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
Oct 13, 2025
On September 30 in Quantico, Virginia, Donald Trump told a meeting of hundreds of top military officials that U.S. cities should be used as “training grounds” for the military to crush “the enemy within.”
Back in 2020, during his first term, Trump said he wanted to do exactly that. He said he wanted to bring in the military to crush demonstrations protesting the police killings of George Floyd and others. But top Pentagon officials ignored him.
Now that Trump is back, playing commander in chief for a second time, he and his puppet Secretary of “War,” Pete Hegseth, are clearing the deck, purging the military of anyone who expresses any disagreements and replacing them with officers they consider to be MAGA loyalists.
No wonder the audience of several hundred top generals and admirals greeted the speeches of Trump and Hegseth with such stony silence. Trump commented on how silent his audience was and encouraged them to applaud and act livelier—which the generals and admirals also ignored.
Ever since June, the Trump administration has purposely provoked crises in several cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis—and especially Portland—with the list expanding all the time. It has unleashed masked ICE and other federal agents against immigrants, or people who happen to look like immigrants or who get in their way—and disappeared them into a system of prisons and internment camps, with the goal of deporting them.
This crisis, provoked by the Trump administration, then was used as the excuse to deploy the National Guard, supposedly in order to protect their heavily armed ICE thugs from the surrounding population.
In fact, much of this is for show. Despite the sheer brutality and thuggery of ICE, the Trump administration is not deporting more immigrants than previous administrations. The Trump administration even tries to hide this fact by not releasing statistics anymore. ICE is also very careful not to raid big workplaces. The U.S. bosses profit greatly off of low wage immigrant labor. So does the government, since undocumented immigrants pay taxes, but are denied almost all government benefits and services.
As for the heavily armed troops of the National Guard, most of what they do is stand around and guard federal buildings. In Washington, D.C. Trump ordered them to pick up trash.
One thing is sure: by sending in the National Guard to several cities, Trump has established a precedent for a much bigger military intervention in the future.
Today, when their cities are targeted, the Democratic Party governors and mayors might denounce the invasion by ICE and the National Guard, pretending to be champions of the poor and the oppressed.
What a laugh! All the Democratic officials are interested in is protecting their turf. They all say the same thing. They all say that Trump’s forces are not necessary. They say THEY have THEIR cities under control, that THEIR cops are sufficient to do the job, if any supposed problem arises.
In reality, the Democrats—just like the Republicans—preside over cities and states in which the rich are getting richer and workers are paying the price, with worsening poverty and homelessness, worsening schools, worsening healthcare. Under these politicians, state-sponsored violence imposes this on the population, with the police killing on average three people per day in this country, and with more than two million people in the jails and prisons. No, it is not just immigrant workers who are treated like criminals, but big parts of the whole working class.
In fact, this is part of the everyday class war that the capitalists, the billionaires, wage to increase their profits at the expense of the working class.
Trump is now talking about much wider repression against all kinds of opposition. But when and how that happens does not depend just on Trump, but on how quickly the capitalist crisis grows worse. Another financial crash and economic collapse can happen at any time. The tariff wars and increasing economic competition going on today can also lead to shooting wars, even a world war.
No matter what happens, the U.S. capitalist class and the U.S. government will demand that it’s the working class that will pay the price. It will crack down and take away the few rights that working people have. This is exactly what the government in this country did during World War I and II, as well as the Cold War and the McCarthy Period.
The U.S. government, no matter who is at its head, could very well call in the military to smash any opposition and bring the population to heal. As for the military officers, who were so silent when Trump and Hegseth spoke, they will enthusiastically carry out their orders when they see the order they impose is threatened.
No politician, despite all their promises, can make this better for black people, for immigrants, for the working class. These politicians are all just servants of the capitalist class.
But the working class can organize itself independently in the workplace, in the community, in the schools, on the streets, to fight against all these attacks. Those fights can grow into a more general fight against the cause of these attacks: a system which is run for the sole profit of a tiny class of exploiters and oppressors, who are aided and supported by the government and especially its military and police. It depends on whether there are enough militants in the working class advocating for this perspective. That is, it depends on whether a working-class party based on this perspective is built.
Oct 13, 2025
The dress code for a job interview is almost always “business casual,” especially if you are a woman. Even for a job where you’re going to wear a uniform.
Assembly line job in steel-toed boots? Interview requires business casual. Post Office? Aldi? Business casual!
But if you lost your job and need another one, you’re probably already behind on rent, light bills, clothing for your kids, not to mention food and transportation.
On top of that, the stress of being unemployed causes many people to gain or lose weight, so their old clothes don’t fit right.
So how are you supposed to afford new shoes, pants, blouses—that you’ll never wear at work?!
Oct 13, 2025
Every town needs a public library. But Baltimore County’s town of Middle River doesn’t have one.
Earlier this year, a developer offered to construct a building and lease it to the county to use as a library for one million dollars a year, plus 2.25% more rent each year for 35 years. County politicians are arguing over how best to turn down this boondoggle while still bowing and scraping. But they don’t propose to build a branch with public money!
More than a century ago, some capitalists would donate funds to build libraries. Those days are long gone. The company that became Martin Marietta built a huge aircraft factory in Middle River at the start of World War II. To house the thousands of workers moving there, private developers built neighborhoods with names like Aero Acres. A federal agency also built housing. The town has tripled in size since then. But nobody built a library!
In this capitalist society, the working class, which constitutes the foundations of the economy and society, isn’t entitled to books or librarians. But the education libraries provide is essential.
Oct 13, 2025
In the fight over the federal budget shutdown, the Democrats are banking on the issue of the cost of Obamacare health insurance to make Trump and the Republicans buckle. Biden and the Democrats included enhanced subsidies for Obamacare in the American Rescue Plan Act passed during the COVID-19 pandemic and extended them under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. They conveniently set the subsidies to expire at the end of 2025, setting it up perfectly to be an issue in the current budget fight.
The subsidies more than doubled enrollment in Obamacare plans from 11.4 million people to 24.3 million. That’s because they reduced monthly premiums for the poorest participants to $0. They also benefited people with incomes over four times the poverty level who don’t have health care through their employers, because they capped the cost of Obamacare plans at 8.5% of the buyer’s yearly income.
If the subsidies end, the cost could increase for the poorest purchasers from $0 to around $800 a year, but more middle income buyers could see their costs increase from less than $6,000 to nearly $30,000 a year.
Trump has a bit of an incentive to settle with the Democrats over this issue, since 88% of the growth in Obamacare marketplaces occurred in states Trump won in the 2024 election. While some Republicans are willing to hold out over the cost of the subsidies estimated at 350 billion dollars over 10 years, others including the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green have come to see they need to work with the Democrats on this one.
The Democrats are clearly using this issue to try to win back some working-class people who voted for Trump. Clearly there are some workers who benefit considerably from these subsidies.
A deeper look, though, shows the limited benefits Obamacare provides. The biggest beneficiaries from the program have been the corporations who profit off of the American healthcare system. Pharmaceutical companies are earning profit margins of 15 to 20%, pharmacy benefit managers earn 5 to 10%, for-profit hospitals and providers make 3 to 8%, and health insurers reap around 3 to 8%.
Extending Obamacare subsidies would do nothing to hold down costs for those who receive health insurance through their employers. Several surveys estimate employers expect to increase health insurance premiums about 9% for employees on average for 2026. They will also do nothing for the 24 million people still estimated to be without health insurance in this country.
The United States spends more on healthcare than any other developed country, about $13,400 per person, almost twice the average of about $7,400 per person for other high-income countries. Yet statistics show it doesn’t result in better health. Life expectancy for the U.S. remains well down the list of high-income countries around the world.
Everyone should have access to healthcare, but that will not happen under a system based on profit. Neither the Democrats, nor the Republicans, nor Trump are about to do anything about that.
Oct 13, 2025
ICE agents were chasing a man in Forest Park, a suburb west of Chicago. The man tried to escape on the Des Plaines River. ICE tried to cut through a cemetery to get to him—they demanded two workers there open the gates. When the workers refused, partly out of concern for the man in the river, they got maced, then tackled and arrested.
Oct 13, 2025
Greg Bovino, a California Border Patrol commander set up as the “face” of immigration raids in Chicago, tweeted about an immigrant who was charged with sexual assault. The tweet included a photograph of Columbino Ramos—a man detained by ICE who has no criminal record at all.
Columbino, who works by collecting scrap metal, was lured into arrest by ICE by a call stating, falsely, that there was metal to be had in an alley on the Northwest Side. A working person, nabbed by ICE, then slandered! Ramos’ daughter went to WGN news, to point out ICE and Border Patrols’ lies and disgusting tactics.
Oct 13, 2025
In the middle of the night on the last day of September, 300 federal agents swarmed a five-story apartment building in South Shore, a black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Some agents rappelled onto the top of the building from Blackhawk helicopters, while others cut through the fence of a school to access a parking lot next to the building. Agents proceeded to break down nearly every door of the building, arresting 37 people in total.
Those arrested included at least four children, who were handcuffed with zip-ties and thrown into the back of a U-Haul, without clothing.
The Border Patrol, which carried out the operation, claimed they were going after supposed members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang—their usual cover story of going after “the worst of the worst”—who, needless to say, do not include young children or babies. “They treated us like we were nothing,” Pertissue Fisher told ABC 7 Chicago. “It was scary because I’ve never had a gun put in my face.” Fisher said she came into the hallway of her building at 10 PM, was put in handcuffs by agents, and was not released until 3 AM Tuesday.
The city had placed a number of recent Venezuelan immigrants in the building. But so far, more than a week later, few facts about those still in custody have come out.
The Department of Homeland Security did make a slick, one-minute video that made the raid out to be something like a movie or a video game, with Greg Bovino, a right-wing Border Patrol leader, in a starring role.
A reporter came by the building the next day and found they could just walk around, because all the doors were still open. Residents found many of their belongings had been plundered.
This open assault on basic democratic rights has made it clear that the black population is targeted by Trump’s authoritarian goons, alongside the largely Latino immigrants who have suffered the brunt of ICE and Border Patrol activity so far. It shows that the whole working class is in this administration’s crosshairs.
Oct 13, 2025
Medals of Honor will be kept by 20 U.S. soldiers who slaughtered 250 or more Miniconjou Lakota people by Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on September 24. A review of the medals was ordered last year.
On the day of the murders, hundreds of U.S. troops surrounded starving women, children, and elders, and opened fire when they began to perform a Ghost Dance ceremony. Several of the soldiers later wrote or testified that they fired on women and children after the order to cease fire. One said he “expected a court-martial.” Army General Nelson Miles wrote in 1891, “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.”
These Medals of Honor were given to reward war crimes in the conquest of the West.
Oct 13, 2025
More than 100 inmates in a California immigrant prison have staged hunger strikes in September and early October, to protest the unlivable conditions they have been forced into.
The 500 or so immigrants imprisoned at the California City Detention Center, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, have reported severely unsanitary conditions, including filthy rooms, backed-up toilets, a lack of clothes, soap, toothpaste and other basic amenities. People with serious medical conditions such as diabetes have been denied their medications. Inmates have not been able to see doctors, not even in urgent cases. Protesting inmates have been put under 17-hour lockdowns and in solitary confinement.
CoreCivic, the company that owns this old private prison in the Mojave Desert, reopened it hastily in late August, without an operating license and despite failing a fire inspection. Rain in September caused severe flooding in much of the prison. Prison guards spoke of not having time to prepare for the inmates’ arrival, and of 16 or 18 hours shifts.
These conditions are in fact common in the federal government’s rapidly expanding immigrant prison system. Tens of thousands of workers, locked up for nothing but their immigration status, are grossly mistreated. Those who protest the abuse, or just try to fight imprisonment and deportation, are put in solitary confinement or transferred to prisons hundreds of miles away, cutting them off from their families, attorneys and community support.
None of this began with Trump. Inmates have been reporting inhumane conditions in immigrant prisons and organizing hunger strikes and other types of protests for many years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But the Trump administration has not only taken the brutality against immigrant workers to new heights; it also parades it in front of the population.
This extreme cruelty is not an accident—it’s part of the administration’s deliberate policy of forcing immigrants to leave the U.S. Administration officials say it openly to immigrant workers, in TV and radio ads and on posters in immigrant prisons: “If you don’t want to be arrested and thrown into the hellholes of prisons we have made for you, leave.” They are even offering money, 1,000 dollars, to those who leave. Some immigrants have given up and accepted the “offer,” but many can’t, because they have families in the U.S. that depend on them.
Immigrant workers are the direct target of this terror campaign. But the Trump administration has put this horror show in immigrant prisons in front of all of us, so that the message is clear to ALL workers: they say, “Toe the line and keep your mouth shut, or expect the worst, even torture.”
Oct 13, 2025
On Sunday, October 5, Working Class Party of Michigan held its 2025 Convention. These are excerpts from several speeches given by 2024 candidates as the Party looks ahead to planning for 2026:
The working class is under attack from every direction. The youth, the elderly, men, women, and even the earth are being attacked. Our health, our economy, our housing, our food are being attacked. Who can we turn to for protection and help, from the horrors occurring in Washington, and spreading throughout our states, and local governments? It should be obvious by now that the Democrats and the Republicans don’t have the answer. As of this moment the United States government is shut down. They are using this shutdown as a way to fire more federal workers and attempt to operate the government with less workers. This means less oversight, and fewer people, doing more work.
We are living in a society where politicians can run wild, disregard laws and impose crimes on humanity, all while the lives of the working class are going straight down the tubes. The downward spiral of the working class is not a new subject; it has been happening to us for a very long time. Prices for everything are going up. People are having to make choices about getting their medical services or getting food. Our youth are being left alone because families may not have enough money for childcare; nor are there enough facilities or programs being offered.
Inflation is up, therefore our money doesn’t go very far. The job market is horrible. Current job growth is being compared to December 2020, when COVID-19 was ravaging the population, and there was negative growth. This means that people who are willing and able to work, even those with college degrees, are unable to find work. Not because the work is not there—it is because the capitalists want to make sure they can keep their lakefront summer homes, and make other workers do more with less. They will cut jobs and then threaten to fire anyone they don’t believe is working fast enough—knowing there are so many unemployed willing to accept less.
Access to medical care is becoming a luxury. Huge hospital systems are swallowing up smaller ones and rural hospitals; then either closing them or converting them into non-emergency centers. Sick people are having to drive hours just to seek medical care, even for something as simple as a diagnostic test.
The Trump administration has said from the beginning they were not going to touch Medicare, but Trump recently enacted a federal budget law that blocks supplemental services for Medicare recipients. Long story short, what the law does is suspend a plan that helped seniors who qualify get money to cover the cost of premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses and automatically enroll people in the federal Low Income Subsidy. The Congressional Budget Office says that suspending this service will save $66 billion over 10 years because of lower enrollment. So, what they are saying is, we are saving money, but they are only doing so by making the process harder and less accessible for the people that actually need it.
While they claim to be saving money on one hand, they are spending billions attacking immigrants. These attacks are not new; deportations are not new. Both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump, including in his first term. This is a part of their plan. Immigrants are used as a tool for capitalists to drive down wages of the entire working class. They hire them, pay them less, knowing that they are less likely to fight over wages or better working conditions.
Then ICE is running around the country, often masked, terrorizing people. They claim they are rounding up all of these alleged murders, rapists, and other violent criminals, but that is not true. Less than 5% of those deported have been convicted of violent crimes. Most of those being deported are ordinary, tax-paying working-class people like you and me. This includes some American citizens.
The cost of housing is skyrocketing. There is a house in my neighborhood; a little over 10 years ago, that house was on the market for about 55K. It is now on the market for almost 200K. And trust me, 150K in upgrades was not done to this house. But because we live in a world of speculation and greed, homes are being priced so high that many working-class families are unable to buy them.
We are seeing increased acts of violence and hate, including lynchings and mass shootings. We are seeing more incidents involving those with mental health concerns. What we are seeing is the desperation people are facing. A desperation that’s taken years, decades, to fester in this society. Cuts in health care and mental health services. Cuts in education, after-school programs and child development. Cuts in jobs, pensions and financial security. But why are there so many cuts when the money is there?
Just recently the Michigan legislature was facing its own budget shutdown. The debate was over money to ‘fix the damn roads’ or to provide money to our schools. Why is this a debate? We need both, and there should be money for both!
The federal shutdown is over money. They have already gutted so many social programs, and they’re still looking to fire more workers and cut more programs that directly benefit the working class, yet the rich continue to get richer. Why? Well let me tell you, they are giving the money to the rich, through tax breaks and other capitalist insider strategies. They are stealing the money produced from our labor, from our children and elderly, and packing up their coffers.
We are currently on a path where our youth and future generations will be fighting some of the same fights our great grandparents had to fight. They are going to have to fight for the right to have adequate education, health care, wages. They are going to have to fight for the right to their own bodies. Women will have to fight for the right to stand alone and not be under the control of a man. But this future is not set in stone. The working class must organize itself as a class and stand up for its needs.
Blaming our situation all on Trump would be easy, but that would give him way too much credit. The conditions of the working class have been going downhill for a very, very long time under both Republican and Democrat administrations. Things seem to be worse now because the Trump administration has pulled out all the stops and safeguards, moving at a faster, chaotic pace to destroy the working class. They are able to do this because the working class has remained silent for too long. Over the years we have seen a decrease in unions and strikes. We do not see protest or mass organizing over working-class issues.
In the absence of the working class fighting, they tell us we have to depend on the Republicans and the Democrats. This has been the same message for over 160 years, since the Civil War. We have been stuck between the two parties, and neither has represented the working class. They both represent the capitalists’ class. They have set up a system where year after year, we are expected to put our hopes in the same two parties, expecting a different result. Under both parties, the voice of the working class has been silenced and beat down.
Well, we are here today to say we want more. We are sick and tired of doing all the work and reaping only the crumbs. We are here to say it is time to stand for our class, the working class. We are here to say we need our own party. We are here, in our grassroots effort to build that party, OUR party. The Working Class Party.
I am going to add one more thing that Working Class Party has to talk about.
There is something else very serious that is facing the working class today. The world is moving toward war, a bigger war than those we are already seeing today. We are moving toward a global war that people in this country will not escape.
Look at the direction that things are going. The U.S. government, under both parties, has been steadily increasing the military budget, year after year. It is now over One Trillion Dollars a year, which is more than the next nine countries in the world combined. Why are they doing this if not for war?
We know that names are just words. But given everything we see happening, I think it is no coincidence that Trump has just changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Today the U.S. government is planning a big push to build more naval warships and to increase their capacity to repair them. Why? Because in a war, ships get damaged and destroyed. This is another sign that the capitalists and the politicians who work for them are planning for war.
The U.S. government has troops stationed all over the world. They have military bases, army, navy, air force, in 170 different countries. No other country has anything close to that.
For over three years now, the U.S. has been actively supporting and continuing the war in Ukraine. The U.S. government has continued to support and provide weapons for Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
These wars and the other wars going on in the world are a sign of a capitalist system in crisis. The capitalists of every country compete against each other for profits, trying to gain more markets to sell products, trying to gain access to more natural resources, trying to exploit more low-wage workers around the world. Tariffs are a sign of an economic crisis, and it was economic crises like these and the competition between capitalists that led to WWI and WWII. In those times, there were regional wars that expanded into a world war. This is very similar to what we are looking at today.
When there is a global war, people in this country won’t escape it. Young men from the working class will be sent to kill and be killed by young men from the working class in other countries. And the population at home will be victims in a war also. With today’s missiles, nuclear bombs and all the modern weapons, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans won’t protect people here like it did during WWI and WWII. Everyone will pay the price when war comes.
We don’t know if war will come in the next six months or the next six years, but it is coming.
… More and more, the capitalist class, aided by the politicians of both parties, is taking the money produced by our labor and using the wealth stolen from us to further enrich themselves. This is where the capitalist system is taking us.
But we are not doomed to this kind of future. Working people, together as one class, can determine what our future will be.
We can have a better future. But having a better future depends on what the working class does. The working class has power. The working class, when it fights, has enough power to change the direction we are headed. The working class has enough power to even change the whole system.
We in Working Class Party understand that and that is why we started Working Class Party nine years ago.
We said that the Republicans and the Democrats both work for and represent the interests of the capitalist class—the bankers, the wealthy and the corporate elite.
We say that the interests of the working class and the capitalist class are opposed to each other. We started Working Class Party by saying that the working class needs its own party.
We know that elections alone won’t change things, no matter who is elected.
… But when the working class is ready to fight, the fight can come on fast and spread like a tidal wave. It has happened before.
Working Class Party is not the mass party that the working class needs. But it can be a starting point for the working class to build a mass party. There is not a fight by the working class today. But the working class, by building a mass party, could open the door to a fight.
In this time period, we must keep this truth alive.
This is why Working Class Party is important.
Oct 13, 2025
This article is translated from the October 10 issue #2984 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France. It was written just before the cease-fire was announced.
Negotiations between Israeli and Hamas leaders to implement Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza began under U.S. auspices in the opulent Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh on October 6.
Without committing to disarmament, but under joint pressure from the U.S. and the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Qatar, Hamas agreed to discuss Trump’s plan. Equally under pressure from Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared he would stop bombing Gaza but wouldn’t end the blockade.
The first phase of these negotiations is about the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the return of the remains of those who did not survive. This operation is expected to be followed by the release of 250 Palestinians sentenced to life imprisonment in Israel, as well as some 1,700 Gazans arrested by the Israeli army since October 7, 2023.
When will the Israeli hostages be released? Which 250 Palestinian prisoners will be freed out of more than 10,000 women and men languishing in Israeli jails? Will they be Hamas leaders or figures like Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah Party official who could play a political role?
On the Israeli side, families await the return of their loved ones. Many Israelis hope for the end of a war that has deformed young people into uniformed assassins. On the Palestinian side, nearly two million Gazans survive in ruins, deprived of everything. On both sides, the prospect of a peace plan clearly inspires hope. But negotiations could break off at any moment. And the Israeli army maintains its occupation of Gaza. Shooting and bombing continue. “Trump’s peace” offers Palestinians no more than a bleak and uncertain future.
Trump has ruled out any annexation by Israel of the West Bank and any resumption of Israeli settlements in Gaza. He renounced deporting Gazans to build his “Middle Eastern Riviera.” His plan calls for Gaza to be administered by an “apolitical Palestinian committee,” which remains to be specified or set up. It would be overseen by a Peace Council chaired by none other than Trump himself.
Behind these vague formulas, the establishment of an American protectorate is emerging. It could be administered by the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which Trump seems to want to bring back into the game, twisting Netanyahu’s arm. But while waiting for the hypothetical establishment of an International Stabilization Force—which remains entirely to be imagined and formed—the Israeli army will continue to occupy Gaza. “Our army will remain in most of Gaza,” Netanyahu repeats endlessly.
This solution—a territory co-administered by the wealthy Gulf monarchies and the Israeli army under U.S. supervision—undoubtedly suits the leaders of the various Middle Eastern governments joining in the negotiations. But even if the war and the massacre stop and partial reconstruction begins, the future the people of Gaza are promised is to survive for years amidst dangerous ruins. Hospitals and schools are demolished. Drinking water pipes and the electrical grid are destroyed. Farmland has become no man’s land. All is under the control of an occupying army. This is enough to engender a new generation of rebels ready to do anything to fight for basic rights. This is the clear result of the two years of war ordered by Netanyahu.
Oct 13, 2025
This article is translated from the September 27, issue #1356 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean. It can be found at: combat-ouvrier.com
On September 11 and 12, in a town north of Port-au-Prince (Cabaret), members of the “Vlad” gang massacred more than 50 people, including women, children, and the elderly. This massacre occurred four days after the death of their leader, Vladimir, alias “Vlad,” during a confrontation with the police.
On the night of September 14–15, criminals from the armed group “Gran Grif” attacked a commune in the department of Artibonite (Liancourt). The population fled their homes to seek shelter. Despite resistance from local self-defense brigades, the bandits ended up setting fire to and demolishing the police station.
On Thursday, September 18, in a small town in the Northwest (Bassin Bleu), gangsters from “Kokorat San Ras” opened fire in the middle of the day, killing several people. The police station, town hall, hospital, and several buildings were set on fire, and they looted a local food depot.
The same gang attacked another town in Artiboniteon the night of Saturday, September 20 to Sunday, September 21. They set fire to several houses and slaughtered various animals, terrorizing the inhabitants. The toll was nine dead, many wounded, and several missing.
This gang has had a base in the area for more than three years and taunts the few police officers in the departments of Artibonite and the Northwest. Some residents are organizing to fight back, but so far, they have not had the necessary means to do so.
These attacks on rural areas are increasing and show that these gangs affiliated with “Viv Ansanm” gangs aim to control the entire country. After Port-au-Prince, Artibonite, and the Central Plateau, the Northwest is now the target of armed groups. The “liberation” of neighborhoods is nothing more than a charade.
The attacks confirm the Haitian state’s inability to contain the expansion of gangs, despite repeated announcements of crackdowns. Faced with these crimes, on September 15, the Transitional Presidential Council’s response was: “The criminals will not triumph.”
On Saturday, September 20, during the commemoration of the birth of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian government paid solemn tribute to the “Founding Father of the Nation” by bowing before “his immortal memory.” The ambassador of France, the former colonizing country, also paid tribute to his memory. The representative of the United States affirmed that “the future of Haiti belongs to the Haitians themselves.” These are all empty statements that the working population does not believe. It was the strength of the indigenous army, the former slaves in arms, that made it possible to stop the advance of the armed forces of the former colonizing country.
The government serves the Haitian bourgeoisie, which is complicit and uses gangs as its henchmen. Faced with them, the future belongs to the Haitian working class, capable of creating its own organization and its own army to defend its own interests.
Oct 13, 2025
This article is translated from the October 3 issue #2983 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
In the island nation of Madagascar off the coast of East Africa, young people have been demonstrating en masse since September 25 to protest nonstop water and electricity cuts and the proposed privatization of these utilities. At least 22 youths were killed by the police and around another 100 injured as of October 1.
In an attempt to stem this growing and radicalizing movement, President Andry Rajoelina announced on September 29 that he was dismissing his entire cabinet including his prime minister. He blamed them for the worsening situation. But this maneuver was not enough. Protestors called to continue the fight. The following day, thousands took to the center of the capital. Several unions announced their support for the demonstrators.
The situation is catastrophic. Water and electricity power cuts last 12 hours a day. Families set out long lines of containers to refill at public wells. A family member must go retrieve them when there is water. Electricity presents the same ordeal not only for residents, but also for anyone who needs electricity for work, whether to operate a small food stall or to work in I.T.
The current movement of young people who identify as Gen Z on social media was preceded last July by a strike by employees of Jirama, the entity that manages the country’s water and electricity. The trigger was the announcement of the transformation of this state-owned enterprise into a private company. The strikers took advantage of their movement to address residents of working-class neighborhoods, explaining that this measure would further aggravate the situation and hand over water and electricity to the vultures of the private sector. Their action paved the way for the current movement.
When repression and threats of prosecution had no effect, the president finally declared: “There will be no privatization of this company as long as I am president.” However, there were good reasons to doubt this promise, and things did not stop there. In September, it was the turn of students at the University of Antananarivo in the capital to mobilize. Most of them have no other prospect than unemployment and also suffer from the dilapidated state of public services and water and electricity cuts, starting at their campus. They called on the population to mobilize against privatization and added a political component to their demands: respect for freedoms and the fight against the corruption that is plaguing the country. The government’s response was fierce repression.
This hasn’t slowed down the protests. Quite the contrary. Some elected officials from working-class communities are also participating in organizing the movement. When word spread that the president was returning to Madagascar after traveling to the United States since September 24, protesters gathered in communities surrounding the capital’s airport to give him the welcome he deserved. No flights were able to land there that day!
Madagascar is a former French possession where the colonial army continuously exercised the worst repression. Today it is one of the five poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank. While basic services are inaccessible to the majority of the population, a tiny minority of local politicians and capitalists lead a gilded existence amidst an ocean of misery. Imperialist corporations exploit the rank and file workers of the I.T. and textile industries through this thin layer of privileged people. But now such plundering is sparking a wave of revolts all over the world—yesterday in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, today in Madagascar….
Oct 13, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of October 5, 2025.
Last week, the stock market hit several more records. The partial federal government shutdown didn’t even put a dent in the rapid increase in stock market prices. That’s because corporate profits are booming, with more billionaires getting richer by leaps and bounds.
As for the rest of the economy, it is in a deepening crisis, spiraling downward. There are big job losses in manufacturing and construction. Young people can’t get jobs. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. And workers are being forced to work more overtime, or second or third jobs, just to pay the bills.
Meanwhile, rapidly rising prices are forcing most consumers to cut back drastically, with growing numbers not able to afford the basics.
Out of this crisis has come soaring homelessness. The U.S. government counts over 1.3 million students as homeless nationwide. In many school districts, such as New York City, which is the biggest in the country, almost one out of five students are considered homeless. And this is the tip of the iceberg, with a lot more homeless students than the government admits.
Millions and millions of the working poor—people with jobs—can’t afford a stable place to live.
This is supposed to be a modern society. Yet, the very workings of the economy are barbaric to the extreme, producing fabulous wealth at the same time as ever worsening poverty. That’s because it’s a capitalist dog-eat-dog economy driven by profits. Nothing else counts, but profits. Companies have to increase their profits or disappear.
So, companies constantly seek to “reduce labor costs,” by forcing fewer workers to do more work, while paying workers less. The profits, which are produced through the sweat and blood of the working class, enrich a tiny minority of capitalist billionaires, who already have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it. So, they gamble their fortunes on every financial market imaginable, from the stock market and real estate to crypto, thus sowing the seeds of the next financial crash and economic catastrophe.
No, the rising stock market is not a sign of economic health and prosperity, but the opposite—it is a sign of the madness and monumental waste of this capitalist economic system, a system, by the way, which is also spawning ever bigger and more deadly wars, as the struggle for capitalist domination extends across borders, over the entire world.
Today, we are told, society is divided between Republicans and Democrats. That is a lie. The real division is between the rich against the poor, the capitalists against the workers.
Donald Trump, the wannabe dictator of the most powerful country on earth, is merely the face of these capitalist billionaires. His disgusting racist rhetoric, his put-downs of women, his crusade against immigrants and so-called foreigners, are merely ways to protect the privileges of his fellow billionaires by dividing workers against each other, while sowing fear and demoralization amongst ever more sections of the working population. All the job cuts and purges that Trump is carrying out against the federal workforce are no different than what companies do all the time.
Last week at Quantico, Trump told hundreds of military officials that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. troops. This is not an idle threat, but an admission that capitalism can only produce more chaos, destruction and repression.
There is nothing inevitable about this crisis. The working class already produces more than enough wealth to assure that every single person on earth could live decently. But that can only happen when the working class overcomes its divisions and brings its forces together to rip away the control over society from the capitalist class of billionaires and their servants at the head of the government and the state apparatus.
Oct 13, 2025
The government shutdown furloughed some 900,000 workers, while hundreds of thousands more are required to keep working without pay.
The Trump Administration is now preparing to lay off 4,000 of these workers. This after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) laid off 300,000 people earlier this year.
Plus, they’re threatening to not give back pay to workers when the government reopens.
Today it is federal workers and immigrant workers who are being terrorized and held hostage by the government. It will not stop there. More and more will be included as the government becomes more repressive.
Oct 13, 2025
This documentary about George Orwell was directed by Raoul Peck, whose renowned work includes the films I Am Not Your Negro and Lumumba. Orwell wrote the book 1984 in 1949, his last book before his death from T.B. The film introduces us to Orwell as a man ahead of his time, critical of warmongering, colonialism, and the death of democracy in the drive for war and profit. His words warn us of the dire consequences of complacence and the dangers of deception. The film shows how these dangers are here now more than ever.
This book is about a young soldier assigned to an army barracks for training in the German Nazi army in the late 1930s. He and a few comrades find ways to circumvent the stifling weight of the militarization of the men. But when he sees some falling victim to the dehumanizing pressure, he’s not happy with just escaping, instead, he tries to lead a revolt. The book exposes the terrible pressure of a war machine on our humanity, and the need to fight back.
Oct 13, 2025
This article is translated from the October 10 issue #2984 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Two years have passed since October 7, 2023, when several thousand fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian groups managed to breach the supposedly impenetrable security barrier erected by Israel along the Gaza Strip. They attacked military bases and any Israelis they encountered.
More than 1,200 people were killed that day, mostly civilians, making it the deadliest attack in Israeli history. Hamas kidnapped 251 people, of whom 47 are thought to still be held hostage in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.
At the time of the attack, many Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and refugee camps in Arab countries felt avenged for the oppression and contempt they had been subjected to for years by the Israeli state. This overlooked the fact that, by randomly attacking women, men, and children, Hamas was resorting to the same methods Israeli leaders use against Palestinians. It also showed how little Hamas cared about the consequences for the people under its rule in Gaza, since it was predictable that the action would be followed by a large-scale Israeli response.
The October 7 attack gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government a way to rebuild national unity to support his administration. At the time his rule was widely contested. For months, he had been dealing with a massive mobilization against a proposed judicial reform. By exploiting the trauma created within the Israeli population, Netanyahu was able to launch a war that became a mission to exterminate the inhabitants of Gaza. The territory has been reduced to a veritable field of ruins by two years of bombings, blockades, and indiscriminate massacres. Entire cities have been completely razed. More than 90% of its homes have been destroyed. The health system has collapsed. The population is literally dying of hunger.
The war’s outcome exposes the barbaric means employed by the Israeli state to subjugate and annihilate the Palestinian people. But it also exposes the failure of the policies pursued by Palestinian nationalist organizations.
The Palestinian Authority was created in 1993 by the Oslo Accords between Israeli leaders and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But Israeli politicians only recognized the PLO’s legitimacy in order to turn it into an auxiliary of the Israeli police, tasked with maintaining order against the Palestinian population. This collaboration with the Israeli authorities gradually caused the Palestinian Authority to lose most of its credibility among Palestinians.
At the same time, Hamas controlled Gaza, beginning in 2007. Hamas wanted to project the image of a fighting organization, more radical than the PLO, for example by firing rockets at Israel and carrying out attacks of which October 7 was the most spectacular and deadly. The stated goal was to restore a Palestine “from the Jordan River to the sea (the Mediterranean Sea).” But Hamas’s leaders knew they did not have the strength to end the Israeli occupation. Still, they wanted to gain influence among Palestinians so as to impose themselves instead of the PLO as an essential middleman with Israeli and Western leaders.
The results of this policy have been disastrous for Hamas itself. What remains of its political and military apparatus today? But disaster has especially hit the Palestinian population, which has paid the highest price in every way.
The population of Israel also pays a high price. They have been drawn into a conflict with no end in sight. Some Israelis oppose continuing the war because it risks the hostages’ lives. Thousands of Israelis have been protesting for months. Reservists are now refusing to be called up. Many Israelis express their opposition to Netanyahu, who can only hold onto power by continuing the war. But this current impasse is also the consequence of the policies pursued by all of his predecessors. Since 1948, Israeli leaders have refused to recognize the rights of the Palestinians. They have deprived them of their property and their land and have forced them to live in refugee camps. No lasting peace is possible without ending the oppression of the Palestinians.
As for the Palestinian nationalist organizations, their real aim is to have their right to run a recognized government apparatus with a place in the sun in the imperialist system, no matter how small. In this way, they are the representatives of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which would like to be treated as an equal to the other Arab ruling classes in the region. But the Israeli state has always opposed this. And Israel enjoys the unwavering support of the major imperialist powers that see it as a pillar of their control over the Middle East.
The only way out for the region’s populations, both Israeli and Arab, is a struggle to overthrow the various regimes which oppress them. Beyond that, the imperialist system must be overthrown—the system which pits peoples against each other in order to dominate all of them, all around the world. On the scale of the Middle East, only a socialist federation of peoples can recognize equal rights for all and allow all to coexist peacefully.