Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Five years since Trump’s January 6 coup
January 6 was not a spontaneous eruption. It was the culmination of a conspiracy that developed over months and gathered momentum as the inauguration approached. The House impeachment report produced immediately afterward documented Trump’s course of conduct in the months leading up to January 6, including his efforts to pressure officials, summon supporters to Washington and direct them toward the Capitol.
Trump was at the center of the plot. He attempted to compel state officials and governors to reverse certified results—most notoriously in Georgia, where he pressed the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn the outcome. When these efforts failed, the conspiracy converged on January 6 itself: a plan to block certification, create institutional paralysis and use violence to block the transfer of power.
The most damning feature of January 6 is not only that a coup was attempted but that it came so close to success and encountered no organized political resistance from the Democratic Party.
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The Democrats feared, above all, that a popular mobilization against a coup would rapidly take the form of a broader social eruption—an opposition that would escape their control and assume a direct, anti-capitalist character. Their “defense of democracy” was constrained from the outset by fear of legitimizing mass struggle from below.
The coup did not fail because democratic institutions proved “strong.” It failed narrowly, through the inexperience, logistical errors and operational incoherence of the conspirators, combined with their inability to secure decisive leverage quickly enough.
The deployment of the D.C. National Guard was delayed for hours. Testimony and documentation describe a roughly 3-hour-and-19-minute gap before the National Guard arrived at the Capitol. That delay provided precisely the window in which the coup could have been consolidated.
The outcome would likely have been different under only slightly altered conditions. Had the mob succeeded in taking even a single prominent Democratic senator or representative hostage, the Democratic Party would have moved rapidly into negotiation—under conditions of terror—in the name of “stability” and “national unity.” The Democrats’ conduct during the attack itself demonstrated that they had neither the will nor the program to prosecute a genuine struggle against dictatorship.
Far more important to the Democratic Party than defending democratic rights was maintaining “bipartisan” unity for the strategic priorities of American imperialism, above all, escalation of confrontation with Russia.
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The record of the Ukraine war underscores this class logic. The Biden administration repeatedly sought vast funding packages and relied on “bipartisan” mechanisms to prosecute the proxy war against Russia, culminating in major congressional passage of large Ukraine aid allocations with significant cross-party support. In practice, “defending democracy” at home was subordinated to the requirements of war abroad.
The Democrats’ collapse is most exposed by their conduct in the 2024 campaign and its aftermath. During that campaign, leading Democrats declared that Trump was a fascist and that his election would mean dictatorship. Yet when Trump won, they accepted the outcome passively and did nothing to build resistance to the incoming regime. Their warnings functioned as electioneering, not a strategy for stopping dictatorship. It was necessary to ensure a “smooth transition.”
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Over the past year since his return to power, the Trump administration has implemented a systematic conspiracy for dictatorship, which is to accomplish what it failed to achieve on January 6. This has taken the form of the deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, the vicious assault on immigrants, open defiance of the courts, the criminalization of political opposition and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act.
The invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro are open gangsterism. Trump’s declaration that the United States would “run” Venezuela following the operation marks a point of no return. His language dispenses with any pretense of legality and replicates the criminal military operations of the Nazi Third Reich.
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These actions are inseparable from the internal trajectory of the regime: impunity for the coup plotters, political persecution, rule by decree and the normalization of violence as state policy. The fundamental conclusion follows inexorably: The defense and revival of democratic rights is impossible without a fight for socialism.
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This fight must be taken forward in 2026. The lessons of January 6—and of what has followed—must be burned into the collective memory of the working class, not as a lament but as a guide to action: Dictatorship will not be stopped by appeals to the very institutions and parties that enabled it. It can be stopped only through the conscious political mobilization of the working class to take power, expropriate the oligarchy and reorganize society, within the United States and internationally, on socialist foundations.
2. “Bold, audacious, stunning”: A servile US media hails Trump’s Venezuela war crime
Major US corporate news media have responded to the US military invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in unison. Celebrating the illegal act of imperialist aggression with words such as “bold,” “audacious,” “daring” and “stunning,” this response—derived from White House talking points—reveals the news media as a direct instrument of imperialist colonialism and war propaganda.
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The entire US media has repeated the talking points of fascist Senator Tom Cotton, who appeared on the Sunday talk shows as a surrogate for Trump to declare that Trump’s attack on Venezuela was “bold, audacious, direct action.”
The response by the Washington Post—owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—set the political and ideological tone for the entire corporate media. In its editorial, the Post hailed the invasion as a “stunning demonstration of American resolve” and a “bold, tactically flawless operation” that removed “a tyrant long allied with hostile powers.”
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Not a single line in the Post editorial questioned the legitimacy of the action or raised the slightest concern that the United States had unilaterally violated the most fundamental norms of state sovereignty. Instead, the Post complained that the White House lacked a sufficiently elaborated “post‑Maduro plan” to manage Venezuela’s transition under de facto US colonial control.
Throughout the broadcast and print media, the vocabulary used to describe the operation was strikingly uniform, revealing a tightly coordinated propaganda campaign taking its line from CIA briefing documents.
- NPR called the operation “an audacious and surprising move” and “a daring middle-of-the-night raid.”
- ABC News described it as a “stunning capture.”
- CBS News reported on “a stunning, large-scale attack.”
- NBC News called it “the most audacious military operation” of Trump’s presidency.
- CNN described the military operation and Trump’s subsequent press conference as “extraordinary” and “remarkable.”
- The National Review called the operation “audacious” and “technically proficient,” arguing it “sends a powerful message” to adversaries.
- Bloomberg headlined its coverage, “Trump Reshapes World Order with Daring Venezuela Raid.”
- The Atlantic ran an article titled “Trump’s Audacious Success.”
- The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump said the US would “run Venezuela after capturing Maduro in audacious attack.”
Across this spectrum, the key adjectives—“bold,” “audacious,” “daring,” “stunning”—were endlessly recycled, while the language of law and references to colonialism and war crimes were completely absent. Not one of these outlets provided a historically or politically accurate description or referred to international law.
The coordination between the media and the military went beyond cheerleading. According to a report by Semafor, the New York Times and Washington Post, “learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night—but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops.” That is, the media was actively involved in covering up a war crime, making it an accomplice.
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These outlets do not “cover” imperialist operations from the outside; they are integrated into the state’s ideological apparatus, briefed by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies and aligned with Wall Street’s demand for control of Venezuela’s vast oil and strategic resources.
Second, the propagandistic repetition of “bold,” “audacious,” “daring” and “stunning” serves a specific ideological function: to transform a crime into a spectacle of virtuosity. By saturating the public with admiration for the operation’s “tactical success,” the news media seek to preempt questions about its colonial character and legitimize the openly declared aim of placing Venezuela under US control.
The total absence of the phrase “war crime” from these reports is itself damning. Within the US corporate news outlets, legality is invoked only against the official enemies. When the US kidnaps a president and bombs a capital, the discussion shifts to a review of the “flawlessly executed” character of Operation Absolute Resolve.
The adulation of the media is also aimed at muffling the opposition of the American public. Before the invasion, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 63 percent of voters opposed US military action inside Venezuela, with only 25 percent in favor. Opposition was overwhelming among Democrats (89 percent) and strong among independents (68 percent), with a substantial share of Republicans rejecting the prospect of another US war in Latin America.
Subsequent polling highlighted by national outlets, including CBS/YouGov and CNN, also confirmed that a majority of Americans oppose the invasion and kidnapping, with skepticism toward the claim that such operations have anything to do with “democracy” or “fighting drugs.” This chasm between public opinion and media propaganda proves that the corporate press does not “reflect” public opinion but regurgitates the strategic interests of the state and the billionaire class it serves.
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A central lesson that must be drawn by workers and youth from the Venezuelan invasion and the media’s reaction to it is that no opposition to war and dictatorship can be expected from the corporate press. The attempt to resurrect and extend the Monroe Doctrine—asserting US hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere—necessarily means permanent war against the peoples of Latin America and escalating confrontation with rival powers, alongside an intensifying assault on the social and democratic rights of workers in the United States itself.
The media’s fawning coverage of the kidnapping of Maduro is a warning that the ruling class is tossing aside all legal norms in pursuit of global domination. Opposition must come from below, through the independent political mobilization of the working class in the US, across the Americas and internationally against imperialism and the capitalist system that breeds war. This requires the building of new, revolutionary leadership rooted in the struggles of the working class, armed with the lessons of history and based on the struggle for socialism.
3. Governor Tim Walz ends re-election campaign, as Trump floods Twin Cities with immigration Gestapo
In a brief but revealing seven-minute statement, on Monday the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, announced he was suspending his re-election campaign. Walz, former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election and a rumored 2028 presidential candidate, had previously announced last September that he would seek a third term.
Walz’s decision comes more than a month after federal immigration agents began kidnapping operations in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul, the largest metropolitan area in the state and home to approximately 3.7 million people. It also coincided with reports from multiple major media outlets, citing federal police, that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing a massive escalation, including the deployment of more than 2,000 federal agents to the metro area under the command of Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino.
This deployment represents a qualitative escalation of Trump’s mass deportation operation and a further step toward dictatorial forms of rule. The number of federal officers now being sent into Minneapolis is comparable in scale to the National Guard deployment in Washington D.C. following the January 6 coup attempt.
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While only a tiny fraction of the Twin Cities population are Somali Americans, up to 100,000, the community has been the target of a concerted fascist campaign from the Trump White House and the Republican Party at-large. The racist campaign, a component of Trump’s mass deportation operation, began with the publication of a New York Times report in November detailing a multi-year federal investigation into alleged fraud perpetrated in the state.
Trump immediately seized on the report to cast all Somalis, in the US and abroad, as “garbage.” In social media posts and in a December tirade publicly aired from inside the Oval Office, Trump attacked Walz and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American elected to Congress, for allegedly abetting the supposed fraud. Referring to Omar, Trump hissed, “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.”
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Following Trump’s December rant, DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began operating in force in the state, seizing over 1,000 people so far, according to the agency. In furtherance of the deportation operation, a video published last month by Trump-aligned YouTuber Nick Shirley claimed to have uncovered more than $100 million in Somali-organized fraud at childcare and healthcare centers.
Following the posting of Shirley’s video on social media, the Trump administration suspended billions of dollars in federal funding to Minnesota and four other states governed by Democrats, including Illinois, New York, California and Colorado.
Despite the fact that many of Shirley’s claims have been proven false, Walz devoted several minutes of his announcement speech to lamenting “criminals” in the state who allegedly took “advantage of our generosity,” thus lending credibility to Republican narratives about mass fraud.
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Walz repeatedly used the word “criminals” to describe the alleged fraudsters, but not once did he refer to the cabal of fascists in the White House, who ordered the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in an illegal military operation that resulted in the deaths of at least 80 people, as criminals.
“Every minute I spend defending my own political interest would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who want to prey on our differences,” he said.
Walz’s decision not to run came amid Republican threats and accusations of supposedly multibillion-dollar fraud schemes allegedly perpetrated by immigrants “imported” by Democrats, none of which have materialized and all of which, including Shirley’s so-called “investigation,” have proven to be fabricated and baseless.
Trump’s federal occupation of Minneapolis is only possible because of the political capitulation of the Democratic Party and figures such as Walz. Even though Walz and his family have been repeatedly targeted by Republican extremists, he nonetheless echoed Republican talking points and appealed for bipartisan cooperation. Walz pleaded to work with Republicans, “anyone” to take on the “criminals.”
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Just as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden sought to build a “strong Republican Party” following Trump’s failed coup five years ago, Walz now offers to aid his Republican “friends” through the final year of his term and beyond:
“As an optimist, I will hold out some hope that my friends on the other side of the aisle will consider what servant leadership demands of them in the moment. We can work together to combat the criminals. We can work together to rebuild the public’s trust and make our state stronger.”
An emboldened Trump responded to Walz’s announcement on Truth Social with fresh attacks on Omar and Somalis as a whole and threats to imprison Democratic governors:
Minnesota’s Corrupt Governor will possibly leave office before his Term is up but, in any event, will not be running again because he was caught, REDHANDED, along with Ilhan Omar, and others of his Somali friends, stealing Tens of Billions of Taxpayer Dollars. I feel certain the facts will come out, and they will reveal a seriously unscrupulous, and rich, group of “SLIMEBALLS.” Governor Walz has destroyed the State of Minnesota, but others, like Governor Gavin Newsum, JB Pritzker, and Kathy Hochul, have done, in my opinion, an even more dishonest and incompetent job. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!
The cowardice of Walz and the Democrats is not a personal failing but the product of definite class interests. The Democratic Party does not oppose Trump’s assault on the working class in Venezuela or the United States because it represents the same banks, corporations and oligarchs as its Republican counterparts.
The defense of democratic rights and social programs requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both parties on the basis of a socialist program. The attack on immigrants is the spearhead of a broader assault on the economic and social conditions of the entire working class.
4. European Union welcomes Maduro’s abduction, while invoking international law
The schizophrenia of the European powers, who invoke international law all the more loudly the more openly they violate it, is an expression of the political dilemma in which they find themselves. They need the US for the war against Russia in Ukraine but view it as an increasing threat.
5. Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind: “Honestly, I don’t think you’ve thought things through enough”
The end result of this misplaced concern with the secondary and even tertiary is a rather drab and even dull film. The real drama is missed.
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The Mastermind spends a good deal of time creating the atmosphere and social trappings of 1970, with numerous references around its edges to the Vietnam War, anti-war protest and so forth. Mooney is not interested in any of that, but, unfortunately, neither does Reichardt turn out to be terribly either. She insists, according to one interviewer, “that politics are only the backdrop to the film, and [she] doesn’t want them ‘to be a forefront thing.’”
All in all, something of a muddle. Reichardt has a good observational eye and writes and films intelligent dialogue and action. She would benefit if she stopped being shamefaced about her social concerns, an accommodation to backward moods in film circles, and consistently pursued them instead.
6. US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial
In a degrading pseudo-legal farce, the Trump administration dragged kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores before a federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
When Maduro was asked to confirm his identity, he declared: “My name is President Nicolás Maduro Moros. I am president of the Republic of Venezuela. I am here kidnapped since January 3rd—”
He was allowed to get only a few words out before 92-year-old Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein cut him off. “There will be a time and a place to go into all of this,” he snapped.
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The hearing lasted just over 35 minutes. Both pleaded not guilty. Defense attorney Barry Pollack, who previously represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, announced he would challenge the legality of his client’s “military abduction.” Maduro, he said, “is head of a sovereign state and entitled to the privileges that go with that.”
Flores bore the marks of the violence inflicted upon her during the abduction. The Telegraph reported that Flores “had visible bruises to her face—one the size of a golf ball on her forehead—red cheeks and what appeared to be a welt over her right eye.” Her attorney, Mark Donnelly, told the court she had sustained “significant injuries during her abduction” and asked the judge to authorize an X-ray to determine whether her ribs were fractured.
Images of Maduro in chains and disheveled are aimed at humiliating him. This is itself a war crime under international law, as it falls under the prohibition of “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”
he Manhattan federal courthouse where Maduro appeared is the same courthouse where Jeffrey Epstein, a close associate of Trump, stood for his arraignment in 2019. Epstein was murdered in prison on August 10, 2019, in what the Trump regime calls a suicide.
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The accusations against Maduro are not meant to be believed by anyone. Maduro was not kidnapped because he trafficked drugs. He was kidnapped because his country sits atop the largest proven oil reserves in the world—303 billion barrels—and the gangster Trump wants them. Trump said so himself at Saturday’s press conference: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars … and start making money for the country.”
The Hill reported on Monday that Trump told oil companies about the assault on Venezuela before it happened, while not notifying Congress, let alone the American people. “Reporters on Air Force One asked the president if he spoke to American oil companies to tip them off before” the attack, The Hill wrote.
“Trump nodded and said he spoke to the companies ‘before and after’ the operation. ‘And they want to go in, and they’re going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re going to represent us well,’ Trump continued.”
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The State Department posted an image of Trump declaring: “This is OUR hemisphere.” US imperialism is claiming the whole of Latin America (along with Canada) as its property, making clear that it will kidnap or murder anyone who resists, in a return to naked colonialism.
While Maduro declared his innocence in a Manhattan courtroom, the United Nations Security Council convened an emergency session a few miles to the north, where the magnitude of what the Trump administration had unleashed became clear. This was not simply a travesty of US criminal law and international law. This was an act of war targeting the entire world.
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Economist Jeffrey Sachs, invited to brief the Security Council, placed the assault in context. “In the past year, the United States has carried out bombing operations in seven countries, none of which were authorized by the Security Council and none of which were undertaken in lawful self-defense under the Charter,” he said. “The targeted countries include Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and now Venezuela.”
Sachs traced the history of US regime-change operations against Venezuela: the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, the funding of anti-government protests in 2014, the crippling sanctions that collapsed oil production by 75 percent and real GDP per capita by 62 percent, the unilateral recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” in 2019 and the seizure of $7 billion in Venezuelan sovereign assets.
“Members of the Council are called upon to defend international law, and specifically the United Nations Charter,” Sachs declared. “Members of the Council are not called upon to judge Nicolás Maduro.”
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UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated he was “deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected.” But such statements will not stop Trump’s global military rampage.
The capitalist powers that built the post-World War II legal order are now tearing it apart in their drive toward a new colonial carve-up of the world. Opposition must come from below—from the independent mobilization of workers in the United States, Venezuela and internationally against imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it.
7. Australia: Worker killed after roof collapses at Mammoth coal mine in Queensland
One worker was killed and another injured when a roof collapsed at the Mammoth underground coal mine near Blackwater in Central Queensland on Friday afternoon. The two men were trapped underground at around 3 p.m., but while the injured man was rescued and taken to hospital that evening, 59-year-old Jeff Palmer was found dead on Saturday night.
For the mine’s owner, Queensland-based multinational Coronado Global Resources, this was the second worker death in less than a month. On December 18, 63-year-old Robert White was crushed by a tractor at the company’s Lower War Eagle coal mine in Wyoming County, West Virginia.
Located in the coal-rich Bowen Basin, Mammoth is part of a 256 square kilometer (99 square mile) complex, which also includes two open-cut mines, Curragh North and Curragh South, producing both thermal and metallurgical coal. While the complex as a whole began operations in 1983, the underground mine is a recent expansion, mining its first coal in December 2024. More than 2,000 workers are employed across the three mines.
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Palmer is the third worker to be killed at the Curragh complex in the past six years. On January 12, 2020, 33-year-old Donald Rabbitt suffered fatal injuries after he was crushed by a falling tire assembly that weighed more than five tons.
The national contract covering roughly 30,000 refinery and petrochemical workers across the United States is set to expire on January 31, opening a struggle with significant global ramifications that requires an independent, international strategy by workers.
Refinery workers, who are members of the United Steelworkers, are determined to win inflation-busting wage increases, improved safety measures and job guarantees in the face of AI-drive job cuts and the transition to renewable energy.
Research firm OPIS reports: “AI is being widely deployed by oil-and-gas companies to automate complex tasks, reduce costs and maximize yields. Some refinery companies have adopted AI to predict equipment failures in scheduling turnaround maintenance and to fine-tune units to optimize production.” Given the experience in other industries, this drive toward automation will translate into layoffs, particularly among maintenance and safety personnel.
Refinery workers are facing off against the oil industry as Trump has launched a brazen attack on Venezuela aimed at seizing the country’s energy resources. The administration has issued threats against countries across the Western Hemisphere, treating the region as the property of the United States.
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The fight for jobs and working conditions in the refineries is inseparable from a struggle against a government of the oligarchy that is launching wars around the world, including against the population of the United States itself. This raises the need for international unity among workers and the rejection of the “America First” program promoted by the union bureaucracy.
The invasion also functions as a partial bailout of the oil industry. While crude oil has largely been spared from tariffs, operating costs have been significantly impacted, and Deloitte estimates that trade measures could lead to as much as $50 billion in project delays. Nevertheless, the industry continues to rake in massive profits, with refining margins reaching multi-year highs in November, according to Reuters.
At the same time, workers must confront the role of the union bureaucracy. The USW forced through the last national contract in 2022, negotiated in secret with the Biden White House, which included paltry wage increases totaling just 12 percent spread over four years. Given record inflation, this amounted to a substantial real pay cut. USW President Tom Conway even boasted that the contract “did not contribute significantly to inflation,” in other words that wages would not keep up with prices.
Another major factor shaping the 2022 agreement was the USW bureaucracy’s desire not to disrupt the launch of the US-backed proxy war against Russia in Ukraine with a major strike on the home front. US energy corporations profited enormously by selling natural gas to Europe to replace Russian supplies cut off by sanctions.
The blocking of the strike in 2022 by the USW allowed the corporations to increase the exploitation of refinery workers and undermine basic safety conditions. With the complicity of the union bureaucracy, the companies rushed turnarounds, imposed exhausting work schedules and ignored workers’ safety complaints.
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In 2022, the USW also isolated a strike by 500 workers at the Richmond, California refinery. It has done the same to Libbey Glass workers in Toledo, Ohio who have been on strike for more than four months. In the steel industry, union officials have maintained a guilty silence following the deadly explosion at Clairton Coke Works.
These betrayals flow from the political orientation and function of the USW. It is one of several unions embracing Trump’s “America First” trade war, falsely claiming this will save “American” jobs at the expense of workers elsewhere. The union leadership vociferously opposed the proposed merger of US Steel with Nippon Steel on protectionist grounds.
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The union bureaucracy, dominated by anticommunism and nationalism and by its support for the “right” of corporations to profit, has long been integrated into the political establishment. It maintained deep ties to the Biden White House, which compared its importance to the administration to a “domestic NATO.” Now, it is auditioning for roles within the new regime Trump is seeking to establish.
Workers cannot defend their interests in any country while being pitted against their brothers and sisters elsewhere for the profits of their “own” capitalists. An estimated 31.9 million workers are employed in the oil and gas industry worldwide. This represents the potential for a powerful, unified international movement rejecting war for oil and waging a joint struggle against unsafe conditions, layoffs, and stagnant or declining wages.
9. Australia: Victorian Labor government to cut at least 1,000 public service jobs
The Victorian state Labor government announced in December that more than 1,000 jobs will be slashed across the public service. This is a deepening of an austerity drive it has pursued over the past three years in office.
The cuts are the government’s official response to the Silver Review, which was publicly released in early December after months of delay. The “independent review,” led by former top bureaucrat and banking executive Helen Silver, was commissioned by the government earlier this year to provide recommendations for eliminating programs, consolidating departments and reducing the public service workforce to pre-pandemic levels.
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The government and the main public service trade union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), claim that the jobs cuts are aimed at the executive level. Such positions, however, will account for only approximately 300 of the 1,000 roles that will be eliminated. The majority of job losses will hit lower-level staff.
ven workers ostensibly unaffected by the job cuts will face new “efficiency” measures, with departments to review all roles and reclassify them to more junior pay grades wherever possible. Furthermore, while the review’s scope did not include so-called frontline staff, the final report stated that the government should nonetheless expect these roles to be “part of broader efforts to improve efficiency and effectiveness.”
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The cuts to social programs are being driven by the demands of the financial markets, on the pretext of reducing Victoria’s growing public debt, which has been projected to reach $188 billion by 2028. In February, S&P released a report putting Victoria on notice for its “lax financial discipline” and threatening a further credit downgrade if it “failed to rein in pandemic-sized spending.”
Much of this debt, however, stems from enormous subsidies funnelled to corporations to maintain profits during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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In the Australian context, the cuts are an intensification of a decades-long assault on the public sector. From the Hawke-Keating era Accords and enterprise bargaining framework of the 1980s and 90s, both Labor and Liberal-National governments have overseen the corporatization of public services.
Beyond the public service, Victorian workers and communities are already feeling the consequences of Labor’s big business agenda. The same Labor government is pursuing public housing demolition, has introduced laws allowing children as young as 14 to be tried in adult courts and rolled out new police powers to suppress public protests, including over the Gaza genocide.
10. Australia: Parliamentary inquiry no obstacle to demolition of Victorian public housing towers
On December 2, the Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Victorian Legislative Council (LSIC) tabled the final report of its inquiry into the state Labor government’s plan to demolish 44 public housing towers in inner Melbourne.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned, all along this inquiry has been “a thinly disguised exercise in defending the Labor government’s decision to smash up the tower residents’ homes and communities.”
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Worldwide, public housing is being eviscerated as capitalist governments everywhere move to impose austerity measures on the working class to pay for militarism and never ending wealth accumulation for the corporate elite.
Defeating the destruction of the 44 towers and other attacks on public housing, will require a political struggle against the Labor government, uniting residents and workers. In the first instance, residents should make a powerful appeal to rank-and-file building workers, without whose labour the demolition plans cannot proceed, as well as to broader layers of the working class, who all face attacks on their living and working conditions.
11. Private equity firms increasingly selling assets to themselves
Private equity firms operate by financing large debt deals for firms, organizing mergers, and buying up companies and then restructuring them to sell them off at a profit.
Much of their activity, which has grown by leaps and bounds since the financial crisis of 2008 and is aimed at circumventing some of the limited restrictions imposed on banks, is carried on out of sight.
Major financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the US Federal Reserve, have continually referred to this sector of the financial markets as “opaque” and have warned that this could potentially be the source of problems in the broader market.
Such concerns were raised by the sudden bankruptcy of the auto industry connected firms Tricolor and First Brands last year. They had complex and largely hidden connections to private equity groups and indirectly to banks. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon likened the bankruptcies to the appearance of cockroaches, where if you see one there are always more.
While much of the activity of private equity is not immediately apparent, information does come to light.
One such example is an article published at the end of last year in the Financial Times (FT) which reported on an increasingly common practice in which private equity groups make money by selling off assets they hold to themselves, making a profit in the process. In 2025, it said, this practice had occurred at a record rate.
One might well wonder how this is even possible or legal. In fact, it is both.
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Milo Minderbender, the fictional character in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22, who made “win-win” deals involving buying and selling with both sides in World War II, would have been completely at home in this world.
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Concern over private equity is growing, but as the New Year unfolds attention in financial markets is largely focused on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the boom it has induced on Wall Street.
One of the chief beneficiaries has been the chipmaker Nvidia, the market value of which has doubled since April. At one point it became the first $5 trillion company before its share price came down somewhat.
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Concern over private equity is growing, but as the New Year unfolds attention in financial markets is largely focused on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the boom it has induced on Wall Street.
One of the chief beneficiaries has been the chipmaker Nvidia, the market value of which has doubled since April. At one point it became the first $5 trillion company before its share price came down somewhat.
There are numerous warnings that the AI boom is a bubble which will burst and the data point in that direction. According to one measurement, based on a 10-year price/earnings ratio, the S&P 500 index is higher than it was before the 1929 crash and well above its level before the 2008 crisis.
Another significant figure is the market capitalization of the S&P 500 as a share of US GDP. Since the release of ChatGPT in October 2022, setting off the AI boom, it has risen from 142 percent to a record 214 percent. The ratio of the market capitalization of tech stocks has more than doubled from 44 percent to 101 percent.
The market is increasingly dominated by the so-called hyperscalers in AI investment—Amazon, Alphabet (the owners of Google) Microsoft, Meta (the owner of Facebook) and Oracle—which account for 19 percent of the S&P 500. The semiconductor makers Nvidia and Broadcom account for another 9 percent.
Even as mass layoffs take place, the US economy has experienced stronger growth this year, but this is highly skewed. According to the OECD, investment in data centres and other such information technology accounted for all of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.
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It is not possible to predict the exact outcome of the deepening crisis. But what is certain is the attacks on the working class will intensify. If the AI bubble bursts, the ensuing financial crisis will bring devastation for wide sections of the working class as the crisis of 2008 showed.
And if the AI boom does bring about an increase in productivity and generate sufficient revenue to pay off the trillions of dollars in investments, these outcomes will only be achieved through massive cost cutting achieved above all by the slashing of the labor force.
As every economic indicator, from the private equity markets and their arcane operations to the stock market, the AI boom and the mass layoffs already taking place across the economy flashes red, the task placed before the working class is to develop a political offensive to meet the deepening crisis of the capitalist system in the fight for a socialist program.
12. The class issues in the fight to defend immigrants and the trap of the “Detroit People’s Assembly”
In just over a month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have abducted at least five teenagers in the Detroit area, most of them high school students with pending asylum cases. The coordinated raids—often triggered by minor police stops or predawn home invasions—are part of a broader campaign to criminalize and terrorize immigrant youth.
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The kidnapping of children is part of a nationwide dragnet by the Trump administration, which has led to an average of 2,600 “at large” arrests every week. Heavily armed and often masked federal agents fan out daily into neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and homes in Detroit, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Charlotte and other cities.
There is enormous popular opposition to the witch-hunting of immigrants, expressed in spontaneous resistance such as neighborhood and school networks warning of ICE activity and high school walkouts. But Trump relies on the Democratic Party, which has done nothing beyond issuing impotent complaints and lawsuits, while mayors like Democratic Socialists of America-backed Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union official, dispatch police to suppress protests against ICE and CBP raids and detentions.
Equally complicit has been the trade union bureaucracy, from the American Federation of Teachers and their state and local affiliates, which have blocked strike action in Chicago and other cities, to the United Auto Workers and Teamsters, which have openly promoted Trump’s tariffs and hostility to immigrant workers.
Under these conditions, it is necessary to examine the role of various pseudo-left organizations which claim to oppose the attack on immigrants, but seek to subordinate the growing resistance of workers, youth and other defenders of immigrant rights to the Democrats and labor apparatus.
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All these people—whose only principle is to have no principles—regularly denounce the Socialist Equality Party for “sectarianism.” By this, they mean our refusal to subordinate the struggles of the working class to the parties and trade union apparatuses of the ruling class. Organizations like the People’s Assembly, they claim, are doing the actual practical work of organizing resistance to ICE.
But what have they achieved with their opportunist politics?
This is summed up in the December 21 Left Voice article that hails their success in getting the Detroit Federation of Teachers to pass a toothless resolution against the student deportations and the Democratic Party-dominated school board to write a letter of protest to ICE!
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These empty declarations do not advance the struggle against Trump’s war on immigrants by one iota. Instead, there is a quid pro quo between the Democrats, the union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left organizations. The latter provide cover for the Democratic Party, which is broadly hated for its anti-immigrant and pro-war policies, along with its capitulation and collusion with the Trump administration. At the same time, the Democrats adopt meaningless resolutions to create the appearance that mass anger can influence capitalist institutions.
There are sincere teachers, students and young people who have been drawn into the People’s Assembly out of genuine outrage over the abduction and deportation of students and a desire to fight these crimes. Their anger is entirely justified. But this sincerity is systematically exploited by the organization’s leadership to steer it back toward the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy.
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The political orientation of Left Voice flows directly from its Morenoite heritage. The tradition associated with the Pabloite Nahuel Moreno has long rejected Trotskyism and the revolutionary independence of the working class in favor of opportunist alliances, electoral blocs and “fronts” aimed at securing influence within bourgeois politics. In Argentina and internationally, Morenoism has repeatedly subordinated workers to nationalist and social-democratic forces, from Juan Perón to various “left” capitalist parties in Latin America and Europe.
The People’s Assembly is not modeled on the united front tactics developed by Leon Trotsky in the struggle against fascism in Germany in the early 1930s. Instead, it reflects the logic of Popular Front politics, pioneered by the Stalinists, which subordinated the working class to bourgeois parties in the name of “unity” and paved the way for historic defeats in France, Spain, Chile and elsewhere.
Far from mobilizing popular opposition to Trump’s dictatorial measures, its politics undermine political consciousness and hold back the development of a powerful movement of the working class against fascism and dictatorship.
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The only social force that has the power to halt the ICE raids and drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power is the working class. In Detroit, those opposing the war on immigrants must fight to mobilize the broad mass of workers facing job losses at GM’s Factory Zero and other locations, teachers and students opposed to Trump’s destruction of public education, low-income residents being evicted and all those opposed to dictatorship and imperialist war.
Rank-and-file committees can prepare collective action, including a political general strike, to demand the removal of all ICE and CBP agents and the return of Santiago Jesus Zamora Perez, Mor Ba, Kerly Mariangel Sosa Rivero, Antony Janier Peña Sosa, Sebastian Herrera and their family members.
The prerequisite for the development of such a mass movement is the complete organizational and political independence of workers and youth from the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy.
13. Mamdani proclaims fictional unity of “all New Yorkers” in inauguration speech
The rise of Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to mayor of the center of American finance capital, is a significant political event in the United States. His election campaign drew support particularly from younger people, sections of the middle class, and wide layers of the working class whose living standards have been ravaged by decades of austerity, deindustrialization and social counterrevolution. Among those voting for Mamdani, opposition to the genocide in Gaza and hostility to Trump’s fascistic assault on immigrants were also major factors.
However, the aspirations of those who voted for Mamdani stand in stark contrast to the political reality of a Mamdani administration.
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It is first of all necessary to point out again that Mamdani’s program is not socialist and amounts to a mild revival of the liberal reformism of an earlier period. He proposes to achieve these reforms—and to guarantee “abundance” for all—by uniting all New Yorkers in class harmony.
“This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the one percent,” he said, “Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor. It will be a tale of 8 and a half million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together.”
Mamdani insisted that his administration would “answer to all New Yorkers, not to any billionaire or oligarch who thinks they can buy our democracy.” But this was paired with the assertion that his government will deliver for “every one of us,” including those who have directly benefited from the vast social inequality that defines life in the city. “No matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from,” Mamdani declared, “the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”
Social and class interests are dissolved by Mamdani into the most abstract of abstractions. We are all “New Yorkers,” separate universes woven together! Trump is a resident of New York, as are significant sections of the American corporate and financial oligarchy. What is the content of their shared identity as “New Yorkers” with the masses of workers and young people struggling to live?
Mamdani’s appeals to collectivism and “solidarity” are ultimately marshaled to promote reconciliation with, not the overthrow of, the ruling elite.
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The character of the inauguration itself made clear that Mamdani’s administration is not a break with the political establishment but a reshaping of its image. Far from a grassroots rebellion against the status quo, the event was a carefully orchestrated ceremony of the Democratic Party.
In addition to Bernie Sanders, who insisted that Mamdani’s program was not “radical,” speakers included New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Mamdani acknowledged the presence of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, former New York City mayor Eric Adams, and Representative Nydia Velázquez. Former mayor Bill de Blasio was also in attendance, along with a number of guest artists and celebrities associated either directly with Mamdani’s campaign or with the broader orbit of the Democratic Party.
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The inauguration took place just weeks before the first anniversary of Trump’s return to power, under a regime that has carried out mass deportations, escalated war abroad, and slashed domestic programs. Yet Trump’s name was mentioned only once during the entire ceremony—in a brief aside by Mamdani, in reference to Trump voters backing him—and there was no reference at all to Venezuela, Iran, Gaza, fascism or dictatorship. “ICE raids” was mentioned only in passing, stripped of any political context.
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Since his meeting with Trump more than a month ago, Mamdani has avoided any public criticism of the fascist president. The only partial exception was his brief statement following the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president on Saturday. Without actually using Trump’s name, Mamdani called the action a “act of war and a violation of federal and international law.” He did not propose any action, only that his administration “will continue to monitor the situation and issue relevant guidance.”
[Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro is currently being held in New York City, but Mamdani has not called for any protests over the blatantly illegal action of the Trump administration. Instead, he said he placed a personal call to Trump in which, according to Mamdani, “I registered my opposition, I made it clear and we left it at that.” Thus Mamdani, in relation to a blatantly criminal action by a fascist president who is declaring war on the entire world.
Mamdani has never explained his White House meeting with Trump in any detail, but in exchange for allegedly reducing the threat of federal cutbacks in New York, Mamdani has proclaimed his willingness to cooperate with Trump. As for Trump, he can quickly turn on Mamdani in the event that he finds their “partnership” no longer of service.
The two main parties of the Canadian ruling class, the governing Liberals and the official opposition Conservatives, have “welcomed” Trump’s criminal assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, claiming that they open the door to “freedom” and “democracy.”
This under conditions where the fascist, would-be dictator Trump has openly proclaimed his intention to seize Venezuela’s oil and “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
Abandoning any pretense the US adheres to international law and the “human rights” rhetoric the imperialist powers have long employed to camouflage their predatory actions, Trump has baldly asserted Washington’s “right” to impose its will by naval blockades, state terrorism and war on any country in “our Hemisphere”—that is the entire Americas from the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego.
Ottawa has long worked with Washington to bring about regime change in Venezuela. It worked to isolate, sanction and otherwise destabilize the Maduro regime, including by helping finance and organize the pro-imperialist opposition, during the first Trump administration and under his Democratic successor, Joe Biden. As Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted at the beginning of his statement on the events in Venezuela, one of the first actions he took on becoming prime minister last March “was to impose additional sanctions on Nicolás Maduro’s brutally oppressive and criminal regime.”
But the Canadian ruling class’s professions of support for Trump’s illegal assault on Venezuela, the killing of at least 80 people, and the kidnapping of Maduro belie sharp divisions and grave apprehensions. These go far beyond Trump having acted unilaterally, cutting its traditional Canadian imperialist junior partners out of any share of the spoils of Venezuela’s vast oil wealth, or even concerns that American imperialism’s attempt to effectively colonize Venezuela could spectacularly backfire, setting Latin America politically aflame.
Trump’s assertion of unbridled US domination over the Western Hemisphere threatens the core interests of Canadian imperialism and the very existence of its federal state, at least as currently constituted.
15. Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela
Reaffirming his administration’s declared aims of asserting unrestricted domination over Latin America and beyond, Trump said at Saturday’s press conference: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.”
The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, in all its madness, ruthlessness and criminality, reflects the objectively desperate position of US capitalism. In South America, it has been displaced by China as the main trading partner and a leading investor in countries throughout the region. Washington seeks to reassert its lost hegemony by military means.
War and outright colonial intervention by Washington plunge the already decrepit political order in Latin America into chaos. In their answers to the crisis wrought by imperialism, all political factions of the national bourgeoisie are exposed as deeply rotten.
On one side, the supposedly “left” nationalists of the Pink Tide show their total inability to answer Trump’s aggression and their ultimate subordination to the dictates of imperialism. On the other, the fascistic governments and political forces spreading throughout the continent make clear the integration of their ruthless dictatorial aims into the US neocolonial offensive.
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The rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.
The Pink Tide represents only the latest chapter in the history of bourgeois nationalism in Latin America. As the Socialist Equality Group of Brazil observed in its August 2025 statement, “No to US imperialist aggression against Venezuela! For the unity of the working class across the Americas!”:
The history of Latin America has been marked by repeated experiments with bourgeois nationalism—from Perón in Argentina to Vargas in Brazil, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. All have ended in failure, betrayal, and often bloody repression of the working class. The Pink Tide represents only the latest chapter in this failed history.
The breakdown of the bourgeois order in Latin America under the fire of imperialism and fascism intensifies explosive social contradictions that have direct revolutionary implications.
16. US assault on Venezuela exposes Turkish ruling elite
In the first official reaction from Ankara, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs avoided mentioning the US assault or Maduro’s fate and said only that “Türkiye attaches importance to the stability of Venezuela and the peace and welfare of the Venezuelan people. We call on all parties to act with restraint so that the present situation does not give rise to negative consequences for regional and international security.”
Erdoğan, who remained silent for nearly three days on the imperialist assault on Venezuela, finally made a statement on Monday evening, carefully avoiding condemning the lawlessness of his “friend” US President Donald Trump or demanding the release of his former “friend” Maduro.
He said, “We do not approve of any action that violates political legitimacy and international law, wherever it may be in the world,” adding, “In the case of Venezuela, we are striving to do what is best and right for both Turkey and our friends, the Venezuelan people.”
This stance reveals what truly drives the foreign policy of Erdoğan and his government, who were the target of a US-NATO-backed coup on July 15, 2016, and who exchanged mutual support statements with Maduro at the time: the interests of the ruling class, which is deeply tied to imperialism.
17. Maoism offered as a bogus alternative to ‘African Socialism’ and Pan-Africanism—Part Two
All the forces that propagated a two-stage theory ended up subordinating workers and youth to supposedly progressive factions of the national bourgeoisie or diverting their struggles into peasant-based guerrilla fighting that ended up consolidating capitalist rule.
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By the mid-1960s China had become Tanzania’s principal external backer. Between 1964 and 1975 Beijing supplied teachers, doctors, agricultural specialists and military trainers, built factories, farms and the TAZARA railway, and armed the Tanzanian army and southern African guerrilla movements.
This flowed directly from Chinese foreign policy, which, encircled by hostile imperialist powers and threatened by the escalating American war in Vietnam, sought to cultivate dissident factions of the African bourgeoisie. The export of Maoist “people’s war” across southern Africa was intended to stretch US imperialism as it worked to prop up Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique and Angola and to sustain the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Maoism, however, was hostile to a socialist perspective. Mao stated this explicitly to African delegates in 1959, insisting that “The task of the whole of Africa is to oppose imperialism and to oppose those who follow imperialism, not to oppose capitalism, not to establish socialism. To call for the establishment of a socialist society in Africa is to make a mistake… At present, the nature of the African revolution is a bourgeois democratic revolution, not a proletarian socialist revolution.”
This two-stage theory subordinated the working class to “progressive” bourgeois forces and rejected the struggle for socialism. Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution advanced the opposite conclusion. In countries of belated capitalist development, only the working class, leading the rural poor, can resolve the democratic tasks, and only by advancing directly to socialist measures within an international revolutionary strategy.
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Today, turning consciously to history is indispensable. That is why tools such as Socialism AI, developed by the International Committee of the Fourth International, are of decisive importance. Workers and youth now have direct access to the accumulated theoretical and historical experience of the international working class, grounded in Trotskyism. It enables a new generation to assimilate the political lessons long suppressed by Stalinism and to carry forward the unfinished fight for world socialist revolution.
18. UK Labour government oversees decision to freeze bank accounts of pro-Palestinian organizations
The decision to freeze bank accounts is in line with Labour government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, and its criminalization of protests in support of the Palestinian people.
The election of “left” candidate Andrea Egan as general secretary of Unison has been presented in the media and by the UK’s pseudo-left groups as a turning point for Britain’s largest trade union and a rebuke of the Starmer Labour government.
In fact, Egan’s electoral victory amid mass abstention reveals that the left-wing of the union bureaucracy commands little to no credibility in the working class, despite the deep unpopularity of the most pro-business and right-wing Labour government in history. Up against Christina McAnea—a close ally of the Starmer government who has resolutely opposed any mobilisation of Unison’s 1.3 million mainly public sector members against pay erosion, job losses and austerity—Egan won just 58,353 votes against McAnea’s 39,353: an overall turnout of just 7 percent.
More damning still is that this figure was the latest in a serious of record-lows going back at least as far as 1995, when turnout was 20 percent—the previous contest saw 10 percent of members vote. Election to the highest post in Unison, as in every other union, is decided by an ever-declining constituency of union members, themselves part of a shrinking unionized percentage of the workforce. The union bureaucracy’s decades of serving as a pro-company apparatus has driven the overwhelming majority of workers to vote with their feet.
20. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Bolivia:
Canada:
Three hundred workers strike major Quebec ski resort
United States:
Flight attendants union says it is moving towards strike vote at regional carrier Horizon Air
Washington state tech health workers vote for strike by 95 percent margin
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
