Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: October 12-18
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
The strike demonstrated the colossal social power of the Canadian working class. Industrial centers across Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and the Maritimes were brought to a standstill. Tens of thousands joined mass rallies in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Windsor, and Ottawa.
75 years ago:
Pakistan prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan assassinated
100 years ago:
Joint Left Opposition in the Russian Communist Party renounces factional activity
The New York Times on Friday published a lengthy article accusing Russia of waging a “shadow war” against the European NATO powers and arguing for military escalation by NATO ranging from cyberattacks on the Moscow subway to shooting down Russian aircraft over Ukraine. The article, by the Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, Steven Erlanger, does not substantiate a single one of the Russian attacks it alleges.
The article ran under the headline “As Putin Wages Shadow War, Europe Looks for a Way to Hit Back.” Its first sentence asserts as fact that “Russia is escalating its campaign of sabotage in NATO countries,” and the subheadline asks, “But how should Europe retaliate? And how hard?”
Erlanger describes an invented “war” by Russia against the NATO powers in which his own article does not cite any deaths or injuries, and for which he presents no evidence that Russia is responsible. What officials “fear most,” he writes, is that one incident might someday cause “a significant loss of life.”
A “war” without dead and without wounded is called a propaganda campaign. Its purpose is to prepare the public for a direct war against Russia, a nuclear-armed state.
The outpouring of support for [Chloe] Freeman from workers—more than $30,000 for her defense has been raised through a GoFundMe account—is resonating at the University of Michigan campus, where students are speaking out against the prosecution and drawing the connection between the assault on immigrants and the broader attack on democratic rights.
4. Victorian election underscores crisis of Australia’s two-party system
The election campaign is already marked by mass anger over the soaring cost of living, the degradation of social services and enormous social inequality.
More than 7,000 and possibly as many 15,000 protesters were detained nationwide in the lead up to and during Saturday’s Jantar Mantar protest, among them numerous protest leaders and opposition politicians. The authorities shut down essential transport networks and police stood by when government-aligned, Hindu-supremacist thugs attacked protesters.
*****
Most extraordinarily, the Ministry of Railways cancelled 75 mail and express trains reaching or departing Delhi, citing “congestion fears.” Around 165 trains were scheduled to reach New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin stations on Saturday; 40 were cancelled, including the Kanpur Shatabdi Express, the Lucknow Mail and the Howrah Rajdhani, with 35 departures from Delhi also scrapped. A railway veteran told the press that the cancellation of trains due to “road congestion” was “unprecedented in recent rail history.” The National Capital Region Transport Corporation likewise closed its Namo Bharat stations at Sarai Kale Khan and New Ashok Nagar.
The Indian Express documented the full scope of what it called a “37-point dragnet.” The Union Home Ministry—to which the Delhi Police reports—made 221 companies of Central Armed Police Forces, some 23,000 troops available until Monday.
Fifteen detention centers were prepared across the city’s districts, including stadiums at Bawana and Chhatrasal. Hotels and guest houses were instructed “not to take in new visitors who appear to be arriving for the protest.” Police coordinated with ride-hailing aggregators Ola and Uber to “regulate movement to central Delhi.” Officers traveled to the hometowns of identified protesters to urge them to stay away—a measure decried as de facto house arrest.
6. UAW election debacle: More than 90 percent of members boycott vote, as apparatus reinstalls Fain
For the apparatus, the election served to settle its internal divisions. Facing a growing rebellion, it closed ranks around [Shawn] Fain. He brought figures from the old Administration Caucus onto his United UAW slate, the same layer he had denounced four years ago for selling out members and opposing direct elections by the membership. The pseudo-left factions of the Democratic Party, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), also united behind Fain. These forces accept and welcome the exclusion of the membership because their base is the bureaucracy itself.
[Will] Lehman’s was the only campaign that challenged the apparatus itself. It called for the abolition of the bureaucracy and the transfer of power to rank-and-file committees in the workplaces.
*****
The mass abstention is the clearest indication of the potential support for an alternative. The hundreds of thousands of workers who did not vote want a way to fight. They have drawn the conclusion, in their own way, that the UAW is a union in name only.
Over decades, the UAW has been transformed into an instrument of management and a corporatist arm of the state. Its function is to police the workforce, impose the contracts the corporations demand and suppress opposition.
The election substantiates the position advanced by Lehman and the WSWS: The development of the class struggle requires the formation of new organizations. The opposition of workers will not develop through the reform of this apparatus but through its abolition. That requires new organizations, controlled by workers themselves: rank-and-file committees in every plant and workplace, linked across plants, industries and national borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
7. With new frigates and naval bases: Germany arms its navy for war against Russia
The German government is rapidly advancing the rearmament of the German Navy and preparations for a direct war against Russia. Within a matter of days, plans for a new naval base in Emden, the procurement of eight frigates costing approximately €11.6 billion, and the multibillion-euro expansion of Bremerhaven into a NATO military logistics hub were announced or further specified. These decisions are part of Germany’s comprehensive transition to a war footing and underscore Berlin’s ambition to assume an increasingly leading military role within NATO.
*****
The timetable is decisive. Under the heading “Fight tonight. Fight tomorrow,” the naval leadership demands both the long-term construction of a powerful fleet and the immediate achievement of the highest possible level of war readiness. The existing forces are to become significantly more capable by 2029.
8. Video: “We must turn the protests in France into a European movement of the working class”
A date keeps appearing on the placards: May/June 68. Back then, police repression against students triggered the biggest general strike in French history. A growing layer of young people and workers is moving to the left—they want fundamental social change.
This is not a purely French matter. In more than 50 Spanish cities, people are demonstrating against evictions and unaffordable rents. There have been public sector strikes in Portugal. Youth protests in Belgium—and in Germany.
For conditions are the same everywhere. Enormous debts, economic stagnation, and a financial oligarchy demanding attacks on social spending. In Germany, the government is spending hundreds of billions on the biggest rearmament program since Hitler—and imposing cuts to education, health and social services. An entire generation is to be sacrificed once again on the battlefields of the rich.
9. Which way forward for the mass protests for housing and a general strike in Spain?
The question is how this movement can fight for its aims, and avoid being dissipated or controlled by Spain's capitalist PSOE-Sumar government.
10. Australia: Staff at 3 Brisbane universities hold joint stoppage but union limits demands
Amid rising discontent, the National Tertiary Education Union called the event as part of a push to secure new sellout enterprise agreements at Australia’s 39 public universities.
11. Spectacular collapse of Australian AI firm’s public float
Bloomberg pointed to the broader implication of the Firmus IPO failure, saying it was “revealing fresh cracks in the AI funding boom” and underscored “the growing concern over how much capital AI infrastructure companies are demanding from public markets at a time when borrowing costs are rising.”
It cited the comments of one investment manager who said that while investors still believed in AI, they were not prepared to “pay any price for companies that spend huge amounts on data centers, depend on a few big customers and promise profits years from now.”
Noting that the warnings about inflated valuations are getting louder, Bloomberg pointed to a projection by Bain & Co that the AI industry would need to generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify the massive amounts of capital being deployed to build data centers. Placed within this context, the Firmus IPO collapse is a pointer to what is building up within the AI boom.
12. ICE runs over man in Texas as DHS Secretary Mullin defends shooting of New York father
As the immigration police continued to trample on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on the Sunday talk shows to justify the ICE shooting of 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in New York City. On Thursday, October 8, an ICE agent, who has yet to be identified, fired seven rounds into Belgal’s SUV in the Marble Hill neighborhood, shooting him in the neck while his five-year-old son sat in the back seat. The agents wore masks, and at least one wore a yellow construction vest in an attempt to conceal his identity.
At a press conference on Friday, Mullin blamed sanctuary policies for criminal activity, attacked Democrats and denounced the public attention being given to Belgal’s injuries and ICE’s criminality.
Mullin threatened, “If sanctuary politicians refuse to take care of their own streets, President Trump has made it very clear, we will.”
13. Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for optogenetics, a light switch for the brain
More than three decades ago, a biophysicist asked a simple question: how does a single-celled green alga sense light and swim toward it? The curiosity to pursue that question, carried from one laboratory to another, has produced one of the most powerful tools in modern brain science. On Oct. 5, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to the three scientists who followed it from pond water to the living brain, “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
14. Michigan’s senatorial candidates debate: El-Sayed lurches further to the right
Michigan’s “progressive” Senate candidate defends capitalism and tariffs, denounces Iran and Venezuela, and backs a “safe and secure” border as he prepares to campaign with Obama.
15. Hegseth kicks off war-recruiting tour at Texas A&M
The selection of Texas A&M as the first stop of Hegseth’s tour was no accident. The university epitomizes the drive to harness higher education to the ruling class’s war drive against Russia and China. In addition to large-scale recruitment through the Corps of Cadets, the university partners with the military to conduct weapons testing and research. The Ballistic, Aero-Optics, and Materials (BAM) Range at the Rellis campus is the largest enclosed hypersonic test range in the United States. The university also develops laser weapons in collaboration with Raytheon and is involved in autonomous drone research. It broke ground on a new $205.5 million Texas A&M Semiconductor Institute in April 2026. Semiconductors, essential components in missile defense systems and nuclear stockpiles, have been a pivotal point in the drive to render supply chains independent of China to prepare for a direct confrontation with the nuclear armed power.
Near- and long-term effects of accelerating global warming will devastate the entire planet and cause major population displacements.
17. Nexteer workers: No enrollment, no health insurance, and barely a warning. Who benefits?
Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee:
We do not only blame the company. The fact the UAW did not ensure that our benefits were automatically rolled over just underscores who completely the union apparatus has betrayed us.
18. Oracle comes to the “rescue” of the Nashville Symphony
Far from representing a genuine solution to the crisis of classical music performance, Oracle’s gift only underscores the extent to which it is being attacked. Culture is increasingly dependent on the largess of the fabulously wealthy. Opera companies and regional symphony orchestras have been hit particularly hard by a combination of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virtual elimination of music education in the public schools and the decline in government grants and support. Federal subsidies, never more than minimal in the US, have been all but eradicated by the cutbacks of the Trump administration.
19. United Kingdom: Royal Mail announces plans to cut 2,500 jobs
Royal Mail’s announcement of 2,500 head office and support job cuts is part of the restructuring under billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group. The Communication Workers Union is enforcing it through the DM26 delivery model and the two-tier workforce, as Burnham Labour government endorses privatization.
20. At London march against Gaza genocide, leaders offer Labour’s token sanctions as way forward
The 37th national march for Palestine in London was part of a global day of action marking three years of Israel’s genocide, with platform speakers claiming mass pressure was shifting the pro-Zionist position of the Labour government.
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
