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
Sep 1, 2025
First it was Los Angeles. Then it was Washington, D.C. Now Trump seems to have his sights set on Chicago, and he is threatening to send National Guard troops there.
With Los Angeles and D.C., there were at least pretexts. They were false pretexts, but pretexts nonetheless. In Los Angeles, Trump responded to what he said were “violent riots” which were in fact protests against ICE raids within L.A. communities. He sent National Guard troops ostensibly to protect those ICE raiders, and to guard federal buildings within the city.
In Washington, D.C., it was more direct because the federal government has overall control over the city, even if it has an elected mayor and independent police force. The law giving D.C. ‘home rule’ still allows the president to take control in the event of an emergency. Well, Trump declared an emergency, took control of the police force and sent in National Guard troops, all supposedly to take control of crime—even though crime in D.C. was already at a 30-year low.
Chicago? Not so much.
Trump seem to be throwing out every reason he can think of, from crime (also down significantly in Chicago) to immigration crackdowns. He’s threatening to send National Guard troops even though there is no threat to federal property, just on the pretense that they are needed to control crime—which should be a blatantly illegal move, since the governor and the mayor have flat out said they don’t want troops there.
But maybe Trump is planning on creating that pretext with ICE. The White House has requested that the Naval Station Great Lakes, just 30 miles north of Chicago, open space for ICE operatives and give “limited support in the form a facilities, infrastructure, and other logistical needs to support DHS operations.” It has been reported that up to 200 Homeland Security officers may be headed there.
So clearly, the plan is to move ICE into Chicago, as they moved into Los Angeles. If they encounter resistance, as in L.A., Trump will grab that as the pretext to send in National Guard troops.
Trump’s administration has made no bones about who their real target is, in all of these deployments and threats. They say they are targeting “Sanctuary Cities,” run by Democrats, and providing some protections for immigrant residents.
Ultimately, and above all, they are targeting those immigrant workers.
It was the main purpose for the ICE raids and National Guard deployments in Los Angeles. It has turned out to be the main result of all those National Guard deployments in Washington, D.C.: not lowering crime, but detaining and deporting immigrants in the city. In Chicago, it will be the same.
Trump—and the ruling class behind him—are targeting immigrant workers, as a way to divide and defeat the working class.
And who are the workers they are targeting? Trump’s cronies make lots of noise about going after the “worst of the worst,” murderers, rapists and child killers. But that’s not at all who they have picked up, in L.A., D.C, or anywhere else. They have been rounding up hard-working members of their communities. They have been implanted in their communities for years, even decades. They pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes that they may never even benefit from. They show up every day on the job and are relied upon to do their jobs. Just like any other member of the working class.
THAT is who Trump is going after, and that is who this administration wants to tell us is our enemy.
If any worker—in Chicago, or anywhere in the country—accepts that, if they allow themselves to be pulled against immigrant workers, another part of THEIR class, they will only hurt themselves.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Trump and the corporations behind him know full well the power that a unified working class can wield. They fear that power. And they are trying their damnedest to crumble that power even before it shows itself. That is exactly why they are working so hard to poison this well, to divide the working class.
But with a unified force, fighting for ALL parts of the working class, the working class can defend themselves against these attacks and even win a much brighter future for all.
Sep 1, 2025
A Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, went before an immigration judge in 2019, to argue he should have a protective order, since he came to the U.S. in 2011 to escape gangs harassing his family in El Salvador. At the time, he gained a status to prevent him from being sent back to El Salvador, since his life was in danger there. He has become an apprentice in a machinist program, and is married with children.
In March this year, Abrego Garcia and 200 other people were put on a plane and dropped off in El Salvador at a notorious prison, where beatings and torture were common and well-known. For two months, the Trump administration claimed they could do nothing for these prisoners. They admitted Abrego Garcia had been sent there as a criminal, but had never been convicted of a thing.
The head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, was particularly loud in calling these immigrants horrible gang members, about which there was not a single shred of proof. Then, when Abrego Garcia was brought home, he was re-arrested, and Noem said to the media he was a gang member, he was a trafficker of women, he brutalized his wife—again without any of these charges making their way through a court. Tom Homan, known as Trump’s border czar, called Abrego Garcia a child molester and terrorist, again without offering proof, as the man had not been convicted of anything.
Abrego Garcia is currently under arrest, threatened with deportation to Uganda. Unlike many other immigrants arrested, he has a lawyer and hundreds of supporters to attend rallies for him. The current administration is determined to keep him in prison and/or deport him as a warning. He has become a public figure; his story of injustice has become nationally known. Trump’s gang is determined he will not live free.
Perhaps he is proof that prosecution against immigrants can be resisted. Those who protest keep him alive and enable the fight to continue.
Sep 1, 2025
The Big Bill passed by the Republicans in Congress includes a huge expansion in funding for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Congress budgeted 75 billion dollars for ICE over four years, almost tripling funding for the agency. Forty-five billion of that is earmarked just for detention of immigrants. That budget is five times what it was last year. Billions are also being given to the Border Patrol. The amount given to immigration agencies is more than the amount budgeted for all the state and local police for the entire country.
Several big private companies that contract with ICE have already announced huge increases in revenue. Yes, budgeting to detain and imprison a much larger share of the working population is music to the ears of their shareholders.
Palantir, a tech company that analyzes data—including data on immigrants—saw its revenue go up by more than half. Palantir makes most of its money off of government contracts—those include contracts with ICE, as well as with Israel for its war in Gaza.
The companies that run private prisons for ICE say their facilities are fuller with detainees than they’ve ever been. One company, CoreCivic, is offering 30,000 beds to ICE—which currently has 57,000. One of CoreCivic’s private prisons in New Mexico has seen 18 inmates die of overdose in the last six years.
ICE is trying to recruit 10,000 new agents and staff. They are offering $50,000 bonuses over three years, in addition to paying off student loans. To support that massive hiring spree, a number of administrators have been shifted out of FEMA, the emergency management agency, for 90-day stints—in the middle of hurricane season!
What does all this mean? The bill pours billions of dollars into building a huge expansion of the U.S. government’s repressive apparatus. Trump and his government are doubling down on their attack on the entire immigrant population. This is a political attack meant to stigmatize and intimidate a large portion of the working class, and to sow a big division within that class.
It will be a big new repressive apparatus, with thousands more agents, and thousands more prison beds. Once that apparatus is built out and in place, you can guarantee that they won’t hesitate to turn it on any other part of the population that might put up any resistance. We, the working class, are the target.
Sep 1, 2025
On August 22nd, Latricia Green was shot to death by her ex-husband at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, where she had been employed for over 20 years.
Green had gone to court twice to get a personal protection order (PPO) against him because she AND even some of her co-workers had been confronted and harassed by him repeatedly at her workplace.
In June, she was denied a PPO because the judge had stated she hadn’t met the burden of proof—all the while the harassment continued.
In her July 20 petition she wrote: “I am asking for help before this goes too far, and things are too late.” On that same day she wrote: “I have tried being cordial because I feel that the system has now let me down each time that I have tried to make reports on this man….”
And while her petition was granted a day later by the same Wayne County Judge who had denied her June petition, the Sheriff’s office said it has no record of Green contacting its office to ask to serve the PPO—for it’s in Michigan that the burden lies on the victim to pay for the order to be served!
She was killed a month later.
According to the director of law and policy at the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence, “Ms. Green did everything we as a society ask of victims. She asked for help. She begged for help. She went to court, she said ‘please help me’…. She did everything right, and she still paid the ultimate price.”
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), an average of over 1,000 women are killed by an intimate partner—husband, or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex- boyfriend—in the U.S. each year.
But there are many more horrifying statistics: The National Domestic Violence Hotline indicates that over 1 in 3 women in the U.S. have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Worldwide, according to U.N. Women, 140 women and girls on average are killed each day by an intimate partner or family member.
In the case of Latricia Green, you can say that the system failed her.
But you can also say that it’s the system itself that puts women in dangerous situations—domestic violence against women is part and parcel of the social fabric of this society, where women are denigrated, where their labor is exploited, where they can be treated like the private property of men—at home, or at work.
And it’s a system where some men can act on this most violent attitude and practice toward women and resort to murder.
Sep 1, 2025
It has happened again—a school shooting, this time in Minneapolis, which left two young children dead and 18 other people wounded, 15 of them also children.
The shooter, 23-year-old Robin Westman, left behind hundreds of pages of writings that showed she had been fascinated with mass shootings from an early age. She had been planning a shooting for years and made a deliberate effort to hide her plans—as well as the weapons and ammunition she was amassing—from others, including people close to her. After some thought, she settled on a target she knew about well: a mass held at her old Catholic elementary school.
All of this fits into a pattern common to people who have committed mass shootings. She also expressed racism against Black, Mexican and Jewish people. The acting U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, Joe Thompson, said Westman’s writings showed her mental state. Others, including police officials and parents of shooting victims, pointed to the mental health crisis in this country.
But right-wing commentators claimed the reason for the shooting was that Robin Westman seems to identify as transgender.
Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster, calls the shooting an act of “trans terrorism.” He was only one of many. Alabama’s lieutenant governor, Will Ainsworth, wrote, “The sooner everyone accepts that God made men, and God made women, and one can never become the other, the quicker we can lessen these events from happening.” Never mind that, of the hundreds of mass shootings in the U.S. in recent times, very few were committed by trans people. The vast majority of mass shooters in the U.S. are white men.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, being transgender is not considered a mental illness. Nor are transgender people connected to higher rates of violence. To sum up, in the words of John Pachankis, Yale professor and expert on the matter, “A school shooter who happens to be transgender has more in common with other school shooters than with other transgender people.”
Capitalism and the society that suffers under it create the problems of violence we encounter. Those who speak for the system model and promote violence, and then pretend to be dismayed by it.
Sep 1, 2025
Hundreds of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta walked off their jobs recently for a rally to protest recent changes in the leadership of the agency. This comes after the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. pushed for the firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez by Donald Trump, which in turn led four top leaders of the agency to resign their positions out of disgust over her removal.
During his confirmation hearings before Congress in February, RFK, Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic, promised to “work within the current vaccine approval and safety systems” and to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) without changes. He later proceeded to fire all seventeen members of the committee in June.
Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine expert at the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vaccines, resigned over his concerns about Kennedy’s pushing of false information about vaccines.
Kennedy did little to endorse measles vaccination despite the measles outbreak in Texas. He also canceled studies at the National Institutes of Health on mRNA vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, closed a network of clinics working to prevent future pandemics, placed limits on public comment opportunities in the development of new regulations, and hired David Geier, who had once been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license, to reinvestigate a link between vaccines and autism, which had already been shown to be false.
Kennedy announced on May 27 that COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy pregnant women, despite research showing they are at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19. Some women have already reported having difficulty in getting vaccines. Now the FDA issued guidelines recommending Covid vaccines only be given to seniors over 65 and those adults and children who can prove they have one serious underlying health condition. This could make it more difficult to get insurers to pay for the vaccines.
A provision of the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover 100% of the cost of vaccines recommended by the CDC’s ACIP. Potentially, Kennedy’s replacements on the CDC’s advisory committee could cut back on its vaccine recommendations.
Vaccinations have been proven effective over decades. Routine vaccines have been shown to have prevented over 500 million cases of illness, over 32 million hospitalizations, and over a million deaths among U.S.-born children in the thirty years from 1994 to 2023.
Dr. Monarez, the fired CDC director, the four experienced officials who resigned in support of her, and the hundreds of CDC employees who walked out have taken a principled stance against the attacks on science by Trump and RFK, Jr. It will take a much bigger fight to push back their attempts to turn back the clock to a pre-vaccine era, one in which we will have outbreaks of diseases that could easily be prevented, all so that Trump and his cohorts can lay claim to the federal budget!
Attacks on science by the government leaders in the richest country on earth are a clear indication of a capitalist system in decay. It needs to go!
Sep 1, 2025
Thirty years ago, in July 1995, workers at The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press went on strike. It became an important strike because of the militancy of the newspaper workers and the activity of other workers who supported the strike.
Detroit newspaper workers had a history of going on strike. There were strikes in 1961, 1962, and 1963. The strike in 1967 lasted 9 months. But the 1995 strike was different because, while the newspaper workers were ready to strike, it was the newspaper’s corporate owners who provoked this strike.
In 1995, The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press were two of the biggest newspapers in the country. They said they were competitors, but they had merged their business and printing operations as the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA). The two papers were both part of large newspaper chains—the Detroit Free Press was owned by Knight-Ridder, while The Detroit News was owned by Gannett. Between them, they controlled over 120 newspapers across the country.
These two media corporations were planning to attack the jobs and wages of newspaper workers across the country and decided the best way to break workers’ resistance was to do it first in a union town like Detroit. Gannet and Knight-Ridder demanded that the Detroit newspaper workers accept drastic wage cuts, the elimination of many full-time jobs, turning other full-time jobs into part-time jobs and impose worse working conditions.
When the contract expired in April without an agreement, the DNA and newspaper workers unions agreed to extend the old contract, and the unions set a new deadline for July. But in July, the newspaper bosses refused to extend the contract any longer and unilaterally imposed new working conditions. On July 13, over 2,500 newspaper workers walked out on strike—pressmen, drivers, printers, mailers, carriers, reporters, and others.
The DNA had already been preparing for a strike and planned to use the strike to break the workers’ unions. Before the strike even began, the DNA had hired armed security and lined up replacement workers. On Day One, the two papers put out a single joint newspaper, using a few skilled workers who had settled their separate contract, a few writers who crossed the picket lines and hundreds of strikebreakers brought in from around the country.
From the beginning of the strike, the newspaper workers put up large, enthusiastic picket lines. But they soon realized this would be a bigger fight than they thought. The strikers began to send out roving squads, using guerrilla tactics to disrupt the sale and distribution of the newspapers. In 1995, many more newspapers were sold than today. Strikers made sure the boxes where people bought newspapers suddenly didn’t work anymore. Strikers went to shopping centers, plant gates, churches and union meetings to talk about their strike. Workers from other workplaces came to walk the picket lines. The strikers asked people to stop buying the newspaper, which many workers did. Newspapers sales dropped drastically, and some advertisers backed out.
The newspapers started losing a lot of money. But the corporate bosses were ready to accept short-term losses in Detroit in order bring down the wages, benefits and eliminate jobs for newspaper workers across the country. They upped their attacks on the newspaper strikers, threatening to permanently replace them if they did not surrender and immediately return to work. The publisher of The Detroit News said “We’re going to hire a whole new work force and go on without unions, or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can.”
Up to that point, the leaders of other unions in Detroit, like the UAW, had given verbal and some financial support to the newspaper strikers. But after the threats to break the newspaper unions, leaders of the UAW and other unions began to call on their members to actively support the strike.
On the Saturday before Labor Day, union leaders organized a march to the newspaper printing plant where the papers were printing their profitable Sunday paper. Thousands of workers, strikers and strike supporters marched to the plant and then surrounded it, blocking all the gates. Up until that point of the strike, the police had been able to push aside picketers and keep the plants gate open. But on that Saturday night, when the police and the private security goons tried to open the roads to the printing plant, workers pushed them back, forcing the police and thugs to retreat. Workers held the picket lines almost all night, stopping the newspapers from getting out their Sunday paper until it was too late to get the papers delivered and sold.
The following Saturday night, thousands of workers came out again. Again, the picket lines were so massive that the police and security could not clear the driveways to get out the delivery trucks filled with the Sunday papers. The newspaper bosses even hired a helicopter to fly over the picket line, pick up a few newspapers inside and fly them out. If that was meant to be a scare tactic, it failed. Workers on the picket lines laughed, knowing that the cost to rent the helicopter was far more than the newspapers would get for selling the handful of papers it was able to carry out.
On the following Saturday nights, strikers and other workers went to distribution centers, where the papers were sent before going out to stores and newspaper boxes. Workers blocked the driveways and roads, often fighting with the security thugs, sometimes clashing with the police. The vehicles of scab workers and hired goons ended up with a lot of broken windows.
The fight by the newspaper strikers and their supporters had grabbed the attention of the whole working class in the Detroit area. The annual Labor Day parade, led by the newspaper strikers, was the largest in many years, about 50,000 people marched in downtown Detroit and then surrounded newspaper headquarters. This militant strike, going beyond ordinary picketing, was becoming a problem for the newspaper bosses. But not only for them. It was also becoming a problem for the Detroit Three auto companies and the other companies in Detroit whose workers were out in the streets with the strikers. These companies feared workers might be getting ideas about making their own fight against what they were facing from their own bosses.
The corporate bosses, like they always do, used the state apparatus against the strike. Their police were not having much success breaking the picket lines, or at least there were big fights every time they tried. So, the corporate bosses used the courts to attack the strikers. Judges granted injunctions to limit the number of picketers at the printing plant and distribution centers.
Some of the most active and militant striking newspaper workers wanted to challenge and even defy the injunctions. But the newspaper workers had not found the way to have any real control over the strike and to make their own decisions. The real decision-making and control of the strike was in the hands of the union leaders, both in the newspaper unions and other unions in Detroit. These union leaders, fearing the high fines and possible arrests that judges could impose on the unions, told workers to obey the injunction and stop the mass picketing. They told the workers to put their faith on rulings by the court and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
This decision by the union leaders derailed the strike. When the mass picketing stopped, it changed the dynamic of the strike and limited its possibilities. It ended the activity of the many workers who had joined the newspaper strikers on the picket lines. The newspaper workers continued to strike, but the newspapers were able to put out the papers using replacement workers. After a year-and-half on strike, the union leaders told the workers to accept defeat and go back to work under the company’s conditions. Only a few strikers were even allowed to go back, the company had permanently replaced most strikers, the rest would have to wait for job openings. Even then, a few newspaper strikers continued their own guerrilla war against the papers. Most of the strikers never went back to work for the Free Press and News.
Many working people in the Detroit area continued to boycott the newspaper. In fact, the Free Press and Detroit News have never regained the sales they had before the strike.
The two newspapers took a great financial loss. It is estimated they lost as much as million dollars during the strike. Gannet and Knight-Ridder took a big hit in Detroit, but they used the length of the Detroit strike to try to scare other newspaper workers and pressure them to accept concessions, which many of them did.
The Detroit newspaper strike held the possibility of a much different outcome. But that would have taken a different policy than the one put forward by the union leaders who led this strike.
The UAW and the newspaper union leaders had called on workers to join the newspaper picket lines, and even go up against the police—up to a point. But when push came to shove, workers were told to back down and go along with the courts.
The reformist policy of the union during this strike was the norm, not the exception. U.S. unions operated on a reformist and corporate basis. Strikes were considered to be the property of a single union and company. This approach may have called for the active support of other workers from other companies and unions, but limited that activity to support.
When the bosses mobilize their courts and capital to break a strike, individual groups of workers rarely have the power to force them back. The union officialdom, which guards its relationship with the bosses and its treasury, moves to keep the fight confined when exactly the opposite is necessary.
All workers are facing corporate bosses who are part of one class—the capitalist class. To go up against that alignment, workers need the broadest base possible in their own class.
The militancy of the newspaper strikers and the other workers who joined the picket lines meant that the newspaper strike had the possibility of turning into a mass strike—the kind of fight that could have backed down, not just the police and courts, but Wall Street bosses and banks.
It is not a formula for winning, because Wall Street and the banks and the bosses are organized and the working class is not at that level. For as long as capitalism remains the dominant system, workers will be forced back.
But in wider fights and in mass strikes, workers can escape the narrow boundaries of reformism to develop a revolutionary perspective, to fight for their real class interests and to not hesitate to take their fight as far as it can go. Finally to tear the bosses system down and replace it with a new one.
Sep 1, 2025
This article is excerpted and translated from the July issue #329 of La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers Voice), the journal of the Organisation des Travailleurs Revolutionaires (Organization of Revolutionary Workers) active in Haiti.
Since Donald Trump authorized the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have been living in the United States for many years, the press has been reporting on the arrival of these Haitian migrants at the Cap Haitien airport.
Tired, ostracized, and criminalized by a racist and xenophobic administration, these Haitians say they did not want to wait for the ultimate humiliation of being arrested and imprisoned by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers before being deported.
Repression is intensifying throughout the United States: ICE raids, arbitrary arrests, raids in working-class neighborhoods, churches, schools, and workplaces. Even legal residents and U.S. citizens are caught in the nets of this repressive machine.
Many immigrants in the United States live in seclusion, terrified of leaving their homes. A real manhunt is underway. The consequences are immediate and dramatic. Deprived of work permits, these migrants have become illegal, without social security or income. They find themselves without jobs, without wages, without the possibility of helping their relatives back home. In Haiti, remittances from the diaspora—about four billion dollars a year—are a source of survival for millions of people. Taking away these resources condemns entire families to poverty, both here and there.
This attack is not only aimed at immigrants. It is directed against the entire working class. By pushing immigrants into the shadows and depriving them of their rights, Trump and his henchmen are seeking to sow division and break solidarity. In this way, they hope to weaken the resistance of all workers.
Only mobilization and active solidarity among all exploited people, regardless of their origin, can push back against Trump and his administration.
Sep 1, 2025
This article is translated from the August 29, issue #2978 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government implemented its “Chariots of Gideon II” plan on August 21, under pressure from ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This plan is a new step in Israel’s genocidal policy.
Five army divisions and 60,000 additional reservists are being mobilized to impose a total occupation of Gaza City. In the name of total security control, Israel is imposing a forced evacuation to what it cynically calls the “humanitarian zone” of Al-Mawasi, an overcrowded southern coastal ghetto transformed into a death trap.
This step comes on top of nearly two years of a war of extermination that has already killed at least 63,000 Palestinians, 83% of them civilians, and a famine that continues worsening. Nothing escapes the carnage caused by Israeli bombs. Schools, refugee camps, and hospitals have been targeted again and again. On August 25, two Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the main medical center in the south, killed at least 20 people, including emergency responders who came to evacuate the wounded and five journalists.
Netanyahu shows he has nothing to fear from any hypocritical pleas and feigned protests by Western leaders, such as the belated commitment by French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders to recognize a Palestinian state. Israel continues to receive the major imperialist powers’ de facto support.
But this headlong military rush may eventually encounter resistance from the Israeli population itself. After 22 months of fighting, a crisis shakes the army. According to estimates, between 50 and 60% of reservists refuse to report, or more than 100,000 people out of the approximately 295,000 mobilized since 2023. The prolonged periods of mobilization—300 days and sometimes even 420—destroy family lives. Three-quarters of reservists suffer from exhaustion, trauma, or psychological disorders. “Our lives are on hold for an impossible victory,” a young soldier from Rishon LeZion testified. Moral objections, denunciations of ethnic cleansing, and complete loss of confidence in Netanyahu: demoralization is massive and is being expressed. Even officers oppose operations deemed suicidal or likely to lead to the execution of hostages. Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned that the occupation would turn into a human and economic “black hole.”
The “Gideon Plan” embodies the deadly impasse of permanent war. For Palestinians, it exacerbates genocide and famine. For Israelis, it reveals the weariness and despair of a youth forced to drag out an endless war. Hope lies in the courage of the Palestinian people who refuse to give in, and in that minority within the Israeli population who refuse to be the instrument of a policy to which they too are subjected.
Sep 1, 2025
This article is translated from the August 29, issue #2978 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Israeli and American bombings in June killed hundreds of people in Iran and destroyed infrastructure. But protest movements which rocked Iran before those attacks are still happening.
The June war let the regime’s police intensify repression against opponents, activists like union members, and immigrants from Afghanistan resisting being expelled. The regime charged some with being paid by Israel, sentenced them to death, and hanged them. Iran has executed 166 people since the beginning of August. At the same time the government is still hated by big sections of society and failed to achieve national unity by citing the imperialist attack.
There are strikes, mainly about wages. For example, nurses at Konarak Hospital in Balochistan demand months of back pay. Oil and gas workers demand enforcement of laws raising their pay. Iranian society is marked by apartheid imposed on women, but female truck drivers mobilize like their male colleagues and are just as vocal expressing their anger at the regime which reduces them to poverty. Annual inflation has been above 30% for years and threatened to reach 40% this spring. Wages are barely enough to survive on bread and rice.
Iranians also hold rallies against blackouts. They denounce the lack of maintenance and the consequences of extreme heat, particularly when the temperature exceeds 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Iran is particularly hard hit by the effects of global warming, which causes heatwaves and water shortages every summer. Drought is worsened by water being diverted by industrialists and owners of large farms linked to the regime. People call them the “water mafia.” The drying up of dams leads to power outages for several hours a day, but also to water outages due to the lack of functioning pumps.
July 23, a record-breaking hot day, was declared a day off in several major cities in an attempt to cope with water shortages. Meanwhile, individuals using more than 34 gallons of water per day were threatened with penalties. Last winter, water plants were already shut down two days a week. This August, two-hour outages happen every day.
Protests against these restrictions are aimed directly against the regime. Anger is building. Many workers struggle to afford a little flour. Having their water and electricity cut off is the last straw!
Sep 1, 2025
This article is translated from the August 29, issue #2978 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Military fighting on the border between Thailand and Cambodia broke out in late July. Since then, Cambodian immigrants working in Thailand have faced a rise in nationalism and xenophobia.
Before the clashes they numbered officially 500,000. In reality around a million Cambodian workers try to earn a living in Thailand in textile factories, construction, and agriculture, mostly in the border regions. The minimum wage amounts to barely $4,200 a year. But wages are even lower and unemployment even higher inside Cambodia.
In less than two weeks, several hundred thousand workers returned to Cambodia, driven by rising racism and attacks by Thai extremist groups. A manhunt climate has taken hold. Groups organize patrols in markets and attack people speaking Khmer, the language most Cambodians speak. Workers who stayed to keep their jobs now hide. They go out as little as possible and avoid speaking Khmer in public.
These workers are essential in many sectors. So the Thai government is now trying to hold on to some of them and limit the impact on employers, mostly by relaxing the policy requiring residence permits. But in fact, rivalry between the leaders of the two countries opened the gate to this outpouring of xenophobia.
Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen and Prime Minister Hun Manet repeat many nationalist lines. They promise to welcome and support Cambodians who return from Thailand. But what do they have to offer them?
A ceasefire was signed August 7. It might have stopped the fighting between the two countries for the time being. But workers have not stopped having to pay the price for the rivalries and nationalism fueled by their leaders.
Sep 1, 2025
Fourteen members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint statement, accusing Israel of starving the population of the Gaza Strip. “The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law,” they said.
It’s not that these 14 governments will take any action against Israel. For almost two years, they have been watching the Israeli military kill more than 60,000 civilians in Gaza, destroy thousands of homes as well as schools and hospitals, and block food delivery to Gaza’s two million people.
But even empty words were too much for the Security Council’s 15th member: the U.S. did not sign the declaration. No surprise there—the U.S. has been providing the bombs for Israel to perpetrate these unspeakable crimes against a whole population.
Sep 1, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 24, 2025.
Look carefully! American capitalism is preparing to take this country to war.
There are three kinds of preparation for war. The first involves material preparation—production of armaments and weapons of destruction. In this regard, the U.S. has long been over-prepared, spending more money on its military than do the next 12 countries put together, having its own military forces based in 170 different countries, when no other country has even one base in this country.
But, there is also a moral preparation for war. Young working-class men and women must be convinced to kill and be killed by other working-class men and women just like themselves. They must be convinced to fight and die in wars from which the wealthy classes will derive even more wealth. Workers must be tricked into accepting this inhumane absurdity.
And, finally, capitalism wants a still more repressive regime. This is why Donald Trump is allowed to play at being an apprentice dictator.
Donald Trump’s regime sends the FBI to raid the homes and offices of former advisers who once worked for him, people like John Bolton, his one-time national security adviser, former FBI director James B. Comey, and former CIA director, John Brennan—not to mention Justice Department officials who once filed civil and criminal charges against him. They are people who know his secrets.
Donald Trump’s regime fires his own officials when their agencies don’t back up his exaggerated claims: for example, his claim that good jobs are plentiful, or his claim that the bombing of Iran was a total success.
Donald Trump’s regime took over functions of the Washington, D.C. elected city government. He said it was to deal with crime. Really? If so, he would have left the Florida and Mississippi National Guard in their home states, which have higher violent crime rates than does D.C. The takeover of Washington, D.C. by military bands from Mississippi and Florida, just like the takeover of Los Angeles, is a threat—a statement that his regime will use military force to impose its aims on a population that doesn’t agree.
Why did Trump push extra-legal moves to take over cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Museums? He claims these institutions give an ugly view of American history. Could it be they bring up some uncomfortable truths?
Why did Trump cut off or threaten to cut off funds for research projects carried out by major universities? Trump claims that universities sponsor anti-Semitism. If he is opposed to this vile ideology that justified the slaughter of six million Jewish people, why does he invite modern-day Nazis to Mar-a-Lago? These real anti-Semites celebrate the Holocaust. No, Trump’s threat to cut off government funds is aimed at getting the universities to reduce their curriculum, that is, to block access to knowledge.
Why did Trump cut off or threaten to cut off access for different news media? Maybe he’s doing someone a favor—his buddy at X, for example. But there’s a bigger issue when he attacks various news media. The attack aims to cut the population off from any views not those of a dictatorial regime.
Yes, most of the big media have supported capitalism’s wars. But the attacks on the media make sure all of them will march in lockstep.
Trump certainly acts like a dictator. And up until now, he has proven himself ready to defend the interests of the capitalist class, on whose class dictatorship he rests.
In that regard, his most important action was to decree that federal workers will be denied the right to choose a union to represent them. As weak as unions are today, as tied into the state apparatus as they have long been, their origins hint at the power the working class could have when it organizes itself.
There is power inherent in the working class when it mobilizes for a fight. Based on the workers’ position in the center of the economy, that power can wreck capitalism’s plans for war AND get rid of its dictatorship.
Sep 1, 2025
August 27 was the 20-year mark for Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath. What happened in New Orleans was so momentous, two entirely different documentaries premiered this month. This documentary on Netflix has three episodes, each with a different director. It explores Hurricane Katrina from the perspective of those who survived the storm, how their life changed as a result, and the impact of the storm 20 years later.
While all three episodes are very good, the third episode directed by Spike Lee is particularly telling. He shows what remains lost since the flood, particularly the forced exodus of New Orleans’s Black population and the decimation of the city’s education system.
Sep 1, 2025
The Trump administration has ordered 18 more government agencies to tear up their collective bargaining contracts with the unions that represent federal government employees.
This is Trump’s latest escalation in the war that he has declared on government workers. Immediately after taking office, Trump sent in Elon Musk and his DOGE hit squad to fire tens of thousands of federal government workers. Trump also issued an executive order eliminating union contracts for some government workers, like the TSA workers at the airports.
Why is Trump going after these government workers? Certainly, one reason is that some of them have protested against Trump’s plans to get rid of many public services. These workers also know the details and can expose the secrets that the government wants hidden from the public. Government workers have some job protections in their union contract, so Trump wants to tear up their contracts and fire anyone who would oppose his cuts or expose his dirty secrets.
Trump is using the power of the presidency to go after these government workers. But it is not by relying on the courts that workers can protect themselves. The courts are already showing that they are on the side of the government and corporate bosses.
Sep 1, 2025
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, leading to one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. An estimated 1,800 people lost their lives, and 200,000 people—more than 40% of the city’s population—were made homeless. Residents drowned in their homes or climbed onto rooftops awaiting help. Taking into account all the communities on and near the Gulf Coast hit by Katrina, nearly two million people were turned into refugees.
But as strong as the hurricane was, what really caused the majority of the loss and suffering was the way capitalist society ignores the threat of extreme weather and its consequences on populations.
Practically all the deaths happened during the flooding that followed the hurricane. Most of that flooding, and the deaths, could have been prevented.
For decades before Katrina, commercial and industrial development had eroded or removed natural storm dampers such as islands and marshes. On top of that, offshore oil drilling had caused New Orleans to sink. Scientists and engineers had warned that, in the absence of natural storm barriers, the levee system around the city would need to be reinforced to withstand strong hurricanes, as these storms periodically hit the Gulf Coast.
But the politicians who ran the city and state governments did not spend money for the protection of the population—especially poor, working-class people. Democrat and Republican alike, they were, as they are today, political representatives of the same big business interests that profited from the weakening of the city’s storm defense.
So, when Katrina hit as a Category 5 hurricane, the levees were not strong enough to hold against it—and the storm surge breached more than 50 levees and other floodwalls. Flood waters, as high as 20 feet in some areas, inundated 80% of the city.
It was known at least five days in advance that Katrina would make landfall near New Orleans. But the only evacuation “order” was the mayor’s informal call to residents just one day before Katrina hit: “Gas up your car and go.” More than 100,000 residents did not own cars. No mass transportation was available for an orderly evacuation.
Hundreds died in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, which lay below sea level. Money buys high ground in flood zones. So, it was largely poor, predominantly Black working-class neighborhoods that were badly flooded.
The authorities, concerned primarily with protecting the city’s wealthy neighborhoods, made no place for the thousands of flood survivors to go. The commanders of the armed forces sent their troops to barricade off the houses and businesses of the rich. Working-class people looking for food and shelter were called “looters.” They were shot at and forced into makeshift prisons. Thousands of National Guard troops herded, at gunpoint, 35,000 flood survivors into the Superdome and Convention Center.
Millions of people across the country saw, on their TV screens, the centuries-old racism of American society, still alive. Black Americans especially recognized in anger that almost all of the people stuck in the city’s two concentration camps were Black—abandoned to live and die in filth, without enough food and water, without sanitary facilities. There was no medical care for the injured and dying. For a whole week, no help arrived; dead bodies were scattered across the floors. When they did get out, most survivors were forced onto buses and planes and flown to other cities.
After the flood receded, many of the working-class residents were blocked from coming back. Their neighborhoods in ruins, disaster relief money was distributed to advantage more affluent areas. As areas were rebuilt, contractors built and sold more expensive homes. Many workers were forced to leave New Orleans.
And so today, the population of New Orleans is 100,000, or about 20% less than what it was before Katrina. The difference is even more blatant in Black, working-class neighborhoods: Lower Ninth Ward, for example, almost entirely Black, has only one third as many people today as it did before Katrina. In short, capitalists and their politicians used this enormous disaster to push working-class people out of New Orleans and remake the city for themselves.
All the death, destruction and misery that the functioning of capitalist society brought upon working people in New Orleans 20 years ago is in our future also. Weather-related disasters are clearly getting more frequent, and more severe, year after year because of the warming of the earth. That warming trend has been accelerated by the burning of more and more fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—for energy.
It will continue to get worse, as long as big capital has control over society’s wealth and resources and wants more of it for itself. Today, the Trump administration is even denying climate science altogether. Until control of society is wrested from the grip of the capitalist class, we will face a future of ever multiplying climate disasters: fire and flood.