the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 18, 2025
More than ten thousand Air Canada flight attendants went on strike at 1 a.m., August 16. They forced the company to cancel about 700 flights that day, carrying about 130,000 people.
Less than 12 hours later, the Canadian government ordered them back to work and imposed binding arbitration.
It’s not clear yet that the government’s order will work: this kind of move is not normal in Canada, and its legality is unsure. More importantly, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the flight attendants will go along with it. Hundreds of strikers could be heard chanting “we won’t stop” outside the Toronto airport after the order was issued.
Whenever the flight attendants finally go back to work, the airline admitted it will take a week or more to get back to normal. So, these few thousand workers, mostly women, have shown their power!
It’s been more than 10 years since their last contract. During that time, prices went way up, in Canada as well as the U.S. Flight attendant wages fell so far behind that their union reported many struggles to pay rent and buy basic groceries.
On top of that, flight attendants are only paid when the planes are moving. But flight attendants have to be on the plane well before it takes off, getting passengers on and off safely, restocking, setting up the cabin—during a delay, ground time can last hours. In addition to a long-overdue raise, the workers demand to be paid for all these hours of ground work. This is the kind of big change in a contract that an arbitrator is very unlikely to grant—one reason the attendants were so determined to strike.
Air Canada says that most airlines around the world only pay flight attendants when planes are in the air. But that just makes the Air Canada flight attendants’ fight all the more important!
Many workers do unpaid labor. Increasing numbers of bosses force people to work through their breaks. Others make workers stay and clean up after their shifts are over. Many require people to be at their work station ready to go when their shift starts—meaning the time to walk through the workplace and get set up is unpaid.
Many service workers rely on tips to survive, so that during slow periods, they earn next to nothing. Workers for delivery companies like Instacart are paid for the delivery—but not for the time to get back to the store they are delivering from.
All this unpaid work is one way the capitalist class has increased the exploitation of the working class.
Women workers are especially exploited. Seventy percent of the striking Air Canada flight attendants are female, and the company’s offer would leave the average flight attendant with a wage less than one third of that of the average pilot, most of whom are men. This kind of wage gap remains common: on average in the U.S., women earn about 83 cents on the dollar compared to male workers.
But even more importantly, the entire society relies on women’s unpaid labor done outside of their paid hours of work.
The capitalist class needs children to be raised—those are the next generation of workers it will exploit! Some fathers help with raising kids, but the vast majority of that work falls on women—mothers, sisters, stepmothers, grandmothers, aunts. This has remained true, even as women have had to work more and more hours outside the home.
Women also do the lion’s share of work taking care of elders—whether their own spouses, or parents, or in-laws.
When public services for children and elders are cut, as they have been for decades, women are expected to pick up the slack—driving kids around and watching them after school, caring for elders. The money taken from these services has been handed to the wealthy class in the form of tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies—in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else. So, all the extra family labor falling on women is another result of the parasitic capitalist class sucking up society’s resources.
The Air Canada strikers did not accept this situation.
Flight attendants, if left to fight alone, might not have the power to throw back the Canadian government and the bosses. But each large strike like this has the potential to extend the struggle to other workers. The working class as a whole DOES have the power to throw back the capitalist class and all its governments, in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else.
However this strike ends, whatever these flight attendants win in the short term, their strike is an example and a message. Women workers don’t have to accept to be always tired, always ground down to the bone—all so that billionaires can race each other to become trillionaires.
Aug 18, 2025
Parents and grandparents are getting a rude awakening when shopping for back-to-school supplies and clothes. Even when items are supposedly on sale or on “special,” they are still high. What used to be $1 for a small notebook can now be $4.
Whether it’s pencils or gym shoes—when you get through the lists of what the kids need, it can be $100 or $200 more for each child than what we thought we would be spending.
Is it the tariffs? Is it the fact that big stores are passing the increases on to us, the consumers? Is it also that big business is trying to make even more in profits, even on crayons?
Aug 18, 2025
The recent stabbing incident in Traverse City at the Walmart, as well as other crimes, have shown that there is a lack of facilities for people with mental issues.
The State of Michigan closed most mental health hospitals over the years, going back to the early 1980s. With nowhere else to go, some mentally ill people are living on the streets, others are in prison.
Michigan is one of the worst states in regard to providing accessible mental health care for those in crisis. Imagine a world with abundant free mental health care—and just think how many tragedies could be avoided!
Aug 18, 2025
Many Chicago-area residents’ electric bills are going through the roof. ComEd imposed a rate hike on June 1, just in time for the summer heat. ComEd and the media play down the size of the rate spike, saying it will “only” be about $10.60 for the “average” customer, but many customers are seeing increases many times that number!
Local politicians act like they’re going to force ComEd to negotiate a new contract with the city that will provide some relief for residents having to choose between food and running their lights and refrigerators. In the meantime, many people are having difficulty paying their bills.
ComEd claims the rate hikes are connected with more electric power being drained to run AI and data centers. So, what does that have to do with workers and the poor? We need to pay sky-high electric bills so ComEd stockholders and billionaires who stand to profit from AI can get richer? And all so they can use AI to push us out of our jobs!
Aug 18, 2025
A new report from the University of California at Merced found that the big escalation of immigration raids in California by the Trump administration in early June caused a steep 3.1% loss of jobs. This catastrophic drop was greater than the immediate decline in jobs during the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, and second only to the unemployment surge during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
According to the Trump administration’s racist lie, the immigration raids were supposed to free up jobs for citizens. But the exact opposite happened. In California, more jobs were lost by workers who are citizens (271,541 jobs lost), compared to non-citizens (193,428 jobs lost)!
“What we know from previous research is that the work that undocumented immigrants or non-citizens do does not exist in a vacuum,” said Edward Flores, the lead author of the report. “If there’s disruptions to the work that undocumented immigrants do, it has ripple effects. A slowdown in one industry causes slowdowns in other industries.”
The immigration raids also sent shockwaves through many communities. Families were deprived of breadwinners, who were arrested by ICE and deported, or disappeared into the ICE detention system. No one had money, as entire families hunkered down, besieged, behind locked doors, causing many more businesses to shutter and streets to empty.
Almost three months later, in Los Angeles, the big immigration raids of early June have given way to a smaller number of street-level raids. So, many still remain in hiding. Businesses operate at depressed levels with many fewer employees. Hospitals and nursing homes are even more short-staffed than before. Restaurants are shuttered. Work at some construction sites has ground to a halt. And, as the school year begins, many students are still not going to school.
All this spells a depressed economy, more job cuts and spreading poverty and misery. The attacks against immigrant workers are an attack on all workers, immigrants and native born alike.
Aug 18, 2025
President Trump sent in 800 National Guard and many other officers from 12 federal agencies, supposedly to take over Washington, D.C. due to high crime.
Trump carefully chose his words to describe crime in D.C. to conjure up black people, homeless, and undocumented immigrants in people’s minds. While this racist garbage is all lies, Trump was right when he said Washington, D.C. has a lot of crime.
While violence, including murder, has declined, some young people are attacking residents, especially with car-jackings. Crime was even higher during the pandemic when schools were closed. The problems young people face today are the same ones they faced before and during the pandemic; poverty, first and foremost.
What future do people have in this society, especially the young? Poverty makes for unstable homes. Schools lack resources. Young people who are bored, angry, and frustrated act out in ways that hurt everyone around them. Older people feel unsafe if they see groups of young people on the Metro or on the street, fearing a robbery or a beating, which absolutely has happened.
We are living in a society which has a history of total disregard for human life. Young people absorb these messages. A teenage girl was asked why she beat a man. Her response was, “because I was bored,”—but that’s not the whole story.
We are all of us affected by a society constantly at war, with media and politicians that send the message that fighting or killing others makes a person a hero. We see political leaders who treat women as sexual play toys; these same men label all immigrants as criminals.
This society has no answers for the young, for the poor—just more violence directed against them.
Aug 18, 2025
Officials from the state of California and Southern California Edison now admit that the deadliest of January’s Los Angeles fires, the Eaton fire, was most likely started by an Edison power line which had not been used since 1971.
It has long been known that unused power lines can get activated and start wildfires—and Edison knew that 24 years ago, for sure, when one of its unused lines caused someone to be electrocuted.
So, the Eaton fire would not even have happened if Edison had removed the idle power line, as it should have.
It’s not just an oversight. When engineers working for the state proposed in 2001 that utilities be required to remove their unused power lines, Edison and the two other big for-profit utilities in California fought it tooth and nail. By the time the state’s regulating agency, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), finalized the rule in 2005, the requirement was gone out the window. The rule now said that it was up to the utility companies to decide when to remove lines that were no longer used—just like it was before, that is.
Not a surprise, considering that the chairman of the PUC was a former Edison president at that time. The utilities “pretty much wrote those rules,” said Raffy Stepanian, an engineer who was part of the PUC’s safety team that had proposed the removal of unused lines.
Abandoned power lines have continued to pose a threat, with hundreds of miles of the unused transmission lines running like spider webs through California. In 2019, investigators traced the Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which destroyed 374 homes and other structures, to an abandoned line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric.
But the utilities don’t want to remove idle lines for the same reason they ignore other basic safety measures, such as maintaining their aging power networks and clearing vegetation near their power lines. They don’t want to spend money on safety, so that they can channel more profit to their big shareholders’ bank accounts.
The Eaton fire has killed 19 people, and counting—the latest body was discovered just recently. All those deaths were avoidable, along with dozens of other deaths in previous fires caused by the utilities’ equipment. The three big California utilities have started more than 3,600 wildfires since 1992.
Causing death through willful negligence is supposed to be a crime in California. But if you are a big utility, you not only get away with the crime—you richly profit from it.
Aug 18, 2025
Elon Musk’s companies face hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills to their small business contractors, according to lawsuits reported on by CNN.
For example, Tesla hires such contractors to install plumbing, paint buildings, outfit facilities with robots and security systems, and similar projects. Many businesses hired to work on Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas say they were never paid or faced months-long delays that forced them into financial crisis and bankruptcy. As a consequence, these contractors were forced to lay off their workers.
SpaceX and X have also reportedly faced similar claims, including lawsuits related to fuel deliveries, jet travel, and construction services.
In court, one of Tesla’s attorneys admitted that Tesla is often slow to pay, saying: “I don’t disagree that it does take Tesla some time to pay, that goes for legal bills, too … I know it full well.”
There are so many such unpaid bills that make this strategy “a business practice of not paying people until they sue,” according to the owners of these contractors.
At the same time, Tesla is awarding Elon Musk around $29 billion in shares, a mind-boggling bonus, showing at least in part where money saved from unpaid bills goes.
Under capitalism, the only way one can get so filthy rich is by ripping off others, and above all, workers.
Aug 18, 2025
Trump and the Republicans look like they will have to fight to keep their majorities in Congress next election. In July, the president called on the Texas state legislature to redraw its congressional districts, to give Republicans five more seats in that state—with the hope that would let them hold onto their slim majority. Normally, congressional districts are drawn after the census.
To block this power grab, fifty or so Texas legislators fled the state. They went to Democratic-led states like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. By boycotting the legislature, these politicians are holding up the project—at least temporarily.
Democratic governors, like J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, have stepped forward, saying they will “protect” the legislators sheltering there. Pritzker and other governors are using the opportunity to grandstand, as they consider running for president in three years.
Against this anti-democratic redistricting, the Democrats offer … to do the same thing. Governor Gavin Newsom in California proposed to redistrict in his state—to give the Democrats five more seats there. Pritzker said doing the same in Illinois is “on the table”—though Illinois is so gerrymandered for the Democrats, it would be difficult to get even one additional seat for his party.
None of this has anything to do with holding down prices, creating jobs, providing education. And both parties are more than happy to take tax dollars out of public services to fund the war against Gaza and others.
In the last election, more people didn’t vote than voted for either Trump or Harris, the Democrat. That’s largely because neither party offers anything real to working people—only noisy circuses like this one.
Aug 18, 2025
The following are from speeches given at the 2025 SPARK Summer Festival on August 10, by Working Class Party 2024 candidates Andrea Kirby and Gary Walkowicz.
To say that the working class is under attack is somewhat of an understatement at this point. We are in crisis. Our health, our housing, our economy, our humanity, are all in crisis. Thousands of workers were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services. Recent legislation changed Medicaid rules, which will make it harder for people to qualify and keep the health care services they need. The same goes for the food stamp programs, making the requirements so difficult that millions of working-class people will suffer food insecurities. They have cut money to FEMA at a time when global warming is causing more natural disasters. Hospitals in rural areas are closing, leaving working-class people without any options. People are having to travel hours to get medical care. The Department of Education is a joke, cutting funding and programs for our youth. They are making it so expensive that only the rich will be able to afford to get an education.
The current attacks on immigrants are just another distraction to keep us from focusing on the high prices, low wages, and poor or unaffordable living conditions. These attacks are just another way to keep the working class divided, a way to blame immigrants for the conditions that those in Washington and the corporations are creating for us. We have heard the story repeatedly, “they are taking our jobs”, “they are the reason we can’t get a raise”. Let us cut that crap right now. We cannot continue to feed into this B.S. Blaming immigrants is used as a tool for capitalists to drive down wages of the entire working class. They will hire immigrants and pay them less, knowing that they are less likely to make a fuss. They threaten firing and deportation when immigrant workers are no longer needed, or they become unruly.
Then there are the tariffs. I bet some of you have probably never heard that word used so much before. What do tariffs mean? Simply put, higher costs for us. If the corporations must pay more to make or ship the product, do you think they are going to eat those costs? No, they are going to pass those costs on to us as the consumers. We see it already, and most of the tariffs are just going into effect. The costs of food, clothes, electronics, cars, and home improvements are going up. You know what is not going up? Our wages, our SSI payments, and our pensions—if you are fortunate to have one of those—are not going up.
Trump says there are going to be some growing pains with all these new tariffs and his plan to grow the U.S. economy, but there is scratch-your-knee pain and then there is shank-to-the-belly pain. The working class is going to feel the latter, shank-to-the-belly pain.
The actions taken under this current administration are not new. Biden and even Obama deported immigrants; they slashed funding from social programs. Every administration increased the military budget. Hospitals have been closing for decades now. Our education system has been racing downhill for years. Global warming has been on the radar for a long time now, and there have been no actions by Washington to slow it down. Why? Because it is not profitable.
Regardless, under Democrat or Republican, the conditions of the working class are getting worse. They used to do a lot of their dirt in secret, behind our backs. Not anymore. These attacks are happening right in front of our faces. We see it every day on the news and social media. It has gotten so bad that many of my co-workers and friends don’t watch the news anymore. Well, comrades, that is not the answer. We cannot bury our heads in the sand. Now is the time to organize ourselves. Now is the time to stand up for our class, the working class. We must organize our own party. We cannot sit back and just continue to complain about the cowards that are in office, because they are not representing our interests. We need people to represent us, the working class and only the working class.
But let’s be real, elections are not the answer either. The answer is in the power of the people. The power in us to come together and take over the wealth that we create, to be used for our needs and not just the 1%. For over 160 years, since the Civil War, we have been stuck between the two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, and neither has done anything for the working class. They both represent the capitalist class and not the workers. We keep putting our hopes in the same system and parties year after year, expecting a different result. The system is incapable of doing anything different except squeezing every penny and bit of sweat it can from the working class. Today is the day, now is the time. We need our own party, and it starts with each of you. We need a working-class party.
Today the world is headed to war. A global war, a world war. A war that will directly involve this country and the population here.
When Trump was running for president, he said he would end the war in Ukraine on Day One. But Trump has been in office for over 200 days, and for 200 days, he has kept the war going by sending more weapons to Ukraine. Just like Biden did.
Trump said he would immediately end the war in the Middle East. And then Trump gets in office, and he continues the same U.S. policy of arming Israel, doing the same thing that Biden did. When Israel bombed Iran, Trump backed up Israel. Just like Biden did.
Some people voted for Trump because he said he was going to end these wars. Yes, Trump WAS against war … UNTIL he got elected and became president. Now Trump is doing the same thing as Biden—supporting these wars. That’s because Trump and Biden are the same in this way: both are serving the interests of U.S. imperialism.
No matter who the president is, the U.S. government, under both parties, arms the Israeli regime because Israel serves the interests of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. The U.S. arms Ukraine to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism against Russia. The U.S. has kept these two wars going, and either of these wars could spread further and bring in more countries.
Maybe the U.S. government doesn’t intend for these wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to escalate any further. Maybe the U.S. leaders don’t plan to send in their own troops right now. But once wars are started, they have a logic of their own. One attack leads to retaliation, which leads to counter retaliation, and a war goes beyond what either side wanted.
But even if the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East don’t escalate any more than they already have, the fact is, the danger of a wider war is growing.
This is not just about what Trump is doing now. It’s not just about what Biden did. These two politicians work for the capitalist class, and it is their whole capitalist system that is moving toward war.
Why, in the richest country in the world, are they making such drastic cuts in social spending today? They are cutting social programs and lowering the standard of living of the working class in order to pay for war.
The money they are taking from Medicaid and food stamps today is being used to increase the military budget. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will increase the U.S. military budget to over one trillion dollars a year. This big bill is The Biggest Military Bill ever. And it’s “Beautiful” only for those who are planning to go to war. And Trump’s bill is just building on what the Democrats did under Biden—increasing military spending year after year after year.
Look around. The U.S. government already has military bases, army, navy, marines, and air force bases all over the world—they have bases in 170 different countries. The U.S. government already has ships and naval task forces stationed all over the world.
The U.S. government is now planning to put a lot of money into shipyards that build and repair naval warships. Why? Government leaders are openly saying that the U.S. does not have the naval capacity they need to go into a major war. Trump said it, and so did someone who wants to be the next president—Gretchen Whitmer.
Another sign of their plans: the U.S. government today has their military generals and admirals already game-planning for a war against China.
At the same time, the politicians of both parties, as well as the major media, are constantly demonizing China. If they go to war against China, they want us to support it.
Even the attacks on immigrants are part of the push toward wars. They are trying to convince us that people who live in another country, working people like ourselves, are our enemies. They need to convince us of that if they plan to send us to war against other peoples.
What does all this tell us? It tells us that the U.S. capitalist class and the political leaders who work for them are planning to go to war, sooner rather than later. We don’t know if that sooner is in the next 6 months, or the next 6 years. But war is coming.
War is part of the logic of the capitalist system. The whole world today is linked together economically. No country can produce everything it needs by itself. But the capitalists of every country compete against each other for profits. They use the state apparatus of their own country to back them up and to gain an advantage over the capitalists of another country. The richer countries drain wealth from the poorer countries. And when the capitalist economy is in a crisis, the only way for the capitalists to gain more markets or access to natural resources is taking from other capitalists—by force if necessary.
All of Trump’s tariffs might look like it’s just Trump being crazy. But tariffs are a sign that the capitalist economy is not working. When the economy is in a crisis, the capitalists of one country use tariffs to protect their own profits and aggressively take from the profits of another country. What do tariffs and trade wars lead to? A leading capitalist, Warren Buffett, said that tariffs and trade wars lead to shooting wars. History shows us that this is true. When that competition between capitalists gets extreme, it becomes a military confrontation. Regional wars, like we are seeing now, turn into a wider war, bringing in more countries. That’s how WWI and WWII happened.
We can’t stick our heads in the sand to what is coming. If the global war comes, our young generation will be sent to kill and die, fighting against young working-class people from another country. And no one should believe that those back home won’t feel the war. With all the advanced technology of today’s weapons, no one will be safe. And in a war, we will all pay the price when the economy crashes down on us, because there are so many goods we get from other countries that we won’t be able get in a war.
The capitalist class is leading us to war. The working class has no interest in war.
The working class may not be able to stop the war from breaking out. War is too deeply ingrained in the capitalist system to stop the war in its tracks. But the working class, even by fighting for its own immediate interests, could slow down the move toward war. And a fight by the working class can change the dynamics of the whole situation. In the course of a fight, the working class can discover how much power it has.
The working class has the power to get rid of the capitalist system that produces wars. The working class has the power to build a society that does not need wars. That’s what we have to fight for.
Aug 18, 2025
This article is translated and excerpted from the August 13, 2025, issue #2976 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On August 7, the head of the Israeli government announced, before a dumbfounded public, his plan for the military occupation of Gaza, or at least the small quarter of the territory that his army does not yet control. This would involve the forced displacement of the one million inhabitants surviving in the ruins to a hypothetical zone beyond the reach of bombing, drones and tank strafing.
The next day, the security cabinet approved the plan. This reportedly took several hours of discussion. Netanyahu’s entourage supports him in his enterprise of death, and far-right ministers demand he take it even further. But an increasingly large fraction of the population demands that he stop his war—a majority, according to the latest polls. Army chief Eyal Zamir even took an official position opposing Netanyahu’s plan. He did this in the name of the 49 hostages still held prisoner, the refusal of many soldiers and reservists to continue the war, and the futility, in his view, of such an intervention on the pretext of eradicating Hamas, which is already without forces. But, apart from a call to order from the Minister of Defense, Zamir’s warning had no effect on the governing band of criminals.
In Israel, demonstrations are multiplying. On August 9, the day after Netanyahu’s plan was approved, 60,000 people protested in Tel Aviv, according to the organizers. The families of hostages, both living and dead, denounced Netanyahu’s contempt for human life, not only of their loved ones, but also of the Palestinians in Gaza, condemned to death by starvation or machine-gun fire. According to the mother of one hostage, Einav Zangauker: “Most people want to end the war and repatriate everyone. The only thing Netanyahu has to do is propose a comprehensive agreement to end the war, one that is real and achievable. But Netanyahu has already decided to kill them and condemn us to eternal war."
Corrupted, pursued by the law, clinging to his post in a headlong rush to catastrophe, Prime Minister Netanyahu pretended to respond to the protests. Saying he had no "choice but to finish the job and definitively defeat Hamas," he denounced a “worldwide campaign of lies" which he had the cynicism to compare to those that preceded the massacre of the Jews in 1939–1945!
The government’s plan can only lead to a worsening of the disaster, for the Palestinians of Gaza, massacred or deported, and those of the West Bank, driven from their villages by ongoing colonization. Nor are the millions of Israelis immune, Jewish or not. They have been reduced to the status of jailers of a people that refuses to die.
Aug 18, 2025
On August 10, the Israeli military conducted a deliberate airstrike on a tent near a hospital in Gaza City, killing five Al Jazeera journalists and another freelance reporter. The Israeli military openly admitted it had targeted one of the journalists, Anas al-Sharif, claiming he was “the head of a terrorist cell.”
They had previously made the same claim as far back as July 24, when an Israeli army spokesperson accused al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’ military wing, according to the Associated Press. Al Jazeera had denied Israel’s claims and the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, had warned at that time that al-Sharif was “being targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign” and al-Sharif believed already at that time that he would be assassinated.
The Israeli military claims it took precautions to “mitigate civilian harm” but it made no claims that the other five journalists killed in the assassination of al-Sharif had any involvement with Hamas. So, the Israeli state not only believes it has the right to be judge, jury and executioner of one man, but to take five other people out with him!
Al Jazeera says 26 to 30 of its journalists have been killed in Israel’s attempt to silence them. The Israeli military has killed more than 200 journalists during the current war in Gaza, according to Democracy Now, more than all the journalists killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Afghanistan combined.
The Israeli military, and its imperialist sponsors in the U.S., apparently believe that if they kill enough journalists, they can prevent the truth about their campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza from getting out.
It won’t work!
Aug 18, 2025
Last Friday, Trump and Putin met in Alaska with pomp and extravagance: rolling red carpets, a gauntlet of warplanes, a military flyover, and a short ride in the heavily armored presidential limousine, called “The Beast,” complementing the pretentiousness of this meeting.
This fanfare did last no more than 2 or 3 hours, depending on who reports. Know-it-all media claim that this was a “short” meeting. Nobody knows what was discussed or achieved by this meeting, besides expressing usual pleasantries and banalities.
Was the war in Ukraine discussed beyond already known commonalities? Maybe or maybe not! According to the White House, the three-on-three meeting only included top foreign affairs officials/advisors in addition to Trump and Putin. Heads of armies or defense departments were not there. So, the talks may have gone beyond Ukraine, and included trade and business relations or world affairs, as some in the media speculated. Or maybe not!
But one thing is sure: the war in Ukraine goes on, recently killing or maiming more than 1,000 Ukrainians and Russians, soldiers and civilians, mostly working-class people.
It is also certain that billionaires and oligarchs, represented by these two, Trump and Putin, will get richer through deals negotiated behind closed doors.
As long as the rich are the ones doing the negotiating and the working class is doing the dying, such wars, in Ukraine or elsewhere, will go on with no end.
Aug 18, 2025
This article appeared in the monthly publication of the British Trotskyist group “Worker’s Fight”, No. 165, Jul–Aug 2025.
According to the Financial Times, Trump’s capitalist masters don’t agree with him that climate change is just a “hoax.” Banks and insurance companies have studied climate data for many years, as part of their assessments of future risk. In fact, the insurance sector—which is married to banking capital—is shrinking. As flooding, fires, and tornadoes occur more frequently, many properties in high climate-risk areas are no longer “insurable.” The U.S. Federal Reserve has warned of collapsing house prices and banks withdrawing from large disaster-prone areas.
The idea that the climate crisis alone could cause a financial crash is probably not so far-fetched. The interesting difference between a conventional cyclical economic crisis and a crisis brought on by climate change is, as the F.T. points out, that while a “normal” financial crash will be followed by a period of recovery—of course, at a cost—a climate crash is likely to be unidirectional.... There will be no recovery phase.
In the meantime, therefore, Trump or no Trump, the insurance industry is “adapting.” Insurance premiums in many thought-to-be-at-risk areas have been put up on average by 82%. And moreover, since most policies renew every year, it allows companies to pull out at short notice. No surprise—they are passing on the risk and the cost to the “public”!
Aug 18, 2025
Famine is spreading across Sudan. Much of the population had already been forced to survive on animal feed made of peanut shells. Now, even that has become too expensive for many people. The deputy director of Save the Children in Sudan reported that: “Millions of people are already weakened after a sustained run of rising hunger; many do not have the strength to miss even a single meal a day.”
Part of the problem is that, according to the U.N., more than two-thirds of the country’s people need humanitarian aid. The U.S, which used to be the largest single donor, has dramatically cut back the aid it provides, reducing what aid agencies can afford to provide.
Sudan is a large, agricultural country that used to export food. The famine is man-made: largely the result of a civil war that has torn the country apart for more than two years, killing more than 150,000 people. In 2019, two military branches cooperated in putting down a popular uprising. But in 2023, the leaders of these two armed forces began a war for state power, which is the main way to gain wealth in many underdeveloped countries like Sudan.
In June, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that ending the war in Sudan would be Washington’s next priority in Africa. But far from moving to protect the population, the U.S. has pursued its own interests.
The U.S., Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have all backed one or another rival army in this war, vying for influence. With no regard for the disastrous consequences the fighting has had for the Sudanese population, the great powers pursue war, even as the body counts mount from fighting and from famine.
The people of Sudan—like those in Gaza and Ukraine—are victims of the wars and famines that are the inevitable result of the domination of the world by the imperialist powers—the U.S. above all.
Aug 18, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 9, 2025.
The U.S. military budget is just over one trillion dollars for the current year. That trillion dollars is more than all the military spending of the next 12 countries put together. Who is the enemy? All 12 of those countries?
Of course, the class that controls this country and its politicians pretend that the money is being spent on “defense.”
"Defense"? Was this country invaded? No, but in every year since the end of World War II, U.S. troops have invaded other countries. Here are only some well-known wars: Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia. There are many more.
Why so many people killed all over the world? Why so many U.S. troops ground up on battlefields far from their home?
Those wars were carried out to impose a world order dominated by U.S. imperialism.
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. banking system has benefitted from a dollar imposed on the rest of the world. American corporations dominated the world’s economic networks. They invested in far-flung mines, plantations and factories. They sucked up material wealth from labor performed for low wages under deadly conditions around the world.
None of this happened just because some god ordained it. This world order was prepared for by World War II. It was kept in place ever since by never-ending U.S. military force.
The U.S. military has bases all over the world—army, navy and air force bases in 170 different countries. No other country has even a dozen bases in other countries. The U.S. has naval task forces, floating bases in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean, in the Indian Ocean, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, not to mention the Arctic Ocean.
All those U.S. bases are part of an interlocking system that imposes control over most of the world for the benefit of greater profit to U.S. corporations.
None of that is new.
But today, something is different. Today, the world is sitting on the brink of a global war, that is, a war that will envelop the whole world in the fighting before it’s over.
We can already see the outlines of that war in the tariffs and trade wars the U.S. has been trying to impose on the rest of the world.
Tariffs and trade wars—these are capitalism’s answer to crisis. Ever since the collapse of the world’s monetary system in 1971, the capitalist world has been living through one financial crisis after another, even in the U.S. The result is a vicious competition between all the world’s corporations, backed up by governments of all the countries—a competition in which each of them tries to gobble up wealth someone else controls.
So today it is tariffs and trade wars, which will drive down the standard of living of workers everywhere. Tomorrow it will be a shooting war. It’s how earlier global wars started.
But no one should believe that the war being prepared for in front of our eyes will be just like previous ones. As horrifying as World War II was, the next one will be infinitely worse. The technology of war has become more deadly. And it has shrunk the world. No longer are there spaces, surrounded by oceans, behind which civilians might escape the worst effects of war. Gaza is the picture of everyone’s future.
The answer to war—like the answer to all the other problems we face—rests on the capacity of the working class to use its position in the heart of the economy to upend the situation. The working class potentially has a power not only to defend its own standard of living. It could tear up the system that causes all the problems, war included. And workers, who produce everything, could go on to organize a collective, decent life for all people.
Aug 18, 2025
On August 27, it will be exactly 20 years since Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath descended on New Orleans in 2005. This new mini-series documentary by National Geographic acknowledges the strength of this huge hurricane. But it clearly shows the disaster was not the hurricane itself, but the manmade problems that made it a disaster.
To begin with, you see there was no plan for assistance for people to evacuate before the storm. Though most survived the passing of the hurricane, the film shows how insufficient levees could not hold, and how 16 feet of water flooded the city. The government had an incompetent response to the disaster. People were stranded on rooftops, water everywhere, no help coming. Or white neighborhoods were rescued while helicopters passed by black people needing rescue. Help was sporadic and unorganized. Tens of thousands of people at the Convention Center were left needing food and water, for days! Rumors and racist accusations ran rampant and spurred racist vigilantes to shoot and kill “looters.” The details of this horrendous event expose the bankrupt nature of our government that is failing, even until today, in every way, to prevent and address environmental disasters.
Aug 18, 2025
Several hundred Spark supporters gathered for a full day of fun at the SPARK Festival in Detroit. As usual, there was a great picnic meal, science discussion, political discussion, arts and crafts to do, jazz and blues to listen to, cards and board games, dancing, children’s activities, and SPARK Sunday Night Live Comedy.
The high point at the end of the Festival was the Spark speeches, dealing with problems that touch the working class. These speeches can be found on pages 6–7 of this issue.