u/DryDeer775

This year’s Salzburg Festival runs until the end of August. The world’s most important festival of classical music and the performing arts was founded over 100 years ago by theatre director Max Reinhardt and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal and this summer again offers a wide range of concerts, opera, theatre and film screenings, including a number of fascinating new productions.

Salzburg’s squares and cafés are abuzz with discussions about music, drama and direction. Unlike last year, however, there is a tense and uneasy atmosphere.

For the man whose artistic imprint shapes the programme was fired just weeks before the festival began. Markus Hinterhäuser, the world-renowned pianist and impresario, had directed the Vienna Festival Weeks from 2014 to 2016 and the Salzburg Festival from October 2016 onward. Under his direction, the latter achieved over 98 percent capacity with more than 250,000 visitors last year. In April 2024, his contract was extended once again by the festival’s board of trustees for a further five years, until September 2031.

But at the end of March, just weeks before rehearsals were due to begin, he was surprisingly placed on leave “with immediate effect,” his contract shortened to end in September. The festival’s board of trustees, which includes the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) state Governor Karoline Edlstadler and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) mayor of the city of Salzburg and former Porsche Holding works Council Chairman Bernhard Auinger, spoke of “irreconcilable differences,” communication problems and a violation of the “good conduct clause.”

A railway workers’ strike paralyzed three of São Paulo’s most important train lines on August 4 and 5, interrupting the transport of approximately 850,000 daily passengers and exposing the disastrous privatization program of far-right Governor Tarcísio de Freitas. São Paulo is the capital of Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous state. The shutdown of Lines 11-Coral, 12-Safira and 13-Jade–the latter, the only rail link to Guarulhos International Airport–of the São Paulo Metropolitan Train Company (CPTM) was suspended after the union accepted a conciliation proposal brokered by the Labor Court.

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"Well, in this community that we’re standing in, we would miss these Haitian workers a lot. They work hard. Many of them are in the healthcare industry. All the fields where poor people would benefit, many of them they work there...Who’s going to replace them?

"I don’t have a lot of Haitian students where I work. But we’re still going to feel the effects. They’re in every aspect of our community life in this neighborhood.

"The US is supposed to be the most democratic country in the world, but come on now, it’s not. It has not been for a while. It’s not democratic. Hey, don’t you see autocrats coming in? And nothing is wrong in their eyes…

"They claim that TPS was a temporary status and it’s run its course. That is what we’re hearing from the government. …But what are these people going back to? Most of them have zero to go back to... If you have a heart, you have to feel badly for them.

If they can get rid of 350,000 Haitians…you’re going to trample on everybody sooner or later."

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem, has proven an enormous popular success. Estimates vary, but it appears well over 100 million people worldwide have already seen it in movie theaters.

What accounts for the wave of interest?

In the broadest sense, life-and-death themes embodied in a classic, treated seriously and generously, have encountered a sizeable global viewing public clearly starved for challenging material.

There is a double significance to this. In the first place, The Odyssey, with its strengths and weaknesses, focuses on the horrors of war, the foul role of a usurping and cruel aristocracy, and the need to treat strangers, guests–immigrants–with hospitality and kindness. And, not a secondary matter, Nolan’s effort depicts the immense difficulties and struggles facing those who oppose all that. The resonance should be clear. People are going to the film in part because it corresponds to how they increasingly feel about the world and about America in particular–and the need to make immense sacrifices in a big cause.

Fellow postal workers:

Starting in March, USPS management seized on a cash flow crisis to call for the deepest cuts in the history of the post office. Now, they have set a date for when these will start.

On August 7, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Postal Service Board of Governors that management “would not take any action until after the New Year.” Even without Congressional action to weaken or eliminate the Universal Service Obligation or roll back service from six days a week, he threatened changes to service standards, higher prices and the closure of “thousands of unprofitable post offices.”

Management plans to spend the next four months preparing the attack. The bureaucracy of the postal unions will use the same period to block opposition from the rank and file.

We cannot wait until January. Management has a timetable. Postal workers need a plan of our own.

In a letter to STWC Convenor Lindsey German, the SEP’s Chris Marsden and Tom Scripps explained that 27-year-old Syrotiuk has been convicted of “high treason” for calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.

He has been sentenced on the basis of six articles he wrote for the World Socialist Web Site.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is expanding agreements with state police in Indiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming that authorize troopers to participate in federal immigration kidnapping operations during traffic stops, accidents and commercial vehicle inspections, according to an August 14 report by FreightWaves.

The agreements were established under the Task Force Model of ICE’s 287(g) program. Once trained and credentialed by ICE, state troopers can question people about their immigration status, detain those suspected of civil immigration violations and transfer them into federal custody.

The program transforms every encounter with state and local police into a potential kidnapping. A worker with car trouble or a truck driver undergoing a commercial vehicle inspection can be questioned, detained and delivered into ICE’s network of concentration camps even though they committed no crime.

Seventeen Wyoming Highway Patrol officers have already received immigration-enforcement credentials. Highway Patrol spokesman Aaron Brown acknowledged that when immigration status arises during a stop, a person determined to be in the country without authorization can be detained and transferred to ICE.

Brown nevertheless claimed that Wyoming troopers “do not act as ICE agents.” The distinction is fraudulent. Under the agreement, state police exercise authority delegated by ICE to identify, detain and arrest immigrants while performing their regular duties.

Section 287(g) takes its name from a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act added by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton. It authorizes the federal government to delegate immigration-enforcement powers to state and local law enforcement agencies.

ICE currently operates three forms of 287(g) agreement. The Jail Enforcement Model permits local jail personnel to question prisoners about immigration status and hold them for transfer to ICE. The Warrant Service Officer Model authorizes corrections officers to serve administrative immigration warrants. The Task Force Model, the most far-reaching, allows police, sheriffs and state agents to carry out federal immigration raids during their normal oppressive operations.

Opposition to the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk continued to build over the weekend, six days after a Ukrainian court gave the 27-year-old socialist 15 years in prison for calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.

The petition demanding his release passed 6,000 signatures. Nearly 500 people in more than 40 countries on five continents have added their names since the verdict, and letters have gone straight to the judges in Pervomaisk from historians, doctors, teachers and retired workers, each demanding that the sentence be thrown out.

Since Thursday the court has heard from a distinguished professor of history in Texas, a historian of Soviet agriculture in West Virginia, an anthropologist at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a doctor writing from Sri Lanka. Letters came as well from a retired teacher in Australia, a reader who signed as a retired civil servant in Britain and others in France, Turkey and the United States.

While the capitalist politicians and corporate media talk endlessly about “the troops,” the sailors themselves are treated with contempt. Asked by a reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Friday whether the deployment had gone on too long, US President Donald Trump answered, “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.” This is the response of a psychopathic sadist who does not even pretend to care whether the sailors he has kept at sea for nine months live or die.

Trump speaks for a ruling elite that has sought for thirty-five years—from Iraq in 1991 through Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine—to offset the decline of American capitalism’s world position through military force, and intends to remain at war indefinitely. The assault on Iran is a criminal operation, illegal under both international and American law, that has inflicted mass death and destruction on a country of more than 90 million people. In the calculus of those who direct it, the endlessly glorified “troops” are cannon fodder—an expendable input, like the bombs and the jet fuel—while the Iranian men, women and children on whom the bombs fall do not figure at all.

The Lincoln itself embodies this history. Launched in 1988, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the carrier has served American imperialism through the entire period of war that opened with the Gulf War of 1991. On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on its flight deck and infamously declared beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” That was a lie.

Twenty-three years later the same ship—with dysfunctional air conditioning, moldy showers, broken toilets and malfunctioning laundry facilities—has been at sea 268 days, logged more than 10,000 sorties against Iran and is now involved in blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Family members, including a Navy-veteran father who told MS NOW his son had personally seen the damage, have reported holes worn through the Lincoln’s flight deck after months of heavy bombing missions.

The Costs of War project at Brown University found in 2021 that at least four times as many active-duty troops and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide as were killed in combat. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 17 veterans die by suicide every day.

The enlisted sailors aboard the Lincoln, like those across the Navy, are drawn overwhelmingly from working class and lower-middle-income families across the country. They enlist straight out of high school or community college for a steady income, health insurance and the chance at technical training and money for education. A sailor at the lowest enlisted rank, after four months’ service, draws base pay of $2,407.20 a month—for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, on a warship in a combat zone. A 2022 RAND study found that one in four active-duty service members experiences food insecurity.

The remarks that I have prepared for today’s event will be focused on the literary masterpiece that Trotsky wrote on this island in 1929 during the first year of his exile from the Soviet Union: My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography.^([1])

Nearly one century after its publication, My Life remains a work of undiminished significance. It ranks among the greatest autobiographies of the 20th century for two reasons. First, Trotsky was a writer of genius. He stands alongside the great masters of Russian literature: Belinsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Herzen. Berthold Brecht commented that he believed that Trotsky might be the greatest of all contemporary European writers. That was an extraordinary tribute, considering the fact that among the great writers of that period were Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger and Brecht himself.

But the stature of My Life in world literature is not only a matter of artistic form. The life recounted in the book was that of an extraordinary man who not only shaped the history of the last century but whose ideas continue to exercise far-reaching influence on the politics of the 21st century.

It is impossible to separate Trotsky the revolutionary from Trotsky the writer. His creative personality was an extraordinary fusion of political and literary genius. How could it be otherwise?

The brilliance of Trotsky’s autobiography was the necessary expression in literary form of the historic stature of his thought and actions.

Trotsky’s life was that of a man who had played a decisive role in the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the founding of the first workers’ state, the building of the Red Army and its victory over the counterrevolution and the creation of the Communist International.

This speech was delivered by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North at the fourth annual international commemoration of Leon Trotsky’s exile on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo), Turkey, held Sunday, August 16 under the title “My Life, Written on Prinkipo, and Trotsky’s Years in Exile.” More than 100 people attended.

Speaking before North were Ulaş Sevinç, national chairman of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International), the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and Adalar deputy mayor Medine Pamuk, who spoke in place of Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, jailed since June in the Erdoğan government’s campaign against opposition-run municipalities. North’s remarks, recorded in advance and screened for the audience, were followed by a live question-and-answer session, which the WSWS will publish this week.

The text of the speech may be found here. Trotsky’s My Life: An imperishable contribution to Marxism and world literature

The derailment of a Southern Railway train on August 13 near Lewes in East Sussex has thrust the safety crisis on Britain’s rail network into the spotlight once again. It comes within two months of the June 19 Bedford crash between two East Midlands Railway (EMR) trains which claimed the life of driver Shaun Burton and left 162 injured.

A routine journey was turned into a terrifying ordeal for the 150 passengers and the train crew on the London Victoria service to Eastbourne. It derailed just before 4pm, leaving three of the rear eight carriages on their side, strewn across the downward slope of the embankment.

The convergence of military defeat, social radicalization, and political crisis is neither an accident nor a bolt from the blue. It is the outcome of the contradictions of American and world capitalism, foreseen and analyzed over many years by the Trotskyist movement.

Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a sweeping domestic spying operation against unions, left-wing organizations and opponents of the Trump administration during the federal occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul, according to government documents reviewed by the New York Times and made public Thursday in a federal court filing.

Undercover agents infiltrated meetings in churches, libraries, parks, schools, restaurants and union halls. They secretly recorded political discussions, entered encrypted Signal chats, collected license plate numbers, and compiled dossiers containing names, photographs, home addresses, employment and family information. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of DHS, also used administrative summonses to obtain years of financial records belonging to national unions and nonprofit organizations without identifying any underlying criminal conduct.

The dragnet was directed not at the agents who murdered Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, but at those who protested their killings, the federal occupation of Minnesota and Trump’s mass deportation operation.

A worker at GM Flint Truck Assembly was severely injured after being hit by a forklift going in reverse on the third shift between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. on August 13. The worker’s name has not yet been released, but according to a worker at the plant contacted by the World Socialist Web Site she had just signed her retirement papers last week.

Many workers came to the injured worker’s aid. However, they were forced to keep the line moving after watching this horrendous accident even as the worker lay on the floor bleeding and waiting for paramedics and the ambulance to arrive to take her to Hurley Hospital in Flint. The injured worker has since been transferred to the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor.

We are publishing here the opening report to the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), given by David North, the national chairman of the SEP. The congress was held from August 2 to August 7, 2026. This report introduced the first resolution, “The SEP and the Struggle Against Imperialist War,” which was unanimously adopted.

"The Iran debacle will send shock waves through the entire American and international political system. The initial economic and political tremors are already being felt. Among its immediate consequences is the exposure of the rottenness of the existing social system based on capitalism—of its two-party system, corporate-controlled media, corrupted academy, bureaucratic labor organizations, identity-obsessed affluent pseudo-left and intellectually degraded culture.

"The war is not an isolated event, unrelated to broader processes. The convergence of military defeat, social radicalization and political crisis is neither an accident nor a bolt from the blue. It is the outcome of the contradictions of American and world capitalism, foreseen and analyzed by the Trotskyist movement. The work of this congress must therefore begin with an examination of the perspective that has guided the work of the party."

Recent SEP recruit Adele commented afterwards, “My biggest takeaway from the meeting’s report is that further clarifications on Marxism and its history are of utmost importance. Still to this day many individuals believe that socialism or Marxism equals Stalinism. Many workers still believe that communism means no personal possessions. Many workers still look for alternatives to the establishment, such as Corbyn and Sultana. 

“The only correct and effective alternative is through the Socialist Equality Party and the parties of the Fourth International. The only party that is taking the necessary steps to educate workers on the history of Marxism, clarifying misunderstandings and historical falsifications, is the Socialist Equality Party.”

Rail workers at East Midlands Railway (EMR) struck for the second consecutive Saturday on August 8. The dispute began in April over the introduction last December of a new fleet of Hitachi-built Class 810 Aurora trains, which have been plagued by faults.

The dispute was transformed by the fatal collision between two EMR trains near Bedford on June 19, one of which was a malfunctioning 810. The crash killed driver Shaun Burton and injured 162 passengers and crew.

Median compensation for chief executives at S&P 500 companies reached $17.3 million in 2025, according to the AFL-CIO’s 2026 Executive Paywatch report, released Thursday.

Excluding Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, average S&P 500 CEO compensation rose 21 percent in a single year, from $18.9 million in 2024 to $22.8 million in 2025. This was the highest level recorded since the AFL-CIO began tracking the figure in the 1990s.

The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio increased from 285 to one in 2024 to 312 to one in 2025, again excluding Musk. The median company ratio was 198 to one. A majority of S&P 500 CEOs received more in one day than the median US worker earned during the entire year.

But Musk represents the most extreme expression of this process. Tesla reported $158.3 billion in 2025 compensation for Musk, 14 times the combined compensation of all the other S&P 500 CEOs. The figure increased average S&P 500 CEO compensation to $340.1 million and the average pay ratio to 5,387 to one. In 2025, Tesla reported median employee compensation of $62,786, producing a staggering ratio of 2,522,203 to one for this single company.

These figures do not include Musk's payday from the SpaceX IPO in June, which briefly made him the world's first trillionaire.

The figures document a vast transfer of wealth to a corporate and financial oligarchy. In the second quarter of 2026, the share of nonfarm business output going to workers fell to 52.9 percent, the lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics series began in 1947. Real hourly compensation fell 3.1 percent during the quarter at an annualized rate.