Perspective
Powerful strike movement emerges in the United States
A series of powerful strikes and social protests have broken out across the United States against intolerable social conditions and breathtaking levels of social inequality.
A series of powerful strikes and social protests have broken out across the United States against intolerable social conditions and breathtaking levels of social inequality.
The emails confirm that the January 6 coup was not a “spontaneous riot” but the culmination of a conspiracy orchestrated at the highest levels of the ruling class and Republican Party elite to overturn democratic forms of rule in the United States.
Despite the internal divisions in the ruling class that find expression in the Times’ editorial, the Biden administration will not be able to simply reverse course and extricate itself from the political crisis that it set in motion by provoking the Russian invasion.
The government statement made by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the federal parliament on Thursday morning, and the ensuing debate, made clear how aggressively German imperialism is behaving once again 77 years after the end of the Second World War.
The Socialist Equality Party is standing Senate teams in three states in order to present a genuine socialist alternative to the broadest possible audience, and prepare for the convulsive working-class struggles ahead.
The measures proposed by Labor and the Liberal-Nationals are aimed solely at maintaining record house prices and the profits of the banks.
The unions called the protests in a bid to deflect the rising anger among workers, poor and youth over the ever-increasing prices and shortages of essentials.
”Highlights of the new 6-year agreement released by the UAW show there are no significant improvements over the last deal over the contract workers rejected by a 4-1 margin May 10.
CNH’s international workforce—along with the workers at its myriad parts producers—are striking workers’ natural allies and a potential source of colossal strength
A University of Miami music professor uses the pages of the New York Times to suggest that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and other Russian composers are “cultural weapons” in the service of Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ op-ed column by Timothy Snyder—“We Should Say It. Russia is Fascist”—is yet another example of the Yale professor’s role as an unscrupulous purveyor of historical falsification aimed at legitimizing the US-NATO war against Russia.
A verbal “slip” by George W. Bush, in a comment about the war in Ukraine, has drawn attention to the far greater crimes of American imperialism in the wars begun by Bush and his father.
The political-ideological fount of the fascist forces that are playing such a prominent and reactionary role in contemporary Ukraine, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, supported the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
This is the second article in a multipart series.
Click here for the first part.
For revolutionary internationalists, the determining question is not “who fired the first shot,” but rather what is the general character of a given war and the social forces behind it.
It is necessary to state bluntly: The mass shooting on Sunday was a political crime. It was carried out by a racist and anti-Semite on the basis of a definite, fascist political ideology.
The Socialist Equality Party is standing Senate teams in three states in order to present a genuine socialist alternative to the broadest possible audience, and prepare for the convulsive working-class struggles ahead.
The Victorian Socialists’ campaign has nothing to do with a fight against capitalism and its political defenders. Instead, the Victorian Socialists are seeking to consolidate a position on the “left” flank of that very political establishment.
“I used to vote for major parties, but what you put forward is a good program.”
The Postal Workers’ Rank-and-File Committee warns that a union-backed Labor government will deepen the assault on the working class, advance the drive to war and continue the homicidal “let it rip” COVID-19 agenda.
Migrants NZ, a popular forum on New Zealand’s draconian immigration policies with more than 75,000 members, shut down after its administrators were threatened with legal action.
The censorship was aimed at preventing any exposure of the National Tertiary Education Union’s role in enforcing sweeping attacks on the jobs and conditions of academics and university staff.
Even as Washington presses its war drive, divisions exist within the ASEAN member countries over US aggression towards China and Russia.
While the focus has been on North Korea, Seoul is preparing for US-led wars with Russia and China.
In his introduction to the International May Day Online Rally, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North reviews the historical origins of the US-NATO war drive against Russia and outlines the political strategy of the working class to oppose the danger of World War III.
This is the report delivered by Joseph Kishore to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. Kishore is the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States.
This is the report delivered by Tom Peters to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. Peters is a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand, which is fighting to build a section of the ICFI.
This is the report delivered by Gregor Link to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. Link is a leading member in Germany of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the youth movement of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties.
This is the report delivered by Cheryl Crisp to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. Crisp is the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in Australia.
Staff and students have come to the support of Catherine Brown, the principal of Cleveland High School who was fired by Seattle Public Schools upon an investigation into emailing families about the end of COVID-19 contact tracing during the Omicron surge in January, which the district requested she withhold.
For low-income workers or those in precarious employment who are fortunate enough to have “affordable” housing, a job loss or reduction in employment hours can quickly lead to homelessness.
The tax filings detail how the foundation spent much of the $77 million it received in donations in fiscal 2020, including $32 million to gamble on the stock market.
In a letter, the committee wrote that they believed Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk had “information regarding a tour” he led through parts of the Capitol the day before the coup.
The college wants to dismiss 127 teaching staff and force them to reapply for their jobs on new contracts that would entail forfeiting 10 days holiday per year.
The wildcat strikes have been subject to a virtual media blackout at a time when profit gouging by oil and gas companies is sending household energy bills spiralling, adding to the disastrous cost-of-living crisis for millions.
India: Water and sewerage contract workers strike in Tamil Nadu; Telangana college teachers hold state-wide protest; Sri Lankan health workers protest; Australia: Aged care workers strike for improved pay and conditions in Adelaide and Townsville.
Once again the UAW is trying to rush through a vote on a tentative agreement without providing workers with full details or the time necessary to study and discuss.
Labour’s campaign to remove Johnson, as an individual unfit to hold office, was designed to ensure that there would be no mobilisation of the working class to end the 12 years in office of a hated Tory government.
The attack on public services is being accelerated by the Johnson government’s need to fund its support for the NATO proxy war against Russia. Military spending already reached £3 billion.
With the push for NATO's accession of Sweden and Finland and the gigantic $40 billion aid package, Washington is signaling unambiguously that the response of US imperialism to the military setback in Mariupol is a further escalation of its proxy war with Russia.
The war in Ukraine has finally exposed the pro-imperialist character of the Left Party. It fully supports the German government’s war propaganda. Criticism of NATO will no longer be tolerated.
The miniseries dramatizes how a young female CEO started and grew a biotech company that delivered on none of its promises, defrauding patients and bilking investors of 100s of millions of dollars.
The Cannes Film Festival is the latest cultural institution or event to disgracefully provide a public stage for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to promote the US-NATO war against Russia.
A leading member of the anti-Putin punk rock group declared that Russia does not have “a right to exist anymore.”
The central and overwhelming responsibility for the present state of unpreparedness lies with the government, media and corporate elite, who are engineering the “return to normal” for their own selfish economic and political reasons.
The mass infection policies enforced by the federal government have left teachers, staff and students entirely unprotected in schools as cases surge.
An unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox virus has officially spread to nine countries outside of Africa, with 107 confirmed or suspected cases reported as of this writing, in the United Kingdom (9 cases), Portugal (34), Spain (32), France (1), Belgium (2), Sweden (1), Italy (3), Canada (22), the United States (2), and Australia (1).
New Zealand has gone from having no COVID deaths for most of the pandemic, to now having one of the highest weekly death rates in the world, as a result of the Labour Party government abandoning its elimination policy.
The refusal of the American government to do anything to address the latest surge of COVID-19 underscores the basic truth that the fight against the pandemic will only be taken forward by the working class.
In this webinar, an international panel of leading members of the ICFI and WSWS writers reviewed the causes and consequences of the US-NATO war drive against Russia and present the political basis for a fight against war.
For revolutionary internationalists, the determining question is not “who fired the first shot,” but rather what is the general character of a given war and the social forces behind it.
The same day that Finland and Sweden formally submitted their NATO membership applications, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared it was ending the country's participation in the Council of the Baltic Sea States.
As Finland and Sweden prepare to join the NATO alliance against Russia, the NATO countries and Japan are planning a vast global intensification of imperialist militarism.
In 2014, the UK hosted a summit of NATO in Wales founding the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), consisting of seven NATO allies which would assemble military forces among the northern and high regions of Europe. Sweden and Finland joined in 2017.
This interactive timeline presents some of the most important events that have brought humanity to the brink of World War III. It includes links to critical articles and statements produced by the International Committee of the Fourth International over the past 30 years.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sri Lanka’s newly installed prime minster, delivered an address to the nation Monday that attempted to exploit the country’s dire economic crisis to justify a massive assault on workers and rural toilers.
The belated arrests are a bid to deflect the widespread outrage over the violent attack on protesters voicing the sentiments of millions in their call for the president to resign and the deep social crisis to be alleviated.
World Bank Chief economist Carmen Reinhart commented, “I don’t want to be melodramatic, but it’s not a far stretch that food insecurity and riots were part of the story behind the Arab Spring.”
Wickremesinghe offered no relief for workers or the poor, millions of whom are struggling to put food on the table. Instead, he emphasised the depth of the economic crisis to justify the harsh measures that he intends to take.
This column profiles important historical events which took place during this week, 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago and 100 years ago
The Soviet engineer wrote his memoirs in the 1970s of experiencing the October Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Terror.
The WSWS is today republishing an excerpt from the 1986 statement How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism to mark the 40th anniversary of the Malvinas/Falklands War.
From Bill Clinton through Joe Biden, the Democrats have spearheaded the effort by American imperialism to encircle Russia and provoke war.
The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka condemns the brutal attack on Monday by thugs of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna on unarmed anti-government protesters encamped at the Galle Face Green. The SEP calls on the working class to intervene independently to protect the lives and democratic rights of the working people.
Numerous reports attest to acute social distress, including millions of people suffering soaring levels of hunger.
The cryptocurrency market was thrown into turmoil last week as the market value of bitcoin, the most widely used cryptocurrency continued to fall, and a so-called “stablecoins” are collapsing.
The eruption of the wages issue in the Australian election campaign is part of an international process as central banks, the representatives of finance capital, demand that wage increases be forcibly suppressed through the lifting of interest rates, inducing a recession if that proves necessary.
The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point as part of the fight against what Chairman Jerome Powell called “wage inflation.”
The US Senate passed by unanimous consent the Access to Baby Formula Act on Thursday, but it will not end the shortages in stores that are expected to persist for weeks if not months.
Thousands of protesters in over 300 cities marched in opposition to the pending overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The Senate consideration of the Women’s Health Protection Act was entirely for show, with its failure known in advance to all participants.
Despite rhetorical denunciations of the attacks on women’s rights at weekend protests, Senate Democrats are doing nothing outside of bringing up an abortion bill they know will fail.
The imagery of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is a brilliant demonstration of the possibilities engendered by human labor coordinated on an international and scientific basis.
The latest black hole image from the Event Horizon Telescope is further evidence that globally organized observational astronomy involving vast quantities of data and their coordination is becoming increasingly routine.
A new modeling study of climate change finds that the resulting forced migrations of animals will significantly increase the transfer of pathogens to humans.
“As part of the anti-Russian campaign that followed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russian research institutes and Russian scientists are being ostracized from the international scientific community.”
Abu Akleh, a widely respected journalist who was also a US citizen, was one of Al Jazeera’s first on the spot reporters, having worked for the network since 1997.
The Al Aqsa Mosque compound, holy to Jews and Muslims, has been occupied illegally along with the West Bank, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. Israel has broken longstanding agreements that allow Jewish visits but bar Jewish worship at the site, as extremists groups demand access to pray there.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 153 Palestinians were hospitalised, while “dozens of other injuries” were treated at the scene. Nearly 400 people were arrested.
According to the UN’s World Food Programme, which has previously warned that the war in Ukraine could drive millions in the Middle East into food poverty and lead to global food insecurity, the cost of the basic food basket in Lebanon, the minimum a family needs per month, soared by 351 percent in the past year.
A spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection said 36 of those rescued are Haitian nationals, while the remaining two were from the Dominican Republic.
Chile’s president, ex-student radical Gabriel Boric, ordered Carabineros Special Forces to break up the picket line at a major oil refinery.
Bolsonaro’s fascistic claims that the upcoming elections will be rigged are now joined with the demand that the armed forces conduct a parallel ballot count.
Security forces and the police stood by as criminals shot at the demonstrators.
The Inquest is necessary to break through the cover-up, lies and misinformation that have been used to justify policies responsible for the avoidable deaths of millions.
“I was denied a medically justified request for accommodation. Then, when incapacitated by the very malaise I had asked to be spared exposure to, I was left too sick to work and without medical benefits,” the worker said.
The following testimony to the Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic has been submitted by a Senior Health Care Assistant in a busy hospital in the north of England. The nurse normally works on a gerontology ward caring for the old and infirm and those suffering from dementia.
Jessica Bleasdale spoke to the WSWS about her experiences advocating for her son and others who are vulnerable, as well as her thoughts on the New Brunswick government’s decision to drop all protective measures.
The studies led by Ferrante showed that the reopening of schools in Manaus in late 2020 led to the emergence of the Gamma variant, responsible for two-thirds of the COVID-19 deaths in Brazil.
Britain’s Home Secretary Priti Patel can make the announcement any time from tomorrow, May 18 until May 31. Assange was put in this perilous situation by a series of rulings delivered by the British judiciary over the last year.
Any conception that a Labor government would defend Assange is refuted by over a decade of experience and the statements of Labor leaders themselves.
According to the Extradition Act (2003) which governs the process, Assange now has four weeks (to May 18) to make representations to Patel before her decision is announced.
A particularly pernicious role is played by Greens MPs who have criticised Assange’s persecution, but are working with Labor to ensure it is buried in the forthcoming election.
Supporters of the ICFI in India spoke to workers and youth about the need to build an anti-war movement of the working class based on socialist internationalism amid the proxy war waged by the US and its NATO allies against Russia.
“I’m anti-war because I came from a country of war, Vietnam, which was invaded even before the Americans.” – Thao, a Western Sydney University student.
The tentative agreement reached by the GEO-AFT with the University of Illinois Chicago would mean further economic devastation for grad student workers.
In early 2020, Professor Baberowski physically assaulted an IYSSE member of the student parliament at Berlin’s Humboldt University and destroyed large amounts of student election campaign material.
David North, the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, spoke with Turkey’s KİTABA DAİR on his book, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished 20th Century, and the rapidly intensifying conflict between Russia and NATO over Ukraine.
“This censorship is not only directed against us, but against the mass opposition to a world war,” says Vandreier. The socialist anti-war perspective of the SGP “is to be banned and censored in the midst of deafening war propaganda for a third world war.”
Workers including bus drivers, healthcare staff and teachers active in rank-and-file committees in the UK were invited by the SEP to discuss a fight against war based on the working class and socialism.
The speakers emphasized that the opposition of the working class to the war is needed to be developed as a conscious political movement for socialism.
“The destruction created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the drive towards a third world war clearly shows that capitalism neither wants nor is able to resolve the basic questions faced by mankind”
On Saturday, Facebook deleted a video posted by the Socialist Equality Party of Germany opposing the German government’s participation in the US-led NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
YouTube deleted the archive of Chris Hedges’ On Contact television program from its platform with no explanation.
The Senate testimony by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has intensified the bipartisan drive to clamp down on left-wing and socialist political content on social media platforms.
In a provocative act of censorship and imperialist gangsterism, the Biden administration took control of three dozen internet domains and shut down websites affiliated with Iran-based media organizations on unsubstantiated grounds of “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.”
The WSWS is publishing the report delivered by David North 25 years ago, on February 1, 1997, motivating the proposal to end publication of the SEP’s printed newspaper and replace it with an international website; as well as North’s reply to the National Committee ‘s discussion of the proposal.
The Times, which wishes readers to take the 1619 Project seriously as a “reframing of American history,” has said more than it intended.
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with Mark Kruger about his new book, the 1619 Project, and the current state of American politics.
Professor Jack Rakove is a leading scholar of the American Revolution and the framing of the Constitution.
Having previously disregarded historiography, Silverstein now falsifies it—and admits to privileging “narrative” over “actual fact.”
The definitive left-wing critique of the 1619 Project. This volume includes interviews with eminent historians and essays from the World Socialist Web Site exposing the New York Times’ racialist falsification of history.
The goal of the Biden administration is to secure US imperialism’s control over the Horn of Africa and trade through the Suez Canal in preparation for confrontation with China.
Berlin, which is playing an increasingly aggressive role in NATO’s proxy war against Russia, is also pushing ahead with German imperialism’s offensive in Africa.
COSATU is warning its ANC partners that they have massively underestimated the anger building in the working class.
This year has seen numerous demonstrations protesting social and economic conditions, with the total number of demonstrations in the eight months since Saïed’s July coup topping those that proceeded it.
The attack on Harvard anthropology professor John Comaroff has taken to a new level the campaign to purge American colleges and universities on the basis of anti-democratic identity politics.
John Comaroff, professor of African and African American studies and of anthropology at Harvard University, has become the target of what has all the earmarks of another filthy #MeToo witch-hunt.
Professors and students continue to speak out against the anti-democratic victimization of University of Michigan professor and composer Bright Sheng.
The judges effectively cleared the way for universities to dismiss staff for criticising management or breaching confidentiality rules.
Review the most critical essays, lectures and letters produced by the ICFI in the course of its intervention in response to the crisis of Stalinism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Although a third world war would mean the end of humanity, the German government is busily making the economic and geopolitical preparations for it, in addition to the military ones. In recent weeks, it has set a course to reorganise trade and economic relations for a war against Russia and China.
.The White House announced on Thursday that it will be sending an additional $800 million in military aid to Ukraine for its proxy war with Russia which is now focused in the East of the country.
NATO wants the military defeat and economic ruin of Russia. It has no interest in ending the war through a ceasefire.
Russia has submitted a formal note protesting the US transfer of billions of dollars in military hardware to Ukraine, and raising the prospect of Russian retaliation against US/NATO arms shipments.
On 18 March, the Berlin Administrative Court rejected an emergency application by junge Welt that it no longer be described as “left-wing extremist” in the secret service annual report.
The German court judgement and its written grounds represent a fundamental attack on democratic rights. The aim is to ban socialist ideas and any criticism of capitalism.
The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee (UK) passed a resolution Monday condemning the ruling of the Berlin Administrative Court, which on November 18, 2021, upheld the designation of the German security service of the German section of the ICFI as “left wing extremists”.
The court’s ruling against the Socialist Equality Party stands in the tradition of National Socialist ideological jurisprudence and Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, and opens the door for the surveillance and suppression of all opposition to capitalism and arbitrary state power.
August 31, 2021 marks 100 years since the birth of Jean Brust, a leading figure in the Trotskyist movement. Comrade Jean, who died November 24, 1997 at the age of 76, joined the Trotskyist-led Young Peoples Socialist League as a teenager in 1937.
Three just-released studies provide substantive evidence for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, with the Huanan market in Wuhan, China the location of the first zoonotic (animal to human) transfer.
As scientific studies continue to undermine the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 is a genetically engineered virus, journalist Glenn Greenwald has accused the New York Times and Washington Post of being insufficiently faithful to the lab leak “theory.”
In the most systematic defense of the Wuhan lab libel to date, Matt Ridley proves only the falsehood of his bad-faith attack on science.
The commission advocated by the Washington Post will be aimed at shielding the government and corporate officials responsible for the deaths of more than one million Americans, while scapegoating China for the pandemic.
The horrific massacre of civilians was immediately exploited by the imperialist powers, led by the United States government itself, to justify far-reaching attacks on the democratic rights of their own populations, and the launching of decades-long wars in the Middle East and Africa.
A series of powerful strikes and social protests have broken out across the United States against intolerable social conditions and breathtaking levels of social inequality.
A verbal “slip” by George W. Bush, in a comment about the war in Ukraine, has drawn attention to the far greater crimes of American imperialism in the wars begun by Bush and his father.
Yesterday’s large-scale sell off on Wall Street, in which shares of major retail companies experienced their biggest decline since the October 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, was in response to clear indications the US and global economy are moving rapidly into recession.
Around the world, in developing and so-called advanced countries alike, millions are facing food insecurity and hunger amid soaring prices and shortages of food.
Cliff Slaughter died on May 3, 2021, in Leeds, England, at the age of 92. His enduring contribution in the 1960s to the defense of Trotskyism stands in tragic contrast with his subsequent political opportunism and repudiation of revolutionary Marxism.
The emails confirm that the January 6 coup was not a “spontaneous riot” but the culmination of a conspiracy orchestrated at the highest levels of the ruling class and Republican Party elite to overturn democratic forms of rule in the United States.
In a letter, the committee wrote that they believed Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk had “information regarding a tour” he led through parts of the Capitol the day before the coup.
Both capitalist parties are in deep crisis, with the Republican Party more and more openly fascistic, and Democratic voters dissatisfied with Biden and the congressional leadership.
In the course of his remarks, Biden managed to omit the words “Trump” and “Republican,” or name a single Republican official, media outlet or commentator who has promoted the racist and anti-Semitic themes of the “Great Replacement.”
The WSWS has published a feature page incorporating a selection of essential essays from its own archives, and other documents produced contemporaneously by the Fourth International.
The Socialist Equality Party in the United States held a summer school from August 1 through August 6. It was devoted to an analysis of the major social and political events in the US and internationally since the previous SEP school, held in July of 2019.
This report to the 2021 SEP summer school was delivered by Dr. Benjamin Mateus, who has led the coverage on the WSWS of the scientific and medical issues posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The following lecture was delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2021 summer school by Eric London, a writer for the WSWS and author of Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement.
This lecture was delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2021 summer school, held August 1 through August 6, by Marcus Day, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site .
North and London discussed the significance of the latest revelations of the the Security and the Fourth International investigation into Trotsky’s assassination.
Pike River: The Crime and Cover-up, published by Mehring Books, examines the causes of the 2010 New Zealand mine disaster, which killed 29 people, and the decade-long cover-up by successive governments and the judicial system, which have shielded the company leadership from prosecution.
Ben Joynson was 10-years-old when his father William died, with 28 other workers, in the 2010 Pike River coal mine disaster. He said the trauma suffered by the victims’ families has been made worse by the lack of accountability.
Gordon Dixon, whose brother Allan died in the 2010 Pike River mine disaster, told the WSWS that the Labour Party-led government’s decision to permanently seal the mine was part of an ongoing cover-up to protect those responsible.
The Labour Party-led government permanently sealed Pike River mine last year, preventing the recovery of the bodies of 29 men who perished in the 2010 underground disaster, and locking away vital evidence of what caused the explosions.
The meeting examined Luxemburg’s role as a Marxist theoretician and political leader, and discussed the significance of her legacy to the contemporary struggle to build a Marxist leadership.
Tabak crafts a commendable and thorough charting of the reckless Foxconn debacle in Racine, Wisconsin but political conclusions must be drawn.
In this new collection, the stated theme of illusion is not always probed deeply—nor is it the only theme.
Joan Didion, the essayist and novelist who critically described nearly 60 years of American social and cultural life, died on December 23.
The second book by an acclaimed and politically engaged young poet is notable for its international and historical perspective.