u/Spirited_Classic_826

>More than a month after a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Raymond Jensen, posted a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, that official remains an employee of the UAW International, drawing a salary of $202,000 a year from the dues of the membership.

>Lehman reported on X that, late last week, a lawyer for the court-appointed Monitor overseeing the UAW informed his legal team that “the Union is presently considering next steps with respect to Mr. Jensen’s employment.” Lehman’s team was told to contact the UAW Legal Department “if you have any further questions about their process.”

>That is, the Monitor, vested by a federal court with sweeping disciplinary powers, has handed the fate of a self-confessed author of a death threat to the apparatus headed by UAW President Shawn Fain—the man whose re-election campaign badge Raymond Jensen Jr. still has on his Facebook page, and on whose behalf the threat was made.

>The facts of the case are not in dispute. On July 16, Jensen—until recently the assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s own region, and currently an “organizer” in the UAW International’s Department of Bargaining Strategy—posted an AI-generated image on Lehman’s public campaign Facebook page. It depicted Lehman bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. Jensen posted it in direct response to a statement on the federal criminal investigation into Fain.

>...

>The Monitor claimed that it had determined a penalty “to reflect the seriousness of his conduct and to deter similar misconduct by others.” It stipulated, and Jensen agreed to, a two-year suspension from UAW membership, a permanent ban on him running for any elected union position, a prohibition on campaigning for any candidate in this election cycle, and making a formal apology to Lehman.

>Workers welcomed the sanctions and drew the obvious conclusion that Jensen would not be allowed to continue his position as a UAW “organizer.” This is clearly what “suspension from the UAW” implied, and any worker who issued a death threat would be immediately terminated from their position. 

>According to the UAW, however, Jensen can be “suspended” as a UAW member while remaining employed by the UAW. Indeed, the only practical consequence is that Jensen no longer has to pay union dues. In other words, an official who violated federal election rules and likely federal criminal law will not only continue to be fully paid, but also receive a bonus!

>The Monitor cannot claim it lacks the power to do more. The 2021 consent decree gives it “the authority and duty to bring disciplinary charges against individuals,” including the power to fine them, strip their benefits or “otherwise discipline” them. When it found last December that Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, had conspired with Fain to strip Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock of her duties and then lied to its investigators, Brooks was removed from his position within two weeks.

>...

>Certain truths emerge from this episode and the response to it.

>First, the character of the apparatus. As Lehman has insisted from the beginning, the threat was never about just himself. It was the answer of the apparatus to rank-and-file opposition—an organization of 560 functionaries taking home more than $100,000 a year, which has presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the deaths of workers, and which cannot answer opposition with arguments.

>Jensen's image only put into a picture what workers confront every day from an apparatus that functions as an arm of corporate management: the 'toxic climate of retribution' the Monitor itself found Fain to have presided over, and the contempt for every worker who votes down a contract, raises a question at a meeting or dares to run against it. 

>Second, the role of the Monitor. Acting on behalf of the capitalist state, it functions not to democratize the UAW but to protect the apparatus—certifying an election in which Fain was installed with the votes of 6 percent of the membership, and now leaving Jensen's paycheck in Fain's hands.

>Third, the bureaucracy cannot be reformed, whether from within or by federal oversight. It must be abolished, and settling accounts with it is the task of rank-and-file workers themselves. That is the significance of Lehman's campaign: not to occupy an office at Solidarity House, but to develop a movement of the rank and file—committees in every plant, controlled by workers themselves, linked across industries and borders, with power transferred to the shop floor.

>Amazon delivery driver Jaylene Vargas Gonzalez died on Monday, August 10, after she was found unconscious inside her delivery van near Fruitland Park, Florida. The vehicle had apparently remained motionless for hours without anyone from Amazon intervening. The cause of her death remains under investigation, but it is the latest death at one of the most dangerous major employers in the United States.

>Deputies were called to the area of Clark Road at about 7:22 p.m. after a resident reported that an Amazon delivery vehicle had remained stationary for several hours. Patrick Miranda, who lives nearby, told local station WKMG that he became concerned after noticing that the vehicle was still running. A phone remained plugged in and a backpack was visible inside, but he could not see the driver.

>Miranda said that when a deputy opened the front passenger door, the officer appeared to recoil from fumes coming from inside the vehicle. The deputy then opened the rear sliding doors and found Vargas Gonzalez unconscious in the back.

>Firefighters responded wearing gas masks and secured the area because of concerns that a toxic substance might be present. She was transported to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

>Authorities have not said what produced the apparent fumes, whether they contributed to Vargas Gonzalez’s death or whether another medical or environmental factor was involved. They have also not said how long she had been unconscious inside the van.

>Amazon closely monitors the movement and performance of its delivery drivers, yet the van had reportedly remained in the same location for roughly four hours before a resident—not Amazon or the company operating the delivery route—called authorities to request a welfare check.

>The company has long been a pioneer in combining high tech with brutal exploitation. A U.S. Senate investigation released in December 2024 found that injury rates at Amazon warehouses were more than 30 percent above the warehousing industry average in 2023, and that Amazon workers had been nearly twice as likely to suffer injuries as workers at other warehouses over the preceding seven years. More than two-thirds of Amazon warehouses examined had injury rates above the industry average.

>The death of Vargas Gonzalez comes amid a broader record of deaths and serious injuries among Amazon warehouse and delivery workers.

>...

>The high injury rate at Amazon is inseparable from the speed at which workers are required to work. Inside fulfillment centers, workers are tracked against production rates that measure how rapidly they pick, stow and move goods. Amazon’s systems record periods of inactivity and give management detailed information on each worker’s performance.

>Delivery drivers face another version of the same system. Amazon determines routes and delivery schedules through its software and subjects drivers to extensive electronic monitoring. Cameras installed in delivery vans track driving behavior and can flag drivers for alleged infractions, such as distraction, speeding or failing to maintain sufficient following distance.

>A Massachusetts Amazon driver previously told the WSWS that he had been penalized after the camera detected his lips moving while he was singing along with a song and classified him as distracted.

>The technology gives Amazon the ability to follow the progress of its delivery operation in extraordinary detail. That makes the apparent failure to respond to Vargas Gonzalez’s stationary van particularly significant. Amazon has not explained when its systems registered that the vehicle had stopped moving, whether anyone attempted to contact her or what procedures exist when a driver suddenly stops progressing along a route.

>Heat is also a serious danger for delivery workers, particularly during summer. Drivers enter and leave their vans scores or even hundreds of times during a shift, making it difficult to maintain a cool interior even when air conditioning is available. Amazon previously required drivers to shut off internal-combustion vans at stops under an “engine off compliance” policy but relaxed that requirement after protests over heat.

>...

>The circumstances of Vargas Gonzalez’s death remain unresolved. But the fact that an Amazon delivery van could remain motionless for hours before a nearby resident called for help makes clear that workers’ safety cannot depend on Amazon management, government agencies or appeals to politicians.

>Workers need rank-and-file organizations capable of intervening directly over conditions on the job. Safety committees elected and controlled by workers themselves should have access to information on injuries and hazards and the power to halt work where conditions threaten workers’ health or lives, without retaliation. Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers confront the same company and the same production system. Their struggle must be linked with workers at UPS, FedEx, USPS and throughout logistics.

>Drone strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands were carried out under a covert CIA program of the type authorized personally by the president and never publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported last Thursday.

>That same day, in Panama, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the doctrine behind it. Anyone trafficking drugs, he declared, is “a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaida.” Washington had spent 25 years refining “the kill chain on how to diagnose and target networks halfway around the world,” he added, and would now apply those skills in the hemisphere “ruthlessly.”

>Two months earlier, the prosecutor whose case files included those exact three attacks was shot dead in the street. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, 46, was killed on June 14 in central Manta by a gunman on a motorcycle as she walked to her car. Her sister Olinda was also killed trying to shield her. Not one of the international reports on the CIA revelations has mentioned her name and made the connection.

>Murder Inc. extended across an entire hemisphere

>Before each attack, the Post established from flight and ship-tracking data that a Cessna Citation Longitude airplane fitted with surveillance equipment flew from Ilopango airport, El Salvador toward the fishing boats. Radio transmissions recorded it arriving from Tennessee with a crew of six in November and taxiing to a military section of the airport. 

>It flew under a US registration number that appears in no FAA record—federal law exempts “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States”—reserved by a company with no evident website, listing as its address a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, a detail first reported by the New York Times the previous day.

>On January 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, the tower recorded the plane’s pre-dawn departure. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent. It had flown toward the Fiorella’s position on January 17, 18 and 20, covering 750 miles on the last flight before dropping off public tracking, and landed back at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m. The Fiorella transmitted its position for the last time two and a half hours later.

>Ilopango is no arbitrary choice. In 1985 and 1986, the airport served as the hub through which US military and CIA officers funneled weapons and logistics to the Nicaraguan contras in their terrorist war against the Sandinista government. US imperialism has resumed operations from the same runway four decades on. Former ambassador John Feeley told the Post the operation appeared to be run “out of a very nontraditional command.”

>Trump has signed an authorization for CIA operations against transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force. Most recently, threatening a similar CIA action like the tracking of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction by US Special Operations Forces in January, the White House authorized covert CIA operations against the Cuban leadership.

>The survivors’ accounts make clear that the plan was a mass execution and abduction. Quadcopter drones dropped explosives onto the galley of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, where the gas cylinders were stored, destroying much of the vessel instantly. One crewman was thrown into a diesel tank; another lost most of the vision in one eye. The range of such drones means the operators were close by.

>...

>In Washington, the response has been silence. Members of the congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post declined to comment. Covert action requires a presidential finding reported to those committees: either the ranking Democrats were briefed on a program that disappeared eight fishermen and said nothing for seven months, or they were not briefed and will not say so now. 

>A June 11 letter from Representatives Joaquín Castro and Bill Keating demanding answers went unanswered past its July 10 deadline, and Keating’s amendment to force release of unclassified footage of the three incidents was defeated on the House floor. The same party voted overwhelmingly for the $901 billion military budget that pays for all of it.

>In Ecuador, the story was buried within 48 hours. El Universo, Expreso, Extra, El Diario and others ran the same EFE wire copy, paragraph for paragraph, as did outlets across Latin America. No editorials. No summons of the foreign minister before the National Assembly. No investigative follow-up. Televistazo alone put the question to the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the US Embassy, and received no answer from any of them. 

>Reactions came only from the legislature, where Noboa’s own bloc urged caution while conceding that an operation of this nature, executed inside national territory, necessarily had to have been known to the government. 

>Meanwhile, a DEA assessment reported in July found the campaign had no discernible effect on cocaine availability, price or purity in the United States. Cocaine leaves Ecuador in containers aboard merchant ships owned by Noboa’s oligarchic family installed in power with US backing, not in the small fishing vessels being blown apart at sea.

>...

>Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March, aligns Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama behind Washington’s command. The same Bukele government that opened Ilopango to the surveillance flights, and whose coast guard helped with the abduction of fishermen, opened the CECOT prison to hundreds of deportees expelled from the United States. The machinery that disappears Ecuadorian fishermen and the machinery that disappears immigrant workers from American cities are one and the same.

>Hegseth was explicit about the geography. The “kill chain” he pledged to employ ruthlessly extends through the Pentagon’s SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM together. NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility is the continental United States, Mexico and Canada. The apparatus being built is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class throughout the Americas.

>Opposition is growing around the world against the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old socialist sentenced by a Ukrainian court to 15 years in prison for “high treason,” for writing that Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against the war and for opposing the official glorification of Nazi collaborators.

>Workers, academics and public intellectuals on four continents have signed the petition demanding his freedom or sent letters of protest to the Pervomaisk City District Court, which handed down the verdict.

>Over the past several days, hundreds of people throughout the world have signed the petition demanding his freedom, which has received more than 5,700 signatures since its publication.

>The signers since the verdict come from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Spain, France, Austria, Ireland, Finland, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, India, China, Taiwan, Poland, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Romania, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Philippines, Brazil, Croatia, Switzerland, Peru—and Ukraine itself.

>The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Bogdan’s articles—which oppose both the Russian invasion and the US-NATO proxy war—and his messages with WSWS editors. The court ordered Bogdan’s property seized and the literature of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, which he led, destroyed.

>Bogdan has been imprisoned since April 25, 2024, when the Security Service of Ukraine arrested him and declared him a Russian agent, a claim the state never substantiated.

>Mario Kessler, a historian of communism and senior fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, sent a letter of protest Wednesday. “I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk,” the letter begins. Further on, Kessler wrote:

>"Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for an Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union? How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?"

>...

>The letters and signatures have accumulated against silence in the Western press. In the 27 months since Bogdan’s arrest, none of the following publications has devoted a single line to his case: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times of London, The Economist, the BBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and Politico; and the wire services Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and Reuters.

>On the day of the sentencing, the Washington Post published two articles on the ruling of Russia’s Supreme Court barring the Yabloko party from September’s parliamentary elections; it has never published a word about Bogdan. David North, who chairs the WSWS International Editorial Board, wrote Tuesday to the New York Times’ international editor, Philip Pan, asking the paper to report Bogdan’s case. No reply has come.

>Bogdan’s defense has 30 days from the verdict to appeal. A complaint over his detention has been pending at the European Court of Human Rights since spring 2025.

>The WSWS has called on workers, young people, journalists, scientists, artists and all defenders of democratic rights to distribute its statements on Bogdan’s case as broadly as possible—among co-workers, classmates and friends and on social media.

>Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the WSWS at freebogdan@wsws.org.

>The German cabinet approved a 700-page package of draft legislation on Wednesday massively expanding the powers of its domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. “We are turning our intelligence services into real secret services,” Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU) said of the reform in an interview with Bild.

>The Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as the domestic agency is called) and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND), responsible for foreign intelligence, are subject to various forms of legal and parliamentary oversight. They may gather information covertly, but have no police powers—for example, they cannot arrest anyone. Secret services, by contrast, may also carry out covert operations—such as paramilitary missions, acts of sabotage, hacking and the destruction of computer systems, propaganda, and covert support for parties and individuals abroad. This opens the door wide to provocations and manipulation.

>...

>The Society for Civil Rights (GFF), whose members include prominent legal scholars, considers the legislative package “unconstitutional in large parts.” The “strict separation between the intelligence services, which only observe and do not act, and the police, which then step in, is being torn down,” the GFF says in its statement.

>The new rules lead to a “policification” of the intelligence services and “awaken desires for ever more new operational powers, since ever new ‘gaps’ can be found and used to justify supposed needs for intervention,” the GFF argues. “Moreover, the draft also blurs the separation between the secret services themselves, since the BND … is now also being given domestic surveillance powers.”

>The strict separation of police and intelligence services was imposed by the victorious Allied powers after the Second World War in order to prevent a repeat of Hitler’s Gestapo (Secret State Police), which had spied upon, arrested, tortured and murdered communists, social democrats and other political opponents of the Nazis, as well as Jews and other minorities. This separation has been treated as a constitutional principle ever since.

>The abolition of this separation is directly linked to Germany’s return to an imperialist war policy. Hundreds of billions of euros in additional military spending, clawed back from social spending, the reintroduction of conscription and the construction of a “war-ready” society all require a police state.

>Interior Minister Dobrindt justifies the strengthening of the secret services with a supposed “hybrid threat situation, the attempts at destabilisation through sabotage, espionage, cyberattacks and covert actions by foreign powers.” But this is propaganda. The real target of the burgeoning apparatus of surveillance and repression is the growing opposition to militarism, social cuts and unemployment.

>...

>The war against “hybrid attackers,” which Kleine-Brockhoff and General von Sandrart are championing, is directed not only against alleged or real external adversaries but above all against opposition at home. It is meant to strengthen the secret services and the state’s repressive apparatus, pave the way for the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically, and concentrate responsibility for the police away from the individual states to the federal government. Numerous politicians have used the mysterious incident in Leipzig to make corresponding demands.

>Schleswig-Holstein’s State Premier Daniel Günther (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) called for an amendment to the constitution to enable domestic Bundeswehr deployments for drone defence as well. He also advocated pooling federal and state powers more closely in the security sphere. The chairman of the Bundestag Defence Committee, Thomas Röwekamp (CDU), demanded the centralisation of air security under the Federal Police.

>The Green Party parliamentary group domestic policy spokesperson, Marcel Emmerich, also advocated ending the “jurisdictional chaos” over drone defence. It was, he said, “a security risk in an emergency.”

>Interior Minister Dobrindt had already put a new Federal Police unit for detecting, intercepting and shooting down drones into service at the end of last year. This is now to be expanded from 130 to 300 personnel.

>Armin Papperger, head of Germany’s largest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, said it was technically possible to protect critical infrastructure, but this must not be done “half-heartedly.” Rheinmetall, he said, was working with Deutsche Telekom, among others, to use mobile phone masts across Germany for the early detection of drones.

>A report published by the Washington Post Monday, detailing how President Donald Trump secretly switched planes for his July 8 flight out of Ankara, Turkey, after the NATO summit, has touched off a political uproar in Washington. 

>Trump boarded Air Force One, then left the plane surreptitiously with a handful of close aides and was taken in a catering truck to a military C-32A jet. This action was supposedly proposed by the Secret Service after intelligence reports suggested a credible threat from an Iranian shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile. A subsequent report in the New York Times claimed that Iranian agents had identified the building where Trump was staying during the NATO meeting, including the exact floor.

>Nothing disclosed by the White House and Pentagon, as well as “leaked” to corporate media outlets like the Post and the Times, can be taken at face value, above all, the claim that Iran was seeking to shoot down Air Force One.

>It is more than likely that this claim originates in the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been raising claims of Iranian assassination plots against Trump as a reason for resuming full-scale bombing of Iran. The Trump administration could use this allegation as the pretext for all-out invasion.

>But the sequence of events involving Trump’s own movements reveals, first and foremost, the panic and hysteria now gripping the administration.

>If Trump truly believed his life was in danger if he flew out of Ankara on Air Force One, what could justify a decision to allow the press corps and numerous high-ranking officials to take that risk? Why was the flight not canceled entirely and alternate means of secure transportation developed?

>Instead, Trump and a few personal aides were rushed out of danger. These included Natalie Harp, whose role as executive assistant is to print out flattering press commentaries for Trump to read; Walt Nauta, his valet; and Dan Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff, whose principal job is to write up and post Trump’s screeds on Truth Social and X.

>Except for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who joined Trump on the military jet, all other top officials who attended the NATO summit flew out of Ankara on Air Force One. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as top White House aides like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and counter-terrorism chief, and Steven Cheung, the communications director.

>...

>In the aftermath of the exposure, the Trump administration has returned to the policy of lies and stonewalling demonstrated so grotesquely in Ankara. The Secret Service referred questions to the White House and Pentagon. The Pentagon referred questions to the White House. The communications director of the White House, Steven Cheung, defended the actions taken, writing: “As the President has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats.”

>It should also be recalled that on the day after he returned to the United States from Ankara, Trump declared that he had given orders that if he were to be assassinated, Iran was to be destroyed by bombing on an unprecedented scale, a scarcely veiled threat of the use of nuclear weapons. He claimed that 1,000 missiles were “Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of [sic] more to immediately follow.” 

>At the same time, the White House denounced the New York Times for reporting problems with the Qatari jet that has been given to Trump to serve as his new Air Force One, going so far as to have the FBI issue subpoenas to all the reporters involved, with agents visiting their homes and even accosting family members. The Pentagon also revoked the security clearance of former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall for allegedly sharing information about Air Force One with the media.

>What really happened in Ankara remains unclear. But the crisis of the Trump administration—and of American imperialism as a whole—is unmistakable. The US ruling class faces both a geopolitical debacle in the war with Iran and a mounting social confrontation with the working class at home.

Heavily edited due to length and still my longest post ever, a lot of the times when I post these summaries I think I cover most of the main points but would highly recommend reading the whole thing

>The following report was delivered by Socialist Equality Party (UK) National Secretary Chris Marsden in Manchester, Assistant National Secretary Tom Scripps in London and Sheffield, and National Committee member Steve James in Glasgow.

>This report will give an explanation of the collapse of Your Party—founded and run by Jeremy Corbyn and his allies. And it will use that explanation to make a case for building the Socialist Equality Party, and the international movement it is part of.

>To do so, we must begin by describing the social, economic and geopolitical situation which confronts the working class. Because political parties claiming to be socialist rise or fall on their ability to measure up to that situation: to understand it correctly and put forward a programme which answers that challenge.

>There are three decisive features of the world today, from which everything else that affects the working class flows: social inequality, war, and the growth of the far-right.

>...

>These three phenomena—inequality, war and the far right—are closely interconnected. The drive by an ever-smaller section of the population to seize an ever-larger portion of the world’s wealth is what ultimately underlies the drive to war. The growing power of the super-rich oligarchy is ultimately fatal to all forms of democracy. State repression and the cultivation of the far-right is the solution turned to by the ruling class to divide and suppress the working class to make war and dictatorship possible.

>All of which is rooted in the capitalist organisation of society around the pursuit of profit by private companies, and the division of the world into competing nation states.

>British society and politics, like everywhere, has been shaped and disfigured by these three decisive trends of modern capitalism.

>...

>Many parties have put themselves forward as the answer. In this country: Corbyn’s Labour Party, and the Green Party, under Zack Polanski. Internationally: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany, and many others, up to Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America, and Jean Luc Melenchon’s Unsubmissive France.

>These are responses to a left-wing shift in the population. But as the revolutionary strategist Leon Trotsky once summarised the same problem, “they are expressions of a shift but also its brake”.

>These new parties or movements would not have been formed if left-wing sentiment had not developed up to a certain point, but their programmes and leaderships act to restrict the development of that sentiment—with consequences that are disastrous for the working class, if left unchallenged.

>This is the case with Your Party, but in explaining this it will become clear that the same fundamental points apply to all the organisations and individuals I have referenced and more.

>We are not dealing with simple mistakes, or problems with individuals, but with political tendencies and the class interests they represent. Marxism is such a powerful and indispensable tool because it allows the working class to identify the social interests which lie behind political movements and parties, and judge them on that basis.

>...

>If a party is not prepared to mount such an internationalist and revolutionary challenge to capitalism—to fight to bring the fortunes of the oligarchy into public ownership; to put workplaces and local authorities under the democratic control of workers; for an international working-class federation to end the division of the world into competing nationalist states—if it is not prepared to do that, then the alternative is submitting to the increasingly brutal demands of the ruling class.

>There was never any question about Corbyn and Corbynism’s response to this choice. This is a political project born out of a stated desire to bring about a left-wing rebirth of the Labour Party: one of the two trusted parties of British capitalism, which Corbyn was a member of for a third of its 120 year existence—years in which it abandoned its old reformist programme and became, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, a nakedly pro capitalist, essentially Thatcherite, party of imperialist warmongers.

>That project was such a disaster that the Corbynites, after 5 years, had handed the Labour Party back to Starmer so unchanged that the Blairites were able to rout the last vestiges of left-wing sentiment out of the party, and Corbyn along with them.

>In the course of his Labour leadership, Corbyn abandoned his opposition to NATO and nuclear weapons, retreated before the slander campaign alleging “left antisemitism”, letting his supporters be driven out of the party and the ideological basis be created for crackdowns on mass protests against genocide. He protected the Blairites, instructed Labour councils to carry out Tory-ordered austerity cuts, and he presided over—with his rhetoric of compromise and social harmony—some of the lowest levels of strike activity on record.

>This was not at all a unique experience. In the years before Corbyn became Labour leader, a party called Syriza came into government in Greece on the back of massive popular support for its pledge of opposition to the austerity measures being demanded of the country to bail out the banks.

>It won a landslide and then proceeded to implement austerity even after a referendum vote, another landslide, against it, all while building up the military and implementing anti-migrant measures.

>...

>The correct answer has been established time and again, through all the major experiences of the 20th and now the 21st century. Of course, you solidarise yourself with the leftward-moving sentiments and with the struggles of workers. But you never for an instant accept their current leaders: you never hide or minimise a single one of their weaknesses, you never cover for or excuse their betrayals and you never let the working class forget either.

>You use these experiences to educate the working class to see further ahead, to look more discerningly. Because how else can it learn to go beyond the likes of Corbyn, not to trust them, but to instead put forward their own leaders who are uncompromising in putting workers’ interests before the demands of the super-rich and the military?

>...

>Trotsky made the same points in the context of the 1926 British general strike whose 100-year anniversary we marked in a series of meetings earlier this year.

>He said the way to build a socialist movement in Britain was “not only through an irreconcilable struggle against capital’s special agency in the shape of” the right-wing Labour Party leadership, “but also through the systematic unmasking of the left muddleheads by means of whom alone” they “can maintain their positions.”

>Those so-called leftists, Trotsky explained, were “systematically poisoning the labour movement, clouding the consciousness of the proletariat and paralysing its will.” He added that “it must be clearly understood that all the traditions, organizational habits and the ideas of all the already existing groupings in the labour movement in different forms and with different slogans predispose them either towards direct treachery or towards compromise.”

>Socialists had to fight to smash apart those groupings. And Trotsky was fierce in his criticisms of those people who claimed to be socialists but did the opposite, whose “historical mission”, as he wrote, consisted in supposedly “correcting” the Labor lefts, “in creating a safety valve for the discontent of the masses, in blurring the edges and in dissolving cogent thought into a formless ‘leftism’.”

>These lines were written when the Labour and trade union lefts were far more militant and had vastly more political authority, real connections with millions of workers, and associations with political struggles than the pale imitations that exist now. Every word written then applies with a hundred times more force and sharpness today, when the issue is far less that the working class is really committed to the Labour left, or the Greens, and more that it is simply disaffected from politics as a whole as a result of successive betrayals.

>...

>When Corbyn became Labour leader, these organisations proclaimed this to be the beginning of the party’s socialist transformation by a left-wing movement led by Corbyn. In fact, as we said it would be, it proved to be a right-wing suffocation of that left-wing movement by the Labour Party, with Corbyn as the point man.

>But the SWP, the RCP, the Socialist Party and others excused or waved aside every betrayal. Corbyn was still the guy. You could make a few muted complaints but no serious criticisms, certainly no effort to organise workers and young people against his capitulation. For the four years after Corbyn bowed out of the Labour leadership, it was the same story: if anyone was going to build a left-wing challenge against Labour, it had to be Corbyn.

>...

>What socialist-minded workers and young people will have to come to understand, if they are to move forward in building a revolutionary movement against capitalism, is the necessity of defeating the forces that advocate this sort of politics. They sit right at the crossroads, that point where workers and young people start abandoning reformist solutions to capitalism and looking for a revolutionary answer, and they send them in circles.

>They sow illusions in the Corbyns and the Polanskis as they’re growing, they subordinate more radical, left-wing workers to their extremely limited programmes, they make excuses for their betrayals, and when it all falls apart they draw a veil over the experience and work to prevent anyone learning anything.

>...

>We have to study the experiences of the working class and the lessons of history so we can provide correct leadership.

>Equally, we must prove our right to leadership not on paper but in practice. We have to show it is possible to win people to our point of view and to organise and mobilise those people to change the balance of forces.

>For these reasons we have launched, this year, a Socialist Equality Party Supporters campaign. We want people to join our party and take on the responsibilities that involves.

>And they are serious responsibilities; as we say in our launch statement for the initiative: “The liberation of society from capitalism is the most difficult challenge ever posed before humanity, fought for against the dangers of war, fascism and all forms of barbarism; it will not be accomplished by the fond hopes and goodwill of political amateurs.”

>But we also appreciate that there are many people who agree with us strongly but don’t yet feel ready to take that step, and we don’t want that to be a barrier to work we can do together—there is plenty to do.

>Becoming an SEP Supporter means being invited to local party campaigns and education classes, helping to advertise meetings, being put in touch with a dedicated SEP member contact for discussion, and many, many other areas of collaboration.

>We see it, after decades in which the working class has been deprived of meaningful political activity, as our responsibility to create an environment in which this sort of work is possible. Above all, we hope it creates the conditions in which we can convince those not yet convinced to join the party as a member.

>So, if this is your first contact with the party, or something has held you back until now, you should join it. If you want to know more before doing so, become a Supporter.

>We want to build this party as the political heart of the working class, infusing its every struggle with the historical knowledge, the strategic experiences and hard-won principles which are collected in the international Trotskyist movement.

>If this can be done, then a global socialist revolution can be carried out to avert the wars, recessions, social and environmental catastrophes threatening billions of lives.

>That’s why the title of this meeting is “Time to build the Socialist Equality Party”.

>On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.

>The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.

>The verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the sentence.

>Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage, no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.

>...

>What was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”

>In fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president whose term of office expired in May 2024. Zelensky remains in power more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.

>As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of “reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of these forces. 

>Among the “proofs” of treason cited by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky, they carry a 15-year sentence.

>When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.

>The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the Zelinsky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.

>The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A 65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which, even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders. 

>...

>A sentence of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee, reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”

>Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars is a threat to his life.

>His fate cannot be left to the courts of a state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties groups, and socialist and antiwar movements in every country: Take up Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest. Sign and circulate the petition for his freedom.

>The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form below to get involved.

>The US economy shed 23,000 jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday, in a break from the tepid job growth in 2026. The decline in July was accompanied by sharp revisions to the previous two months’ report showing both the elimination of jobs and a continued exodus of workers from the labor force altogether.

>The decline was driven by a 53,000-job loss, concentrated overwhelmingly in “local government education,” the name the BLS uses for all public education jobs organized at the local level, meaning K-12 schools and community colleges. Fifty thousand of the job losses were in teaching or other school support staff positions.

>The start of the new municipal fiscal year on July 1, 2026, triggered immediate staff reductions across major urban school districts facing severe budget deficits following the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds. Chicago Public Schools issued formal layoff notices in July to over 160 central office staff while cutting hundreds of vacant school-level positions to address a $732 million budget shortfall. Similar municipal budget cuts took effect across major metropolitan districts in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, where thousands of seasonal support staff, tutors and non-tenured classroom aides were officially non-renewed entering the summer.

>The private sector added only 30,000 jobs in July. This means that the economy could not provide work to the normal 100,000–150,000 monthly new entrants into the labor force. 

>The revisions announced to previous months’ records reveal that this trend has in fact been ongoing for several months. The BLS revised May’s report down by 66,000 jobs, from 129,000 to just 63,000 new jobs for the month. June was also revised down, from 57,000 to just 20,000 new jobs added. 

>This means that the already weak job growth reported for late spring and early summer was actually substantially weaker than the public was initially told. 

>This pattern of revealing much weaker economic performance months after the fact has become common for the Trump administration. Last September, the government revised its 2024 jobs figures down by nearly 1 million. The preliminary benchmark revision for 2026 is due to be published on August 28 and is expected to reveal even more widespread losses.

>Attempting to spin the news of the dismal report, the White House was quick to report that the unemployment rate had ticked down to 4.1 percent from 4.2 percent. But as has been the case month after month, the decline in the jobless rate did not reflect an improving labor market. 

>...

>The number of people on temporary layoff jumped by 153,000 to 921,000—a sharp increase that signals employers are firing workers at an accelerating pace. The long-term unemployed, those jobless for 27 weeks or more, stood at 1.8 million, accounting for 25.5 percent of all unemployed people.

>Retail trade lost 19,000 jobs, with the heaviest losses in warehouse clubs, supercenters and general merchandise retailers. Financial activities lost 14,000 jobs and are now down 121,000 since its peak in May 2025. Leisure and hospitality, which shed 61,000 jobs in June, showed little change in July—meaning that the World Cup hiring binge predicted by economists never materialized or was so temporary that it never impacted jobs reporting numbers. 

>Rising fuel costs due to the war on Iran was cited as a major factor for the retail layoffs. Staff at commercial stores have been slashed as rising costs have caused workers to cease any spending outside of absolute necessities. 

>...

>Friday’s report is just the latest glimpse into the massive scale of inequality in the US. The labor share of income has fallen to the lowest level on record, at 53.8 percent. The year 2025 was the worst for job growth outside an official recession since 2003. Layoffs tripled in January 2026, accelerating to levels not seen since the Great Recession. AI, a powerful and labor saving technology, is being deployed systematically to eliminate jobs, with technology firms leading the way: Oracle cut 21,000 jobs, Meta laid off 8,000, Cloudflare eliminated 20 percent of its workforce, and Block slashed 4,000 positions, nearly half its staff.

>The downward revisions to prior months suggest the deterioration is more advanced than the official data acknowledge. The forces driving the crisis—war, the AI-driven restructuring, the relentless pressure on wages, are intensifying and will continue to do so as the war against Iran drags on and expands.

>The destruction of jobs will have a devastating impact on the working class. Especially as the Trump administration and state governments have moved to slash what little social safety nets exist for workers. The loss of these jobs will mean that families go hungry or lose their home.

>The ruling class of financial oligarchs endlessly gains wealth. As workers are kicked to the curb, the top 10 percent of Americans control around 70 percent of all wealth. Among that, the top 1 percent alone control over 30 percent of all wealth—roughly the same share as the bottom 90 percent of the entire population.   

>These conditions have created a social powder keg, the growth of class conflict and the political radicalization of workers and young people.

>The Socialist Equality Party (US) held its Ninth National Congress from August 2 to 7, 2026. Delegates discussed and adopted resolutions on the fight against imperialist war, the breakdown of American democracy, the defense of immigrants, the escalation of class struggle and the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), the attitude of socialists to AI technology and the defense of the heritage of the two American Revolutions.

>The SEP has held a national congress every two years since its Founding Congress in 2008. The Ninth Congress adopted the six resolutions unanimously. The congress also heard greetings and reports from the sections and sympathizing groups of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

>The opening report by David North, national chairman of the SEP, introduced the first resolution and framed the congress as a whole. “The Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes at a critical turning point in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization,” North stated. Denouncing the war against Iran, he continued: “The aura of American invincibility, built up over three and a half decades on the brutal strategy of ‘shock and awe’ bombardments, has been shattered.”

>A third world war, North explained, is already underway, developing “in the manner of a metastatic process: It is spreading globally as a chronic and expanding condition, colonizing new regions, fusing previously separate conflicts, and progressively transforming the world economy and every national state in preparation for the general conflagration toward which it tends.”

>...

>The course of the war, North stated, “will send shock waves through the entire American and international political and financial system,” exposing “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 same contradictions driving war, inequality and the turn to dictatorship have produced the emergence of the working class as a global force of resistance. The report traced “a single ascending curve” running from the strike waves triggered by a pandemic that has claimed more than 30 million lives, through the French pension struggles and general strikes across Southern Europe and South Asia, to the three “No Kings” protests, the largest single-day demonstrations in American history. 

>“After an 80-year taboo,” North stated, “socialism is reemerging in the United States itself, albeit in distorted forms, channeled by the Democratic Socialists of America back toward the Democratic Party, but expressing a shift in consciousness no apparatus can permanently contain.”

>What stands between this movement and its political expression, the report explained, is the crisis of revolutionary leadership—a crisis, North stressed, that the ICFI has never held “resolves itself automatically.” It is in these terms that he defined the significance of the congress itself. “A perspective is an instrument of struggle,” he said. “Its publication, its verification and its defense are themselves moments in the resolution of the crisis of leadership, which is resolved not by objective processes alone but by the conscious building of the revolutionary party within them.”

>...

>[Kishore's] report then turned to the radicalization now developing within the United States. “Under the blows of impossible living costs, endless war, ICE murder and the open construction of dictatorship, millions are being propelled into political life and are moving to the left, a movement that the Democratic Party seeks to smother and control.”

>The initial beneficiary of this movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, is “a 44-year-old organization resting on a political lineage of nearly 90 years, every stage of which was defined by a break from Marxism and from the working class”—from Max Shachtman’s 1940 break with Trotskyism, through Michael Harrington’s program of “realignment” within the Democratic Party, to the merger that founded the DSA in 1982. “The DSA is not a working class organization,” Kishore stated. “It arose from two petty-bourgeois tendencies, it rests today on the affluent layers of the professional middle class, and its function within the political system is not to represent workers but to manage them on behalf of the Democratic Party.”

>The task of the party, Kishore concluded, is to win the workers and young people now moving toward socialism to a genuinely revolutionary perspective.

>Eric London introduced the third resolution, on the defense of immigrants. His report documented an administration that “has continued its efforts to establish authoritarian rule by using immigration as the instrument for dismantling the democratic rights of the entire population.

>...

>Tom Hall introduced the fourth resolution, which documents the growth of workers’ struggles on every continent. Against trade union bureaucracies that function as an anti-strike corporate police force, the resolution advances the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), whose purpose “is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them.”

>Hall concluded: “The conscious factor will be decisive. It would be a serious political error to assume that the objective crisis will resolve itself, or that our role is confined to observing events and commenting upon them after the fact.”

>Evan Blake introduced the fifth resolution, on the party’s attitude to artificial intelligence (AI). The report situated its analysis within the Marxist approach to technology, explaining that none of AI’s reactionary uses “flow from the technology itself, but from the social relations within which it is developed—private ownership, the profit system and the division of the world into rival nation-states.”

>On this basis, the report rejected the hostility to AI promoted across the pseudo-left, explaining that “the practical result of a categorical rejection of AI is not to disarm the corporations and the state, which will wield it regardless, but to disarm the working class alone.” Hostility to AI, Blake said, “obliterates the distinction upon which the entire Marxist attitude toward technology rests: the distinction between a machine and the social order in which it functions.” The resolution demands the expropriation of the technology monopolies and the direction of the technology toward human need within a planned world economy and insists that not a single job be lost to AI-driven automation.

>The report and subsequent discussion also emphasized the significance of Socialism AI, launched by the International Committee in December 2025, which, as Blake noted, places the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov and the archives of nearly three decades of the World Socialist Web Site “at the disposal of workers and young people entering into struggle everywhere, at once, in any language, at any hour.”

>...

>A separate evening session was devoted to the memory of Alan Gelfand (July 28, 1949–October 29, 2025) and to a discussion of Security and the Fourth International, the International Committee’s investigation into the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalin’s GPU and the infiltration of the Trotskyist movement by state agents. Gelfand, a Los Angeles public defender, was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1979 after demanding an investigation into the presence of government agents in its leadership. In the more than four decades since, every charge Gelfand raised regarding the penetration of the SWP by state agents has been substantiated.

>...

>The congress was not simply an event in the life of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. It was international in character. Representatives of all the sections and sympathizing groups of the International Committee of the Fourth International took part.

>Contributions were made by Chris Marsden, national secretary of the SEP in the UK; Alex Lantier, national secretary of the PES in France; Deepal Jayasekera, general secretary of the SEP in Sri Lanka; Cheryl Crisp, national secretary of the SEP in Australia; Tom Peters, leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand; Ulaş Ateşçi, national chairman of the SEP in Turkey; Tomas Castanheira, leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in Brazil; Keith Jones, national secretary of the SEP in Canada; and Christoph Vandreier, chairman of the SGP in Germany. The congress also received greetings from the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists in the former Soviet Union.

>These greetings and reports were not formalities but political contributions, bringing to the deliberations the experiences of the working class on every continent.

>...

>The reports, resolutions and contributions to the discussion of the Ninth National Congress will be published on the World Socialist Web Site in the coming days. They will play a significant role in the political education of masses of workers and young people, and they constitute the analysis and program with which the working class must arm itself in the struggles now opening up.

>Everyone who is serious about the fight against war, dictatorship and capitalism—everyone looking for a genuine socialist movement—should study these documents, draw the conclusions that flow from them and make the decision to join the Socialist Equality Party.

>The state electoral committee has now decided on the admission of parties to the Berlin House of Representatives (state legislature) election on September 20. 

>The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) was approved without any objections, having met all requirements. Its members and supporters have held thousands of conversations with Berlin workers and young people in neighbourhoods, parks, outside libraries and supermarkets, and obtained the required 2,200 voter signatures prescribed for approval.

>In an undemocratic procedure, only 17 of the 30 parties that had applied to participate were approved. Two of them are standing only in individual districts; the last House of Representatives elections saw 30 parties represented on the ballot.

>With the SGP on the ballot for the Berlin election, there is a party that openly opposes the pro-war policy of all the parties in the German parliament, the Bundestag, and which fights for a socialist perspective that places the needs of the population above the profits of the super-rich.

>It is worth noting that many smaller nominally left-wing parties that had still stood five years ago made no effort whatsoever to participate in this election—among them the Klimaliste and Team Todenhöfer. Others, such as the party Mera25 founded by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, the Pirate Party, or the Tenants’ Party, failed to clear the hurdle of collecting sufficient supporting signatures.

>Many of these groups evidently refrained from standing because they do not wish to take votes away from the Left Party, which is seeking to provide Berlin’s next mayor in this election. The SGP is thereby the only party on the ballot that opposes the all-party coalition for rearmament, war and the dismantling of social provisions.

>...

>The Left Party is no opponent of militarism; it is a component of the war coalition. It voted in the Bundesrat (upper chamber of parliament) in favour of the trillion-euro war credits and made possible Merz’s rapid election as Federal Chancellor. Its parliamentary group leader Heidi Reichinnek has stated unambiguously that the party is “fully on board” with “improving Germany’s defence capability.” The then party Chairman Jan van Aken jubilantly welcomed the assassination of the Iranian state leadership by the United States.

>The Left Party claims to be able to resolve the social catastrophe in Berlin. That is a lie. The Left Party and its predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), participated in the Berlin state government for 16 years—16 years in which they cut tens of thousands of public sector posts, reduced wages and sold off 150,000 publicly-owned flats to financial investors. The social misery from which Berlin suffers today is their handiwork.

>The Left Party is now preparing to pick up where it left off with a re-run of its coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens. In Elif Eralp, it has fielded a distinctly right-wing lead candidate who openly backs Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians. Eralp’s declared role model is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who owed his election to the massive opposition to Trump—and whose first act in office was holding a “productive” meeting with Trump at the White House. That is precisely the Left Party’s programme too: high-sounding social promises in the election campaign, betrayal the day after.

>...

>The AfD cannot be combated in alliance with such “democrats.” One might as well ally oneself with the arsonist to put out the fire.

>The fascists can only be stopped by the independent mobilisation of the working class against war and its root cause, capitalism. This requires the building of an international socialist party and a break with all parties that defend capitalist property.

>The SGP’s socialist programme

>That is precisely the programme for which the SGP is standing in the Berlin state elections. We counterpose the international unity of the working class to the growing nationalism and warmongering. We fight for the defence of every job and against all cuts to wages, pensions, health, education and public infrastructure. We demand the expropriation of the banks, corporations and billion-euro fortunes and democratic control of the economy by the working class. And together with our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), we are building a worldwide movement against war and capitalism.

>This week, our supporters have begun putting up hundreds of election posters across Berlin. In the coming weeks we will conduct an intensive election campaign, with information stalls, rallies and election meetings, to discuss the central political questions and go on the offensive. Every seat we win in the House of Representatives we will use as a platform for the struggle against war, social devastation and fascism.

>The objective foundations for a socialist counter-offensive are in place. The trade war places fierce class struggles on the agenda. In the United States a powerful movement is developing against Trump, and across Europe the working class is engaged in waves of strikes and protests. What is missing is political leadership—an international socialist party that provides the spontaneous struggles with a conscious perspective. The SGP is the German section of this party. Its candidacy in the Berlin state elections is a decisive step in its construction.

>Get involved now! Support the SGP’s election campaign! Circulate our election statement! Register as an active supporter and join the SGP!

>A United Auto Workers official has been suspended from the union for two years after he posted an image on Facebook showing Will Lehman, a candidate for UAW president, bound and gagged with a shadowy figure behind him pointing a rifle.

>The federal monitor overseeing the union issued the suspension of Ray Jensen on Tuesday. Last month, Lehman had raised concerns about the AI-generated image on social media and in a press release.

>Jensen, who is an organizer in the UAW's Department of Bargaining Strategy and a former assistant regional director based in New York, also must apologize to Lehman. He is not allowed to run for any elected position in the union going forward, or campaign in the upcoming election, according to a stipulation signed by both Jensen and Neil Barofsky, the attorney from New York who serves as the court-appointed union watchdog and is running the upcoming election.

>The stipulation states that the union's election rules prohibit any threats, intimidation, retaliation or similar conduct. The monitor said Jensen violated that rule, and that a remedy "should be imposed to reflect the seriousness of his conduct and to deter similar misconduct by others."

>...

>Lehman told The Detroit News that the monitor's move to discipline Jensen "was forced by a large amount of workers that were deeply disgusted" by the image. Other union members had reached out to the monitor, he said, and there was an outcry about the incident on social media. Any worker who posted such a threat, he said, "would be fired."

>Lehman said he perceived the image as "a death threat" when he saw it, and he recalled being surprised that such a prominent UAW figure would post it online attached to their name.

>"He thinks he can just do something like that," Lehman said, adding he has not met Jensen before.

>Last Friday, Japan’s far-right government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi launched its new National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), a body designed to centralize intelligence gathering across the country’s various military and police agencies. This restructuring of Japan’s intelligence operations is being undertaken as Tokyo remilitarizes as part of the US-led war preparations against China and to suppress domestic opposition to such a conflict.

>The NIB is Japan’s first centralized intelligence body since World War II. This new body will collect information from agencies, including the Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries as well as the National Police Agency (NPA), supposedly to focus on terrorism, national emergencies, and counterintelligence nationwide.

>The NIB will streamline intelligence sharing between these different agencies while independently setting the government’s related agenda. The bureau was founded through the National Intelligence Council Establishment Act passed in May.

>The revamping of intelligence gathering operations is a major component of Japan’s remilitarization, which has sharply accelerated under Takaichi’s far-right government—a coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner Nippon Ishin no Kai. Article 9 of the constitution banning Japan from fielding a military or waging war overseas has for all intents and purposes been turned into a dead letter.

>The formation of the NIB is just one aspect of so-called “intelligence reform” with Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara stating on Friday that this was the “first step.” He added: “Strengthening the government’s central intelligence coordination function will enable it to make sound decisions based on higher-quality, timely information amid today’s complex and challenging international environment.”

>...

>All of this is being carried out under the basis that Tokyo lacks the intelligence tools to counter China and Russia. The establishment media has commentary and articles labeling Japan a “spy paradise,” filled with lurid tales of Russian and Chinese “agents” collecting and stealing information and technology. This includes a major piece in the New York Times on July 12 used to paint Tokyo as insufficiently tough on spies, specifically from Russia.

>In reality, Japan has long had one of the world’s most extensive intelligence-gathering networks, built in the post-war period, with a focus on China, North Korea, and Russia. Tokyo operates widespread signal intelligence (SIGINT) gathering networks, collecting information transmitted by electronic means. Documents revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence had been operating since the 1950s in close collaboration with the US’s National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA has also trained Japanese spies and provided technology for mass internet surveillance, including the XKeyscore system.

>The reorganization of Tokyo’s intelligence operations is meant to expand military collaboration with its allies. Tokyo has already established trilateral intelligence agreements with the US and South Korea as well as the US and the Philippines in order to target China, as the countries carry out massive war games and the construction of a wide-ranging missile system on Beijing’s doorstep.

>The creation of the NIB was carried out in collaboration with the United States, Australia, and Germany. According to the New York Times, US officials have advised Tokyo on cyber-defense systems to counter so-called industrial espionage and scrutinize foreign investment. Australian officials have similarly advised Takaichi’s government on technology while the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service recently visited Tokyo to discuss the NIB and closer collaboration between the two countries.

>Tokyo has also sought closer cooperation with the top-level, US-led Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, which includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, there have been reservations over what the Five Eyes members consider an “information security gap,” which has led to calls within and outside Japan for an anti-espionage law.

>For the ruling class, free speech and association as well as other democratic rights must be done away with in the name of “national security” to prevent public knowledge of war planning and to criminalize opposition. These war plans include the extent to which Japan has played a central role in whipping up tensions with China in the Indo-Pacific alongside the US.

>...

>These measures are being undertaken in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Japan and the US both hope to eliminate China as a major economic competitor. Tokyo at the same time is remilitarizing in order to once again independently assert its own imperialist interests through military means after three-and-a-half decades of economic stagnation.

>Tokyo has removed restrictions on exporting lethal weaponry abroad, raised military spending to 2 percent of GDP while planning to increase it further, and deployed long-range missiles on its territory for the first time. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi declared last month that Japan should begin discussions on acquiring nuclear weapons.

>Conscious of the widespread anti-war sentiment throughout the working class, this agenda is being carried out under the phony guise of “collective self-defense,” with successive governments in Tokyo whipping up an anti-China atmosphere. This can only take place through a massive assault on the democratic rights of the working class.

>US Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnapped as many as 51,000 people in July, the highest monthly total in the agency’s history, as the Trump administration intensified its mass deportation operation across the country.

>Fox News reported Monday that ICE made approximately 51,000 arrests during the month, an average of 1,645 every day. The figure, attributed to multiple federal sources, surpassed the previous record of roughly 43,000 arrests set in June.

>Separate preliminary Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by CBS News recorded more than 46,000 people booked into ICE detention during July. The figures measure somewhat different stages of the mass deportation operation. The CBS total includes people initially arrested by Customs and Border Protection before being transferred to ICE custody.

>Both reports confirm an immense nationwide escalation. ICE is kidnapping workers at their homes and workplaces, ambushing immigrants at airports and immigration check-ins, and carrying out traffic stops using masked agents in unmarked vehicles.

>At airports alone, ICE agents are reportedly seizing between 20 and 40 people every day, with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supplying passenger information used to identify and target travelers.

>The airport arrests expose the Democrats’ complicity in Trump’s attacks on immigrants, which serve as a spearhead for the creation of a presidential dictatorship. During the partial DHS shutdown in the spring, Democratic politicians made limited calls for the removal of ICE agents deployed as substitute airport personnel. Those demands have been completely abandoned even as ICE and the TSA have transformed airports into hunting grounds.

>As of last weekend, ICE has imprisoned approximately 68,000 people across its sprawling network of concentration camps and makeshift holding facilities. The vast majority of those detained are held in facilities operated by private prison companies or local governments under lucrative contracts with the federal government.

>The Trump administration has continued to escalate the mass deportation operation despite widespread opposition following the murders of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the recent killings of immigrant workers Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

>After replacing Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin sought to reduce public attention surrounding the operations while continuing to increase arrests. Rather than the highly publicized occupation-style deployments, ICE is increasingly relying on quieter arrests at homes, workplaces, airports and routine immigration appointments.

>...

>The consequences of this operation were underscored by the death this past weekend of Edwin Jeovanny López Cornejo, an immigrant worker from El Salvador who had been imprisoned for six weeks at the privately operated Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

>...

>Neither ICE nor the DHS publicly announced his death. María Cornejo said hospital staff, not ICE, notified the family that her son had died.

>“What I want is justice,” she said. “I don’t want my son’s death to go unanswered.”

>She continued, “If they don’t ensure that justice is served, well, they’re going to keep doing this forever, and we don’t know how many more people we’ll have to lose in this country.”

>The family said that during the six weeks López Cornejo was imprisoned, neither his mother, his daughter nor other relatives were permitted to visit him.

>López Cornejo is at least the second immigrant to die after being imprisoned at Delaney Hall since the facility reopened last year.

>Last December 12, Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti, died one day after being transferred to the facility. ICE smeared Brutus as a “criminal illegal alien” and claimed he died from “suspected natural causes.”

>His family has disputed the agency’s account and demanded a full investigation into his death. They have also rejected ICE’s depiction of Brutus, who was seeking asylum in the United States when he was imprisoned.

>Between Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody, according to a joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. The mortality rate is nearly four times that recorded under the Biden administration and more than two and a half times the rate during Trump’s first term.

>Additional deaths since the report’s cutoff, including that of López Cornejo, have driven the toll still higher. On average, an immigrant has died in ICE custody approximately every 10 days since Trump returned to office.

>...

>DHS officials sought permission to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to involuntary medical procedures since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

>At least three immigrants were definitely subjected to the procedures, while court records indicate that two more probably underwent them. Another five ended their hunger strikes as force-feeding was about to begin.

>Force-feeding involves restraining a prisoner while medical personnel insert a tube through the nose and down the throat before pumping liquid nutrition into the stomach. The procedure can damage the nose, esophagus and internal organs and is widely regarded by human rights and medical organizations as torture.

>Other procedures authorized by federal judges included forced intravenous hydration, involuntary blood draws and the collection of urine samples.

>In six of the cases reviewed by the Guardian, the immigrants had no legal representation during proceedings authorizing their forced treatment. Federal judges frequently approved emergency requests before the hunger strikers had any meaningful opportunity to object.

>The practice did not begin with Trump. In 2024, during the final year of the Biden administration, DHS attempted to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to forced medical treatment. The Guardian confirmed that the procedures were carried out against at least two people and probably against four others.

>The continuity exposes the fraud of claims that the Democratic Party represents an alternative to Trump’s mass deportation operation. Biden maintained ICE, expanded its resources and authorized the same methods of physical coercion now being employed on a vastly greater scale.

>...

>Parias told L.A. Taco that 75 to 80 detainees receive drinking water from two 10-gallon containers. After another detainee discovered the apparent worms, they collected several in a plastic bottle to preserve the evidence.

>“They are little animals, like worms, black in color, and small that are moving around in the water, swimming and alive,” Parias said.

>“They are almost poisoning us with this type of little animal,” he added. “Many people are experiencing stomach issues.”

>Parias said detainees drank the contaminated water despite the apparent organisms because they were thirsty. He also alleged that when the containers were emptied, staff sometimes waited as long as three hours before refilling them.

>The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka condemns the attempt by Kayts police to threaten World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporter Dinesh Heymaal with arrest following his coverage of a fishermen’s protest and subsequent media event at Kurikattuwan Jetty, 31 kilometres from Jaffna, on July 29.

>The police withdrew their threat to arrest Heymaal only after the WSWS editorial board in Colombo was informed of their actions. The incident is a serious attack on freedom of expression and the democratic rights of journalists, and exposes the methods employed by the police to intimidate those who challenge capitalist politicians and union bureaucrats.

>The protest was organised by the Fisheries Cooperatives in the islands near Jaffna Peninsula against incursions by large Indian bottom-trawlers that had damaged the nets of around 200 fishermen in the area. The organisers demanded punitive state action against Indian fishermen, calling for them to be arrested and even shot. No demands were raised concerning the soaring cost of fuel, the IMF austerity measures imposed by the Dissanayake government, the rising price of nets and equipment, and the destruction of fishers’ livelihoods amid the global capitalist crisis.

>This selectivity is not accidental. It reflects the class interests of those who organised the protest. The leadership of the Fisheries Cooperatives is not composed of impoverished small-scale fishermen, but wealthy individuals with close ties to Tamil nationalist politicians.

>Heymaal covered the protest from the beginning. Afterwards, while he was having tea at a nearby restaurant, two uniformed police officers accompanied by two plainclothesmen approached him. Heymaal had earlier observed the plainclothesmen monitoring the protest and press briefing. The police had apparently noted his motorbike and followed him after he left.

>The police threats against Heymaal were directly connected to an incident at the media event following the protest.

>During the press conference, Heymaal challenged Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) leader Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam over his call for the Sri Lankan Navy to take drastic actions against Indian trawlers. Heymaal pointed out that such a demand ran counter to the aspirations of people in the North and East for the withdrawal of the military from the region and an end to militarisation.

>Heymaal also attempted to question Annalingam Annarasa, chairman of the Federation of Jaffna District Fisheries Cooperatives Union. A media person who appeared annoyed by Heymaal’s questioning of Ponnambalam attempted to stop him, declaring that “only those invited media persons” could intervene.

>...

>When the police officers subsequently threatened Heymaal with arrest, one referred to his remarks during the press briefing. Using abusive language, the officer shouted: “We saw you, bugger, talking big there [at the press briefing].”

>The officers demanded to see Heymaal’s media identification card, although they had no legitimate authority to interfere in his work as a journalist. They also recorded details from his national identity card.

>There is no doubt that the police were emboldened by the provocative attempts of the media personnel to prevent Heymaal from asking questions. The police were clearly attempting to intimidate a journalist because he had challenged political figures and raised uncomfortable questions.

>The SEP takes this threat against our comrade seriously. Police harassment and intimidation of journalists is continuing and intensifying under the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.

>In the war-ravaged North and East, the military maintains a pervasive presence 17 years after the end of the bloody communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Police and military surveillance of the population has long been a feature of daily life in these provinces.

>The police monitoring of the Kurikattuwan Jetty protest, where ordinary fishermen spoke openly about their worsening living conditions, and the officers’ subsequent intimidation of a WSWS reporter, are part of a broader effort by the state to restrict political discussion and suppress opposition.

>...

>The threats against the WSWS must be understood in this broader political context. For more than half a century, the SEP and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Communist League, have fought for the independent interests of the working class, against all attacks on democratic rights and all forms of nationalism and communalism. That struggle has been carried out in the Sinhala- and Tamil-language newspapers, Kamkaru Mawatha and Tholilalar Pathai, and today on the WSWS.

>The SEP will not be intimidated by police threats or attempts to suppress socialist journalism. We call on workers, youth, and all defenders of democratic rights to oppose every effort to silence the WSWS and other independent journalists.

>Governments globally are increasingly resorting to authoritarian methods and are inflaming communal and nationalist divisions to uphold capitalist rule, which is plunging broad layers of the population into poverty. The defence of freedom of expression and freedom of the press is therefore inseparable from the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society.

>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 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.

>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.”

>...

>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 consequence.

>...

>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.”

>On Thursday, a meeting of the recently formed Industrial Workers Rank-and-File Group (IWRFG) of Australia unanimously passed a resolution condemning the public death threat against Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman by a high-ranking United Auto Workers (UAW) official.

>The postal, factory, trucking and other workers at the meeting expressed their horror over the vile post, depicting Lehman—an officially certified candidate for UAW president, bound and gagged, with a masked man aiming an automatic rifle at his back, in an AI-generated image.

>The poster, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., is a highly paid functionary of the UAW apparatus and a prominent supporter of current president Shawn Fain, making clear that this threat carries the implicit sanction of the incumbent union leadership.

>Lehman is being targeted because of the socialist platform on which he is campaigning for union president, calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy, the building of rank-and-file committees in every plant and the transfer of power, and the UAW’s vast resources, to workers on the shop floor. The UAW apparatus is attempting to crush Lehman’s campaign, including through threats of violence, because it knows that the program he is fighting for will win enormous support from workers, throughout the automotive industry and the entire working class.

>Workers at the IWRFG meeting noted Lehman’s comment warning that, if a threat of this character can be made openly against a candidate for the UAW’s highest office, “then no worker who challenges the bureaucracy in their own local is safe,” making this an act of intimidation directed not against one individual but against the entire rank-and-file opposition internationally.

>The meeting unanimously passed the following resolution:

>The Industrial Workers Rank-and-File Group (Australia)

>- condemns in the strongest possible terms the death threat issued by Raymond L. Jensen Jr. against Will Lehman, and declares its complete opposition to all such threats, violence and intimidation directed against rank-and-file workers who dare to challenge the trade union bureaucracy.

>- endorses the demands advanced by Will Lehman and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC): a full investigation encompassing not only Jensen’s conduct but the knowledge, encouragement or acquiescence of the UAW leadership; a public repudiation of the threat by the UAW; an immediate public statement by the Monitor’s office; the immediate suspension of Jensen from his position without pay pending completion of the investigation, with all appropriate legal and disciplinary sanctions to follow; referral of the matter to the Department of Labor and to federal law enforcement; and affirmative measures to guarantee that the remainder of the 2026 UAW election is conducted free of intimidation.

>- recognises that the attack on Will Lehman is not merely a UAW problem or an American problem, but an attack on the democratic rights of the working class internationally. The trade union bureaucracies in every country—including Australia, where union officialdom collaborate to suppress rank-and-file opposition—employ similar methods of intimidation, slander and violence against workers who fight for independent organisations. The defence of Lehman is the defence of every worker’s right to organise free from the threats and retaliation of the corporate-union apparatus.

>- declares its solidarity with Will Lehman and his campaign to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to rank-and-file committees on the shop floor. The IWRFG recognises in Lehman’s struggle the same fight being waged by workers across Australia—against sell-out enterprise agreements and against the suppression of workers’ struggles and democratic rights by union officials in league with management and the state.

>- will fight to circulate this resolution widely and to take up the defence of Lehman as an integral part of the fight to build rank-and-file committees in every workplace in Australia and internationally. We call on workers to register their opposition to this incitement to violence by emailing the UAW at feedback@uaw.org and copying the Will Lehman campaign at info@willforuawpresident.org.

>The attack on Will Lehman is an attack on us all. Defend democratic rights! Build rank-and-file committees internationally!

>Five workers were killed in an inferno on July 21 at the Nimato helmet factory in the Katuwana Industrial Zone in Homagama, about 25 kilometres southeast of Colombo.

>The tragedy is one of Sri Lanka’s deadliest industrial disasters. It was not a random accident, but the result of a profit-driven system that forces people to work in factories where basic safety measures are ignored.

>The fire broke out around 9:45 a.m. on Tuesday. Authorities later found that large quantities of PVC, polystyrene foam and other highly combustible materials had been stored inside the factory, allowing the blaze to engulf the three-storey building within minutes.

>More than 80 workers were on duty, but most were on their breakfast break when the fire began. Had they all been at their workstations, the death toll would have been much higher.

>Preliminary police investigations indicated that an electrical short circuit may have occurred after a fan fell into a container of paint thinner. Workers tried to put out the flames with fire extinguishers while their trapped colleagues cried out for help. But the thick smoke and intense heat rapidly overwhelmed the building, leaving those trapped on the third floor with no escape.

>Mario Edward, 54, a production supervisor, was among those who took the lead in fighting the fire. He collected an extinguisher from the ground floor and rushed back upstairs, where he was killed by the fire.

>The other four who died were young workers from impoverished agricultural areas who had migrated to the city to find work. Two were 19 years old and the other two were 24. According to media reports, they were Dilip Dilanka, Pahan Udara, Sachin Dilshan, and D. Damayanthi.

>The bodies were burned beyond recognition. DNA testing was required to confirm identities.

>...

>It is already clear that the helmet factory, like many others in Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones and industrial estates, was a death trap. Since around 2010 the factory had operated in a three-storey building that packed a large workforce into a cramped area. The ground floor housed heavy machinery, the second contained the painting section, and the third was used for helmet assembly with polystyrene foam and other combustible materials.

>Fuelled by burning chemicals and flammable materials, the blaze rapidly engulfed the building. Air entering through the main entrance intensified the fire. The building’s steel framework collapsed, blocking the emergency exits, and the external emergency staircase became detached from the structure, trapping workers on the third floor.

>Media reports note that the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) found the Nimato factory failed to renew its Environmental Protection Licence after 2024. It had not submitted mandatory noise and air quality assessments or a waste management report. The factory stored and used large quantities of PVC and chemicals that release toxic compounds when burned.

>Even more damning, the CEA confirmed that the factory had no emergency response plan to deal with a fire or any other industrial disaster. Officials had repeatedly instructed management to rectify these violations, most recently on July 2, but no action was taken. CEA officials did not halt production until the factory was made safe and did not warn the workers about the dangers they faced.

>The tragedy has exposed another glaring example of official neglect. Despite around 2,000 workers being employed in the Katuwana Industrial Zone and thousands more in the 34 companies operating in the nearby Templeburg Industrial Estate, there is no fire station either within the industrial zone or in Homagama itself, which is home to more than 237,000 people.

>...

>The Katuwana inferno was not an “accident” but an industrial mass murder—the product of a capitalist system that subordinates human life to the relentless drive for profit. Safety measures are neglected and left unenforced because every rupee spent protecting workers is a rupee subtracted from the bottom line. No regulatory tweak and no appeal to the conscience of the capitalist class will stop the killing.

>The trade unions, acting as agencies of the companies and the state, have suppressed opposition among workers to the evisceration of workplace safety.

>To defend their safety and their lives, workers urgently need new organisations that they control: rank-and-file action committees, independent of the pro-company union bureaucracies, should be established in every workplace. These committees must halt production when factories are unsafe, while fighting to defend jobs and wages. They must mobilise workers to demand the full disclosure of all safety data and bring to justice those responsible for deaths and injuries.

>Workers in Sri Lanka must link their struggles with workers in India and other countries, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which is fighting to mobilise workers internationally in the struggle against capitalism and for international socialism.

>Attempting to dress up his position with pseudo-Marxist credentials, Mosquera falsifies the positions of Leon Trotsky and revives a decades-old slander that Trotsky was “sectarian” on France and Spain in order to rehabilitate the Popular Front. Every element of this argument is false.

>Mosquera is a regular contributor to International Viewpoint, the publication of organizations that make up the remnants of the former Pabloite United Secretariat, and more generally, the dregs of global pseudo-leftism. The publication in turn identifies him as a member of Democracia Socialista, which it describes as “part of” the Pabloite section in Argentina.

>In fact, it is part of a grouping that calls itself Poder Popular, joined with neo-Guevarist tendencies. It extols the legacy of Mario Santucho, who briefly fused his petty-bourgeois nationalist organization with the group headed by the Argentine Pabloite Nahuel Moreno, before following the logic of the Pabloite line of liquidation into Castroism and launching an armed guerrilla struggle that ended in catastrophic defeat, taking the lives of many, including his own.

>...

>To make this program respectable, Mosquera imports the claim made by Perry Anderson, the longtime editor of New Left Review, that Trotsky showed “flexibility” toward alliances with non-working class sectors against Nazism and during the Kornilov affair of August 1917, yet fell into “sectarian errors” in opposing the Popular Front in France and Spain. This is a grotesque fabrication.

>It erases the distinction Trotsky spent years elaborating between a united front of workers’ organizations for defensive struggle, and a Popular Front government that subordinates the working class politically to its class enemies.

>In Germany, Trotsky called for a united front of Communist (KPD) and Social Democratic (SPD) workers against the Nazis—joint action between two workers’ parties, each retaining full political independence. He never proposed a coalition government with the SPD, still less with bourgeois parties. In December 1931 he wrote: “No common platform with the Social Democracy... March separately, but strike together!” The Stalinist KPD rejected even this minimal unity, branding the SPD “social fascists”; the German working class was divided and crushed, and Hitler took power in January 1933.

>The Kornilov affair, which Mosquera cites via Anderson as proof of Trotsky’s supposed flexibility, in fact demonstrates the very method he later applied to France. In August 1917 the Bolsheviks fought General Kornilov’s coup alongside troops loyal to the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, while granting Kerensky himself no political support. Lenin’s instruction, which Trotsky quoted in 1931, was: “We shall fight against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky... The distinction is delicate but must not be forgotten.”

>...

>This convergence is not accidental. It has a definite class content. As the WSWS has explained, the pseudo-left is not a wing of the socialist movement that has made mistaken tactical choices. It is the political expression of a privileged, upper-middle-class layer—hostile to Marxism and to the independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Its material position is bound up with the parliamentary apparatus, the trade union bureaucracy, the universities and certain professions. Its historic function is to corral movements of social protest back within the safe confines of the institutions of bourgeois rule, dressed variously in the language of identity politics, national reformism or “left” electoralism.

>Mosquera, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, other Jacobin writers and the PTS’s leadership are drawn overwhelmingly from the same academic and professional milieu, occupying adjacent positions within that same social layer. The affinity is not merely social: as the WSWS has documented, Jacobin América Latina’s own editorial board includes sitting and former Latin American government officials, giving Mosquera’s proposed “broader progressive bloc” a concrete, existing address.

>The disputes between such forces are a family quarrel over how best to manage, not overturn, the crisis of Argentine capitalism to secure their social privileges—whether through an open electoral bloc with Peronism or through a “united front” to police the Peronist union bureaucracy’s authority over workers.

>What is missing is the revolutionary party Trotsky spent his life building against exactly this kind of “left” cover for capitalist rule. Obstructing the construction of that party is the real function shared by Jacobin’s open support for Peronism and PTS’s centrism. The International Committee of the Fourth International alone is fighting to build it in Argentina and internationally.

>Opposition continues to grow among autoworkers to the death threat issued by a high-ranking United Auto Workers official against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. On Tuesday, Lehman’s campaign released a powerful statement by Lehman on the threat and urging workers to oppose it. The campaign also posted a second video containing statements from workers at the Bridgewater Interiors plant and the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit defending the candidate.

>In his video statement, Lehman explained that on July 16, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., until recently assistant director of UAW Region 9 and still holding what Lehman called a “cushy seat” as a UAW International staffer, posted a threat on Lehman’s public Facebook page. Under Lehman’s statement on the federal criminal investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain, Jensen posted an AI-generated image of Lehman bound, gagged and bleeding, with a masked man aiming a rifle at his back.

>Lehman said Jensen, who collected over $200,000 last year, according to the union’s LM-2 filing—five times the average earnings of the workers whose dues he collects—displayed an “I Support Shawn Fain” badge on his Facebook page.

>“This is a federal crime, specifically threatening a union member for speaking out on candidates and union affairs,” Lehman said, adding that his attorney Eric Lee has demanded the court-appointed Monitor suspend Jensen without pay and refer the matter to federal law enforcement, writing that “the message transmitted to the UAW membership is unmistakable. Extreme violence against Will Lehman is encouraged and enjoys the sanction of the union leadership.”

>Lehman noted the Monitor’s own office found that Fain created a “climate of retribution” and threatened to “slit the throats” of his opponents.

>Jensen’s threat, Lehman said, “is no different from Donald Trump threatening the opponents he brands as the radical left. Both fear any action from below.”

>...

>Far from retreating, Lehman’s campaign has expanded in the days since the threat was posted. Campaign teams have distributed his statement and leaflets at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, the Detroit Assembly Complex-Jefferson plant, the Bridgewater Interiors and Dana plants in Warren, Michigan, the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly, Sterling Heights Assembly and Sterling Stamping plants, and the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan. The campaign team has been joined by auto parts workers and workers from Stellantis Jefferson and GM Flint Assembly.

>The second video contains statements from workers who rallied to Lehman’s defense when he campaigned Monday at Bridgewater Interiors and the Warren Truck Assembly Plant. “They’re trying to shut you up,” a young Bridgewater worker told Lehman. “And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.”

>...

>Support for Lehman has also come from the Dana Driveline plant in Toledo, Ohio, where workers rejected two contracts backed by the UAW bureaucracy. Tommy, a worker at the plant, told the WSWS, “Ray Jensen’s threat against Will Lehman is deplorable, disgusting, and furthermore a perfect example of the negligent abuse of AI. Jensen’s post implies a gross desire for violence against Mr. Lehman, simply for not only criticizing the corrupt UAW leadership, but for openly challenging it. Everyone at the top knows they’re losing support as time goes on, and they know more of their dues-paying members are aligning themselves with Mr. Lehman.

>“I call on all UAW members, whether they support Mr. Lehman’s campaign or not, to call out Ray Jensen and the rest of the arrogantly complacent UAW leadership for the threat against Will’s life. Demand the UAW sever all ties with Jensen, and aid in the investigation against him, so that he may face the just consequences of his grotesque actions.”

>Rochelle, a Michigan teacher added her voice, telling the WSWS, “Raymond Jensen’s threat to Will Lehman is totally inappropriate and inexcusable. It is particularly egregious coming from an individual that is in a leadership position within the organization, of which Will is a member, and he should have been fired immediately. The UAW’s lack of discipline regarding this matter is certainly troubling and telling. Thus if any rank-and-file member is unhappy with the way things have been handled, one must vote for Will Lehman as he is obviously a threat to the current apparatus.”

>The threat has also been denounced by Greg Mooney, recording secretary of UAW Local 2147 at General Dynamics Land Systems in Lima, Ohio and another candidate for UAW president.

>In a video statement, Mooney said, “One of the international reps out of Region 9, an organizer by the name of Raymond Jensen Jr., retaliated against one of the candidates running for president and made a death threat. That is totally unacceptable, and it’s gone too far. This has been going on for quite a while, where these International reps, a handful of them, have been going out and attacking the candidates running against Shawn Fain and his slate. I can’t say that Shawn Fain has been encouraging this behavior to happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Nonetheless, the people running for international office should not have death threats made against them by international staff.”

>Mooney said Jensen had “harassed me and several other candidates” and “has been referred before the IEB a couple times, but that behavior was never addressed.” He added, “We shouldn’t have to be paying these people’s salaries to turn around and attack the membership.”

>Nearly a week after the threat was posted, neither Fain nor any officer of the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) has repudiated it, and Jensen remains on the union’s payroll.

>But the growing response at the factory gates and the statements of opposition confirms that the threat, far from intimidating workers, has become a catalyst for the very rank-and-file rebellion the apparatus fears. As Lehman stated, “The apparatus resorts to intimidation because it fears you. The answer is not to retreat but to organize.”