Delivered the night before the midterm elections, this lecture explains why the war against Iran, the AI bubble and the eruption of mass struggle across Europe pose the necessity of socialist revolution.
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The ballots cast in the 2026 elections will be counted tomorrow. The question that should be the starting point of any serious analysis of this election is: What is the issue that should dominate this election?
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Washington has told several Gulf Arab governments to prepare for a renewed war against Iran, a “short, intense campaign,” after the elections. Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of Central Command, briefed the president in person last Thursday, with Defense Secretary Hegseth and General Caine present. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and the USS Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group are expected in the region by late November, which could bring the number of carriers to three.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has received a classified briefing on what is intended, has stated publicly that “the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.” He has said that the plan will produce prolonged and escalating warfare, and he has connected this to the reports that the target list includes civilian infrastructure. He used the phrase “devastating escalation.”
The target lists under discussion extend from the deeply buried facility at Pickaxe Mountain, to the assassination of Revolutionary Guard commanders, to what the Financial Times describes as “civilian infrastructure such as factories, oil refineries and power plants.” A retired American vice-admiral, who served as deputy commander of Central Command, explained the attraction of this approach with complete candor: “If you went after the refineries … then they don’t have fricking gas to put in cars.” This would, he said, “really just bring the country to its knees without having to go after military targets.”
Iran is a country of 90 million people. Like every modern society, its existence depends upon electricity. Electricity purifies the water and runs the sewage treatment. It refrigerates the food and the medicine. It pumps the water to the upper floors of apartment blocks and operates the equipment in the hospitals and the incubators in the maternity wards. To destroy the electrical system of a country of 90 million people is to condemn an unknown but very large number of them to death—not by explosion but by typhoid, cholera, dysentery and the diseases of contaminated water and, above all, among the very young, the very old and the sick.
We know what this produces, because the United States did it to Iraq 35 years ago. Middle East Watch reported in 1991 that “the allies virtually destroyed Iraq’s electrical system, including four of the country’s five hydroelectric facilities.” General Schwarzkopf stated that 25 percent of Iraq’s generating capacity had been rendered “completely inoperative” and a further 50 percent “degraded.” The consequence, the report continued, was that “the nation’s electricity-dependent water-purification and sewage-treatment facilities were crippled, creating a serious health hazard,” while hospitals met the resulting emergency with “at most, erratic electricity supplied by back-up generators.” The report estimated the deaths from direct bombing at perhaps 2,500 to 3,000 and added that these figures “do not include the substantially larger number of deaths that can be attributed to malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.”
The consequences were foreseen. The Defense Intelligence Agency produced a document dated January 22, 1991—five days after the bombing began—entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” which assessed the effects of denying Iraq the means of purifying its water and anticipated outbreaks of disease. The destruction of a civilian population’s water supply was studied in advance.
Iraq in 1991 had a population of some 18 million. Iran has 90 million. What is being prepared is the same operation on five times the scale, against a population that has already endured eight months of bombardment and a naval blockade. It is the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life of a civilian population, and it is being discussed in the American press as a menu of tactical options. The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines as genocide the deliberate infliction upon a people of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Israel and the United States are preparing a conflict of genocidal dimensions.
The president has raised the question of nuclear weapons. On October 15, Trump told an interviewer: “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to. We’re the greatest nuclear power in the world.” But in April, during Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he announced that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” and promised a bombing campaign that would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one.” In September, from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, he declared that he could “annihilate” Iran. The threat of annihilation has been made repeatedly and in public.
Only the United States, has used nuclear weapons against a civilian population. The order was given by a Democratic president, and the weapon was used twice, against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that president, ex-haberdasher Harry Truman from Independence, Missouri, said that he didn’t lose a night’s sleep over giving the order. Reflecting on Truman’s use of the bomb, the American historian and World War II veteran Gabriel Jackson wrote in 1999:
In the specific circumstances of August 1945, the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States — for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the conduct of different types of government — blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.
The use of such weapons against Iran would be mass murder—hundreds of thousands of people, in all probability millions, killed in an afternoon, and the survivors left with burns, radiation sickness and genetic damage transmitted to children not yet born. That is only the physical reality.
There is a second consequence, and it concerns everyone in this room. You would spend the remainder of your lives as citizens of the country responsible for genocide. Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the attempt to justify what was done there still deforms American political and intellectual life; the lie that it was necessary must be retold in every generation because the truth is unbearable. The act contemplated now is of an even greater magnitude, committed in full view of a world that would not forget it, and there would be no recovering from it. It would mark the moral disintegration of the United States. The question that you must ask yourselves is what are we going to do to stop it from happening?
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with young people in London, Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield about building a working-class movement across Europe for socialism. Students shared their views on the protests and the political conclusions they are drawing.
At Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Esther, who studies chemistry, said, “The protests are a normal response when people can’t do basic things because of lack of money. It’s understandable that things are on fire—lives are being vandalized. Whatever policies governments have, they are not sustainable. Some people are getting rich and so much money is spent on war. I’m against war.”
Esther agreed that students needed to turn to the working class, “It would be so much better if workers and students got together. We need a community so workers can stop production and still feed their kids. We have everything in the world for everyone to have a good life.”
Libby is doing an MA in Fashion marketing at MMU. She said of the protests, “It’s good because it makes people aware of the issues like the cost of living. I can’t afford anything nowadays. Job prospects are bleak, and fashion doesn’t get much funding. The Arts get low funding.”
Immigrants are an easy scapegoat,” she continued, “Blaming everything on immigrants! And war is never worth it.” Asked about Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham, she said, “I don’t really trust politicians; I’ve not had a good run of them in my lifetime. I’d like to think there is light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s getting harder.”
Koladi, who studies economics at MMU, stopped at the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) bookstall with his friend David, a finance and accounting student. He explained they were struggling to find work to cover basic living costs while at university: “I’ve been looking for a job for over a year, anything.”
David said it was hard to make ends meet: “The job market, inflation, no pay rises. You can work eight hours, four days a week and only get paid £400.”
“The end stage of capitalism is horrible,” added Koladi. Pointing to the threat of nuclear war, he said: “America has the largest military in the world. They could have free health care and education if they didn’t use the money on defense.”
Communication Workers Union (CWU) leaders Dave Ward and Martin Walsh have issued a joint statement with Royal Mail management and its billionaire owners, led by Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group, claiming to address the crisis that has erupted over the new delivery model, DM26, and to provide “a way forward.”
The “Agreed Outcomes” statement is a damage-limitation exercise aimed at blocking postal workers’ demands to halt DM26. Rolled out since May, DM26 eliminates one in four delivery duties across more than 80,000 delivery staff, ramping up workloads ahead of thousands of job losses.
The CWU is not in dispute with Royal Mail, it is trying to contain opposition from its own members. The immediate aim of its joint statement, agreed in closed-door talks between Walsh, Royal Mail CEO Alastair Cochrane and EP Group, is to buy time by pausing DM26’s further rollout until January 11. This is to ensure no disruption during the lead-up to Christmas, Royal Mail’s busiest and most profitable period.
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The “Agreed Outcomes” negotiated by the CWU with EP Group deepen the two-tier workforce, accelerate the gutting of the service, and accept the gig-economy benchmark. Ward and the postal executive have no mandate for this. They should be removed from office through a vote of no confidence.
Workers must establish and fully document the impact of DM26—including breaches of health and safety, the driving out of veteran posties, exploitation of new entrants, and industrial-scale breaches of the USO. This means breaking the grip of management-union working groups and establishing direct lines of communication from the shop floor.
Rank-and-file committees are needed in every workplace, answerable to those who carry the mail service. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) has outlined a strategy to fight back. Its statement, “Royal Mail workers must take charge: scrap DM26, end the two-tier workforce!”, demands the transfer of power from the bureaucracy to the shop floor. It calls for abolishing gig-economy conditions, ending the two-tier workforce, and opposes the profit-driven gutting of the mail service by EP Group’s private equity investors.
This is the first 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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Across Africa, a new generation is entering into mass struggle against the political order inherited from decolonization. In Mozambique, the Liberation Front (FRELIMO), once committed to “Marxism-Leninism”, violently suppressed the 2024–25 protests, leaving more than 400 people dead. In Tanzania, the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), heir to Julius Nyerere’s “African socialism”, responded to the 2025 uprising with a brutal crackdown that claimed the lives of 3,000 protestors. In Kenya, the state founded by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first President and a central figure in the Pan-African movement, saw Gen Z protests against International Monetary Fund (IMF)-backed austerity erupt into a mass revolt against the entire post-independence state. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), in alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP), presides over more social inequality than under Apartheid, regularly repressing striking workers and inciting xenophobia to divide the working class.
These are the historical consequences of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist movements that, in one form or another, embraced Pan-Africanism and promised that “independence” based on capitalism and the borders imposed by colonialism would end imperialist domination and social oppression. Many also proclaimed their allegiance to socialism, “Marxism-Leninism” or “African socialism”. Half a century later, workers and rural masses continue to face the brutalities of impoverishment, imperialist war and dictatorship.
As mass struggles erupt against Africa’s bourgeois nationalist governments, Professor Hakim Adi has republished his intellectually dishonest book, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919–1939.
First published in 2013, the book examines a relatively neglected chapter in the history of the international socialist movement: the Communist International’s intervention among Africans and people of African descent in the two decades following the October Revolution. It traces the Comintern’s policy on the “Negro Question”, its efforts to organise black workers across national boundaries and to advance a socialist perspective among the millions of workers and rural masses awakened to political struggle by the First World War and the brutal realities of colonial oppression. It assembles considerable documentary material on the organisations, conferences and personalities through which African, Caribbean and African American revolutionaries were drawn to Bolshevism.
But Adi’s book is an exercise in Stalinist historical falsification. He turns the history of the Communist International into a grotesque caricature to lend revolutionary credentials to Pan-Africanism, a petty-bourgeois nationalist ideology whose common premise is that Africans and people of African descent share fundamental racial and cultural interests transcending class divisions. The Comintern’s perspective, his central thesis claims, was “essentially Pan-Africanist”.
The United Auto Workers shut down the 47-day strike by nearly 1,300 workers at water heater manufacturer Bradford White in Middleville, Michigan, after claiming that workers ratified the company’s “last, best and final” offer by 58.6 percent to 40.1 percent on Sunday. The deal is virtually identical to the one workers rejected by 62 percent a week earlier.
The most significant aspect of the vote is that more than 40 percent of the members still rejected the deal despite the campaign of strong-arming and blackmail by the UAW apparatus. The bureaucracy isolated the strikers for nearly seven weeks, starved them on $550 a week in strike pay and made it clear it would do nothing to oppose management’s threats to replace strikers with scabs if the walkout continued. On the eve of the ratification vote, Local 1002 President Jessica Vazquez told local media that management could replace her members “with minimal training” of strikebreakers.
From the beginning, the UAW International and Local 1002 never wanted a strike. After the six-year contract expired on September 1, union officials extended it for 15 days and only authorized a walkout, the first at the plant since 1978, after workers voted down the first agreement by 96 percent.
UAW President Shawn Fain, Region 1D Director Scott Zuckschwerdt and Local 1002 officials set out to wear down the strikers and forced them to vote on the same contract until they “got it right.” But strikers rejected the next two deals by 95 and 62 percent respectively.
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For nearly seven weeks, Bradford White workers fought the company’s strikebreaking operation, overseen by the Barry County Sheriff’s Office, led by the notorious fascist sheriff Dar Leaf. As for the UAW bureaucracy, its chief concern was campaigning for Democratic Party candidates in the midterm elections in order to deepen its collaboration with the employers to suppress opposition to job cuts, speed up and the transition to a war time economy.
During the course of the struggle, the most class-conscious and militant workers sought to provide direction and leadership to the struggle by forming the Bradford White Rank-and-File Committee.
Any organization that actually defended workers would tell management what it could do with its ‘final offer.’ It would mobilize thousands of UAW members to defend these picket lines and use the strike fund, our money approaching $1 billion, to hold the line.
The UAW is doing the opposite. It is bringing back essentially the same agreement we rejected, and it is helping management stick a gun to our heads by making clear it will do nothing to stop management from replacing us. That is not representation. That is labor police work for management.”
The committee said that the UAW bureaucracy was following the same playbook as it had during the 2023 Mack Trucks strike when Fain brought back a “last, best and final” offer virtually identical to one workers had rejected by 73 percent.
Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman, who ran against Fain in 2022 and 2026, opposed that sellout and fought for an all-out walkout by every Mack Trucks and Detroit Three autoworkers. The day after the Bradford White strike began, Lehman issued a statement calling for all UAW members to support the walkout.
To prevent the sabotage of the UAW apparatus, Lehman called on Bradford White strikers to “immediately establish a rank-and-file committee of their own, elected by and accountable to the workers, to publish their demands, supervise any ratification vote, and demand full strike pay. The $857 million in the strike fund is paid for by the members and it must be used to sustain those in battle not pad the salaries of corrupt UAW officials.
He added:
A rank-and-file committee must reach out to workers at Bradford White’s other plants and to parts workers and workers at the Big Three to transform an isolated strike into a unified offensive. I am running for UAW president not to gain a position in the apparatus but to build a powerful movement from below so rank-and-file workers can take the conduct of our struggles into our own hands.
The struggle at Bradford White is far from over. In the coming weeks workers will be thrust into struggle over job cuts, unsafe conditions and the further erosion of their incomes due to wartime inflation and the sellout contract.
The Chilean government of José Antonio Kast is convulsed by the gravest political crisis of its short existence. The revelation by the investigative outlet Interferencia on October 21 that the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights had quietly signed 56 decrees reducing the sentences of men convicted of the rape and sexual abuse of children has detonated a scandal that has already claimed the scalp of Undersecretary of Justice Luis Silva and now threatens the minister himself, Fernando Rabat. The affair has exposed the rottenness of the entire political establishment and, above all, the role of the Chilean “left” as an indispensable prop of bourgeois rule.
The decrees not only free child rapists but granted sentence reductions to torturers and murderers of the Pinochet dictatorship held at the Punta Peuco Prison. These include former CNI agent César Acuña Luengo, responsible for the 1987 disappearance of Alejandro Pinochet, a left-wing militant who bore the dictator’s name but was no relation. Also benefiting are three Tren de Aragua gang members, a neo-Nazi murderer and drug traffickers.
The reductions were not a deviation from the Kast government’s program. Kast is the son of Michael Kast, a Nazi officer who collaborated in the Pinochet dictatorship’s repression, and his brother Miguel advised the DINA secret police. Kast himself is a longtime admirer of the dictatorship who founded the Republican Party in 2019 as an homage to Donald Trump and campaigned on a program of police-state measures modeled on El Salvador’s Bukele.
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A government that grants legal immunity to the police, criminalizes immigrants and youth, builds walls and trenches on its borders, and seeks to transform the prison service into a military force will, when it suits its class, release torturers and rapists by decree. The apparent contradiction is the logical expression of a fascist right that presents itself as the defender of “order” while administering a system whose real content is the impunity of the powerful and the repression of the exploited.
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The Kast government is the product of the betrayal of the working class by the PC and FA, who formed the previous government. The World Socialist Web Site warned at the time that “the political descendants of the forces that bore responsibility for straitjacketing the working class ahead of the September 11, 1973 coup are today playing the same role.” That warning has been vindicated many times over. Millions of workers who voted for Kast in December 2025 did so not out of enthusiasm for fascism but out of desperation after four years of a “left” government that promised change and delivered austerity, police repression and the defense of capitalist property relations.
The crisis of the Kast government is deepening. But the working class will not advance through the maneuvers of the pseudo-left, who are again seeking to manage the crisis for the ruling class while preparing to present themselves in the next electoral cycle as the “responsible” alternative to the far right.
The working class must draw the opposite conclusion. The sentence reductions are a symptom of a deeper crisis of a capitalist system that can no longer resolve its contradictions through growth and reform, and that is therefore turning to authoritarianism and war. The answer must be the building of the revolutionary party of the working class as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, capable of uniting workers across national boundaries in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society.
On October 28, after six strike deadlines and two rejected agreements, workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Puebla, Mexico, voted to accept a one-year contract that the company and the Independent Union of Volkswagen Automotive Industry Workers (Sindicato Independiente de Trabajadores de la Industria Automotriz Volkswagen, SITIAVW) had declared “definitive.” According to the union, 3,890 workers voted in favor and 1,493 against, with 20 null votes.
The deal is the worst of the three put before the workers: a 4.4 percent increase in base wages, 0.25 percent more into the savings fund and a one-time payment of 12,000 pesos (about US$640), which the company counts as 3.59 percent to reach a “global” figure of 8.24 percent. Workers had rejected a 10.04 percent package on September 11 and a 13.16 percent two-year deal on October 15. The promise to reinstate 611 workers laid off in August when VW eliminated the third shift on the Jetta and Tiguan lines was eliminated from the last offer.
Whatever the contract says, management told workers at mandatory meetings on October 20 that it plans to freeze wages “until at least 2030,” according to accounts given to La Jornada de Oriente. The freeze is part of a global plan to hold down the pay of VW’s roughly 650,000 employees until 2030, after IG Metall’s representatives on the supervisory board voted on September 3 for a “Future Plan 2030” that eliminates 50,000 jobs, 25,000 of them in Germany.
Two days after the vote, Milenio reported that VW and the SITIAVW had agreed to run the Taos assembly line on a single shift from November 2 to December 15, followed by “technical stoppages” from December 16 to 18 and through the last two weeks of the year. At least 1,000 technicians will be “temporarily relocated.” Production resumes January 2, 2027.
Comments on social media by workers point to widespread anger at the raise approved, which is widely described as “spare change.” A worker noted that “the raise was approved due to intimidation by the charro [gangster] leader.”
What decided the vote was the union’s open threat to leave workers on the picket lines through the holidays with no strike pay. The SITIAVW had assigned mandatory picket duty under threat of sanctions and said nothing about a strike fund.
The vote, more broadly, was the outcome of a joint operation by the company, the union apparatus and the Morena governments in Puebla and Mexico City to wear workers down until they voted the way VW wanted. It has opened the way for shift cuts and new handouts to the automakers. The problem is not that workers are unwilling to fight, but that they lack organizations of their own, independent of the union bureaucracy and the capitalist state.
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Workers at VW must prepare for the coming struggles by building rank-and-file committees in every department, elected in open assemblies and independent of the SITIAVW and the state, to fight for the reinstatement of all laid-off workers, no more job cuts, no shift cuts and wages that keep up with the cost of living.
These committees must link up with workers at Audi in San José Chiapa, at the IMSS and at VW plants in Germany and the US through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The scale of the spending is a measure of what the ruling class believes is at stake. With the Republicans widely expected to lose the House, the oligarchs have concentrated their money on a handful of Senate seats that will decide whether Trump keeps control of the chamber that confirms his nominees and would try any impeachment. A single individual (Musk) has spent more than $200 million to elect Paxton, who led the legal effort to overturn the 2020 election.
And in California, where a referendum to impose an extremely modest “wealth tax” is on the ballot, billionaires headed by Sergei Brin of Google have spent some $300 million to defeat it, while virtually the entire Democratic Party establishment, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, opposes it, along with a substantial number of union bureaucrats.
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The election is a contest between factions of the same financial oligarchy, conducted by two parties that it funds and controls. Whatever the outcome, the policies of the next Congress on war, on the transfer of wealth to the rich and on democratic rights, will be determined by the interests of the class that has paid for it. The working class can defend its interests only by breaking with both parties and building its own political movement, independent of the corporations and billionaires and directed against the capitalist system that produces them.
At a meeting on October 6, aviation workers from across Canada voted to establish the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee and to launch an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo. Robayo, 39, a ramp agent employed by Samsic Assistance Canada, was crushed by the nose gear of a French Bee Airbus A350 during a routine pushback on 24 August at Montreal Airport.
Based on interviews with Samsic employees, and the report of a whistleblower, the World Socialist Web Site established that Robayo was forced to work without the extension cable that would have kept him at a safe distance from the aircraft; that the equipment on the ramp was in a state of generalized disrepair; and that the workers had repeatedly raised complaints that were ignored by Samsic and government regulators.
The death at Montréal-Trudeau Airport was treated as an isolated tragedy by the media, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union, and the authorities. But only six weeks earlier, on July 13, Hafida Drici, 53, a CGT (French General Confederation of Trade Unions) delegate with twenty years’ service, was crushed by a runaway bus on the tarmac at Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle. She worked for Samsic Assistance Shuttle, another subsidiary of the same group.
Drici reportedly got out of the stationary bus to greet a colleague, but the vehicle suddenly began to move and crushed her against another bus. L’Humanité reported the bus was a 2008 vehicle from the company’s retired fleet, returned to service after newer buses broke down. Brake defects had been reported to the Drieets, the French labour inspectorate, during a month-long strike in April 2026. The same brake warning later appeared on the bus she was using.
As Samsic’s global operations make clear, the deaths of Robayo and Drici were not accidents. They are an integral part of a global business strategy that calculates worker deaths as a cost of doing business, facilitated by government-spearheaded deregulation and the ruthless pursuit of corporate profit.
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Samsic is a family-owned group founded in 1986 in Brittany by Christian Roulleau. It is headquartered in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes. In January 2019, Roulleau handed direction to his son-in-law, Thierry Geffroy. The group reported €4.1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 155,000 employees in 27 countries.
Its core business is facility management: cleaning, security, green spaces, maintenance, logistics, reception, temporary staffing. It describes itself as the second-largest cleaning company in France, the seventh-largest security company and the eighth-largest staffing company. Its airport division, Samsic Airport, is a smaller but strategically important vertical: roughly 8,000 employees, €460 million in revenue, and 33 stations.
Samsic’s airport division is established in Paris-CDG, Paris-Orly, Le Bourget, Lyon, Nice, Nantes, Toulouse, Rennes, Brest, Caen, Dinard, Mulhouse, Cherbourg; Brussels-Zaventem, Charleroi, Liège; Montréal-Trudeau, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton; Chicago O’Hare, San Francisco; Pointe-à-Pitre, Fort-de-France, Cayenne; Sainte-Marie, Réunion; Santo Domingo, Puerto Plata; Lisbon, Zagreb, Belgrade and Doha. North America accounts for more than 30 percent of Samsic Assistance’s revenue. The division’s revenue has grown by roughly 250 percent since 2021, and the group targets a 35 to 40 percent North American share by the end of 2027.
Through the Roulleau family holding company called F.F.R., Samsic borrowed aggressively in the form of bonds and loans to finance rapid expansion by buying up competitors.
Samsic’s entry into the Canadian market exemplifies its business model. The company seized on the downturn of airport employment during the early stages of the pandemic and favorable federal government regulatory reforms to rapidly expand its presence at most of the country’s main airports.
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The ability of subcontractors like Samsic to ratchet up the exploitation of low-paid workers is directly bound up with the semi-privatization of Canada’s major airports in the 1990s, when the Liberal government allowed nonprofit airport authorities to take over operations and subcontract ground services to third parties.
After years of complaints about deteriorating working conditions and safety concerns from trade unions and workers, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government announced a reform to section 47.3 of the Canada Labour Code that was touted as a move designed to protect workers from low wages.
The 2021 reform nominally introduced a provision requiring a subcontractor to pay the same remuneration to employees as its predecessor after a service contract changed hands, a process referred to as “contract flipping.” However, the rule was made all but irrelevant by the government’s conscious refusal to order a new subcontractor to respect seniority rights or the previous collective agreement.
As a result, subcontractors could simply hire new workers with no seniority to cut labour costs, or change job titles to reduce wages. This was precisely how Samsic secured the Montreal contract in 2023.
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Prior to the deaths of the Samsic workers in Canada and France, concerns were raised about dangerous working conditions, but regulators did nothing.
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The deaths of Hafida Drici and Oscar Robayo were not the result of a single defective bus or missing cable. Rather, they took place due to the disastrous state of workplace safety produced by decades of government-imposed deregulation and rampant corporate profiteering in which the trade union bureaucracies are fully complicit.
The Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee voted to launch an independent workers’ inquiry into Robayo’s death based on the understanding that the only way to safeguard workers’ lives and reduce workplace injuries is for democratic workers’ control over safety.
The mobilization of workers in the air, on the ground, and in airport terminals to uncover the criminal practices of the globally operating corporations that put their lives at risk, and advance non-negotiable demands that workers must fight to impose, will be major steps forward in the struggle to prioritize workplace safety over capitalist profit.
We urge all workers with experience in the airline industry, whether in Canada, France, or around the world, to come forward with testimony to the workers’ inquiry. Experts in the aviation industry who can shed light on the disregard of basic safety procedures and the consequences this can bring should also speak out.
The AWRFC will ensure anonymity for workers who fear retaliation for raising their voice in protest at a system that sooner rather than later will claim its next victim. Email aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com or fill out the form below.
Speeches delivered by IYSSE representatives Florian Hasek in Stuttgart and Clemens Huber in Erfurt at protests organized by Gen Z against the madness of war and social misery. Both spoke from the main stage. [English text at the WSWS; English auto-translated captioning available if watched at YouTube.]
Florian Hasek of the IYSSE speaks at the Gen Z rally in Stuttgart
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Clemens Huber of the IYSSE speaks at the Gen Z protests in Erfurt
The following statements were delivered by representatives, Tamino Wilck, Clemens Huber, Florian Hasek, and Joshua Seubert of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in various cities during the Gen Z protests last Saturday.
[Once again English is available at the WSWS, and infuriatingly, those desiring auto-translated English subtitles are forced to watch at Alphabet's YouTube.]
Statements by IYSSE Representatives at the GenZ Protests
After two strikes, followed by a week-long ban on teaching last month, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is trying to seal another sellout deal with management at the University of Melbourne.
NTEU members at the university should reject the proposed enterprise agreement and vote no in a suddenly-called meeting of NTEU members on Wednesday. The deal will impose deeper cuts to wages compared to soaring inflation and intensify the partnership between the union apparatus and management in imposing further restructuring, including the use of AI.
The agreement will end industrial action on the eve of the November 28 Victorian state election. This is another move by all the trade union apparatuses to shut down workers’ struggles, like those of schoolteachers, health workers and local council workers, against the austerity measures of the federal and state Labor governments.
It will also prevent industrial action at the university for almost four years, until April 2030, even as the federal Albanese Labor government continues to slash funding for the country’s 39 public universities and transforms them to meet the demands of employers and the military.
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For years, successive Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments have subordinated universities to big business, forcing them to depend increasingly on corporate revenue and exorbitant international student fees.
The Albanese government has stepped up this offensive. Its 2026 budget cut $230 million from university research and more than $600 million from Higher Education Support. Despite election promises, Labor has also retained the Coalition’s Job-ready Graduates scheme, which has pushed the cost of three-year arts and humanities degrees above $50,000 while depriving universities of approximately $1 billion annually in teaching funding.
Universities face further cuts in their income from full fee-paying international students because Labor has imposed enrollment caps, trebled visa fees and increased visa application rejections to 40 percent as it seeks to outflank the far-right One Nation party in attacks on migrants, refugees and overseas students.
While cutting university funding, federal Labor is pouring around $60 billion annually into the military, with expenditure to rise further as Australia is integrated into US-led preparations for war against China.
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The attack on higher education is part of Labor’s broader austerity offensive to pay for war preparations. The May budget outlined $63.8 billion in cuts over four years, including around $38 billion from the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), threatening essential support for hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities.
To fight for decent wages, secure jobs and free, high-quality public education as a fundamental social right, academic and professional staff, casual workers and students must establish democratically controlled rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade unions.
These committees must unite with schoolteachers, health workers and other sections of the working class against austerity, attacks on democratic rights and the diversion of billions into militarism and war. Such a struggle requires a complete break with the union apparatuses, which function as an industrial police force for managements and governments.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network initiated by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), is fighting to build such committees and unite educators with workers in Australia and internationally.
In the Victorian election, the SEP is also standing candidates, Morgan Peach, a SEP National Committee member and president of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) club at the University of Melbourne, and Peter Bryne, a long-standing SEP member, in the Melbourne Northern Metropolitan upper house region to take the fight for a socialist perspective out to the broadest layers of the working class.
University workers and students are urged to contact the CFPE to discuss this perspective and the formation of rank-and-file committees.
Teachers at all state universities in Sri Lanka, numbering around 7,000, held a one-day strike last Friday, expressing their deep anger over the crisis engulfing higher education. All academic activities across the state university system came to a standstill as almost all teachers participated in the strike.
Called by the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA), the action demanded solutions to the shortage of academic staff, crushing workloads, the lack of adequate physical and human resources, salary anomalies, cuts to allowances, and the heavy tax burden imposed on teachers’ meagre incomes.
Nearly 2,000 teachers marched about half a kilometre from the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in central Colombo to the University Grants Commission (UGC), carrying placards demanding: “Six percent for education,” “Defend free education” and “Save the state universities.”
Marchers also carried a placard bearing the slogan, “A rich country—a poor education,” a bitter parody of the 2024 election slogan of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government. Teachers from the University of Jaffna, Eastern University, Sabaragamuwa University and other universities outside Colombo travelled to join the protest.
*****
The crisis engulfing the universities is the product of continuous cuts to public education imposed by successive Sri Lankan governments under the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These cuts are now being intensified by the Dissanayake government.
Student enrollment has nearly doubled, rising from around 25,000 in 2012 to 45,000 today. According to FUTA, the state university system needs 12,000 academic staff members, but only 5,200 are currently employed—a shortfall of more than half. This has led to a sharp deterioration in the student-teacher ratio and a corresponding decline in the quality of education.
The exodus of academics is directly driven by government policy. Under Sri Lanka’s tax regime, most university academics pay up to 36 percent of their income in taxes. At the same time, financial allocations for academic research have been drastically cut, depriving universities of the capacity to conduct serious academic research.
The university system is further strained by severe shortages of student hostels, laboratories and lecture halls, as well as inadequate library facilities. These conditions leave students and staff struggling to work in an environment that makes a mockery of claims that the country provides free public education.
*****
Around the world, capitalist governments and ruling elites have systematically abandoned the traditional mission of higher education, which historically emphasized the well-rounded intellectual, social and cultural development of students. In its place, they are imposing a model dictated by profit, austerity and militarism.
*****
In 2012, FUTA led a 100-day strike—one of the longest industrial actions on the island in three decades—demanding a 20 percent wage increase and an increase in education expenditure to 6 percent of GDP. The union leadership betrayed the strike without securing a single demand, sending teachers back to work on the basis of empty government promises.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party calls on university teachers to break from FUTA’s bankrupt, pro-capitalist perspective and fight for a socialist program that defends and advances fully funded, adequately staffed free public education at all levels. They must confront the fact that free education cannot be defended within the framework of capitalism.
We urge academics to establish their own rank-and-file action committees at every university, democratically elected by teachers and independent of the FUTA bureaucracy, to take the struggle out of the hands of union officials. These committees must open their doors to representatives of students and non-academic workers.
The struggle to defend education is inseparable from the broader struggle of the working class. Only by reorganizing the economy to serve the needs of the majority, abolishing the profit system and repudiating foreign debt repayments can the necessary resources be released for the development of free education, health care and other essential social services.
We call on teachers to take up this struggle and attend the SEP-organised public meeting on November 10 at 4 p.m. at the Colombo Public Library Hall.
The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) held an election meeting in Lower Hutt on November 1, addressed by Socialist Equality Party (Australia) assistant national secretary Max Boddy and SEG Hutt South candidate Tom Petterson.
The campaign marks the first time in New Zealand’s history that a Trotskyist party has stood a candidate in a general election. In opening the meeting, Boddy said: “We are standing because the questions that will decide the future of workers and young people—the drive to war, the degradation of the planet, the attack on living standards, on democratic rights—are being kept out of the election.”
The SEG was “not standing because we believe the crisis facing workers can be resolved through parliament,” Boddy said. Rather, its campaign was “part of the fight to build a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in New Zealand.”
He situated the campaign in the continuity of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 to defend the internationalist principles of the Russian Revolution: that workers must unite across borders, based on their common class interests, to overthrow the capitalist system and build a socialist society.
The election is unfolding as a crisis for the political establishment. The National Party, which leads the right-wing coalition government, and the opposition Labour Party are both deeply unpopular, and workers and young people are moving to the left.
Petterson explained that “Whichever party leads the next government, it will accelerate the militarization of society and fully integrate New Zealand into the global imperialist war that is now erupting. This will be paid for by deepening the brutal austerity measures that are already being imposed.”
New Zealand is an imperialist ally of the US and, along with Australia, is playing a key role in militarizing the Pacific region in preparation for war against China.
Roughly 2,000 interns and residents are fighting for new contracts with eight private hospitals in New York City. They are fighting for significant wage increases, better benefits and working conditions and stronger protections for international medical graduates who are vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant attacks.
The workers belong to the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), which has allowed negotiations to drag on interminably. The contract for interns and residents at the Institute for Family Health expired on June 30, 2025. The contracts for workers at Maimonides Medical Center, the Brooklyn Hospital Center, NewYork-Presbyterian, Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center expired on October 31, 2025. Workers at BronxCare and St. John’s Episcopal Hospital have had an expired contract since December 31, 2025. Workers at St. Barnabas Hospital are also in negotiations.
Interns are medical school graduates in their first year of hospital-based residency training. Residents have completed their first year of training and practice medicine under the direct or indirect supervision of senior physicians. Their workweeks can be as long as 80 hours, and they are paid substantially less than fully qualified attending physicians. A first-year resident at the Brooklyn Hospital Center earns $79,188 a year, or about $19 an hour for an 80-hour week, barely $2 above the city’s minimum wage. The hospital’s CEO, Gary Terrinoni, received $1.82 million in 2024. Residents struggle with New York’s high cost of living, student debt, the expenses of medical training and, in some cases, supporting their children.
Moreover, one in five of CIR’s New York members is an international medical graduate. Many of these physicians rely on visas to continue their training and employment. Under Trump, they face the threats of visa restrictions and the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. “They’re terrified,” Conrad Fischer, residency program director at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, where about half of the internal medicine doctors hold visas, told Healthbeat last year. “If we didn’t have international graduates, we would close.”
*****
The residents are struggling against a social crisis that afflicts the entire city. The median asking rent in New York City has reached a record $3,785, according to Realtor.com. It increased by 4.5 percent in the past year, while private sector hourly earnings have only increased by 4.2 percent. Residents are simultaneously grappling with an average student debt of more than $200,000.
To fund the illegal war on Iran and further enrich the corporate and financial oligarchy, the Trump administration is attempting to reduce the Medicaid rolls by imposing new work requirements. At least 475,000 New Yorkers statewide could lose their Medicaid coverage, and the state’s uninsured population could increase by 45 percent to 1.45 million people, according to the New York State Department of Health. NYC H+H has budgeted for up to $622 million in federal funding cuts, according to the state comptroller. Maimonides, Wyckoff Heights and the Brooklyn Hospital Center could face cuts, layoffs or closures, according to a Public Citizen study.
Members of some of these ostensibly nonprofit hospitals’ boards also belong to New York’s financial oligarchy. The board of Maimonides Health includes Eugene Keilin, cofounder of private equity firm KPS Capital Partners; Paul T. Addison, who held senior positions at Citicorp and Salomon Smith Barney/Citigroup; and Robert E. Foran, a former chief financial officer of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority who previously held senior positions at Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. On the board of Mount Sinai Health system is John B. Hess, former CEO and chairman of Hess Corporation, and Richard A. Friedman, who had a long career in investment management at Goldman Sachs. This is the social layer responsible for residents’ inadequate pay and overwork.
*****
The residents’ struggle follows the strike of 15,000 nurses that took place in January and February. At some of the same hospitals where the residents are negotiating, nurses struck for raises, safe staffing, fully funded benefits and protections against violence.
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) did everything possible to sabotage the biggest nurses’ strike in the city’s history. Instead of waging a powerful, united struggle, the union kept its members divided and imposed inadequate contracts on them hospital by hospital. President Nancy Hagans violated the union’s bylaws and forced nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian to vote on a pro-management agreement that their bargaining committee had already rejected. One nurse described this action as “a stab in the back.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the pseudo-leftist Democratic Socialists of America, gave lip service to the nurses while his partner, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, signed emergency declarations that brought in scab nurses from out of state. Mamdani later endorsed Hochul for re-election. He has said nothing in support of the interns and residents.
*****
To win better wages, protect international medical graduates against deportation and limit their grueling workweeks, the residents must take the initiative away from the CIR bureaucracy. The first step must be the formation of rank-and-file committees at all New York’s hospitals. These committees must be independent of the union leadership and controlled democratically by the workers. They will provide the organizational form through which residents can formulate a strategy for a genuine fight. This strategy must include an appeal to other healthcare workers, who face the same conditions and the same class enemy. Ultimately, the residents must confront the source of the attacks that they face: the system that subordinates healthcare to profit.
Several hundred California State University (CSU) workers rallied at the Long Beach campus on Tuesday, October 27, demanding higher wages, job security and relief from mounting workloads. The action, held under the slogan “Five Unions, One Fight,” was part of a series of campus protests as 29,000 California Faculty Association (CFA) members began voting to authorize a strike.
The five unions cover close to 80,000 faculty, staff, student workers and academic professionals across the CSU system. Workers at the Long Beach rally described salaries that fail to cover basic expenses, exhausting hours and years of temporary employment that prevent them from securing housing near their jobs.
The November Victorian state election is revealing and deepening a profound crisis of Australia’s political establishment.
A Newspoll published on October 26 put the governing Labor Party on just 24 percent, the Liberal-National Coalition on 33 percent and far-right One Nation on 20 percent of first-preference votes. A subsequent Roy Morgan poll placed One Nation at 22 percent, almost level with Labor on 22.5 percent.
Long a marginal political force, One Nation is now being discussed as a potential participant in government or holder of the balance of power. The prospect of a far-right party entering government—something without precedent in recent Australian history—has provoked shock and concern among many workers and young people. How has this come to pass?
One Nation’s rise is an expression of a national crisis of the two-party system—itself a manifestation of the global breakdown of capitalism. The party’s support has surged in federal polling, amid the disintegration of the Liberal-National Coalition over the past year and widespread opposition to Labor.
One Nation exploits immense social anger over the cost-of-living crisis, unaffordable housing, deteriorating public services and the destruction of secure jobs. It fraudulently presents itself as the champion of ordinary people against a discredited political establishment, while blaming immigrants and welfare recipients for conditions created by decades of pro-business policies that One Nation itself supports and pledges to deepen.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) insists that the primary responsibility for One Nation’s rise rests with Labor and the trade union bureaucracies. They have played a central role both in creating the social crisis it exploits and cultivating the reactionary political environment in which it has come to prominence.
*****
One Nation’s substantial financial backing exposes the class interests behind its populist posturing. Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has provided support, including an aircraft worth around $1 million. Hancock Agriculture chief executive Adam Giles and Hancock Energy executive director Ian Plimer each donated $500,000, while stockbroker Angus Aitken and his wife Sarah contributed another $1 million.
Amid the disintegration of the established parties, sections of the capitalist class are cultivating the far right as a means of imposing their agenda through increasingly authoritarian methods.
This is part of an international process, expressed in the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina and the far-right Alternative for Germany. In late 2025, Rinehart flew Hanson to Florida aboard her private jet, where Hanson attended Trump’s Halloween party and addressed a conservative conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Dear visitors to the Left Book Fair, dear comrades and friends,
I am pleased to present our latest book, Where Is America Going? Fascism or Socialism?, here in Nuremberg today. The book was edited by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, and published by Mehring Verlag.
When we first presented the book at the Leipzig Book Fair in March, the world was reeling from the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. In the United States, Trump was deploying armed ICE agents against immigrants and the population. The murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis had provoked outrage around the world.
Since then, the international crisis has intensified dramatically. The war against Iran continues, and Trump is threatening new attacks following the US midterm elections. The Ukraine war threatens to erupt into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. The European powers, led by Germany, are rearming on a scale not seen since the Second World War.
In the United States, the congressional midterm elections will take place this coming Tuesday, November 3. The Trump administration is intensifying its attacks on democratic rights and attempting to use the Justice Department to intervene in the electoral process and, if necessary, overturn the results.
But this is only one side of the development.
On the other side, we are witnessing an enormous upsurge of the class struggle. In France, hundreds of thousands of young people and workers are demonstrating against social cuts, dilapidated schools, repression and militarism. Similar movements are developing in Italy, Spain, Greece and other countries.
Yesterday, an international day of action by dockworkers against war and militarism took place, with workers mobilizing at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions across five continents. A general strike took place in Italy. And in Germany, too, tens of thousands of young people protested today against social attacks and the reintroduction of conscription.
Under these conditions, the question posed in the title of our book—Fascism or Socialism?—is not an abstract historical alternative. Objective developments themselves are placing it ever more directly on the agenda.
This is precisely why this book is of extraordinary importance.
The historical and social roots of American fascism
What makes this book so important?
The collection contains analyses, statements and lectures by David North, the Socialist Equality Party in the United States and other authors of the World Socialist Web Site from 2015 to 2026. They document Trump’s rise, his first presidency, the coup attempt of January 6, 2021, and his return to power. But their significance goes far beyond this.
What is decisive is the Marxist method with which they analyze these developments and uncover their fundamental driving forces.
In the bourgeois media, Trump’s rise is usually explained in terms of his character, his authoritarian behavior, his ruthlessness and his racism.
But this does not explain how such a politician could attain the most powerful office in the world, why he was reelected after a failed coup attempt, or why he can rely on sections of the state apparatus and the ruling class.
North therefore asks in the preface: “What social, economic and political processes produced Trump? What class forces stand behind him?”
His answer is that Trump is not the cause but the political expression of a profound historical crisis of American capitalism.
I would like to quote a somewhat longer passage from the preface in which North formulates this connection with particular sharpness and precision:
In his writings on the rise of German fascism, Leon Trotsky made the following perceptive observation: “Not every embittered petty bourgeois could become a Hitler, but a little bit of Hitler exists in each of them.” One might apply this insight to present-day conditions in America: Not every businessman is a Trump, but considerably more than a little bit of Trump exists in a substantial section of the American business class.
Among the executives of countless real estate corporations, private equity firms and cryptocurrency companies, there are plenty of people whose personalities, behavior, aims and methods more or less resemble those of the American president. Trump did not create this culture. He is both the personification of the ruling corporate and financial oligarchy and its criminal culmination. In his person and modus operandi, the distinction between CEO and mafia boss becomes blurred. ( p. 21)
This is the decisive starting point.
Trump did not suddenly descend upon an otherwise healthy American democracy out of the blue. He embodies a ruling class whose power and wealth rest on ever more extreme exploitation, financial speculation, military violence and the systematic erosion of democratic rights.
Since 1945, the United States has undergone a fundamental transformation.
In 1945, it was the world’s leading industrial power, controlled approximately half of global industrial production and possessed the bulk of the world’s gold reserves. On this basis, it was able to stabilize world capitalism to a certain extent and make social concessions at home.
With the loss of its industrial supremacy and the abandonment of the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971, its economic decline became apparent.
The ruling class responded with a veritable social war against the working class.
Under Reagan, an offensive against workers began that was essentially supported by the trade union bureaucracy and continued by the Democrats: Millions of industrial jobs were destroyed, wages were driven down and social programs dismantled. Financial parasitism increasingly replaced productive investment.
North examines this development in his preface using extensive economic and social data.
According to figures from the Federal Reserve cited there, the wealthiest 1 percent of households already controlled 34.6 percent of all American wealth in the third quarter of 2025—approximately $55 trillion. The bottom half of households, by contrast, owned just 2.5 percent.
This constitutes a fundamental material basis of the political crisis. A society in which a tiny minority accumulates ever greater wealth while millions of workers lose their livelihoods comes into conflict with democratic forms of rule. The oligarchy develops increasingly authoritarian methods to enforce its interests.
The turn toward dictatorship is not a personal whim of Donald Trump but an expression of the incompatibility of extreme social inequality with democratic rights.
The early warnings of the WSWS and Trump's return
The book demonstrates how early the Trotskyist movement recognized this development.
As early as March 2016, when Trump was still fighting for the Republican presidential nomination and many commentators dismissed him as a bizarre fringe phenomenon, David North warned on the World Socialist Web Site that his political behavior exhibited a “distinctly fascistic character.”
North analyzed Trump’s racist demagogy and explained why it found a response.
Millions of Americans had experienced a deterioration of their living conditions under Republicans and Democrats alike. The Democratic establishment in particular relied on identity politics and the defense of Wall Street.
Trump was able to pose as an opponent of the system, although he himself was a billionaire and representative of the financial elite. This was possible because the anger of broad sections of the population found no expression in an independent socialist movement of the working class.
Bernie Sanders channeled opposition to social inequality back into the Democratic Party. For decades, the trade union bureaucracy had suppressed the class struggle and subordinated workers to the capitalist parties.
Trump’s rise was not an expression of an inherently reactionary working class, but of a political crisis and the suppression of an independent workers’ movement.
This analysis was confirmed by subsequent developments.
The WSWS warned in 2016 that Trump was not a temporary phenomenon. His movement was rooted in the crisis of American capitalism and the disintegration of its bourgeois-democratic framework.
Five years later, on January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to overturn his electoral defeat through a coup d’état.
David North explained immediately afterward that this was not an isolated aberration but the expression of a far-advanced fascist conspiracy.
The Democrats did not mobilize against it. Under Biden, they sought to preserve the Republican Party as a pillar of the political system. In foreign policy, they criticized Trump primarily over Russia.
Under these conditions, Trump was able to expand the MAGA movement, bring the Republican Party under his control and return to the White House in 2025.
Today, he commands instruments of power that were not directly available to him in 2021: the Justice Department, immigration enforcement agencies, the security apparatus and command over the military.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) also play an important role in this process. The electoral victory of their member Zohran Mamdani in New York City and further successes by socialist candidates demonstrate that there is a powerful left-wing and socialist sentiment among workers and young people. The DSA, however, channels these aspirations into the Democratic Party.
During his election campaign, Mamdani presented himself as a fierce critic of Trump. After his victory, he sought cooperation. Since November 2025, they have met three times, most recently in September at the New York mayoral residence. They are in regular contact and agreed on closer cooperation on a housing construction project. Despite continuing differences, their demonstrative opposition has given way to pragmatic collaboration.
David North wrote about this development as early as November 2025:
Mamdani debases himself not merely out of cowardice. His behavior is an expression of the vulgar, pragmatic politics characteristic of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left. They lack any understanding of, indeed any interest in, comprehending the contradictions of capitalism and the tendencies that drive it toward crisis, fascism and war, and the working class toward revolution. Mamdani’s betrayal demonstrates once again that the central problem of our time is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. (p. 368)
Developments ahead of the midterm elections underscore the danger.
Among other things, the Justice Department is attempting to prevent certification of the Senate election result in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses. In California, the administration attempted to exclude votes already cast from the count.
Although courts have partially rejected these measures, they constitute a serious warning.
The administration is using the powers of the state to influence electoral procedures and challenge and overturn results it does not want.
The decisive question, therefore, is not whether Trump wins or loses this or that election.
It is why the American ruling class is turning ever more openly toward dictatorial forms of rule and what social force can stop this development.
The volcanic eruption of American imperialism
This connection becomes even clearer when we examine international politics.
Fascism and war in the United States are not separate developments. They arise from the same historical crisis.
The United States possesses the world’s most powerful military apparatus, but its economic supremacy has been undermined. The ruling class is attempting to arrest its relative decline through military violence.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy 35 years ago, the United States has waged wars against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Today, this struggle for global supremacy is directed against Russia and China.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched their war of aggression against Iran. Eight months later, the conflict continues. Trump is threatening new attacks immediately after the elections.
In the book, North draws on a historical analysis by Leon Trotsky.
As early as 1928, Trotsky warned that US hegemony would express itself even more ruthlessly during its period of crisis than during its rise. In 1934, he declared that history was driving humanity toward a “volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”
The book demonstrates how this prognosis is being confirmed today. North’s characterization of American foreign policy is as sharp as it is accurate. I would like to present another quotation from David North’s preface:
Trump applies the methods of the Prohibition-era American mafia to foreign policy. Having been brought to power by the ruling class, he has at his disposal not merely the Thompson submachine guns of an Al Capone, but the entire arsenal of American imperialism—the most destructive military force in human history, with its many thousands of nuclear warheads capable of annihilating civilization. Herein lies the essential danger of the present situation: the methods of a gangster, backed by the weapons arsenal of a superpower, employed in the service of a ruling class that is no longer capable of making any rational decisions. (p. 36)
This analysis also explains the enormous intensification of conflicts between the imperialist powers.
The European governments are not responding with a peaceful alternative. They are pursuing their own imperialist interests and preparing to wage war independently of Washington. Germany plays a leading role in this process.
The recent EU summit in Brussels demonstrated that, under conditions of growing tensions with Trump, the European powers want to escalate the war against Russia and build Europe into an independent military power.
Hundreds of billions of euros are being poured into rearmament, and the Bundeswehr is to be massively expanded. Eighty years after the end of the Nazi dictatorship and the barbaric war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, Germany is being systematically prepared for a third world war.
And just as in the United States, this course is inseparably linked to massive social attacks and the strengthening of the state apparatus.
While hospitals are closing and schools are deteriorating, there are virtually no financial limits on rearmament.
War abroad and social war at home are two sides of the same policy.
The awakening of the international class struggle
It is precisely against this backdrop that the current mass protests acquire enormous significance.
In France, student protests against dilapidated schools, teacher shortages and cuts, have developed into a broad movement.
On both October 17 and October 24, more than half a million people took to the streets. Increasing numbers of workers, teachers and public-sector employees are joining the protests.
The Macron government is responding with police violence, mass arrests and bans on demonstrations. Numerous young people have been seriously injured.
We are witnessing similar developments in Italy, Greece, Spain and other European countries. In Germany, too, resistance to social cuts, conscription and war policies is growing. I have already mentioned today’s mass protests by young people.
Increasingly, the working class itself is intervening. The international day of action by dockworkers is just one example.
Dockworkers are opposing the use of their workplaces for military transports. At the same time, they are demanding higher wages, secure jobs and public investment in social needs instead of rearmament.
International coordination demonstrates the objective power of the working class: Ports, railways, industrial plants and modern infrastructure function only through the labor of millions of people who are interconnected internationally. This contains enormous revolutionary potential.
Millions of people are drawing political conclusions from their own experiences. Unlimited resources are available for war and rearmament, but supposedly there is no money for schools, hospitals or pensions. Governments that speak of democracy use police violence against young people and workers. These problems are international; they arise from the historical crisis of world capitalism.
The fear of the ruling elites was revealed in a statement Trump made on October 20.
Referring to the mass protests in France, he declared that this was no longer just a minor riot or protest but a “full-on revolution.”
He immediately linked this remark to racist agitation against immigrants and demands for mass deportations.
The far right, which is being consciously built up from above everywhere, seeks to divide the working class along national, ethnic and religious lines and prevent a united movement.
But the ruling class itself is in a deep crisis.
The same contradictions that drive it toward dictatorship, militarism and war are, on the other hand, bringing millions of people into motion.
North therefore writes in the book’s preface—and the entire book develops this conception—that the crisis produces not only the danger of fascism and war but also the objective possibility of social revolution.
History does not proceed in a straight line toward reaction. The crisis also radicalizes the working class.
The decisive question of revolutionary leadership
But this raises a fundamental political question: Does the crisis of capitalism automatically lead to socialism?
No. And this is precisely one of the most important conclusions of the book.
In the lecture “Where Is America Going? Oligarchy, Dictatorship and the Revolutionary Crisis of Capitalism,” North explains that the objective crisis does not guarantee victory over capitalism.
The deeper the crisis, the more violent the efforts of the ruling class to save its system.
The socialist revolution therefore requires the conscious intervention of the working class in the historical process.
Protests, strikes and the rejection of a government are not enough. What is decisive is the program and political leadership that give these struggles a conscious direction.
This is where the significance of the International Committee of the Fourth International lies.
The defeats suffered by the working class in the 20th century were not an expression of its inability to transform society along socialist lines. They were the result of the betrayals of the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies and the absence of revolutionary leadership.
Against the Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country,” Leon Trotsky defended the program of world socialist revolution and founded the Fourth International in 1938.
This perspective acquires extraordinary relevance today.
The world economy is an integrated process of production. A smartphone or a car is produced through the combined labor of workers in numerous countries.
The ruling classes subordinate these productive forces to the interests of rival nation-states and private owners. The consequences are trade wars and militarism.
The same process has created an international working class that is larger and more closely interconnected than ever before.
This is the foundation of socialist internationalism.
The socialist perspective is therefore not an abstract utopia. It is rooted in the objective development of the world economy and the international class struggle.
Advances in science and technology create the conditions for overcoming poverty, hunger and disease. Under capitalism, however, these technologies are used to maximize profits, expand surveillance and wage war.
The problem lies in the property relations that subordinate social production to the enrichment of a minority.
Socialism means placing these productive forces under the democratic control of the working class and developing them in accordance with social needs.
But to achieve this, the growing objective movement of the working class must be united with a conscious revolutionary program.
This requires the building of independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools and neighborhoods that unite struggles across industries and national borders. Above all, it requires the building of an international revolutionary party.
North expresses this historical perspective at the end of his November 2025 lecture through an extraordinarily powerful image. I would like to conclude with this longer quotation:
The world in which we live resembles a dormant volcano, on whose slopes civilization has erected its monuments, established its institutions and organized its daily life. For a time, the volcano appears inactive. But beneath the surface, immense pressure is building. The magma rises. The tremors intensify. And finally, an eruption of catastrophic force occurs, completely transforming the landscape.
The metaphor of the volcano captures not only the destructive but also the creative energy of this process. A volcanic eruption destroys the old terrain, but at the same time creates new land.
The eruption of the class struggle in the United States will destroy the decayed structures of capitalism, but it will also open up the possibilities for a new world. From the depths of social oppression will emerge a force greater than any army or corporation: the collective power of a class that produces all wealth and yet owns nothing. If this force acts consciously, guided by scientific socialism and the analysis of objective reality, it will sweep away national and ethnic boundaries and unite humanity in a common struggle for its liberation. (p. 370)
This passage sums up the perspective of the book. We are at a historical turning point.
The United States demonstrates the disintegration of bourgeois democracy, a process that is also developing here. The escalation of war reveals the looming danger of a devastating third world war between nuclear-armed powers.
But the mass movements throughout Europe and internationally, the strikes by workers and the radicalization of young people also demonstrate that an immense social counterforce is developing.
The central question is whether this objective movement can be united with socialist consciousness and revolutionary leadership. The book provides a historical method, a program and a perspective for doing so.
I therefore encourage everyone to read the book, discuss it and seriously engage with the political conclusions developed in it.
The alternative of fascism or socialism will not be decided by parliamentary maneuvers or the decisions of individual politicians. It will be decided in the international class struggle.
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.
