Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. United States Midterm Elections: Democrats consolidate control of US Congress, statehouses
WSWS veteran author and political analyst Patrick Martin surveys the results of the midterm elections in the United States. They were a massive repudiation of the Trump administration which benefited Democrats, despite their own unpopularity. With the assistance of Socialism AI, here are
2. After the US midterms: What next?
The overwhelming defeat of the Republican Party in the midterm elections registers a growing rebellion against the framework of right-wing politics that has dominated the United States and its two-party system for decades.
The vote was the sharpest repudiation of a sitting president’s party in the more than half-century since the 1974 elections that followed the resignation of Richard Nixon. On Tuesday, the Democrats won the national House vote by about 13 points and gained at least seven Senate seats, six of them in states Trump carried three times.
The shift ran through every region and every section of the population. It was sharpest among those whom Trump claimed as his base: rural counties, young men and workers without college degrees. Trump made the election a referendum on himself and lost resoundingly.
Within the confines of a political system that permits no alternative to the two parties of big business, the vote reflects opposition to the war on Iran, inflation, extreme levels of social inequality and attacks on democratic rights. It is the continuation, in the context of an election, of the No Kings demonstrations involving millions of people last year and the mass protests against ICE murders in Minneapolis and other cities that erupted at the beginning of 2026.
The vote is part of the international movement of mass demonstrations of youth and workers that have spread over the past two months across France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Spain and Germany. Moreover, the debacle suffered by Trump follows by only two weeks the defeat of the fascist Bolsonaro in Brazil.
There is a genuine elation among workers and young people over the humiliation of Trump. Lest this fact be overlooked, it must be noted that Trump remains in office. He remains committed to his fascistic agenda. Moreover, there is already speculation that Trump will view the election results as a reason to escalate the war against Iran.
David Sanger of the New York Times writes today: “Past presidents, suddenly plunged into lame-duck status, have often reached for their military options, partly to demonstrate that their role as commander in chief is undiminished.”
As events will soon make clear, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the sentiments animating masses of people and the Democratic Party.
For all the election night hoopla, the transfer of a congressional majority to the Democrats will not fundamentally change the policies of the ruling class. The wars will expand, social inequality will increase and the assault on democratic rights will continue. While the working class is moving to the left, the financial-corporate oligarchy will continue its program of imperialist militarism and class war.
Throughout Trump’s two terms, the Democrats, far from opposing Trump, functioned as his enablers. Their stance has never changed: bipartisanship, “common ground,” a readiness to “work with” the president. They repeated it as Trump sent troops into American cities, built detention camps for immigrants and launched a war on Iran.
The Democrats will rely on the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to provide this program with a left cover. On Tuesday the number of DSA members in the House rose from two to eight, as six newly elected members from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado and California joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. But their influence on the policies of the Democratic Party will be negligible.
In an article touting the dominance of “moderates” in the Democratic Party caucus, the New York Times states:
Many of their newly elected members have already made clear that they expect Democrats to pursue achievable results rather than sweeping ideological ambitions. And given the scope of Democrats’ majority in the House, the relatively smaller bloc of left-wing members may be limited in its ability to insist that its priorities be met.
The DSA contingent will function as a fig leaf for the Democrats. Its members ran as Democrats and will sit in a caucus led by Hakeem Jeffries, for whom Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have voted as the party’s candidate for House speaker in every Congress since 2023.
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The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the ruling class, and what it fears above all is opposition to Trump from below. The one issue on which it waged a relentless campaign against Trump was the war against Russia in Ukraine, demanding that Trump escalate US involvement.
Within hours of the polls closing, the Democrats were back on script. “The American people have chosen the economy over extremism. The American people have chosen hope over hatred,” declared Jeffries, who will become speaker of the House in January. “[W]e are ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the other side of the aisle,” he said.
Millions did not vote for “hope over hatred.” They voted against war, social misery and dictatorship. After two years spent searching for common ground with a would-be dictator, however, Jeffries announced that the search would continue.
Barack Obama sang from the same hymnal, calling for “a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” It was Obama who, the day after Trump’s first election in 2016, assured the country that the contest had been merely “an intramural scrimmage” between two sides of the same team.
The offer of “bipartisan common ground” to a party that has spent two years working to establish a presidential dictatorship is a pledge to Wall Street, and Wall Street took note. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1,570 points, or 3 percent, its best day since April 2025 and its second best since Trump was re-elected
That was the verdict of the financial oligarchy on the election. The bankers are neither naive nor sentimental. They know that the Democrats are not going to implement a policy of social reform, let alone socialism. If they believed the election posed any threat to their interests, they would not be celebrating.
After Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democrats imposed deficit reduction and abolished welfare. After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, they rescued the banks, halved the wages of newly hired autoworkers and offered cuts to Social Security in pursuit of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. Joe Biden, who followed Trump’s first term, waged war against Russia, armed the genocide in Gaza and prepared the way for Trump’s return.
The other line that predominates in the media is that the election marks a return to normalcy. “The system has held,” the New York Times editorial board proclaimed, under the headline, “Trump Has Met His Match.”
Do not be deceived: Trump is a symptom, not the cause. He is the political representative of a financial oligarchy that retains its grip on power.
Two forces will dominate policy and the response of the state in the coming period. The first is the economic crisis, which is showing many signs of entering a new stage. With the national debt above $40 trillion and the war driving up prices and borrowing costs, the ruling class will demand that the working class pay. The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, laid out the agenda on Wednesday, proclaiming that “one issue cries out for finding common ground: the looming fiscal cliff,” that is, the need for major cuts to social programs.
The second is American imperialism, which will not be turned into a gentle lamb by a change in the composition of Congress. There is much talk of the election marking an end to the war against Iran, but no faction of the ruling class is prepared to tolerate a major setback in the Middle East. The war on Iran, moreover, is one front of a global war, including the intensification of conflict with China and war against Russia in Ukraine, the main priority of the Democrats.
Popular sentiment is far to the left of the Democratic Party. Millions of people want an end to war, the defense of democratic rights and a radical improvement in their conditions of life. Every faction of the ruling class and, one must add, the trade union apparatus, are terrified of the radicalization expressed in the vote and what it anticipates.
For decades, the profound class divisions of American society have been suppressed, by the two parties of big business, by the union bureaucracy and by an official political culture that denied the very existence of class. These class divisions are now beginning to erupt, and they will develop with explosive force.
The opposition that found expression at the polls will not remain on electoral grounds. The United States is entering a period of escalating class struggle.
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To advance its interests, the working class must develop as an independent political force, united with workers across national borders and armed with a socialist and revolutionary program. The central political task of our epoch, upon which the victory of socialism and the future of humanity depend, is the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.
This is the third 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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Pan-Africanism encompassed diverse political tendencies, but it shared a common starting point: the idea of shared interests among all Africans and people of African descent across national boundaries. The early Comintern proceeded from a different class standpoint. It recognized the immense significance of racial and colonial oppression, but it insisted that liberation depended upon the independent revolutionary mobilization of the working class against capitalism and imperialism.
The distinction was fundamental. The Comintern did not assume that black workers possessed a fundamental common political interest with black capitalists, landlords, chiefs, colonial intermediaries or aspiring sections of the petty bourgeoisie, simply because they shared a racial or continental identity. It sought to draw the struggle against racial oppression and colonial domination into the program of world socialist revolution. It did not deny the forms taken by the oppression of black and colonial peoples, but fought to connect their struggles with the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class.
4. United Kingdom: Burnham, King Charles and the dead end of apologies and reparations for slavery
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s October 30 declaration that he was “open” to a formal state apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade was timed to coincide with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), held in Antigua and Barbuda on November 3–4. It was an attempt to take the heat off King Charles III over the issue during his nine-day tour of the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua.
The proposal is a particularly egregious example of the naked hypocrisy of all such apologies for historic crimes, coming from the mouth of a political representative of British imperialism and an active participant in the many crimes it continues to commit against billions of people.
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Marx identified the role of slavery in the birth of the capitalist system: “the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Capital, he wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
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The independence won by the African and Caribbean colonies from the late 1950s did not end imperialist domination. Power passed to national bourgeois elites that left the economic structures of colonialism intact. Those who sought to challenge them paid with their lives. Patrice Lumumba, who demanded that the Congo control its own mineral wealth, was murdered in 1961 with the complicity of Belgium and the United States.
The workers and poor farmers of Africa and the Caribbean do not simply confront the legacy of slavery and colonialism, but a living system of exploitation that is administered from the City of London, Wall Street and the Paris Bourse. From the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank imposed “structural adjustment” programs across the former colonies. They privatized industries, cut subsidies and gutted health and education. The result is a continent shackled by debt.
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What would reparations for slavery amount to? The US economic consultancy the Brattle Group estimates that transatlantic chattel slavery inflicted losses on its victims of $77–108 trillion, valuing the lives of 19 million enslaved people across 31 countries—roughly 802 million years of life lived in bondage. Continuing harm after abolition adds another $23 trillion, pushing the total to $100–131 trillion.
Britain’s share is about $24 trillion for enslavement, owed to 14 countries, plus about $2 trillion for harm after abolition. Britain’s share alone is more than six times the annual output of the British economy. No capitalist government will ever pay such a sum. This does not price the damage done to African societies by the depopulation, warfare and arrested development that Nathan Nunn’s research measures.
The reparations movement knows this. It is dominated by heads of government who administer the brutal exploitation of their own citizens on behalf of global corporations and banks, supported by privileged layers of the black petty-bourgeoisie in their own countries and in the imperialist centers. Its leaders utilize the issue for their own self-advancement and, in the case of the African and West Indian political elite, to posture as friends of the workers and rural poor whose lives they make a misery.
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The reparations movement wins popular support from a sincere hatred of the crimes of slavery and colonialism. But its leadership seeks only a renegotiation of the terms on which the former colonies are exploited within world imperialism, through apologies, debt rescheduling and development funds, while maintaining their own seat at the table.
Irrespective of the motives of its participants, the demand for reparations raised by CARICOM, the African Union and their supporters in Britain is incapable of redressing the historic wrongs of slavery and colonialism because it does not address the still existing system responsible for them.
A reparations settlement, before repairing a single school or hospital, would have to match capital drain from Africa of $254 billion every year, indefinitely. Over a single generation of 25 years, that comes to more than $6.3 trillion, before any account is taken of the damage the slave trade and colonialism inflicted. A one-off payment of $1 trillion, far beyond anything any imperialist government has ever contemplated, would be recovered by the banks, corporations and bondholders in four years.
Reparations could only have a real impact if they put an end to the outflows themselves: the cancellation of all debts, an end to the repatriation of profits and the seizure of the wealth hidden in offshore accounts. This would require the expropriation of the transnational corporations and banks, which no capitalist government will ever carry out.
Then there is the question of who would pay and who would receive it. Payment would come from the taxes of working people and further cuts to public services. The fortunes built on slavery, consolidated over two centuries into the banks, insurance houses, landed estates and corporations of the City, would be untouched. This is exactly the ground on which Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK and the far right seek to mobilize opposition to any reckoning with the legacy of empire.
Moreover, reparations are conceived as transfers between states. The money would be administered by the same national ruling elites that preside over poverty, IMF austerity and the super-exploitation of workers.
Most important from a political standpoint, the demand for reparations defines the injured and the guilty by descent, not by class. In Britain and the US, it has been taken up by sections of the upper middle class around Labour, the Democrats and in the universities for precisely this reason. Their premise is that the fundamental division in society is race, and that guilt for slavery is inherited by all white people. That includes workers whose own ancestors were driven off the land into the factories and mines, or who worked in Lancashire’s cotton mills spinning slave-grown cotton for starvation wages. Such politics divide the working class, to the benefit of the ruling class that profited from slavery and profits from exploitation today.
Workers in Britain, Africa and the Caribbean face a common struggle against a common enemy: the same banks, corporations and bondholders, and the governments that serve them. Burnham’s cuts to welfare to fund rearmament, the IMF programmes administered by African and Caribbean governments, and the debt payments that take precedence over hospitals and schools are different forms of one global system of exploitation.
The working class can confront it only by uniting across every border and every division of ethnicity. This is being confirmed by the wave of Gen Z youth-led protests that began in Africa, where young Kenyans stormed parliament in 2024 against an IMF-backed finance bill, and which is now engulfing Europe, from school blockades in France to housing camps in Madrid. The grievances are the same everywhere: decent schools, housing and jobs, the cost of living, and the diversion of social resources to debt repayments and war.
Slavery was not a crime of one “race” against another. It was a system of labor exploitation, rationalized by racism, at the heart of the primitive accumulation of capital. Its beneficiaries were a class of merchants, planters, bankers and manufacturers. They turned the same methods against the working class at home and throughout the empire, and their heirs still rule today.
The crimes of slavery and colonialism will not be redressed by apologies drafted in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, or by negotiations between capitalist governments over a settlement. What is required is the unconditional cancellation of the debts of the former colonies, the expropriation of the banks and corporations whose wealth was built on slavery and colonial plunder, and the placing of society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class.
This can only be achieved through the unified struggle of workers in Britain, Africa, the Caribbean and internationally, on the basis of a world socialist programme. That is the perspective fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party.
5. Türkiye: No to the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement and imperialist war in the Middle East!
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is being put to a vote in the Turkish Parliament. Following is an English translation of Ulaş Sevinç's video statement. YouTube does not translate many videos into English outside of viewing them directly on YouTube. Ulaş Sevinç is the chairman of the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
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The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is being put to a vote in the Turkish Parliament. The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal opposes this pact unconditionally. We base ourselves on the overwhelming popular opposition to war against Iran and Yemen, to the genocide of the Palestinians and to collaboration with the imperialist powers. We are fighting to mobilize this opposition in an international antiwar movement.
The agreement between Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is modeled on Article 5 of NATO. Under it, an armed attack on any one of the three countries will be considered an attack on all of them. Withdrawal from the pact will not be possible for the first 10 years.
The claim that this is a “defense” agreement is false. What is to be “defended” is the Saudi regime, which opened its bases to the US war against Iran, has slaughtered the people of Yemen through bombing and starvation and collaborates with the Zionist state.
What is to be “defended” are the reactionary geopolitical interests that the Turkish bourgeoisie is seeking to advance in collaboration with US imperialism. This agreement ties the workers and youth of Türkiye to a chain of conflicts stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to South Asia and puts them in danger.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US-Israeli war against Iran, the Saudi monarchy’s war against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in Yemen, NATO’s war against Russia over Ukraine and Washington’s preparations for war against China are interconnected fronts of a war for the redivision of the world among the imperialist powers.
US President Trump hailed the Mecca agreement as a “big, bold and important first step.” Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Levent Gümrükçü said the agreement is “essentially complementary to all the multilateral platforms on European security of which we are a member, above all NATO.” This agreement does not express independence from imperialism but complete subordination to it.
The bourgeois political establishment and the trade union confederations in Türkiye do not oppose the Mecca alliance on principle and are doing nothing to mobilize popular opposition. The opposition to the agreement by the New Party (Yeni Parti) led by Özgür Özel, itself pro-NATO and pro-imperialist, is a tactical reservation based on the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie. It was none other than the Republican People’s Party (CHP), then led by Özel, that in 2025 prepared an anti-Iran report for NATO proposing the alliance’s expansion into the Middle East.
War preparations abroad and the escalating assault on social and democratic rights at home are two sides of the same process. Repression and censorship of the press are increasing, and political arrests are mounting. The bill for rearmament is being handed to working people through falling wages and social cuts. The threats by Turkish government representatives—“Do not be tempted by France!”—reflect the ruling class’s fear of an explosion of the growing opposition among youth and the working class.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi appeals not to the establishment parties in parliament or to the government but to the working class of Türkiye, the Middle East and internationally. This is the social force that has no interest in the escalating imperialist war and that is capable of stopping it.
In this struggle, we call on you to build independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces and schools, to unite with your class brothers and sisters in the region and around the world in the fight for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East, and to build the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi.
Today’s one-day French national strike marks an initial intervention of the working class in the historic eruption of mass protests across Europe. After the high school revolt that began in France in September came mass housing protests in Spain, public sector strikes in Portugal and Ireland, youth protests in Belgium, Greece, Italy and Germany, and an international dockworkers’ strike against war. In France, hundreds of thousands now regularly march in joint youth-yellow vest protests, even as police have imposed curfews, banned protests and arrested over 10,000 people.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) calls on workers and youth today to gather in assemblies in their workplaces, schools and neighborhoods and elect committees of action. These must formulate key demands, continue meeting after today, and take control of the strike from the union bureaucracies. For six weeks, the bureaucracies have left students and “yellow vests” to face the police alone. Now, the working class must have its say.
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Across Europe, what must be prepared is a struggle like the 1936 or 1968 French general strikes: a mobilization of the social power of the entire working class to block the economy and pose the question, “Which class will rule?” This cannot be done unless, in the course of the struggle, the working class breaks free of the grip of union bureaucracies and pro-capitalist politicians.
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France’s debt has reached €3.5 trillion, and interest payments alone will reach €65 billion this year, more than the state spends on education. In France as across Europe, each new round of borrowing for arms drives interest rates higher, and the markets then demand social cuts to balance the budget. Lecornu’s €54 billion austerity plan is the result.
The European powers respond to deepening global war and international tensions with Washington with warmongering and rearmament. They are escalating NATO’s war against Russia, even after Moscow warned it could use nuclear weapons if NATO tried to isolate Kaliningrad. They are preparing €800 billion in new military spending under the “ReArm Europe” plan.
A government that can neither abandon these war aims nor touch the wealth of the oligarchy has nothing to offer workers and youth. It can impose its policies only by force.
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Before the 1936 general strike and World War II, Trotsky mercilessly attacked those who called “to hold the masses immobilized up to the moment when they will be blessed from above by the government of the People’s Front. Strikes, protests, street clashes, direct uprisings are absolutely inevitable. … The task of the proletarian party consists not in checking and paralysing these movements, but in unifying them and investing them with the greatest possible force.”
In 2026, as a new global war is erupting, there will be no Popular Front reforms or Grenelle Accords. Already decades ago, Mélenchon was a member of the Socialist Party (PS) when the Mitterrand government, elected in 1981 on a reform program backed by the Stalinist PCF, reversed course under pressure from the banks and embraced austerity. Today, his government, refusing to expropriate the capitalist oligarchy, cannot resolve the problems of inequality, fascism and war.
The alternative is the independent organization and mobilization of the working class, and building a political movement for workers power and socialism. Committees of action are the essential forums in which such a struggle can take place. These committees can fight for all the essential demands of working people in France and across Europe, such as:
• Dropping charges against arrested protesters, ending curfews and protest bans, disarming the riot police, and eliminating emergency police powers.
• Withdrawing France’s €54 billion austerity budget and other social attacks.
• The repudiation of sovereign debt owed to the capitalist oligarchy and its expropriation.
• An end to wars against Russia, Iran, Gaza and the Sahel, to rearmament, and to conscription.The committees must link workers entering into struggle in France with their class brothers and sisters across Europe, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). This can prepare a European general strike against war, austerity and dictatorship.
The objective situation is moving towards such a strike. As Trotsky warned in Whither France, the alternative in a general strike is “either complete capitulation or revolutionary struggle for power.” The Parti de l’égalité socialiste fights to imbue the working class with this understanding, and appeals to its supporters and readers of the World Socialist Web Site to contact it and support its struggle. The alternative to the European Union is the United Socialist States of Europe.
7 Tightening credit hitting AI boom amid a “bloodbath” for junk bonds
The major AI firms continue to spend money on the AI buildout and the development of computing power, running up larger debts even as financial conditions become more difficult and risky.
But they cannot call a halt, because to do so would mean falling behind in the race to grab a portion of the profit bonanza they have gambled on securing, even as analysis shows that the revenue generated by AI will fall short of that needed to cover all the capital spending and secure a sufficient return.
Diseases of the human body often manifest themselves at its extremities before striking at the essential organs. There is a parallel in the financial system.
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All told, the four largest hyperscalers—Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon—had negative cash flows of $45 billion in the quarter compared to positive cash flow of $36 billion a year before.
This means AI development must increasingly be funded by debt or the issuing of new shares. But a turn to debt financing takes place in very different conditions from those which prevailed for almost a decade and a half after the crash of 2008, when interest rates were at historic lows.
The raising of money now takes place in competition with governments in the US and around the world that must issue new debt just to pay the interest bill on their previous borrowing, which is assuming an ever-increasing portion of their budgets.
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The pending initial public offering (IPO) by Anthropic, scheduled for later this month for which the prospectus has been issued, has been characterized as “bellwether” for the market. A New York Times report described Anthropic as a “tent pole of the AI industry”—the implication being that if the IPO fails or falls short the tent could collapse.
Doubts have already started to emerge with the private capital giant Blackstone, a major anchor for the IPO, telling investors Anthropic may not receive investment grade status on going public, contrary to what was said previously. The rating is important because if it receives anything less than investment grade, Anthropic will be cut off from important sections of capital because many pension and insurance funds would not be allowed to make large investments in it.
8. Vote for the Socialist Equality Group in the New Zealand election!
This is the first time that a member of the Trotskyist movement has contested a New Zealand election. As we have emphasized in public meetings, statements and discussions with workers, Petterson is not standing to promote false hopes of progressive change and socialism through parliament.
The SEG’s campaign aims to build a new party to lead the working class: the New Zealand section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Its aim is to unite the working class, in every country, to overthrow capitalism and to reorganize society on the basis of socialism.
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Workers and young people internationally are moving to the left. This was reflected in yesterday’s US midterm elections, which resulted in a massive repudiation of the Republicans and Trump. The Democratic Party, however, is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, and moving to the right: While initially benefiting from opposition to Trump, it will seek to contain and suppress any movement against war and the oligarchy’s interests, which both parties represent.
Similar processes are underway in New Zealand. There is mass opposition to the Gaza genocide, the war against Iran, and the assault on living standards. Like the Democrats in the US, however, the New Zealand Labour Party offers no alternative to the right-wing government. Large numbers of workers and young people recognize that Labour and National are two parties of big business, jointly responsible for soaring social inequality and poverty.
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Election coverage has focused on minor tactical differences, endless discussion of possible coalitions and speculation about whether a government can be formed before Christmas. The official campaign has proceeded almost as though New Zealand were sealed off from the world.
Only the SEG’s campaign has told workers the truth about the immense danger that humanity faces from the eruption of world war. The imperialist powers, led by the US, are responding to the historic crisis of capitalism by seeking to violently redivide the world, seize markets and resources, and reduce much of the planet to colonial slavery.
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To launch a real fight against austerity and war, however, workers need new organizations that they control. The SEG calls on them to build rank-and-file committees in every workplace, in opposition to the union apparatus that strangles and betrays workers. The unions have imposed one sellout deal after another, cutting real wages for tens of thousands of teachers, healthcare workers and others over the past year.
Building the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, initiated by the ICFI, will enable workers to unite across borders and overcome national divisions stoked by unions and capitalist parties to weaken the working class. Only such international unity can defeat multinational corporations that exploit workers in multiple countries.
Rank-and-file committees must also take action to stop the production and shipment of weapons for the Gaza genocide, the Ukraine war, the war against Iran and the military buildup against China. The NZ union bureaucracy has shown its real position on war by refusing to organise dockworkers in NZ to join the international dockworkers’ strike of October 30 against war. In fact, the Public Service Association, NZ’s largest union, has made statements supporting military spending to prepare for war against China.
Most importantly, there can be no struggle for socialism without revolutionary and internationalist leadership, to establish the political independence of the working class from all capitalist parties and organizations.
The SEG is not building a party based on short-term electoral goals or phony promises to “reform” capitalism through parliament. The system has no reforms to offer: The alternatives that confront the working class are socialism or barbarism.
The SEG is fighting to build a section of the ICFI, the only party that advances the program of world socialist revolution. This is the same program that guided the Russian Revolution and that was defended by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, in an uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, social democracy and every other nationalist, anti-Marxist tendency that adapted to imperialism.
9. Australia: Meeting launches SEP’s socialist, anti-war campaign in Victorian election
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) launched its campaign for the November 28 Victorian state election at a public meeting on Sunday, November 1, in Wollert, in Melbourne’s outer north. The SEP is standing Morgan Peach and Peter Byrne in the Northern Metropolitan upper house region.
Workers and young people attended in person and online.
Opening the meeting, chair and SEP member Evrim Yazgin explained that the Victorian election was an expression of a deepening international political crisis. Elections around the world were becoming focal points of instability, amid the breakdown of traditional parties, the growth of the far right and the turn towards authoritarian rule.
“The two parties that have governed Victoria for generations share barely half the vote. This is the product of broad hostility to the main parties of bourgeois rule—above all to Labor, which has governed this state for 33 of the past 44 years.”
Opposition to Ontario’s right-wing Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford has been growing across the province’s university and college campuses since Ford announced sweeping cuts to student grants last February. The Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), on which about 450,000 post-secondary students rely, was restructured to compel students to fund the vast majority of their tuition through loans, placing them tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Repeated protests, including by high school students, have occurred since a large mobilization at Queen’s Park in early March. Various organizations have called one-day student strikes for this Thursday, November 5.
Ontario students will join a burgeoning movement of young people against capitalist cost-cutting, and militarism and war that has spread across Europe in recent weeks and begun to draw support from workers.
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The gutting of OSAP is one front in a coordinated offensive on post-secondary education. Ford ended the seven-year tuition freeze his government enacted in 2019, permitting institutions to raise fees every year henceforth up to the rate of inflation. The freeze was never a gift to students. Rather it was a device to force universities to balance their books by cutting programs and services and recruiting international students and charging them exorbitant fees. With that revenue stream now slashed by the federal Liberal government’s cap on foreign students, the burden is being shifted directly onto the remaining students.
Ontario spent an average of just over $10,500 per university student during the 2023-24 education year, dead last among the provinces and nearly $7,000 below the national average. As government funding has fallen, tuition’s share has risen relentlessly and student debt has skyrocketed.
The government is also moving to interfere with the funding of student unions, threatening the ancillary fees that support campus food banks, legal clinics, and countless other critical services.
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Ford’s austerity drive is part of his government’s contribution to the Canadian ruling elite’s redirection of society’s resources to wage world war and enrich the financial oligarchy.
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In response to mounting anger among students over austerity and war, a coalition of trade unions and local activist groups led by the Canadian Federation of Students Ontario (CFSO) called “Hands Off Our Education” is planning a province-wide student strike on November 5. The CFSO makes radical-sounding references to the need to build “student power” and calls for a seat at the table with the Ford government to negotiate post-secondary education funding. Its model is the 2012 Quebec student strike.
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Students are directed to make empty appeals to Ford to “negotiate” with student representatives, or to the NDP and union leaderships to do something for education after they defeat Ford at the next election in 2029. For years, the unions and NDP have promoted the Liberals as a “lesser evil,” even as they implemented austerity measures and illegalized strikes when in power. The NDP, wherever it has held office, has implemented austerity just as ruthlessly as the Liberals and Conservatives.
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The contracts of 275,000 Ontario education workers, including teachers and support staff, expired at the end of August, and they confront a government determined to dismantle public education. Some 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, are in their third month of a strike to demand an end to the barbaric piecework system, which claimed the lives of three workers on the job between 2020 and 2022. Nearly 1,300 mine workers are in the second week of a strike at the Teck Resources Highland Valley Copper mine in British Columbia.
Five hundred steelworkers at Stelco face layoff due to the reactionary trade war between American and Canadian imperialism. And over 9,000 Stellantis autoworkers have just voted by 97 percent to strike against job cuts and the selloff of the Brampton assembly plant to a military vehicle producer.
These struggles are the real basis of a worker-led counteroffensive against austerity and war to which students must lend their support and politically stimulate.
For students to turn to the working class, they must engage with the central strategic experiences made by the Trotskyist movement over more than a century, above all the necessity to build a revolutionary political leadership to direct the millions of workers and young people being radicalized by capitalism’s ever deepening world crisis.
The objective interests of the vast majority of the population for decent public services, secure employment, and a free, well-funded education system are incompatible with the capitalists’ drive to boost corporate profits and wage war for their predatory economic and geopolitical interests. This conflict must form the basis of a conscious strategy for the working class to fight for political power and the reorganization of society along socialist lines.
Workers and young people must break politically from the trade unions, which are working to smother the students’ opposition. The unions sabotage workers’ struggles by straitjacketing them within the pro-employer collective bargaining system, and by systematically dividing workers in Canada from their class brothers and sisters in the US through their championing of the Carney government-led “Team Canada.”
Workers are confronting the prospect of some of the deepest cuts in USPS history, which will likely begin early next year, according to the timetable set by Postmaster General David Steiner. At the August 7 Board of Governors meeting, he threatened to examine the closure of thousands of “unprofitable” post offices, reductions in service and higher prices unless Congress agreed to his legislative proposals.
The Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General supplied a detailed menu in July. Its white paper, “Options for Addressing the U.S. Postal Service’s Financial Gap,” examined a 10 percent reduction in employment through hiring freezes, early retirement, reductions in force or layoffs. It estimated up to $5.6 billion in annual savings. The OIG calculated that ending automatic conversion of lower-paid pre-career employees to career status after fiscal 2024 could have cut fiscal 2025 payroll costs by $2.5 billion.
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The 1970 postal wildcat strike demonstrated what workers can accomplish when they defy the strike ban and take action independently of national officials. Today’s letter carriers must demand full disclosure of management’s proposals, oppose any imposed contract and organize to defend every job, route and delivery service. They must build rank-and-file committees capable of uniting the postal workforce in a common struggle against USPS management, the union bureaucracy and the corporate and political interests behind the cuts.
It has been more than two months since auto parts worker Bradley Clouse was crushed to death at the Astemo America plant in Berea, Kentucky. New accounts from a worker who was on the factory floor when Clouse was killed, together with the analysis of an experienced workplace safety expert, point to the same conclusion: the Astemo Americas plant was operating without a functioning lockout/tagout system, the very protection that would have prevented the horrific death of the 33-year-old maintenance worker.
Clouse was killed early on the morning of Wednesday, September 2, one day after Governor Andy Beshear visited the plant to celebrate a $112 million expansion. He was crushed inside a machine while attempting to stop it from leaking varnish.
A worker who was working nearby spoke to the World Socialist Web Site on condition of anonymity. He described a workplace where the most basic safety procedures were never implemented. “Astemo doesn’t use a lockout/tagout system at all,” he said. “We weren’t trained on one, so I don’t think that’s a thing there.”
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Clouse’s death is one of many in a mounting toll across American industry. Gregory Knopf was killed at Ford’s Sharonville Transmission Plant in March of this year when a press machine activated during maintenance. In the weeks since Clouse was killed, the slaughter has continued: a contract technician died at an Applied Materials facility in Austin, Texas in early September, and in late October, Henry Antonio Marmol Martinez, a 52-year-old maintenance mechanic and father of six, was crushed to death at the McWane Ductile Foundry in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, a plant OSHA had certified under its highest “Star” safety designation.
These deaths are not accidents; they are the predictable product of an industry that subordinates human life to the drive for profit. The 80,000 workers employed by Astemo in Japan, Taiwan, the US, Mexico, UK, Spain and other countries produced nearly $400 million in profits in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026. Jointly owned by Honda Motor Company, JIC Capital and Hitachi, Astemo is listed as the world’s 25th largest auto components manufacturer, producing chassis, braking, steering, engine-management, and electric vehicle components.
The Berea plant does not have a union. Although the United Auto Workers union has a significant presence in Louisville and other industrial locations in Kentucky, after decades of collaborating with the major automakers to drive down wages and conditions at supplier plants approximately 80 percent of the 600,000 workers employed in the US auto parts industry are non-union. Astemo made 31 percent of its $14 billion in worldwide revenue in the Americas.
The only way to stop the sacrifice of workers’ lives for corporate profit is for workers to organize themselves, independent of the companies and the union apparatus alike. Workers at Astemo and throughout the auto parts industry must build rank-and-file committees with the power to stop production when conditions are unsafe. Rank-and-file committees cannot be subordinated to the Democratic and Republican parties, which celebrate “investment” while workers are killed on the job.
13. Mexico's President Sheinbaum throws governor a lifeline over Guadalajara water protests
On the night of November 1, residents of eastern Guadalajara blocked the intersection of Javier Mina Avenue and Pedro Celestino Negrete Street, forcing the city’s Day of the Dead Catrinas parade to change its route. The protesters, from San Felipe, Oblatos, La Ex Penal, Blanco y Cuéllar, La Loma and other working-class neighborhoods, said they had gone 32 days without water. “I’m sorry about the parade, but forgive us and understand us too, we have gone more than a month without a drop of water,” Leticia Hernández told UnoTV. They vowed to keep blocking streets until supply is restored.
In nearby El Retiro, tap water that had run brown and smelled of sewage for days turned bright turquoise. The water utility, the Intermunicipal Water and Sewerage System (SIAPA), has offered no explanation. It keeps 627 neighborhoods under tandeos, rotating supply cuts, and Governor Pablo Lemus of the right-wing Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) admits that about one-third of a metropolitan area of more than five million people faces interruptions.
These protests follow a month of mass mobilizations that the Jalisco government met with tear gas, water cannon, beatings and jailings. President Claudia Sheinbaum and her “left” nationalist Morena party first denounced the repression and called on Lemus to resign. Then, on October 28, they brought him to the president’s morning press conference in the National Palace to announce a 25-billion-peso (about $1.35 billion) plan whose main works begin in 2027 and are due to finish at the end of 2028.
The federal government acted to contain the political crisis, not to end the water crisis. Faced with a movement that threatened to merge with the strikes and protests spreading across Mexico, Morena closed ranks with the MC governor.
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Protests continued on October 18, giving rise to neighborhood blockades in Guadalajara and Tonalá. At the same time, Workers of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) have been blockading hospitals across the country, including Jalisco, and truckers carried out a national stoppage. On October 19, defending fuel subsidies, Sheinbaum warned: “Look at what is happening in various countries of the world,” referring to the mass protests in France. Behind their partisan quarrels, Morena and MC share one concern: to keep these struggles from coming together and targeting the whole rotten system they both defend.
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To judge the October 28 plan, workers need to know how water reaches their homes. Between half and two-thirds of Guadalajara’s water comes from Lake Chapala, which receives the Lerma River after it crosses the industrial heartland of central Mexico, along with agricultural runoff loaded with agrochemicals. Part of that water travels to the city through an open canal built in the 1950s, where it receives household and industrial sewage and garbage. The authorities now admit to 150 illegal discharges into the canal.
The water then reaches the 70-year-old Treatment Plant No. 1 in Miravalle, which supplies roughly 42 percent of the population. The head of the National Water Commission (Conagua), Efraín Morales López, admitted the plant is too old to treat water carrying that load of contaminants. What it cannot remove flows into homes. From there, water enters some 8,000 kilometers of decaying pipes that lose 40 to 50 percent of it to leaks.
An IMDEC registry of 1,477 reports from 520 neighborhoods found that 84 percent received foul-smelling or turbid water, often for more than a year, and two-thirds of those affected reported skin conditions. Around Chapala, in Poncitlán, thousands of children suffer kidney damage, and Jalisco has some of the highest rates of chronic kidney disease in the world. Of 784 formal complaints tracked by IMDEC, SIAPA resolved six.
Workers are paying for the crisis. María Morales, who took part in the November 1 protest, told UnoTV that her household spent 5,000 to 6,000 pesos ($270–325) on bottled water and private trucks in six weeks, about 40 percent of what a minimum-wage worker earns in that time, while still paying SIAPA bills.
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In Mexico City, groundwater extraction is sinking the historic center by as much as 40 centimeters a year. In all three World Cup host cities, a university study found, public money went to tourist infrastructure while water conflicts went unresolved.
Mexico’s water is distributed through concessions under the National Water Law imposed in 1992 by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, which turned it into an asset for agribusiness, mining, beverage and industrial corporations. Morena’s December 2025 water law banned the private resale of concessions but kept the system in place.
Internationally, a United Nations University report this year found that much of the world has entered “water bankruptcy,” with 2.2 billion people lacking safe drinking water and 70 percent of aquifers in long-term decline. As the World Socialist Web Site explained, the report’s proposals to reallocate water rights and protect the poor are “utopian under current conditions,” because they collide with capitalist private property and the nation-state system.
Guaranteeing water requires an emergency program to replace the networks and clean up Chapala and the Santiago River, the expropriation of the corporations that poison and hoard water, and the placing of the entire system under the democratic control of working people. That is a socialist and internationalist program, and it requires building revolutionary leadership in the working class.
14. Germany: IYSSE meeting discusses the perspective of the European movement
The IYSSE (International Youth and Students for Social Equality) held an online meeting on Monday evening, addressing the perspective of the rapidly growing youth and workers’ movement against war and social cuts across Europe. Speakers from Germany, France and the United States analyzed the character of the protests and placed the question of the political independence of the working class at the center.
15. Attend SEP (UK) online meeting: “Europe in revolt: A new stage of the class struggle”
On Wednesday, November 11, at 7pm [London/Paris time] , the Socialist Equality Party (UK) will host an online public meeting, “Europe in revolt: a new stage of the class struggle”.
Our main speaker will be Alex Lantier, national secretary of our sister party in the Trotskyist movement, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES). He will be joined by the national secretary of the SEP (UK) Chris Marsden.
The meeting will provide a Marxist analysis of the wave of protests and strikes sweeping the continent. It will be held one week after national strikes called in France on November 5, on the same day as national strikes are held in Spain, one day before a public sector strike in Ireland and ahead of a second weekend of national youth protests in Germany.
Workers and students are fighting against the cost-of-living crisis, militarism and conscription, the rise of the far right and climate catastrophe.
The same struggles will come to Britain. They are held back only by the restraints placed on workers and youth by the trade union bureaucracy, the Greens and the Corbynites, and by the nervousness of the Labour government in implementing the full austerity and militarist program demanded by the ruling class. Neither can last.
All of the fundamental issues driving the protests in France, and across Europe, affect Britain as well. Public debt as a percentage of GDP is approaching 100 percent; it faces some of the highest borrowing costs in the G7 as investors push for cuts to social spending commitments.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
