Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US midterm election: A massive repudiation of Trump and the Republicans
The 2026 midterm elections are an overwhelming repudiation of Donald Trump and the policies of his government by the American people. The Republican Party was swept out of power in the House of Representatives in a landslide and lost control of the Senate as well.
The Republicans lost Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Kansas, Maine and Iowa as of this writing, while not capturing any seats previously held by Democrats. The incoming Senate could have a Democratic majority as high as 56-44, depending on the outcome of the races in Alaska and Mississippi.
The anti-Trump wave also brought down entrenched Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and billionaire gubernatorial candidates Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio and Rick Jackson in Georgia.
The Democratic victories were by such wide margins that they were called very early by the Associated Press and the television networks, and faced no significant challenge from the Republican candidates. Nor was the Trump administration able to intimidate voters from going to the polls—on the contrary, turnout appears to have been the largest ever for a non-presidential election.
In Texas, the largest state under Republican rule, three-term incumbent Abbott called Democrat Gina Hinojosa to concede at 10:00 p.m. local time, as he trailed her by more than a million votes. Hinojosa will be the first Hispanic governor of Texas, while Democrat Xavier Becerra will be the first Hispanic governor of California—a rebuke to Trump’s racist demonization of immigrants, particularly those from Mexico.
*****
The shift in the House of Representatives was equally striking. Democrats captured Republican-held seats in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska and Colorado, with results from the West Coast still being counted.
Some state delegations were entirely transformed: Colorado went from 4-4 to Democrats ahead in all eight districts. In North Carolina, a Republican gerrymander aimed at creating an 11-3 split in the delegation has resulted so far in five Democratic wins and a 5-4 Democratic lead in the remaining contests, which would be a gain of seven seats in a single state. In Florida, all four Democratic districts redrawn to favor Republicans were won by the Democrats anyway. There was a similar outcome to the Republican gerrymander in Texas.
The election exploded the fiction of “red” and “blue” states that has dominated corporate media coverage of American politics for two decades. Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas, supposedly bastions of the Republican Party, elected both Democratic governors and Democratic senators.
The exit polls show how sweeping the repudiation was. Thirty-nine percent of voters cited the economy as the most important issue, and 32 percent cited threats to democracy. Only 3 percent cited “crime,” a sign that support for the law-and-order demagogy of the fascist right has collapsed.
The vote was also a verdict on the war against Iran. On the eve of the election, the United States bombed Qeshm Island, and the Gulf states were told to prepare for an operation immediately after the vote. Yet in NBC’s exit poll, 62 percent of voters said the war was the wrong decision, and 74 percent called it a major factor in their vote.
Voters viewed both capitalist parties negatively, a sign of the continuing radicalization of workers and young people. Sixty-nine percent said the US economic system “favors the wealthy,” and 57 percent expect life for the next generation to be worse than it is today.
This was the first national election since federal immigration agents murdered the protesters Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minnesota, and since the murders of immigrant workers in Texas, Maine and many other states. In it the American people dealt a powerful blow to the anti-immigrant frenzy of the Trump White House. Exit polls showed a huge swing against Trump and the Republicans among Latino voters, young working-class men and college students.
In Michigan, Trump’s racist, Islamophobic campaign against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed backfired, even with the last-minute stab in the back from Representative Haley Stevens, who had lost the Democratic Senate nomination to El-Sayed. Kamala Harris lost Michigan in 2024 in large part because she was identified with the Gaza genocide. El-Sayed rose to political prominence by criticizing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the war against Iran, although he later retreated on both.
The election results were not only a repudiation of Trump but a shock to the Democratic Party and to the financial oligarchy as a whole, which underwrites and controls both parties. For two years, the Democrats prostrated themselves before Trump and presented him as an all-powerful colossus, with themselves as all but helpless to stop him.
The vote revealed something entirely different: a population far to the left of the Democratic Party and determined to strike a blow against the administration.
The Democratic Party is the initial, electoral beneficiary of this anti-Trump movement. But every action of the Democrats will be aimed at curbing this movement and diverting it back within the framework of “normal” capitalist politics.
While the working class is moving to the left, the Democratic Party is moving to the right. The new House majority will have far more ex-soldiers and ex-spies than members who claim to favor “democratic socialism.”
In a lecture Monday night at the University of California, Berkeley, WSWS Editorial Board Chairman David North stated: “Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s vote, policy will be determined in the final analysis by the crisis of the capitalist economy, by the disposition of a technology [AI] that is transforming the conditions of labor for the entire human race, by the drive of American imperialism to war and by the response of the international working class.”
None of these processes will be altered by a change in the composition of Congress. The contradiction between the aims of those who voted and the policies of the party they voted for cannot be resolved within the two-party system. It will be fought out in the class struggle.
2. US strikes Iran on eve of midterms
The US military attacked Iran’s Qeshm Island, at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, on Monday night, the eve of the midterm elections.
Speaking on Fox News Tuesday morning, US President Donald Trump called the strike “just a minor attack. It wasn’t war.” In the same interview he said: “Look, I’m not looking to, you know, kill lots of people, but if we have to, we’ll have to.”
*****
The cable network MS NOW reported October 30 that three senior officials from the Gulf Arab states said the administration had briefed their governments to prepare for strikes “as soon as Nov. 4,” the day after the election.
The elections expressed widespread opposition to the war against Iran and the affordability crisis it has triggered. Pew Research Center polling published on October 8 found 65 percent of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the war and 47 percent expecting it to last more than another year.
*****
Thousands of US troops “remain in the waters off Iran” to enforce the naval blockade, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, and “Another aircraft carrier and thousands of additional troops are also on their way to the Middle East.”
MS NOW reported on October 30 that the USS Theodore Roosevelt and its strike group were headed to the region, which would make three American carrier groups there. It also reported October 30 that the United States was moving more Patriot missile batteries into Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The military is considering using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, one of the largest non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, against Iran’s energy infrastructure and nuclear sites, among them Pickaxe Mountain, CNN reported October 15.
The Qeshm strike followed several weeks of smaller US attacks, none of which Washington had announced. The Journal wrote Monday that according to an official the administration had withheld the details so the attacks would not signal a resumption of major combat.
*****
The AP reported Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had joined senior members of the administration in urging Trump to order a “quick but extensive air campaign” after the election. The AP, citing a person briefed on the call, wrote Monday that Netanyahu had pressed Trump for strikes in a telephone call over the weekend.
Netanyahu and his far-right allies lost their parliamentary majority in Israel’s October 27 election. A return to full-scale war could allow Netanyahu to set up an emergency government.
*****
Ali Abdollahi, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, warned Tuesday that Iran would answer any threat from the United States and Israel immediately and “without geographical limitations,” Xinhua reported Tuesday.
Iran opened a third Basij militia training center in Tehran on Monday, the AP reported Tuesday. Ali Kowsari, the militia’s deputy head for training, said that “1,500 training bases will start working in all cities and towns” this week, with the aim of training one million volunteers.
3. Reserve Bank of Australia hikes interest rates amid clamor from ruling elite for deeper austerity
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) increased the official interest rate by 25 basis points yesterday, taking it to 4.85 percent, the highest level since 2008.
The rate hike is one component of a multi-pronged offensive against the working class. Workers are already bearing the brunt of persistent inflation through soaring prices, especially for basic necessities. That same inflation is being invoked to justify interest rate increases that drive up mortgage repayments and deliberately suppress economic activity and employment.
At the same time, the corporate and financial elite is seizing on the economic crisis to demand sweeping cuts to social spending by the federal Labor government, which is already imposing major austerity measures.
The most immediate consequence of the rate rise will be to add around $90 a month to repayments on a $600,000 mortgage. That brings the cumulative increase from five rate rises this year to approximately $5,500 annually. Compared with the ultra-low rates prevailing before the tightening of monetary policy began in 2022, annual repayments on such a mortgage are now around $19,000 higher.
According to research firm Roy Morgan, 1.75 million Australian mortgage holders, almost one in three, were at risk of mortgage stress in September, an increase of more than half a million since January. This means their mortgage repayments had reached levels considered financially burdensome relative to household income. Of them, 1.26 million were classified as “extremely at risk.”
*****
The criminal US-Israeli war against Iran, backed and aided by the Albanese Labor government, has already devastated the country and destabilized the global economy. Washington is now preparing to resume its bombardment, potentially as early as this week, with plans reportedly including attacks on civilian infrastructure that threaten a catastrophic escalation throughout the region.
Higher interest rates cannot reverse these war-driven shocks to the world economy. Instead, the RBA is seeking to suppress domestic economic activity and employment.
*****
Higher unemployment is not simply an unintended consequence of the RBA’s policies. It is a central mechanism for suppressing wages, by increasing job insecurity and weakening the ability of workers to fight for pay rises. This comes after years of falling real wages. As of June, wages were still 1.4 percent below their level four years earlier, after accounting for inflation.
But the financial and corporate establishment is demanding a far wider offensive. Across the corporate media, business circles and parliamentary opposition, the campaign for sweeping cuts has grown to a fever pitch. Increasingly, Labor’s ability to deliver major austerity measures is being presented as the decisive political test on which its fate hangs.
*****
Far from being a technical problem caused by excessive spending on public services, the renewed inflationary surge is bound up with a deepening crisis of the capitalist economy, marked by war-driven price shocks, slowing growth and growing financial instability. The response of the ruling elite is to protect corporate profits and wealth through an intensified assault on workers’ social conditions.
*****
Meanwhile, Labor has increased annual military spending to record levels of around $60 billion, with hundreds of billions more earmarked for AUKUS and other measures aimed at completing Australia’s transformation into a launching pad for a US-led war against China.
*****
The mounting crisis of the political establishment, evident in the Victorian election and federally, is being driven by mass hostility to the relentless assault on workers’ jobs, wages and social conditions. Labor and the other major parties are pursuing the same essential agenda of austerity and militarism being implemented by capitalist governments internationally, amid a deepening global economic crisis.
This hostility will increasingly find expression in major struggles of the working class, as is already emerging in France and across Europe. Such struggles can only be taken forward through an independent socialist perspective directed against the capitalist system itself, the source of the economic crisis, social inequality and war.
4. Merz government responds to Gen Z protests with repression, militarist offensive
The German government is responding to the mass protests by young people against social cuts, rearmament and war with an aggressive intensification of its reactionary policies. While Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt are attempting to intimidate the movement with threats, accusations of extremism and racist agitation, the government is relentlessly pressing ahead with its social attacks and preparations for a direct war against Russia.
The response underscores the political significance of the mass demonstrations on October 31, in which more than 120,000 young people participated across over 30 German cities. The protests against the destruction of education, skyrocketing living costs, militarism and conscription are part of an international movement. They enjoy broad support: According to a Forsa poll published on Tuesday, 83 percent of respondents expressed sympathy for the demonstrations.
Government spokesman Stefan Kornelius made clear on Monday just how brazenly the German government is responding to this social opposition. Asked whether the protests had prompted Merz to reconsider his policies, he declared: “The chancellor feels encouraged to continue his policies.” Kornelius explicitly referred to the planned reforms of the pension and healthcare systems and defended the massive military buildup.
The message is unmistakable: The government has no intention of making concessions to young people. It intends to impose its policies of social devastation, militarization and the expansion of the state apparatus even more aggressively.
*****
The Bundeswehr is making increasingly concrete preparations for war against Russia. At the end of October, German and Dutch generals toured Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to assess operational areas, infrastructure and conditions for military operations. Since July 1, the 1st German-Netherlands Corps has been commanding potential NATO land operations in Estonia and Latvia. German Army Inspector General Christian Freuding threatened Russia in his press statement: “If you dare, it will not be a good day for you.”
In Lithuania, the Bundeswehr is testing electronic warfare capabilities under the name “Vigilant Owl II” and developing systems for reconnaissance and the disruption of enemy communications. At the same time, nuclear escalation is intensifying. On October 20 and 21, France and Britain conducted a joint exercise in which French fighter aircraft simulated a nuclear strike while British jets provided escort. Germany is also seeking closer cooperation with France on nuclear operations.
Eight decades after the Second World War and Germany’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, German imperialism is once again preparing for a major war against Russia, threatening a devastating nuclear escalation.
The war preparations are directly connected to the social attacks against which young people and workers are increasingly rebelling. While military spending is exploding and the defense budget is set to increase by almost a third in 2027, pensions, healthcare, education and social benefits are being targeted for attack. At the same time, the government is pushing ahead with the reintroduction of conscription. Workers and young people are to pay for rearmament both through the destruction of their living conditions and by sacrificing their lives in war.
*****
That is why the youth movement must be united with the working class and expanded internationally. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) argued for this orientation at the demonstrations and at their online meeting entitled “From the youth protests to the international class struggle: What perspective is necessary?” They advocate building independent rank-and-file action committees in schools, universities and workplaces to unite resistance against war, conscription and social cuts.
The gigantic resources devoted to war and profits must instead be placed under the democratic control of the working class and used to meet social needs. Not appeals to the German government but the independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of an international socialist program can stop the drive to war.
The contract covering 90,000 New York City municipal workers in AFSCME District Council 37 (DC 37) is set to expire on Friday. The city-wide contract covers 30 percent of the municipal workforce across dozens of locals, including administrative and clerical staff, social service caseworkers, school-based support staff, library workers, IT professionals, and 911 operators across the city’s agencies. The contract struggle marks a major new stage in the developing confrontation between the working class and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The municipal workforce in New York City has seen this firsthand. The expiring contract provided raises of just 3 percent for the first four years and 3.25 percent in the final year. These “raises” fell well below inflation, which peaked at over 8 percent in 2022. Over the course of the last contract, median housing costs in the city have spiked roughly 32 percent, making the city even less affordable to those who work for it.
The city is a major low-wage employer. The expiring contract set a wage floor of just $18 per hour when it was enacted in July 2023. This miserable wage is only one dollar more than the city’s minimum wage—and less than half of a living wage for a single adult with no children. To raise a family on such a wage in New York City is next to impossible.
Despite the urgent need for raises to lift workers out of poverty and cope with the out-of-control cost of living, the DC 37 bureaucracy is collaborating with the Mamdani administration to stall. Negotiations between the union and the city are not even scheduled to begin until the contract expires, an extraordinary repudiation of the principle of “no contract, no work.” This has become standard practice by municipal unions in New York, and is intended to wear down workers.
Workers must respond by taking the initiative. This means building a network of rank-and-file committees across the city to oppose the stalling tactics of the union bureaucracy and prepare a genuine fight, under the democratic control of workers themselves.
Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won office on a promise to raise the standard of living for the city’s working class, which has suffered through decades of stagnating wages and the dismantling of benefits while the cost of living has soared. However, he promptly began abandoning his campaign pledges even before taking office.
*****
Mamdani has assembled an administration with a long track record of imposing cuts on city workers. His first deputy mayor is Dean Fuleihan, who, over his 50-year career in Democratic politics, has consistently imposed austerity on city employees on behalf of finance capital. As budget director and first deputy mayor for Democrat Bill de Blasio, Fuleihan collaborated with union bureaucrats to cut city workers’ real wages (through 2 percent annual raises) and benefits. He also set the stage for privatizing retirees’ healthcare, which was imposed through a backroom deal with city unions, including DC 37.
To cover for his record, Mamdani has established the so-called Mayor’s Office of Worker Power. The agency is overseen by Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, Biden’s former labor secretary who intervened to push through sellout contracts at the west coast docks and among Boeing machinists. But even this fig leaf explicitly excludes municipal workers on the grounds that it would create a “conflict of interest.”
Mamdani’s record does not merely expose his own program. It flows from the fact that even the most limited improvements to workers’ conditions is possible only through an independent movement of the working class against the corporate oligarchy and its two party system.
*****
Beyond the city limits, mass protests emerged against the Trump administration’s murderous ICE occupation of Minneapolis. And internationally, governments across Europe are being shaken by ongoing mass student protests and major strike action.
The conditions exist for a powerful unified struggle by municipal workers in the city. Tens of thousands of transit workers have been without a contract since May, and are facing the same demands to sacrifice yet again despite their vital role in the functioning of a city with obscene wealth flowing through Wall Street and corporate boardrooms. Emergency Medical Service workers, who are covered under a separate DC-37 contract, have been without an agreement, and without a raise, since 2022. Fire Department EMTs start just above the city’s wage floor, a poverty-level wage that results in rapid turnover. Conditions for workers throughout New York are reaching an impasse.
6. Quebec Premier endorses the French state’s violent crackdown on student-worker protests
Following an October 26 telephone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, Quebec’s newly elected premier, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, published a message on his Facebook page stating that he had “expressed the full support and solidarity of the Government of Quebec and our condemnation of the unrest fomented by the far left.”
By adopting the Élysée’s rhetoric about “seditious acts” attributed to “organized far-left groups,” the leader of the Quebec separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) is endorsing a narrative aimed at smearing social protest and justifying the state violence deployed against it. This is a clear signal that his own government and the entire ruling elite—pro-Quebec independence and federalist alike— will resort to the same methods against the working class in Canada.
The youth-led protests sweeping France and Europe express the universal opposition of workers and young people to sweeping social spending cuts, the high cost of living, militarism and war, and police repression. The Macron government is trampling democracy underfoot by criminalizing protests in order to defend the interests of the capitalist oligarchy, whose wealth has soared since the 2008 global financial crisis, and especially during and after the COVID pandemic.
The movement launched by French high school students against dilapidated schools and a chronic teacher shortage has fueled broad pan-European protests in opposition to the rising cost of living, the housing crisis and rearmament. From Spain to Serbia, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Greece, young people and the working class are entering into struggle against the state-big business assault on their living and working conditions.
In France, the government has responded with dictatorial measures. Tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers have been mobilized; thousands of demonstrators have been arrested, most of them under the age of 18; and numerous protesters have been maimed by crowd-control weapons.
Unable to suppress social anger despite banning gatherings and imposing curfews, the Macron government is brandishing the threat of a state of emergency and putting forward “anti-vandalism” laws aimed at terrorizing the population so as to silence all social opposition.
St-Pierre Plamondon’s enthusiasm for the French state’s repression and the ruling class campaign to turn reality on its head and smear those opposing rule by the financial elite as “anti-democratic” follows an especially right-wing election campaign in Quebec, during which the PQ and all the establishment parties vied with one another over who could best impose reactionary measures. The PQ’s program for Quebec “sovereignty,” based on austerity, militarism and the continual demonization of immigrants, was explicitly presented to the ruling class as the best means of slashing public spending and building an “entrepreneurial Quebec” allied with US imperialism.
With its pro-business nationalist program widely unpopular, the PQ has sought in recent years to broaden its support within the ruling elite by aligning itself with the far right, going so far as to echo the anti-immigrant diatribes of fascists such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
*****
The Canadian ruling elite is well aware that its agenda of rearmament and imperialist aggression—which requires drastic cuts to public services to finance a massive increase in the military budget to 5 percent of GDP by 2035—is deeply unpopular.
Under conditions of growing social inequality and the continued erosion of what remains of the welfare state, the ruling class knows that it is sitting on a social powder keg. But confronted with intensifying inter-imperialist tensions and an unsustainable economic situation, it neither wants to nor can offer concessions.
Since social spending cuts and the assault on workers are incompatible with democratic forms of government, the ruling elite—in Canada as in the United States and Europe—is turning to authoritarian methods to impose its diktats and increase worker exploitation.
Across Canada, austerity imposed at both the provincial and federal levels has been accompanied by an unprecedented attack on workers’ democratic rights, particularly the right to strike.
*****
The working class cannot defend its fundamental democratic rights—including the right to protest and the right to strike—by appealing to the very capitalist state that is abolishing them in order to preserve the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchy.
What is needed instead is a unified struggle by workers on both sides of the Atlantic against St-Pierre Plamondon, Carney, Trump and Macron—and their common turn toward dictatorship to crush growing social opposition and restructure class relations for war.
This requires a political break with the union apparatuses that isolate and sabotage workers’ struggles—with the full support of establishment “left” parties such as the NDP and Québec Solidaire—in order to maintain “social peace,” that is, capitalist order.
English-speaking, French-speaking and immigrant workers in Canada must unite with one another, and with their class brothers and sisters in North America and Europe, in an independent political mobilization against police repression, austerity and war—and their common source, bankrupt capitalism. The basis for this struggle is a socialist and internationalist perspective and the struggle for workers’ power.
7. Pseudo-lefts campaign for Labour, Greens in New Zealand election
As New Zealand approaches an election on November 7, there is widespread hostility among workers and young people to both the National Party, which leads the current coalition government, and the main opposition Labour Party. Combined support for the two major parties has fallen below 60 percent, a historic collapse. Neither will be able to form a government without relying on two or three other parties.
Labour and National, as well as their support parties, share the same basic agenda: to drive down spending on public services and impose the cost of the economic crisis on working people, while sharply increasing military spending and recruitment and integrating New Zealand into US-led imperialist wars.
Workers and young people in New Zealand, as is the case internationally, are being radicalized and looking for a means to oppose war and austerity. The Socialist Equality Group’s election campaign in the Hutt South electorate—where SEG leader Tom Petterson is standing as a candidate—has found growing anti-capitalist sentiment and support for socialist ideas.
*****
The more explosive this global crisis becomes, the more vehemently the pseudo-lefts insist that nothing can be done except to “pressure” right-wing governments for reforms. In France, the “left populist” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, along with the French union leaders, says that President Macron should offer token reforms—even as his government unleashes police violence against young people and is preparing for dictatorship.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) New York mayor Zohran Mamdani—who is glorified by SA in New Zealand—claims that it is possible to collaborate with the fascist and war criminal Donald Trump to make life more affordable.
In Australia, the Victorian Socialists (VS) are standing in the state election with a program of very limited reforms, similar to that of the Greens, which the organization claims can be extracted by getting into parliament and putting pressure on Labor governments. VS and its national arm, the recently formed Australian Socialist Party (ASP), are hailed by the ISO, which says “a New Zealand equivalent … is sorely needed,” even while admitting that the ASP is “not revolutionary.”
Like the ASP and the DSA, the New Zealand pseudo-lefts trace their origins to tendencies which broke from the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, during the last century and adapted themselves to nationalism and reformism. They have since lurched further to the right and transformed into openly pro-imperialist appendages of the union bureaucracy and the established parties.
The insistence by the ISO and Socialist Aotearoa that Labour and the Greens can be made to serve the working class is a 21st-century version of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which Trotsky fought against in the 1930s. The Popular Fronts subordinated the workers of France and Spain to alliances with capitalist parties and governments, betraying revolutionary movements and paving the way for fascism.
The Socialist Equality Group’s intervention in the 2026 election is directed against all these tendencies. Its campaign in Hutt South is not a bid for a seat in parliament to “pressure” a future Labour government. Its focus is on the most urgent political task: to build a new party based on the whole heritage of the struggle for Marxism and Trotskyism and the lessons of all the victories and defeats of the working class.
The Fourth International was founded on the understanding that the crisis of humanity is a crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class. Building that revolutionary leadership today requires a relentless political struggle to expose every capitalist party, the union bureaucracy and their pseudo-left defenders.
We urge workers and young people to support our campaign, vote for the SEG’s candidate Tom Petterson in Hutt South, but most importantly to join the SEG and fight to build the New Zealand section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
8. United States: Teamsters shut down Genesys nurses’ strike after isolating it for more than a year
After being isolated by the Teamsters union on the picket line for 411 days, the nearly 700 nurses and case workers of Henry Ford Genesys Hospital, in Grand Blanc, Michigan, outside the industrial city of Flint, have “ratified,” under duress, a contract that leaves in place the very conditions they walked out to change. The staffing ratios from the previous contract remain — the contract under which the nurses struck, because Henry Ford refused to honor it.
The walkout began September 1, 2025, after the contract expired in June and negotiations deadlocked over staffing and pay. The nurses struck against conditions in which they were routinely assigned more patients than they could safely care for, forced into exhausting overtime, and left without adequate support. One medical-surgical nurse told the World Socialist Web Site that understaffing forced her to choose between holding the hand of a dying patient and passing pain medication. “We all have a lot of shame and guilt from not being able to take care of people properly,” she said.
Henry Ford Health — the 13-hospital, $12 billion system that took over Genesys in October 2024 — answered with an aggressive campaign of strikebreaking. It kept the hospital running with contract nurses paid more than $100 an hour, recruited permanent replacements, and publicly praised the scabs. In November 2025 it declared an impasse and imposed its terms unilaterally. In December it threatened to permanently replace the strikers. It used court injunctions to strip the picket line of tents, chairs and burn barrels through the winter. When a mass shooting struck a church two miles from the hospital, striking ER nurses ran back to help treat the victims — and were ordered by administrators to “get out.”
The hospital that left them in the cold, eager to replace them, is now supposed to be trusted to respect a contract it never respected before. The 13 percent wage increase over three years is roughly what Henry Ford would have handed out as a cost-of-living adjustment anyway, union or no union. It is also unclear from the available details whether nurses will be guaranteed their original jobs, one of the main reasons they held the line for months.
The vote totals tell the story. The contract passed 230 to 165 — a 58.2 percent turnout, with only about a third of the total bargaining unit casting a ballot in favor.
On Facebook, one nurse wrote, “I voted no also, what was the point of taking all the concessions and getting nothing for what we walked out for? I’m deeply sad at the result, but I’ve moved on. I took a position elsewhere. Henry Ford doesn’t deserve me or any of us that stood up for what we believed in for our patients in the community.”
*****
Genesys nurses held the line for 411 days, stayed out through a winter of court injunctions, scab labor and threats of permanent replacement. While the strikers did not lack courage, they were isolated and betrayed by the Teamsters bureaucracy.
Through all of this, the Teamsters did nothing to broaden the fight. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman visited the picket line in October 2025 — but their purpose was to prepare the isolation and eventual shutdown of the strike, not to win it.
O’Brien, who in 2023 blocked a strike by 340,000 UPS workers and pushed through a contract that opened the way for tens of thousands of job cuts, who helped block the rail strike under Biden, and who spoke at the Republican National Convention, offered no strategy. The union substituted controlled demonstrations for industrial action: a rally in Lansing built around the Democratic Party’s long-dead Safe Patient Care Act, and an “informational picket” in Detroit that mobilized 800 members while stopping nothing.
The Teamsters deliberately kept the Genesys strike isolated from the struggle of the Corewell Health nurses. Ten thousand registered nurses at Corewell, members of Teamsters Local 2024, voted by 90 percent in March 2026 to authorize a strike over the same issues. Corewell Hospitals are located across the state of Michigan. Corewell Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak is less than fifty miles away from Henry Ford Genesys.
Though a strike against Corewell would have greatly strengthened the position of Genesys nurses, the Teamsters never called one. The eventual contract included a no-strike clause prohibiting sympathy strikes, and a “joint staffing committee” explicitly barred from requiring the addition of a single nurse and immune to the grievance procedure.
Even within Genesys itself, the strike was kept separate from the rest of the workforce: a separate technical unit ratified its own contract in June 2026 and kept working, while Henry Ford concluded eight separate union contracts during the strike.
This is the record of the trade union bureaucracy. Its function is not to fight the corporations but to police the working class on their behalf — to absorb workers’ anger, channel it into dead ends, and deliver them back to work on management’s terms. That is what has just happened at Genesys.
Many Genesys nurses are now signing a petition backed by right-wing forces to decertify the Teamsters. That is a measure of how completely the nurses have lost confidence in the union. But decertification is a diversion that would leave the essential question untouched.
That question is the construction of a leadership and an organization they genuinely control. The opposition now welling up among the nurses must be channeled into building organizational structures that belong to the nurses themselves.
*****
The lesson of Genesys is that the working class can only defend itself through its own independent organization — against the hospital chains, against the union apparatus that serves them, and against the parties of war and austerity. The Genesys nurses have shown the way with a year of courage and sacrifice. The nurses who come after them — at Corewell, at Michigan Medicine, across the country — must take up that fight, and win it.
9. Mexico’s government imposes rejected wage deal on health workers as union moves against protesters
On October 28, health care workers of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) found the 8 percent wage package, they had rejected in the streets already on their pay stubs. A text message from the IMSS thanked them “for sustaining the IMSS every day.”
That same day, the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration (CFCRL) issued a resolution registering the agreement between the IMSS and the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS). No worker voted on it.
Workers carried out their plans for a third national march on October 30, blocking the entrances of the Interior Ministry (Segob) in Mexico City, with protests in 11 cities across eight states. The Mexico City government put the turnout in the capital at 800; organizers had expected at least 10,000. A “constituent assembly” the next day called a fourth national march for November 9.
The rebellion continues, but it faces a major turning point. The vote of October 14, in which workers overwhelmingly rejected the first offer, has simply been overridden, not by SNTSS Secretary General Rafael Olivos alone, but by the labor machinery the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum and her party Morena have further integrated into the state through its 2019 labor reform in the name of “union democracy.”
The same state now deals with the movement’s most pliant representatives, while the union bureaucracy hunts down the most combative workers. The struggle cannot be won within this “legal” framework, whether by retaking the SNTSS through its statutes or by registering a new union under the same laws. It requires organizations independent of the union apparatus, the state and Morena.
*****
The deal splits the 8 percent into 4 percent on the base wage and 4 percent on a rent allowance known as Concepto 11. Only the base wage counts toward pensions. Against annual inflation of 3.45 percent in September, the base wage gains just over half a point.
*****
The split has brought into the open the question of whether to retake the SNTSS or form another union. Animal Político reported a disputed proposal for a congress of more than 150 delegates to form a “new union option.” Soto has denied any plan to found a new union.
Morena’s 2019 labor reform promised union democracy and the freedom to choose a union. The CFCRL it created has now registered a contract revision that no worker voted on. Whether workers retake the SNTSS through its statutes or register a new union, they will answer to the same registry, the same labor courts and the same Labor Secretariat. A new union recognized on these terms would face the same demand Sheinbaum made of the SNTSS on October 21: “The union has to cooperate.” As Leon Trotsky wrote of Mexico as early as 1940, “the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions.”
Nor does the nonpartisan stance adopted on October 31 make the movement independent. A movement that asks Morena’s Interior Ministry to arrange the removal of a Morena deputy remains, whatever its intentions, tied to Morena. Independence requires a conscious break with Morena, with the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), whose leader workers drove from their sit-in on October 21, and with every other party of the capitalist class.*****
The rank and file have shown a different instinct, holding the encampments at IMSS headquarters and at the union building since October 8 and 9. The committees the October 31 assembly agreed to build point in the right direction. To advance, they must be independent of the SNTSS and its statutes, of the CFCRL and of Morena. Elected in every hospital and clinic, with recallable delegates, such committees could organize the defense of every worker summoned before the Honor and Justice Commission, take inventory of the shortages and open the books of the IMSS and the union.
On this basis they could prepare what the movement’s leaders have so far ruled out: a national strike organized from below, with emergency services kept running under workers’ control, as in Chihuahua on October 9.
*****
It requires linking IMSS workers with those of IMSS-Bienestar and the ISSSTE, with the CNTE teachers and with health workers internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Above all, it requires a socialist program and the building of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Mexico. The World Socialist Web Site urges IMSS and IMSS-Bienestar workers who want to build these committees to contact us.
10. Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising: Revolt against intolerable conditions in the past—and present
In 1381, following the devastation of the Black Death and in a war-driven economic crisis, peasants in southern England rose in rebellion against the imposition of a poll tax. The Peasants’ Revolt was crushed by military repression after being lulled with false promises by the king.
Pandemic, war, economic crisis, the machinations of the ruling class, revolt—these are timely matters. To find a film echoing them is significant.
To find those contemporary echoes so explicitly stated is even more noteworthy. Veteran filmmaker Paul Greengrass began writing The Uprising in 2020, two days into the first COVID lockdown. His script is sympathetic to a population devastated by a pandemic and draws clear links between the advisory Council to King Richard II and today’s oligarchs.
Greengrass could not initially get his film made but has explained that “it started becoming more and more relevant. It felt very strongly contemporary when I wrote it, and it became only more contemporary as the years went by.”
Greengrass deserves credit for this, and for his continued attention to contemporary conditions. It reflects well on a successful director of Hollywood action movies that he continues to come back to the injustices of the world around him.
*****
With whatever limitations, he continues to be angry at oppression and the oppressors. His determination to continue exploring this puts him in a minority of directors. It reflects well, too, that he has turned to a moment of British revolutionary history that deserves to be better known than it is.
The Uprising follows historical events reasonably closely. The leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt—Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and radical preacher John Ball (Jamie Bell)—are here. To underscore the identification with the mass of the oppressed, Greengrass’s central character is a fictional but representative Essex laborer, Ploughman (Andrew Garfield). He is humanity identified as labor: “I am what I do,” he says.
Comparing his historical epic with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Greengrass asked himself, “Who’s my central character going to be? It’s going to be the simple farmer, not Maximus.”
The Black Death devastated Britain in 1348, killing 30-45 percent of the population. The result was super-exploitation on two fronts.
The labor shortage, which led to a Europe-wide drive for better wages and conditions, saw the aristocracy intensify its demands on labor. The feudal economy was based on serfdom, agricultural laborers tied to the landed estates of the aristocracy by debt bondage.
The abundance of land and shortage of labor after the Black Death created competition for employment. Workers were becoming more mobile in the quest for living wages, breaking from the tied land and beginning to move to towns. It was the first step towards their proletarianization.
In response, the English monarchy froze wages to force more labor from their reduced workforce.
The monarchy was also trying to finance wars in France. The wars had resumed in 1369 when Edward III of England, now King of France again, attempted to regain previously held French territory.
*****
The portrayal of the pent-up fury of the oppressed finally erupting is compelling. Garfield conveys the mute swelling of this anger and frustration brilliantly as the tax officials plunder and degrade his community. His explosive cry of “We’ve given you enough!” gives life to Lenin’s description of “the exploited and oppressed masses [realizing] the impossibility of living in the old way.”
This rings true for audiences. As Greengrass has said, “It’s how people feel today a lot of the time: we’ve had enough.”
In a blatant act of victimization for trade union activity, Ash Field Academy special school in Leicester has announced the dismissal of UNISON trade union representative and teaching assistant Tom Barker on September 29 following an 11-month investigation.
Teaching assistants who are members of UNISON will take strike action on November 4, marking 16 days of action in his defense and to demand the overturning of his dismissal.
Barker was suspended in October 2025 just days after organising a ballot for strike action over low staffing levels which raised safety concerns for children and staff alike. During his 11-month suspension Barker was subject to three separate investigations, seven interviews, and a hearing which lasted a total of 15 hours.
UNISON insists that Barker has been victimised for his role in the previous strike vote and that Discovery Schools Academy Trust (DSAT), which runs Ash Field Academy, has penalised him for union activity.
The Trust has not revealed the nature of the allegations against Barker, who has launched an appeal against the dismissal. A mass picket will be held outside the school calling on solidarity across trade unions and the community in his defence during the strike on November 4.
UNISON Leicester City branch secretary Sam Randfield, said: “UNISON has been clear throughout this extraordinarily drawn-out investigative process: we consider the allegations against Tom to have been made in bad faith, and we don’t believe the evidence supports the Trust’s decision.
“Rather, we consider these acts to be vindictive attempts to punish UNISON members at Ash Field for pushing back against dangerously deep cuts to the workforce.”
*****
Rising costs and depleted school budgets have seen a significant increase in redundancies and pay cuts of up to 20 percent and a restructuring of pay grades for thousands of TAs across the sector. 50 percent of schools reported cutting teaching assistants (2025) and 55 percent reported cutting support staff overall. Almost three quarters (74 percent) of school leaders expected TA cuts in 2025-2026.
The victimization of Barker is an attempt to stifle any opposition to this agenda. The actions of DSAT demonstrate that the defense of wages, jobs and conditions will be a bitter battle, necessitating unified action across the sector.
*****
Educators must mobilize their collective and independent strength against this offensive and in opposition to the trade union bureaucracy, which drives every dispute down a blind alley of appeals to employers and the government.
The suspension of Barker must be lifted and a unified campaign launched to oppose the decimation of state education. The drive to privatization, cuts in education spending and the defense of the basic democratic right to organize in the workplace can only be fought by the building of independent rank-and-file committees.
This is the second 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.
*****
Adi’s falsification becomes especially glaring in his treatment of the Communist International’s founding manifesto, which Trotsky wrote. Adi presents Lenin as having extended the national question beyond the oppressed peoples of the former Tsarist Empire to the colonial world as a whole. He stresses that Lenin regarded the oppressed peoples of Africa and Asia as an active revolutionary force in the struggle against imperialism, and that the revolutionary movement in the colonies was “vital” because imperialism might be breached there “at its weakest link”.
Within these passages on Lenin, Adi introduces the 1919 Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World, without identifying its author. Adi notes the manifesto’s call to the “Colonial Slaves of Africa and Asia” to rise against colonial rule, before citing its conclusion:
The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class... The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your own liberation.
Adi then offers the following conclusion:
This formulation suggested that not all the Bolsheviks understood or shared Lenin’s views on the colonial question and the full significance and nature of the anti-colonial struggles.[8]
Which Bolsheviks did not share “Lenin’s views”? Trotsky wrote the Manifesto, the founding Congress of the Communist International adopted it unanimously, and Lenin endorsed it. This foundational programmatic statement of the Third International demonstrated that Trotsky’s views were “shared” entirely by Lenin.
13. Part Two: The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)
The Socialist Equality Party’s founding congress, held in Montreal August 22-24, unanimously adopted the following comprehensive document outlining the party’s historical and international foundations. Following is an abridged continuation from Part One made with the assistance of Socialism AI:
Here is an outline of points 27–38:
The origins of the Trotskyist movement in North America
27. Cannon and Spector's stand — In fall 1928, American Communist Party leader James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector (principal theoretician of the Communist Party of Canada) jointly initiated a struggle to win their parties back to the program of world socialist revolution, after gaining access to Trotsky's critique of the Comintern's draft program, which exposed "socialism in one country" as a national-opportunist perversion of Marxism.
28. Spector's expulsion and statement — Spector was expelled from the CPC within days of his return for refusing to condemn Cannon. His defiant November 6, 1928 statement to the CPC Political Committee summarized the differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism, denounced the squandering of the British and Chinese revolutions, repudiated "socialism in one country," and exposed the Stalinist falsification of party history.
29. The Stalinization of the CPC — The expulsion of Spector and his supporters was decisive in transforming the CPC into a pliant tool of the Soviet bureaucracy. A clique led by Tim Buck—whose provincial outlook, Canadian nationalism, and ignorance of Marxism made him a suitable enforcer of Stalinist orthodoxy—emerged victorious and would toe the Stalinist line for three decades.
30. **The repression of the Left Opposition** — The expulsions were bound up with the bureaucracy's turn to violent repression of the Left Opposition: Trotsky was expelled from the CPSU in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata, then deported to Turkey in 1929, while supporters were rounded up by the GPU. This coincided with the bureaucracy's cribbing of the Left Opposition's economic program and the Comintern's ultra-left "Third Period."
The early struggles of the International Left Opposition and the German catastrophe
31. The founding of the Communist League of America — Cannon and Spector's stand broke the Stalinists' isolation of Trotsky and contributed to the emergence of the International Left Opposition. In May 1929 Trotsky's supporters founded the Communist League of America (Opposition), within which the Canadian Trotskyists functioned for five years, writing for *The Militant*.
32. Jack Macdonald's conversion — Among those won to the CLA was Jack Macdonald, founding chairman and former national secretary of the CPC. His May 1932 statement defended Permanent Revolution, denounced the Comintern's subordination of the Chinese CP to Chiang Kai-shek, and traced the Stalinists' opportunist directives to the Canadian party.
33. The outlawing of the CPC and the "Third Period" — When the Canadian state outlawed the CPC in 1931 under Section 98, the CLA led the defense while exposing the Stalinist leadership's acquiescence to its own outlawing. The "Third Period" ultra-left line labelled social democracy "social fascist" and insisted no distinction be drawn between fascism and social democracy.
34. The German catastrophe — The "Third Period" policy politically disarmed the German working class, paving the way for Hitler. In November 1932 the combined vote of the SPD and KPD exceeded the Nazis', but the immense social power of the organized workers was squandered. Trotsky contrasted the weight of a thousand organized workers with the "human dust" of the fascists.
35. Trotsky's fight for the united front — From September 1930, Trotsky fought for a united front of the KPD and Social Democrats against fascism, including workers' defense guards, while exposing the Social Democratic leaders' complicity. The Stalinists and Social Democrats prevented such a struggle, and when Hitler was appointed Chancellor there was no organized resistance.
The Struggle for the Fourth International
36. The call for the Fourth International — After months of silence from the Comintern and its sections over the German defeat, Trotsky concluded the Third International was dead for the purposes of socialist revolution and in July 1933 issued the call to build a new, Fourth International.
37. The founding of the Workers Party — In 1934 the Trotskyists in the US and Canada founded separate organizations with a common name, the Workers Party, reflecting the shift from winning back the Communist Parties to building new mass revolutionary parties. The previous year CLA militants had led the Toronto anti-fascist strike of up to 25,000 people—the largest of its kind in North America—demonstrating the effectiveness of the united front tactic.
38. The struggle against centrism — The victory of fascism and the Great Depression radicalized millions of workers, producing centrist organizations (the Spanish POUM, Britain's ILP, Germany's SAP) standing between reformism and revolution. Trotsky distinguished the centrism of workers—a temporary stage in their passage to revolutionary politics—from the professional centrist leaders who used the "United Front" to conciliate with the Soviet and labor bureaucracies rather than as an instrument of revolutionary class struggle.
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
