Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US midterm elections anticipate explosive growth of the class struggle
The Democrats have responded to the overwhelming opposition to Trump with calls for “bipartisanship” and “common ground.” This is motivated above all by the fear, shared by every section of the ruling class, of the growth of the class struggle. Tens of millions voted for higher wages, affordable healthcare, an end to war and an end to oligarchic rule. But the incoming Democratic House and Senate have been given their marching orders by Wall Street: Rescue the markets and fund war.
Whatever their posturing before the vote, the Democrats will be compelled to wage war on the working class. Who is to pay for a national debt approaching $40 trillion? How is the military budget to be raised to $1.5 trillion? The answer of both parties is the same, and a collision is inevitable.
2. Debt, energy, war and the fight for socialism
The direction of the world economy, and with it the politics of the ruling class, is increasingly defined by the intersection of three destructive processes.
First, the pile of debt undergirding global growth has reached astronomical proportions. On present trajectories, the world is heading toward roughly $375 trillion in total debt by the end of 2026. For comparison, capitalism—taken globally and using generous arithmetic—generates perhaps $15–25 trillion in profit or surplus each year.
Debt is a stock of financial claims backed by assets and future income, and much of it is continuously refinanced rather than paid off. But the comparison conveys the extraordinary scale of the claims that have accumulated against future production. Capitalism is mortgaging its future on an unprecedented scale.
And each year, more is added. Nearly $30 trillion in debt was added in 2025 alone. Debt is accumulating on a scale comparable to the annual expansion of the world economy itself. Interest payments on public debt alone have risen to $3.3 trillion. An ever greater stream of social wealth is sucked up and siphoned off to service the claims of banks and other creditors.
Alongside this is a second critical process: the rising cost of basic necessities and of the energy and raw materials on which economic life depends.
Diesel, a fuel essential to trucking, mining, agriculture, construction and manufacturing, has more than doubled in price for many users over the past year. European diesel futures traded between roughly $600 and $700 per tonne before the Iran war began in February. They now trade above $1,400 per tonne. These increases work their way through the economy, raising the cost of producing and transporting almost everything.
Natural gas prices, meanwhile, have tripled in Europe and Asia since the war began, with the United States relatively insulated. Similar pressures have appeared in jet fuel used by planes and the bunker fuel used by ships.
But the pressure extends beyond hydrocarbons.
Copper, a pivotal metal underpinning electronics, electrification, renewable energy and the infrastructure of AI, has also surged in price. Throughout much of the 2010s, it traded between roughly $2 and $4 per pound. It has recently traded above $6.50, reaching record levels.
Global food prices, meanwhile, remain dramatically above their levels of a decade ago. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index stood at 136 in September 2026, compared with an annual average of 91.9 in 2016—an increase of nearly 50 percent.
War, climate change, higher energy and transportation costs, and broader inflationary pressures are all to blame. For households already spending much of their income on food—grain, meat, cooking oils—it is a punishing drain.
But accompanying these two damaging processes—debt and inflation—is a third: war.
The war in Ukraine, the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, the fighting in Yemen, and beneath them all the mounting confrontation between China and US imperialism—these conflicts are increasingly intertwining and intensifying.
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Debt finances war; war raises the cost of necessities and of borrowing; and mounting economic pressure feeds an increasingly desperate struggle to secure control over the sources of global wealth.
The ruling class increasingly looks to artificial intelligence as a potential escape from this impasse. AI has generated enormous speculative valuations and investment, sustaining the appearance of renewed dynamism in an otherwise stagnating economy. But even as it revolutionizes production, it heightens the social contradictions of capitalism. The very advance hailed as a way out intensifies the crisis. Meanwhile, a new financial bubble has been inflated around it. It is only a matter of time before it bursts.
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The crisis of world capitalism offers its ruling classes no progressive way out. They turn instead toward war, even as its prosecution further destabilizes the capitalist economy upon which their own power rests.
In Ukraine and across the Middle East, warfare increasingly takes the form of economic attrition. Energy infrastructure, trade routes and productive capacity become military targets. The destruction of the infrastructure necessary to sustain civilian life becomes a means of exhausting an opponent’s capacity to continue the war.
Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries, for example, has driven Russian refinery throughput to its lowest level in more than two decades in 2026, with diesel production estimated by the IEA to have fallen nearly 30 percent. Dozens of warehouses and other commercial sites have also been struck. Russia, meanwhile, has increasingly targeted Ukraine’s power infrastructure. Russian attacks on Tuesday killed dozens and further damaged the grid as the region heads into winter.
This grinding stalemate, in which tens of thousands are sacrificed every month, increasingly turns on each side’s capacity to withstand prolonged economic and social destruction. American, Chinese and European war planners are studying its implications for future conflicts, including the possibility that a war over Taiwan could develop into a similar struggle of attrition.
The same logic is at work in Iran. The Trump administration and the Iranian government confront one another over who can withstand the sustained disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. For Washington and Israel, the failure to secure a decisive outcome creates pressure for further escalation. The United States is actively contemplating the use of its largest non-nuclear weapon on Iran.
In all cases it is working people who bear the cost of war.
Together, these convulsions express the historical exhaustion of capitalism. They emerge from contradictions accumulated over decades and intensified after the financial collapse of 2008. The vast expansion of debt and financial speculation that followed deferred the crisis while deepening the conditions that produced it: social inequality, economic instability and the struggle between the major powers over markets, resources and strategic advantage.
Capitalism as a system of organizing global social life has nothing left to offer the world. Nor can it secure its own future. Its attempts at self-preservation increasingly undermine the economic and social foundations of its continued existence. As Marx wrote, “The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”
All roads here lead in one direction: the intensification of the class struggle.
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The international character of the crisis demands an international response. Humanity’s accumulated scientific knowledge, technology and productive resources make possible a secure and dignified life for all, with shorter working hours and greater scope for human development. AI, automation and other developments can have a positive, revolutionary effect on humanity’s future.
But realizing these possibilities requires ending the subordination of production to private profit and the nationalist ambitions of the financial aristocracy. The productive resources of society must be placed under democratic social control and directed toward human need.
The struggle against war is inseparable from the struggle against the impoverishment of the working class. Both demand the independent political mobilization of workers, young people and the unemployed across all national borders. This movement must fight for an irrevocable break with finance capital and the expropriation of the financial aristocracy, whose wealth and power stand in the way of humanity’s further development. That is the revolutionary socialist program, and the only way through this historical impasse.
3. Australia: Police with military weapons start patrolling NSW streets
Under conditions of rising social discontent in Australia and globally, the state Labor government in New South Wales (NSW) is spearheading an unprecedented turn in policing operations, featuring officers carrying visible military-grade long-arms on daily patrols for the first time in Australian history.
This month, Premier Chris Minns’s government began taking the militarization of policing to a new level, deploying its newly-established Armed Response Command (ARC) to patrol prominent public places in Sydney, including potential protest locations near the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.
Officers are also cruising in purpose-built vehicles—BMW X5s and Toyota LandCruisers—fitted with technology to receive intelligence information from the command’s operations center. Established at an initial cost of $94.3 million, the command is expected to comprise 250 officers by the end of 2027, with 28 civilian staff members.
This historic turn is clearly designed to create a threatening political climate, normalizing the presence of heavily-armed police squads on the streets, with their weapons on visible display.
ARC officers are armed with shortened versions of the semi-automatic Australian Combat Assault Rifle, developed primarily for use in wartime battle. Measuring over 70cm long and with a range of more than 500 meters, they can fire 50 rounds per minute, raising the specter of lethal shootings.
This is part of a wider response, brought forward amid explosive mass struggles by students and workers across Europe against war, re-militarization, the soaring cost of living and the deteriorating conditions in schools and social services.
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The government’s intent is to intimidate—and potentially use lethal force against—demonstrations or other eruptions of opposition, not individual gunmen. That includes not only the continuing demonstrations against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of Palestine, but any unrest, as in Europe, or rallies by striking workers.
NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon last month declared that the ARC would have a dual purpose, that of deterring people who “incite hatred or cause fear,” as well as those “who wish to commit harm.”
This is line with the efforts of the political and media establishment to conflate opposition to the genocide in Palestine to antisemitism and to accuse Gaza demonstrations of causing fear in the Jewish population, even though the protests have been joined by many Jewish people who denounce the Israeli regime.
Over the past three years, the anti-genocide protests in Australia have been among the largest per capita in the world. In August 2025, 300,000 people took part in a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite intensive attempts by Minns and the police to ban it.
After four decades of increasingly militarized policing in all Australian states and territories, primarily involving para-military riot and “tactical response” squads, the ARC represents a sharp further shift in police operations, designed to establish an intimidating presence on the streets.
Rather than acting as a “flying squad” or an on-call SWAT team, the ARC represents Labor’s adoption of US and European-style policing operations where military-grade firepower is a permanent open fixture in civilian areas, often backed by heavily-armed troops.
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Over the past two decades, Labor also has backed legislation to enable the military to be called out to combat domestic unrest or alleged threats to designated infrastructure, giving soldiers unprecedented peacetime powers, including to use lethal force, detain civilians, issue directives and search people and premises. That is in line with the deployment of troops against demonstrators internationally, most recently in France and the US.
The strengthening of the police and intelligence apparatuses, alongside the military, will be directed against the working-class discontent and political disaffection that is brewing as the burdens of war are imposed on working people, via the soaring cost of living and cuts to essential disability, health, education and other social programs, while billions of dollars are poured into the military in preparation for war.
4. Trump holds war planning meeting amid speculation of November 9 attack on Iran
The carriers USS George Washington and USS George H.W. Bush and their strike groups are in the Arabian Sea. A third carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was due in Singapore on Friday and was at least two weeks from reaching the Middle East, CBS News reported Thursday, citing a US official.
The election result has prompted a deep crisis within the administration.
5. Trump names Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff
Three days after the devastating defeat of the Republican Party in the US midterm elections, President Donald Trump doubled down on anti-immigrant bigotry by removing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and replacing her with Stephen Miller, who has spearheaded the administration’s violent campaign against immigrant workers.
The appointment was a particular slap in the face to millions of Hispanic voters who turned sharply against the Trump administration, particularly in Texas, where Democrats swept every statewide office, electing a US senator for the first time since 1988 and ousting three-term governor Greg Abbott, a key Trump ally.
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Miller is Trump’s longest-serving policy aide, having the main responsibility for anti-immigrant efforts in the first Trump term, when he advocated for the family-separation policy that imprisoned immigrant children, thousands of whom permanently lost contact with their parents. In the second term, he has pushed for punitive measures like deporting immigrants to third countries where they don’t know the language or have any family, as well as advocating repressive measures directed against the American population more broadly, such as deploying ICE agents to airports and National Guard troops to Washington DC, Memphis and other cities.
His most notorious statement—out of many crude lies—came after the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents, last January. He smeared Pretti as an “assassin” because he was lawfully carrying a licensed weapon when federal agents threw him to the ground and executed him at point-blank range.
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The Democratic Party has won 256 seats in the House of Representatives, compared to only 161 for the Republicans, with 18 still undecided. It has captured at least seven Republican Senate seats, giving it a 54-44 margin, with narrow leads in both Alaska and Mississippi, which have grown as counting continues.
Under those conditions, the selection of Miller is a declaration by Trump of complete indifference to the wishes of the American people, expressed in the midterm vote, for an end to the war in Iran and the war against immigrants, and a reduction in the spiraling cost-of-living.
The Democrats, having benefited electorally from the mass hostility to the Trump administration, welcomed the opportunity to posture as opponents of Miller. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, likely the next Speaker of the House, issued a statement saying, “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands… His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, the future Majority Leader, said that Trump had “learned nothing” from the election. “Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration,” he said. “Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice. Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.”
The truth is that the congressional Democratic leadership regrets the selection of Miller because it cuts across their plans for bipartisan collaboration with the Trump administration, particularly if it can reach agreement with the White House on escalating US military intervention in the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
6. Three senior police generals arrested in Indonesia over illegal wiretapping
Three senior Indonesian police generals were arrested on Tuesday on charges of illegal wiretapping that was conducted against President Prabowo Subianto himself, as well as other politicians and top officials. The arrests take place amid a deepening economic and political crisis in the country and an increasingly public rift between Prabowo and former president Joko Widodo.
Concerns that the arrests could potentially trigger protests and unrest were underscored by the dispatch of 20,000 troops to Jakarta. While the military declared the troop movement was “routine,” the timing is hardly coincidental. It is unclear how many of the soldiers have been put on the streets.
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The political intrigues and fracturing of relations in ruling circles in Indonesia take place amid global economic and financial turmoil and an unfolding world war that threatens to escalate again as Trump prepares a new military onslaught on Iran.
While the growth rate for the Indonesian economy stood at 5.45 percent for the first three months of the year, its share market has taken a battering, falling by 40 percent since the beginning of the year. It fell by 12 percent late last month when the Morgan Stanley Capital Investment (MSCI) index warned that Indonesia could be demoted to “stand-alone status” over allegations of share market manipulation by a tight-knit group of super-wealthy oligarchs.
Prabowo himself is under political siege as his flagship school food program has been plagued by cost blowouts, high-level corruption and an estimated 50,000 cases of food poisoning. He has also faced a succession of protests over a range of issues, including the lack of funding for tertiary education, expanded military spending and the appointment of serving military officers to top civilian positions. He commands an overwhelming majority in parliament with an alliance of seven out of the eight parliamentary parties but several of his allies have begun to cautiously distance themselves from the president.
The arrest of the three police generals, particularly Widodo’s ally Listyo, appears to mark a determined effort by Prabowo to tighten his grip over the state apparatus as his administration heads into deeply troubled waters.
7. Three executions in a single day—in Indiana, Alabama and Florida—as Democrats remain silent
The three state killings came just two days after the Democrats’ sweeping victory in the November 3 midterm elections, which constituted a stunning repudiation of Trump’s policies on social inequality, war, the assault on immigrants and attacks on democratic rights. Yet a wide internet search turns up not a single comment from any Democrat on Thursday’s three executions.
Instead, the Democrats have responded to their victory by offering to collaborate with the administration in its reactionary policies. Their stance on capital punishment is not a recent change. In 2024 the party dropped abolition of capital punishment from its platform for the first time in over a decade. But even before that, Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama defended the use of state killings against offenders who have carried out the most “heinous” crimes.
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On the same day as the three executions, California Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, moved to commute the death sentences of all 548 people on the state’s death row to life without parole. Of these, 382 require approval from the California Supreme Court.
In an open letter, Newsom declared, “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.” He called the state’s system “a failure” by every measure, one that “has resulted in the conviction of innocent people.”
The commutations will spare hundreds of lives, but the timing of the action marks it as a cynical move to boost Newsom’s “progressive” credentials ahead of a presidential run. California has been under a moratorium on executions that Newsom himself imposed in 2019. If the state’s death penalty system has been “a failure” by every measure, why did he wait seven years—until after the midterms and barely two months before he leaves office—to act? Notably, he made no mention of the three men being put to death that day in other states.
8. Sri Lankan government introduces draconian organised-crime bill
The Sri Lankan government is advancing a sweeping regime of police and executive repression through its Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill (POCB), presented to Parliament on October 20, following the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) on October 6.
Brought forward under the pretext of combating “terrorism” and “crimes,” both bills constitute a serious attack on the democratic rights of working people, further strengthening the repressive powers of the capitalist state.
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The draconian nature of the POCB has attracted significant criticism from local and international human rights organizations. Amnesty International is demanding the immediate withdrawal of the new bill, calling it “the most alarming in a string of repressive laws” proposed by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.
Amnesty warned that the legislation “entrenches impunity and risks reviving the conditions that enabled arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment under the PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act], including use of coerced statements to secure convictions.” It added: “It allows what effectively amounts to secret trials and it removes virtually all the safeguards designed to prevent the abuse of police power.”
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The JVP/NPP government intends to rush this legislation through parliament as it is well aware that its austerity agenda cannot be imposed on working people democratically. Already anger and opposition is rising over deteriorating living conditions and the destruction of jobs mandated by the IMF. Moreover, the trade unions aided by fake left groups such as the FSP that have contained protests and strikes are increasingly discredited.
The Socialist Equality Party is the only party that not only unequivocally opposes the POCB and PSTA but demands the repeal of all anti-democratic legislation including emergency regulations and anti-strike laws.
We call on workers to form their own democratically-elected action committees in every workplace and institution, independent of the trade unions and all capitalist parties as the basis for mounting a political struggle for basic social and democratic rights.
The struggle for democratic rights is bound up with the struggle for a socialist and internationalist program and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government to restructure society to meet the needs of the majority not the profits of the super-wealthy.
9. Mass protests over Ueno Bank collapse topple Paraguay’s president
In the early hours of Tuesday, 3 November, the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP) initiated a “resolution procedure” against Ueno Bank after its solvency ratio collapsed to 5.56 percent, less than half the regulatory minimum of 12 percent. The bank’s app, cards and transfers went dark overnight, locking out 2.9 million customers in a country of 6.1 million people.
Within days, eight senior executives had been arrested, the president of the Central Bank had resigned, and the president of the republic, Santiago Peña, had announced his own departure in a crisis that is still claiming heads, after three consecutive nights of mass protests outside Congress.
Congress rejected Peña’s resignation on Thursday, since accepting it would have made him a senator for life with immunity from prosecution, and the Chamber of Deputies voted 78–0 to impeach him. On Friday, the Senate rejected his request for a 72-hour extension to prepare his defense and ordered him to appear within half an hour. The same day, his chief of staff, Javier Giménez, his legal adviser, Roberto Moreno, and his interior minister, Enrique Riera, resigned.
Peña’s is the first government of Trump’s Shield of the Americas to fall. It comes two weeks after the defeat of Trump’s candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, in Brazil and three days after the massive repudiation of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. It exposes the brittleness of the regimes making up the far-right alliance established by Washington to police the hemisphere, most of them deeply unpopular and facing recession and protests.
The authorities and the financial press have worked in unison to insist that Ueno was an aberration. “Authorities say the crisis is limited to Ueno and does not reflect broader weaknesses in Paraguay’s banking system,” Reuters reported.
In fact, the collapse of a major bank, underwritten on Wall Street by JPMorgan and Bank of America, is a warning of the fragility of the so-called emerging markets. They are being squeezed by record debt, US interest rates near two-decade highs and inflation driven by war and tariffs.
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The scale of the disaster is difficult to overstate. Ueno held approximately $850 million in public funds, including some $380 million belonging to the Social Security Institute (IPS), which funds workers’ pensions and healthcare. Only 30 percent of the value of its deposits is insured.
When the Central Bank began payments on Thursday night, only those with up to 10 million guaraníes (about $1,600), no debts and an account at another bank were eligible. A domestic worker from Luque, Benicia Sosa, described waking up “without being able to do anything, without a single peso,” with her husband and eight children all locked out of their accounts.
Until days ago, Ueno was celebrated as the crown jewel of Paraguay’s economic “miracle,” and its $350 million bond issue in March was the largest corporate issuance in Paraguayan history.
Behind the façade, its growth was financed by a closed circuit of self-dealing and corruption. The bank lent to companies linked to its own controlling shareholder, Grupo Vázquez, “on signature alone,” to firms with negative net worth. Related-party lending reached $628 million against a legal limit of roughly $80 million, and the bank concealed the excess through “accounting engineering” and a chain of shell companies. The BCP’s former head of supervision, Fernando Rivarola, documented these maneuvers in a 25-page report in July. He was promptly removed from his post by decree of President Peña, and the report was concealed from the Senate.
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In 1999, the assassination of a vice president and the massacre of protesters forced President Raúl Cubas Grau from office, and the crisis ended in a reshuffling of the ruling clique. Today, the ruling class is attempting the same under far more explosive conditions.
On Thursday night, protesters outside Ueno’s headquarters drove out Paraguayo “Payo” Cubas, the far-right leader of Cruzada Nacional, who calls for dictatorship and is promoted as the “Paraguayan Milei.” They blocked his path, shouting “opportunist,” and denounced him for the senators elected on his lists who went over to Peña’s camp. “Santiago Peña and the Colorado Party have stolen all our savings,” one protester told reporters. “We are fed up with 70 years of plunder.”
This anger cannot easily be channeled behind an alternative far-right figure. It represents the objective potential for an independent movement of the working class: for the full restitution of all savings and pension funds, the opening of the books of Ueno, Grupo Vázquez and the Central Bank, and the seizure of the assets of all who profited.
Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution holds that in countries of belated capitalist development the national bourgeoisie is organically incapable of resolving even its own democratic tasks, and the Ueno affair confirms it. Paraguay’s ruling class has never broken from its comprador and criminal character, and the tasks of genuine national sovereignty and ending the plunder of public wealth can be carried out only by the working class, organized independently of all bourgeois parties and factions.
What is required is the construction of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Paraguay, armed with the program of socialist revolution: the expropriation of the financial oligarchy, the nationalization of the banks under workers’ control and the international unity of the working class.
10. US military launches new strikes on Venezuelan soil, amid plans for long-term presence
The US military participated in a drone and helicopter attack on a camp of the Colombian National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) in the Venezuelan state of Apure last Friday, according to four US officials cited by the New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal reported that US military drones executed the strike with the “cooperation” of the Venezuelan government. The local NGO Fundaredes has raised the death toll from 19 to 23.
Friday’s operation carries inland the campaign of US military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which has killed at least 240 people since September 2025.
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The Apure attack is the second known US strike on Venezuelan soil since the January 3 bombing of Caracas and abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores. In June, an airstrike guided by CIA intelligence killed Héctor “Niño” Guerrero, the alleged leader of the Tren de Aragua, in the gold mines of Bolívar state, and US officials thanked their Venezuelan counterparts for their cooperation.
These operations mark the conversion of Venezuela into a US military protectorate. The armed forces, police and intelligence apparatus built under Chavismo now act as the local adjuncts of the occupying power. Their task is to secure the plunder of the country’s oil and to hold down a working class that is moving into struggle.
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In 2006, the Argentine anti-Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau wrote in Nueva Sociedad that Venezuela required “a new collective actor, whose symbol is Bolivarianism and whose emergent is Hugo Chávez, through a populist rupture.” He defended “the centrality of the leader as the unifying factor” and insisted that “if there is a danger to Latin American democracy, it comes from neoliberalism and not from populism.”
In a recent lecture, David North, chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, explained that Laclau and his collaborator Chantal Mouffe provided the theoretical framework for a non-socialist “left populism” that shaped Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, whose founders were their declared disciples. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) they announced that what was in crisis was “a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the working class.” In place of the working class, they put a “people” assembled around a leader.
Venezuela was offered as the proof. “Perhaps the one who went furthest is Chávez,” Mouffe said in a 2019 interview with Samuele Mazzolini. “He gave the Venezuelan masses a political identity.” She recalled with approval how Chávez told the anti-globalization activists at the World Social Forum in Caracas: “look, we are the state.” What remained of this, she said, explained “the support that Nicolás Maduro still has.”
The founders of Podemos learned in the same school. Íñigo Errejón, the party’s chief strategist, wrote his doctoral thesis on the “struggle for hegemony” under the first government of Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), co-authored Construir pueblo (2015) with Mouffe, and directed a research program at GIS XXI, a polling firm linked to the Venezuelan government. “Chávez and Chavismo are a profound source of political pedagogy,” he declared in 2013.
Venezuela now teaches the real lesson of left populism. The “we” that Chávez said was the state was the army and the state apparatus of the national bourgeoisie. When US imperialism struck, that apparatus caved. It handed over the oil, opened the airport and the airspace to US forces, and now leaves the dead from the earthquake uncounted.
The repudiation of the working class as the revolutionary class served to tie workers to a bourgeois nationalist leadership that has delivered them to imperialism. The transformation of Venezuela into a protectorate overseen by Chavismo is, in fact, a profound source of political pedagogy. It confirms Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: in countries with belated economic development, democracy, which fundamentally includes independence from imperialist oppression, cannot be secured under capitalist rule, but requires that the working class take power as part of the world socialist revolution.
11. Berlin: Die Linke congress votes overwhelmingly for right-wing coalition with Greens and SPD
At the same time as tens of thousands of young people took to the streets in Berlin to protest against war and the social catastrophe, Die Linke paved the way for a state government that will push ahead with social cuts and step up the repressive powers of the state.
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The many workers and young people who gave the party their vote and are turning away from its right-wing government policies must turn to a genuinely socialist perspective. The insane war policy and the social catastrophe will not be ended by appeals to the capitalist parties, but only when workers intervene independently in political events, expropriate the big banks and corporations and place them under democratic control. That is what the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is fighting for. Sign up now to take part in the fight for socialism.
12. Müller Dairy Products Group to close plants in two German states
Acquiring, streamlining, selling, or closing down is the method by which the global Müller empire was built, growing over 55 years from a dairy with four employees into a global corporation.
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Buy, relocate, close: that’s the strategy of a corporation that, by its own accounts, generated record revenue of €10.3 billion in 2025, having increased its revenue tenfold over 25 years. In addition to Germany, the Müller Group has a significant presence in the United Kingdom, Poland and the Czech Republic.
A global corporation with billions in revenue could easily invest in modernizing its facilities and securing jobs. But by decision by corporate management, billionaire Theo Müller’s return on investment takes precedence over the livelihoods of the employees.
Theo Müller’s fortune has grown not only at the expense of the workers but also through the exploitation of numerous tax loopholes. For tax reasons, the Theo Müller Group has been headquartered in Luxembourg since 2011. Theo Müller himself, along with his family, moved to Switzerland as early as 2003 to avoid paying German inheritance tax in the future. In Switzerland, he also founded Theo Müller Holding, which serves as the family’s private holding company and provides them with significant tax advantages.
The billionaire moved to Switzerland to save on taxes, while in Saxony he received subsidies for his dairy business and was awarded the Saxon Order of Merit by Minister President Michael Kretschmer (CDU) in 2021. With an estimated fortune of around €10 billion, Müller ranks 361st among the world’s richest people and 16th in Germany, according to Forbes.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the German oligarch openly harbors sympathies for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). He has referred to AfD Chairwoman Alice Weidel as a “friend” and proposed a coalition between the conservative Christian Democratic Union and the AfD in the context of the 2024 state election in Saxony and again in 2026 in Baden-Württemberg.
13. DSA’s Nithya Raman wins Los Angeles mayoralty amid shift to the left
Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles City Council member affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a fellow Democrat she previously endorsed, to become mayor-elect of the second-largest city in the United States.
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Bass, a former congresswoman endorsed by Governor Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, conceded Thursday. In a campaign statement, she said she was “committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition.”
Raman, 45, was born in Kerala, India, and emigrated to the United States with her family at age six. She will become Los Angeles’s first Asian American mayor. An urban planner educated at Harvard and MIT, she lives in the affluent Silver Lake neighborhood with her husband, television writer and producer Vali Chandrasekaran, and their twin children.
Raman released her own victory statement praising Bass as someone who has “given decades of her life to make the city what it is today.” She added that her administration would be focused on “building housing people can afford, parks for our children to play in, a transit system that can get people to where they need to go, a city that is safe for working people and its families and a city government that is actually capable of delivering on its promises.”
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Raman’s victory follows the election last year of DSA member Zohran Mamdani in New York City. On Tuesday, fellow members Janeese Lewis George, David Morales and Yousef Rabhi won mayoral elections in Washington D.C., Providence, Rhode Island, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, respectively. Lewis George did not face any Republican opponent and will succeed Democrat Muriel Bowser, who took office in 2015.
The electoral gains extended to Congress, where six new DSA-backed Democrats won House seats, including Claire Velez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City, Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, Donavan McKinney in Detroit, Melet Kiros in Denver, and Angela Gonzales-Torres in Los Angeles. Together with returning representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, their victories expand the organization’s congressional contingent from two to eight. Both of Detroit’s two congressional seats are now held by DSA members, Tlaib and McKinney.
The election of DSA-affiliated mayors in the two largest US cities and the national capital reflects a broad shift to the left among workers and young people. Faced with soaring living costs, poverty wages, unaffordable housing, unending war and the growth of fascism, spearheaded by attacks on immigrants, millions are looking for a socialist alternative to the reality of capitalist America.
Raman, like Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, is a political beneficiary of this mass radicalization. These bourgeois politicians employ socialist branding and occasional left-wing phraseology to sow illusions in the possibility of reforming capitalism and the Democratic Party. They advance neither democratic control of the means of production by workers nor the international unity of the working class against capitalism. Their program consists of timid reforms and policies aimed at a more equal distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent, while channeling mass social anger back into the Democratic Party.
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In addition to securing the support of the DSA-LA, Raman was heavily supported by wealthy hedge fund managers and real estate developers. The Washington Post reported hedge fund billionaire Aaron Sosnick contributed $7 million to pro-Raman committees.
Raman also was endorsed by several trade unions, including Unite Here Local 11, which purports to represent the city’s hotel workers, along with United Auto Workers 4811, which claims some 60,000 members, including grad students, teachers and other workers employed by the University of California.
Raman told CNN in May, “I appreciate the comparison” to Mayor Mamdani. The two DSA Democrats are very similar: While campaigning, they barked about “defunding” the police and abolishing ICE, but once in office did the exact opposite. As a member of the City Council, Raman voted for at least four annual city budgets that increased police funding. Asked by CNN earlier this year whether she still supported reducing police funding, she answered, “No.”
During the October 13 mayoral debate, Raman positively invoked fascistic former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates while criticizing police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement:
“This city used to be the gold standard, in terms of noncooperation with immigration enforcement, years ago—under the era of Daryl Gates,” she said. “And now, under this mayor, we’ve actually lost trust from our immigrant community.”
Raman subsequently said she was referring to Special Order 40, the 1979 policy restricting police stops conducted solely to determine immigration status.
Gates led the LAPD from 1978 to 1992 and helped establish its SWAT unit, which spearheaded the militarization of police departments across the country. The department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division conducted illegal surveillance and infiltration of political organizations. In response to revelations about the unit’s criminal operations, Gates said police intelligence work “cannot be and never will be as pristine pure as some would like it. There is absolutely no way that we cannot, on occasion, trample on some people’s privacy and their freedom.”
Defending chokeholds, the racist Gates said, “blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do in ‘normal people.’”
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The crisis of unaffordable housing, growing inequality and attacks on democratic rights will not be resolved by electing Democratic Party-approved “socialists.” The way forward does not involve electing Democrats, but in building an independent movement in the working class, organized in rank-and-file committees against all parties and tendencies that defend the profit system and artificial division of workers.
14. Turkish parliament approves Mecca defense pact amid Middle East war
The Turkish parliament on Thursday evening ratified the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on August 7.
Of the 279 votes in favour, 222 came from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), 24 from its fascist ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and 25 from the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
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The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, declared its unconditional rejection of the agreement in a video statement before the vote.
The statement explained that what the agreement would “defend” is the Saudi regime, which has opened its bases to the US war on Iran and is slaughtering the people of Yemen through bombardment and starvation, along with the reactionary geopolitical interests that the Turkish bourgeoisie seeks to advance in collaboration with US imperialism. As military spending rises and the cost of war is imposed on workers through falling wages and social cuts, it is accompanied by growing political repression in Türkiye.
The Mecca Agreement is a product of the global imperialist war bound up with the genocide in Gaza, the US-Israeli war against Iran, the Saudi monarchy’s war against the Houthi Ansar Allah movement in Yemen, NATO’s war against Russia over Ukraine and US preparations for war against China. The pact ties workers to a chain of conflicts stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to South Asia. Under the agreement, which is modeled on NATO’s Article 5, an armed attack against one party is considered an attack on all three, and the parties may withdraw only after 10 years. Although the text contains no provision on nuclear weapons, Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella is effectively being extended over its allies.
The parties’ own statements refute claims that the pact represents an alternative to alliance with the US and NATO or a step toward independence from them. US President Donald Trump hailed the agreement as a “big, bold, and important first step,” and Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Levent Gümrükçü described it as “complementary” to NATO. The real issue driving Washington’s three allies into such an alliance is the regional powers’ pursuit of their own reactionary interests amid the violent US-led restructuring of the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East.
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The agreement is sharpening the rivalry between two US allies, Türkiye and Israel. Three days after the signing in August, a senior Israeli official told Ynet, “This alliance is aimed against Israel,” adding: “The Shiite axis has weakened, and for a long time we have seen the Sunni axis getting stronger. … Israel needs to build alternative alliances, especially with the Hellenic axis, Greece and Cyprus, together with India and the United Arab Emirates.”
On August 18, Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase, 70 kilometers from the Turkish border; Netanyahu’s office claimed that by permitting a Turkish military deployment at the base, Damascus was threatening Israel’s security. If Syria joins the Mecca alliance, every Israeli attack on the country could be considered an attack on all parties, bringing NATO member Türkiye and nuclear-armed Pakistan into direct confrontation with Israel. This underscores that the Mecca Agreement, for all its “defensive” claims, is a preparation for broader wars.
The war policy confronts overwhelming popular opposition in Türkiye: In an Areda Survey poll in March, 93.2 percent of respondents said they opposed the US and Israeli attack on Iran. The political establishment and the trade union confederations, however, are doing nothing to mobilize this opposition. Their real role is to keep this social opposition, which is merging with anger over the cost of living and growing political repression, under control.
The vote in parliament has confirmed that the struggle against war cannot be waged through the political establishment. The SEP advances a socialist programme based on mobilizing the working class in Türkiye and internationally as an independent social force against imperialist war and for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
We call on workers and young people to build independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces and schools and to demand the cancellation of the Mecca Agreement, Türkiye’s withdrawal from NATO, the closure of US-NATO bases and a halt to oil shipments to Israel through Türkiye.
This is the fifth part of a 10-part series responding to British-based historian Hakim Adi’s recently republished book, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919–1939.
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Between its Fourth Congress in 1922 and its Sixth Congress in 1928, the Communist International, founded by Lenin and Trotsky, underwent a profound political transformation. The internationalist programme on which it was founded was repudiated in favour of the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”, while the emerging Soviet bureaucracy consolidated its control over the Communist parties. Adi passes over the immense political struggles through which this transformation occurred.
Indeed, Stalin enters Adi’s narrative as Lenin’s “successor” to present the Stalinised Comintern’s policies as a further development of those formulated by Lenin.[1] The description is deeply misleading. Lenin appointed no political heir, and when illness removed him from active political life, Trotsky, not Stalin, was widely regarded in the Soviet Union and internationally as the figure most likely to inherit Lenin’s leading role. Lenin’s final Letter to the Congress described Trotsky as the “most capable” member of the Central Committee, while warning that Stalin had concentrated “unlimited authority” in his hands, and proposed removing him as General Secretary.[2]
What took place was not a smooth transition between Lenin and Stalin, but a bitter struggle between the Soviet bureaucracy led by Stalin against the revolutionary internationalism defended by Trotsky and the Left Opposition from 1923 onwards, on which the Comintern had been founded.
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For the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the nationalist transformation in the Comintern had fatal consequences. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution rejected the conception that the democratic and national tasks of the revolution required the proletariat to submit to bourgeois leadership: in countries of belated capitalist development, the struggle against imperialism, landlordism and national oppression could be carried through only under the independent leadership of the working class, drawing the peasantry behind it and extending the revolution internationally. The Stalinist doctrine assigned to the national bourgeoisie in oppressed countries a potentially revolutionary role, in a separate democratic stage, opening the way for the political subordination of Communist parties to bourgeois nationalist organizations.
In China, this program was put to a decisive test, an experience that Adi’s book excludes.
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The Chinese Revolution was the most important practical test of Comintern policy towards bourgeois nationalism in a colonial and semi-colonial country. Its defeat occurred barely a year before the Sixth Congress of 1928. But Adi excludes this experience from his discussion of the Congress and its colonial program.
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It was Trotsky, and the Trotskyist movement that would extract the central lesson from the Chinese catastrophe: the national bourgeoisie could come into conflict with imperialism while remaining violently hostile to the independent mobilization of the working class. As Trotsky explained:
The question of the nature and the policy of the bourgeoisie is settled by the entire internal class structure of a nation waging the revolutionary struggle; by the historical epoch in which that struggle develops; by the degree of economic, political, and military dependence of the national bourgeoisie upon world imperialism as a whole or a particular section of it; finally, and this is most important, by the degree of class activity of the native proletariat, and by the state of its connections with the international revolutionary movement.”
Trotsky’s conclusion from the Chinese experience was categorical: “For fear of the masses the bourgeoisie subsequently deserts the revolution.”
To be continued
16. Part One of three articles: Two syndicalists gut the UK 1926 General Strike of its political lessons
With the assistance of Socialism AI, here is a summary of Part One of Thomas Scripps' review of The Future in Our Past by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee:
The book's argument and its flaw. Cant and Lee use the 1926 British General Strike to advance a purely syndicalist outlook—a struggle based solely on trade union militancy, denigrating questions of political program and history. Their book mentions Leon Trotsky only once, in a footnote dismissing his analysis, and never mentions Stalin, whose policy destroyed any revolutionary road forward for the British working class.
Their false diagnosis. Cant and Lee reject the claim that the strike was doomed from the start, arguing the Communist Party could have continued it. But they reduce the CP's failure to a tactical error—failing to build rank-and-file structures in advance—rather than recognizing the opportunist, Stalinist policy that actually betrayed the strike.
The real betrayal. Under the Zinoviev-Stalin bloc, the CPGB subordinated itself to the TUC General Council, an avowedly counter-revolutionary body, culminating in the slogan "All power to the General Council!" The Anglo-Russian Committee (ARC), formed in 1925, was central: instead of using it as a weapon to expose the trade union bureaucracy, Stalin and his allies treated it as a permanent "co-partnership" and a gateway for revolution. Stalin cheered the ARC even after its British members had betrayed the workers, and the bureaucrats used it as a shield before discarding it once the crisis passed.
The deeper roots. This flowed from the degeneration of the Communist International and the theory of "socialism in one country"—a nationalist, bureaucratic response to the defeats after 1917 (especially the aborted German Revolution of 1923). Trotsky showed that this broke the "backbone of internationalism": the working class's fundamental aims cannot be realized by national means. Strategic questions in Britain were ultimately decided at the level of global perspectives, and Trotsky's revolutionary internationalism foreclosed any subordination of the class struggle to alliances convenient to the Soviet bureaucracy.
Scripps notes there is "more than an echo" of Stalin's nationalism in Cant and Lee's dismissal of Trotsky's emphasis on "foreign policy."
17. Part Three: The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)
The Socialist Equality Party’s founding congress, held in Montreal August 22-24, unanimously adopted a comprehensive document outlining the party’s historical and international foundations. Following is an abridged version which began with Part One and Part Two (made with the assistance of Socialism AI):
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Crisis in the Workers Party of Canada
45. The Workers Party's founding — At its founding in late 1934, the Workers Party was a small but vibrant organization that had extended its influence from Toronto to Montreal, Vancouver, and other centers. In July 1935 it was one of five signatories of the "Open Letter to All Revolutionary Proletarian Organizations and Groupings."
46. The crisis and dissolution into the CCF — Despite promising beginnings, the Workers Party was thrown into a political crisis culminating in its 1937 dissolution into the social-democratic CCF in a misapplication of the "French Turn." The leadership underestimated the significance of defending the program of world socialist revolution, becoming preoccupied with immediate tactical questions at the expense of world strategic considerations.
47. The syndicalist inheritance — The Workers Party inherited from the early CPC and the One Big Union/IWW a tendency to see socialist revolution as emerging from ever-widening, trade union-led economic struggles. Soon after its founding it produced a resolution calling for building a left wing in the unions on a purely syndicalist basis, characterizing the unions as "schools for socialism."
48. The Popular Front's appeal — The Canadian Trotskyists responded impressionistically to the Stalinists' shift from Third Period ultra-leftism to the Popular Front. The insidious counter-revolutionary character of Popular Frontism was not immediately apparent to many workers, and its nationalist-populist character struck a chord among the petty bourgeoisie.
49. The CCF's character — The CCF, founded in 1932 on the basis of Second International social democracy, brought together Christian socialists, agrarian populists, trade union bureaucrats, and Fabians. The Trotskyists initially made a correct analysis, denouncing it as a prop for the capitalist order and noting that reformism had no historical roots in the Canadian working class.
50. The entry into the CCF — In May 1937, after a brief but bitter internal struggle, the Workers Party was dissolved and a small majority entered the CCF in what was claimed as an audacious application of the "French Turn." In reality it was a political retreat permeated by adaptation to nationalist pressures and a prioritization of tactical maneuvering over the fight for the program.
51. The terms of entry — The majority rushed to dissolve the party even though the CCF leadership insisted on highly unfavorable terms: the Trotskyists had to give up their newspaper, were prohibited from joining as a group, and acceptance was left to individual CCF branches. The entry was opposed by cadres already doing entry work, who argued the CCF's influence was declining and revolutionary workers were coming under Stalinist influence.
52. The Stalinists' role — The CPC, through the Popular Front, was even more systematic in advocating the political subordination of the working class, openly supporting the Mackenzie King Liberal government while projecting itself as the party of October. A February 1938 report baldly justified the entry as a means of overcoming the movement's isolation—an opportunist attempt to find a tactical shortcut to a temporary unfavorable relationship of forces.
53. The failure to seek international assistance — Neither side sought the help of the world Trotskyist movement to clarify the political issues, exemplifying nationalist pressures. Had they done so, they could have drawn lessons from the US Workers Party's entry into the Socialist Party, which was politically prepared through extensive discussion and laid the basis for the founding of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.
54. The League for a Revolutionary Workers Party — The entry was marked by passivity and conciliation; Macdonald abandoned his leadership responsibilities almost immediately, confirming his political demoralization. The centrist LRWP, which opposed the French Turn on principle while supporting the POUM's entry into the Popular Front government, was able to posture as revolutionary intransigence and temporarily eclipse the genuine Trotskyist movement before disappearing during the war.
55. Trotsky's intervention — Apprised of the situation in late 1937, Trotsky drew trenchant conclusions, writing to Earle Birney that the Canadian section "didn't give any sign of political life" and that the comrades had "entrenched" themselves "in reformism itself," insisting "it is necessary to have in Canada an active revolutionary section."
The founding of the Fourth International and the outbreak of the Second World War
56. The founding congress — The Fourth International's founding congress (September 1938, near Paris) was an historic milestone. Its founding document, Trotsky's The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, defined the chief task as resolving the crisis of proletarian revolutionary leadership: "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."
57. The Transitional Program — To overcome the gulf between objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat, the Transitional Program formulated transitional demands (sliding scale of wages, nationalization, factory committees, soviets, workers' defense guards) as a bridge to the conquest of power. Trotsky insisted the program "must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers."
58. The reorientation of the Canadian section — Through the intervention of Trotsky, the SWP, and the Pacific Bureau, a principled basis for overcoming the crisis was developed. The Trotskyists constituted an opposition group within the CCF on the basis of a statement against imperialist war, but were targeted for expulsion—completed by November 1938—as the CCF leadership prepared to repudiate its pacifism and line up behind the ruling class.
59. The Socialist Workers League — An independent Trotskyist party, the Socialist Workers League, was refounded in early 1939 and sought affiliation with the Fourth International. But the leadership refused to review the entry experience, a political evasion that left crucial questions unclarified when the outbreak of war and the state's illegalization of the SWL compelled re-entry into the CCF for legal cover.
60. The character of the Second World War — Canada waited one week before formally entering the war in September 1939. The war was not for "democracy" or "anti-fascism" but a continuation of the 1914 struggle among imperialist powers. Trotsky's Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War (May 1940) elaborated the program of transforming the imperialist war into civil war and world socialist revolution.
61. The defense of the degenerated workers' state — Trotsky's last years were dedicated to preparing the Fourth International for war, including opposing tendencies that designated the Soviet bureaucracy a new exploiting class ("state capitalism" or "bureaucratic collectivism"). In In Defense of Marxism he stressed that the USSR's origins in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism made it a degenerated workers' state, with the bureaucracy a parasitic excrescence to be overthrown in a political revolution.
62. Burnham and Shachtman's turn — Following the Stalin-Hitler pact, Burnham and Shachtman urged the SWP to drop its unconditional defense of the USSR. Their refusal to defend the gains of October was an adaptation to the right turn of a left-liberal petty-bourgeois layer aligned with the Democratic Party, which recoiled when Stalin's diplomacy placed Moscow in opposition to the Roosevelt administration.
63. Trotsky's rebuttal — Trotsky stressed that the "bureaucratic collectivist" claim wrote off the revolutionary role of the working class and rejected the viability of world socialist revolution. He rejected the pessimistic position that the defeats reflected the "incapacity of the proletariat," insisting the defeats were the outcome of the betrayals of its mass organizations.
64. The defense of Marxist method — Trotsky emphasized the anti-Marxist, empiricist methodology of Burnham and Shachtman, replying to Shachtman's dismissal of dialectical materialism that the proletarian party "is not at all based upon 'such concrete issues'" but requires "a clear, far-sighted, completely thought-out world outlook."
65. The defections of Spector and Birney — Spector withdrew from the Fourth International in April 1939 without explanation, anticipating the right-wing trajectory of the Burnham-Shachtman opposition; by the 1950s he was active in the Democratic Party-aligned Socialist Party and a Zionist labor federation. Birney, who emerged as the principal Canadian leader, supported the opposition, then resigned in January 1940, conceding his break expressed "middle-class isolation and despair," and soon declared his preference for "capitalism over sovietism."
66. The revisionist trajectory — The Burnham-Shachtman arguments anticipated a long line of post-war revisionist attacks on Marxism, all of which regarded the Stalinist regimes as historically legitimate and wrote off the working class. Burnham became a leading Cold War ideologue; Shachtman authored a leaflet dropped by the US military during the Korean War and endorsed the bombing of Vietnam; Birney embraced Canadian imperialism, became an army officer, and won a Governor-General's Award in part for his pro-war poem "On Going to the Wars."
Trotsky's place in history
67. The GPU infiltration — The outbreak of war placed Trotsky's life in greater danger than ever. To complete the elimination of the Russian Revolution's leadership and prevent the development of the Fourth International, Stalinist agents infiltrated the Trotskyist movement—including Mark Zborowski, Sylvia Callen, and Joseph Hansen. Zborowski ("Etienne") assisted the GPU in the assassinations of Erwin Wolf, Ignace Reiss, Leon Sedov, and Rudolf Klement.
68. Trotsky's assassination and legacy — On May 24, 1940, Trotsky escaped an attempt facilitated by GPU agent Robert Sheldon Harte; on August 20, 1940, he was assaulted by GPU agent Ramon Mercader and died the next day. He was the last and greatest representative of classical Marxism, who developed a conception of revolutionary theory rooted in materialism and oriented to the education and mobilization of the working class. He rejected the claim that the defeats of the working class demonstrated the failure of Marxism, insisting such arguments were based on political demoralization, not theoretical insight.
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!Canal Red, the Spanish-language channel founded by Pablo Iglesias, the former leader of Podemos and former deputy prime minister of Spain, has broadcast an interview with WSWS editor Johannes Stern about the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the young Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for opposing the war. The interview premiered November 5 on the program Balaklava. It also takes up the rearmament of Europe and the silencing of anti-war opposition.
Bogdan, 27, is a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) arrested him at his home on April 25, 2024, and charged him with “high treason under martial law.” On August 10, 2026, the Pervomaisk City District Court sentenced him to 15 years in prison and ordered his property confiscated. The only evidence against him was six anti-war articles he wrote for the World Socialist Web Site. His lawyers have appealed.
Stern is the editor of the German-language World Socialist Web Site and a leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) in Germany.
The interview is in English, and the rest of the program is in Spanish. To get translated subtitles, open the video’s settings (the gear icon), choose Subtitles/CC, then Auto-translate and your language.
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
