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UPSURGE IN BOLIVIA: United Left Platform webinar on June 26
Upsurge in Bolivia: What It Means for the Fight Against MAGA and U.S. Imperialism
Jun 26, 2026 8:00 PM -
Workers’ Voice newspaper: June-July edition
Trump continues his assault on working and oppressed people: From the attack on voting rights to the environmental impact of the war on Iran to abortion rights to the struggles of immigrant meatpacking workers on the picket line, this edition is filled with insightful views on how working people are confronting the horrors of capitalism under the management of the Trump administration. Also in this issue read about migrant workers in Africa, the struggle against data centers, and the meaning of recent elections in Hungary.
The June-July 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy:
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PSTU and IWL-FI denounce the COP 30 farce
Capitalism’s role in the climate crisis demands a revolutionary socialist response for true environmental justice.
By the UNIFIED SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (PSTU, BRAZIL)
Since Nov. 10, the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change 2025, known as COP 30, has been taking place in Belém (PA), in the Amazon region of Brazil. The UN’s policy, along with the Brazilian government and other states, to hold the event in the Amazon region, away from the large megacities, aimed to give a “democratic” veneer to a conference that, like its predecessors, serves merely as a theater to express insincere concern and empty promises in the face of impending capitalism-driven disaster.
What is on display in the capital of Pará, however, is precisely the opposite of the image that the UN would like to project: the marginalization of Indigenous peoples, activists, and social movements, while representatives of power and large capitalists entrench themselves in shady negotiations, filled with lobbies from agribusiness, foreign oil companies, and mining companies. The city has been militarized through a GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order), a measure from the Lula government that places security in the hands of the Armed Forces, imposing true martial law in the area.
The spaces dedicated to “official” negotiations were confined to an area called the “Blue Zone,” protected by a strong security scheme. The absurdity reaches the point where agribusiness itself, one of the main forces responsible for deforestation and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, has its own space, called the “Agrizone,” conceived by the CNA (National Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock) and funded by big farmers and the State.
Resistance and mobilization
Parallel to COP 30, however, the People’s Summit also took place, an independent event bringing together Indigenous peoples, social movements, and activists from various countries around the world. It is a space where PSTU and the International Workers’ League (IWL-FI) has been actively working, alongside the CSP-Conlutas union federation, denouncing the farce of COP 30, and all the fake, “green capitalist” solutions to climate change that do not identify capitalism as the heart of the problem of the climate catastrophe that deepens every day. The delegation of PSTU and IWL-FI includes, among other important leaders, the serengeiro (rubber worker) Osmarino Amâncio, successor to Chico Mendes in the great struggles for the defense of the forest and the environment against murderous and predatory agro-extractivism.
On Oct. 11, Indigenous peoples and social movements participating in the Global March for Health and Climate occupied the Blue Zone, denouncing the environmental impact and attacks on Indigenous territories, and were harshly repressed by security forces. The scenes of Indigenous people being beaten in a place that was supposedly meant for discussion in defense of their interests exposed the cynical, farcical nature of this conference. After the incident, the UN sent a letter to the Brazilian government demanding more “security” at the location, which was promptly complied with.
On the following day, a large “boat rally” took place, officially opening the activities of the Peoples’ Summit, where nearly 200 vessels sailed on the Guamá River. The PSTU and IWL-FI activists participated on the boat dedicated to denouncing the genocide of the Palestinian people and in defense of a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. The activists demand an energy embargo on the State of Israel, including a ban on the sale of oil that, today, has Brazil fueling the tanks that kill Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
On the same day, the 12th, a welcoming plenary was held at the countryside headquarters of the Union of Construction Workers of Belém (affiliated with CSP-Conlutas) for activists and Indigenous peoples, quilombolas (descendants of enslaved Africans), and riverside communities arriving for the activities of the Peoples’ Summit. Construction workers led a major strike in September that halted construction work, including that of COP 30, for two weeks, denouncing the stark social inequality in the city and gaining international attention.
On the 13th, the PSTU participated in the panel “COP 30 is a mechanism of capital to legitimize the destruction of the Amazon,” organized by CSP-Conlutas. The debate featured the participation of Osmarino, as well as Raquel Tremembé, an Indigenous leader from Maranhão who was the vice presidential candidate on the PSTU ticket led by Vera in the last elections, among other representatives of Indigenous peoples and activists.
“Social movements and self-organization: what is the climate solution?” was another panel on the 14th, which featured the participation of Jeferson Choma from Opinião Socialista and the channel Ecologia Marxista (watch the panel here). On the 15th, a large United March for the Climate took place, officially closing the activities of the Peoples’ Summit.
The participation of PSTU and IWL-FI
The PSTU’s action around COP began well before the start of COP 30. The strike that shook Belém in September and threw into question the entire hosting of the event, and which denounced the super-exploitation of construction workers, was led by militants of the party and CSP-Conlutas.
At the Peoples’ Summit, the PSTU raised the banner that “the environmental catastrophe is capitalist” and that, therefore, “the solution must be revolutionary and socialist,” uniting workers and laborers with Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and riverside communities. In addition, the party advocates for the Palestinian people and the necessity of the international struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples against capitalist barbarism.
With a delegation composed of militants from the city and from various other parts of the country, the PSTU disseminated a special publication for COP 30 (download here in Portuguese), taking up the whole debate about the roots of the environmental and climate crisis, the role of the Lula government in deepening this process, and proposing the only possible solution: socialism. The party’s youth group, Rebeldía, held a presentation meeting of the PSTU to a new generation that increasingly sees itself without prospects in the face of the deepening climate crisis.
The capitalist class that governs the world has systematically failed to confront climate change, and continues to peddle the same empty promises and false solutions to the crisis. We need a class-conscious program to fix this mess, and it’s going to take the combined, coordinated actions of organized workers, Indigenous people, and other oppressed people on the frontlines of climate disaster to put it into action. The PSTU’s efforts to bring unions and activists together to speak out against the farce of COP and capitalist-led climate strategies, combining mass rallies together with strikes and press coverage, are a vital example of the kind of organizing needed all over the world to stop climate change and stop capitalism.
Read more in Portuguese
“The loggers and the miners are destroying everything that exists in the forest,” says chief Raoni
Read more in Portuguese
Osmarino Amâncio: “For us, forest peoples, green capitalism is a tragedy”
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COP 30: UN report shows we’re on the path to climate collapse
Capitalism’s inherent contradictions threaten our planet; only a revolutionary shift can avert ecological collapse.
By JEFFERSON CHOMA
As heads of state and negotiators arrived in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP 30), a warning from the UN echoed: the world is about to permanently exceed the limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a threshold considered extremely dangerous for global warming.
According to the new report from United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), even if all commitments made since the Paris Agreement are fulfilled, the average temperature of the planet is expected to rise between 2.5°C and 2.9°C by the end of the century. In other words, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is gone. And with it, the belief that it would be enough to “adjust the course” of green capitalism to save the planet has also collapsed.
The numbers are compelling. The UNEP estimates that the chances of limiting warming to 1.5°C are currently zero; to keep it below 2°C, only 8%. Even meeting the “minimum” mitigation targets would only reduce the chances of collapse by a statistically insignificant degree. In short, we are heading towards a scenario of 2.3°C to 2.5°C of warming, even if all current promises are fulfilled.
Capitalism, as a careful reading of the report indicates, is unable to stop the catastrophe it itself has caused.
The fossil fuel engine keeps accelerating
The contrast between the diplomatic/political discourse and reality is striking. Instead of reducing fossil fuel production, economic powers are expanding production. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global oil production is expected to reach 105.8 million barrels per day in 2025 (2.7 million more than in 2024) and reach 107.9 million in 2026.
The Production Gap Report 2025, also from the UN, confirms the gap: countries plan to produce 120% more oil, gas, and coal by 2030 than would be compatible with the 1.5°C target. While leaders speak about a “just energy transition,” the fossil fuel machine rolls forward, driven by billion-dollar profits.
On the brink of collapse
The effects are already visible. For the first time, in 2024, the global temperature has permanently surpassed the mark of 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels. On the way to 2°C, the planet is approaching an irreversible tipping point: accelerated melting of polar ice caps, thawing of the permafrost (releasing ancient gasses and pathogens), collapse of biodiversity, and destruction of key ecosystems.
The Amazon, one of the planet’s main climate regulators, is also on the brink of collapse. Scientists warn that if between 20% and 25% of the forest is destroyed, it will stop absorbing carbon and start emitting greenhouse gases. Today, it has already lost about 17% of its original coverage. The Amazonian collapse would mean the failure of water regulation in South America, the multiplication of extreme weather events, and the spread of pandemics caused by ecological imbalances.
We are facing a civilizational crisis that threatens to disintegrate societies, destroy productive forces, and impose an unprecedented historical regression.
Lula’s speech at COP 30
The choice of Belém as the host of COP 30 should have symbolized a new Brazilian environmental leadership. But the country arrives at the event amid glaring contradictions.
On one side, the Bolsonaro far right continues to be an open enemy of the environment, openly advocating for the invasion of Indigenous lands, the dismantling of environmental legislation, and the resumption of the “boiada” (clearcutting cowboy ranchers) if it returns to power. On the other, the Lula government, although it adopts a supposedly “progressive” discourse, has reinforced policies that deepen environmental destruction.
In his opening speech at COP, Lula stated: “Accelerating the energy transition and protecting nature are the two most effective ways to curb global warming. I am convinced that, despite our difficulties and contradictions, we need roadmaps to, in a fair and planned manner, reverse deforestation, overcome dependence on fossil fuels, and mobilize the necessary resources for these goals.” Pretty words, but divorced from practice.
How do we reconcile the commitment to the energy transition with this government’s own enthusiasm for oil exploration in the Amazon? Studies show that if all the oil in the region is extracted and burned, between 4 and 13 billion tons of CO₂ would be released, equivalent to the combined emissions of China and the United States in 2020.
The contradictions do not stop there. Lula greeted the Amazon and its peoples in his speech, saying: “In the global imagination, there is no greater symbol of the environmental cause than the Amazon rainforest. Here flow the thousands of rivers and streams that make up the largest watershed on the planet. (…) Therefore, it is fair that it is the turn of the Amazonians to ask what is being done by the rest of the world to prevent the collapse of their home.”
But, in practice, the government advocates policies that bring the Amazon closer to collapse. Lula supports the paving of BR-319, which will be a deforestation corridor cutting through the heart of the forest, and the construction of Ferrogrão—a railway that will connect Mato Grosso to Pará to transport soy from agribusiness, cutting through Indigenous areas and protected nature reserves. In addition, the privatization of waterways on the Madeira, Tocantins, and Tapajós rivers is advancing, transforming the largest Amazonian waterways into shipping routes for commodity exports.
These projects are a salvo of climate bombs that expand deforestation, perpetuate the extractivist model, and subjugate the country to the interests of international capital.
Meanwhile, the government is negotiating with Trump’s United States for the extraction of critical minerals and rare earths, and grants billion-dollar tax exemptions to data centers that consume enormous volumes of energy and water, with no social return.
Between rhetoric and the abyss
The contrast between green rhetoric and denialist practice reveals the structural impasse of Brazilian and global environmental politics. Capitalism, dependent on the infinite expansion of consumption and the extraction of finite resources, cannot resolve the climate crisis without negating itself.
COP 30, therefore, will be yet another showcase of empty promises. While leaders pose for photos and proclaim commitments, the fossil machine keeps spinning, accelerated, lubricated by profits and “progressive” rhetoric.
Belém is the symbolic stage of a global choice, to maintain the model that pushes the planet to collapse. The F3 tornado that destroyed a city in Paraná was yet another small demonstration that the future has already arrived. Either we take history into our own hands and overcome capitalism, or humanity will face an unprecedented catastrophe.
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Egyptian state repression: Made in the West
By M.A. AL GHARIB
The release of Alaa Abdel Fattah from an Egyptian prison in late September shined a light again on one of the world’s most brutal regimes, a state that inflicts incarceration and political repression on a wide sector of society.
All revolutionaries celebrate Alaa’s release and express respect for his principled endurance as well as for the social struggles from below that pressured the regime to release him. As revolutionary socialists it is also our duty to keep exposing the horrors of the Egyptian carceral state and to solidarize with the thousands of other political prisoners who continue to languish in its dungeons. A central part of this task, especially for revolutionaries in the imperialist countries, involves exposing the ways that Egyptian state repression is a product of Western imperialism. If that repression did not serve Western imperialist agendas, it would, at the very least, be seriously weakened and offer greater openings for Egyptian revolutionaries to topple it.
Political prisoners in Egypt
Alaa Abdel Fattah after release from prison. Since helping to lead the 2010-2011 Egyptian revolution, Alaa Abdel Fattah was repeatedly targeted by Egyptian state security. In spite of all that he has suffered over the past decade and a half, he continues to be a dedicated pro-democracy activist. He has been jailed numerous times and spent most of the last 12 years in prison, most recently serving a six-year sentence based on trumped up charges of “spreading false news.”
To bring attention not only to his case but that of the thousands of political prisoners in Egypt as well as to the brutal character of the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regime, Alaa courageously undertook a series of hunger strikes. The most notable of these coincided with the COP27 Climate Summit hosted by Egypt in 2022. Imprisoned in the Tora Prison complex, he was subjected to brutal treatment, denied sunlight, fresh air, legal representation, and visitors. His release was the result of years of solidarity work, led by his family and activist comrades, both in Egypt and internationally.
After Alaa’s release, thousands remain in prison. Indeed, the scale of political imprisonment under Sisi dwarfs that of his brutal predecessors, ballooned by transforming the routine administrative procedure of pretrial detention into the machinery of mass detention. The security forces’ methods include widespread use of disappearance of individuals off the street without informing family members or lawyers, along with unfounded, evidence-free accusations of terrorist activities. The imprisoned spend months or even years in jail.
During the same week that Alaa walked free, Egyptian security forces arrested the journalist Ismail Alexandrani, the trade unionist Shady Mohamed, and cartoonist Ashraf Omar. These are only among the most prominent of the tens of thousands of individuals in prison as part of Sisi’s unceasing project to crush dissidents.
According to an Amnesty International’s end of year report for 2024, the Egyptian state arrested 1594 individuals considered political prisoners during that year. The targeted included “journalists, lawyers, protesters, dissidents, opposition politicians and those critical of the government’s human rights record and handling of the economic crisis.” Enforced disappearance and torture are routine and death sentences and executions are common after “grossly unfair trials.”
Further: “Women and girls, religious minorities and LGBTI individuals experienced discrimination, violence and prosecution for exercising their human rights. Authorities failed to protect economic and social rights in the economic crisis, adequately adjust social security measures or ensure private companies complied with the minimum wage requirement. The government introduced new legislation jeopardizing the accessibility and affordability of healthcare. Forced evictions from informal settlements continued. Thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, most from Sudan, were arbitrarily detained and expelled.”
The more well-publicized cases include politician Yehia Hussein Abdelhady, accused of spreading “false news,” arrested July 31, 2024, after making Facebook posts critical of Sisi and the army and in support of regime change; Rasha Azab, a women’s rights activist and journalist who has suffered constant harassment by the regime for her criticism of the state’s response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza; Ashraf Omar, arrested in July after he published a cartoon criticizing the government’s plan to sell state assets; and Khaled Mamdouh, a journalist at the news website Arabic Post. Both Omar and Mamhdouh are accused, like Alaa Abdel Fattah and so many others, of “spreading false news.” These are middle-class, more privileged individuals. It is terrifying to contemplate what brutal treatment the regime visits on working-class people.
Arrests rain down on the those involved in the most innocuous acts. In 2022, The New York Times reported that security forces arrested one politician for “mulling” over running for office in opposition to Sisi. Two women on a Cairo subway, overheard complaining about rising fares: thrown in a prison. A young military conscript who posted a Facebook meme of Sisi with Mickey Mouse ears: grabbed by security goons and flung into a cell.
As reported by Jacobin in 2020, travel bans are also common and easily number in the hundreds, if not thousands. Most activists, according to the report, are no longer allowed to leave Egypt, whether for holidays or professional reasons. Leading activists and journalists Aida Seif al-Dawla, Gamal Eid, and Hossam Bahgat, have been among the most severely targeted.
The aforementioned 2022 Times article gives an idea of the process of disappearance. In 2018, Waleed Salem, a PhD student at University of Washington-Seattle and studying the Egyptian judiciary, was arrested and charged with “joining a terrorist group [and] spreading fake news.” Salem described both charges as “absurd, easy to refute,” and lacking any evidence. However, in reality, “he was trapped.”
“Held in pretrial detention, Mr. Salem was never tried or formally charged with a crime. Instead, every time he maxed out the legal detention period, a prosecutor extended his imprisonment in a hearing that usually lasted about 90 seconds. ‘The first five months, you’re trying to convince yourself it’s just five months,’ Mr. Salem said. ‘But after five months come and go and you’re still there, now you start to fear the worst.’”
The role of Western imperialism
President Biden, right after the 2020 election and after vowing on the campaign trail to “ostracize” dictators over human rights abuses, normalized relations with both Muhammad Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, along with Sisi. State repression in Egypt not only serves to crush domestic opposition to a brutal bourgeois regime; it serves Western imperialism. The services the Egyptian state offers the West include purchasing weaponry and “homeland security” technology, providing a cost-effective sub-imperial force to ensure “stability” (i.e., smashing progressive movements from below across the MENA), and creating a buffer for a colonial and genocidal Israel.
The history of Egypt’s client status in relation to Western imperialism goes back to the end of the Nasser era in the late 1960s. When the United States joined the USSR in putting an unceremonious end to the British-French-Israeli attempt to invade the Suez Canal after Nasser’s attempt to nationalize it in 1956 (the so-called Suez Crisis), the two “superpowers” announced their arrival as the new global hegemons. It wasn’t, however, until the Israelis smashed the Nasser-led Arab armies in the 1967 “Six Day” War that the U.S. started to see Israel as useful in the project of Western imperialist hegemony in the MENA. By the 1973 “October” War, Israel was firmly within the U.S. camp.
It was during the 1970s as well that Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, began to shift Egypt away from Nasserism’s anticolonial politics, seeing the benefits—at least for the Egyptian bourgeoisie—of a pro-Western orientation. It was during this time that Sadat initiated the so-called Infitah (“opening”), a neoliberal turn that still continues to eviscerate Egyptian society today. The 1979 Camp David agreement with Israel, under U.S. tutelage—seen by the Global South, particularly Palestine, as a treacherous separate peace—was the culmination of Sadat’s politics. Egypt was now consolidated as a client of the U.S. The flood of Western financial aid and the consequent ballooning of state domestic surveillance, under the control of the odious Mubarak, would now darken Egypt’s horizons.
Workers and refugees can “eat hay”
The Egyptian state can count on dependable Western financial support. As Amnesty’s 2024 annual report discusses, to stave off economic and financial crisis in Egypt during that year, the International Monetary Fund, the EU, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged around USD 57 billion in investment, loans, and financial assistance. In March of the same year, the EU announced a 7.4 billion euro (USD 8 billion) funding package to Egypt and in September, the U.S. furnished Sisi regime with USD 1.3 billion in aid.
Both the U.S. and EU packages came with human rights waivers. This was all for the benefit of the Egyptian repressive state apparatus. Meanwhile, workers in Egypt, like their U.S. and European counterparts, can “eat hay” as the Arabic saying goes. Egyptian workers, for example, contended with a runaway cost-of-living crisis, with annual inflation by fall 2024 reaching a whopping 24.9 percent.
While the EU rationalizes its deals with the Egyptian state as promoting “democracy, fundamental freedoms, human rights, and gender equality,” the actual details are telling. Most EU assistance is for “fortifying borders,” in which Egypt, along with Tunisia and Mauritania, is tasked with policing migrants to Europe, especially those from Libya and Sudan. The 2023 EU-Egypt deal, carrying the Orwellian name “Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument” (NDICI), was justified as contributing to “the eradication of poverty and the promotion of sustainable development, prosperity, peace and stability” but in reality was another border security deal. As the MENA-based Revolutionary Socialists have pointed out, keeping refugees out of the EU is what these deals are really about.
U.S. funds the explosion of the Egyptian carceral state
U.S. support of the Egyptian state has been, as is nearly everything under the U.S. bourgeois regime, a bipartisan commitment. While Trump has referred to Sisi as “my favorite dictator,” it was Obama who oversaw the shift to the increased repression of domestic dissent.
It was right after the 2013 coup that brought Sisi and the military into dictatorial power that the U.S. shifted this support away from military hardware toward technologies of domestic repression—for example, surveillance software, drones, and border security. This has been a boon for the U.S. “homeland security” industry. This has also meant an explosion of domestic surveillance and repression: Egypt has built almost a third of its sixty-two prisons since 2011. These are prisons in which more than 60,000 political prisoners are incarcerated, accounting for around 60 percent of the total imprisoned.
Egypt’s collaboration with Israel during Gaza genocide
Meanwhile, the very same U.S. and EU, especially Germany, account for the vast majority of arms deliveries to Israel. Collaboration with Israel is another essential service provided by reactionary Arab regimes. Egypt takes a leading role here—for example, policing the border with Rafah, ensuring that the starvation of Gazans and Israel’s impunity remain unchallenged, and simultaneously contributing to the Israeli economy as a major importer of the latter’s natural gas.
Over recent years, despite symbolic protestations against Israel’s genocide, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—along with Israel—have deepened their participation in U.S.-led “security” structures. One example is the so-called Regional Security Construct, modeled on the imperialist intelligence-sharing “Five Eyes” alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S.). Along with sharing radar and sensor data amongst each, a key goal of the construct is the search for and destruction of Hamas’s subterranean tunnels, a key element of Gazans’ survival during years of genocide and decades of Israeli-U.S.-imposed demodernization of the Gaza Strip. All of this simply builds upon Egypt’s role before the genocide, providing a buffer zone for Israeli impunity in the Strip. Domestically, Sisi’s government, like that of its security construct allies, crushes any spontaneous protests for Palestine, utilizing many of the aforementioned practices of repression.
The importance of struggles from below
The repression of Egyptian dissidents and even of many everyday non-political people is largely made in the West. The United States and the EU fund the repression, supply the tools to execute it, and look the other way. As in other parts of the postcolonial Global South, this repression serves both the interests of imperialism and of the domestic bourgeoisie.
In the United States, the gargantuan recent “No Kings Protests” offer an important opportunity for constructing a mass movement for radical change. While these protests are an important temperature check on the mood of the masses, they are also marked by political confusions. In particular, many of the slogans at the protests demanded a restoration to the pre-Trump liberal order. Many protest signs celebrated the “founding fathers” or denounced how Trump, Miller et al. supposedly contradict “American values.” Trump, we’re told, is borrowing from “an authoritarian playbook.”
All of this obfuscates both the material dynamics of the authoritarian turns from the U.S. to Germany, the UK, France and beyond, and erases the role of Western imperialism in boosting the far right. Moreover, it normalizes liberal democracy as the limit of class struggles: the boldest demand that it allows our movements is for the restoration of the bourgeois democracy that was itself fertile soil for the far right. “America is already great,” as Hillary Clinton said.
The notion that U.S. presidents, the CIA and FBI, etc. need lessons in authoritarianism from semi-colonial countries is laughable. As socialists, we must educate our movements in the fact that the West has an abiding interest in authoritarianism and that the United States and the EU make an outsize contribution to far-right tendencies and repression on an international scale, particularly in the semi-colonial and imperial periphery.
The kinds of authoritarianism and fascistic tactics used “abroad” have a long history in the imperial core, particularly in the U.S. As many Black revolutionaries have long recognized, there was and is a deep connection between Jim Crow segregation, European and American colonial Indigenous genocides, and the methods of Nazis and fascist regimes.
Moreover, what else other than superb examples of “Western values” are the white and European settler colonies of apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, Israel, the Portuguese colonies in Africa, etc.? As the ex-Israeli PM Ehud Barak, whom liberals refer to as a “dove,” said of Israel: It’s a civilized villa in the “jungle” of Arab “savagery.” Listen to the words of any Portuguese settler, Afrikaaner, or Rhodesian talking about what they were up to in southern Africa, and how drenched they were in the arrogance of bringing European “civilization” to the “violent, backward African barbarians.”
Most importantly, what is obscured is the dialectical relationship between capitalism, authoritarianism, and fascism. Capitalism is inherently authoritarian even in times of “normal” functioning: anti-union, hostile to direct democracy and any working-class independence, wholly comfortable turning to racism and other forms of oppression to entrench the disorganization of the working class. The capitalist class will turn to fascism when capitalism, as it inevitably will, falls into crisis and if such crisis moments are allowed to metastasize. When the capitalist class has no alternative for reviving profitability other than the total smashing of working class capacities for social reproduction, such as unions and all other arenas of independent working class life, it will turn fascist.
Far from being utopian, the emphasis of revolutionary socialists on working-class independence and militancy from below is the only way our movements can both effectively defend ourselves against the attacks of the right and offer any hope for the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This is emphasized by our comrades in the MENA Solidarity Network, who write of Alaa’s release from jail: “From trade unions and conferences to protests and vigils outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, collective pressure kept his case alive … Sisi’s pardon is not an act of goodwill. It’s a constitutional right forced by international solidarity and fear of renewed revolt. The regime still rules by repression, trying to erase the spirit of 2011.”
The spirit of 2011 is, ultimately, what frightens the Egyptian state and its imperialist sponsors. Mass movements from Egypt to Syria to the Gulf and Yemen to North Africa dared to storm the heavens then. They have paid dearly for their courage and while that revolutionary spirit may be at an ebb, its embers still flicker. To adapt a metaphor from Marx, capitalism generates radical powers, which are like an old mole, burrowing “often undetected, beneath the surface.” The mole knows well how to work underground, “suddenly to appear: the revolution.”
Photo: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
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Trump administration rolls back Temporary Protected Status for refugees
By JAMES MARSH
The Trump administration has decided that the limited humanitarian protections offered by Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for millions of refugees is “contrary to the national interest.” This includes the protections previously offered to refugees from a list of countries victimized by U.S. imperialism, including Haiti, Honduras, and Afghanistan—along with the latest country in the sights of the imperialist war machine, Venezuela.
On Nov. 7, some 250,000 Venezuelans lost their TPS protection in the United States. The action stems from an Oct. 3 Supreme Court decision, which reversed a lower court ruling and sided with the Trump administration, opening the way for the eventual expiration of TPS status for at least 350,000 Venezuelan exiles living in this country. Without TPS, these people lose not only their protection against deportation but also their work permits and driver’s licenses.
This is part of a broader counter-reform of the immigration system that disregards humanitarian law and serves to increase the vulnerability of working-class immigrant communities. While Temporary Protected Status only offers limited protections to refugees and shares the flaws of the U.S. immigration system generally, this rollback of humanitarian protections will have disastrous impacts on immigrant communities and throw refugees back into dangerous living conditions. The working-class movement must be prepared to defend immigrant communities and to advance the struggle for immigrant rights towards freedom of movement for all.
What is Temporary Protected Status?
TPS offers humanitarian protections for immigrants in cases in which deportation would send them back to unsafe living conditions. Distinct from legally recognized refugee status, which has a cap on the number of visas granted, and asylum status, which is granted after arrival in the United States, TPS came out of political fights over who would and would not be offered refugee status.
Refugees fleeing state repression in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and ’90s were not offered refugee or asylum status because of the close ties between the U.S. government and the dictatorships of those countries. TPS was offered as a stopgap measure so that refugees could remain in the U.S. temporarily, even as the U.S. government continued to back the violent repression carried out by death squads in their home countries. TPS would provide a stay on deportation for 18 months, subject to extensions, and while not offering a path to citizenship, it could be accompanied by other legal paths to citizenship.
However, the failure of TPS to provide a path to citizenship is a critical flaw to offering humanitarian protections. Instead of offering a stable path to integration, TPS keeps refugees in the status of guest workers, kept in a permanent state of surveillance, vulnerability, and uncertainty for years.
It is this flaw of perpetual uncertainty that was exploited by the Trump administration as it revoked this temporary status en masse for refugees from Afghanistan, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cameroon, Nepal, Syria, and Venezuela. While the legality of some of these decisions was contested in district courts, the Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 3 that the stripping away of TPS protections could proceed.
Why is TPS being rolled back?
The narrative put forward to justify this rolling back of TPS is one of “criminality,” associating undocumented immigration with law breaking and associating this in turn with criminal violence. It is a narrative that Democratic administrations adopted with their logic of using the deportation system to sort out the good immigrants from the bad ones, implying that some immigrants are wholly bad and inherently criminal. This assertion is now being pushed further by the Trump administration to deprive immigrants of their basic rights. It is based on blatantly false claims, as undocumented immigrants have relatively low crime rates compared to the general population, and further uses the category of criminality to deprive people of their human rights in fleeing life-threatening violence.
The rollback of TPS and its justification is part of a larger project of mass deportation with a flagrant disregard for human rights. The devastation wrought on working-class communities by ICE raids has provoked mass protests, which in turn has led the Trump administration to try to use the National Guard to silence this dissent—as with the occupation of Los Angeles following protests for immigrant rights.
This escalation of mass deportation is part of a broader counter-reform of the U.S. immigration system led by the far right. Where legal pathways for immigrants remain in place, the rights offered by these pathways have been more limited and more temporary. This counter-reform has made use of guest-worker schemes and exorbitant payments for visas at the same time that it rejects humanitarian protections for refugees. This includes the extortionate $100,000 annual fee imposed on the H-1B visa for workers in specialty industries like the tech sector on Sept. 18. It also includes Trump’s advocacy of guest-worker programs, modeled on those used in the Gulf States to import workers without offering them a path to citizenship, which would make immigrant workers dependent on their employers to remain in the country.
These restrictions on immigrant rights are part of a longer history of restricting the rights of immigrants for the benefit of the capitalist class. Free trade agreements like NAFTA, put in place in 1994, offer freedom of movement for capital, not for workers or refugees. The attacks on immigrant communities in the U.S. and in Europe have seen them at the front of the authoritarian rollback of rights that is characteristic of the rise of far-right authoritarian populist governments in the wake of the Great Recession, while the capitalist class uses them as a testing ground for the expansion of mass incarceration and political policing.
Policies that restrict the rights of immigrants serve to heighten the vulnerability of immigrant workers and deepen their exploitation. Immigrant workers are less able to advocate for their labor rights and dissuaded from organizing publicly for fear of attracting attention, which makes them more vulnerable to exploitation while weakening the ability of the working class as a whole to organize. This perpetual state of precarity was in some ways furthered by TPS as a temporary measure, but its repeal makes this precarity all the more severe.
What can we do?
The immediate concerns of the rollback of immigrant rights by the Trump administration should be understood as an attack on the working class as a whole. These attacks on working-class communities demand a mass movement by the working class, with a unified pushback from immigrant organizations in solidarity with labor unions and grassroots activist groups, and with democratic participation from immigrant workers.
We must demand an end to deportations and all government attacks on immigrants. People who are concerned for basic civil liberties must fight for freedom of movement as a human right. A society without borders would be possible under working-class self-rule.
Photo: Protest for Salvadoran refugees outside the White House in 2018 (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)
Sources:
• “Temporary Protection, Enduring Contradiction: The Contested and Contradictory Meanings of Temporary Immigration Status,” Miranda Cady Hallett, Law & Social Inquiry 39, no. 3, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24545672.
• “Trump wants to end temporary protection for over a million immigrants. What does that mean?” Tim Sullivan, Associated Press, May 20, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-temporary-protected-status-parole-trump-8a1358964032129ba84f10aab071ba68
• “Fear, uncertainty as Trump administration ends TPS for several countries,” Shelby Bremer, NBC San Diego, July 18, 2025. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/trump-administration-ends-tps-for-several-countries/3871875/
• “How the United States Immigration System Works,” American Immigration Council, June 24, 2024. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/how-united-states-immigration-system-works-fact-sheet/
• “San Jose group’s clients sue Trump administration over $100,000 H-1B visa fee described as ‘extortion,’” Ethan Baron, The Mercury News, October 3, 2025. https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/10/03/san-jose-sue-trump-100000-h-1b-fee-extortion/
• “How to make immigration palatable in a populist age,” The Economist, October 22, 2025. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/10/22/how-to-make-immigration-palatable-in-a-populist-age
• “Anti-Blackness and the Criminalization of Immigrants,” Sarah Hamilton-Jiang, The Other Side of the Water: Immigration, and the Promise of Racial Justice podcast, October 6, 2020. https://www.jeanvnelson35.org/anti-blackness-and-the-criminalization-of-immigrants-part-one
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Workers’ Voice Newspaper: November – December Edition
New twists in the U.S. political situation present important challenges for working people. These questions are taken up in the Nov.-Dec. 2025 edition of Workers’ Voice newspaper:
A rotten ceasefire deal in Gaza is already broken. What do the new hostilities mean for Palestinians fighting for liberation in the Gaza Strip? The fight against ICE terror in our communities remains a priority in the fight to defend civil liberties. What is the meaning of the election of Zohran Mamdani in NYC? How will Trump’s anti-speech, anti-democratic repressive memo NSPM-7, to be used by the FBI and their shadowy Joint Terrorism Task Force, be implemented? Is the U.S. heading toward war with Venezuela and how should socialists respond?
Also in this issue read about the reactionary fantasy of the “tradwife,” the “Crisis in Farm Country,” and the fight to reinstate Dr. Tom Alter as a professor at Texas State University after being unjustly fired.
The November – December 2025 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy.
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Rosalía’s new album: A multilingual meditation on love, sacred and profane
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Rosalía’s Lux delivers gorgeous multilingual operatic pop intermingled with Catholic meditations on divinity and corporality, love and revenge
By CARLOS SAPIR
From start to finish, Lux, the latest album by Catalan singer Rosalía, flits from one operatic height to the next. Whether it’s the maximalist choir and string orchestra of the opening track, Sexo, Violencia y Llantas, and its pre-release single Berghain, the breezy pop heights of Reliquia, or the chromatic trap stylings of Porcelana, Rosalía is adept at effortlessly fusing musical genres into a beautiful, opulent tapestry.
In some ways, Lux is a return to form, much more similar to Rosalía’s first two albums, Los Ángeles and El mal querer, than it is to Motomami, her love letter to reggaeton. Despite the album’s sonic range, Lux largely eschews the Latin American beats that characterized Motomami. Meanwhile, the flamenco claps and vocal twirls that were the center of her sound on El mal querer are back, although their influence is somewhat more muted in comparison to the grandiose operatic solos, church choirs, and straightforwardly classical compositions that dominate Lux.
Themes of contradictions
Thematically, Rosalía’s meditations on divinity, profanity, love, and revenge are also similar to her first two albums, although this time around with more heavily pronounced Catholic overtones. From the album art, which depicts the singer in a nun’s habit and sporting the gold-painted lips and expression of a Roman statue, to song titles that reference religious relics, to the meditation on the first track “quién pudiera venir de esta tierra/y entrar en el cielo y volver a la tierra” (“who could come from this earth, and enter heaven and return to the earth”), to the direct affirmation on “De Madrugá” that “la cruz en el pecho calibra mi cuerpo” (“the cross on my chest steadies my body”) against the temptation of revenge.
This is not to say that the album is an effort to proselytize: Rosalía revels in the contradictions of love sacred and profane. On Berghain, named for the legendary gay Berlin nightclub, a German church choir that sounds like it just finished chanting Beethoven’s Ode to Joy announces a paean of communion, “Björk” declares in English that “the only way to save us is through divine intervention”, and then is harshly interrupted by Yves Tumor repeatedly shouting, “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me,” like a violent threat. Elsewhere, Rosalía expresses her need to hunt down her paramour as a divine imperative on the track titled “Dios es un stalker” (“God is a stalker”).
A linguistic melange
In addition to fearlessly mixing genres, Lux dashes across linguistic boundaries. While predominantly sung in Rosalía’s distinctly peninsular Spanish, inflected with Calé (Andalusian Roma) vocabulary, the album also has Rosalía sing verses and refrains in Catalan, English, German, Arabic, Ukrainian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese and Italian. In interviews, Rosalía expressed her ambition that she would have included “all the languages of the world” if she could have; at the end of the day, Rosalía is still human and the album fits in an economical 50 minute run time.
Rosalía’s linguistic range is unique and delightful, although ultimately her global scope feels more “world traveler” than “internationalist.” While some languages (Portuguese and Italian) get entire songs, and English is sprinkled throughout, other languages get shorter shrift. A chorus in Latin here, a word in Ukrainian there, Rosalía’s delivery of some of these lines is so quick and operatic that it can be hard to follow even if you understand the language in question and are actively listen for it. Rosalía’s six lines of Japanese poetry on “Porcelana” is a bit more complex than North West, shouting, “こんにちは私の名前はノースちゃん！カリフォルニア！から！東！京！イエス様王様” (“Hello, my name is North-chan! From! California! to To! Kyo! Lord Jesus Lord King!”) on FKA twigs’s “Childlike Things” earlier this year, but it still sounds a bit awkward.
Rosalía, despite her global inflections, does not address much in the way of global politics, although it is noteworthy that she reserves her deepest expressions of vengeance for Ukrainian on “De Madrugá,” with the chorus line “Я не шукаю помсту, помста шукає мене” (I do not look for revenge, revenge looks for me). Her use of Arabic for expressions of world-rending fealty is more obscure (من أجلك أدمر السماء، من أجلك أهدم الجحيم، فلا وعود ولا وعيد | “for you I would destroy the heavens, for you I would demolish hell, without promises or threats,” sung with an operatic delivery that is nigh-impossible to understand despite its musical euphony). Other pairings are more pat: “Berghain” gets German presumably because Berghain is in Germany.
Nevertheless, if the biggest criticism of an album is that its recording artist is not fully fluent in over 10 languages, that’s a pretty solid album. Rosalía should be celebrated for attempting what no other pop star of her stature has done in recent memory, if ever, even if her global scope is more catholic than it is internationalist. Moreover, in a global moment when imperialist powers are doubling down on chauvinist ideologies of national superiority, art that crosses borders and embraces other languages is all the more valuable.
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Mamdani wins strong victory in New York City
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By TONY STABILE
Zohran Mamdani, a DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) member and New York State assemblyman representing parts of Queens, has won the mayoral race in New York City. Mamdani received over one million votes, including big majorities in a number of working-class districts as well as in many liberal or “progressive” middle-class neighborhoods. His election demonstrates a groundswell of support for left political policies and may mark a new chapter for the internal politics of the Democratic Party. For the working class, his election strikes a hopeful yet ambivalent note.
Mamdani’s victory came in the midst of strong Democratic Party gains in many other areas of the country in the Nov. 4 election. Polls of voters in New York City, as in other places, showed that most saw the rising cost of living as the major issue that motivated their choice in the election. Many media commentators view the Democratic victories as an explicit rejection of President Trump’s policies.
Mamdani retreats from earlier policies
Mamdani entered the race for mayor as a practically unknown candidate. Polling at little over 1% in February of this year, Mamdani’s focus on everyday economic reforms and social media expertise quickly helped him into the limelight. While Cuomo and Adams remained mired in various baroque sexual and financial scandals, Mamdani outlined a social democratic vision for addressing issues such as the New York housing crisis, the high cost of childcare, underfunded public transportation, and inflated grocery prices.
Mamdani won the Democratic primary against significant odds. The Democratic Party establishment vigorously opposed his candidacy. Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries refused to endorse Mamdani in the primary, while New York Representatives Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi did not mince words about his politics. Gillen called Mamdani the “absolute wrong choice for New York,” and Suozzi pronounced his “serious concerns” about the assemblyman. That’s not to mention the tens of millions of dollars from top Democratic donors (including billionaire Michael Bloomberg) that went into the Cuomo Super PAC’s attempt to defeat Mamdani in the primary.
After attaining the Democratic Party nomination, Mamdani’s strategy in the general election saw a marked retreat from his bolder policy planks. Mamdani told Steven Colbert on the Late Show that he supported Israel’s right to exist, a sentiment he also conveyed to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in closed-door meetings. He has backed away from substantive criticism of the highly militarized NYPD, maintaining Jessica Tisch, billionaire heiress and NYPD Commissioner under Eric Adams, in her current position. Mamdani has also intimated in private meetings that he intends to compromise on his proposed “millionaire tax”—a staple policy of his primary campaign.
Crisis in the Democratic Party
After the disastrous 2024 presidential election, as well as two years of cowardly inaction in the face of Donald Trump’s assault on the civil rights of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and women, the Democratic Party found itself in a moment of crisis. What little support Democrats once had among the working-class, Black people, and Latino Americans was eroding by the day. Their bid to court affluent, college-educated voters had failed as well, as their pro-genocide and pro-austerity political program reached historic levels of unpopularity.
This month’s election victories might have injected a burst of enthusiasm into the veins of the Democratic Party. But how long will this bump in popularity last if the party and its elected officials fail to mount a solid counterforce to Trumpism? Or to capitalist exploitation in general? Neither Democrats nor Republicans can claim to represent the working class.
The current dispute over health care, which underlies the government shutdown, shows that the proposals of the Democrats remain tepid. The Democrats are satisfied to argue that insurance prices and subsidies should not skyrocket, but refuse to make the case for universal free health care as a basic right.
It remains to be seen whether Mamdani’s election will shift the Democratic Party’s tactics. However, any such changes are likely to be superficial. While the Democrats might decide to turn up the volume in their speeches about the plight of the poor and hungry, it remains highly doubtful that they will do much of anything to mobilize people in the streets, or to encourage people to organize themselves in popular assemblies and within their unions and community organizations.
Mamdani, for his part, is not quiet about his plan to revitalize the decrepit Democratic Party. On the campaign trail, to POC and immigrant residents of NYC who voted for Trump due to Democrats’ support for the genocide in Gaza, their hawkish foreign policy, and inflation, Mamdani told them he wanted to make the Democratic Party “work for them again.” And his rhetoric has gradually moved steadily to the right in alignment with this goal. Mamdani’s increasing dependence on the support of New York’s billionaires and DNC apparatus indicates that the politics of his administration will trail Democratic Party consensus, rather than lead it.
What does this mean for workers?
Since Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign in 2016, workers in the United States have witnessed a surge in supposedly anti-establishment Democratic campaigns. Sanders’ movement spawned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, in turn, inspired countless local, state, and federal candidates. It is rare to see a Democratic primary without a candidate of this “progressive” type. Meanwhile, despite this near-limitless supply of politicians professing anti-racist and pro-working-class policies, a growing and dangerous movement of right-wing populism persists in the U.S.
These “progressive” politicians who run as Democrats, despite their best intentions, are compelled by the demands of wealthy Democratic Party donors and the political pressure of high-ranking party officials to turn away from working-class interests at the cost of their political career. For instance, Ocasio-Cortez voted to break the railworkers’ strike in 2023, and Sanders campaigned strenuously to elect Biden, who unconditionally supported the genocide in Gaza with financial and military aid. More recently, Sanders has gone so far as to voice cautious support for Trump’s catastrophic immigration policies.
Mamdani’s election is a powerful sign of the popularity of left-wing policies. Still, workers do not need another politician who will compromise with bosses and landlords. The Democratic Party has produced these at a rapid clip for over a century.
In our nation’s largest city, working people and immigrants suffer under astronomical rents, police violence, and degrading infrastructure. Mamdani, who campaigned on alleviating these struggles, cuts backroom deals with the very capitalists, cops, and landlords who profit from them. As always, the task of working people and their allies is to create their own independent organizations and to fight the capitalist class directly, not to put their fate in the hands of yet another politician running in a capitalist party.
Photo: Richard Drew / AP
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Gaza ‘Ceasefire’: A Rotten Deal, Already Broken
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By JAMES MARKIN
Since Trump’s emissaries finalized the deal between Netanyahu and various Palestinian armed groups, the situation in Gaza has been contradictory and confusing. On the one hand, Palestinians celebrated as they were able to leave hated refugee camps and return to their homes. On the other hand, the killing has not stopped and Israel has used the opportunity to launch a bombing campaign against Lebanon.
From a diplomatic perspective, there are two parts to the current situation. The U.S. and European imperialist blocs spent the months leading up to the opening of the UN in New York to negotiate a shared vision for “peace” in Gaza. This is nothing less than a plan for full colonization under the rule of the imperialist hatchet-man Tony Blair. Then Trump strong armed Israel into accepting a “ceasefire” agreement with Hamas that required them to withdraw and allow food into Gaza in exchange for a bilateral prisoner release. This ceasefire deal does not contain some of the more objectionable parts of the overall “Peace Plan,” such as the disarmament of Hamas or the creation of an international authority to rule over Gaza in their stead.
Israel never fully implemented their part of the deal, continuing bombardments that are explicitly prohibited by the agreement and not releasing aid into the strip, another clear requirement of the agreement. Indeed, Israel has not opened the Rafah crossing, another violation.
By Oct. 18, eight days after the “ceasefire” had gone into effect, the Gaza Media Office recorded 47 separate Israeli violations of the deal. This included the murder of an entire family of 11 Gazans on Oct. 17, whose crime was to cross the “yellow line,” an imaginary line drawn by the Israeli military and not published, which marks the borders of its current area of operations. Over the weekend of Oct. 18, after clashes in Rafah led to the deaths of two Israeli soldiers, Israel announced that all humanitarian aid would be suspended and launched a series of brutal bombing attacks against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. At least 40 people were killed, according to the Gaza health ministry.
On Oct. 28, in a single night, at least 104 Gazans were slaughtered in a wave of Israeli bomb attacks. By Nov. 3, the death toll in Gaza since the “ceasefire” was agreed to had reached at least 236. Killings by the IDF are especially bad along the “yellow line.”
While Trump’s longer Peace Plan calls for the IDF to ultimately withdraw to the borders of the Gaza Strip (minus a buffer zone), history suggests that the IDF might insist on remaining within this yellow line, essentially leaving half of the Gaza Strip under direct Israeli occupation. These fears have only become more real over the past few weeks as the IDF has begun to install yellow concrete markers showing where they believe the boundary to be.
While Hamas and its allied forces have still not agreed to the full Trump plan, they agreed on Oct. 14 to allow a “temporary Palestinian committee” of independent technocrats to run the portions of the Gaza strip that Israel does not directly control. During the recent visits by Trump and Vance to Israel, they announced the formation of the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a U.S.-run international army command based in Israel. The plan is that the international force that is to occupy Gaza will be commanded by the CMC.
The specifics of how exactly the planned “disarmament” of Hamas by the international armed force will go is still unclear. However, it is clear that the ultimate aim of this policy is to turn Gaza into essentially a U.S. colony, under occupation by this U.S.-led international force. It is clear that if this comes to pass then the U.S. will have done what Israel could not do: eliminate armed resistance in the Gaza strip.
This is why the U.S. wants to keep the ceasefire deal alive: Both in order to maintain prestige for Donald Trump but also to enable the implementation of the plan for the international takeover of Gaza. The question remains whether Trump will maintain the pressure on Netanyahu that allowed the deal to be announced in the first place.
It is clear that Israel will not keep the letter of the deal either way. But major questions remain about the degree to which Israel actually intends to withdraw from the strip. It is clear that Israel has taken a beating diplomatically over the last year, and that the public attitude toward the Zionist regime amongst the working public of the country’s imperialist patrons is at an all time low. It is possible that they will try to only hold to the parts of the deal which benefit them, as they successfully did when it came to previous peace talks in the West Bank, large sections of which have now been de facto annexed. Whether their genocidal war will ultimately end up being a victory or a defeat will be determined by the terms agreed to at the end of this new negotiation process between the U.S., Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, other armed groups, and the state of Israel.
We have already seen the impact of the heroic wave of strikes carried out by the Italian workers as part of the “Blocchiamo Tutto” (Block Everything) movement against Italian support for Israel. Ultimately, workers need to keep up the pressure on the imperialist governments that rule over them through mass demonstrations, and where possible, strikes like in Italy.
Photo: Mahmoud Isleem / Anadolu
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How to fight ICE
By VALENTINA SALGADO
In recent weeks, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Portland, Chicago, and other urban centers have been targeted by immigration raids, backed by federal troops mobilized under the pretext of fighting crime. The violent operation in Chicago on Sept. 8 demonstrated that neither the laws, nor the courts, nor the Constitution will prevent Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime from intensifying its attacks on immigrants, workers, youth, and the oppressed.
That morning, hundreds of ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and National Guard troops, under Operation Midway Blitz (a clear reference to the lethal Nazi blitzkrieg in World War II) descended from Black Hawk helicopters onto buildings in the working-class neighborhood of Southshore, breaking down doors and smashing windows, assaulting residents with tear gas and stun grenades, zip-tying terrified children, and firing rubber bullets indiscriminately. To date, Midway Blitz has detained more than 3,000 immigrants whom the government labels as “criminals” and even several citizens.
Similar scenarios are repeated in urban centers that are “sanctuaries” for immigrants and where there is opposition to Trump’s policies, in addition to “routine” raids throughout the country. According to the DHS (Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE), so far this year, 548,000 people have been deported. Most them had no criminal record and were flown away without any legal process, while another 60,000 people remain in detention centers surviving in inhumane conditions. All of this is possible thanks to the dramatic increase in the budget and recruitment for ICE and CBP; more than $85 billion this year (for comparison, Guatemala’s total annual budget is $19 billion) for more weapons, biometric software, detention centers, and tens of thousands of new agents recruited from the dregs of society.
Immigrant communities have not stood idly by in the face of this brutal escalation. They have generally responded in two ways—by forming Rapid Response Networks (RRNs) and by lobbying for legislation in municipalities and states to prohibit local police and public agencies from collaborating with ICE, using a model such as the Immigrant Trust Acts that are in effect in several states. RRNs offer Know Your Rights workshops in communities, churches, schools, and workplaces, maintain emergency hotlines for when ICE shows up, and dispatch patrols of activists who try to discourage the agents, documenting their behavior and advising those affected.
This RRN model has spread throughout the country thanks to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) such as NDLON (National Day Laborer Organizing Network), Resistencia en Acción NJ, Movimiento Cosecha, Raíces, Mijente, Sagrado Corazón, Amigos de Guadalupe, El Concilio, and many more, which currently lead the immigrant movement. RRNs attract hundreds of activists, natives and immigrants, promoting solidarity and the capacity to fight back. However, the results of these efforts are uneven: Sometimes, RRNs manage to prevent detentions and empower immigrant families by showing them support. But as small, mobile teams with changing compositions, they do not constitute a constant or numerous presence in the neighborhoods, and therefore can hardly contribute to the self-organization and defensive mobilization of these communities.
The second strategy employed by NGOs, which involves lobbying Democratic politicians and pressuring city councils and legislatures to pass measures that protect immigrants by preventing collaboration between local agencies and ICE, has served to rally and mobilize activists, as has RRN. We should celebrate this. At the same time, what good is a law, whatever it may be, that lacks the mechanisms or resources for its enforcement? Who will compel the police and local government agencies to refuse to collaborate with ICE? And, given their shared repressive nature and ideologies, won’t the police and immigration authorities covertly align themselves when the time comes?
But the fundamental problem with this strategy is that it limits itself to asking for “protection,” on the one hand, and on the other hand, it asks for it from politicians and institutions that can never represent our interests because they belong to the parties of the rich, the Democrats and Republicans.
Wouldn’t it be better to redirect those huge efforts to mobilize people to council and legislative meetings, and the time and resources spent lobbying those people for a limited goal of “protection,” toward building a mass movement with our class comrades, the workers born here? Working people in this movement could bring in their unions if they have them; students, as well as Palestine solidarity activists, would also be included. Such a movement could be powerful enough to force the government into granting papers for all, and even obtain the abolition of ICE and the repressive agencies that attack all of us who are fighting for a better world.
To this end, the challenge facing the immigrant movement is the development of its own leaders, capable of proposing a political program, strategies, and tactics to win full rights for all. This is difficult to achieve when the leadership of the immigrant movement, including the RRNs, is in the hands of NGOs. First, because, although these organizations often arise from sincere activists within the communities themselves, many depend on donations and subsidies from agencies and foundations that prevent them from truly confronting the capitalist system that creates the inequality and exploitation in the first place, even while being critical of it.
And second, because in general, NGOs are not internally democratic. They are governed by boards of directors that are not elected by the community, and they transmit this mode of operation to the movement, thus hindering its political development and capacity to lead the formation of united fronts with other social sectors to fight for all our needs.
No matter how well-intentioned their leaders may be, NGOs will never be able to prepare us to face militarized operations involving dozens of heavily armed ICE and other repressive agents who will attack our communities and workplaces more and more as they get more funding for weapons and recruit more personnel. The NGO formula of RRNs and lobbying, and acts of individual heroism in civil disobedience arrests will not only be insufficient, but will prevent us from forming a unified mass movement that, starting with immigrants, also mobilizes unions and other workers’ organizations to democratically decide our political goals and tactics so we can first stop government aggression and then win full rights for all.
So, wouldn’t it be important for us to call for large assemblies in our immigrant communities to discuss in depth and vote democratically what we want, how we want to organize to achieve this, with whom, and who our leaders will be? It is there that we can discuss and vote on whether we are content to ask for “protection” for immigrants or whether we would rather fight together for the right to citizenship for all. We will energetically support anyone who wants to bring this about.
Photo: San Francisco protest on Oct. 13. (Marina Newman / Mission Local)
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FBI directed to prosecute and disrupt ‘anti-capitalist & anti-Christian’ groups
By ERWIN FREED
National Security Policy Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) makes explicit the anti-speech, anti-democratic, anti-worker mood of the big billionaires and their political puppets. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was shamelessly used by his political allies and so-called friends to give “rationale” to a document that criminalizes the vast majority of U.S. residents’ political, cultural, and social beliefs.
Released Sept. 25, NSPM-7 directs the FBI’s shadowy “Joint Terrorism Task Force” (JTTF) units to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” that can be indicated by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
As journalist Ken Klippenstein has pointed out since breaking the story (reprinted in Truthout, Sept. 29, 2025), mainstream news and Democratic Party politicians have been extremely slow and hesitating in first noticing and then speaking against NSPM-7. In one of the first and only mainstream investigations into these developments, Reuters journalists identified nine liberal organizations specifically targeted by the White House. These included Soros’s Open Society Foundations— ActBlue, Indivisible, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). Even in that otherwise sober article, the authors do not reference NSPM-7 by name.
Statements by many high-level GOP and MAGA spokespeople show that they are attempting to shape a political narrative that rationalizes strict control of liberal organizations. Notably, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, called Oct. 18 No Kings Day demonstrations “Hate America rallies” and characterized attendees as “anarchists, Antifa advocates, [and] pro-Hamas.” The latter characterization has a double effect. On the one hand these statements obscure the fact that being anarchist, an Antifa advocate, or pro-Hamas is not illegal. On the other, by framing No Kings Day in this way, the far right is pressuring liberal organizations like Indivisible to draw a hard line between themselves and people who hold more left-wing views. The administration is hoping that instead of rallying against repression, middle-class Democratic Party activists will begin to engage in red baiting or at least look the other way.
National Security Policy Memorandums have a long history in the bipartisan construction of mass surveillance and militarized political policing. Similar memos and legal opinions, often completely secret, gave the green light for NSA surveillance of virtually all phone and internet use in the United States. By putting this one out publicly, the Trump administration is making clear to all real and imagined opponents of its hyper-reactionary, pro-austerity, and anti-labor program that they are objects of police harassment, infiltration, and disruption.
Under Trump, the FBI, ICE, and other federal agencies are openly working to implement and rationalize the measures laid out in the right-wing Project 2025 document that laid out perspectives for Trump’s presidency. The ruling class has staffed all important offices with supporters of the “unitary executive,” while arranging mass surveillance, and cutting whatever welfare programs and workers’ protection that remains. In order to push through these incredibly unpopular and destructive policies, capital is mobilizing the state to repress the working class and youth and terrorize entire cities under the guise of “deporting illegals” and “fighting crime.”
The basic justifications for surveillance and anti-democratic policing are baked into U.S. ruling-class propaganda, including the media and education system. Combatting “anarchism” and “communism” has been the justification for red squad tactics for as long as there have been police in this country. Creating the myth of “violent extremists” threatening an imaginary “capitalist order” papers over the everyday violence of poverty, underdevelopment, and racist policing felt by working class communities, particularly women and Queer, Black, immigrant, Indigenous, and disabled people within those communities.
The U.S. ruling class feels compelled to use such naked forms of political repression and official corruption because the country is facing imperial decline. Profitability was on the decline well before even the COVID pandemic, and the United States is unable to compete with China in many sectors and places internationally. Domestically, big capital is attempting to give itself additional space for accumulation by drastically slashing the public sector, attempting to restart a version of the Braceros program, and put every union in the country on the defensive.
In order to push through these drastic changes, the ruling class is trying to intimidate people against protesting and to lay down more “national security” infrastructure. NSPM-7 is one part of a long history of the so-called global war on terror. That same “war” is what produced ICE and developed all of the technologies of social control currently being used by the Trump administration.
While the attacks are very real, so are the possibilities of building public and broad opposition to them. No Kings Day on Oct. 18 was one of the largest single days of action in U.S. history. Cities that directly faced military occupation turned out hundreds of thousands of people. ICE is facing daily opposition everywhere in the country.
The basic methods and tactics of building this opposition are not new to the U.S. working class. Ernest DeMaio, head of the United Electrical Workers Midwest District 11, headquartered in Chicago, gave one such example from his own life during the height of McCarthyism: “The big scare was in 1952 in Chicago. On September 2, we struck the International Harvester chain. That’s the day I was called by HUAC. The strike was set for midnight. At nine a.m., I’m in the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some three thousand of our guys took off from the picket line, surrounded the courthouse, and, as I was being sworn, stormed the courthouse, singing…”
Building a labor movement that responds to attacks from the state with mass mobilization has the possibility of creating the self-organization and independence necessary to win real political demands. This means keeping track of, exposing, and organizing against every attempt to further limit the democratic rights of the working class.
Photo: Protest in Minneapolis in 2010 against FBI raid on antiwar groups. (Craig Lassig / AP)
