r/Trotskyism

>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.

>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.

On August 10, a court in the city of Pervomaisk in southern Ukraine sentenced Bogdan Syrotiuk—a 27-year-old socialist and leader of the Trotskyist Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists—to 15 years in prison for “high treason” for calling for the international unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against war.

Bogdan has been convicted of a thought crime, in a ruling that blatantly violates international human rights law and the European Convention on Human Rights. The charge rested on the antiwar articles Bogdan published on the World Socialist Web Site and on his opposition to the Ukrainian government’s glorification of Nazi collaborators.

The very statements cited in the ruling make clear that he was an opponent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called on workers and young people in both Russia and Ukraine to oppose it. The verdict cites his “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” and his “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures”—explicitly citing as evidence his denunciation of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose movement participated in the Holocaust.

The savage treatment of Bogdan and the kangaroo-court character of the proceedings explode the official narrative that has dominated the governments and media of the United States and Europe: that Ukraine is an embattled democracy, fighting to defend freedom against an unprovoked invasion. The prosecution of Bogdan exemplifies the real state of affairs in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian state has outlawed left-wing politics and suppressed all independent political and trade union activity. In March 2022, the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended 11 opposition parties and merged the major national television channels’ news into a single state-run broadcast. That June, the courts banned the largest opposition party in parliament. Strikes are prohibited under martial law, and wartime labor legislation has suspended collective agreements and stripped basic protections from the majority of the workforce. Elections have been suspended since Zelensky’s own term expired on May 20, 2024. He rules by decree.

>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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This statement was passed unanimously at the summer meeting of the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist International. We say: Defend the Cuban revolution! Defeat US imperialism! Fight for world socialism!

我不是托派 但是没怎么接触过这个群体的人 所以比较好奇也很希望与托派群体能交流一下看看他们的一些观点和理论了解一下

Capitalism has plunged the world into its deepest crisis in living memory. Billions face skyrocketing costs and austerity, while the ruling class crowns its first trillionaire. The so-called “rules-based international order” is dead: the imperialist vultures arm to the teeth, fighting bitter battles over markets, unconcerned by the bloody destruction left in their wake. Meanwhile, the relentless pursuit of profit is destroying the environment—and putting the very existence of humanity itself into question.

But the billionaires won't get the last word. In just a few years, mass movements have erupted in more than a dozen countries: from Nepal to Kenya, from Serbia to Bangladesh, from France to Italy. Even the US—the belly of the beast of world capitalism—isn't safe, as the Minneapolis uprising shows.

The pattern is clear: we have entered an epoch of revolutions. Millions of ordinary people have begun to question the system and are striving to take their fate into their own hands.

And yet, these revolutions have failed to solve any of the fundamental problems of society. That's because, heroic and inspiring as they are, they have failed to destroy the root cause: capitalism itself.

As the crisis deepens, broader and more powerful revolutionary movements are inevitable—even in Canada. This raises burning questions: How can the working class end capitalism? What ideas and organizations are necessary? What role should communists play?

Join us at the inaugural Toronto School of Communism for answers to these questions. This year's theme is revolutions—we'll study key revolutions from history, the richest source of lessons for revolutionaries today.

No revolutionary movement can succeed without a firm grounding in theory. This school exists to train up a new generation with the ideas needed to win. If you want to end capitalism—you must be there!

Hello! I'm new to communism and I started reading books I bought to the RCI (the ideas of Karl marx by Alan Woods)

All the Marxist theories makes a lot of sense to me but the book doesn't really explain how did the proletarian state that lenine created in 1917 became a stalinian bureaucracy.

From what I understand the proletarian state is much more democratic that every nowadays capitalist states. So I don't really understand how a real democratic worker state got hijacked by a minority of elites.

And also I know stalitinists are saying this is still communism but what makes trotskysts say this isn't ?

I'm also open to resources to dig this topic further.

Thanks 😁

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

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

Trying to organize, applied to the RCA but curious as to if there are issues with them or if there're any groups that are more reliable, thank you.