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 15, 2025
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is being presented in the news media as a tragic event that marks a time of reckoning, a chance to bring the country together. As Utah Governor Spencer Cox said repeatedly in recent days, “This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” All this, in order supposedly to reduce the level of violence.
This is the usual message of unity that politicians push during a period of crisis—which the Democrats readily agreed to. But not Trump. He doubled down on blaming what he calls “the lunatic left,” as one more excuse to increase the repressive violence that he had pushed since Day One of his administration.
As if on cue, the news media, schools and other businesses responded to Trump’s rhetoric by firing a long list of people supposedly for what they said or wrote somewhere. These firings had one aim: to intimidate anyone who dares question how this society is being run.
So, behind all the rhetoric about “unity” and “bringing us together,” big employers and the heads of government agencies have continued to go on the attack, a violent attack. For what else can one call it when the boss takes away the livelihood of a person and their family, just in order to make an example of them?
Today, we are told that all the school shootings, mass murders, political assassinations mark a new period of violence. But horrible violence has always been an integral part of this society. As the revolutionary black militant, H. Rap Brown, said in 1967, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”
It was true in 1967—and it is even more true today. The entire economic system and society is controlled by a tiny minority, the capitalist class, the billionaires. Everything is run in order to increase their profits and wealth. They extort more work out of fewer workers. They cut jobs. They cut wages and benefits. They increase prices so that workers can’t afford to buy what they make, nor increasingly to put a roof over their heads. They move investment from one region to the other, leaving ruin and waste in their wake, while vast parts of the population have no jobs, and young people have no future.
It takes incredible amounts of violence to impose this on the population. Companies try to break strikes and unions. Cops regularly gun down poor people, poor black people, plenty of poor whites and immigrants, also.
Those who aren’t killed often wind up in prison. More than two million people are in prison in this country at any one time. That’s more than any other country on earth. Almost all are poor, from the working class. And this also means that a big percentage of the working class has some kind of record—which the boss often takes advantage of.
At the same time, this society fosters racism and prejudice of every kind in order to divert workers’ anger and get them to fight each other, feeding racist violence and violence against women.
That’s how violent this society is—in ordinary times. Today, the violence is getting worse. The capitalists grow richer by sucking the society dry, imposing an ever more violent and vile rule over the population.
A society run for the profit of a tiny minority can have no answer other than violence. The answer has to come from the working class. It’s the working class that is in the center of the economy and the entire society. That gives it the means to take the power away from the capitalist class and organize the society in a completely different way. Instead of it being run in the interests of a tiny minority, it will be run in the interests of all humanity.
Sep 15, 2025
Many workers are not familiar with the man who is being posthumously praised as a hero and martyr by the Trump administration and the right.
Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, was funded and endorsed by millionaires and billionaires, among them the DeVos family and the wealthy owners of private equity, healthcare giants, Home Depot, and others.
He was very much a proponent of capitalism and its predominant definitions of nation, race, and gender, and endorsed the principles of The Great Replacement Theory. These principles call for the removal of non-whites and Muslims from the U.S. They put forth the view that the U.S. as a country should be reserved for whites of European descent.
Also central to its program is the view that women must work under men’s instruction to fulfill the role of wife and mother and housekeeper central to the raising and nurturing of future generations who will accept their exploitation or become rulers.
Kirk spoke for the millionaire and billionaire class, to those predominantly situated to become bosses or to enforce society’s inequalities.
His ideology is one that locks society into the continuation of capitalism, a system that has long outgrown its usefulness for the world population and is in rapid decline toward barbarism.
But capitalism has raised the means of production to a level high enough to support the world’s population. What is needed is a revolutionary transformation to bring the working masses of the world up to their rightful place, creating and administering a new society. One where all are supported according to need while contributing according to ability. Finally, a classless society.
Sep 15, 2025
On September 12, ICE agents operating in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas Gonzalez.
According to a neighbor, agents dressed in military-style clothes, with their faces covered, had set up a traffic stop in this largely immigrant suburb. The agents claim that Villegas Gonzalez ran into one of them with his car, before they opened fire and killed him.
So far, ICE has released no video backing up their story. But even if it’s true, who can be surprised that someone might panic when confronted by military-looking men in masks, especially after all the stories of brutality trumpeted by the administration?
The administration has tried to justify their “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration raids in Chicago by claiming they’re going after the “worst of the worst.” But the only thing they could find on Villegas Gonzalez was that in the last fifteen years he had gotten a speeding ticket, a ticket for driving with an expired license, and another for driving an uninsured vehicle. He worked as a cook and had lived in the U.S. for at least 15 years. In other words—he was a normal worker.
That’s exactly who ICE is terrorizing. And that is a threat to all workers.
Sep 15, 2025
Although Trump has declared that Washington, D.C. is safe, it’s news to many residents of D.C. who don’t feel safe.
People living in poor neighborhoods who are still experiencing crime don’t feel safe. People are concerned about being stopped at a checkpoint or otherwise stopped; most black workers, who have historically had bad interactions with law enforcement, don’t feel safe.
Many immigrants have been harassed and sometimes arrested by masked, unidentified ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) thugs. They certainly don’t feel safe.
And restaurants in D.C. were seeing fewer customers, because some feel afraid to go out in what is now a militarized zone.
A few thousand armed troops temporarily in our cities will not eliminate crime. Crime is part of this capitalist society, which is filled with people experiencing poverty, desperation, and inequality. Most crime is against property, and violent crime is most often among people who know each other. We will have to change the society to solve crime.
Sep 15, 2025
First, the administration threatened to cut off billions of dollars to universities if they didn’t crack down harder on those who protested the massacre in Gaza. Harvard seemed to resist, but ultimately, almost all of these schools have cooperated.
Some educators are now under attack for what they say in class. A professor at Texas A&M was fired earlier this week for saying that there are more than two genders.
Others have been fired for what they’ve said outside of class. A Texas State University professor said in an online socialist meeting: “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world—that of the United States?” His words were recorded by a right-wing activist, who posted them on social media. The Texas State president called this “conduct that advocates for violence” and fired the professor on September 10.
Officials in at least eight states have now said they would investigate K-12 teachers for “inappropriate” comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk, especially on social media. Teachers have been fired or suspended in at least twelve states so far.
Right-wing activists have also set up websites to expose “radical activists calling for violence,” making lists of names. The leader of the right-wing Proud Boys posted, “Make Liberals Homeless Again! Take their jobs!” Trump ally Laura Loomer bragged about having outed “dozens” of people for their social media posts and said, “I hope all of them lose their jobs.”
This is not the first time educators have faced pressure to toe a political line, nor the first time an attack on educators has spread to other layers of the population. During the anti-communist campaign from the 1940s into the early 1960s, hundreds of teachers were fired—along with many other workers. This anti-communist “Red Scare” was part of the campaign to pull the U.S. population into war, first World War II, then war in Korea, then Vietnam, and more—wars fought to ensure U.S. corporations’ domination of the world.
The current attacks on teachers are also aimed at silencing dissent, and preparing the population for the new wars this capitalist system has in store for us.
Sep 15, 2025
On September 8, the U.S. Supreme Court supplied a great big green light for the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against immigrant communities. By a 6-3 margin, the Supreme Court justices ruled that it was perfectly okay for roving bands of masked federal agents to indiscriminately target anyone who they claimed looked “suspicious.”
The Supreme Court made clear that this includes anyone who they claim looks or sounds “foreign.” And so is “anyone who works or appears to work in construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.
In other words, anyone who happens to be a low-wage worker has a target on their backs.
Not surprisingly, several Democratic Party leaders expressed outrage at this latest Supreme Court decision. California Governor Gavin Newsom even promised that “we will continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.”
But working people should have no illusions that the Democrats are coming to anyone’s rescue. For the ICE deportation machine was not an invention of Donald Trump. Over the last decades, it was built, brick by brick, by both Democrats and Republicans alike. President Barack Obama became known as the “deporter in chief” for deporting three million people from the country. This was more than all the deportations carried out by all previous presidential administrations during the entire 20th century combined!
Neither is racial profiling against immigrants anything new. In 2014, the second Obama administration decided against removing exceptions for racial and ethnic profiling in immigration enforcement. The Biden administration continued this policy of racial and ethnic profiling.
All the Trump administration has done is carry out these attacks on a much bigger and more public scale. But both the Democrats and Republicans have made clear that immigrants, and those who merely look like immigrants, have few if any legal rights.
This should not be a surprise. Both parties represent the interests of the capitalist class, which increasingly depends on terrorizing the working class into accepting low wages and poor working conditions in order to increase corporate profits ever more.
Sep 15, 2025
On August 22, Decarlos Brown, a 34-year-old black, mentally ill, homeless man, stabbed Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old white Ukrainian immigrant, to death on a public train in Charlotte, North Carolina. After the transit system released surveillance video of the stabbing, Donald Trump seized on the opportunity to put out a video from the Oval Office expressing outrage over the killing.
In the video, Trump held up side-by-side pictures and describing the young white victim as “a beautiful young girl” and her attacker as a “deranged monster.” The next day Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling Brown an “ANIMAL” who should be given a “Quick Trial” and be given “THE DEATH PENALTY.”
In making these comments Trump was clearly using typical dog whistles in an attempt to whip up racist hysteria over the incident. It’s probably no accident, then, that the very next day there were threats made against six Historically Black Colleges and Universities that caused them to put their campuses on lockdowns and cancel classes.
Trump also seized on the fact that Decarlos Brown had a long criminal history. And what he omitted was Brown’s long history of mental illness, including being diagnosed as schizophrenic and suffering from hallucinations and paranoia.
Certainly, Trump and Duffy, his Transportation Secretary, are seizing on real concerns facing many workers who do have to use public transportation systems, and feel threatened and alienated, suggesting that the origin of the attack is racial.
Trump’s comments harken back to the time when Trump put out a full-page ad attacking the Central Park Five in New York and calling for the death penalty for them, though they were later exonerated of the charges which wrongly sent them to prison.
Yet neither right-wing demagogues like Trump nor mainstream Democrat and Republican politicians are going to fight for the mentally ill, not for health care, nor for housing and decent paying jobs to allow them to get off the streets. In fact, many of the homeless even have jobs, but don’t make enough money to pay rent on a place to live, and their homelessness often contributes to their mental illnesses.
The stabbing in Charlotte is certainly horrible. It took place in a society in which real concerns over rotten conditions in mental institutions led to movements for de-institutionalization, only to see care for the mentally ill practically disappear completely. This has led to the mentally ill being forced to live on the streets or wind up in this country’s massive prison complex.
Safety for passengers on public transit and care for the mentally ill are not counterposed. But the capitalist system is moving backward, devolving into chaos and dismantling any humane solutions for the population. As long as profit is the sole driver, society has no way to prevent such tragedies.
Sep 15, 2025
For the last 20 years, to get elected, politicians have advocated bringing manufacturing jobs to the U.S.
In 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each pledged to bring back manufacturing to win the presidency. In 2020, President Biden campaigned on adding five million manufacturing jobs. After he was elected, Biden supposedly allocated 2 trillion dollars to build a manufacturing base for such jobs. Now, Trump says he aims to achieve this goal by imposing higher tariffs on other countries. All this political chit-chat is hogwash, whether it ends up with real attempts or is just another lie.
In fact, the U.S. already ranks second, just behind China, in its share of overall global manufacturing output. That is, by most measures, America is already “a manufacturing superpower.” At the same time, this superpower needs more than 415,000 workers to fill its open manufacturing positions right now, according to the Federal Reserve. Bosses’ organizations, like the Manufacturing Institute, estimate that manufacturers will need 3.8 million additional workers by 2033. According to the manufacturers, recruiting and retaining workers is their number one business challenge.
Yet, the bosses are cheap when it comes to wages. Currently, the average hourly pay of a manufacturing worker is around 8% lower than that of a non-manufacturing worker, such as a service sector worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For example, the 2024 median hourly wages in apparel manufacturing and textile manufacturing were $15.49 and $17.56, respectively, as reported by the Cato Institute. In South Carolina, a garment worker will start at just $11 an hour. Production line jobs at Samsung’s U.S. washing machine production plant in South Carolina start at just $16-$17 an hour.
Some of these jobs are demanding and hazardous. For example, as the Wall Street Journal notes, at 6 a.m. every weekday in Salem, Ohio, workers in steel-toed boots clock in to the small factory at Quaker City Castings to build sand molds, pour molten metal at 3,000 degrees, and grind iron and steel castings. To protect themselves from flames and dust, workers wear hard hats, face shields, and respirators. Yet, the company pays an average hourly wage ranging from $12.49 per hour for a Grinder up to about $23.45 per hour for a Certified Welder.
So, no wonder that manufacturing bosses find out that new hires frequently quit for less taxing, much less dangerous, or better-paid employment in other industries, where they can work as drivers, in warehouses, or in fast food chains. And they can earn similar, albeit low, wages.
Plus, it often takes one to two years to learn the skills necessary to perform such dangerous and demanding work, and more years to learn how to apply those skills in the specific workplace. For example, tasks at Quaker City Castings, such as preparing a wood pattern for a mold that meets precise blueprint dimensions, require engineering skills.
Although acquiring such manufacturing skills requires time and money, the bosses don’t want to pay for learning. For low-wage manufacturing workers, learning these skills at school is costly. And it can be risky, since manufacturing jobs can change or disappear at a moment’s notice when it suits a company’s interest to close or move a plant, or put in new technology.
So, no wonder that, as a consequence of the dire economic and social conditions they have created, the manufacturing bosses cannot recruit enough workers.
The bosses may import skilled workers from other countries to address this labor shortage. But currently, the Trump administration is extremely hostile to immigrant workers, with or without legal papers.
The Trump administration has cut the budget for Medicare and Medicaid and is planning to cut Social Security and other social programs. Due to such cuts, workers, regardless of age, health, retirement status, or other factors, could be compelled to accept manufacturing jobs to make a living.
But whatever happens, companies won’t provide U.S. workers well-paying, stable, and safe manufacturing jobs.
Sep 15, 2025
As we shop for fruits and vegetables in air-conditioned stores, we might consider who is picking the strawberries or almonds.
The highest value of farm products is from California, which has at least half a million farm laborers, mostly from Mexico and not all here with the “right” papers. Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida also sell huge amounts of food products, again with most laborers coming from Spanish-speaking countries.
So, it is not a surprise that Arizona, Texas and Nevada have the highest number of heat-related deaths; the workers who are outdoors in high heat are most at risk, that is, agricultural workers, construction workers, and the workers who pick up trash and repair the road and sewer mains. And whether politicians agree with reality or not, the entire world is experiencing higher temperatures than seen in the past, thanks mostly to the burning of fossil fuels.
For those who must work outside — often workers! — their health is determined by what the politicians in their states agree to. As of August 2025, Texas employers are not allowed to offer water breaks for those working outside, although the ruling is before the courts. In California, thanks to hard-won organizing of unions among agricultural workers, some of them get breaks with water and shade. In blue state Maryland, considered a rich and liberal state, a trash worker died of heat last summer in Baltimore.
Heat exposure has also been linked in scientific studies to a lower life expectancy; in other words, workers will die at a younger age due to heat exposure in their work.
Just like a thousand other matters in everyday life, the results working people get are not the results richer people get, no matter how hard we work.
Sep 15, 2025
When the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its contractors were shut down earlier this year, some ten million dollars’ worth of contraceptives were left in a warehouse in Europe. These supplies could have helped prevent pregnancies in a number of poorer countries, but the Trump administration has now destroyed them.
An English non-profit for reproductive rights offered to repackage, relabel and distribute these 2,000,000 packs of contraceptive pills, 50,000 IUDs, and 900,000 implant devices, so they could go to help mostly African women avoid unwanted pregnancies. The administration refused.
This administration has also showed it wants to prevent women in the U.S. from controlling pregnancies, by ending programs that distributed contraception to low-income women. These women will have fewer choices in life, thanks to politicians’ decisions.
In 2024, the U.S. spent as much on the military as all the other wealthy countries in the world COMBINED. That says what really matters to U.S. politicians.
Sep 15, 2025
This book describes the lives of the working homeless. Their jobs are minimum wage or barely better. They are not counted as homeless as they are not living on the street or in a shelter. Instead, they more and more are unable to find affordable places to rent, so they are forced into living at squalid “Extended Stay” hotels or overcrowded rooming houses or sleeping on the floor of a relative. This means they have no tenant rights and at the same time do not qualify for the limited available aid for the homeless. The author has assembled a stunning array of facts and details of this steadily worsening disaster.
This crisis is especially bad in rapidly gentrifying cities. The author focuses on five families in such a situation in “booming” Atlanta, Georgia. Through an in-depth narrative of these families, he shows the effects of rising rents and frantic profit-driven development, which literally razes what affordable housing there is. You see people working as many hours as they can, sometimes two jobs, but still, pushed to move to less and less desirable (yet more and more expensive) housing. You see hopes dashed, families fractured, move after move destroying any stable life.
Sep 15, 2025
Starting December 31, Aspirus Ironwood Hospital, in the western end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, will eliminate its labor and delivery services.
Pregnant women will have to somehow make a 45-mile drive to Tamarack Health Ashland Medical Center, another Aspirus Health facility, in Ashland, Wisconsin—or give birth in Ironwood hospital’s emergency department—or what, fend for themselves?!
According to a spokesman for Aspirus, the current closure of this birthing center was due to its inability to draw adequate staffing to the region.
What a crock. It’s nothing but outrageous from a company/conglomerate that operates 18 hospitals in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, northeastern Minnesota, northern and central Wisconsin. It’s nothing but outrageous because Aspirus already had closed its Ontonagan hospital and its labor and delivery services and some nurse staffing at Keweenaw Hospital in 2024.
Recently, the state of Michigan had allocated 1.2 million dollars to Aspirus to help subsidize the costs of providing prenatal, birthing and postpartum services at its Ironwood hospital. But Aspirus said in an email to the Detroit Free Press that “accepting taxpayer dollars to temporarily prop up an inappropriate care model would not have been responsible.”
In other words, it’s an “inappropriate care model” because labor and delivery services are always the area of a hospital where they don’t make money, and even less so in rural areas with smaller populations. They are not profitable in areas, like the U.P., where Medicaid covers many of the childbirths.
This is a medical system where health care isn’t the priority, but profit is. And areas of the country, like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, have felt the brunt, with hospital closures and services eliminated.
And it’s women and babies who pay the highest price for these draconian cuts.
Sep 15, 2025
At an event at the “Museum of the Bible” on Monday, Trump decided he hadn’t been misogynist enough lately. Speaking on domestic abuse, the President stated: “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”
Domestic violence is a public health and safety crisis in this country and has been for decades. “A little fight with the wife” sometimes becomes a murder: on average, three women are killed every day by a husband or boyfriend.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump would make such frivolous comments about a serious issue. As disgusting as he is, this is an issue which has been a problem for longer than the Trump administration and has never been seriously addressed.
Sep 15, 2025
The Department of Defense has just been renamed the Department of War. And surely renaming a U.S. agency that drops bombs on a boat from Venezuela, on bunkers in Iran, on Houthis and Yemeni, is just telling the truth when it calls itself the War Department.
The U.S. continues to supply the weapons to exterminate tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. It spent 20 years in Afghanistan and nine years in Iraq dropping bombs and shooting people dead, without calling them wars.
The U.S. military has been the biggest spender in the world for more than 100 years, with a military-industrial complex that outspends the next twelve countries in armaments and support to other countries’ wars.
They want to give themselves a new name? OK. They are just “telling it like it is.”
Sep 15, 2025
This article is translated from the September 12 issue #2980 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Ukrainians rallied in several major cities starting September 5 against proposed legislation that brings back harsh sentences for soldiers accused of abandoning their posts or refusing to obey orders. Depending on their case, soldiers may face five or ten years in prison.
Protesters including veterans denounced the “corrupt people at large” who are protected by the government. Adult children of cabinet ministers, senior officials, and legislators who are supposed to enforce the law have gone into hiding abroad to avoid being mobilized, with its risk of being killed in action.
Ukrainians are far from the image of a people united in their will to fight that the regime’s propaganda disseminates. Many soldiers, including enlisted personnel, have left their units without authorization. There have been 202,997 recorded cases since 2022, including 50,058 confirmed desertions. As this phenomenon grew, the government decided last August to not punish soldiers for their first abandonment of their post or unit, for a period of one year. In the eyes of the General Staff, this was intended to prevent their “absence” from becoming a definitive desertion. But today, as the Ukrainian army struggles increasingly to make up for its losses, it’s time to strengthen discipline more than to “preserve human resources.” Generals and government officials need cannon fodder.
In Russia, the Ministry of Defense and the FSB domestic spy agency issued instructions in February 2023 to no longer make data on desertions public. However, cross-checks of military tribunal records show at least 18,341 convictions handed down for desertion or for abandoning a post. Russian media outlet in exile The Insider compiled a list of reports published by some 100 garrison courts which show that only one in three cases goes to trial. The total number of desertions over three and a half years might reach 60,000, or nearly 10% of the troops Russia has deployed in Ukraine.
More worrisome for the Russian authorities, this trend continues to grow. Between the start of the war and 2024, the number of convictions for desertion increased tenfold! This certainly doesn’t match the image of a “Russia forming a united and supportive popular front” in the face of war that President Vladimir Putin touted in July. But he’d probably like to believe it anyway....
Sep 15, 2025
This article is translated from the September 12 issue #2980 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Leaders of the so-called “coalition of the willing,” the countries that claim to support Ukraine, flocked around French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the élysée Palace in Paris on September 4. They declared that 26 of them are committed to providing military aid to the Kyiv regime “on land, at sea and in the air.”
It is unclear whether this will satisfy Zelensky, who hoped his supporters would commit to sending at least 20,000 to 30,000 troops as a “security guarantee” in the event of a ceasefire with Russia. Only France and Great Britain have promised to send troops, but not that many. Other “volunteers” refuse to commit their ground troops, even if they promise to collaborate in some way in Ukraine’s defense.
On the other hand, Trump has every reason to congratulate himself. He has said repeatedly that the U.S. intends to withdraw militarily from Europe in order to concentrate its forces against China. The U.S. did everything it could to provoke this war between Russia and Ukraine. Now American imperialism has reaped substantial profits for its arms industries, oil and mineral corporations, banks, and so on. So, Trump thinks the war can end—even if this means leaving his European allies to manage as they can by continuing to aid Ukraine in its war. And Trump extends his magnanimous generosity to the point of offering to sell them 100 billion dollars worth of U.S. weapons to supply to Kyiv.
In other words, Washington wants to untangle itself from the conflict, while leaving second-rate imperialist powers like France, Great Britain and Germany to provide Ukraine with those famous military guarantees that were so much discussed in mid-August in Washington. But Washington wants to let U.S. capitalists keep profiting from the war.
In practice, this amounts to engaging Europe in what could be a continent-wide military conflict. Because—in actual fact instead of the hypocritical diplomatic language repeated this summer in the summit in Anchorage and the meeting at the White House—we are witnessing the continuation and acceleration of the escalation of war. Never before have so many Russian drones and missiles struck Ukrainian cities almost every night, including Kyiv and even, for the first time, government buildings there. As for Western arms deliveries to Ukraine — which are what increased military budgets in France and elsewhere are for — they continue to grow, as do the losses they cause. The Russian army loses 1,000 men each day to death or injury for the goal of advancing a mile in anticipation of post-war negotiations.
But it’s not all bad news! The chairman of American oil giant Exxon took advantage of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska to meet with the chairman of Russian giant Rosneft to discuss business. The aim was to start collaborating again to explore and exploit vast gas fields on the Russian island of Sakhalin. The war had put this project on hold. According to the Wall Street Journal, Exxon asked the White House for a green light and then got the Kremlin’s approval.
The fact that Exxon is preparing to refine Russian gas into billions of dollars hasn’t stopped Trump from ranting against European countries that continue to buy Russian oil. The fact is, in peace as in war, business is business in the capitalist world. And business needs its share of victims: Ukrainians, Russians, and others.
Sep 15, 2025
This article is translated from the September 12 issue #2980 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Israeli army has stepped up its operations against Gaza City in an effort to take full control of it. On September 8, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened its residents and told them: “Leave now.”
More than one million Palestinians live in Gaza City. To force them to flee, the Israeli army systematically targets all homes previously spared from bombardment, particularly buildings higher than 20 stories. In three days after September 5, three high-rises were completely destroyed. Their residents were warned only shortly before and had to urgently evacuate.
According to a Palestinian rescue organization, five buildings of more than seven floors and more than 350 tents were bombed in just three days, leaving nearly 8,000 people homeless. “Every day, we receive dozens of injured people from these bombings, which occur almost every hour and every minute,” said the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
According to the Israeli military administration, some 70,000 Palestinians have already fled the city. But the vast majority of residents find themselves trapped in the ruins without any way to carry their belongings, despite the bombings. Many do not have vehicles. Truckers demand as much as $2,300 or more to drive to the so-called Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone set up by the Israeli army in the south. But there is no space for more tents there, no water, no sanitation, and no food aid in the “humanitarian zone”—and no more security than in the rest of the Gaza Strip.
Officially, the Israeli offensive was not launched by September 10, but the number of Palestinian victims rose nonetheless, victims of bombs, bullets and famine. According to the U.N., famine affects one fifth of Gaza because of the continued blockade.
The death toll is rising on the Israeli side, too. Four soldiers were killed on September 8 by Hamas fighters on the outskirts of Gaza City. In East Jerusalem that same day, six Israelis were killed in a shooting attack at a bus station.
The fact that the two Palestinians behind the attack were from the West Bank is a reminder that another war has been raging for months in this territory occupied by Israel. Since January, the Israeli army has stormed refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, displacing their residents. Also on September 8, Israeli soldiers killed two 14-year-old boys trying to return to Jenin. According to a U.N. agency, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have died in the West Bank since October 2023, victims of the army and settlers.
Following the Jerusalem attack, far-right Israeli Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, “The Palestinian Authority [the Palestinian government in the West Bank] should disappear from the map.” To hold the support of ultranationalist factions, Netanyahu is adopting their policy of annexation and total war. The Israeli army bombed Doha, Qatar, targeting Hamas leaders who participated in recent negotiations.
This policy of constant escalation would not be possible without the unwavering support of American leaders. Like Biden before him, Trump has in the Israeli state a defender of the imperialist order in the region, with total impunity.
Sep 15, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of September 7, 2025.
A 22-foot speedboat was blown out of the water near Venezuela’s coast by a U.S. warship.
Trump claims the 11 people on board were part of a Venezuelan gang smuggling drugs into the United States—a gang supposedly led by the president of Venezuela.
There are lots of reasons to doubt Trump’s story. First of all, the boat was so loaded down with people, there was no room for drugs. Second, Tren de Aragua, the gang Trump blamed, isn’t known to smuggle drugs. But it does smuggle people. Most of the 11 could have been migrants, trying to escape from the poverty and violence imposed on the region. Third, no one other than Trump and his sycophants seems to believe that the president of Venezuela is running Tren de Aragua.
But even if Trump’s concocted story were true, so what? He can’t change this fact: the most advanced weapons of war were used to incinerate 11 people riding in an open boat. That is war.
Make no mistake. There is a war going on around Venezuela today. Not a war against drugs, but a war to reinforce U.S. corporate domination over the Caribbean. It is an imperialist war.
The U.S. today has an armada in the Caribbean—eight warships, as well as a nuclear powered fast-attack submarine, a mobile lander for taking troops on shore, and a combat unit of 2200 marines, on standby to go ashore. Some of the ships carry helicopters; some, cruise missiles. All carry a full complement of sailors, 4500 in all. The whole battle group is reinforced by ten F-35 Stealth fighters based on Puerto Rico.
Maybe this is only a bluff, the kind of threat in which Trump delights, a warning the U.S. could blow up Venezuela’s oil platforms if it wanted.
Maybe it’s only Trump trying to puff up his tattered reputation, now that his tariff show has bombed and the U.S. economy is going to pieces.
But maybe it’s a way to provoke a coup in Venezuela, a country already on the verge of economic collapse, creating a pretext to justify a real U.S. invasion.
It would not be the first U.S. invasion of countries in the Caribbean. Ever since U.S. marines turned the countries of the Caribbean into “banana republics” in the early years of the 20th century, the region’s plantations have been owned by American companies like United Fruit.
U.S. troops kept profits flowing. Haiti was occupied from 1915 to 1934; the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. Over the years, country after country felt the thunder of U.S. weapons: Haiti again in 1946 and 1959. Cuba in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Guatemala in 1966, El Salvador in 1966, Nicaragua in 1981, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and, once again, Haiti in 1993 and 2004.
If today’s naval armada is not just a threat, but a serious act of war, it will be over oil. Oil has made Venezuela a target ever since 1910, when the Rockefeller family grabbed the right to exploit the country’s natural wealth. And new reserves have been discovered in Venezuela’s neighbor, Guyana.
But there’s a strange, more modern twist to this story. The foreign minister of Venezuela says there was no explosion—that it was only a fake video created by a U.S. spy agency, using Artificial Intelligence.
Well, maybe. We live in a world where politicians specialize in “made-up truths.”
But even if the explosion were only a clever algorithm, there still is a very real naval armada parked in the Caribbean.
Military force has always been used to keep the Caribbean as U.S. imperialism’s “backyard.” Military force imposes low wages and steals the region’s natural wealth. The disasters it creates, harm not only working people of the Caribbean, but also working people here.
Sep 15, 2025
On September 10, another school shooting occurred in Evergreen, Colorado, wounding two students, as an armed 16-year-old pumped round after round toward other students.
In the past 10 years, there were 390 shootings at schools and colleges throughout the U.S. and 259 people, children, young people, teachers and staff died in these events. In the past eight months, there were 47 school shootings with 19 dead and at least 77 injured—before Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University on September 11. And the numbers of school shootings and deaths are going up, not down.
And these school shooting numbers don’t include the numbers of “ordinary” killings or burglaries or carjackings or domestic violence against women and children. The United States has more violent activity involving guns than any other rich country in the world.
Sep 15, 2025
The U.S. Forest Service bans the use of masks during arduous work, such as digging trenches to contain wildfires, although it is well known that these masks reduce the hazardous effects of toxic fumes. A half-century ago, after the requirement for urban firefighters to wear masks went into effect, cancer rates among them drastically decreased.
Today, about 40,000 workers fight wildfires. About two-thirds of these firefighters work for state and federal agencies. Inmates and other workers fight wildfires under private contractors. The new recruits, who sometimes join right out of high school, are paid a pittance. Many start with just five days of training.
Getting exposed to toxic fumes from wildfires is extremely hazardous. Many firefighters who responded to wildfires in the Los Angeles area last January developed instant migraines, coughed up black goo, dropped to their knees, vomited, and got dizzy.
Repeated and/or prolonged exposure to wildfires causes chronic health consequences at a young age. Some firefighters struggle to walk up a flight of stairs after seasons spent in smoke, as the New York Times reported. One firefighter, Brian Wangerin, said, “I’ve been on eight of the 10 biggest fires in California history. Now I can’t even push a shopping cart without having chest pain. I can’t hold my kids.”
Others have become permanently disabled after breathing in concentrated plumes of ash, fungus, or poison oak. These young firefighters are getting cancer in their 20s, developing heart disease in their 30s, and waiting for lung transplants in their 40s.
A week ago, after the New York Times recently exposed the Forest Service’s ban on using masks, the agency posted a new guidance admitting for the first time that masks can protect firefighters against harmful particles in wildfire smoke. But they recommend masks only for light duty, not during direct wildfire fighting.
One retired Forest Service manager said, “We need to be honest about what people are signing up for. We’re lying to our people, and we’re lying to the public.”
The Forest Service lies and operates like any capitalist business: treating its firefighters like a disposable workforce.
Sep 15, 2025
Border Patrol agents detained two members of a wildfire-fighting team in western Washington state. The two men were battling the state’s largest wildfire. The Bear Gulch fire there has burned over 9000 acres of the Olympic National Forest.
That says it all—this government lets the woods burn down around us in their drive to juice their deportation numbers!
Sep 15, 2025
California has shut the doors of Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for low-income residents, to undocumented immigrants. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom demanded this cut in his budget proposal last May, and the Democratic majority in the state legislature passed it in late June.
Starting in 2026, undocumented immigrants will not be allowed to enroll in Medi-Cal; and as of 2027, those who are already enrolled will have to pay 30 dollars a month. But it’s not only undocumented immigrants. The state is eliminating dental coverage for ALL non-citizens as of July 2026.
This is a quick U-turn by California Democrats who, only last year, had opened Medi-Cal to all of the state’s low-income residents, regardless of immigration status. Newsom, who is likely to run for president, had used it to present himself as the answer to Trump and his cruel attack on immigrant workers.
Newsom and his fellow Democrats now say they have no choice because the state is running a big budget deficit. But in that same budget, the Democrats more than doubled the state’s tax credit to the film industry, to 750 million dollars a year. And Newsom says he wants to carry on with the California Delta tunnel project — the digging of a 45-mile underground river — which will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
Both are big gifts to big business — to big movie studios and big agricultural companies. And that’s where the Democrats’ fake compassion for immigrant workers stops — or any workers, for that matter.
It’s nothing new. When in office, Democrats, like Republicans, have always attacked immigrant workers. Barack Obama still holds the record for deporting most immigrants. Joe Biden shut the border to asylum seekers — desperate families escaping violence in their home countries, that is. And it was Bill Clinton who, in the 1990s, made deportations easier. Clinton also sealed off urban border crossings, forcing immigrants into the vast, deadly desert, where thousands of people have died trying to cross the border.
U.S. immigration policy has always been bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats have both criminalized and terrorized immigrant workers, so that businesses can more easily impose lower wages on immigrant workers — and eventually on all workers.