Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Randa Abdel Fattah’s novel, Discipline, launched in London
Palestinian-Australian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah spoke in London on October 6 about her new novel, Discipline, as part of a sold-out UK and Ireland tour.
Discipline draws on her experience of censorship, institutional retaliation, and the breakdown of democratic norms in Australia and internationally. Tuesday night’s launch at the Trouble Club was an act of defiance against mounting repression, raising the central political question of our time: can society’s deepening crises be resolved through reform, or do they require revolutionary change?
Abdel-Fattah was recently at the center of a major free-speech controversy in Australia. In January, Adelaide Writers’ Week disinvited her—the only Palestinian writer listed—citing “community cohesion” after the Bondi Beach massacre. The backlash saw 180 writers and artists withdraw in protest, the director resign, and the event collapse.
After her UK tour was announced, the campaign against her escalated. Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp and the Board of Deputies of British Jews called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to bar her entry to Britain, while a headline in The Spectator demanded, “Don’t let Randa Abdel-Fattah into Britain”.
On September 4, organizers of the Cambridge Literary Festival cancelled her planned appearance after a campaign by Zionists, citing “operational issues”.
Abdel-Fattah told her audience on Tuesday, “Before Israel’s genocide in Gaza my books were celebrated by the media, arts institutions and universities, which promoted my work as a symbol of diversity and gave me prominent platforms.”
She recalled, “That changed when I criticized Israel. The genocide became a dividing line: doors closed, censorship intensified, and institutional support turned into repression.”
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Some of the book’s most striking passages concern complicity. Its blurb asks, “Silence is complicity, but what does it take to speak up?”
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On the myth of journalistic neutrality, Abdel-Fattah was at her most forceful. “What is the other side of [a child’s body] having more than 300 bullets?” she asked. “How can you talk of balance with children’s dismembered, decapitated bodies in plastic bags?” And on the pretense of neutrality itself: “It is as absurd as saying, I am neutral over the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.”
There was a quiet dignity in her recalling the Adelaide Festival controversy: “It was my very presence as a Palestinian that was constructed as a threat,” she said—noting the bitter irony that festival director Louise Adler, who had invited her and who resigned over her exclusion, was herself an anti-Zionist Jewish woman whose parents survived the Holocaust.
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On the myth of journalistic neutrality, Abdel-Fattah was at her most forceful. “What is the other side of [a child’s body] having more than 300 bullets?” she asked. “How can you talk of balance with children’s dismembered, decapitated bodies in plastic bags?” And on the pretense of neutrality itself: “It is as absurd as saying, I am neutral over the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.”
There was a quiet dignity in her recalling the Adelaide Festival controversy: “It was my very presence as a Palestinian that was constructed as a threat,” she said—noting the bitter irony that festival director Louise Adler, who had invited her and who resigned over her exclusion, was herself an anti-Zionist Jewish woman whose parents survived the Holocaust.
World Socialist Web Site journalists Paul Mitchell and Jean Shaoul spoke during the Q&A.
Mitchell said the attacks on Abdel-Fattah were part of a global turn to authoritarianism aimed at suppressing opposition to war. Referring to his coverage of the Old Bailey trial of Sarah Cotte, who faced terrorism charges for a speech she gave at SOAS at the age of 19, he argued that her acquittal by a mostly white jury demonstrated the dead-end of race-based politics and the need to appeal to the working class.
Responding to Abdel-Fattah’s comments on the failure of political leaders, Labour politicians and trade union officials, Mitchell insisted, “what is needed is an international party of working people,” invoking Marx’s call for workers of all countries to unite.
Shaoul expanded on the international dimensions of the Gaza onslaught, noting how the United States, Britain, Germany and Australia continued to arm and politically shield Israel, despite protests by millions. She argued for an international movement of working people capable of ending war and the capitalist system that produces it.
Abdel-Fattah’s answer was remarkable: “I agree that’s what we need. The genocide has proven to us that the current world order serving the billionaires is not sustainable. I am a firm believer in revolution, not reform… I don’t believe in the lesser-of-two-evils idea… We have to actually create a complete alternative. It’s the political economy; it comes back to race and class.”
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Abdel-Fattah is a brave writer and personality who has paid a heavy price— a suspended research grant, exclusions, a premier comparing her to murderers—for saying what millions can see with their own eyes. As she put it, she wrote her book “for” the communities that are usually written “about.” That is no small thing.
Discipline is a literary achievement and a document of this moment in history: a record of how cultural institutions, universities and media organizations have aligned with state power to suppress opposition to genocide and war. The response to Abdel-Fattah’s UK and Ireland book tour, following events in Australia, demonstrates how this agenda of state censorship and repression is being challenged ever more openly.
2. Canada: Carney Liberal government deepens assault on federal public sector workers
Almost immediately after Carney assumed the reins of power in Spring 2025, he increased military spending to meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP target, with the 2025-2026 military budget ballooning to over $63 billion. The Liberal government is now committed to meeting the new NATO target of 5 percent of GDP for military spending by 2035, saying that over the next decade, “Canada will unleash half a trillion dollars in defense investment—from submarines and aircraft to drones, sensors, and radar systems.”
In a bid to attract major investments and offset the economic damage from the trade war with the US, the Carney government has at the same time committed to maintaining ultra-low corporate tax rates and lavishing tens of billions on big business, in the form of direct subsidies and infrastructure projects. It has announced a “Productivity Mega Deduction” that it claims will lower the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment from 13 percent to 6.4 percent, “the lowest of any major economy in the world and less than half the rate in the United States.”
This drive to rearm Canadian imperialism and strengthen Canadian capital requires an equally massive reorientation of government spending. The Carney government launched a “Comprehensive Expenditure Review” (CER) in July 2025, requiring most federal departments to slash their operational budgets by 15 percent over three years and aiming to cut the federal workforce by nearly 40,000 full time jobs.
Significantly, these reductions are concentrated in departments that provide critical public services or regulate industry—Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship; Employment and Social Development, which administers EI and other social assistance programs; Transport, which regulates air, marine and rail transportation safety; Health, which administers the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The repressive arms of the state—the Department of National Defense, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Canada Borders Services Agency (CBSA), and the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—are exempt from the CER budget cuts.
The CER has resulted in significant job losses across the federal public sector. Since March 2024, the number of workers employed by the federal government has fallen by 22,490, a decrease of 6.1 percent over two years. The job cuts have accelerated, with over 12,600 of those job losses occurring in the past year, a cut to the overall federal workforce of 3.5 percent.
Nearly half of the 12,600 jobs eliminated in the past year were term, casual or student positions, with workers’ contracts simply not renewed. Such forms of non-permanent government employment exploded in recent years.
But this was only a first wave. Multiple departments have invoked the euphemistically named Workforce Adjustment (WFA) process, the procedure enshrined in the collective agreements negotiated by the public sector unions that allows the government to eliminate permanent positions and lay off workers.
Over 25,000 workers have received letters warning them that their positions were “affected” or “at-risk,” with almost 10,000 permanent positions currently slated to be cut through the WFA process.
The government also introduced the Early Retirement Incentive (ERI), reducing the financial penalties for workers to retire before meeting age and years of service requirements, to encourage older workers to leave their positions so that they could be eliminated through attrition. In a measure of the organizational chaos caused by cuts and their effect on worker morale, over 10,000 workers applied. The loss of these experienced workers and their accumulated knowledge promises to deepen the crisis within departments already reeling from budget and program cuts.
The workers that remain are expected to “streamline” program delivery and integrate AI tools to create “efficiencies” that make up for the sharp reduction in departmental budgets and workforce—an effective speedup that will place an ever-greater burden on already-strained public services. Carney has appointed Patrick Pichette, a former senior executive at McKinsey and Google, as the CEO of Digital Transformation Canada, a new federal organization with the mandate to “modernize” the public service through the adoption and scaling of AI tools.
3. Flooding across Thailand exposes disregard for preparation
Working-class communities confront the consequences of inadequate flood protection, which is not simply an issue of engineering or natural forces, but of the ruling class’s refusal to address public safety.
4. Philippine impeachment trial escalates campaign against Duterte over alleged China ties
Former senator Antonio Trillanes’s allegations of Chinese financial ties to Vice President Sara Duterte have turned the impeachment trial into an open instrument of Washington’s anti-China war drive.
5. Germany: Warning strikes in retail sector in Berlin and Brandenburg
While the 220,000 employees want to fight for decent wages, the Verdi union is trying to impose real-terms pay cuts and poverty wages on them.
The turning point in Magdeburg shows that, 80 years after the Nazi terror, significant sections of the ruling class are once again turning to fascist methods to impose their policies of war and social cuts against the population.
7. Video: Germany’s intelligence agencies are preparing the public for war against Russia
Germany’s intelligence chiefs are now stating openly what this is about: the population is to be prepared for war with Russia.
8. Texas carries out state killing of Jamaal Howard, first since Christa Pike’s failed execution
Texas put Jamaal Howard to death Wednesday evening at the state prison in Huntsville, the first execution in the United States since Tennessee’s failed attempt to kill Christa Pike on September 30.
9. Duquesne Light workers enter second week of strike in Pittsburgh over safety, wages and benefits
More than 900 electric utility workers at Duquesne Light in Pittsburgh are entering the second week of a walkout that began September 15, the first strike at the company in 58 years.
10. Adam Wingard's Onslaught: Military “super soldiers” on a rampage
The film opens with a chaotic montage of US military operations around the world. Decades of carnage and criminality—Border Patrol raids, Abu Ghraib’s torture cells, mass destruction in Iraq, Vietnam, etc.—are juxtaposed against hollow “anti-war” statements by US presidents, Democrat and Republican alike.
The montage places particular emphasis on “Operation Paperclip,” an initiative authorized by President Harry Truman in 1945 to recruit former Nazi scientists into the US military-intelligence apparatus. An estimated 1,600 scientists, engineers, technicians and counterintelligence officers were recruited under the program, including former high-ranking members of the Nazi SS. Despite their complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, the Paperclip recruits were shielded from prosecution by the US government, which was rapidly ramping up war production at the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
In the film, Nazi admirer and “third-generation Paperclip” scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) oversees a top-secret program to produce enhanced “super soldiers” capable of killing without hesitation or remorse. Three soldiers, “promoted” for their war crimes against civilians, have been outfitted with various enhancements: night vision, resistance to physical damage, enhanced strength, etc. As Kammler puts it, “once they begin killing, they will not stop until their programming is deactivated or until there is no one left in their path alive. They are the human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile.”
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There are important historical issues bound up with initiatives like Operation Paperclip and the alliance between the “democratic” US government and Nazi elements. Wingard’s inspiration for the Kammler character was an infamous Nazi SS officer of the same name who oversaw Germany’s V-2 rocket development and the construction of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The real Kammler was “officially” said to have died in 1945, but there is evidence to suggest he was captured and transferred to the United States, where he aided in the development of the US’s own rocketry program.
Wingard’s film touches on these issues, but can’t make much out of them. The connection between the growth of fascist militarism and the broader crisis of capitalism—the breakdown of the postwar order, the explosion of social inequality, the lurch to the right by the entire political establishment—lies outside the filmmakers’ grasp. Absent this, Wingard turns to action and horror clichés, with vague references to “the Illuminati” and other disoriented conspiracy theories.
The notion that fascism is something “foreign,” injected into the US’s political bloodstream from without, is entirely misguided. It finds expression in the somewhat absurd depiction of the Kammlers, with their heavy German accents and sexual eccentricities. In reality, the “democratic” Truman administration (guilty of one of the greatest war crimes in history, the atomic bombing of Japan) could integrate Nazi elements precisely because the US and German ruling classes shared a common objective: the subjugation of the international working class and the defeat of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the fascist Trump administration proves that US capitalism is perfectly capable of producing its own version of Nazi leadership, every bit as criminal as the Third Reich’s. One would imagine that idiot-warmonger Pete Hegseth would be highly enthusiastic about a “super soldier” mass killing program like the one depicted in the film, with perhaps the one stipulation that test subjects’ testosterone levels be carefully monitored.
Wingard, like any artist with a degree of sensitivity, has a feeling that there is something deeply rotten in the upper echelons of society. When asked at a public event who the most dangerous “super-villain” is, he responded, “The president of the United States.” But more thought, more clarity on the real sources of militarism and oppression, is necessary for artistic success, even (or especially) for popular filmmaking.
11. Maine Senate debate: Collins and Jackson defend capitalism, austerity and war
During the debate on Tuesday evening, both Republican incumbent Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson defended the capitalist healthcare system, attacks on immigrant rights and the war aims of US imperialism internationally.
12. Campaigning in traditional Republican strongholds, Trump threatens Los Angeles and San Diego
Defending the war in Iran, Trump said, “Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles.”
13. Cilia Flores denounces torturous treatment in US jail as anti-government protests grow in Venezuela
A US judge refused to release Cilia Flores from a Brooklyn jail despite her failing health, as prosecutors added torture charges against her and Nicolás Maduro. In Venezuela, protests over blackouts and starvation wages are spreading against the Rodríguez regime.
14. Mexican healthcare workers rally outside Interior Ministry as union readies vote on sellout contract
IMSS workers must learn from the maquiladora workers in 2019 and begin to gather in democratic assemblies to form rank-and-file committees in every hospital, clinic and department, independent of the SNTSS, the SNTSA and every capitalist party.
15. US economy and Wall Street increasingly dependent on AI amid concerns over circularity
It has been estimated that investment in AI will total $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032 and that “never before has the US economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry.”
16. White House discussed plans to attack Iran before elections
The Trump administration is preparing a major new bombing campaign against Iran, according to reports published Wednesday and Thursday by The Atlantic, Axios, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
17. Harvard University graduate student workers vote 88 percent for strike authorization
Harvard University graduate student workers have voted 88 percent in favor of strike authorization. In addition to demands on wages and conditions, they are fighting in defense of international and non-citizen workers.
18. Truckers, healthcare workers and others mobilize as class struggle grows across North America
Across North America strikes and protests by workers have been growing in recent weeks, driven by the impossible cost of living and growing conflict with the corrupt trade union apparatus.
19. Masses of youth march in France as union bureaucracies delay broader struggle
On Thursday, over 100,000 youth and workers marched in France in a nationwide day of action called by high school student unions against President Emmanuel Macron’s government. It was two days after nearly a half-million marched in a similar nationwide protest as protests spread across Europe—with mass housing protests in Spain, high school strikes in Belgium and protests against conscription in Germany.
The decisive question before youth and workers participating in these movements is independently mobilizing the working class in a broader struggle. The youth alone cannot defeat police repression, or impose the revolutionary social and economic change necessary to end austerity, militarism and war. The full social power of the working class must be mobilized, across Europe and internationally, independently of bureaucracies integrated into the existing order.
The case of France highlights the need for independent action: the intersyndicale (all-trade union alliance) has postponed all nationwide action until November 5. This call for a one-day action is an attempt to delay broader struggle, not to develop it. Even though protesters often refer to the May 1968 French general strike, which was triggered by police repression of student protests, neither the intersyndicale nor parties close to it, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise (LFI), have called for a general strike or to bring down Macron.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) has called on youth and workers who are in struggle to build committees of action, independent of the union bureaucracies, to fight in the working class for a broader mobilization in struggle. This is a path to overcome the bureaucracies’ delaying tactics and those of their allies, such as LFI. Youth and workers active in struggle must come together in committees and go into workplaces and working class neighborhoods to explain the necessity of a broader mobilization of working class against police state repression, austerity, war, and capitalism.
20. High school protests against austerity, repression and war spread to Belgium
The movement is part of a wave of social and class struggles against austerity, neo-fascism and war with high school protests in France, housing protests in Spain and across Europe.
21. 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.
