the basis of its privileges, but at the same time, feared a revolutionary mobilization of the working class across Europe which would extend the revolution and, ultimately, undermine those privileges. As a result, the official propaganda acquired a heavily nationalist connotation. More so than ever before, the Stalinist bureaucracy resorted to the promotion of Great Russian chauvinism. Instead of openly speaking of a revolutionary civil war against fascism and capitalist counter-revolution, it spoke of the “Great Patriotic War.”
*****
After the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, the first defeat of the Nazis during the war, the Red Army began its advance westward. As it beat back the fascist armies, it also uncovered the enormous war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS. Military commissions by the Red Army systematically gathered evidence of these crimes, interviewing local residents, taking pictures and drafting reports. Grossman closely worked with these commissions, especially during the liberation of Poland, where the Nazis had constructed six death camps, several of which were almost entirely devoted to the gassing of the Jewish people.
Some of Grossman’s best-known essays from this period, “Ukraine without Jews” and “The Hell of Treblinka,” are included in new, full translations in this volume. Even 80 years later, they count among the most devastating reports on the Holocaust. Writing them proved to take a heavy toll on Grossman. He himself came from Berdichev, a town in Ukraine with a large Jewish population, which was murdered in its entirety by the Nazis. Grossman’s mother was among those shot. After the discovery and report of Treblinka, Grossman suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet, emotionally devastating as it was for Grossman to write them, the pieces are remarkably objective. They appeal, first and foremost, to the reason of the reader and seek to draw out the historical lessons of the crimes of fascism.
In one particularly incisive passage, Grossman ponders the underlying causes of the seemingly senseless brutality of one particularly notorious SS guard in Treblinka, Sepp, who gleefully murdered children with his bare hands as people were sent into the gas chambers. Grossman writes,
Sepp’s actions were necessary. They helped to reduce people to a state of psychic shock. They were an expression of the senseless cruelty that crushed both will and consciousness. He was a useful, necessary screw in the vast machine of the Fascist State.
What should appall us is not that nature gives birth to such monsters—there are, after all, any number of monsters in the physical world. … It is not they that should appall us but the state that summoned them out of their holes, out of their underground darkness—the state that found them useful, necessary, and even irreplaceable in Treblinka near Warsaw, in Majdanek near Lublin, in Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, in Babi Yar, in Domanevka and in Bogdanovka near Odessa, in Trostianets near Minsk, in Ponary in Lithuania and in hundreds of other prisons, labor camps, penal camps, and camps for the destruction of life.
A particular kind of state does not appear out of nowhere. What engenders a particular regime is the material and ideological relations existing among a country’s citizens. It is the nature of these relations that we need to think about; this is what should appall us.
*****
The last section with Grossman’s wartime writing includes some of his essays on the liberation of Germany. In an article simply entitled “Germany,” Grossman ponders the immense contradiction between the principles of fascism and those of the Enlightenment. Observing that everywhere in Berlin he saw signs warning “Light is your death!” (because of air raids by the Allies), he writes,
… seeing how Hitlerism’s vicious principles were applied in every sphere of public and private life, I couldn’t help but think that the sentence—Licht ist dein Tod! (Light is your death!)—was the perfect slogan for Adolf Hitler himself, that it epitomized everything most important about his theories and practice. It was with this slogan that Hitler approached the German people. It was under this creed, under this banner, that the German nation lived for twelve years.
How times change.
There was a time in this country of darkness when a great poet and thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, said on his deathbed, “Licht, mehr Licht! [“Light, more light!] … The time will come when the German nation will be able to look the nations of the world in the eye, honestly and straightforwardly; the time will come when in this realm of gloom and evil, in this land that has been governed by the laws of darkness, where walls bore the words, “Light is your death!”—the time will come when people will once again remember the words spoken on his deathbed by the great Goethe: “Light, more light!”
*****
In the years to come, Grossman would face ever more censorship. His novel Stalingrad was only published in a heavily censored version. The sequel Life and Fate was never published during his lifetime. Yet despite being increasingly disillusioned by Stalinism, until the end of his life, Grossman retained an intense commitment to the cause of socialism and the liberation of all mankind, and remained immensely proud of his own contribution to the victory of the Red Army over fascism.
One cannot read his articles on the war today without a sense of the tragedies that have since occurred. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Stalinist bureaucracy accomplished what German imperialism had failed to achieve in World War II: the destruction of the first workers’ state in history. The restoration of capitalism, the vile promotion of nationalism and the rise of criminal oligarchies in all the successor countries of the USSR, have opened up the entire region to a renewed onslaught by imperialism. Unlike during World War II, the destructive impact of decades of Stalinism and the promotion of nationalism have created a situation where, instead of fighting side by side against imperialism and the rule of the oligarchy, Ukrainian and Russian workers are shooting at each other on the battlefields. The Ukrainian Trotskyist, Bogdan Syrotiuk, was imprisoned for “high treason” in Ukraine for opposing this disastrous policy and calling for a return to the unified struggle of the Ukrainian and Russian working class.
But Grossman’s writings on the war also give a very concrete sense that a very different historical path, one of joint struggle against fascism and reaction on a class basis, is possible. The principal challenge today lies in overcoming the disastrous impact of Stalinism on the political consciousness of the working class through a fight for the historical truth about the October Revolution, the nature of Stalinism and the struggle of the internationalist Left Opposition against it. Only on this basis can the international unity of the working class and its Marxist consciousness be reestablished.
Christa Pike remains unconscious and on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital five days after the state of Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection on September 30. She remains hospitalized under guard as doctors try to clear the massive dose of pentobarbital from her system.
6. Germany: VW management, IG Metall union and works council escalate attacks on auto workers
The VW management board has terminated 10 of 13 collective agreements at VW. The company’s current all-out assault will go even further than the 2024 contract unless workforces take on the IG Metall and works council apparatus.
7. Flock surveillance camera use explodes across the United States
Flock reports more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, recording approximately 20 billion license plate scans per month. That amounts to an average of roughly 667 million scans per day, or 7,700 per second, feeding a vast searchable database of vehicle movements to police and federal agents.
"Rank-and-file committees are probably the best way to outflank the unions, to be completely independent of all the vested interests,” John said. "The fight against the current—we're not going to speed up, that's it. It's bad enough as it is. Pushing back—the shop floor is the place to do it.”
9. Reform of elderly care: German government exacerbates the crisis
It is futile to leave the struggle against these draconian cuts in healthcare to the leaderships of the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) or the unions Verdi and IG Metall.
10. Join the IYSSE in the fight for a socialist future against war, dictatorship and social devastation!
Students in Türkiye and around the world are returning to school amid an intensifying wave of war, dictatorship and social devastation. At the same time, social anger and struggles are growing in the working class and among young people.11.
The trade union bureaucracy promotes the dangerous illusion that the replacement of Starmer with Burnham represented a step change to the left and provides “hope”, that the Labour Party will listen, and that Burnham is “on our side".
Mamdani's "Strategy to Combat Antisemitism" embraces the narrative used to slander opponents of the Gaza genocide as antisemites.
12. Insurgent candidate for UAW president holds campaign meeting on eve of vote count
Ballots in the United Auto Workers presidential election were due Monday. The count begins Tuesday, October 6 in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, Illinois, and results are expected by the end of the week.
In 2022, it took the UAW Monitor four days to count the ballots. Because none of the candidates received a majority, a runoff election was held between the two top vote-getters, with Shawn Fain declared the winner in March 2023 by a mere 477 votes and with the support of barely 6 percent of the 1.1 million active and retired members in the union.
Fain, who promised an end to “company unionism,” has presided over massive layoffs and a further erosion of the living standards and working conditions of UAW members. His opponents, including Vice President Richard Boyer, are largely drawn from the same bureaucracy.
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, is running as a socialist candidate for UAW president based on a program of abolishing the UAW apparatus and transferring power to workers on the shop floor.
On Sunday, Lehman and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) held an online meeting titled “The Way Forward After the Vote: A Rank-and-File Strategy to Fight Job Cuts, War, and Dictatorship.”
13. “They just throw us away”: Tyson workers speak out after Joslin, Illinois plant closure
The plant was abruptly shut in August, leaving families who spent decades working at the slaughterhouse seeking food and clothing assistance.
14. Spanish snap elections pose threat of far-right dictatorship
Yesterday, faced with mass protests nationwide to demand the right to housing, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the dissolution of parliament and general elections for November 29.
Vithanage’s films are distinguished by their sensitivity to the social and class relations in Sri Lanka, past and present.
The 1,200 workers continue to resist company demands for concessions while pressing for substantial improvements.
17. Five miners killed in Soma, site of Türkiye’s 2014 mining disaster
Five miners were killed and two others were rescued injured on 1 October when a roof collapsed in an underground coal mine in Soma, western Türkiye.
18, French students speak out against war, repression of high school protests
A growing radicalization is developing among young people, disillusioned with the bureaucracies and organizations that have long channeled social struggles, and who are increasingly seeking a revolutionary path.
19. Mexico: Twelve years since disappearance of Ayotzinapa students: the cover-up continues
A “new report” presented by the Sheinbaum administration on September 28 does little to advance the prosecution of those responsible and continues the cover-up of the military’s role.
20. SEP (Australia) holds eighth national Congress
The congress adopted five resolutions that outline a socialist and internationalist perspective on the key issues facing the working class.
21. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Educators and staff at universities launch 72-hour protest strike over funding
Canada:
After strike is shut down by provincial NDP, Manitoba lab workers designated “essential”
Prince Rupert longshore workers strike
Chile:
Peru:
United States:
Duquesne Light workers strike in Pittsburgh
New Jersey refinery workers authorize strike over wages, benefits and contract language
Contract talks resume for striking Alton, Illinois, city workers
Corvallis, Oregon city workers issue 10-day strike notice
22. Workers speak in support of Bogdan Syrotiuk at the 90th anniversary of Battle of Cable Street
A rally and march was held in East London on Sunday to mark the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street.
23. 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.
