Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The 1619 Project revisited: A retrospective evaluation in light of Trump’s assault on democracy
Six years ago this month, on August 14, 2019, the New York Times launched its 1619 Project—a sprawling, multi-media attack on the American Revolution and Civil War, the two revolutions that shaped the American republic and democracy.
The “true founding” of the United States, Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed, was not in 1776. It was instead in 1619, when the archive first attests to the arrival of enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia. The rest of American history, the 1619 Project insisted, was one long, dark night of racism, only occasionally countered by the efforts of black Americans who “fought back alone” to redeem democracy.
In launching this enterprise, the Times proclaimed that it was setting out to alter decisively how the American Revolution and the Civil War were taught to students. The text of the original essays that comprised the August 14 publication was reprinted in the tens of thousands for distribution to schools throughout the country. Henceforth, the American Revolution and Civil War would be understood as shameful chapters in the history of American racism. Its leaders, from Washington to Lincoln, would be forever deprived of their undeserved reputation as heroes of democracy.
Immediately recognizing the Times’ 1619 Project as an exercise in historical falsification, the World Socialist Web Site published a systematic rebuttal on September 3, 2019. This was followed by a series of interviews with leading historians, including James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Dolores Janiewski, Adolph Reed Jr., Richard Carwardine and Clayborne Carson. These articles and interviews were read hundreds of thousands of times and drew national and international media attention.
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The World Socialist Web Site intervention, which also included a lecture series held at major American universities, laid bare the 1619 Project’s major errors and distortions: its portrayal of slavery as a uniquely American “original sin” unconnected to the emerging global capitalist system; its erasure of the multiracial character of the abolitionist, civil rights and labor movements; its insistence that all contemporary social ills descend from “anti-Black racism” allegedly rooted in a national “DNA”; and Hannah-Jones’ ignorant claim that generations of “white historians” had censored discussion of slavery.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained, these fabrications revealed an overarching effort by the Times to promote racial division among American workers and youth by imposing a racialist myth on American history—an attempt, in the words of Times editor Dean Baquet, “to teach our readers to think a little bit more” in a racial way. The Project would itself both symbolize and project an almost zoological theory of history, which posited that only “black people” could intuit “black history.” New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein said, “We knew from the beginning that we wanted the magazine to be almost entirely comprised of contributions from black writers, thinkers, photographers, and artists. This was non-negotiable.”
Of all the 1619 Project’s many distortions and outright fabrications, its central lie, and the one from which all the others flowed, was its claim that the American Revolution and Civil War were not progressive, world-historic milestones in the struggle for democracy and human liberation—in spite of the many limitations imposed on them by their times. They were indeed not revolutions at all, according to Hannah-Jones, but counterrevolutions animated by supra-historical white hatred of blacks. The British Empire, she suggested, was the progressive force in the American Revolution. As for the Civil War, there was no difference between North and South. It was a war between equally racist brothers.
This position—with all its vast implications for both US and world history—ultimately boiled down to the claim that there never was a democratic revolution in America and that therefore it has no democracy worth defending.
Six years ago, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the 1619 Project’s sweeping denigration of the American Revolution and Civil War would hand a powerful weapon to the far right. “By repudiating these foundational struggles,” we explained, “the New York Times has provided an opportunity for Trump”—who quickly seized the opening by menacingly pledging to impose “patriotic education” so that “our youth will be taught to love America.”
As the World Socialist Web Site predicted, the 1619 Project gave ammunition to state and federal efforts to police education, ban books and enforce nationalist curricula, including most recently Trump’s attack last week on the Smithsonian Institution. The Times’ effort to create a black nationalist reframing of American history has provided an opening for the attempt to officially enforce a white nationalist version.
The politics of the 1619 Project played no small role in Trump’s victory. The Democratic Party’s cynical belief that the focus on race would outweigh social and economic grievances was a disastrous political miscalculation. The 2024 election saw pronounced shifts among poor and working class voters—including a historic increase in support for Trump from black Americans, more than doubling his share from previous cycles.
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One of the crucial problems exposed by the entire affair is the protracted decline in American intellectual life. The decades-long promotion of identity politics in academia and the corresponding attack on Marxism, materialism, social class and the very concept of progress in history—what the postmodernists deride as a “meta-narrative”—has contributed significantly to the political vulnerability of the population before the fascist threat.
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The 1619 Project must itself be understood in class terms. It is not simply that the Times was “mistaken” about history or that it miscalculated in its embrace of racialist politics before the 2020 elections. The 1619 Project catered to the worldview and class interests of the Democratic Party’s “base” in the privileged upper-middle class. It is this layer of the population that seeks to obscure the class question in the past and present in favor of various forms of identity, through which it hopes to milk positions and benefits in the present.
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And where are these forces now? What have they to say about the Gaza genocide? The growth of dictatorship and inequality? The advancing world war? Hannah-Jones, who made millions off the 1619 Project, has been mute, authoring one article in the last two years for the Times—though in a recent MSNBC interview she claimed that Trump’s policies are aimed at making “working white people … feel racially ascendant and powerful.”
As for the pseudo-left groups that proclaimed the 1619 Project, they have been largely silent in the face of the encroaching dictatorship of the Trump administration. Jacobin, for example, has not produced a single article or comment opposing Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Washington D.C. Its editors are awaiting a lead from the Democratic Party.
Working class people—white, black and immigrant—for whom the defense of democracy is a life-and-death issue, cannot be so indifferent. On June 14, 2025, more than 6 million people participated in the “No Kings” protests across over 2,000 cities and towns throughout the country, making it one of the largest coordinated demonstrations in US history. The massive turnout saw protesters carrying handmade “No Kings” signs—an explicit invocation of the anti-monarchist spirit and democratic principles of the American Revolution—as they rallied in opposition to rising authoritarianism.
On Saturday August 23, about 500 survivors, activists and supporters gathered at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo for a National Day of Action against President Donald Trump’s escalating assault on historical truth, democratic rights and the working class.
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At the center of the outrage is Trump’s Executive Order 14253, cynically titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Far from promoting truth, the order inaugurates an authoritarian cultural purge, rewriting curricula, altering museum exhibits, dismantling diversity initiatives and manipulating public narratives to glorify American capitalism and erase the crimes of US imperialism. Histories of slavery, indigenous genocide, immigrant incarceration and state repression are being whitewashed in the name of “patriotism.”
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The administration is actively invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law used during WWII to justify the imprisonment of Japanese Americans. This archaic statute allows individuals to be detained as “enemy aliens” without due process. Today, Trump wields it to justify mass deportations and indefinite detention.
Internal ICE documents estimate over 60,000 immigrants are currently detained nationwide, with capacity expanding as shuttered prisons reopen. Images displayed at JANM juxtaposed photos of Japanese American families boarding buses in 1942 with modern-day ICE roundups, evincing an eerie familiarity: families torn apart, rights stripped away, trauma echoing across generations.
During WWII, Executive Order 9066 authorized the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them US citizens. That crime, though justified under the false banner of wartime necessity, was carried out by the same capitalist state that exists today.
But Trump’s trajectory is even more dangerous. His plan to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War signals preparation for more war abroad and more repression at home. This is combined with a coup d’état in progress and the mass expansion of ICE detention centers.
Saturday’s rally was both an act of remembrance and a warning. The same ruling class that carried it out in the 1940s is utilizing the machinery for mass repression today.
The Democratic National Committee, which held its summer meeting Monday through Wednesday in Minneapolis, was virtually silent on President Donald Trump’s military takeover of Washington D.C. and his plans to deploy the National Guard in cities across the US.
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Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said: “Donald Trump’s economic policies are failing, the Epstein files scandal continues to linger, and his public support is dwindling. It’s no wonder he seeks to distract the American people.”
It was all laid down to Trump’s personality, in order to conceal the class forces behind the drive to dictatorship and its main target, the working class....
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The near-silence and lack of any serious opposition from the Democratic Party—or any other official institution of bourgeois rule—is not accidental. As [an] August 26 World Socialist Web Site statement explained:
This basic class dynamic also explains the role of the Democratic Party. While there may be disagreements over Trump’s methods, both big business parties accept that drastic changes in social policy must be imposed at the expense of the working class. The differences are tactical. On the central question—who will pay for the deepening crisis of American capitalism—there is no disagreement.
This was on full display Wednesday when Muriel Bowser, the Democratic mayor of Washington D.C., gave a press conference. She praised what she called the “federal surge” for bringing down carjackings, said she was “strategically using” federal resources (i.e., the police and military occupation) and pointedly said she had spoken to Attorney General Pam Bondi and the president. In other words, her administration was not merely staying silent but was fully collaborating in the imposition of martial law conditions in the city.
The Democratic Party’s complicity with the drive to dictatorship at home is complemented by its rabid support for the imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine and its backing of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. The DNC meeting defeated a resolution calling for the suspension of US military aid to Israel.
4. 2 children killed and 17 wounded in Minneapolis Catholic school mass shooting
At around 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, as students and parishioners gathered for Mass inside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, a shooter approached the side of the building and began firing through the stained glass windows with a rifle, shotgun and handgun.
Two children, aged 8 and 10, were killed while sitting in the pews. Seventeen others were wounded, including 14 children between the ages of 6 and 15 and three elderly parishioners. Authorities expect all of those injured to survive.
The shooting reportedly lasted roughly two minutes before the attacker died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the parking lot. The shooter had set up makeshift barricades around some chapel doors to impede the students’ ability to escape and used all three weapons, alternating between them. Police also discovered a smoke bomb at the scene.
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Authorities arrived within minutes and began evacuating students and staff, moving them to safety and establishing a “reunification zone” for families.
Minneapolis authorities have identified the shooter as 23-year-old Robin Westman, a former student of the school who had no significant criminal history. Westman was born male but identified as a trans woman, changing names legally in 2020. Investigators report that Westman acted alone in the attack.
Westman posted a series of videos and a written manifesto online which were later removed from YouTube and other social media platforms. The videos included sketches of the church, weapons, ammunition and references to a killing spree targeting children and the Catholic community.
Other videos mocked God for failing to stop massacres, lamented the violence in the US and abroad and featured anti-Israeli statements. One segment included the phrase “Kill Donald Trump.” Westman referenced infamous shooters by name on camera, and exhibited gear marked with slurs and references to other domestic terrorists.
Quoting directly from the posted manifesto, Westman allegedly wrote, “F–k those kids,” along with incendiary language. The attacker timed the video and written statement’s release to coincide with the shooting. According to a report by CNN, Westman left a written message for friends and family expressing the intention to commit suicide.
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The Minneapolis school shooting is the latest in the decades-long crisis of violence in American schools. According to a review by CNN, there have been 44 school shootings in the US so far this year. In 2022, 2023 and 2024 there were a total of 80, 82 and 83 school shootings respectively.
Every family in the US with school-age children is dealing with the threat that a shooting will occur at their school. As many as 95 percent of US public schools perform active shooter drills and “lockdown” protocols at the start of each academic year.
Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, in April 1999—in which 13 students and one teacher were killed—US schools have become the sites of mass social trauma. Over the past 25 years, incidents like Sandy Hook (2012), Parkland (2018), Uvalde (2022) and now Minneapolis have revealed the deep social crisis of American society. Children and educators in the US now face among the highest rates of mass shooting risk anywhere in the world, a reality that is unique among advanced capitalist countries.
While political leaders and mass media commentators routinely invoke the “incomprehensibility” of the “evil” attacks carried out by “monsters,” they, in fact, take place within the context of the deepening decay of American society brought on by unprecedented social inequality, state violence and decades of war abroad.
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The World Socialist Web Site has consistently argued that school shootings are not “incomprehensible” or “inexplicable” but the product of the capitalist system. The WSWS has emphasized that the social and psychological crisis reflected in these mass school shootings are rooted in the glorification of violence, the collapse of secure employment, the marginalization of youth and the absence of any genuine collective future under capitalism.
5. Australia: Qantas fined $90 million over illegal sacking of 1,800 workers
Last week, Federal Court Justice Michael Lee ordered Qantas to pay a fine of $90 million over its illegal sacking in 2020 of 1,820 baggage handling workers. At least $50 million of this will be paid directly to the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which unsurprisingly hailed the decision as a massive victory.
The fine is on top of $120 million the airline was previously ordered to pay in compensation to the workers—around $66,000 each on average, less than the median annual wage nationally—who were unceremoniously thrown on the scrap heap at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns and who have waited five years for the seemingly interminable legal manoeuvres to conclude.
What happens to the remaining $40 million of the fine is unclear. Last week, TWU national secretary Michael Kaine said the union would be “strongly submitting” that it go to “those 1,820 workers whose lives have been absolutely decimated.”
Yesterday, however, the union’s lawyers told the Federal Court “our position is $30 million would be an adequate sum [for the workers], and that the rest would be used for the general purposes.” In other words, the TWU bureaucracy wants to claw back an average of $5,500 each from its “absolutely decimated” members, in order to up its payout to $60 million.
The $90 million fine is reportedly the largest ever handed down against a company for breaching Australian industrial relations legislation. But this says more about the pro-business character of the laws and the courts that enforce them than the size of the fine, which is a drop in the ocean for Qantas. The company recorded an after-tax profit of $1.6 billion for the 2024–25 financial year, 27.9 percent higher than in 2023–24, off $23.8 billion in revenue.
While Justice Lee did not order the maximum possible penalty of $121 million, he stated that the fine should be large enough to not be viewed by Qantas as a “cost of doing business.” The response of the financial markets—a 1.6 percent jump in the airline’s share price in the hours after the ruling—suggests it is being viewed in exactly that light.
6. Tariffs will pay for tax cuts for the wealthy
From the start of its tariff war against the rest of the world, the Trump administration, from the president down, had been promoting the Big Lie that its sweeping levies—the highest since the disastrous days of the 1930s—benefit the American population, paid for by foreign countries and corporations.
Trump knows these claims are false and that tariffs are the equivalent of a sales tax on imported goods paid for at the border to the government by the importer and then passed to the final consumer or the company using the goods. If not passed on, either by the importer or the company using the goods, then the tariff is paid for by a lowering of the firm’s profits because its cost structure has been raised.
A report issued by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last Friday has revealed one of the central mechanisms at work in the tariff war. It is a means by which a domestic tax is levied to pay for the massive tax-cut handouts to the corporations and the ultra-wealthy in Trump’s so-called “big beautiful budget bill.”
The CBO said the tariffs announced so far this year would raise more than $4 trillion in the coming decade and be used to cut government deficits by that amount. It said the tariff would lower the primary deficits by $3.3 trillion and the interest bill by $700 billion.
It has previously estimated that the hit to government revenue from the Trump budget will be $4.1 trillion over the next decade. In other words, in essence the tariffs are an impost on the domestic economy to finance the tax cuts.
The CBO’s estimate of the impact of the budget deficit has been dismissed by the Trump regime, but it eagerly seized on the revenue figures. Trump said it showed he was “right” and tariff revenues “are going to reduce the deficit by numbers far greater that ever expected—unheard of.”
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The tariff hikes have yet to show up fully in consumer inflation data because some firms have taken the decision—at least to this point—not to raise the prices in order to retain revenue and market share. But this situation cannot continue indefinitely, and the tariff hikes are already starting to show up in consumer durables.
In a recent note George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank said: “The top-down macro evidence is clear: Americans are mostly paying for the tariffs. There is likely to be more pressure on US consumer prices in the pipeline.”
7. Genoa dockworkers confront Bahri Logistics over weapons shipments amid Middle East wars
Dockworkers in Genoa, Italy are taking a stand against arms shipments to Israel and the Middle East, after they blocked weapons shipments aboard the Bahri Yanbu, a vessel belonging to Saudi shipping company Bahri Logistics.
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Bahri Logistics, formally known as the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia, is a major logistics provider. It attracted international attention in 2014, when it signed an exclusive, five-year deal to transport weapons and military equipment for the Saudi Armed Forces.
Several NGOs have launched actions against Bahri Logistics over its role in transporting weapons. Amnesty International has called on French authorities to stop Bahri’s ships from transporting arms to Saudi Arabia, citing the serious risk that these weapons would be used to commit war crimes in Yemen. In 2019, French NGOs took legal and public action to block Bahri ships from loading arms in European ports.
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By refusing to handle Bahri’s shipments, CALP [the collective of Genoa dockworkers] stands out as one of the few organizations in Europe taking principled, independent action against imperialist war and genocide. Its defiance reflects a growing understanding in the working class, amid official support for the Israeli regime amid its genocide in Gaza, that opposition to war cannot be left to capitalist institutions. It must be organized independently from below, by the rank-and-file.
8. Terence Stamp (1938-2025): A supremely intelligent actor
It is a testament to British actor Terence Stamp that he weathered being an icon of the Swinging Sixties—a trivialization pointing to wider artistic difficulties—to remain an impressively intelligent performer. The work changed, not for the better, but his depth and range endured.
The pseudo-left Socialist Alternative (SAlt) organisation held a two-day conference in Sydney on the weekend of August 16–17. Billed as “Socialism 2025,” the event was attended by several hundred people, and included participation from most of SAlt’s leadership, including those from interstate.
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The SAlt conference was a case study in how the pseudo-left seeks to divert that opposition back into the dead-end of parliamentary politics. While using “socialist” and even “revolutionary” rhetoric to win support from radicalized students and youth, SAlt is closely linked to the Labor-aligned trade union bureaucracy and collaborates with the Greens.
In an event spanning dozens of panels, many issues were raised. But the political essence of the conference was to argue for and justify the subordination of opposition to the political establishment in the form of Labor, the Greens and the trade union bureaucracies, and through them, to the capitalist system itself.
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SAlt’s modus operandi includes the glorification of endless protests, based on futile appeals to the powers that be. That has been the organization's role throughout almost two years of mass demonstrations against the Gaza genocide.
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The protests have manifestly failed to halt the Zionist regime’s barbarous war. SAlt’s perspective of endlessly appealing to the governments to shift course has served to subordinate mass opposition to the very political forces, above all the Labor government, that support the mass murder, politically and materially.
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The formation of political traps based on a vague left-populism that accepts the existing capitalist order is also an international development. In the US, Bernie Sanders continues to peddle the fraud that it is possible to “fight the oligarchy” within the framework of the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and the CIA. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, who repeatedly betrayed his supporters during his tenure as Labour leader, is forming a new party based on claims that it is possible to revive a social-democracy that can achieve reforms through parliament.
All of these tendencies seek to obscure the reality that workers and young people confront a capitalist system that is in deep crisis and is incapable of any progressive reform. Globally, the ruling classes are turning to fascism and dictatorship, to suppress mass resistance to their program of austerity and war that will end in a global nuclear catastrophe.
10. Chancellor Merz declares Germany “can no longer afford the welfare state”
“The welfare state as we know it today is no longer economically sustainable with what we are producing as a national economy,” declared Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Saturday at a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) state party conference in Osnabrück.
This is an unmistakable declaration of war on the entire working class. What remains of the hard-won social achievements of the past are to be thrown to the profit-hungry wolves of the stock markets and channeled into rearmament.
11. What teachers need to know about the sellout contract in Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ tentative contract announces minimal raises, token parental leave, harsher attendance rules and rising healthcare costs for new employees in a bid to oppose any struggle among teachers.
13. Trump’s 50% tariffs on India take force
The tariffs threaten to badly destabilize an Indian economy that already confronts slowing growth and is characterized by low private investment and mass unemployment and underemployment.
14. Death toll from Gaza mass starvation hits 313
The latest deaths follow the official declaration of a famine in parts of Gaza by the UN-affiliated body that monitors mass hunger.
Remarks delivered Wednesday before the United Nations Security Council revealed the horrifying toll of the deliberate famine carried out by Israel, with the direct support of the United States and indirect support of all imperialist powers.
Addressing the United Nations Security Council, Joyce Msuya, the UN’s deputy humanitarian chief, said, “Over half a million people currently face starvation, destitution, and death.” Msuya added, “By the end of September, that number could exceed 640,000. Virtually no one in Gaza is untouched by hunger.”
She noted that over 130,000 children under the age of five are at acute risk of malnutrition. “This famine is not a product of drought or some form of natural disaster,” she said. “It is a created catastrophe—the result of a conflict that has caused massive civilian death, injury, destruction, and forced displacement.”
Msuya continued:
Last month, over 100 Palestinians, on average, were killed every day, according to estimates by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, nearly twice the average daily toll recorded in May. In the same period, some 800,000 people were newly displaced, pushed into overcrowded areas that lack shelter and other essentials.
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Following these remarks, every member of the United Nations Security Council, excluding the United States, voted in favor of a statement implicitly alleging that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. “The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law. Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately,” the joint statement declared.
On the part of France, Germany and the UK the declaration is completely hypocritical. The governments of all of these countries have repeatedly justified the Gaza genocide on the grounds that Israel has the “right” to defend itself against the people whose land it illegally occupies.
In fact, Israel has no more “right” to wage war in Gaza than it does to starve the Palestinians. Both acts are completely criminal, and the pro-forma declarations of the imperialist powers declaring their shock at the deliberate mass starvation of the population is nothing more than an effort to publicly distance themselves from the crimes they have sponsored and enabled.
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On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump held a meeting nominally focused on the administration’s plans for Gaza. While the White House provided no details, among the participants was former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose staff has been involved in the Trump administration’s plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
In an interview with Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said that Trump’s plans would be implemented “before the end of this year.”
In February, Trump presented his plan to “own” the Gaza Strip, “level it out” and send the Palestinian people to “other countries.”
15. Sri Lankan union leaders shut down postal strike
Trade union leaders last Sunday capitulated to government threats and called off an indefinite strike by 17,000 Sri Lankan postal workers that began on August 17 and paralyzed the country’s postal services for seven days.
The unions caved in even though none of the strike’s 19 demands—including unpaid overtime benefits, job security, workplace conditions, and the imposition of fingerprint machines—was met.
The Postal and Telecommunications Officers’ Association (PTOA) and the Joint Postal Trade Union Front (JPTUF), which called the strike, repeatedly called for talks with the postal, health and media minister, Nalinda Jayatissa. The minister and postal service authorities, however, refused to grant any of the demands and instead issued ultimatums for workers to return to work.
From the outset the postal workers’ strike became a major confrontation with the government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, which is implementing the savage austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Postal services are among the state-owned enterprises earmarked for commercialization and privatization.
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The postal struggle once again starkly revealed that without a political program to defeat the government’s onslaught, postal employees—or for that matter, any section of the working class—cannot defend their basic social and democratic rights.
The unions deliberately isolated the postal strike, opposing any turn to other sections of workers to combat the government’s threats. Not a single union leader issued a call for solidarity with postal workers. In recent weeks, workers at the Ceylon Electricity Board and state university non-academic staff held limited strikes. Trade unions, however, are calling these scattered actions to divide workers and dissipate their anger.
The government plans to fully or partially privatize hundreds of state enterprises and institutions putting up to 500,000 jobs at risk. This is one aspect of the IMF’s sweeping austerity agenda imposed in return for a $3 billion bailout loan after the Colombo government defaulted on foreign debts in 2022. The IMF measures are aimed at “debt sustainability” in Sri Lanka—that is, repayment of foreign loans and boosting investors’ profits. The government is determined to crush any worker resistance or political dissent against its pro-IMF policies.
16. Oklahoma to impose “America First” loyalty test for teachers from New York and California
The 50-question multiple-choice test will screen for radical leftist ideology, gender ideology, and American exceptionalism.
17. Zarah Sultana’s bid for leadership of Britain’s new left party: “Corbynism capitulated”
Sultana’s leadership pitch against “Corbynism” reflects two related processes: Firstly, substantial sections of the former Labour “left” and their pseudo-left backers recognize that Corbyn is a much reduced and even discredited figure due to his record of retreat as Labour Party leader. Secondly, oppositional sentiment in the working class is far to the left of that which Corbyn successfully corralled and betrayed a decade ago.
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Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015 under conditions of a leftward shift in the working class internationally following the global financial crisis of 2008. Left-populist parties pledging opposition to austerity were elected to power in Greece (Syriza) and Spain (Podemos). In Germany support for Die Linke (the Left Party) grew, likewise for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. In the United States Bernie Sanders called for a “political revolution against the billionaires” winning mass support before declaring his backing for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden then Kamala Harris.
The betrayals by these left-populist and pseudo-left parties did not pass without consequence. Corbyn does not elicit the same popular enthusiasm he did a decade ago. The “historical gulf” separating 2015 from 2025—marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, NATO’s war against Russia, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump’s moves to establish a fascist dictatorship, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and a Labour government launching a frontal assault on the working class—has profoundly changed political consciousness.
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Sultana nevertheless calibrates her critique of Corbyn to prevent an open rift.
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Many workers and youth will have welcomed Sultana’s declaration that she is “proudly” anti-Zionist and her rejection of “capitulation” before the “class enemy”. But they should demand to know what program she is advancing for the new party to ensure such betrayals are not repeated.
As set out in her interview with NLR, her “vision” for the party is a variant of the reformist half-measures championed by Corbyn and her only proposal to prevent another political rout is to put the right people (such as herself) in place to ensure “institutional resilience”.
18. Continents are drying at an accelerating rate, severely impacting the supply of fresh water
The inability of the moribund capitalist system to effectively address climate change and all its myriad devastating consequences poses an existential crisis for humanity.
Many postal workers have been looking at what the flight attendants did and asking themselves, “Why didn’t we defy the government like the flight attendants?” This question is entirely legitimate, but it’s important to recognize that the flight attendants’ courageous defiance was not enough to prevent their union leaders from stabbing them in the back.
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