1. Behind the US midterm elections: economic crisis, world war and the drive to dictatorship
The US midterm elections conclude Tuesday under conditions in which the objective factors that will determine American policy, whoever emerges with control of Congress, are entirely excluded from the campaign. Three interrelated processes will shape what follows the vote.
First is the economic crisis. This week brought the most serious indications yet that the speculative bubble on which American capitalism rests is beginning to collapse. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, lost a record $482 billion in market value on a single day after reporting a free-cash-flow deficit of some $9 billion—driven by spending on AI. On Friday, the Nasdaq fell 2.86 percent. Intel plunged 28.6 percent, and the chip index fell 7.2 percent, for a monthly loss of more than 15 percent.
The speculative bubble is a reflection of a protracted crisis of American capitalism, which is entering a new stage. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond stands near 4.9 percent, the national debt has passed $40 trillion, the global position of the dollar is under increasing threat, and the Federal Reserve is discussing further rate hikes.
The collapse of this house of cards will have incalculable consequences. Whatever their tactical differences, both parties will respond, as they did in 2008, with a massive bailout of the financial oligarchy, paid for by the working class.
Second is the escalating global war. The administration has postponed its plans to expand the war against Iran until the votes are counted. According to Axios, US and Israeli officials are preparing a week-long bombing campaign against Iran’s leadership, nuclear facilities, energy installations and infrastructure, to begin after November 3. Washington has told governments in the region to prepare for Iranian retaliation.
At the same time, the war against Russia in Ukraine is moving toward a direct clash between nuclear powers. In September, Russia warned that it was ready to use “all its arsenal, including nuclear weapons,” if NATO moved to isolate Kaliningrad. On October 18, Ukraine attacked Russia with more than 1,000 drones. The European powers are escalating the conflict, and the principal aim of the Democratic Party is to ensure that American imperialism plays the leading role in a war against Russia.
Third is the growth of social anger and the class struggle. In Europe it has already erupted. In France, hundreds of thousands of workers and students have marched for six weeks against cuts to schools and the soaring cost of living, and the movement has spread across the continent.
The American ruling class is acutely aware that the same conditions exist here. When the movement in France erupted, the Wall Street Journal warned its readers, “Don’t think it can’t happen in the US given the current state of American politics.” Fortune ran the headline “France is rioting over surging inflation, skyrocketing national debt and crumbling schools. America is its sleeping twin.”
It is the complete suppression of the actual reality that will shape American policy that gives the entire spectacle its degraded character. Neither party can tell the population the truth, because both defend the interests of the capitalist oligarchy that rules the United States.
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The answer to dictatorship and war, social inequality and fascism lies in the development of the class struggle. War and dictatorship cannot be stopped by pressuring the Democrats or through bourgeois elections, but only through a complete break with the Democratic Party and the independent and revolutionary mobilization of the working class. The Democrats, the trade union apparatus that functions as their arm, and the pseudo-left all sow complacency and downplay the danger of dictatorship.
The Socialist Equality Party is building the political alternative to this entire rotten establishment. It fights to mobilize the strength of the working class against war and dictatorship through the formation of rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace, independent of the union apparatus and linked across industries and national borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
American workers face the same attacks as the workers and youth now in the streets of Europe, and their struggles must be unified on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program: the expropriation of the oligarchy’s wealth, the reorganization of economic life to meet social needs and an end to imperialist war.
2. Dockers’ international day of action: Workers strike at 113 ports against war and genocide
In their statement of October 29, the Socialist Equality Parties (SEP) in Europe explained that the dockers’ action “points to the enormous power of the international working class to disrupt the machinery of war. This power must now be consciously organized and extended.” It “cannot be confined to a one-day protest,” but “must become the starting point for sustained, coordinated strike action.”
The statement warned of the political limitations of the organizers, whose joint declaration “does not even mention Ukraine.” The European trade union bureaucracies, including Germany’s ver.di, back NATO’s war against Russia. The USB and other unions associated with the Stalinist-led World Federation of Trade Unions confine themselves to appeals for negotiations between the imperialist governments and the Putin regime, while the CGT seeks to channel opposition into talks with President Emmanuel Macron.
The SEPs called for the building of independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools and working-class neighborhoods, linking dockworkers with railway workers, truck drivers, seafarers and young people resisting conscription, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The aim “must be the preparation of a sustained European general strike, challenging the rule of the capitalist oligarchy and raising the question of workers taking political power.”
The task facing workers and youth is to expand and develop these struggles through the conscious adoption of the program of socialist internationalism: the fight for the United Socialist States of Europe as part of a world socialist federation, and the building of the Socialist Equality Parties, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, as the revolutionary leadership of the working class.
3. Canada’s trade unions work to suppress opposition to Liberal government’s attack on right to strike
Bill C-39 “normalizes” newly-assumed, authoritarian government powers to criminalize strike activity in key sectors of the economy through a concocted "reinterpretation" of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, bypassing the need for parliamentary consent.
4. David North brings fall lecture series to George Mason University
In the well-attended meeting, North stressed the importance of historical knowledge for anyone who seeks to fight for socialism.
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Two lectures remain in the series. We urge all our readers and supporters in the San Francisco Bay Area and across Michigan to attend, help promote the meetings and bring their coworkers, classmates and friends.
UC Berkeley: Monday, Nov. 2, 5:00 p.m. Genetics and Plant Biology Building, Room 100, Bayard Rustin Way, Berkeley, California
University of Michigan: Monday, Nov. 9, 7:00 p.m. Michigan League, Vandenberg Room, 2nd floor, 911 N. University Ave., Ann Arbor, Michigan
5. Ebola cases exceed 10,000 with case fatality approaching 50 percent
The Congolese Ebola epidemic has reached 10,274 confirmed cases and 4,992 deaths. Of confirmed patients whose illness has ended, two of three have died, no better than in West Africa 12 years ago, while the 31 cases outside the Congo have produced four deaths.
6. Trump prepares post-election crisis with threats in Alaska, California, Washington
The White House is preparing to challenge the election of Democrats for both Senate and House seats through bogus claims of voter fraud.
7. Bukele sends thousands of Salvadoran troops to Haiti with US, Colombian and Dominican support
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has begun sending more than 2,000 troops, along with helicopters and armored vehicles, into Haiti. According to an Axios report published Thursday, he did so after a phone call on Tuesday in which President Donald Trump told him: “Do what you have to do.” Sources told Axios that the number could “double or triple.”
The pretext is the fate of four Salvadoran aviation technicians in the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF). They disappeared on October 18 after gunmen attacked their armored vehicle in Santo, in Croix-des-Bouquets, 12 kilometers from Port-au-Prince. Bukele has threatened that the attack “is nothing compared to what is coming.”
On Thursday, writing in Haitian Creole, he declared: “We didn’t come to Haiti to make money, because no one is paying us to do it. We came to Haiti to fight against the wicked.”
Axios reports that the Salvadoran force “appears to be operating parallel to the GSF” and to Vectus Global, the private army of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. It describes Haiti as “a test case for Bukele and... Prince to act as public-private proxies for U.S. muscle in the hemisphere.”
Washington has tried to keep out of sight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “wants to keep Haiti off the radar,” a source told Axios, and Bukele’s request for US drones and transport planes was “officially denied.” Colombia, the source added, “may act as an unofficial go-between” so there are “no U.S. fingerprints on the mission.”
The fingerprints are there all the same. The first Salvadoran reinforcements landed in Port-au-Prince on October 23 aboard a US military C-130 that, according to the Miami Herald, was “provided by the Pentagon at the request of the U.S. State Department.”
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The Dominican Republic has become the operation’s rear base. On October 24, two days before he opened the conference of the Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels (A3C), President Luis Abinader said he had spoken with Bukele to coordinate logistical and intelligence support. A Boeing 747 freighter of the US carrier National Airlines delivered Salvadoran helicopters to Santo Domingo on October 28. The next day, seven Salvadoran combat helicopters took off for Haiti from the Dominican Army’s El Rodeo fortress in Jimaní, on the border. Brian Mast, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated the aim bluntly: “I hope the mission is revenge, retribution and destruction of the gangs.”
This marks a new stage in the construction of what amounts to Plan Condor 2.0. Washington has given its approval for one Latin American regime to send thousands of soldiers into another country, outside even the formal cover of a UN mandate. The force is being supplied, by all indications, by Washington through the far-right governments of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic.
Under the banner of fighting “gangs” and “narco-terrorists,” a hemispheric force is being assembled, a Gestapo for the Americas, aimed at the working class and at turning the hemisphere into a secure base for US imperialism’s war preparations against China.
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Condor’s methods of cross-border kidnapping, torture and disappearance were never repudiated by the region’s armed forces and remain the lifeblood of every officer corps trained by Washington. The main organizer of Condor was Chile’s DINA secret police, itself a Frankenstein monster of the CIA. Declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in 2024 show that in February 1974 Pinochet personally asked CIA deputy director Vernon Walters to help DINA in its “formative period,” and that in mid-1975 the CIA put its director, Manuel Contreras, on its payroll. In June 1974, a US Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that Chilean officers saw DINA’s founding decree as “the foundation upon which a Gestapo-type police force will be built.” Bukele is offering his military in the same role: a regional strike force that Washington can rely on to act across borders.
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Bukele claims El Salvador is paying for 90 percent of the offensive, while workers pay for an IMF program. Under a $1.4 billion loan agreement, his government has laid off some 15,000 public employees since 2024. In mid-October he announced that 10,629 prisoners, now called “casual collaborators” of the gangs, could be released early.
His 2027 budget cuts more than $25 million from the National Civil Police and freezes spending on the overcrowded prisons.
This is the crisis of the “Bukele model.” Under a state of exception in force since March 2022, more than 90,000 people have been jailed, and human rights groups have documented between 458 and 570 deaths in custody. Bukele then rented out the CECOT mega-prison to the Trump administration as a dumping ground for deported immigrants, where they were tortured. With the mass incarceration machine now unaffordable, he is turning the army itself into an export.
El Salvador’s own history shows what such forces are trained to do. The US-trained Atlacatl Battalion murdered nearly 1,000 peasants at El Mozote in 1981. Last week Bukele urged France to adopt his methods against its student and worker protests, boasting that it “could do it in a week.” The target of this apparatus is clear. It is not the gangs but the growing mass opposition to social inequality, war and dictatorship.
This is not a peculiarity of the far right. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the US border to head off Trump’s tariffs. Governments of every label offer their security forces to Washington to secure a favorable relationship with US imperialism.
The answer to Plan Condor 2.0 cannot come from a refurbished “left” bourgeois nationalism. It requires the unification of the workers of Haiti, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and the United States in a common struggle against imperialism and the capitalist system that produces social inequality, dictatorship and war.
8. Youth, workers in Portugal mobilize against cost of living, for right to housing
Throughout October, major protests have been taking place in Portugal, bringing together demands over the rising cost of living, wages, pensions and public services, as well as the right to housing and the struggle against evictions.
From Sanders and the DSA in the US to Mélenchon in France and Sánchez in Spain, they have all hailed Lula’s reelection as the path forward against fascism, ignoring how Lula paved the way for the growth of fascism in Brazil.
10. The election in Hutt South and New Zealand’s social crisis
The intensifying social crisis in the Hutt South electorate, mirrored in working class areas across New Zealand and the world, underscores the importance of the SEG’s election campaign.
11. Australia: One year since the fatal Cobar mine explosion
Wednesday marked one year since an explosion at Polymetals Resources’ Endeavor silver, lead and zinc mine near Cobar, in far west New South Wales (NSW), killed shift supervisor Patrick “Ambrose” McMullen, 59, and charge-up operator Holly Clarke, 24. A third worker, Mackenzie Stirling, then 24, was seriously injured.
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A year later, answers are still not forthcoming.
That gives the lie to all the official declarations of concern that followed the explosion. The past 12 months have been characterized above all by a concerted effort by the company, the NSW Labor government, the safety regulator and the mining unions to suppress the questions raised by the disaster, dampen down the anger and concern in Cobar and ensure that the extraction of profit continued uninterrupted.
In a token statement noting the anniversary, NSW Labor Natural Resources Minister Courtney Houssos said nothing more about the NSW Resources Regulator’s investigation than that it “is ongoing and will be released publicly when complete.”
The status of the investigation has not changed publicly since November 25, when the regulator published a four-page interim report. That perfunctory document established little more than was already known: At around 3:30 a.m. on October 28, 2025, McMullen, Clarke and Stirling were preparing a ballistic disc explosive to clear a blockage of rocks when the device detonated prematurely.
The report confirmed that Endeavor was using older-style electric detonators and identified their vulnerability to electrical and radio-frequency interference as one line of inquiry. But no restrictions were placed on Polymetals, nor on the use of similar technology at other mines.
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The tone for the entire official response was set by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns immediately after the disaster. Addressing Australian Workers Union (AWU) delegates, Minns declared: “We can’t stop all accidents on work sites, and we can’t promise that. No responsible government can do that.”
One year later, this has effectively been the guiding principle of the entire official response. The deaths of workers are treated as an unfortunate but unavoidable accompaniment to mining, while nothing—not even an unexplained explosion that killed two people—is permitted to interfere with production and profit.
It was on this basis that Polymetals began reopening Endeavor just eight days after the explosion. Within weeks, full operations, including blasting, had resumed. Workers had been instructed not to speak to anyone, including their own families, about the explosion or conditions at the mine.
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To the extent that the union bureaucracy intervened at all, it was to direct workers’ concerns back behind the official investigation and regulatory apparatus. Even its anniversary statement merely declares that the investigation “is ongoing and the exact cause is yet to be formally determined,” without a word of criticism that this remains the case after an entire year.
The unions seek to further divert attention by claiming the fundamental problem is that safety standards in NSW metalliferous mining “lag behind the coal industry,” where statutory union safety officials exist.
This is a fraud. The supposedly superior regulatory regime in coal mining has not prevented workers from being killed in the sector almost every year. Five coal industry workers were killed on the job in 2024, and at least three more so far this year.
The issue is not the absence of another union official incorporated into the regulatory apparatus, but workers’ lack of independent control over safety and production.
Since the Endeavor explosion, at least nine more workers have been killed in Australian mining. Nationally, Safe Work Australia recorded 222 workplace deaths in 2025, the highest toll since 2012.
But the significance of the Cobar anniversary cannot be reduced to another statistic in this grim national toll.
What has happened over the past year provides a concrete demonstration to workers of who and what they confront.
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Endeavor workers, together with miners throughout Cobar and across the industry, need their own organizations—rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy and controlled by workers themselves—to fight for the release of all information relating to the explosion and for workers to exercise genuine control over workplace safety.
Such committees must enforce the right of workers to halt production wherever they consider conditions unsafe, without loss of pay or threat of victimization.
Above all, the experience of the past year demonstrates the irreconcilable conflict between workers’ safety and a system in which every decision is ultimately subordinated to production, “productivity” and corporate profit.
The deaths of Patrick “Ambrose” McMullen and Holly Clarke must not be allowed to disappear into another interminable official investigation while business carries on as usual. The defense of workers’ lives ultimately requires a political struggle against the capitalist profit system itself, including for mining companies, along with other major corporations and the banks, to be placed under public ownership and the democratic control of the working class as part of the socialist reorganization of economic life.
12. Australia: NSW hospital crisis leaves seriously ill patients waiting days for care
In one case a man with a partially ruptured kidney spent 23 hours on a hard chair and in another an elderly patient waited more than 77 hours before deciding to go home.
13. Another leadership purge in China amid intensifying global conflict
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held its fifth plenum of the Central Committee over four days this week behind closed doors against the backdrop of global economic turmoil, trade war and the opening shots of world war. During their summit in Washington in September, US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping only extended a shaky trade war truce agreed last year by three months—now due to expire in January.
The lengthy communiqué released on Thursday after the Central Committee referred in passing to the “profound changes in global, national and Party conditions [that] have made even more arduous the Party’s tasks,” but did not elaborate. The entire plenum was devoted to the tightening of party “self-reform” and discipline—that is, a strengthening of Xi’s position in preparation of the CCP congress next year at which he is likely to be reinstalled for a fourth term as general secretary.
The communiqué was profuse in hailing the party’s achievements, above all of Xi as “the core” of the leadership. It said the party had confronted a “grave situation marked by weak, hollow, and watered-down Party leadership, lax, superficial, and ineffective self-supervision and self-governance, as well as some startling problems within the Party.”
No details of “the grave situation” and “startling problems” were provided. However, in a speech delivered to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in January and published this month, Xi demanded that “‘two-faced’ cadres who paid lip service to directives, while practicing political opportunism, departmentalism or factionalism behind the scenes,” should be identified and removed.
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The Central Committee that met this week comprised just 279 members—162 full members and 117 alternate members—of the 376 members who were installed in 2022. No explanation was provided for the absence of more than a quarter of the committee’s original membership—significantly higher than the tally of “empty chairs” at the last plenum.
The meeting continued the purge of top party bodies by confirming the expulsion of a record 33 Central Committee members from the party—24 full members and nine alternate members. These including two members of the powerful 24-member Politburo—Ma Xingrui, former Xinjiang party secretary, and Zhang Youxia, former senior vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission. No details were provided of the alleged “grave violations of discipline and the law” against any of the 33.
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The expulsion of Central Committee members is only the tip of the iceberg. The report of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection for 2025 released in February stated that disciplinary inspection and supervision organs nationwide had filed 1.012 million cases, detained 47,000 people, and imposed Party disciplinary and administrative sanctions on 983,000 people. The CCP has just over 100 million members.
While focusing on the military, Xi also confronts a worsening economic and social crisis within China. Economic growth continues to slump. Official figures for the third quarter showed just 4.5 percent, largely propped up by exports. That brought growth for the first nine months of 2026 to 4.6 percent—just within the target range of 4.5 to 5 percent. The figure is less than half China’s growth rate in the 1990s and 2000s.
In his speech in January to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Xi expressed his concern that his directives were simply not being fully implemented. He called in particular for greater supervision of his key policies, including investment of advanced technology and manufacturing, and reining in huge local government debts.
One indication of the social tensions being fuelled by slowing economic growth is the continuing high levels of youth unemployment. The jobless rate for 16 to 24-year-olds was 18 percent in September, marginally below 18.9 percent in August. In 2023, the government stopped publication of youth unemployment figures, which had climbed to well over 20 percent, only restarting their release after changing the methodology to mask the real extent of the youth joblessness.
The Central Committee communiqué released this week is full of praise for Xi, hailing “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building” as an important new addition to party doctrine that gives “fundamental guidance and a guide to action” for strengthening the CCP. In reality, the plenum provides a small glimpse into the party’s opaque inner workings, which are fractured and riddled with discontent and outright corruption. In the face of a mounting crisis at home and abroad, Xi holds the party together by balancing between various factional interests and meting out severe discipline to those he regards as a threat.
14. Reports confirm Trump’s plans to resume Iran war including strikes on civilian infrastructure
Numerous media reports and statements by government officials have confirmed that the Trump administration is preparing for a renewed war against Iran after the November 3 midterm elections. The actions being prepared include reinforcement of American forces in the region and warnings sent to Gulf allies that they should prepare for an intense military campaign.
On Thursday, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy posted on X that he received a classified briefing on the plans, confirming that the White House is assembling the means for another assault that could engulf civilian infrastructure across the region.
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Murphy’s warning is significant because he has seen the classified plans. But his invocation of a threat to America’s “commitment to the rule of law” treats its destruction as a future possibility; as though this aspect of the criminality of US imperialism has not been underway for more than two decades.
The record of military campaigns that violate US and international law run through successive Republican and Democratic administrations from the George W. Bush-era aggressive war against Afghanistan and Iraq, illegal detention and torture, and spying on the US public, to the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi in Libya and the expansion of targeted assassinations under Obama. This background places Trump’s murderous and illegal assault on Iran within the context of bipartisan criminality since the beginning of the 21st century, not as a departure from an otherwise law-abiding foreign and domestic policy.
Like all Democrats, Murphy is not opposed to the imperialist objectives behind the Trump administration’s assault on Iran. In his own words, Murphy agrees that Tehran must be prevented from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that the Islamic Republic is “responsible for the killing of thousands of Americans and unacceptable levels of support for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), briefed Trump at the White House on Thursday on military options against Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine participated, alongside other cabinet members. The meeting followed a Wednesday session involving military leaders and Vice President JD Vance.
Cooper rarely briefs Trump in person. The gathering therefore marks a significant stage in the preparations. According to the Journal, Washington has told Gulf Arab governments to prepare for a “short, intense campaign” after the elections. Trump himself declared last week, “We may do another little Epic Fury,” the name of the bombing campaign that began in February.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has consistently maintained, the ongoing war with Iran expresses the crisis of American imperialism and its attempt to overcome political and economic contradictions through military force. The destruction already inflicted has produced neither submission nor stability, but preparations for wider attacks. The makings of a third world war lie in the logic of the expanding crisis of world capitalism, not just in Trump’s bullying and recklessness.
15. Finnish and Norwegian leaders speak with Putin amid escalating NATO war on Russia
Against protests from the Democrats, who hope to escalate the war on Russia if they win next week’s midterm elections, Trump is stepping up efforts to reach a rapprochement with Russia. The European imperialists fear being excluded and are determined to escalate the war.
16. Climate activist, author and professor Andreas Malm barred from UK
These attacks on free speech and movement are the concern of all socialists and defenders of democratic rights; they must be widely publicized and strenuously opposed.
17. Garvaghy Road provocation: British imperialism deliberately stokes sectarianism in Northern Ireland
The Loyalist provocation in Portadown, following repeated outbursts of anti-migrant violence, is a warning that none of complex historic issues bound up with centuries of domination by British imperialism have been resolved.
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
