Discuss. I agree with the assessment, before paying attention to politics (I did listen to parties platform just as a normal ass left-liberal) you would have never known these guys are supposedly trots

>In Wolfsburg, members of the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) and the VW Action Committee distributed a leaflet headlined, “Enough is enough—Defend every job at Volkswagen!”

>The early shift streamed out of the plant, the midday shift streamed in. Workers stopped, took the leaflet, and used the shift change for brief, hurried exchanges. Some read the first lines as they walked. Others pocketed the leaflet and then came back to make a remark.

>The unrest among the workforce is palpable. The VW executive board is determined to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and close several plants. While the government and corporations pour billions into rearmament and war, wages in the automotive industry are to be cut and entire workforces laid off.

>“Now they’re closing four of them”

>Many workers were particularly outraged by the broken guarantee to spare the plant. Marco, an older employee who has worked at the plant for over 20 years, said: "Back then, at the meeting, they said no site would be closed. Now they’re closing four of them and acting as if it fell from the sky. And the IG Metall union co-signed that. They’ve known for months what’s coming for us, and they kept quiet until everything was signed and sealed. We are being systematically silenced until the decisions have long been made."

>A female worker, Sabina, responded to a worker’s remark that IG Metall was “doing something” with bitter irony: "Yes, they are doing something—namely, selling us out. They agreed to the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs together with the executive board, and now they act as if they are our saviours. I don’t believe a single word they say anymore. Not one."

>...

>New press reports that VW intends to sell models developed in China in Europe in the future, and possibly have them manufactured in plants such as at Zwickau were the dominant topic in many conversations. Several workers had read the news on their phones during their breaks.

>“Yesterday they still said there are no plans to build China models here, and today it says Zwickau or other plants are to be used for that,” said Rheinhardt, an assembly worker. “So what applies now? Every new ‘rescue concept’ ultimately means only that somewhere else cuts are made, production is shifted, or a plant is shut down. They are systematically playing us off against each other—Zwickau against Wolfsburg, German workers against Chinese workers. And while we are squabbling among ourselves, they continue to cut jobs.”

>Others asked how one could talk about “new opportunities” when staff were being cut and plants were being called into question at the same time. The suspicion that these scenarios were primarily intended to legitimise further job cuts was widespread among the workers at the gate

>...

>The SGP members’ explanations about the international networking of action committees met with great interest. Many workers heard for the first time that in the US an ordinary worker, Will Lehman at Mack Trucks in Pennsylvania, is running as a socialist candidate in the presidential election of the autoworkers’ union, UAW, and explicitly linking his campaign to the establishment of action committees in order to abolish the union bureaucracy and transfer power to the workforce. The fact that workers in Germany, the US, Mexico, Poland, Turkey and China are confronted with the same attacks and are joining together in the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was new to several employees and was immediately understood as a necessary response to the global strategy of the corporations.

>“The corporations are also organising internationally,” said one worker. “VW, Stellantis, Mercedes, Toyota, Tesla—they are all doing the same thing: cutting jobs, suppressing wages, closing plants. If we fight only nationally they play us off against each other. Workers in other countries have the same problem. Why shouldn’t we join forces?”

>The Volkswagen Action Committee draws a clear conclusion from this: The fight against job cuts, plant closures and wage cuts cannot be left to those who have co-negotiated these measures. Employees must build their own democratically controlled combat organisations, action committees, independent of IG Metall and the works council, which unite with colleagues in all VW plants across the entire automotive industry worldwide. The alternative to the capitalist profit and war system is for the working class to take control of production and organise industry as part of a democratically planned socialist economy that serves not the profits of a small minority, but the needs of the great majority.

The words of the Declaration of Independence, like those of all great revolutionary documents, come suddenly alive in periods of social struggle. Its denunciation of George III, a ruler “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads today like a condemnation of the Trump administration. As the historian Adam Hochschild observed in the webinar held by the World Socialist Web Site on June 25, the Declaration’s indictment of the king reads as if it “were written this morning.”

In the language of the Declaration, the military has been rendered “superior to the Civil Power” through the deployment of troops into American cities. Immigrants are “transported beyond Seas” without charge or trial to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Federal agents are protected “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” as in the cases of the ICE agent who shot Renée Good and the CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” stands as an indictment of a society that has just minted its first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Nearly 1,000 billionaires command $8.4 trillion, and the top 1 percent holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. American society is mired in corruption and criminality, with President Donald Trump having reaped $1.43 billion in a cryptocurrency scam during his first year in office. 

Watch "The American Revolution and Its Place in History", only on the World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org/1776

>The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that nonfarm payrolls rose by just 57,000 in June, far below economists’ expectations and accompanied by sharp downward revisions to previous months’ figures. Payroll gains for April and May were revised down by a combined 74,000 jobs.

>The headline unemployment rate fell from 4.3 to 4.2 percent, a figure seized on by the Trump administration to present the report as a sign of economic strength. But the lower unemployment rate did not reflect a strengthening labor market. It came as 720,000 people left the labor force and household employment fell by 507,000. The labor force participation rate dropped by 0.3 percentage point to 61.5 percent, its lowest level since March 2021, with 720,000 people leaving the labor force. Household employment fell by 507,000.

>The official unemployment rate conceals the real scale of joblessness and underemployment. The BLS reported 6.0 million people outside the labor force who nevertheless want a job. Of these, 1.8 million were marginally attached to the labor force, meaning they wanted and were available for work and had searched in the previous year but not in the previous four weeks. The number of discouraged workers stood at 477,000. Another 4.7 million people were working part time for economic reasons because their hours had been cut or they could not find full-time work. The broader U-6 measure of labor underutilization stood at 7.9 percent, nearly twice the official unemployment rate.

>The sectoral breakdown underscores the narrow and unstable character of job growth. Leisure and hospitality employment fell by 61,000 in June, reflecting weaker-than-usual seasonal hiring. This is one of the clearest signs in the report of weakening conditions for low-wage workers. Restaurants and hotels, sectors that normally expand staffing in the summer, accounted for a major share of the losses.

>The decline in leisure and hospitality comes amid a mounting squeeze on working-class living standards. Average hourly earnings rose 3.5 percent over the year, while the Consumer Price Index rose 4.2 percent in May. Energy prices rose 23.5 percent over the year, and gasoline prices were up 40.5 percent, driven by the widening impact of the US war with Iran and the disruption of global energy markets.

>...

>Separate layoff data show that AI is playing a central role in the corporate offensive against jobs. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that US employers announced 45,849 job cuts in June. Technology led all sectors, with 15,503 announced cuts during the month and 139,156 so far in 2026, an 83 percent increase over the same period last year. Technology now accounts for nearly one-third of all announced job cuts.

>AI was cited as the leading reason for job cuts for the fourth consecutive month. Challenger reported that AI accounted for 14,029 announced cuts in June, or 31 percent of the total. So far this year, AI has been cited in 101,743 job-cut announcements, roughly 23 percent of all announced cuts.

>Major corporations are openly using AI to slash headcount while redirecting resources toward profits, stock valuations and infrastructure for further automation. Oracle disclosed that it had cut 21,000 jobs over the past 12 months, about 13 percent of its workforce, citing the adoption and deployment of AI. Meta laid off about 8,000 workers while shifting thousands of employees into AI-focused roles. Cloudflare cut roughly 20 percent of its workforce after reporting record quarterly revenue. Block eliminated 4,000 jobs, nearly half its workforce, with CEO Jack Dorsey declaring earlier this year that most companies would reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.These cuts are not the workings of an impersonal market. They are the product of a deliberate class policy. The financial oligarchy is using every lever available—AI, inflation, war, anti-immigrant repression and the Federal Reserve’s high-interest-rate regime—to impose the cost of capitalism’s crisis on workers.

>...

>Artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies could be used to eliminate drudgery, shorten the working day and vastly expand the material and cultural life of humanity. Under capitalism, they are being deployed to eliminate jobs, intensify exploitation and enrich a tiny layer of executives and investors.

>The June jobs report is a warning. Beneath the official unemployment rate, millions of workers are being pushed out of the labor force, forced into part-time work, priced down by inflation, terrorized by immigration raids or targeted for replacement through AI-driven restructuring. The defense of jobs and living standards requires the independent organization of the working class against the corporations, the Trump administration and the capitalist system they defend.

Like, Lenin would encourage communists to try to participate in bourgeoisie governments, but not when a whole dual power existed?

It is hardly surprising that a book on democracy and its history written by a far-right professor is steeped in anti-democratic ideas, trivialises Nazi terror and hails the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a revitalisation of democracy. What is remarkable, however, is that Jörg Baberowski’s latest treatise, Am Volk vorbei—Zur Krise der liberalen Demokratie (Bypassing the People—On the Crisis of Liberal Democracy), is being hailed and praised in countless media outlets. This can only be understood as a deliberate political campaign to secure the AfD a place in government.

The election victories reflect a profound shift to the left in the political orientation of masses of workers, youth, professional people and sections of the middle class, driven by the crisis of American and world capitalism. The escalation of imperialist war, including the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the criminal aggression against Iran, growing poverty and economic insecurity for the masses combined with mounting billions for the corporate oligarchy, the hated Trump regime’s erection of a fascistic dictatorship and the cowardice and complicity of the Democrats are fueling growing popular resistance and interest in a socialist alternative to the existing system.

Socialist Equality Party Assistant National Secretary Tom Scripps spoke outside the Turkish embassy in London on Tuesday. He and a group of SEP members aimed to deliver a letter of protest to the Turkish ambassador protesting the unjust arrest of Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, and hundreds of others, by the Erdoğan government.

This followed a protest outside the Turkish embassy in Berlin held by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, and protests held on Büyükada (Prinkipo) island—part of Ercan Ali’s municipality—participated in by the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International).

Staff at the embassy refused to open the door or to receive the letter, which has been submitted by email. The text is posted below.

As Engels explains, the capitalists “engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit” are structurally incapable of looking beyond the “first, tangible success.” For them, “the sole incentive becomes the profit to be gained on selling.” And this profit is vast: The net income of stock market-listed oil and gas companies in the US alone in 2022 was $916 billion, of which 84 percent was captured by the richest tenth of the population, and half by the richest 1 percent.

To attempt to address the climate crisis by issuing appeals to governments to regulate this oligarchy, or directly to the boardrooms themselves—as do the green and environmentalist movements—is like discussing vegetarianism with a pack of hungry wolves.

The profits of fossil-fueled capitalism not only insulate the super rich from the effects of climate change but render them indifferent to the democratic sentiment of those who are affected. The ruling class stands to lose between $1.4 and $2.4 trillion in stranded fossil fuel assets and investments in a move to a net-zero emissions society. A comparison of the time and resources spent by the European governments on each confirms that they are more prepared to contemplate war with nuclear-armed Russia than such a transition.

Safeguarding human life on earth means seizing power away from these arsonists by expropriating the oligarchy and toppling capitalist governments in a world socialist revolution.

Or was it all actually just him making a dialectically appropriate alliance with non-capitalists/lumpen/petite-bourgeoisie classes the way that the Bolsheviks were willing to make alliances with, you know, Cossacks, soldiers, peasants, even Black Hundreds and even intervene in the mass executions of police by Red Guards and other revolutionaries in cases where there was an expedience of temporary alliances to build socialism?