At least 99 people died Thursday and Friday during desperate attempts
by tens of thousands of people attempting to swim from Morocco to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa, and over 100 remain missing.
Over 60,000 reached their destination during a 24-hour period, during
which they were met with brutal violence by the Spanish military and a
concerted campaign to force their return to poverty-stricken Morocco.
The political establishment and media outlets across Europe erupted with
furious denunciations of “invaders,” as they churned out far-right
talking points about the “hybrid threat” posed by migrants attacking
Europe.
The trigger for the mass incursion appears to have been a
Spanish Supreme Court ruling that prohibited the authorities from
immediately deporting refugees if they are intercepted at sea while
trying to reach Spanish territory. But Spain’s Socialist Party-led
government, no less than far-right governments led by the likes of
Meloni in Italy and Trump in the US, has no time for such legal
niceties. Echoing Trump’s self-serving propaganda that Europe was
experiencing an “invasion,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
denounced the migrants for having launched an “attack on Spain’s
territorial integrity” and dispatched the military to Ceuta.
*****
Working with the police, soldiers quickly rounded up the migrants in
Ceuta and dispatched them back to Morocco so that by Sunday, government
officials could claim that virtually everyone had been returned, without
so much as a legal hearing. One man told Germany’s Tagesschau news
program that he was even prohibited from entering a supermarket to buy
food, because the authorities arbitrarily decided to establish passport
controls at the entrance.
The cruel brutality on display towards
desperate people seeking to flee social and economic misery and
political persecution is the result of the Fortress Europe policy
enforced by all of the continent’s governments, whether they consist of
conservative, social democratic or pseudo-left parties. The European
Union has effectively abolished the right to asylum for those seeking to
enter the continent by building external borders patrolled by heavily
armed guards that even the fascist Trump would be proud of. As a
consequence, over 32,000 refugees and migrants have been recorded as
dead or missing while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe since
2014, according to the Missing Migrants Project.
Europe’s far right has seized on the events in Ceuta to escalate
fascist anti-immigrant propaganda, while the political establishment
across the continent is going out of its way to integrate these
narratives even more into mainstream discourse. Italy’s prime minister,
the Mussolini-admirer Giorgia Meloni, announced the suspension of the
Schengen Agreement with Spain for a month, which halts passport-free
travel between the two countries.
Governments from 22 of the EU’s
27 member states demanded an emergency meeting of interior ministers for
Tuesday in a letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
*****
Sanchez responded by blaming the events in Ceuta on “people
smugglers.” But the fact of the matter is that the scenes of desperation
in North Africa can only occur because the EU has blocked off all legal
routes into the continent. The real criminals sit in government offices
in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid, because their contempt for
basic democratic rights, and their funding for authoritarian regimes in
Africa to keep migrants out, create the social misery that forces
people to take desperate measures. Their policies are no better than
those of the fascist Trump, whose ICE thugs stalk the streets of
American cities to seize immigrants, whether or not they have the legal
entitlement to remain in the US, and routinely use deadly force against
their victims.
The Libyan coast guard and blood-drenched military
dictatorship in Egypt both receive billions in EU funds to carry out
what is euphemistically referred to as “pullbacks” of migrants seeking
to reach Europe. This process includes the creation of concentration
camp-style facilities where torture and slave-like conditions have been
exposed, and “desert dumps,” where the EU’s bought-and-paid-for thugs
simply abandon groups of starving migrants in the Sahara Desert. Some
800 people were even returned by Egypt to Sudan during a three-month
period from January to March 2024 amid the civil war raging in that
country, according to an Amnesty International report.
In this way, European imperialism works to strengthen “partners” in
Africa with whom its banks, corporations and financial oligarchs can
intensify the brutal neocolonial plundering of the continent. Egyptian
dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, who rose to power in a 2013 coup during
which he massacred thousands of political opponents, regularly enjoys
the red-carpet treatment in Berlin and other European capitals. In
exchange, Cairo has concluded highly profitable contracts for Europe’s
major capitalist outfits that will keep cash flowing into the pockets of
their wealthy shareholders, such as the $8.1 billion contract struck
with Siemens to build a 2,000-kilometre (1,273-mile) high-speed rail
network, and another $8 billion deal to build three natural gas power
plants and wind farms.
Further south, the EU is determined to gain
the upper hand through deals with the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Zambia, Angola and other countries to open up the exploitation of cobalt
and other critical minerals necessary for its “clean energy”
transition. It aims to ensure that European imperialism, not its rivals
in the US or China, seizes the lion’s share of resources for key
industries of capitalist “growth,” like EV production, renewable energy,
AI data centers, and hi-tech manufacturing of digital equipment.
Workers laboring in the mines, processing facilities, transportation
and other sectors in these countries, which are among the poorest in the
world, have no rights and earn a pittance. The average wage in the DRC,
for instance, amounts to $142 per month, with many millions living off
of much less.
At home, the European powers’ demonization of
refugees and immigrants serves to divert popular anger from the real
culprits for the deepening social and economic crisis confronting
millions of workers. Social life in Europe is not under “attack” by
“invading” immigrants, but by a financial oligarchy that demands
unchecked power to accumulate wealth and wage wars of aggression to
capture natural resources, cheap labor, markets, and geostrategic
influence, whether against Russia in Ukraine or Iran in the Middle East.
Riyadh is scrambling to stabilize its position, with the Saudi Defense Ministry announcing that 14 states including Turkey, Pakistan,
Egypt, Sudan and Djibouti had endorsed its proposal for a maritime defense coalition, to be headquartered in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has also
asked the US and major European powers to join.
Reports suggest
that Saudi Arabia may be preparing for a major ground offensive in
central Yemen, indicating the way that the US‑Israeli war on Iran is metastasizing across the region, drawing in Gulf monarchies, reshaping
Iraq’s internal balance of forces and threatening a new phase of
large‑scale conflict from the Red Sea to the Tigris.
*****
Alongside these military operations, Washington is seeking to
construct a long‑term US-Saudi strategic bloc anchored in nuclear
cooperation and advanced weapons transfers that will bind Saudi Arabia
to the US‑Israeli axis, marginalize competing powers, and construct a
durable regional bloc for confrontation with Iran.
Washington
signed a “peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement” with Riyadh, which
would allow Saudi Arabia to build nuclear reactors using US technology
and, critically, to enrich its own vast uranium reserves without
accepting the International Atomic Energy Agency’s full verification
regime. In a region where Iran and the UAE operate reactors but import
their fuel under strict oversight, US‑sanctioned Saudi enrichment would
trigger a cascade of nuclear ambitions across Turkey, Egypt, and other
prospective regional powers, as well as the renegotiation of the UAE’s
agreement with the US.
The US Department of Energy described the deal as the foundation for a
“long‑term, multi‑billion‑dollar partnership.” Tens of billions will
flow to US corporations for the construction and development of the
kingdom’s civilian nuclear program, sidelining France, Germany, South
Korea, and China—despite Riyadh’s 2022 memorandum for developing a
nuclear program with Beijing. The nuclear agreement is the
economic‑industrial element of efforts to consolidate a US‑dominated
regional order.
*****
Israel has opposed the agreement because it threatens its nuclear
monopoly and its qualitative military edge. Trump’s subsequent Truth
Social post claimed the deal would prohibit enrichment and require Saudi normalization with Israel—a claim Netanyahu hailed as a victory. But it
is highly unlikely Trump will sabotage a deal that delivers enormous
profits to US corporations and locks Saudi Arabia into Washington’s war
coalition to placate Israeli objections
The strikes against the PMF in Iraq, the maritime coalition, the renewed
Saudi offensive in Yemen, and the nuclear accord are bound up with US
imperialism’s efforts to entrench its domination over the Middle East,
subordinating the Gulf monarchies to Washington’s command and
integrating Saudi Arabia into the US‑Israeli axis for the confrontation
with Iran.
Situational Awareness had made massive bets on the AI boom,
leveraging its profits through large borrowings from the major banks,
and was facing margin calls—demands for additional collateral—which
would have led to a fire sale of its assets, possibly causing a major
plunge across the market.
According to the Financial Times,
had fire sales proceeded the “semiconductor rout” could have run “out
of control.” It was only prevented when the hedge fund Citadel, owned by
the billionaire Ken Griffin, moved in and bought $16 billion worth of
Situational’s public equity holdings at a discount of 10 percent on
Thursday. The market then breathed a sigh of relief and bounced up on
Friday, with Citadel making a tidy profit on its deal.
But what took place could well be repeated on an even broader scale. After the rescue operation the New York Times
commented that while AI-related stocks rallied and the market rose
“that’s being treated on Wall Street as evidence of a reprieve rather
than permanent proof the implosion will be contained.”
This is
because, while it was an extreme case, the activities of Situational
were not fundamentally different from what is taking place across Wall
Street—the use of borrowed funds in order to juice profits to ever
higher levels in the expectation that share prices will continue to
rise. In the case of Situational, it has been estimated that for every
dollar it provided from its own capital it borrowed an additional three
or four dollars to make its trades.
The use of such leverage boosts the return on the upside but leads to major losses when the assets fall in value.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fundamental thesis was set out in an essay
published in 2024 entitled “Situational Awareness,” the name he then
used for his hedge fund established in that year. He maintained
that AI
demand would continue to grow requiring the massive building of data
centers, the manufacture of chips and the development of electricity
infrastructure—the same basic scenario that has powered the entire
market.
Launching his fund in 2024, he wrote: “Before long, the
world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred
people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs that have
situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have
found myself amongst them.” And some of the biggest names on Wall Street
bought into the claims.
*****
As stocks skyrocketed in the first half of the year, Situational was
the toast of Wall Street and Aschenbrenner was being hailed as a
visionary and Wunderkind as its market value climbed more than 400
percent. As recently as June he was described as the “Nostradamus of
AI.”
These assessments were backed up by money from Goldman Sachs
and others, including JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America. It also
received backing from the major financial trading firm Jane Street which
rarely provides money to outside managers.
Everything was on the
up and up and in early July Situational was selected to play a major
role in $27 billion listing of the South Korean chipmaking firm SK Hynix
on Wall Street.
But the hedge fund was then caught in the savage
downturn in chip stocks in July, centered in South Korea, as doubts began
to surface about the sustainability of the AI boom. These included when
and even if the massive investment in data centers would turn a profit
and over the problems for the American hyperscalers created by
competition from China.
*****
There is a recognition in financial markets and media circles that
the demise of Situational has a broad significance and confirms warnings
by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Together with
other financial bodies, the BIS has noted that market valuations are
overstretched and that the use of leverage to boost profits poses
significant dangers in the event of a downturn. The fear is that margin
calls by banks lead to fire sales of assets leading to a further
downturn, with an impact on banks and other bodies which have provided
the funds for speculation.
A terrorist attack on a high-end Italian restaurant, Balzi Rossi, in
Moscow on the evening of Saturday, August 1, killed at least three
people. As of this writing, 21 others are reported to have suffered
injuries of varying severity. The restaurant is located on Kudrinskaya
Square, less than a 30-minute walk from the Kremlin.
According to
Russian media, the bomb was a self-made explosive. An unidentified
woman carried the device to the restaurant, where a private wedding
banquet with 50 invitees was held. A report in the Russian business
daily Kommersant suggested that the woman may have been unaware
that she was carrying an explosive device. The bomb was detonated
remotely after a security guard outside the restaurant prompted the
woman to open a box she wanted to hand over as a gift. The woman, the
security guard and one visitor were blown to pieces as a result of the
blast. Had the woman been able to enter the restaurant, the number of
dead would have likely been significantly higher. Kommersant reported that the force of the explosion was equivalent to a kilogram of TNT and that the device was packed with metal pellets.
Russian authorities have initiated an investigation into what they described as a “brutal act of terror.”
While
they have not officially established a link to the war in Ukraine, it
is likely that such a link exists. Ever since the beginning of the
NATO-provoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, terrorist
attacks on Russian soil have formed a critical part of the NATO-Ukraine
war strategy. Terrorist attacks have killed Darya Dugina, a prominent
far-right figure, several generals and well-known pro-Kremlin
journalists. In a major terrorist attack on the Moscow Crocus City Hall in March 2024, over a hundred people were killed.
The restaurant bombing occurred as Ukraine has dramatically stepped
up its long-range drone strikes on Russian territory. During the day of
the Moscow terrorist attack alone, Russian authorities reported to have
shot down 743 drones and 15 aerial bombs. In the following 24 hours,
another 635 drones were downed over 18 Russian regions, the Black Sea
and the Azov Sea.
The strikes were carried out with AI-guided
Hornet drones, which have been developed and produced by a US company
owned by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is one of the richest
people in the world, with a net worth of $63.4 billion, and is highly
connected in the US military, intelligence and Democratic Party
establishment.
*****
Ukraine’s intensification of drone warfare comes as the front lines
have, by and large, stalled with soldiers on the battlefield locked in a
war of attrition. Hundreds of thousands have died already in the war,
with many more wounded and maimed.
*****
There are signs that this strategy is producing considerable tensions within the ruling oligarchy in Russia. Since a failed coup attempt
by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, very few signs of these
conflicts have emerged into the open. However, in mid-July, one of the
country’s richest men and owner of critical Russian industries, Andrey
Melnichenko, published a lengthy piece in TheEconomist, one
of the most important outlets of international finance capital. In
contrast to ex-oligarchs, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who have long
been attempting to organize a palace coup from outside and are openly
aligned with NATO, Melnichenko, with an estimated net worth of $20.4
billion, has been considered part of the inner circle of pro-Kremlin
oligarchs. It is unclear whether Melnichenko, who has met with Putin
personally, spoke with TheEconomist for 60 hours with
or without the approval of the Kremlin. However, there have been no
reports of him subsequently having suffered repercussions.
In a
lengthy essay entitled, “A Plan for Russia,” Melnichenko warned that the
West’s plans for Russia would all end in disaster—leading to a
“collapse into anarchy,” the transformation of Russia into a vassal
state of China, or a “permanent state of war” of Russia “against the
world.” Instead, Melnichenko pleaded, the West should recognize Russia’s
“sovereignty,” “step back from the abyss” and negotiate a settlement.
He indicated that “Russia’s business community” was prepared to
participate in such discussions. The Economist comments, “Implicitly, he wants Mr Putin to relinquish one-man rule and devolve power. But he does not talk about democracy.” The Economist
described Melnichenko’s essay and lengthy discussion with the journal
as a sign that “he and his fellow tycoons can no longer afford to ignore
the rot in a country they watched descend into tyranny.”
Yet the
true fear of Russian oligarchs such as Melnichenko is not “tyranny” but
social revolution. The Russian oligarchy’s primary concern, more so than
“sovereignty” in the face of imperialism, is its class rule over the
working class. Between the threat of both imperialist subjugation and a
social revolution by the working class, it is the latter which it fears
the most.
*****
The Ukraine war,
already, is part of a metastasizing conflagration in which the
imperialist powers seek to redivide the world. Workers in Russia can
only oppose this war by uniting with their class brothers and sisters in
Ukraine, Europe, Asia and America, to oppose imperialism and the
capitalist system as a whole.
In social media postings Friday and Saturday, President Donald Trump
renewed his push for the creation of a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization
Fund” which would provide payouts to his fascist followers—largely those
prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He
made the threat in response to the refusal of two Republican senators to
support his nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, his former
personal lawyer. The two senators, John Cornyn of Texas, who was
defeated in the Republican primary, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina,
who is retiring, wanted Blanche to put it in writing that the planned
$1.8 billion fund had been abandoned. The White House barred Blanche
from doing so.
Trump pulled back on the proposed fund after it came under attack by a
significant section of congressional Republicans, including senators
who had to flee for their lives from the mob which stormed the Senate
chamber seeking to block a congressional vote to certify Trump’s defeat
in the 2020 election.
The fund was to be established through a
grossly illegal arrangement in which Trump would agree to settle a $10
billion suit which he filed against the Internal Revenue Service—which
he now controls—over the leaking of his tax returns to the New York Times.
In return, the Department of Justice—which he also controls—would
establish the $1.8 billion fund to “compensate” alleged victims of Biden
administration “weaponization” of the justice system.
In other
words, the fund would provide payments to Trump supporters who committed
crimes and were prosecuted under Biden, and then were pardoned by Trump
on his first day after returning to the White House in January 2025.
The vast majority of these were foot soldiers in the attempted coup of
January 6, 2021, since the Biden administration never sought to
prosecute higher-level conspirators.
The Biden Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor who brought
charges against Trump, but so belatedly that the case was abandoned
after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
*****
The renewed conflict over the slush fund comes as another Trump effort
to manipulate the criminal justice system collapsed. US Attorney for the
District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Friday that she was
dropping all charges against David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic
athlete who was arrested and charged with felony destruction of property
for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln
Memorial.
Pirro, a Trump favorite on Fox News, conceded that there was no case
against Hearn and that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by
incompetent renovation by the contractor, a former pool contractor for
Trump properties outside Washington, who was awarded a no-bid contract
despite having no experience in the type of work required.
In a transparent effort to avoid Trump’s wrath, Pirro blame the
Interior Department and the Park Police for supplying bad information
which led her to claim there was “tremendous evidence” against Hearn.
But
Trump responded, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what
she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM … There may
have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by
VANDALS!”
While the prosecution might appear ludicrous and the case trivial, it
was anything but that for David Hearn, who faced a potential 10-year
prison sentence because Pirro had him indicted for felony rather than
misdemeanor vandalism, due to the damage allegedly exceeded $1,000.
East Midlands Railway (EMR) workers walked out Saturday over safety
concerns related to the model of one of the trains involved in the Bedford crash on July 19, killing train driver Shaun Burton and leaving 162 people injured.
Train
conductors and onboard hospitality staff, members of the Rail, Maritime
and Transport union (RMT)—are to take part in further 24-hour stoppages
on the next two successive Saturdays over faults with the Hitachi Rail-built Class 810 trains. EMR introduced the Class 810s into service
last December after three years of delays due to problems with the new
fleet.
The RMT organized pickets at several stations, including Sheffield,
Derby, Nottingham and London St Pancras. The stoppage forced EMR to run a
skeleton service between Sheffield and Nottingham, with only one train
an hour to London St Pancras and services ending at 7p.m.
It was a
Class 810 Nottingham-to-London train which came to an unexpected stop
south of Bedford on July 19 due to a fault with its Automatic Warning
System (AWS) applying the brakes. The Corby-to-London train then
collided into its rear, killing its driver Shaun Burton instantly.
Burton
had applied the brakes as the train passed a signal at red, but this
was not enough to avoid the crash. This has placed a major question mark
over the integrity of the signalling system and onboard safety devices
on the trains.
What is not in doubt—but is not addressed by the
initial report by the official investigation by the Rail Accident
Investigation Board (RAIB)—is that this busy section of line carrying
intercity services has not been equipped with Train Protection and
Warning System (TPWS). This would have prevented the crash.
TPWS
uses electronic loops in the track that are linked to the signal. As the
train passes over the loops, they communicate with the train’s onboard
equipment, which automatically applies the brakes if the train passes a
red signal or is approaching too fast.
EMR—run by private operator
Transport UK Group—has continued to put Class 810 trains into service,
despite problems requiring a 20-minute reset, with the loss of
safety-critical systems and communication between the driver and signaler.
The strike action went ahead Saturday after last-minute
talks between the RMT and EMR failed. RMT General Secretary Eddie
Dempsey stated, “Despite numerous attempts to resolve the dispute
through talks, EMR will not remove the 810s from service. Therefore, the
strikes will go ahead, and we remain available for further talks.”
*****
EMR Managing Director Will Rogers has submitted his resignation after
stating that the problems with the 810 trains had “fallen below the
levels we and our customers expect.”
*****
The role of the RMT, led by Dempsey, is to contain and isolate the
fight. It has not organized all grades in this dispute, including train
driver members and station staff. ASLEF, representing most train drivers
at EMR, has not organized its members in joint strike action. This will
only come by rank-and-file workers organizing against the
divide-and-rule policy enforced by the union apparatus of both unions.
Workers
spoke about how their struggle had been brewing ever since EMR
introduced the Class 810 trains last December, their safety concerns and
the Bedford crash.
This discussion was cut short by RMT Midlands
Regional Officer John Watson, who said that workers could not speak
publicly over these issues as it was a disciplinary offense and EMR
would claim they are “bringing the company into disrepute”. He said only
officials employed by the union could make statements.
The WSWS team replied that EMR could not be in any more disrepute:
slashing passenger services and playing Russian roulette with safety.
They asked Watson why the RMT was not organizing a campaign to remove
the gagging order but instead ensuring compliance. He replied:
“Unfortunately, this is how it’s been since the Thatcher years.”
This is a cover used for every Labour government, from Blair to
Starmer, and now the Burnham government. Workers join unions in the
belief there is safety in numbers through collective action and they can
discuss and agree a common action to stand up to employers and publicly
voice their opposition. Restricting this disables workers’ democratic
rights to speak on their struggles, appeal to broader sections of
workers and society against media smears and generalize their fight
against the capitalist profit system at war with workers’ jobs,
conditions and the provision of critical public services.
*****
The fight to defeat the public silencing of workers engaged in struggle
is bound up with workers determining the strategy to fight, deciding how
their collective power can most effectively be deployed, demanding the
assets they have built up are used to support workers on strike and
ensuring their struggles end in victory rather than managed defeats by
the union bureaucracy..
*****
A collective strike strategy to fight for the restoration of safety must
be combined with the demand for an independent workers’ inquiry into
the Bedford crash. This is the only way to establish the truth, hold
those criminally responsible to account, and fight to reverse decades of privatization, maintenance cuts, job losses and productivity drives.
Some 4,285 WestJet flight attendants walked off the job early Sunday
morning after nearly eleven months of negotiations failed to produce
either a contract or a tentative agreement. Members of Canadian Union of
Public Employees (CUPE) Local 8125, the cabin crew are striking against
unpaid ground duties, inadequate compensation and punishing schedules.
WestJet—Canada’s
second largest air carrier—cancelled 309 flights through Sunday night,
as it shut down its mainline Boeing 737 and 787 operations during one of
the summer’s busiest travel weekends.
The central issue in the
dispute is the unpaid pre- and post-flight labor that flight attendants
perform. Cabin crew report before departure, conduct safety checks,
assist during boarding, manage delays and remain responsible for
passengers during deplaning. Yet they receive no direct wages for this
work. What “compensation” they get is through a rigged “credit hour”
system that bundles flight time, ground duties and delays into a single
calculation, with time spent performing work pre- and post-flight given a
far-lower value.
Summing up the sentiments of the rank and file
against a system that robs them on average of $1,100 per month and
particularly penalizes low-paid, low-seniority attendants, the strikers’
picket signs declare: “Unpaid labor won’t fly.”
WestJet has
resisted workers’ demand for full wages for all the labor they perform,
insisting that unpaid pre- and post-flight work is the norm across the
industry in North America.
*****
Corporate Canada is already demanding that the Liberal government,
led by the former blue-chip executive and central bank governor Mark
Carney, break the strike. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has declared
that “every hour matters” and is urging Ottawa to use “every tool at its
disposal” to restore air service.
The most immediate weapon
available to Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu is Section 107 of the Canada
Labour Code. The Trudeau and Carney Liberal governments have
“reinterpreted” this hitherto obscure provision to transform it into a
mechanism for outlawing strikes and imposing binding arbitration through
the unelected Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB). They have
thereby dispensed with even the democratic fig leaf of a parliamentary
vote on back-to-work legislation.
Since 2023, Ottawa has invoked
Section 107 ten times, nine of them to halt or suspend strikes and
lockouts or impose binding arbitration. Workers at Air Canada, Canada
Post, major ports and the country’s two principal railways have been
targeted, as were WestJet mechanics.
*****
WestJet workers must draw the sharpest lessons from last year’s Air Canada strike,
when flight attendants defied a government back-to-work order, only to
have the CUPE union apparatus shut down their strike at the very point
that it was galvanizing mass support and the big business Liberal
government had been pushed onto the back foot. Above all, the experience
demonstrates the urgency of striking WestJet cabin crew establishing
democratically controlled organizations of struggle—rank-and-file strike
committees—so that they can countermand the inevitable efforts of the
CUPE bureaucracy to sabotage their fight.
On August 16, 2025, the
more than 10,500 Air Canada flight attendants walked out over unpaid labor and falling real wages—the very same issues the WestJet workers
are striking over today—launching their first national strike in nearly
four decades.
Less than twelve hours after the strike began, Hajdu
invoked Section 107. But workers defied the CIRB’s back-to-work order,
exposing the fragility of the government’s strikebreaking operation.
CUPE
officials responded with militant-sounding speeches while entering
closed-door negotiations supervised by a government-appointed mediator.
Some 36 hours after the back-to-work order was to take effect, the CUPE
leadership ordered the flight attendants to return to work without any
vote or even any details of the agreement.
It soon emerged that the union bureaucracy’s claims of “victory” and “ending” unpaid work were a total fraud.
Under the terms of the CUPE negotiated agreement, pre-flight duties
were initially compensated at just 50 percent of the regular wage, while
post-flight work remains unpaid.
Moreover, CUPE struck a deal
with Air Canada and the government under which the flight attendants
were denied the right to vote on the new compensation system for pre-
and post-flight work. The only portion of the contract that they were
allowed to vote on—the schedule of wage increases—the flight attendants
rejected by an overwhelming 99.1 percent.
*****
This betrayal cannot be separated from CUPE’s integration into the “Team
Canada” nationalist alliance with the Carney government. CUPE
officials, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the New Democratic
Party have rallied behind Carney in the name of “defending Canada”
against Donald Trump’s trade war and annexation threats. Nationalism is
the political glue binding the union bureaucracy to the capitalist state
and ensures it will enforce government dictates, regardless of union
officials’ militant posturing.
*****
CUPE’s appeal for “free collective bargaining” at WestJet must be
understood within this framework. By asking Ottawa to allow negotiations
to proceed, the bureaucracy is negotiating the terms of its continued
role as an enforcer of labor discipline. It accepts the pro-business labor code, the CIRB and the state-regulated bargaining system
repeatedly used to suppress strikes because it is the source of its
privileges.
*****
WestJet flight attendants must establish rank-and-file committees
independent of the CUPE apparatus in order to take control of the strike
out of the hands of the bureaucracy, ensure democratic oversight of
every proposed agreement and prepare defiance of any government
strikebreaking order. They should appeal to Air Canada workers, pilots,
mechanics, airport workers, postal workers and railway workers,
including the CPKC strikers, for support in defending the right to
strike and workers’ living standards.
This appeal must extend to
flight attendants and airline workers in the United States, Mexico and
internationally. Unpaid labor is an industry-wide issue enforced by
transnational airlines and backed by governments across borders. Workers
can defeat this coordinated offensive only through the international
unity of the working class.
CUPE’s record points toward an
impending sellout, either through capitulation to Section 107 or the
imposition of a concessions-filled agreement after a brief period of
militant posturing. Rank-and-file organization and a
socialist-internationalist political strategy are necessary to defeat
that betrayal and mobilize the working class against the Carney
government’s program of austerity, war and attacks on democratic rights.
Twenty-four hours after Keiko Fujimori assumed the presidency of Peru
on July 28, security forces killed “Comrade Richard,” third in command
of the remnants of the guerilla group Shining Path (SL), now operating
as the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), in the VRAEM (Valley
of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro Rivers), one of Peru’s poorest and most
isolated regions and a drug-trafficking hub of the country’s southern
jungle.
In her inaugural address, Fujimori announced that the
Armed Forces and National Police (PNP) would take the lead in internal
security operations under states of emergency, alongside a reform of the
prison system and a 15 percent increase in the minimum wage. At her
first cabinet meeting the following day, the government took up a
supreme decree requesting legislative powers from Congress. According to
RPP, the stated purpose was to give the executive immediate legal tools to accelerate the state’s response to crime.
The sequence is a grave warning to the Peruvian and South American working class.
The
MPCP, numbering between 100 and 200 members, functions as a protector
of illegal drug production and trafficking routes in the VRAEM. It lost
any capacity to threaten Peru’s cities decades ago. That military
insignificance is precisely what makes it politically useful.
The
Maoist politics of Shining Path, hostile to the working class as a
revolutionary force, and its methods of individual terror served Alberto
Fujimori (1990–2000) as the pretext for the self-coup of April 5, 1992,
when he dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution and ruled by
decree with the backing of the Armed Forces. His daughter is reaching
for the same instruments of repression.
The VRAEM operation was
carried out for maximum political impact, while international
delegations, including several representatives of the South American far
right and the Trump administration—the largest delegation in attendance
with six officials—were still on Peruvian soil for the inauguration.
The
military occupation now being prepared will not center on the jungle.
It will center on the working class districts of the major cities, where
the extortion gangs and hitmen operate. It is also where the majority
of Peru’s Venezuelan immigrants live, prime targets to be used as
scapegoats for military repression.
*****
Fujimori’s proposal to place internal security in the hands of the Armed
Forces and police under a state of emergency amounts to declaring her
government a de facto military regime.
*****
Fujimori’s announcement was reported by the corporate media across
the world within hours and understood for what it is. The Bolivian daily
La Razón described her handing of “internal control” to the
military as the first measure of a promised iron-fist government modeled
on her father’s. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported her
declaration of war on criminal organizations, drug traffickers and
illegal mining, and her announcement that the Armed Forces would
temporarily take the lead during states of emergency.
*****
In preparation for war against China, a network of US military bases
is taking shape across South America. [Daniel] Noboa agreed to the construction
of two in Ecuador, including one at Manta, with a base on the Galápagos
Islands also under consideration. But the Ecuadorian people oppose the
move: on November 16, 2025, a referendum rejected lifting the
constitutional ban on foreign military bases.
The US has offered
Peru $1.5 billion to upgrade the dilapidated Callao naval base, 73
kilometers south of China’s Chancay megaport and positioned to intercept
Chinese vessels.
Argentina has been building an integrated naval
base at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, since 2022, to project military power
into the South Atlantic and Antarctica. US Southern Command officials
have visited and voiced concern over alleged Chinese ambitions there.
Under
US pressure, Panama moved against the Balboa and Cristóbal port
concessions held by a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of CK Hutchison. In
Peru, Chinese-based COSCO still owns and operates the Chancay megaport,
but regulatory oversight has been transferred to a Peruvian government
body.
*****
The chief architect of a joint South American bloc to impose the
burden of the crisis onto the working class, the peasantry and the youth
is the fascistic Trump administration. Its aim is to methodically expel
Chinese commercial influence and foreign direct investment from South
America under the false pretext of defending sovereignty.
The
stakes are considerable. Chinese foreign direct investment in Peru
totals $35–38 billion, followed by Chile with $20 billion; the US trails
far behind at under $7 billion. While China sent a two-person
delegation to Fujimori’s inauguration, the US arrived with six
officials.
*****
Taken
together—the national security agenda, the consultations on prison
construction, Fujimori’s pledge to place internal security in the hands
of the Armed Forces and PNP and the killing of a Shining Path commander
24 hours after taking office—the direction is unmistakable. Across the
continent, a bloc of far-right governments is preparing military rule...to
subordinate South America to US imperialism in its confrontation with
China.
The dropping of the divestment demand follows months of direct
intervention by the UAW bureaucracy to sabotage the struggle of Columbia
student workers. In March, after SWC members voted by 91.5
percent—1,129 to 105—to authorize a strike, UAW Region 9A leadership,
directed by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Brandon
Mancilla, refused to approve the walkout unless students’ political
demands related to the defense of democratic rights, campus policing and
divestment were substantially narrowed. Union Servicing Representative
Courtney Bither, who made over $140,000 last year, informed the SWC that
the UAW International Executive Board was unlikely to authorize a
strike, 'if it's all of your initial proposals still on the table.' SWC
was threatened with being placed under receivership and subsequently
removed demands to end campus surveillance and get police off campus.
Now the divestment demand has been scrapped.
*****
The actions of the UAW bureaucracy expose the bogus claims by UAW
President Shawn Fain and his defenders in the DSA and other pseudo-left
groups that the criminal investigation into his abuse of power and
retaliation against internal rivals is the result of a political
witch-hunt for the UAW’s supposedly “anti-war stance on Gaza.”
As Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, pointed out at the July 30 debate with
other presidential candidates, Fain backed “Genocide Joe” Biden, sat by
as anti-genocide protesters were dragged out a UAW convention that
endorsed Biden, and sabotaged the struggles of Columbia, University of
California and other academic workers fighting the repression of
protesters, along with workers in strategic defense industries that
supply Israel with weapons.
“After organizing some of these
higher education sites, the UAW sells them out. Whether it is University
of California, Columbia, Harvard, the UAW repeatedly brings back
agreements that aren’t what the members want. It has even told workers
they can’t strike over political demands. What type of workers
organization bars workers who are paying dues to it from striking over
things they find they need to fight for? This all gets swept underneath
the rug so someone can make $200,000 a year as an organizer.”
Students
at Columbia must draw the critical political lessons of the last three
years and beyond. A fight against genocide, war and dictatorship, and
for basic democratic, social and economic rights demands the development
of a mass movement of the working class independent of the corporatist
trade union apparatus and all capitalist political parties. It requires
the building of independent rank-and-file committees as part of the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)
and, most importantly, the building of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the fight for socialism.
*****
As in the automotive plants and other industrial sectors, the UAW
bureaucracy works on behalf of capitalism. At the universities, that
means subservience to the administrations that run the institutions. The
Columbia administration--tied to Wall Street, the military-intelligence
apparatus and both the Democratic and Republican parties--is an
instrument of the corporate-financial oligarchy and cannot be appealed
to for reforms. It has collaborated fully with
the Trump administration’s efforts to implement an American version of
Gleichschaltung—the Nazis' 'synchronization' of intellectual and
cultural life to state ideology.
The UAW apparatus functions not
as a defender of workers but as a pillar of class rule. UAW President
Shawn Fain operated as a de facto member of the Biden White House and
today supports Trump's trade war measures. At Harvard, the UAW shut down
a 40-day strike by 4,000 graduate workers in June without a contract.
At the University of California, 48,000 academic workers were kept on
the job for weeks despite a 93.3 percent strike authorization vote
before a sellout was rammed through. Presently, the UAW bureaucracy is
isolating hundreds of striking public defenders in New York City and Detroit.
The
way forward for student workers begins with a break from the UAW
bureaucracy and the building of rank-and-file committees independent of
the apparatus. This is the basis of socialist autoworker Will Lehman's
campaign for president of the UAW. Lehman does not seek to reform the
union bureaucracy but to abolish it, transferring the union's vast
resources to the democratic control of rank-and-file workers....
A joint statement issued by UAW President Shawn Fain and UAW Vice
President for Stellantis Rich Boyer declared, “A member of our union
went to work today expecting to complete his shift and return home to
his loved ones, but sadly, that will not happen.
“The UAW will
investigate and demand details from the company of exactly how this
tragedy occurred to ensure this kind of accident never happens again.”
Responding to the statement, a Stellantis Mopar worker posted on
Facebook, “With all due respect, words are not enough. They say they
don’t want another tragedy, but where was the urgency before a member
lost his life?"
I
want to express my deepest condolences to the family, friends and
coworkers of James Brasher. He is the latest victim of a system that
sacrifices workers’ lives to corporate profit. In the last two years, we
have lost at least five other brothers in the UAW: Daulton Simmers at
Caterpillar, Frank Logsdon at Metalsa, Antonio Gaston at Toledo Jeep,
Ronald Adams Sr. at Dundee Engine and Gregory Knopf at Ford Sharonville.
Far from protecting our lives, the joint UAW-management safety
committees protect the corporations.
It isn’t a matter of
correcting issues after the fact but of preventing them before workers
are injured or killed. That will only happen when workers take health
and safety into our own hands. That means establishing rank-and-file
committees in every plant with the power to shut down production until
we decide conditions are safe enough to work.
Two weeks ago,
workers at Stellantis plants across Metro Detroit were forced to breathe
some of the most toxic air ever recorded in a major American city.
Workers collapsed. Workers were carried out on stretchers. While UAW
President Shawn Fain waited more than 24 hours before posting a Facebook
message “urging” employers to do the right thing, Vice President Rich
Boyer sent a letter to Stellantis locals on July 17 claiming that UAW
Industrial Hygienists had verified air quality “remains within
acceptable limits.” That letter tells every autoworker in this country
what the joint safety apparatus exists to do. It does not protect
workers. It certifies that poisoned air is contractually acceptable, so
the line never stops.
Any “investigation” carried out by the UAW,
management and government safety agencies will only result in another
cover-up. If James Brasher’s family and co-workers are to get the truth
they deserve and if those responsible are to be held accountable,
rank-and-file workers will have to conduct an investigation themselves.
The
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)
demonstrated in the investigation of the death of Ronald Adams Sr. that
workers, acting collectively and independently, can uncover what the
company and the bureaucracy have a legal and financial interest in
burying.
If you work at the Center Line facility or anywhere in
the Stellantis network’ and you know what led to James Brasher’s
death—if you have witnessed safety corners being cut, if you know about
the conditions on that renovation project, if you have seen things that
supervisors and union reps told you to forget—I am urging you to come
forward. Your identity will be protected. You will not fight alone.
James
Brasher deserved to come home. His family deserves the truth. And every
autoworker in this country deserves a union that actually fights for
their lives. That is not the UAW under Fain and Boyer. Such a union will
only be won through the independent organization of the rank and file
to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power to workers on the shop
floor.
During the July 30 UAW presidential candidate debate, Lehman spoke about
the industrial slaughterhouse in America, while Fain, Boyer and the
other candidates were silent on this issue. “Every year in this country,
more than 5,000 workers die on the job because safety is subordinated
to profit,” Lehman said in his opening statement, adding, “In our
plants, Antonio Gaston, Ronald Adams Sr., Gregory Knopf were crushed to
death under the 2023 contract that this leadership called ‘historic.’”
The UAW bureaucracy has responded to the deaths of James Brasher the
same way it has done before: issuing condolences and promises of
investigations even as it conspires with management to cover up their
mutual responsibility.
In his latest racist provocation, New Zealand foreign minister
Winston Peters last week unleashed a tirade against Chinese-born Green
Party MP Lawrence Xu-Nan, telling him to “go back to your own country.”
Peters
leads the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party, which is part of the
National Party-led coalition government and is making anti-immigrant
xenophobia central to its campaign
for the November 7 election. Like Trump in the US, Nigel Farage’s
Reform UK, and One Nation in Australia, the party is seeking to divert
growing anger over collapsing living standards (wages in NZ have plunged 6.4 percent in the last five years) in a backward and reactionary direction.
The demonization of Chinese people is also intended to more closely align
New Zealand with US-led war preparations against China, which are
proceeding at a rapid pace.
*****
Xu-Nan is a New Zealand citizen who moved to the country with his
family in 1994, when he was a child. There are roughly 279,000 people of
Chinese descent living in NZ, making up 5.6 percent of the population.
The
outburst prompted a formal complaint from the Chinese Embassy, which
released a statement the next day saying it had “lodged solemn
representations with the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade over the negative China-related remarks made by [Peters].” It
urged the government to “respect and safeguard [the Chinese community’s]
legitimate rights and interests, and to create an open, inclusive and
non-discriminatory environment for them to study, live and work in New
Zealand.”
In a Facebook post, Peters doubled down, describing the
Chinese ambassador and others who criticised him as “pearl clutchers”
and “communist shills.”
*****
The Labour-Greens government from 2020 to 2023 presided over soaring
living costs and rising homelessness and child poverty. To pay for the
subsidies given to big businesses during the pandemic, it imposed
austerity measures and froze wages for teachers, healthcare workers and
others. Labour lost the election by a landslide as a result, opening the
door for the return of NZ First in the present right-wing coalition
government.
Whatever the outcome of the election in November, the
political establishment will continue its lurch to the right. In
particular, both major parties—Labour and National—are committed to
doubling military spending, which will be paid for with deep cuts to
social programs.
The attacks on migrants, in which all the
capitalist parties are complicit, are aimed at dividing workers along
national and ethnic lines to block a unified struggle against social
inequality, austerity, and war. The working class must respond by
building its own party, based on a socialist and internationalist
program. This includes defending the rights of all immigrants to live
and work wherever they choose, with full citizenship rights.
In
the latest mining industry fatality, a worker was killed and another
seriously injured in a collision between two vehicles at BMA’s open-cut
coal mine.
The
vote shows that South Australian nurses and midwives are not only up
against a Labor government that wants to slash their pay and conditions,
but a union bureaucracy that is complicit in the attack.
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC) has become the second largest ever recorded, surpassed only by
the 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic and its 28,616 confirmed, probable
and suspected cases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) Disease Outbreak News,
with data as of July 30, the country has reported 3,605 confirmed cases
and 1,587 deaths, a crude case fatality ratio (CFR) of 44 percent. It
is now the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in the DRC, passing the
2018 to 2020 Kivu epidemic’s total of 3,470 cases in 76 days. Kivu took
23 months.
It spans 49 of 140 health zones across Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uele and Tshopo. Epidemiological week 30 was the worst yet, with 567 cases and 296 deaths, roughly 42 deaths a day. Dr. Thierno Baldé, the WHO incident manager, said Ituri accounts for more than 90 percent of cases and roughly 80 percent of deaths. Uganda declared its own outbreak over on July 28, having recorded no confirmed case since June 21, at 20 cases and two deaths, a fatality rate of about 10 percent.
*****
Everything needed to stop this outbreak was known before it began.
Ebola’s transmission routes were mapped decades ago. In June the CDC
named the variable that would decide the outcome: the share of the sick
found and isolated before they infect anyone else, and it was right
about what would follow if that went unmet. What the agency scaled
afterward was screening at four American airports. Uganda has closed its
own outbreak at twenty cases, eighteen of whom lived, by tracing
contacts and treating the sick, across a border from provinces where the
dead are counted in thousands.
*****
Epidemic detection has been made a commodity, and a commodity goes to
whoever can pay for it. That is the same reasoning that left Bundibugyo
without a vaccine for nineteen years, a species too rare to constitute a
market, applied now to whether the dying can be counted at all.
The
international working class must take the pharmaceutical and
biotechnology industries out of private hands and place them under its
own democratic control, so that what gets developed answers to human
need rather than to shareholder return and threat designation. It must
take public health out of the market altogether. It must turn the wealth
now consumed in the war over eastern Congo’s minerals toward the health
infrastructure the Congolese population has been denied. This requires a
unified political struggle by workers in Africa, Europe and the
Americas against the imperialist order that has organized global
medicine around its own security, and the building of sections of the
International Committee of the Fourth International.
On midday, 23 July, Socialist Equality Party (SGP) members, relatives
and friends bid farewell to their comrade Herma Huber. She passed away
on 25 June, already seriously ill, in her Frankfurt flat, at the height
of an extreme heatwave. In 1971 Herma was a founding member of the
Socialist Workers League (BSA), the forerunner of the SGP, remaining a
member until her death, and thereby contributing to the rebuilding of a
section of the Fourth International in Germany.
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.
The Trump administration’s rule imposing work requirements on
recipients of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and
disabled, took legal effect on Friday, July 31, setting into motion the
deepest restructuring of the program since its founding in 1965.
The
instrument is the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), which President
Donald Trump signed on July 4, 2025. It slashes federal Medicaid
spending by an estimated $911 billion over a decade. The Congressional
Budget Office expects the cuts to leave 7.5 million more Americans
uninsured by 2034.
By the government’s own estimate, the work
requirement will strip 2.3 million people from the Medicaid rolls in its
first year. Enrollees aged 19 to 64 must document 80 hours of work,
community service or schooling every month, or earnings of at least
$580. States must begin enforcement by January 1, 2027. Nebraska starts
next month.
A medical exemption requires proof that a condition
“significantly impairs” the ability to work. Having cancer is not, by
itself, enough. When Arkansas imposed the same policy in 2018, more than
18,000 people lost coverage in six months, overwhelmingly through
paperwork failures. Twenty-six states sued over the narrow “medically
frail” definition. A Massachusetts federal judge declined Thursday to
block the rule.
Beyond Medicaid, the law cuts roughly $270 billion
from student loans and $187 billion from SNAP, the food stamp
program—cuts driven above all by expanded work requirements, which will
force 2.4 million people a month off food assistance.
The
administration is also ending the subsidy that has stabilized premiums
for Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. The Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Tuesday that the subsidy will
lapse at the end of this year, raising costs for the 25 million seniors
enrolled.
The White House has also drafted a rule, ProPublica
reported in April, to reverse a 2024 Biden era Social Security rule that
expanded Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled,
threatening nearly 400,000 recipients with cuts of roughly $331 a month
or the loss of benefits. First Medicaid, then Medicare, then Social
Security—Whatever remains of the social safety net is to be dismantled.
None
of the money cut is being “saved.” It is being reallocated—upward to
the rich through the OBBBA’s tax handouts and outward into the machinery
of war. The administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request demands
$1.5 trillion for the military, an increase of $445 billion over current
levels and, adjusted for inflation, the largest single-year rise since
World War II.
*****
This is not austerity imposed by a scarcity of resources—The American
financial oligarchy has never been wealthier. The gutting of social
programs is a deliberate reallocation of the wealth produced by the
working class to pay for the crisis of American capitalism and the wars
through which the ruling class seeks a way out.
*****
The assault on Medicaid and Medicare is accompanied by a war on
public health and medical science. Two days before the Medicaid rule
took effect, Senate Republicans staged a McCarthyite inquisition against
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years. Fauci invoked the Fifth
Amendment more than 100 times. The committee’s chairman, Republican
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky—having first published the scientist’s
private diaries—sought to set Fauci up for a perjury charge and closed
the hearing by scheduling a contempt vote.
Not a single Democrat
on the Senate committee protested the witch-hunting of Fauci or reacted
when Rand Paul had Fauci’s lawyer removed from the hearing room.
Under
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., some
20,000 Health and Human Services employees have been driven out, all 17
members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)
vaccine advisory committee have been fired and replaced with
anti-vaccine ideologues, $500 million in mRNA research has been
canceled, and the universal hepatitis B birth dose has been abandoned.
The
results are tabulated in disease and death: 2,318 confirmed measles
cases this year, the most since 1991, and Long COVID debilitating
millions. US life expectancy remains below that of every comparable
country.
The Trump administration’s new Medicaid work rules have
been met largely with silence from the Democrats and the US media. The
word “Medicaid” did not appear on the front page of the July 31 print
edition of the New York Times or on its website Friday evening, even though that page carried a report on hospitals flooded with the newly uninsured. The Washington Post’s home page likewise had no mention Friday evening.
*****
The assault on social programs and democratic rights is provoking an
upsurge of the working class. In July, 4,000 nurses at Boston’s Brigham
and Women’s Hospital led the largest healthcare strike in Massachusetts
history, and autoworkers at parts plants across Michigan have repeatedly
rejected contracts pushed by the UAW apparatus.
The defense of
these rights requires the independent mobilization of the working class,
free of the shackles of the Democrats, the Republicans and the trade
union bureaucracy, through rank-and-file committees on shop floors, in
hospitals, in neighborhoods, in schools and on campuses. These
committees—linked internationally through the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—must fight for the
unconditional restoration and expansion of Medicaid, Medicare, Social
Security and SNAP as inviolable social rights, preliminary to
guaranteed, free healthcare for all. This must be paid for through the
expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the utilization of the
trillions now devoted to war for the satisfaction of human needs.
The UAW presidential candidate forum held online
the evening of July 30 laid bare the gulf between rank-and-file Mack
Trucks worker Will Lehman, a socialist, and the five other candidates,
who are contending for control of an apparatus sitting atop $1.25
billion in net assets.
Every candidate apart from Lehman is a product of the apparatus or a
contender to run it. Incumbent Shawn Fain is under federal criminal
investigation, as the Justice Department has convened a grand jury and
subpoenaed the Monitor over findings that Fain abused his office to
obtain benefits for his fiancée and her sister, then retaliated against
Vice President Rich Boyer for refusing them. Boyer, now running against
Fain, negotiated the 2023 Stellantis contract that opened the door to
the mass firing of temporary workers and the layoff of thousands more.
The
other three candidates are Brian Keller, a Stellantis Mopar worker who
ran in 2022 and won support at several assembly plants before endorsing
Fain in the runoff; Tricia Geiger, a highly-paid UAW International
servicing representative; and Greg Mooney, recording secretary of Local
2147 at General Dynamics Land Systems in Lima, Ohio, a supporter of
Autoworkers for Trump.
Will Lehman's opening statement in the forum
In his opening statement, Lehman placed the election in its real context:
We
as workers confront historic attacks on our conditions and our lives.
Workers’ share of the national income is the lowest since records have
been kept. Escalating global war is driving up prices. Paychecks don’t
cover basic necessities in a country that just minted its first
trillionaire. More than 21,000 autoworker jobs have been wiped out since
the start of 2024. The corporations aim to use AI and automation to
carry out a global jobs massacre. Democratic rights are being torn down,
and our immigrant brothers are hunted by ICE agents.
Every year
in this country, more than 5,000 workers die on the job because safety
is subordinated to profit. In our plants, Antonio Gaston, Ronald Adams
Sr., Gregory Knopf were crushed to death under the 2023 contract that
this leadership called “historic.” This month, workers were carried out
on stretchers as smoke filled the plants and the lines kept running.
Lehman then told members where their dues go: 560 International
staffers were paid more than $100,000 a year; Fain was paid $276,000
last year, 6.6 times what the average member earns; $118 million was
spent on the apparatus’s own officers and staff, 14 times what it paid
out in strike benefits. “This was never about a few corrupt officials,”
Lehman said. “The bureaucracy as a whole is an arm of management.”
He ended his opening remarks by calling for the independent mobilization of autoworkers and the working class, stating:
There
is a growing mood of anger and rebellion among autoworkers, healthcare
workers, educators, legal aid workers and workers in the UAW. What we
need is a strategy and an organization, class struggle instead of class
collaboration, internationalism instead of nationalism, rank-and-file
committees in every plant and workplace, controlled by workers, linked
across industries, to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power to the
shop floor. This campaign is not about what I will do for you. It is
about what you are going to do.
The moderator, retired New York Times
labor reporter Steve Greenhouse, opened the debate by calling the UAW
one of the nation’s greatest unions and pledging to be “scrupulously
neutral.” His first question exposed this pretense, as he asked what had
“enabled the UAW to come away with a victory in the stand-up strike”
against GM, Ford and Stellantis in 2023 and whether it had made
mistakes.
That the strike was a victory was not offered for debate, and five of
the six candidates accepted the premise. Fain called the union’s
contract campaign “brilliant,” declaring, “I’m proud of what we’ve
done,” and touted the general strike he claims to be preparing for May
Day 2028.
Lehman alone rejected these claims, stating bluntly,
“It was not a real strike. It was a disaster. It was a Hollywood
strike.” Workers had voted overwhelmingly to strike, but at most 30
percent were called out while the rest worked overtime. Those who did
walk out were starved on inadequate strike pay. Lehman stressed: “That’s
not solidarity. That’s isolation.”
*****
A critical aspect of the debate was the recent death threat
made against Lehman by Raymond L. Jensen Jr., a UAW organizer who was
until recently assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s own region,
and paid roughly $202,000 in 2025. On July 16, Jensen posted an
AI-generated image on Lehman’s public campaign Facebook page showing him
bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked man
aiming an automatic rifle at his back. Jensen, whose Facebook profile
carries an “I Support Shawn Fain” badge, posted it beneath Lehman’s
statement on the federal investigation into Fain.
Threatening a
union member to interfere with his rights in a union election is a
federal crime. Until Thursday night, neither Fain nor any member of the
union’s executive board had said a word about it. At the debate, Lehman
explained that the threat was not just about him but about the response
of the apparatus to all rank-and-file opposition, referring to Antwiane
Sanders, a Nexteer worker fired for speaking out against UAW officials
at a contract meeting inside the plant.
Fain first tried to ignore
the issue and only responded when Lehman confronted him directly. “I
don’t condone that stuff,” he said, before adding: “If you’re running
for president, get ready, brother, because you’ll be getting them every
day.” This statement effectively endorsed and doubled down on the
threat. Fain gave no indication whatsoever that Jensen would face any
consequences.
*****
Asked what the union’s stance toward the Trump administration should
be, Lehman warned that Trump is “trying to enact a fascist dictatorship”
and that workers should back neither capitalist party. Tariffs serve
the ruling class, he explained: They raise prices, save no jobs and set
workers in one country against those in another. He denounced both the
Trump and Biden administrations as war criminals.
The other
candidates avoided any sharp criticism of Trump and signaled a
willingness to bargain with the fascist in the White House, above all,
over tariffs, which every other candidate supported. Fain boasted of the
collaboration with Trump, saying the UAW had been in US-Mexico-Canada
Agreement talks in Mexico City and had “worked very close” with U.S.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
A question on organizing in
the academic sector exposed what unites the five against Lehman: a
preoccupation with the dues base on which the salaries of the apparatus
rest. Boyer complained that higher education did not deliver “the best
bang for our buck” and asked how long it would take to recoup the $100
million allotted for organizing. Geiger, Mooney and Keller said the
same.
Lehman answered that the money belonged in the strike fund,
and that gains won on the shop floor, not paid staff, draw workers to
the UAW. What the union should not be funding, he said, are “cushy seats
for organizers who do nothing and contribute nothing to the union, just
going around and earning a paycheck for nothing.” Academic workers who
turned to the UAW in the hopes that they would be united with
autoworkers in their struggles found an organization that sells them out
and bars its own members from striking over political demands,
including opposition to the Gaza genocide.
In his closing statement, Lehman elaborated on his program, stating:
Let’s
be honest about the situation we face. The ruling class is waging an
all-out war on the working class. ... We cannot pretend that the
interests of workers in the UAW have nothing to do with what is
happening in this country and the world. The reality is the interests of
workers and the interests of the capitalists are antagonistic. They
cannot be reconciled. We can win what we need only through struggle.
Every
other candidate is telling you, “Elect me, put a better person at the
top of the apparatus, and things will change.” Workers have been through
that four years ago. Shawn Fain made the same promise, and every worker
knows how that ended. Put a new individual at the top of the same
apparatus, and you get the same policies because the apparatus answers
to the companies and to itself. It defends the social and economic
system based on the exploitation of the workers.
The
alternative was a new power built from the shop floor and linked across
industries and borders and the fight for a fundamental reorganization of
economic life. “Socialism means equality,” he said. “It means workers’
control of production. It means the international unity of the working
class based on our interests. That fight has already begun.” He pointed
to the contract battles at Bridgewater Interiors and American Axle, and
to the millions marching against dictatorship: “The working class, the
sleeping giant of American politics, is beginning to awake.”
Lehman
ended by paraphrasing Thomas Paine, stating, “‘These are the times that
try men’s souls.’ The complacent bureaucrat and the lying reformer
will, in this crisis, betray the fight. But the worker who stands up now
deserves the love and thanks of all humanity.”
The debate made
clear that the only social force capable of halting the jobs massacre,
the killings in the plants and the drive to world war is the working
class itself, organized through its own rank-and-file committees. Lehman
ended with an appeal to act on that, stating: “Vote for me, but do more
than vote. Build. Build the committees, build this movement. That is
where our power is.”
The
Communication Workers Union bureaucracy has co-authored this wrecking
operation because it accepts EP Group’s drive to make Royal Mail
"competitive" and "sustainable" for the company’s billionaire investors.
The
£8.4 billion pledged for the next phase of Britain's Dreadnought
nuclear armed submarine program was the first truly significant
funding announcement of Burnham’s premiership, committing him to
austerity and war.
Since
the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action one year ago,
3,500 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act (2000) for
holding cardboard signs reading, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine
Action.”
More than a month after the June 24 earthquakes devastated northern
Venezuela, the confirmed death toll has risen to 5,546, with 16,740
injured. The United Nations fears that as many as 51,000 people may
still be missing.
The widening humanitarian crisis has not
stopped the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars
from Venezuelan oil sales—with estimates as high as 96.5 percent of the
revenue.
While US and Venezuelan troops patrol the streets to
intimidate workers going without basic necessities, imperialist looting
is taking place on a historic scale.
*****
The scale of the disaster is unfathomable. The Venezuelan
government reports 190 buildings collapsed and 856 severely damaged, but
NASA’s assessment puts the figure at 58,000 buildings destroyed or
damaged.
The World Bank estimates $19.6 billion in direct damages
but says the full cost of physical recovery—including debris clearance
and rebuilding to modern standards—could reach $50 billion, close to
half of Venezuela’s entire GDP.
According to official figures,
some 18,000 people have lost their homes completely, and more than
23,000 remain in shelters. The UN humanitarian relief agency projects
that 1.3 million people will require assistance over the next six
months.
Conditions on the ground are deteriorating toward a
secondary catastrophe. Dust from pulverized concrete hangs in the humid
air on top of the smell of corpses. Garbage accumulates in the streets,
as families camp outside buildings declared too dangerous to enter.
An
estimated 1.2 million tons of debris must be managed, much of it
contaminated with fuels, motor oil, paints, solvents and plastics
released when the buildings came down.
Diego Díaz Martín of the
environmental organization Vitalis warned the AP that seasonal rains
could trigger landslides across earthquake-weakened hillsides, while
many affected areas have not been assessed.
Safe drinking water is
scarce. There are no guarantees the water in tanker trucks has been
properly treated, the AP reports. Unsafe water and inadequate sanitation
are already triggering disease outbreaks.
*****
Against this
mounting catastrophe, Washington has committed $386 million in
assistance, and Venezuela secured a further $346 million in emergency
financing from the IMF. Set against $50 billion in recovery costs, these
sums are derisory.
*****
Meanwhile,
sanctions remain in force and $22 billion in Venezuelan state assets
remain frozen and billions more are being taken by US imperialism.
The financial mechanism at the center of this arrangement deserves the closest scrutiny.
Since
the January 3 invasion that abducted President Nicolas Maduro, the
United States has directly controlled the sale of Venezuelan crude. The Financial Times calculates that the Trump administration has collected more than $13 billion in revenue from Venezuelan oil sales so far.
Washington
has said almost nothing about where that money has gone, with an
executive order describing the US role as “custodial.” Trump, for his
part, boasted in June that the US had recovered the cost of the military
operation in Venezuela “28 times” through oil, adding that the United
States is “making a lot of money, too.”
*****
The paper trail is
deliberately opaque. A first tranche in January 2026 was valued at
roughly $500 million, but only $300 million was actually confirmed
transferred by both Venezuelan and US officials; the remaining $200
million was reportedly held in an account in Qatar, with no confirmation
from either side that it was ever released.
*****
There is
no independent audit, no public ledger and no mechanism by which the
Venezuelan population can determine what has become of its key natural
resource. There is likewise no way of knowing what portion has found its
way into the accounts of the Trump family and its business associates.
In
order to safeguard this sacking operation, the US military occupation
continues to deepen. Former Vice President Elías Jaua told Truthdig:
“The United States has not only taken over the country’s main airport
and seaport but also deployed 900 Marines in La Guaira and 2,000 across
the entire operation.”
He added that US forces have conducted
drone and helicopter mapping of the entire Venezuelan coastline,
imposing de facto control over Venezuelan airspace and coastal waters
from US bases in Puerto Rico, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago. American
troops now patrol La Guaira accompanied by an Israeli military
delegation.
The government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez,
Maduro’s former vice president, functions entirely according to Trump’s
demands. Caracas has announced its withdrawal from the International
Criminal Court, now a key target of US provocations. It lodged a
diplomatic protest against Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi for
observing that “Iran is not Venezuela, where you take one person and
everyone else gets scared and backs down.”
Caracas has removed
Russia’s Rosneft from oil projects and halted oil shipments to China
that had serviced Venezuelan debt. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is
reported to be directly managing Venezuelan export allocations,
sidelining European companies as well. Rodríguez has hosted an Israeli
delegation and a US congressional delegation led by the fascistic
Florida Republican Brian Mast, while moving to restore relations with
the far-right governments in Chile and Peru.
*****
The metamorphosis
of the Chavistas from proponents of “Socialism of the 21st Century” into
the managers of US imperialist interests is the most damning refutation
possible of the entire perspective of bourgeois nationalism and left
reformism. It demonstrates that no nominally left or nationalist force
operating within the framework of capitalism can secure national
sovereignty or lasting social improvement.
This capitulation is
being demanded with special ferocity precisely because US imperialism
itself is in crisis—burdened by record debt and trade deficits, a
weakening dollar and a losing economic contest with China. Its response
is to squeeze Latin America dry through methods of direct colonial rule
not seen in a century.
Just as workers and young people in the
United States increasingly reject the myth of American capitalism as a
land of opportunity and turn toward socialism, workers across Latin
America can see that capitalism offers them neither social improvement
nor physical safety. The radicalization now developing throughout the
region requires a genuinely socialist political program and a
revolutionary party.
On Friday, July 24, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers
Party–PT) attended the official reactivation of Avibras, for decades
Brazil’s largest defense industry company. The ceremony brought together
the three chiefs of the Armed Forces, government ministers, businessmen
and officials of the Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and
Region (SindMetalSJC), affiliated to the CSP-Conlutas trade union
federation led by the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU).
The event represented the convergence, on the same platform, of the
bourgeois state, the military high command, big private capital and the
pseudo-left trade union bureaucracy.
The reactivation is the
centerpiece of a drive Lula has pressed forward over the past month to
expand Brazil’s defense industry. The US invasion of Venezuela and the
kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026 set off alarm
bells through the Lula government. The threat of direct US military
aggression against Brazil was recently acknowledged officially by the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which warned that the Trump
administration’s designation of the criminal factions Primeiro Comando
da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) as “Foreign Terrorist
Organizations” in late May “could be invoked as justification for
extraterritorial actions.”
That designation comes on top of the
punitive tariffs imposed against Brazil since July of last year—part of a
broader US offensive against Brazil and Latin America aimed at rolling
back Chinese influence and installing governments aligned with
Washington’s interests across the region. A new round of US tariffs was
imposed on July 15, designed to help Trump’s fascist ally Flávio
Bolsonaro win the October presidential election against Lula. The Lula
government answers this offensive with rearmament: a nationalist and
militarist response to the crisis of global capitalism.
Founded in
1961, Avibras produced missiles, rockets, armored vehicles and space
launchers for the Brazilian Armed Forces and dozens of international
clients. In March 2022, the company entered bankruptcy proceedings. More
than 400 workers were laid off, though the courts suspended the
dismissals.
Without receiving their wages, the workers carried out
a strike lasting three and a half years—from September 2022 until March
of this year, when a fund led by billionaire businessman Joesley
Batista of the JBS group announced an investment of R$300 million (US$59
million) to resume production. The largest meat processing enterprise
in the world, JBS is also one of the largest beneficiaries of state
credit programs under the first PT government. The Lula government
announced a further R$300 million, not yet invested in Avibras, whose
primary stated purpose is to cover workers’ back wages.
*****
In
his speech, Lula declared it “a special day,” explaining that since the
beginning of his government in 2023 he had held meetings with military
chiefs and ministers with the aim of reactivating the company. For Lula,
keeping Avibras idle was unacceptable: “There was no political,
economic, or social explanation, and there is no explanation either as a
sovereign nation, for us to preside over a country that had a company
which had accumulated the technological knowledge of Avibras—producing
something so important for the country’s security—shut down and being
destroyed.”
The most revealing passage of the speech, however, was
Lula’s comparison of the Armed Forces to God–an institution one turns
to in every crisis. “I want the Armed Forces well prepared, well
trained, with enough soldiers to take care of this country,” he
declared. The president enumerated the resources that would make the
country a coveted target: critical minerals, rare earths, the world’s
largest tropical rainforest, 12 percent of the planet’s fresh water.
The
“sovereignty” Lula invokes is entirely that of the bourgeois state and
its Armed Forces—the same forces that harbored and protected the
conspirators behind the January 8, 2023 coup attempt, whose apparatus
remains intact and closely intertwined with the US military. In a
country that has not fought a war involving its national sovereignty in
more than a century and a half, and which was ruled by a blood-soaked
military dictatorship for some two decades beginning with a
Washington-backed coup in 1964, there is an infinitely greater
likelihood that a revamped military will turn its guns against the
Brazilian working class than fight a war of national defense.
At
the delivery of a frigate to the Navy at the TKMS Estaleiro Brasil Sul
shipyard in Santa Catarina on June 26, Lula portrayed that apparatus as
the foundation of “the beginning of a country that will assume, in fact
and in law, the right to be sovereign,” emphasizing that his
governments—the 2003-2010 period and the current one alike—have always
been marked by a “good relationship with the military.”
The
program Lula announced is that of a government preparing to become an
arms exporter on a growing scale. Pledging that “the Armed Forces,
together with the Defense Ministry, will prepare to place whatever
orders need to be placed,” he went further still: “We are going to have
to travel, Zé Múcio [Defense Minister], selling things.”
To
obfuscate what amounts to the transformation of Brazil into a major
international arms dealer, Lula reached for a cynical formulation
typical of bourgeois militarism: “When I sell a weapon abroad, I say: it
was made by Brazilian workers—men and women—and they don’t want to kill
anyone. This weapon is for peace. It’s just so you can say you have it,
so nobody messes with you.”
Lula has invoked Washington’s
expansionism to justify this program: “Right now the American president
wants to take Greenland, Canada is going to become his state, he wants
to take the Panama Canal,” he declared in June. His “weapons of peace,”
however, have a precise destination in the real world. In the 1980s and
1990s, Avibras supplied equipment for the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf
War. Today, four of Brazil’s five largest defense export customers are
NATO members, including Germany and the United States, and Brazilian
equipment is being used in the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
At the
same Santa Catarina ceremony, Lula spelled out the place this program
now occupies in his government: “Beyond education, beyond healthcare,
beyond the energy transition, beyond artificial intelligence, defense is
part of my priorities to transform this country into the true country
it needs to be.” He added: “For the first time, I will include the
question of defense in my government program.”
*****
In
his speech at the ceremony, Lula was effusive in his praise for the
Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and Region (SindMetalSJC).
“The union is a source of pride for the maturity of its understanding of
the importance of the company and the political moment we are living
through.” The phrase captures the role played by the Morenoite
leadership of SindMetalSJC: that of a bureaucracy which, over three and a
half years, “matured” in the direction of the negotiating table and in
accordance with the interests of the bourgeois state, militarism and
national private capital.
Present at the ceremony, Weller
Gonçalves, the union’s president and a PSTU member, addressed Lula
directly, advancing essentially the same nationalist and militarist
program as the PT government. He recounted the “many meetings held with
Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, with Defense Minister Múcio and with
other ministers.” What was conspicuously absent from Weller’s remarks,
however, was his own intensive campaign of engagement with the Brazilian
military, whose principal interlocutor was the reactionary military
commander Robinson Farinazzo. This partnership culminated most recently
in a public campaign for SindMetalSJC to receive the Order of Military
Merit, the Brazilian Army’s highest decoration.
At
the ceremony, Weller handed Lula a document that encapsulates the
program the Morenoite bureaucracy has pursued throughout this entire
period. “The return of Avibras is a great victory for our country,” the
document declared, crediting the union’s struggle with having prevented
“Brazil’s main defense industry from being handed over to foreign
capital.” Addressing Lula directly, Weller was still more emphatic: “We
did not waver in defending Avibras as a national company.”
The
document also put forward what it called a “strategic proposal for
national development”: the re-nationalization of aviation giant
Embraer—which also produces military aircraft—the nationalization of
Avibras and all strategic companies in the defense sector, and their
merger into a large state-owned industry integrated with universities
and research centers.
Just as Lula had done moments earlier, the
document justified this proposal in terms of the “profound
transformations in world geopolitics,” the “ongoing wars” and the
“rivalry between major imperialist powers,” concluding: “no country that
intends to preserve its sovereignty can do without a national defense
industry.”
The interview Weller gave to Brasil247 on July
24 is still more revealing about the real political role the union has
played. He disclosed that at the outset, government representatives
argued: “Look, you talk about nationalizing the company, you talk about
government investment. Brazil is not at war. If we invest in Avibras,
people will question why we’re not investing in healthcare, in
education, in infrastructure.”
That argument—whose substance was
subsequently repeated by Alckmin and Lula—reveals that the systematic
lobbying by the Morenoite-led union helped create the political
conditions for the PT government to present rearmament as a national
priority on a par with social policies. “The defense industry needs
government funding. It’s the money from our taxes that the government
must invest in Avibras,” Weller concluded. He also argued that the
company “will need to improve itself” and “pivot to producing drones.”
Weller
did not ignore the fact that his alliance between a “communist trade
unionist” and a military figure like Farinazzo had drawn criticism. In
what appears to be a direct reference to the WSWS—which has published an
extensive record of articles exposing the SindMetalSJC’s militarist
program amid broad silence from the pseudo-left—he declared: “There are
even some websites out there, aren’t there, Commander, that stir up
controversy saying: ‘wow, a communist trade unionist alongside a
military man—what’s that about?’” He answered his own question: “Each to
their own ideas. But when it comes to the struggle for the return of
Avibras, it is a united front.” Such a nationalist, multi-class front
between a union leadership and the military represents a grotesque and
reactionary parody of the “united front” policy advanced by Trotsky.
The
political content of this fraudulent “anti-imperialism” is further
exposed by the positions on the main international conflicts adopted by
the PSTU and CSP-Conlutas, the trade union federation to which
SindMetalSJC is affiliated. While crying for Brazilian “national
sovereignty,” they have championed the US-NATO arming of Ukraine in its
proxy-war against Russia, the war in Syria and other initiatives by the
same imperialist powers.
In the Brasil247 interview,
Weller went still further in his nationalism. He claimed that the
Bolsonaroist far-right had hijacked “national symbols,” adding: “The
real patriot is the worker on the shop floor … The real patriot is the
metalworkers’ union that stood on the front lines fighting for Avibras
and wants to defend our country. This far-right crowd has nothing to do
with patriotism.”
Weller’s argument is, at its core, a declaration
against the international character of the working class. By
proclaiming that “the real patriot is the worker” and contesting the
“national symbols” with the far right, the SindMetalSJC president
advances no independent class perspective. The “patriotism of the
worker” Weller invokes is, in practice, the patriotism that leads
workers to subordinate themselves to bourgeois nationalism—to accept the
sacrifices demanded by the state and capital in the name of the nation,
and to identify their interests with those of their own ruling class.
But
the working class has no homeland. By its very position in the
productive process, it is an international class. A metalworker in São
José dos Campos has more in common with a Boeing worker in Seattle, a
defense factory worker in Germany or a worker in Iran than with Lula,
the Brazilian generals or the businessmen who now control Avibras. What
unites them is not the flag, but exploitation—and what divides them is
not national origin, but class.
The Avibras ceremony takes place
as the imperialist wars enter a new stage. The war between Russia and
NATO-backed Ukraine and the war waged by the United States against Iran
are intensifying, while the genocide in Gaza continues unabated. Last
week, Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, claiming
it was carrying drones and missiles bound for Russia. Iran denounced the
attack as aggression against a commercial vessel. As the WSWS analyzed,
the attack exposed the global character of imperialist war, with the
conflicts in Ukraine and Iran increasingly converging into a single
conflagration.
The answer to the escalation of imperialist war and
the growing threat of a third world war cannot come from bourgeois
nationalism—not from the PT government, not from the military, and not
from the trade union bureaucracy that marched alongside them. It
requires the independent political mobilization of the Brazilian working
class in unity with its class brothers and sisters in the United
States, Ukraine, Iran and across the world—in a common struggle against
capitalism and the imperialist war system it generates.
Never before has a German chancellor been as unpopular as Friedrich
Merz. After just under 15 months in office, only 18 percent of the
population are satisfied with his performance, while 78 percent are
dissatisfied. This is the lowest approval rating recorded for a sitting
chancellor since polling began in 1998. At the same point in his term,
Merz’s predecessor Olaf Scholz still had an approval rating of 41
percent, while Angela Merkel’s stood at 66 percent.
*****
Merz has responded to the collapse in the government’s poll ratings
by reshuffling his cabinet and reorganizing the leadership of the
CDU/CSU parliamentary group. Following the resignation of parliamentary
group leader Jens Spahn, Merz installed his close confidant Thorsten
Frei, previously head of the Federal Chancellery, as Spahn’s successor.
Spahn was forced to step down after he and his husband had a child
through a surrogate mother in the United States, despite surrogacy being
prohibited in Germany and publicly opposed by both the CDU and Spahn
himself.
The Federal Chancellery is now headed by former Health
Minister Nina Warken, who, according to Merz, demonstrated through her
health reforms “that she can lead a ministry and push through reforms
even in the face of opposition.” Warken has been replaced as health
minister by Carsten Linnemann, the former secretary-general of the CDU.
Although he holds a doctorate in economics, Linnemann has no expertise
in health policy and is regarded as a staunch representative of business
interests. His task will be to impose the austerity measures initiated
by Warken against widespread opposition.
Merz sacked Transport
Minister Patrick Schnieder in a humiliating manner, which sparked a
storm of indignation within the Rhineland-Palatinate regional
association, where his brother is Minister-President. Schnieder’s
successor is Steffen Bilger from Baden-Württemberg, a lobbyist for the
automotive industry who has made a name for himself as an opponent of
environmental regulations. From 2004 to 2007, Bilger was chairman of the
youth organization of the Weikersheim Study Centre, the right-leaning
think tank founded by the former Nazi judge Hans Filbinger.
Merz also replaced several state secretaries or transferred them to other ministries.
The
reshuffle, which Merz had apparently barely discussed with anyone,
exacerbated the crisis. For the first time, the Chancellor is being
publicly attacked and called into question from within his own ranks.
Tensions within the party are reaching a boiling point. The high-handed
manner in which Merz went about his business also offended regional
associations in the east and facilitated the eruption of pent-up panic
within the party. With state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania just a few weeks away, CDU office-holders
fear for their influence and their positions.
*****
The criticism of Merz is not directed at his policies, but at the
arrogant manner in which he implements them. Merz’s critics fear that he
is thereby provoking an uprising that threatens not only the government
but capitalist rule as a whole. They support his agenda of rearmament
and social spending cuts, which has catastrophic consequences for large
sections of the population, but, like the Chancellor himself, are
seeking the most effective method possible to implement it—even in
collaboration with the AfD if necessary.
The government’s
disastrous poll ratings are a measure of the growing opposition to
policies that have no support whatsoever amongst the population. The
systematic escalation of the war in Ukraine against the nuclear-armed
power Russia, the enormous sums spent on rearming the Bundeswehr (German
Armed Forces), the drastic cuts to healthcare, care services, pensions
and welfare benefits, as well as the job cuts in the car industry, are
meeting with growing resistance.
Only the super-rich are better
off under Merz. The number of centimillionaires—those with more than
$100 million—rose from 3,900 to 5,000 in his first year in office. In
the same year, poverty reached a historic high, with a rate of 16.1
percent, or 13.3 million people.
The crisis facing the Merz government must be viewed in this context.
Merz’s critics within the CDU and in the media almost unanimously accuse
him of “technical errors,” “poor communication” and “bungling.” Their
aim is to make his reactionary policies more effective. In contrast,
public opposition is directed against the substance of Merz’s
policies—against cuts to social services, poverty, unemployment,
militarism and war.
This opposition finds no political expression in official politics.
The SPD is part of the Merz government and heads two key ministries: Defense and Finance. The Greens support both the war and rearmament
policies and are not in government solely because they are not needed to
secure a majority. The trade unions are working closely with the
government and business associations to push through mass redundancies
and cuts to social services and to stifle resistance to them.
This
enables the right-wing demagogues of the AfD to exploit to some extent
the anger and frustration of the middle classes—and indeed of
workers—for their own ends. However, the AfD is not an opposition party;
rather, it takes the reactionary policies of the ruling class to
extremes. It is no coincidence that it is supported by the world’s
richest man, Elon Musk, and Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance.
It is only a matter of time before the AfD is brought into government.
The other parties are systematically paving the way for it by adopting
its inhumane refugee policies and its “law and order” agenda. What is
currently still preventing them from forming a coalition government is
the fear of massive protests, as well as differences of opinion on
foreign policy.
It is telling that even the Left Party, which was on the brink of
collapse just a few years ago, is gaining support once again. It is
attracting voters and members, particularly among the younger
generation, because it speaks out publicly against cuts to social
services, militarism and the rise of the AfD.
However, the Left
Party is not a political alternative, but rather a lightning rod and a
safety valve. It spouts left-wing rhetoric to absorb the growing radicalization. In fact, it protects the hated federal government,
helped Merz to a swift rise to the chancellorship and even voted in the
Bundesrat, Germany’s second chamber of parliament, in favor of the
government’s war credits. Wherever it assumes government responsibility,
it defends capitalism and supports austerity programs. In this way,
it strengthens the AfD. In Thuringia, where the Left Party held the
position of Minister-President for ten years, the far right now enjoys
over 40 percent support in the polls.
The vicious circle of militarism, war, social spending cuts and
dictatorship can only be broken by an independent working-class movement
fighting for the overthrow of capitalism. The Socialist Equality Party
(Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, SGP) is fighting for this perspective
in its campaign for the Berlin House of Representatives election on 20
September. The SGP’s election statement declares:
We
do not make hollow appeals to the warmongers, nor do we beg for
handouts. We organize resistance against redundancies, wage cuts and
social cuts, and, together with our sister parties in the International
Committee of the Fourth International, we are building a worldwide
movement against war and its root cause, capitalism.
Across
both the Trump and Biden administrations, official public health policy
forced working class and minority Americans to bear the pandemic's
highest death toll.
More
than 80 public defenders, social workers, paralegals, and support staff
walked out on July 24 against the Neighborhood Defender Service, an
agency that handles about half of the indigent defense cases throughout
Wayne County.
The
former Maine Senate president is being promoted as a working class
insurgent, but his 26-year political record is defined by economic
nationalism, attacks on immigrant and Canadian workers and corporate
subsidies.
El-Sayed
made a point of declaring his opposition to socialism, signaling to the
corporate oligarchy that he did not represent a threat to its basic
interests.
In
a period marked by unprecedented global shocks, the two leaders of the
Australian Council of Trade Unions have served as the linchpin of
capitalist stability.
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.
