Following Israel’s election on October 27 that produced no clear winner with the necessary 61 seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, President Isaac Herzog has called on Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the largest opposition party Yashar to form a government.
Eisenkot declared in a statement on X, “Now is the time to form a national emergency government. I will do everything to ensure we are worthy”. He has up to four weeks to form a government to replace that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving premier, amid signs that US President Donald Trump is preparing to resume military operations against Iran.
Should Eisenkot fail to form a government, Herzog could turn to Netanyahu to form a national unity government or call fresh elections. Either could leave Netanyahu in power for months.
What is at stake in all these scenarios is the formation of a government able to carry out Washington and Tel Aviv’s war agenda. The election campaign was largely fought as a contest between two war criminals over how best to prosecute the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and extend it to the West Bank, and continue the ongoing wars against Lebanon, Syria and above all Iran.
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Whether Eisenkot or some other politician succeeds in forming a government to replace Netanyahu, or Netanyahu retains power, it will not make an iota of difference to workers in Israel, the region and the wider world.
Eisenkot’s path to the premiership is far from straightforward and is likely to compound the political turmoil roiling the country. The former army chief won 21 seats, with his “Change” allies securing a further 27 seats, while Netanyahu’s coalition secured 53.
Eisenkot set out four conditions for joining his proposed “broad Zionist government committed to the national interest”. These include recognition of Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, liberal and egalitarian state; a commitment to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence; mandatory military, national or civilian service for all Israeli citizens and “recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization whose military and governing capabilities in Gaza must be dismantled”.
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Netanyahu and his coalition bloc have whipped up a vicious anti-Arab campaign, repeatedly claiming that the elections were stolen by Arab parties, alleging bribery, intimidation, forgery and other irregularities. His Likud party is preparing to appeal the election results—either in part or in whole—based on allegations that Arab political parties used electronic means of tracking voters to boost turnout in a manner banned by the High Court of Justice just before the election.
However, the Central Election Committee said that the allegations being probed, even if found to be accurate, were not of a scale that could affect the results. Two other cases of alleged election interference brought by Likud in a bid to delay the official certification of the results have fallen apart.
One of Netanyahu’s longstanding allies, the ultra-orthodox United Torah Judaism that won seven seats, also refused to support Netanyahu’s nomination to form a government for failing to introduce a law exempting the ultra-orthodox Jews who choose to study in religious seminaries from military conscription. Instead, it has secured the support of Lieberman—which along with Eisenkot’s “Change” bloc had campaigned on compulsory military conscription for all Jewish Israelis—for a compromise on exemptions from military service.
Lieberman’s aim in creating what he hopes would be a bloc of 20 seats in the Knesset—if the other ultra-orthodox party Shas were to join—is to secure the premiership for himself. In announcing his decision, he attacked Eisenkot, without naming him, over his claim to lead the “largest party”. Lieberman also criticised Eisenkot’s plans to form a minority government with the support of the Arab parties, saying that talk of such a government cost the “government of change” bloc seven or eight seats in the last 10 days of the campaign.
More than two months after contracts expired for roughly 7,000 hospitality workers at 46 Chicago hotels, the UNITE HERE Local 1 apparatus is keeping the overwhelming majority of its members on the job without an agreement. Despite an 85 percent strike authorization vote in September, union officials have confined the struggle to brief, isolated picket lines involving a tiny fraction of the workforce. At the time of this writing, there are no active pickets, and all hotels are operating normally.
Contracts covering room attendants, housemen, cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, bellmen and front desk staff at Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt hotels expired on August 31. After waiting until September 21 to hold a strike vote, UNITE HERE delayed another two weeks before calling a walkout on October 9 at just six downtown properties. On October 18, it called out workers at the Hilton Chicago and the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
In total, workers at 38 of the 46 hotels have not been called out for a single day. The union has mobilized only dozens of its 7,000 members. Rather than launching an all-out strike to shut down the city’s hospitality industry, it called temporary one- to two-day “Hollywood” strikes, meant only to posture as a fight and let workers blow off steam while ensuring the hotels never lost a dime. Workers who did strike were isolated from their brothers and sisters at other properties and quickly sent back to work under the same expired contracts. UNITE HERE has provided no progress updates.
UNITE HERE has the closest relationship with the city and state Democratic Party and has been determined to prevent a citywide strike by 7,000 hotel workers, which would have brought them into direct conflict with the Democrats. Three of Illinois’ 18 billionaires belong to the Pritzker family, including Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, whose family controls 89 percent of the shareholder voting power in Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Determined to prevent a clash with the Democrats before the midterm elections, Cook County College Teachers Union, Local 1600, also called off a a walkout of 1,500 faculty and staff at the City Colleges of Chicago on October 19.
The same collaboration extends to City Hall where Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union staffer backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, is preparing massive cuts to close an $882 million gap in the city’s 2027 budget. The Chicago Public Schools, which faces a $732 million deficit, is also pressing for deep cuts. In the face of growing opposition by workers and young people who delivered a historic blow to Trump and the Republicans in the midterm elections, the Democratic Party is desperately looking to the union apparatus to hold back the rising tide of militancy and political radicalization of the working class.
During the walkout at the Hilton Chicago, a World Socialist Web Site reporting team spoke with workers fed up with skyrocketing living costs, exhausting workloads and social inequality. Nathan Bell, a bartender, said on the fifth day of the strike, “The conditions are basically all the things that have eroded since COVID. A lot of people either retired or got laid off and never came back. The hotel was like, once we get back up to business levels, we will rehire. That hasn’t happened.
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Describing the impact of rising living costs and declining tips, Bell continued: “You look at what you get paid, and then you look at what your grocery bill is. I buy the same stuff every week, mind you. I’ve watched it go from $180 to $200 to $220 to $275. If you’re working a tip position, you’re at the behest of your guests that come in and tip. And for some of our positions, particularly things like bellmen and doormen, they don’t really tip anymore because people don’t carry cash... Everyone is squeezed.
“We’re all kind of fighting over the same dollar and passing it around, right? Except the owners,” Bell added. “Their dividends keep coming, their stock price keeps rising... I think it’s criminal. The CEO of Hilton makes in one day what the average housekeeper makes in two years... That’s unconscionable in my book.”
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UNITE HERE’s refusal to mobilize its membership reflects the bureaucracy’s deep contempt for the rank and file. When a WSWS reporting team visited pickets at one hotel, a union staffer barred reporters from speaking to workers not coached on speaking to the press, saying workers might say “crazy things” and that their views might not align with the narrative the union is attempting to control.
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Workers can prevent another UNITE HERE betrayal, as happened in 2018. To break the stranglehold of the apparatus, Chicago hotel workers must form rank-and-file strike committees in every hotel and department, democratically elected by and accountable only to the workers. These committees should fight to call out all 46 hotels immediately, establish rank-and-file oversight over all negotiations, and unite hospitality workers with educators, healthcare workers, BP refinery, autoworkers and other sections of the working class through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
That fight is unfolding amid a global upsurge of the class struggle. On October 30, tens of thousands of dock and port workers took part in an international day of action across 113 ports in 22 countries against imperialist war, the Gaza genocide, rising living costs and austerity. This is part of a growing movement of workers and youth in France, Italy, Germany and across Europe against low wages, austerity and war rearmament.
The outcome of these struggles cannot be left to spontaneity or to a union bureaucracy that functions as a labor police force for management and the state. The success of workers’ fights is determined by leadership, organization and a clear political perspective. Above all, this movement must be guided by a socialist perspective that breaks with both parties of big business and strives for the expropriation of the billionaires and democratic control over production by the working class.
More than 4,000 graduate student workers at Harvard University are in the second week of a strike that began Tuesday, October 27, their second walkout this year. Members of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW, Local 5118) have been without a contract since June 2025. The union leadership ended their 40-day strike last spring, the longest in the union’s history, on June 1 without a contract.
Strikers’ demands include wages and benefits that keep pace with the cost of living in Greater Boston, protections for international and noncitizen workers and an independent process for complaints of harassment and discrimination.
The strike follows a vote of 88 percent last month to authorize a walkout. Workers again confront an administration sitting on an endowment of nearly $68 billion. The decisive question is not the militancy of the membership, which has been demonstrated repeatedly, but who controls the struggle.
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A chasm separates the UAW apparatus from the union membership. In the union’s 2026 officer elections, only 98,029 ballots were cast out of roughly 1.1 million eligible active and retired members, a turnout of 8.9 percent—lower even than in 2022, which was already the lowest turnout of any national union election in US history. In many cases workers were never informed that an election was taking place.
HGSU-UAW members cast just 53 ballots, about 1 percent of the local’s membership and down from 308 in 2022. At Columbia, only 29 ballots were cast out of roughly 3,000 members. Meanwhile, these same workers have repeatedly voted by overwhelming margins to strike.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker, was the only candidate for UAW president who challenged the apparatus itself. In September he issued a statement to roughly 100,000 UAW academic workers returning to campus, calling for rank-and-file committees linking university and industrial workers.
The DSA, which backed UAW President Shawn Fain, has joined the corporate press in presenting his reelection as a “mandate.” At Harvard, DSA members hold leading positions in the union and played a central role in ending the spring strike. Their “rank-and-file strategy” has meant, in practice, defending the apparatus against the members.
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A winning strategy for Harvard academic workers requires the formation of a Harvard Graduate Workers Rank-and-File Committee, democratically controlled by workers themselves. Workers should fight for the following program:
Unite all workers across the Cambridge, Longwood and Allston campuses, including master’s students, hourly student workers and the hundreds removed from the bargaining unit in 2025.
Take control of bargaining and all strike decisions. All bargaining sessions must be open to the membership. No closed-door talks, and no end to the strike without a full vote on a written agreement.
Prepare a joint struggle with HAW-UAW, MIT graduate workers and Harvard dining and service workers, and build links with graduate workers at Columbia and UAW Local 4811 at the University of California.
Defend international and noncitizen workers through the mobilization of the working class against ICE and the Trump administration’s attacks, not through reliance on the courts or the Democrats.
Reject any victimization of strikers. An attack on one striker is an attack on all.
Affiliate with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to link the struggle at Harvard with autoworkers, parts workers and educators fighting the same apparatus and the same employers.
On November 3, precision bearing manufacturer Schaeffler AG announced the elimination of 3,460 jobs in Europe, 2,660 of them in Germany. Measured against the core workforce of 31,957 employees, this will destroy around 9 percent of jobs by 2028. Including the cuts resulting from earlier programs and the 1,800 partial retirement contracts already signed, the share leaps to around 18 percent.
While the company bleeds the workforce dry, the Schaeffler family cashes in. For the 2025 financial year alone, a hefty €224 million in dividends went to the family. The cuts are not an “unavoidable constraint” but the result of the owners’ unrestrained greed for profit—and the IG Metall union is not the opponent of this attack but its willing enforcer.
The job cuts now announced are the latest link in a chain of mass slashing that has stretched over years. Under the “Efficiency Programme 2020,” launched during the coronavirus pandemic, Schaeffler destroyed 4,400 jobs across Europe, 3,300 of them in Germany, and closed the plants in Steinhagen and Hameln.
Between 2021 and 2023, a further 2,000 jobs fell victim to “Agenda 4 plus One.” The merger with Vitesco Technologies Group AG in 2024 cost 2,800 jobs. As recently as November 2024, Schaeffler had announced that it would cut around 2,800 jobs in Germany alone. Now, once again on the backs of the workforce, the company will cut 3,460 more.
The current program hits production hardest. Around 50 percent of the cuts fall on manufacturing, 30 percent on research and development and 20 percent on other functional areas. The program affects 16 sites in Europe, and the company plans to close five of them eventually—among them Dortmund with 430 employees and Morbach with 160, both in the Powertrain & Chassis division, which makes products for combustion engines.
Schaeffler will discontinue activities in Berlin (270 employees) and abandon the Schwalbach site, moving a large proportion of its 385 employees to Frankfurt. The company plans further cuts in Höchstadt, Erlangen, Schweinfurt, Herzogenaurach, Bühl, Nuremberg and Regensburg; at the French sites in Haguenau and Toulouse; in Skalica and Kysuce in Slovakia and in Herstal in Belgium.
The thrust is unmistakable. The combustion-engine business is being wound down. The corporate leadership and IG Metall justify this with the “transformation” of the industry to electromobility and with alleged management errors in the past. But this narrative is a smokescreen that conceals the true character of the attack.
The crisis in the auto and supplier industries is not the result of individual wrong decisions but an expression of global overcapacity and the intensified competitive struggle between transnational corporations, which is erupting in the trade war between the US, Europe and China. The EU has imposed import tariffs on Chinese electric cars; the US under Trump has imposed tariffs on the entire auto industry—and German corporations are responding by ruthlessly shifting the costs of the crisis onto their workforces.
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Schaeffler AG likes to present itself as a “family business.” But its foundations were laid under the Nazis—based on plunder, forced labour and war. For a long time, the official founding of Industrie GmbH (later INA) in 1946 in Herzogenaurach was regarded as the “zero hour,” the moment Nazi Germany collapsed. But a study by the historian Gregor Schöllgen, commissioned by the Schaeffler family itself in 2009, revealed the deep entanglement with the Nazis.
The cornerstone was “Aryanisation,” the plundering of Jewish property. In 1940, the company’s co-founder, Wilhelm Schaeffler, acquired Davistan AG in Katscher in Upper Silesia—today Kietrz in Poland—a formerly Jewish textile and carpet factory whose owner, Ernst Frank, had been forced to flee the Nazis. Schaeffler snapped up the heavily indebted business from the administering creditor banks at well below its value.
Wilhelm Schaeffler and his brother Georg joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) around 1938–40. From the summer of 1943, they consolidated the booming military equipment business in the newly founded Wilhelm Schaeffler KG; the plants produced bomb-release mechanisms for the Luftwaffe, incendiary bombs, Wehrmacht (army) uniforms and needle bearings for tanks and military vehicles.
To keep up war production, Schaeffler exploited hundreds of forced labourers in Katscher, mainly from France, the Soviet Union and Poland; the Polish workers were interned under harsh conditions in the local “Polenlager 92” (Poles’ camp 92).
With the Red Army advancing, the family evacuated machinery and materials in 40 railway wagons to Upper Franconia in early 1945. After the end of the war, Wilhelm Schaeffler was extradited to Poland and sentenced to a multi-year prison term for his economic activities in the occupied territory. His brother Georg used the rescued machinery to lay the foundation in Herzogenaurach for today’s global corporation.
This history is not a moral footnote. It reveals the true nature of capitalism. Profits were and are made at the expense of the working class—if necessary, over dead bodies, with war and forced labor.
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The attack at Schaeffler is part of a concerted attack on the entire metal and electrical industries—combined with rearmament, social cuts and preparations for war. The warning strikes of recent days, in which tens of thousands of metalworkers at more than 2,000 workplaces took part, show their readiness to fight. But IG Metall is systematically channeling and smothering this anger in order to prevent a wildfire—in the interests of the corporations.
That is why workers must now build independent rank-and-file action committees—elected by the workers themselves, accountable to the workforce and free of full-time union officials and works council barons. These committees must lead the fight to stop all layoffs and plant closures, for full compensation for inflation, against every wage cut—including the so-called “solidarity contribution”—and against the switch to war production.
In 2026 state health departments have reported eight measles-associated deaths in the United States, six in Pennsylvania, one in New York and one in Wisconsin. From 2016 through 2024, no one in the country died of measles. Three people died in 2025. In less than two years of the dismantling of public health by the Trump administration, spearheaded by anti-vaccine fanatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a record built over decades has been undone, and among the dead are infants too young to have received the vaccine.
These deaths were preventable, and they were permitted. Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, the result of a public program of mass vaccination that cost little and was not organized for profit. From November 10 to 13, a commission of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) will meet to determine whether that status has now been lost.
The return of measles is a byproduct of the malign neglect that the financial oligarchy adopted as its answer to the COVID-19 pandemic, putting the interests of Wall Street above the health and lives of the working class. It has advanced alongside an assault on every social program on which working people depend.
The scale of the resurgence is without precedent in a generation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recorded 5,182 confirmed cases this year as of November 5, against 2,289 in all of 2025 and 285 in 2024.
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The burden of measles falls on those with the least protection. It falls on infants too young for the vaccine, on rural working families without health insurance who live far from a clinic, and on patients whose cancer treatment has destroyed their immunity. Natalie Dailey Garnes of the MD Anderson Cancer Center told The Cancer Letter that some children on immunosuppressive treatment “cannot be re-vaccinated” and “are really dependent upon the broader community to be vaccinated.”
The Amish and other Plain communities have been made the scapegoats of this epidemic. They face real barriers to medical care, including the lack of health insurance and of regular contact with physicians, alongside long-standing religious convictions regarding medical intervention. But as The Cancer Letter’s Claire Marie Porter wrote, the Plain communities “have been largely unvaccinated for 300 years,” and so “something else has changed.”
What has changed is the collapse of immunity in the population around them, as vaccination rates in the public schools fell and the political assault on public health tore down the wall that once kept the virus out. Lancaster County, the center of the Pennsylvania outbreak, accounts for fewer than half of the state’s 1,487 cases.
This policy has found its political expression in Kennedy’s anti-vaccine and anti-science pronouncements. On February 26, 2025, the day a child’s death in the West Texas outbreak was announced, Kennedy declared that “it’s not unusual” and that “we have measles outbreaks every year.”
In August 2026 he suggested that the first two Pennsylvania deaths “may even have been altogether fabricated.” He then asked the CDC’s director to remove them from the agency’s online tally, after CDC staff had already accepted the state’s finding.
Kennedy did not begin the dismantling of public health, which was well advanced under both parties, but he now administers it on behalf of a government of the financial oligarchy.
The attack on vaccinations is bound up with the attack on the social conditions of the working class as a whole. The language of “medical freedom” and parental “choice” promoted by Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement provides the ideological cover for this program. What is presented as the right of the individual to refuse a vaccine is the abandonment by society of any responsibility for the health of its members.
Vaccination has averted 154 million deaths worldwide since 1974, and the measles vaccine alone accounts for 93.7 million of them, according to a study in The Lancet.
The measles vaccine is safe and effective, and mass immunization is an elementary requirement of public health and of the self-defense of the working class.
The anti-vaccine movement is reactionary and must be opposed. It is a petty-bourgeois reaction that preys on legitimate grievances over the cost and inaccessibility of medical care and channels them to the right, and Kennedy’s MAHA is the spearhead of the fascist assault on public health. Workers’ distrust of the state is earned through experience with a ruling class that has dismantled public infrastructure, but that distrust is an indictment of the ruling class, not a reason to refuse vaccination.
None of this is peculiar to the United States. When governments worldwide abandoned COVID-19 elimination, healthcare systems everywhere were thrown into disarray, and by mid-2020, 90 percent of countries reported disruptions to essential services, routine immunization among them. Measles cases among children under five rose 40 percent worldwide between 2019 and 2023, according to a study in Nature Medicine.
On Saturday afternoon, Michał O. drove his car onto the Main Market Square in Kraków and opened fire indiscriminately on civilians from inside the vehicle. According to the latest information, he killed six people, including one British citizen, and injured another 16, some of them critically. Among the injured were two police officers who managed to arrest him after a car chase and a brief exchange of gunfire. The authorities appealed for blood donations.
The 24-year-old Polish attacker was also seriously injured. He underwent two operations and died in hospital on Monday morning. He was wearing military camouflage clothing, a helmet and a protective vest and “used a military-style rifle,” according to the Krakow police spokesperson. The weapon was apparently a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, for which the perpetrator held an official firearms licence. Additional weapons and ammunition were found in his vehicle. According to Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, the attacker was not a member of the Polish armed forces.
At the attacker’s home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, approximately two hours’ drive to the north, police later discovered the bodies of his parents and sister. According to local authorities, they died on Saturday morning. All three bodies had gunshot wounds. Like his father, the perpetrator was a sport shooter, and the family owned several firearms, a fact known in the neighbourhood. The family had lived in the rented house for more than ten years and was regarded as an ordinary, friendly family. Michał himself was considered quiet and withdrawn, but nevertheless helpful.
According to Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski, the perpetrator is believed to have held “very radical views.” Investigators found “indications that he espoused a far-right ideology” in the apartment. Whether and how this was connected to the crime remains unclear. What is clear, at the very least, is that his martial combat gear suggests roots in a militaristic, gun-oriented culture. At the same time, contradictory claims are circulating on social media about his alleged sympathies for Russia or Ukraine, for fascists or for the LGBTQ movement.
On Sunday, prosecutor Tomasz Waszczuk, spokesperson for the Krakow District Prosecutor’s Office investigating the case, announced that the attack was being classified as an act of terrorism. President Karol Nawrocki has declared two days of national mourning. The attack in Poland’s second-largest city took place shortly before Independence Day on November 11.
Although the circumstances surrounding the crime remain unclear, it is certainly the largest attack since the restoration of capitalism in 1990. In recent decades, Poland has experienced neither major mass shootings nor terrorist attacks of the kind that have tragically become commonplace in other countries. Poland’s crime rate is comparatively low, and its homicide rate per capita is below the EU average.
Right-wing politicians have repeatedly cited this as evidence of the success of strict laws and restrictive immigration policies. In fact, however, the only attack that caused a shock comparable to the latest incident was the assassination of the liberal mayor of Gdańsk in 2019. Paul Adamowicz was stabbed to death on stage during a charity concert by a 28-year-old supporter of the Law and Justice party (PiS). Adamowicz was one of the fiercest critics of the then PiS government.
Violent attacks in Polish schools have been rare and, due to strict gun laws, have generally involved blunt-force injuries and stabbings. But this appears to be becoming a thing of the past.
One indication is the increase in firearms licenses by 50,000 to 411,000 in 2025 alone. Violence is rising particularly in schools. At the beginning of October, a corresponding wave of violence shook Poland’s schools. Within three days, one person was murdered and around two dozen injured. The nervousness of the authorities was evident in their decision to conduct bag searches at more than 80,000 schools within just a few days and arrest 135 people, particularly over threats made online.
Behind such individual incidents lie more fundamental social developments. In 2023, following mass shootings in California, the WSWS wrote: “Mass shootings, however, cannot simply be explained by individual motives. Mass violence is a social phenomenon and therefore also requires an understanding of social issues.”
In Poland, alongside sharply intensifying class conflicts, a nationalist hysteria over alleged threats is particularly prominent. The country plays a leading role in NATO’s war against Russia, and longstanding anti-Russian resentments have been systematically intensified since the beginning of the war. They go hand in hand with a military buildup supported across party lines.
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Recent events have repeatedly demonstrated just how poisoned the political atmosphere has become. For example, Bartosz T. Wieliński, deputy editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, made the absurd suggestion in a commentary that a “large-scale Russian operation to influence young people” was behind the violence in schools.
The conflict over Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal between the government of Donald Tusk and PiS-aligned President Karol Nawrocki has also escalated in recent days. After Nawrocki refused to swear in newly elected constitutional judges chosen by parliament, and the court’s PiS-appointed president, Bogdan Święczkowski, denied them access to the court, Święczkowski was suspended and a female judge close to Tusk’s camp assumed temporary leadership of the court.
Far-right extremists besieged the court, while Nawrocki cut short a foreign trip and gained access to the sealed-off court building after midnight. During the incident, the former amateur boxer became involved in a physical altercation with one of the newly appointed female judges.
Two of the most prominent nominally left members of the Senate Democratic caucus appeared on Sunday television interview programs to claim that there were deals to be made with fascist president Donald Trump on economic and social policy, while arguing against focusing on holding Trump and his cronies accountable for crimes ranging from financial corruption to waging illegal wars.
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Sanders called Trump “erratic” rather than fascist, authoritarian or dictatorial, adding that he was “a good politician” who could be persuaded to work with the Democrats. “I think, when Trump looks out in the world and he sees millions of people working for starvation wages, he might not be unsympathetic to raising the minimum wage to a living wage,” Sanders said. “He would love, I think, to take credit for doing what every other major country does: guaranteeing healthcare to all people.”
While nominally an independent, Sanders sought the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020, at times even calling himself a democratic socialist. But in practice, he has been a completely conventional bourgeois politician, particularly backing the foreign policy of American imperialism, whether on Ukraine, the Middle East or China.
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In response to a question from Welker, Sanders embraced the position put forward by Democratic senator-elect Adam Hamilton of Kansas, the pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in that state, who said the Democrats should prioritize cooperation with Trump over retribution for his innumerable crimes. He offered this sophistry:
Do we want to hold the Trump administration accountable for their corruption, for their illegal, unconstitutional actions? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, when you’ve got the highest rate of childhood poverty in America, of any major country, when 20 percent of our seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 a year, when people are scared to death that Elon Musk and the other billionaires are pushing AI down our throats with cataclysmic impacts on the economy, our privacy rights, on our health, and—and imposing an existential threat to humanity, we cannot spend all of our time investigating Trump. We’ve got to stand up for working-class families, make a real difference in their lives.
According to Sanders, holding Trump accountable would be an obstacle to bettering the conditions of life for working people. Besides its inherent absurdity—presuming that Trump can be moved by genuine concern for the interests of the masses of workers whom he has despised and exploited his entire life—Sanders is covering up the real driving force of the attacks on jobs, living standards and social benefits.
These are facing destruction, not simply because Trump is a criminal (although that is certainly true), but because the financial oligarchy must destroy the social gains of the working class to maintain its profits, increase its wealth, and pay for the massive expansion of its police-military apparatus under conditions of escalating warfare around the world.
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In his appearance on CNN, Sanders struck a slightly more left pose, at least initially, declaring, “The new Democratic majority has got to be bold, work, take on the oligarchs, and fight for the working class of this country.”
But he admitted in response to questions from host Dana Bash that not even half the Democratic caucus in the House supports Medicare for all—to say nothing of the Republicans—and there is even less support in the Senate. Sanders cited polls showing the popularity of guaranteed access to health care for all, but these numbers only demonstrated that the corporate-controlled two-party system is incapable of providing what working people want and need.
Asked about the December 11 deadline for funding the federal government, Sanders demurred when asked if he would oppose legislation that continued funding for the war in Iran, saying “nobody is comfortable with the government shutting down. Nobody wants that.” Instead, he appealed to “my Republican colleagues” to pressure Trump to end the war.
He added that on January 1, 2027, 15 million people would lose access to healthcare because of the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2025. Again, he appealed to “our Republican colleagues” to take action to prevent that social disaster, without offering any action on the part of the Democrats.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, appearing on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” said she looked forward to bipartisan cooperation with congressional Republicans and the Trump administration on legislation on credit card rates and on further trade restrictions on the export of sophisticated computer chips to China.
Warren said, “We have worked on a bipartisan basis to try to stop Donald Trump from encouraging Nvidia, permitting Nvidia to send these chips to China. And now we’re seeing some of the consequences of that. So we have got a lot of places where work needs to be done and a lot of different avenues to do it.”
The anti-China campaign is only one of the areas in which the Democrats are pushing for an even more aggressive foreign policy stance for US imperialism, even if cloaked in different rhetoric than Trump’s bullying demands for concessions on trade, investment flows, and outright land grabs (Greenland, Canada, Panama, etc.)
Neither Sanders nor Warren mentioned the war in Ukraine, but behind the scenes the Democratic leadership is already engaged in discussions on how to revive the flow of US arms and financial aid to the right-wing dictatorship of Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president hailed the outcome of the US midterm election as a positive for the war against Russia.
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The administration treats congressional oversight as a crime, while the Democrats, who won both houses in a landslide and need no Republican votes to pass legislation, respond with offers of cooperation, as if the losers had won.
Their appeals for “bipartisan common ground” are not naïveté. They reflect the class interests the Democrats share with Trump: defense of the financial oligarchy, fear of the social opposition expressed in the vote, and agreement on the essentials of imperialist policy abroad.
Staff members from The College, Western Sydney University’s preparatory feeder school, spoke passionately at a National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members’ meeting last week to discuss WSU management’s plan to impose a block teaching regime across the entire university, one of the largest in Australia.
Educators described the “crushing” conditions inflicted on both staff and students since the block mode blueprint was forced on them at The College at the start of last year.
They outlined the oppressive staff workloads produced by having to deliver subjects and assess students in compressed four-week blocks, and the pressure from management to push students through in order to achieve inflated student retention and satisfaction rates.
For the students, mostly working-class young people trying to qualify for university courses, it has meant completing four blocks each semester, instead of four subjects over a 13-week semester, watering down the content and leaving no time for deeper or reflective learning, nor for adequate feedback.
Over the past month, WSU management has engaged in a sham consultation process with staff on its “Western Momentum” model, giving them only until last week to file submissions before the WSU Board of Trustees makes a final decision in early March. WSU students and the casual staff—on whom WSU relies for up to 80 percent of its teaching—have not even been told about it.
At the NTEU meeting, however, the trade union’s branch president David Burchell tried to downplay the danger of the plan, and the agenda behind it. He said it was just a “loopy idea” from the vice chancellor and there would be plenty of time to respond next year via the “change” consultation processes in the union’s latest enterprise agreement with management.
This is a warning that the NTEU leadership will seek to smother any real struggle against the plan, as it did by blocking calls by the WSU Rank-and-File Committee (RFC) for a unified fight in 2024 against its imposition at The College.
*****
For decades, the NTEU and CPSU have imposed sellout [enterprise agreements] at the universities, cutting wages in real terms and assisting restructuring. This has also left students with larger classes, narrower study options, less educational support and fewer services.
Politically, the current restructuring is being driven by the Albanese government’s pro-corporate and militarized reformatting of tertiary education, as outlined in its 2024 Universities Accord report, and now being enforced by “mission compacts” that universities must sign with Labor’s Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC).
On behalf of the corporate elite, the Labor government is maintaining the previous Liberal-National Coalition government’s Job-ready Graduates scheme that sets punitive fees of more than $50,000 for three-year arts and humanities students, particularly seeking to push them into science and technology courses, while cutting the funding for universities for humanities degrees.
By also capping international student enrollments, Labor is increasingly starving the universities of adequate funding, along with public schools and public hospitals, and gutting the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and other social programs.
To fight this offensive, university workers and students have to actively take matters into their own hands. They need to build genuinely democratic new forms of organization—rank-and-file committees—open to all students and staff, including the majority of university workers who are no longer union members because of the unions’ track records.
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) members have spoken with workers, students and the rural poor about worsening living conditions and growing disillusionment with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.
The soaring cost of living, poverty and deterioration of essential services that drove millions into the streets in the 2022 mass uprising, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign, remain unresolved. The JVP/NPP, which exploited mass hostility to the traditional capitalist parties to win office in 2024, has continued the International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity programme imposed by its predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe—imposing heavier taxes on workers and the poor, gutting public services and pressing ahead with privatisation.
The discussions took place during a campaign for an SEP public meeting, “Two Years of JVP/NPP Rule: A Government of Big Business and IMF Austerity,” on November 10 at the Colombo Public Library auditorium. SEP/IYSSE members distributed Sinhala and Tamil versions of the meeting announcement at workplaces, universities and residential areas, discussing the government’s record and the need for an independent socialist movement of the working class.
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The discussions revealed growing opposition to the JVP/NPP government and the trade union bureaucracies that have suppressed workers’ struggles. They underscored the necessity for workers and youth to break from all the capitalist parties and build an independent political movement of the working class, fighting for socialist policies as part of an international struggle against capitalism.
We invite workers and young people to participate in the November 10 public meeting at the Colombo Public Library auditorium at 4 p.m.
The New Zealand election last Saturday has produced a crisis for the ruling elite, with neither the incumbent National Party nor the opposition Labour Party able to declare victory.
Support for the two capitalist parties that have dominated politics for most of the past century collapsed. National received 29.21 percent, a major drop from 38 percent in the last election, while Labour got just 29.36 percent. Their combined result, less than 59 percent, is the lowest it has ever been. More than 4 out of 10 votes went to one of the smaller parties.
Whether either side is able to form a coalition government will not be clear for weeks or even months. An estimated 399,365 special votes cast overseas, or by people voting outside their electorate, or who enrolled after the electoral roll was published, about 14 percent of the total, will not be counted until November 27. This could eliminate the National-led bloc’s current two-seat majority.
Media commentators are expressing nervousness about the uncertainty and the likely instability of the next government. The Post’s Josie Pagani wrote: “Whether National or Labour now provide the PM, that PM will be politically weak” and predicted that a government would not be formed before Christmas.
Turnout, estimated at 74.6 percent of enrolled voters, is the second-lowest in New Zealand’s history. Factoring in 6.3 percent of eligible people who did not enroll, turnout falls to just 69.9 percent. More than 1.2 million people, nearly one-third of eligible adults, did not vote.
This points to mass hostility and alienation from the entire political establishment. As is the case internationally, the economic crisis, soaring living costs and the developing world war are driving workers and young people to the left and into struggles. The lead-up to the election saw nationwide strikes by university and polytechnic workers, retail workers, firefighters and public servants.
The National Party has led a right-wing coalition government for the past three years that imposed brutal austerity measures. It slashed thousands of jobs from the public sector, increased student fees, kicked thousands of unemployed youth off welfare, and cut wages for teachers and healthcare workers.
The Labour Party, however, had no fundamental differences with any of this. It promised during the election campaign to continue cutting spending, while supporting National’s plan to double the military budget.
This bipartisan agenda, decided behind the backs of the working class, is the reason why the election campaign was so empty. The urgent issues facing workers were buried by the media and the established parties. There was no discussion about New Zealand’s integration into the unfolding world war targeting Russia, Iran and China. Nor did any party offer any solutions to plummeting wages, soaring unemployment and the vast increase in the cost of living facing workers.
*****
In opposition... the Socialist Equality Group intervened in the election and stood a candidate, Tom Petterson, in the Hutt South electorate. This was the first time the Trotskyist movement has stood in a New Zealand election. In the preliminary results, Petterson gained 42 votes, all of which would have been highly conscious votes for a socialist alternative.
Moreover, the SEG’s campaign was not aimed primarily at getting votes. It warned the working class that nothing would be resolved by the election or through parliament.
The SEG is fighting to give the emerging anti-capitalist and anti-war sentiment among workers a conscious, socialist and internationalist perspective. SEG members and supporters spoke with hundreds of workers, distributed thousands of copies of the group’s election statement, and held an important public meeting, raising the fundamental class issues buried by the entire political establishment.
It explained that whatever unstable coalition government is formed in the coming weeks and months, the working class will face immense struggles against imperialist war and the assault on social programs and living standards. Workers will come into conflict with the entire political establishment and the trade union apparatus, which serves to facilitate wage cuts, mass redundancies and other attacks demanded by big business and the state.
The critical task is to build the necessary socialist and internationalist leadership to unite workers in New Zealand with those in Australia, the Pacific and internationally to put an end to the capitalist system and establish a socialist society. We call on workers and young people to join the SEG and fight to build the New Zealand section of the Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Department store chain David Jones, one of Australia’s oldest and best-known retailers, went into receivership on November 5, threatening the jobs of more than 6,000 workers in Australia and New Zealand. The collapse is part of a deepening economic crisis of soaring prices, rising interest rates and mounting retail closures.
The 188-year-old retailer’s board appointed McGrathNicol as administrators, while lender Hilco appointed FTI Consulting as receivers and managers. All 38 stores—37 in Australia and one in Auckland—are still trading while the receivers examine restructuring and sale options, but there are strong indications that most, if not all, locations will be shuttered.
The aim of any sale will be a stripped-down operation built around the profitable flagship stores in Sydney and Melbourne’s central business districts and wealthy suburbs, while outer suburban locations are closed. The most widely reported estimates are that up to 26 stores will be shut down, with five loss-making Westfield locations—Parramatta, Hornsby, Carousel, Woden and Southland—identified as likely initial targets.
A circular to employees from FTI Consulting, reported by Workplace Express, said “it is likely there will be steps to reduce the retail footprint in the near-term.” It also warned that workers who are made redundant or resign “may need to wait a period of time” for entitlements accrued during the receivership. Payment will depend on asset sales whose timing “is uncertain.”
Hilco, owed more than $200 million according to AAP, has its loan secured against David Jones’ stock. Suppliers have been told that debts owed before November 5 depend on the outcome of the administration. Brands including Gucci, Saint Laurent and Oroton stripped their concessions in David Jones stores within hours of the announcement, leaving bare shelves.
The immediate trigger was a breakdown in negotiations between the retailer’s owner, private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners, and Scentre Group, the Westfield operator that is landlord to 17 of the 38 stores. Scentre said David Jones had paid no rent since September 30. The talks centred on store closures and rent cuts.
But the collapse into administration is the culmination of a protracted decline, marked by successive changes of ownership and mounting losses. Woolworths Holdings bought the business in 2014 for more than $A2 billion. Just eight years later, private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners snapped it up for just $100 million.
Private equity firms scour the globe for opportunities to extract the highest possible returns, slashing costs, stripping assets and offloading businesses that fail to deliver the profits demanded by investors. The consequences of such operations are invariably borne by workers through job destruction and attacks on wages and conditions.
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On November 3, two days before David Jones went under, the Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates for the fifth time this year, to 4.85 percent, the highest level since 2008. The aim, fully endorsed by the federal Labor government, is to slow the economy and drive up unemployment, to impose downward pressure on wages.
Indeed, official unemployment rose to 4.7 percent in September, its highest level in nearly five years, with 732,000 people out of work, up 55,200 over the year.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that annual inflation reached 4.3 percent in September. The RBA now forecasts that inflation will not fall below 3 percent until late 2027. Meanwhile, wages nominally grew by an average of just 3.2 percent over the year ending in the June quarter, far below the inflation rate.
This comes on top of the cumulative effect of years of high inflation and real wage cuts. The real value of wages is at the same level as in 2011, but living conditions are far worse, largely because the cost of housing has more than doubled.
This wage offensive has been spearheaded by Labor governments at state and federal level, through punitive real wage cuts throughout the public sector, rammed through with the assistance of the trade union bureaucracies, in the face of determined struggles by workers.
The soaring cost of basic goods and services has hit non-essential spending hard. Among mortgage holders, 31 percent told a Finder survey they had cut discretionary spending because of rate rises.
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David Jones is the largest casualty in a wave of retail collapses. Footwear chain Betts entered administration in July and announced the closure of 20 of its 35 stores, followed by six more under a rescue deal. Barbeques Galore collapsed in February and was placed into liquidation, with all 62 company-owned stores earmarked for closure. Womenswear retailers Cue and Veronika Maine fell into administration in September, with 26 stores to close.
This follows a decade in which collapses and restructures have destroyed thousands of retail jobs.
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Workers need their own organizations to discuss the threat, establish common demands and coordinate action across stores and distribution operations.
Rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers and independent of the union apparatus, should demand full disclosure of the company’s financial position, oppose closures and redundancies, and insist on payment of all wages and entitlements.
The need for rank-and-file committees extends throughout the retail sector, where workers face mounting job destruction, closures and attacks on wages and conditions. Such committees must be established at Myer, Coles, Woolworths and across retail and logistics, to unite workers in a common struggle against these attacks, including internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The collapse of David Jones is just the latest demonstration that the capitalist system, hurtling from one crisis to the next, is incompatible with the needs of society.
The Socialist Equality Party fights for an alternative perspective: A workers’ government to place major corporations, including retailers, as well as the banks, under democratic workers’ control and ownership. Only then can economic life be organized around social need rather than private profit.
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) candidates Morgan Peach and Peter Byrne have been campaigning across Melbourne’s northern suburbs ahead of the November 28 Victorian state election. The working-class areas of the Northern Metropolitan Region, where they are standing, have been particularly hard hit by soaring housing costs, declining real wages and the deterioration of essential public services.
In discussions with workers and young people, SEP campaigners have explained that the cost-of-living crisis is inseparable from the broader assault on working-class living standards, including the diversion of vast public resources into war and militarism. They have raised the need for an independent movement of the working class against austerity and war, in opposition to the Labor government and all the capitalist parties.
Eddy, a delivery driver who emigrated to Australia 45 years ago, spoke to SEP campaigners in the working-class suburb of Dallas.
“I do deliveries and I am busting my back. I can’t stop working and I am in my 60s. Who will pay the mortgage?”
“The political parties are all the same, just different faces,” he said. “How long has Labor been in office? It’s been 12 years and everything is more expensive and life in general is so hard. There are a handful of billionaires but look how many people are homeless.”
With hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Ukrainians killed and maimed, anger and fatigue with the war are becoming an ever more dominant feature of social life in Ukraine.
On November 2, 100 to 200 people gathered to protest a detention center controlled by the neo-Nazi Azov unit within the Ukrainian National Guard in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a suburb of the capital Kiev. Earlier, posts had circulated on social media indicating that soldiers were being tortured at the site. One man was alleged to have been tortured and held in the basement there for 37 days. A young boy, believed to be 14 years old, was photographed as he was led out of the detention center in a state of shock.
The protests quickly escalated. While pro-Kiev media reported that some individuals attacked police officers, a former Ukrainian military intelligence officer has since issued a statement, bragging that his men were deployed against the protesters. In the video, Ivan Pylypchuk, known as “Zalizniak,” bluntly explained that he organized and led columns of paramilitary thugs who, citing the the Prayer of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, marched into the protesters, beating up and dispersing them.
Neither Pylypchuk nor any of his thugs were arrested. Instead, police arrested several protesters and at least two women who helped alert the crowd to the detention center.
What occurred at the site still remains unclear and, given the cover-up by the authorities, it is unlikely the full truth will emerge anytime soon. However, evidence points to severe abuse and even torture of soldiers, including possible deserters, at the hands of Azov. Not even Ukrainian authorities denied that at least four of the men found at the site had been severely injured. They have all been hospitalized.
*****
This summer, the 27-year old Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk was sentenced to 15 years in prison for alleged “treason under martial law” after a trial in which the prosecution failed, on every level, to deliver any evidence to substantiate the charges. The case was built on articles by the World Socialist Web Site which, in fact, documented Syrotiuk’s Marxist opposition to both the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine, and the Zelensky regime. In Germany, where Zelensky is regularly paraded as as a “bulwark” of European democracy in the media, not a single major party or newspaper has covered the case.
In addition to ever more overt opposition from below, there are also growing signs of cracks within the Ukrainian political and state elite. Last week, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Prosecutor General’s Office charged Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, with “state treason” in absentia, accusing of her of “information and subversive activities against Ukraine” and “justifying the Kremlin regime and the full-scale war.” On Twitter/X and other channels, Mendel has for many months criticized the openly dictatorial measures of the Zelensky regime. Recently, she made a pitch to far-right layers in the US and Germany, appearing on the podcast of right-wing US media personality Tucker Carlson and events by the German neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), to accuse Zelensky of preventing “peace” with Russia.
For workers and young people in Ukraine and across Europe, the central task is to consciously fuse opposition to austerity and war internationally and root this movement in a socialist program, aimed at overthrowing capitalism and unifying the continent on a socialist basis.
On Friday, October 30, US Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. unsealed a superseding federal indictment that adds four defendants to the prosecution of anti-genocide protesters at the University of Michigan (U-Mich). The new defendants, Henry David MacKeen-Shapiro, 23; Aaron Hunter Vonbargen, 25; Joseph Mark Fisher, 23; and Srishti Tarana Sharma, 23, bring the total to 12.
MacKeen-Shapiro and Vonbargen were arrested before the unsealing, appeared in federal court in Detroit on October 30 and were released on $10,000 unsecured bonds. Fisher and Sharma remain at-large. Vonbargen, Sharma and MacKeen-Shapiro are all former students at U-Mich. Vonbargen was last enrolled in 2024, MacKeen-Shapiro in 2025 and Sharma in 2026. The university said it is still seeking information on Fisher.
The original eight defendants, indicted May 20, have all pleaded not guilty: Zainab Hakim, 23; her sister Amatullah Hakim, 21; Paige Feyock, 26; Ahmet Korkaya, 28; Jonathan Zou, 22; Alexander Sepulveda, 23; Mariam Odeh, 24; and Colin Weger, 24.
The expanded prosecution has a retaliatory character. Zainab Hakim and MacKeen-Shapiro are the first and second named plaintiffs in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed May 1, 2025 against the U-Mich Board of Regents, then-President Santa Ono and university human resources officials. That suit documents how the university fired Hakim, MacKeen-Shapiro and three other student workers in April 2025 and blacklisted them from employment in the university system. The firings came 11 months after the students attended a peaceful sidewalk protest outside the U-Mich Museum of Art, where they chanted for divestment while campus police attacked the crowd with pepper spray. In effect, the US Attorney’s office has intervened to prosecute the lead civil rights plaintiffs, on behalf of the university officials those students are suing in federal court.
All 12 defendants are charged with conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. Zainab Hakim and Feyock are additionally charged with witness intimidation, an offense that carries a potential 20-year sentence. Prosecutors allege the two confronted a classmate they suspected of cooperating with law enforcement. Sepulveda faces an additional charge of destruction of property to prevent seizure, punishable by up to five years, over allegations that he wiped the contents of his phone and computer.
The “conspiracy” is nothing more than the ordinary, constitutionally protected activity of political organization carried out by students who dared to oppose a genocide funded by their own university. Under this framework, any coordinated digital campaign against powerful institutions can be reclassified as an interstate criminal syndicate. The indictment treats political slogans like “we must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand divestment by any means necessary” and “if you aren’t losing sleep after funding mass murder and genocide, then WE WILL WAKE YOU UP” as criminal threats.
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The expansion of the indictment was accompanied by an inflammatory ideological statement from Gorgon, who declared: “These alleged attempts to terrorize our Jewish community and government officials are nothing new. From Pharaoh to Hitler to Hamas, those who terrorize Jews have been the bad guys. As Americans, our job is to fight the bad guys.”
This is the language of a political witch-hunt. In June, Gorgon similarly declared that the protests were “anti-American,” while FBI Director Kash Patel promoted the raids on social media. The purpose of this rhetoric is to smear opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza—which has killed over 74,000 people, according to official figures, though the true toll is far higher—as “terrorism” and “antisemitism,” and thereby to justify the criminalization of political dissent.
The Democratic Party laid the groundwork for the Trump administration’s federal conspiracy frame-up. The University of Michigan Board of Regents, the university administration and Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel all participated in the earlier stages of this repression. Nessel brought state felony charges against campus protesters before being forced to drop them in May 2025. The university spent at least $850,000 to deploy plainclothes operatives from the private security firm City Shield to spy on pro-Palestinian protesters on and off campus, banned SAFE, issued trespass bans and brought disciplinary charges.
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This attack is part of a broader assault on First Amendment-protected speech and political advocacy, rooted in Trump’s September 2025 executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization and National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “common threads animating” domestic terrorism. These methods, conspiracy charges built on association and ideology, are being refined and tested on students today so they can be deployed against striking workers tomorrow.
The prosecution of the U-Mich Twelve, the Minnesota 15, and the Prairieland defendants in Texas is an attack on the entire working class. The defense of democratic rights and the defeat of the imperialist war machine require the independent political mobilization of the international working class against the source of war and dictatorship: the capitalist profit system.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality call on all students, campus workers, professors and staff to demand the immediate dropping of all charges against the U-Mich Twelve. Drop all charges! Defend the right to protest against genocide! Mobilize the working class against dictatorship and war!
Obsession, released earlier this year, is a horror film written and directed by Curry Barker. It tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), a young man who wishes his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would fall madly in love with him. His wish comes true, with unforeseen and violent consequences.
*****
While looking for a gift for Nikki, Bear buys a “One Wish Willow” from a curiosity shop, a supposedly enchanted tree branch that promises to grant the user a single wish. He joins his coworkers on a night out, hoping for an opportunity to speak to Nikki alone. Opportunities present themselves, but Bear squanders them. Frustrated, Bear snaps the One Wish Willow in half, wishing that Nikki loved him “more than anyone in the world.”
Nikki’s demeanor changes instantly. She becomes consumed by a jealous, insecure obsession with Bear. Bear initially attempts to convince himself that her “love” for him (really, an unhealthy dependence and possessiveness) is genuine. However, Nikki’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. She covers his front door in tape to prevent him from leaving. She becomes violent toward Sarah, whom she sees as a rival for Bear’s affection. She spirals into despair at the notion her intense feelings for Bear are not reciprocated. “Why don’t you love me?” she screams in rage and agony.
The “real” Nikki, apparently trapped in some kind of inner prison, occasionally breaks through, pleading with Bear to kill her. Bear attempts to reverse the effects of his wish, but a One Wish Willow representative informs him that the wish can only be undone by Bear’s death.
*****
As one would guess, things end badly for everyone involved.
The film has been unexpectedly popular. Made on a budget of less than $1 million, it has grossed over $500 million at the global box office and is currently the seventh highest grossing film of the year in the US, and the 10th worldwide. It has been particularly popular among young people. According to box office analysts, 75 percent of the film’s audience has been between 18 and 34 years of age.
*****
Still, the film’s merits are slight. Like most contemporary horror films, it largely fixates on the gruesome and unpleasant. If it has hit a nerve with a substantial audience, it is because it taps into elements of a much larger crisis, particularly aspects afflicting the youth.
Millions of young people find themselves in situations like Bear’s and Nikki’s at the start of the film: working low-wage jobs, dreams and ambitions unfulfilled, feeling that precious time is being wasted. In such situations, it is not uncommon for one to attempt to find within intense romantic relationships the sense of purpose and feeling that one lacks elsewhere in life. Under certain circumstances, such an “obsession” (even to the point of emotional soap opera) can become a means of diverting one’s attention from the social facts that are truly damaging or threatening one, a complicated structure of evasion.
*****
If one element of the film strikes a chord it is that both Bear and Nikki are ultimately victims of a larger force outside their immediate control. Of course, that force is neither supernatural nor ambiguous. The enormous social and economic pressures bearing down on the young generation affect, directly or indirectly, every aspect of their lives, including their love relationships.
*****
Some figures help fill out the picture:
• A 2026 study published in Community Mental Health Journal found that, “Individuals in the lowest income group (earning <$25,000 annually) reported the highest prevalence of frequent loneliness (23.2 percent) and frequent perceived social isolation (30.3 percent). In contrast, those in the highest income group (earning ≥$200,000) reported the lowest prevalence of both (4.9 percent and 9.8 percent).” Loneliness was most acutely experienced by young people aged 18-29 (23.3 percent).
• An article published in the Journal of Wellbeing Economics found that the number of young adults who report feelings of despair and mental ill-health has increased significantly since 2015, a trend largely driven by a sharp increase among young workers aged 18-22. A separate study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that hourly workers with unpredictable work schedules faced a higher risk of divorce and relationship breakup.
• A 2026 survey by the Bank of Montreal found a sharp increase in the price of dating for young couples, with nearly half of respondents who were single saying that dating is “not financially worth it.” For those in relationships, 58 percent said they were financially dependent on their partner, up from 40% a year ago. A 2026 survey of Gen Z and Millennial renters found that 42 percent of respondents chose to stay in relationships longer than desired due to high housing costs.
Many more such figures could be cited. Young workers face rising levels of ill-health and social despair and are increasingly denied the opportunity to form stable relationships. When they do enter relationships, they are increasingly unable to leave them, even if they are unhappy, or worse.
*****
The situation facing young people is not fixed or immutable. It is a prelude to an explosive growth of social opposition, already in its early stages in France, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere. There is a growing rebellion against a social order that cannot provide a future for young people or their loved ones. The struggle for the necessities of life, including, in the last analysis, the ability to form stable relationships, requires a conscious battle against the existing social order.
With the assistance of Socialism AI, here is a summary of Part Two of Thomas Scripps' review of The Future in Our Past by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee:
The CPGB's "pivot" was not a question of timing. Cant and Lee argue the CPGB's May 13, 1926 switch from "All power to the General Council!" to "Demand Emergency Conferences of Strike Committees" was "fundamentally correct—but came far too late." Scripps counters that this tactic cannot be understood apart from the international perspective that produced it: under Stalin's influence, no policy genuinely mobilizing workers against the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy could ever have emerged. The May 13 statement was largely rhetorical distancing from the consequences of the CPGB's own policy, championing the isolated miners' strike while maintaining amicable relations with the very General Council that had sabotaged it.
The party question. The policy shaped by "socialism in one country" undermined the central lesson of 1917—the irreplaceable leading role of the revolutionary party. Zinoviev's own "Theses on the Role of the Communist Party," passed at the Second World Congress, declared that political power "can only be seized, organized and led by a political party"—an indictment of his own policy four years later. These theses were aimed specifically at syndicalism, whose roots Zinoviev traced to bourgeois propaganda that workers can be "non-party" and to the betrayal of the old social democratic parties. The task was an out-and-out struggle for political leadership, not tailing the trade union bureaucracy.
Trotsky's fight. In The Lessons of October (1924), Trotsky insisted that "without a party, apart from a party... the proletarian revolution cannot conquer," and applied this in Where is Britain Going?—whose UK publication Stalin delayed. Trotsky rejected the Stalinist "stabilization" thesis, warned that the Labour and TUC leaders would aim "not towards paralyzing the bourgeois state... but towards paralyzing the General Strike by means of the bourgeois state," and declared that "a general strike is only one step from armed insurrection." He demanded the dissolution of the Anglo-Russian Committee, calling "Purcellism" the pseudonym of the "stabilization" in England.
The National Minority Movement. Cant and Lee champion the NMM as a rank-and-file vehicle, but under the Stalinist perspective it became a mechanism for hindering revolutionary development. The correct policy, Trotsky argued, was the "complete independence of the British Communist Party"; instead, maintaining the bloc with the General Council's strikebreakers meant the party's "actual dissolution" into the NMM. The masses knew only Purcell, Hicks and Cook as its leaders—whom Moscow vouched for—and when these "left" friends betrayed the proletariat, the NMM was "reduced to zero" and the CP to "a negligible sect."
By dismissing these political questions, Cant and Lee leave readers to lament—but not understand—why the labor aristocracy won the battle for leadership of the working class.
This is the sixth 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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The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) suffered from grave weaknesses inherited from the predominantly white labor movement out of which it had developed. White chauvinism had to be fought ruthlessly, and the party had to orient itself decisively towards the oppressed black majority. But this did not settle the question of the programme upon which that turn was to be made.
Adi acknowledges that on the eve of the Sixth Congress, the CPSA was already “starting to make some headway amongst Africans both in urban and even rural areas,” with hundreds joining the party. This radicalization also influenced the African National Congress. Its president, J. T. Gumede, returned from Brussels and the Soviet Union sympathetic to the CPSA, while the Cape Town branch of the ANC described the Communist Party as “the only political party that champions the cause of the workers of South Africa irrespective of color.”
The real question was what political perspective should guide the turn toward the oppressed black majority. The Stalinized Comintern instructed the CPSA to agitate for “an independent black South African Republic as a stage towards a Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic.” Adi presents the policy approvingly and describes national self-determination and majority rule as “the first stage towards establishing socialism in South Africa.”
But did destroying white supremacy, national oppression and imperialist domination—securing democratic equality; addressing the land question; or mobilizing the oppressed black majority—constitute a separate political stage through which the working class had to pass before the struggle for socialist power could be posed? Adi’s is explicit: “Not the immediate building of socialism but the liberation of the country from the imperialist yoke.”
The same perspective that had subordinated the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang, answered in April 1927 by the massacre of the Shanghai working class, was codified as the official program of the Communist International and imposed upon the Communist Party of South Africa.
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.
