Site icon Workers' Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores

Home

  • Workers’ Voice newspaper: March-April edition

    Workers’ Voice newspaper: March-April edition

    The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is a major escalation in the Middle East that has dangerous implications for working people everywhere. The brutality of the imperialist assault internationally is paired with the attack on civil liberties by the Trump regime inside the U.S. This includes the continued operations of ICE and Border Patrol, the threats to the 2026 mid-term elections, environmental rollbacks that deeply impact the Black community, and unchecked police brutality.

    Our editorial in this issue warns us: “There is a great danger of underestimating the determination of the U.S. corporate elite to drive through this effort. We cannot rely on court rulings or upcoming elections to save us. We must organize now, not only for mass demonstrations and community networks against ICE violence, but to find our way to building a new working-class party through which we can organize our political defense on every plane and on every day.”

    In this issue we also have articles on the Epstein files and the ruling class, the San Francisco teachers’ strike, and a review of the new album by U2.

    The March–April 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:

  • No borders, no binaries!

    By RIO NERO

    During the 2024 election cycle, immigrants and transgender people became the primary targets of a scapegoat campaign that was launched by the Republican Party and deepened by the Democrats, which now has borne fruit in the form of a slew of executive actions. As of March 26, both transgender people and immigrants had endured attacks from above in the form of 101 2 executive actions respectively, intending to force transgender people out of public life and to lay the groundwork for mass deportations of immigrants.

    Transgender people in the U.S. are facing the rollback of discrimination protections, the loss of funding for federal health programs oriented towards trans people, exclusion from athletics programs and public restrooms in federal and educational facilities, and specific attacks on trans youth—including the prohibition of educational material on gender and sexuality in schools up to the college level—a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth, and, through the slogan “parental rights,” a policy of outing trans youth to their parents 3, which would force millions of trans youth into potentially dangerous situations.

    Immigrants in the U.S. are experiencing a new proliferation of harassment, intimidation, and kidnapping by ICE agents, while the Trump administration is currently enacting plans to expand detention facilities, including the recently passed Laken Riley Act, a $26.9 billion plan to ramp up capacity at immigrant detention centers. The government of Mexico anticipated the fallout from this plan of mass deportation and is currently setting up shelters for deported migrants in Nogales, Mexico, along the Arizona border.4

    While the struggles for transgender and immigrant rights may initially appear disconnected, the two are more acquainted than one might think. The first and most obvious connection is that transgender people and immigrants are not separate groups—according to a January 2024 study by the Williams institute, 13% of all trans people in the U.S. are immigrants. Apart from this, immigrants—especially undocumented immigrants— and transgender people share a similar sense of vulnerability and economic precarity.

    On Jan. 20, 2025, the Trump administration passed “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” an executive order that legally erased transgender people from federal documentation. The text of the order is designed to force transgender people’s identification documents, such as passports and driver’s licenses, to correspond to the gender signifier that is on their birth certificate.

    The issuing of this executive action wreaked havoc on transgender peoples’ freedom of movement. Passports submitted for renewal were instead confiscated, and in at least one case, returned in a destroyed condition. 5 Individuals who chose the now invalid X gender marker may not be able to use their passport at all.

    This experience of un-documentation is a marked overlap with the experience of undocumented immigrants, whose freedom of movement is administratively bound by a lack of government-issued identification documents. Both groups are increasingly ostracized from participation in public and economic life, facing challenges finding employment in an already crushingly competitive job market.6

    Over half of immigrants 7 and 82% of transgender people 8 report workplace and employment discrimination, with undocumented immigrants more or less locked out of legal employment, forcing both groups into disproportionate involvement in highly exploitative under-the-table arrangements without legal protection. In their own ways, both groups find themselves toe-to-toe with accepted societal and cultural norms in the U.S, and as a result must rely on small communities of others like themselves in order to share resources and support in a hostile societal environment.

    Immigrants and transgender people are both highly marginalized populations that are primarily working class. For the purposes of this article, “working class” refers not to level of income, but to people who must sell their labor, usually in the form of waged labor, to survive. In a capitalist economic system, it pays to keep workers separated into distinct groups that can be pitted against each other. This serves to keep labor costs down for capitalists looking to hire, and the blame for problems endemic to a capitalist system pinned on vulnerable workers, rather than on the capitalist class, which seeks to indefinitely prolong an economic system that primarily serves to generate profit rather than to meet people’s needs.

    During the last election cycle, Donald Trump campaigned in part on the slogan “Kamala is for they/them, not you.” 9 This exemplifies the phenomenon of misplaced blame; in this case, Trump points to a transgender “other” and implies that this marginal group bears interests counter to “yours,” whoever you may be, and wields the loyalty of a powerful political edifice—the Democratic Party.

    In response, the Democrats evaded the issue of transgender people, mentioning this vulnerable population only to distance their party from support of transgender rights with statements that implicitly fed into anti-trans rhetoric, such as Biden’s statement in summer of 2024 that the Democratic administration “opposes surgery for transgender minors,” 10 evoking the QAnon-adjacent boogieman of forced gender reassignment surgery for children at the behest of “transgender groomers” and so-called “Marxist politicians,” such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The slogan “Kamala is for they/them, not you” is currently regarded as a wildly successful 11 political maneuver that shifted the presidential race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor, and lowered public acceptance of transgender people by 3-4 percentage points. Unfortunately, scapegoating works.

    If the Trump campaign had one finger pointed at transgender people, they had the other pointed at immigrants—and so did the Democratic Party. While the Republican Party employed campaign ads that toted racist lines such as “Stop the caravan. Vote Republican,” 12 the Democratic Party competed for an even harsher immigration stance. In a campaign ad simply titled “Tougher,” Harris promises to hire thousands more border patrol agents to crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking, placing the responsibility for these social ills squarely on the backs of immigrants. 13

    This bipartisan onslaught against immigrants has resulted in a 14 percentage point increase in the number of U.S. adults who want to see immigration decreased; in 2023, 41% desired a decrease in the immigrant population, and in July 2024, this number had increased to 55%. 14 While rhetoric around drugs and crime certainly appealed to rural and suburban populaces, this predatory attack also fed off of American workers’ concerns about unemployment due to employer’s preference for the cheapest possible labor, which is to be found amongst undocumented immigrants who have no choice but to take on highly exploitative contracts.

    Regardless of their immigration status or other demographic particularities, all workers share the same interests in terms of higher wages, low rents, access to health care, more leisure time, and better working conditions, but all of these interests are diametrically opposed to those of capitalists and landlords who make their millions off the backs of working people. High wages would result in smaller profits for the capitalists, who purchase the labor power of workers, and low rents would invariably put a dent in the passive profits of landowners who demand their tithe for shelter. When the living conditions of working people are poor, capitalist political parties keep the common social and economic interests of all workers unrealized by ensuring that workers keep hostility circulating endlessly within their own class. So long as marginalized groups like immigrants and transgender people have to answer for systemic poverty and violence, the capitalist perpetrators of these social problems may thrive undisturbed.

    In a broader sense, immigrants and transgender people, alongside cis-gender women, share a common region in the capitalist economic landscape: the reproduction of the labor force. Women, and gender minorities that share the physical capability, literally replenish the labor force by giving birth to future workers. Immigrants expand the labor force by increasing the U.S. population through migration and participation in the U.S. economy, whether that’s through legal employment or the cheapest labor of them all—slavery. The vast majority of people who are victims of sex and labor trafficking are immigrants, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans would have you believe. 15

    The relationship of transgender people to reproductive labor is slightly more abstract. The far right imagines that transgender people threaten what they view as the ideal system of social reproduction under capitalism: the nuclear family. Most effective, the right believes, is the once normative setup of two adults, one tasked with economic pursuits and the other tasked with birthing and raising the next generation of workers, business owners, and traditional wives. This sex-deterministic model is ideologically wrapped in a backwards, patriarchal worldview in which embodiment of “God-ordained” gender roles is crucial to living a good, respectable life. On a purely ideological level, transgender people are fundamentally threatening to these sex-deterministic beliefs, because if it is true that the gendered social roles and behaviors that individuals fulfill and enact are not biologically determined, and it is true that gendered biology can be altered, these oppressive, patriarchal gender roles must be of a purely social, and therefore malleable, character.  While “God’s Truth” may be immortal, social constructs certainly are not.

    The liberal wing of the capitalist class is more than capable of employing meaningless, progressive lip-service towards oppressed groups like transgender people. However, liberal political support will always leave the roots of a given oppression intact, because capitalist class rule relies on subjugation. Patriarchal oppression is both the foundation of transgender oppression and an entrenched element of capitalist society, used to ensure replenishment of the global working class at the lowest cost and to maintain the family legacies of capitalists. For this reason, meaningful political support toward transgender people is nothing short of a political liability to the most liberal of capitalists.

    In our current era, which may very well be the dawn of U.S. fascism, the declining neoliberal capitalist wing apparently finds even lip service towards transgender people to be a liability. Meanwhile, the dominating capitalist right is ideologically fixated on “bringing back” the American dream, largely through legally exterminating those it deems degenerates, and transgender people more than fit the bill. The nuclear family is a core tenant of the American dream, after all.However, this sex-deterministic family model, even if it were desirable, is far out of reach for the majority of today’s workers.

    The rate of population growth in the U.S. is on the decline. This is related to high costs of living paired with low wages, keeping the vast majority of the youthful population of the U.S. living from paycheck to paycheck, spending vast amounts of their income on rent, and unable to save enough money to buy a permanent home or otherwise plan for the future. The number of 25-34 year olds who own their own home has dropped from 50% to 27% in two generations. 16 This simply is not a conducive economic environment to raising a family.

    In the golden age of liberal capitalism, problems of stabilizing the capitalist economy and reproducing the workforce were solved through welfare. Franklin D. Roosevelt is synonymous with the idea of social welfare and reform in the U.S., having championed the “New Deal,” which reinvigorated the depressed American economy by alleviating conditions of poverty among the U.S. working class—conditions that could have otherwise proven to be revolutionary. But welfare is not a profitable venture, and the dismantling of welfare apparatuses in the 1980s has left low-income workers with nowhere to turn to in the present.

    Currently, about half of U.S. workers make less than $33,000 per year.  Today’s capitalist state answers problems of labor force decline with a far more cost-effective solution: Ban abortions, ban no-fault divorce, force transgender and LGBTQ people into the closet, and keep immigration highly restricted or illegal, ensuring that those immigrants have no rights and are working at little to zero cost to their employers (or prison wardens and labor traffickers). These factors combined are designed to force a struggling working class to reproduce beyond its means.

    This situation will not be alleviated without the pressure of a mass movement. We cannot depend on political parties that are happy to paint our respective communities as “groomers” and “invaders” if it means swinging an election in their favor. The Trump administration agrees that immigrants and transgender people have much in common—enough so to run its presidential campaign on our collective backs.

    If we are united, our forces will be significantly more capable than they are while we are separate and disorganized. We should connect our communities, build broad collaborative actions, and broaden our base of support and collective power, independently of the capitalist political parties that are incapable of keeping our best interests at heart.

    All political struggles are won collectively. The civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the movement for gay rights all were prescient examples of movements that took great strides in securing political rights. It is clear that the victories of past struggles are in no means indefinitely secured, and if we want to keep the victories of struggles past, we ought to take the lessons of the past to heart, fight along the proven lines, and advance the rights and living conditions of our collective community.

    Photo: Transgender Law Center

    ,

  • ‘The Encampments’: A timely film for the Palestine movement

    By LENA WANG

    “The Encampments” (directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, 2025) documents the surge of Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and beyond in the spring of 2024. The film faithfully captures the political mindset, resolve, and self-sacrifice of the Columbia student organizations protesting for their school to divest from Israel. While timely, informative, and emotionally moving, however, the film ultimately prioritizes the symbolic actions of the morally conscious few over the organization of the masses.

    It is true that the Columbia encampment—and the spectacle of its repression—sparked a remarkable wave of protests using similar tactics across college campuses. Some of the film’s strongest moments depict the hypocrisy, callousness, and Zionist sympathies of  Columbia University administrators, who regularly justified their unflagging support for Israel under the guise of “defending Jewish students’ safety.” Notably, it was this kind of rhetoric that then-University President Minouche Shafik used when she called upon the NYPD to brutalize and arrest student protesters, many of whom were themselves Jewish.

    However, since the filmmakers were embedded in student organizations at Columbia, they created a misleading picture of Columbia students as the vanguard, rather than a wing, of the movement—a perspective that sidelines the role of working-class and community organization. For instance, there is very little reference to the massive rallies and marches against the genocide prior to spring 2024, or the decades of Palestine solidarity work that came before.

    As it makes protagonists out of Ivy League students and heroic spectacles out of footage of their arrests, the film erases the primacy of the working-class struggle. It pays no attention to the local forces in the New York City community that so quickly mobilized huge defensive rallies and resources for the Columbia students. It ignores the kind of work done by the many organizations that have been mobilizing alongside student activists; one is Labor for Palestine, a group built in 2004 to push working-class solidarity with Palestine, which opposes Israel through BDS resolutions in union locals.

    The film attempts to historicize the encampments in another way: by interspersing the students’ acts of civil disobedience in 2024 with footage of antiwar student protests from 1968. A current Columbia student shares his takeaways from the history of the civil rights movement, alleging that you need to be prepared to be beaten and gassed to fight for the causes you believe in. But the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements weren’t inspiring because they were repressed, but because they mobilized millions in the working class and oppressed nationalities, and won.

    Following the ICE kidnapping of one of the film’s interviewees, the Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the producers decided to speed up the film’s release. The urgency was due to a sense of duty to inform the public about Khalil and his role as the encampment’s negotiator with the university administration. The film notes the news of Khalil’s arrest in its closing cards, and ends on its ultimately shortsighted thesis—“instead of defeating the movement for Palestine, repression has reignited it.”

    This idea has been manifested in many encampments and occupations nationwide, that is, where activists engage in direct actions that purposefully instigate repression. Proponents of such ultra-left tactics, including many chapters of the Palestinian Youth Movement and Students for Justice in Palestine, often use two lines of reasoning—first, that “escalating” their “disruptive” actions will “put pressure” on institutions to heed their demands, and second, that their heroic sacrifices will reveal the barbarity of the administration and the state, therefore inspiring others into action. We saw this logic present when organizers of the encampment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst declared “victory” after being raided by the police, leading to over 130 arrests of activists and bystanders.

    As Peter Camejo described in the pamphlet “Liberalism, Ultraleftism or Mass Action” (an abridged transcript of his 1970 speech to the Young Socialist Alliance), many ultra-leftists often believe that the ruling class will “listen” to activists if they’re rowdy enough. Their actions, as attempts “to affect the moral conscience of the ruling class,” still hold the liberal assumption that the ruling class has a moral conscience at all. More anarchistic ultra-leftists intend that their small actions will “escalate” into larger ones over time. But rather than sparking a mass revolution, direct action activists often find themselves isolated, burnt out, or jailed after a wave of repression. The working class will not be mobilized spontaneously by “the propaganda of the deed” but by a strategy of independent mass action.

    To quote Camejo again, “We’re not interested in moving 20 or 200 or several hundred community organizers to engage in some sort of civil disobedience, window trashing, or whatever. We say that is a dead end, because it doesn’t relate to the power that can stop the war—the masses. You can’t ask the 15 million trade unionists to sit in at a congressman’s office. There just isn’t enough room. Of course, the ultralefts know that 15 million workers aren’t going to do that, so that call is clearly not aimed at involving workers.”

    To be clear, we do not oppose encampment as a tactic. Workers’ Voice members have participated in encampments—and especially those more oriented towards mass action. Notably, at San Francisco State University, the Students for Gaza were able to leverage the power of their student and faculty unions to beat back repression and used the camp space as a hub to organize mass rallies. Within two weeks, through open bargaining—as opposed to the negotiations behind closed doors that occurred on many other campuses—they forced the administration to commit to divestment.

    As we reach the one-year anniversary of the encampments, the film has been screened across college campuses as outdoor and building occupations have cropped up again, though they have been even more short-lived this year than last, and have led to immediate police repression. Rather than catering to our own morale with stories of heroism, we must reflect on the victories and failures of our tactics. As civil rights are under attack in the U.S., and Gaza continues to burn, we must focus our energy on reaching the broadest possible layers of the masses to form a united front to demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel and an end to deportations. The students alone cannot defeat the U.S.-Israeli war machine, let alone a small band of student radicals; only a united working class has the power to truly “shut it down.”

    “The Encampments” is a timely and relevant film for today’s Palestine movement, albeit a flawed one. We recommend that our readers screen the film in their communities, share how it reflects or departs from their recent experiences on the ground, and discuss how to strategize in the movement going forward.

    Photo: Makhmud Khalil speaks at Columbia University (a scene in the film “The Encampments”).

    , , ,

  • Free the children! End the starvation and genocide!

    By Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) |

    May 25, 2025 — International Children’s Day is June 1 in Ukraine, Russia, and 47 other countries. This Children’s Day, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls for the freedom and return of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has kidnapped and for ending the mass starvation of millions of children in Palestine, Sudan, and other sites of widespread child hunger such as Haiti, South Sudan, and Mali.

    • Kremlin documents dated a week before the full scale invasion on Feb. 18, 2022, detail plans to abduct Ukrainian children and bring them to Russia under the guise of
      “humanitarian evacuations.”
    • Ukraine has verified Russia’s deportation of 19,456 children to date, but Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab places the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.
    • Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, are under indictment by the International Criminal Court for abducting children.
    • Russia says it “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023.
    • Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has documented 43 Russian children’s camps housing deported children: at least 32 are explicitly for “re-education.” Ukrainian children are indoctrinated, punished for Ukrainian language and culture and forced to participate in “military-patriotic” training courses.
    • Abducted teenage Ukrainian boys forced to accept Russian citizenship face conscription into the Russian army to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
    • Trump has cut funding for a program that tracks abducted Ukrainian children, and DOGE may have permanently deleted a database with crucial information.
    • A negotiated outcome to the war on terms other than Ukraine’s will result in an irreversible loss of Ukraine’s children and its future and irreversible harm to the children.

    Russia’s war against the children of Ukraine joins the war against Palestinian children being conducted by the Zionist regime of Israel, with the full support of the Trump regime in the USA, as a ghastly crime against children and humanity.

    Gaza

    • As of this writing, every child in Gaza is severely undernourished and facing imminent death by starvation due to Israel’s having prohibited entry of food, water, and other necessities into Gaza.
    • According to the UN, at least 100 children have been killed or injured every day in Gaza since Israeli strikes resumed on March 18, even as the United States underscores continued support for Israel.
    • From October 2023 to Palestine Children’s Day on April 5, the Palestinian Ministry of Education on Saturday said more than 17,000 children had been killed in Gaza, about 1,100 children had been detained by the Israeli army, and about 39,000 others had lost one or both parents.
    • Israel detained 1,200 Palestinian children from the occupied West Bank in the same period.
    • More than 9,500 Palestinians, including women and over 350 children, are currently held in Israeli prisons under harsh conditions.
    • Since October 2023, around 1.9 million people — including thousands of children — have gone through repeated forced displacement amid bombardment, fear, and loss according
      to UNRWA.
    • Israel has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians and wounded 118,366 in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children. Thousands of others missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
    • The atrocities that Palestinian children have undergone since October 2023 are but a continuation of decades of deprivation and attacks by Israel.

    Sudan

    Sadly, the horrific civil war in Sudan may have even deadlier results than either Russia’s war against Ukraine or Israel’s war against Palestine.

    • Sudan is becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history as the ongoing protracted famine puts hundreds of thousands at imminent risk of death.
    • 24.6 million people are acutely food insecure and 638,000 face catastrophic levels of
      hunger.
    • Over 1 in 3 children face acute malnutrition.
    • 12.5 million people have been forced from their homes.
    • The World Food Program (WFP) is supporting over 3 million Sudanese people each
      month, but the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid will cause radical cuts in this
      aid. WFP spent $9.8 billion on aid last year, and nearly half of the funds were contributed
      by the U.S. This year, it’s facing a projected 40% reduction in funding.

    Israel must immediately end its blockade and its war on Palestine!

    All US medical and food aid for children and others in Sudan and everywhere else must be immediately restored!

    The Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on the US government and the international community to insist that Russia adhere to international law and return Ukrainian children to Ukraine and to sanction Israel diplomatically, economically, and militarily until its food blockade of Gaza is lifted. We also call on the US government to restore its funding to the World Food Program to feed hungry children in Sudan and other famine areas.

    We call on the United States and European nations to cease providing weapons and other help to Israel’s war on Palestinian children and adults and send military aid to Ukraine for its self-defense.

    Photo: Ombudsman of Ukraine and 11 children who were returned from Russia on Feb. 20, 2024. (Lubinets/X)

    , , ,

  • Turkiye: After the March 19 political coup

    By ESAT ERDOĞAN – Kirmizi Gazete

    Since 2016, Turkiye has been ruled by a new Bonapartist regime in which all powers are concentrated in the executive palace, with rule by appointed trustees without separation of powers. Erdoğan is the undisputed Bonaparte of this regime as a leader who has even “liquidated” his own party. A capitalist oligarchy dominated by the energy, arms and construction sectors is clustered around the palace. This weak and distorted regime is sustained by the pressure of the judiciary and security bureaucracy on all sections of the struggle.

    Under the impact of numerous political, economic, and regional crises, Erdoğan Bonaparte has long lost his popularity and credibility among the people. As a result of this loss of power, he lost the 2024 mayoral elections against the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). The municipalities of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, Antalya, Bursa, and other cities where money and social amenities are concentrated passed to the opposition.

    Enraged by the shocking electoral defeat, Erdoğan’s palace regime began to develop tactics to forcibly take back the municipalities won by the opposition and to set up an election that it could not lose. The first of these tactics was to forcibly intimidate the opposition and the municipalities they govern with the cudgel of the judiciary loyal to the palace, rendering them impotent. The second was to split the third largest party in the country, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), and the Kurds who vote for it, away from the opposition bloc. The regime has long used repression against the Kurds, and now it is continuing the process by calling it “peace.” Thirdly, the regime has started to attack the capitalists and religious sects that have distanced themselves from Erdoğan.

    The Palace attacks the opposition with the judiciary and security bureaucracy

    The Palace has been appointing trustees to DEM Party-run municipalities for many years and has held the prominent Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş in prison for nine years as a political hostage for no legal reason. The regime also unlawfully imprisoned prominent figures of the Gezi uprising (2014). Lawyer Can Atalay, deputy of the Workers’ Party of Turkiye (TİP), businessman Osman Kavala, film producer Cigdem Mater, architect Tayfun Kahraman, and others have been unjustly imprisoned for years without any legal basis. Ümit Ozdag, the leader of the right-wing Victory Party, which has an anti-Erdoğan political line, is also a prisoner of the regime. Ozdag has been declared an enemy by the regime, especially because of their ability to rally nationalist votes. It should be added that the heads of TUSIAD, Turkiye’s largest business organization, have also been harshly detained for their criticism of the course of events in the country.

    This wave of arrests, trusteeships and security state operations reached a new phase with the arrest of the mayors of large municipalities run by the CHP and the appointment of trustees to their municipalities. The grounds for arrest were sometimes alliances with the legal Kurdish party and sometimes corruption. The cases were weak, the documents insufficient, but the arrests continued. Shortly afterwards, the Palace negotiated a “peace” with the Kurds of Turkiye and a disarmament of the PKK.

    On March 19, the Palace upped the ante by having Erdoğan’s main rival, Istanbul mayor Imamoğlu, arrested. However, something he did not expect happened: the university youth crossed the barricades and did not listen to the Palace’s warnings. Lit by the spark of the university students, mass mobilizations began. For the first time, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) joined the street protests of the masses.

    The 2nd month of the coup left behind

    The mass mobilizations that started with the political coup of March 19 have emerged from their 2nd month. The wave of resistance led by university students continues, albeit at a slower pace. However, despite all the dynamism of the mass movement led by the student youth, socialists, and the CHP, which is the primary victim of the issue, the palace regime of Erdoğan Bonaparte has not yet been dissolved. Although the regime could not appoint a trustee in Istanbul, it paralyzed the municipality with five waves of arrests. Detentions, arrests and forced confessions continue. Images of torture and harassment have become commonplace during protests. Early morning raids against socialists and revolutionary youth leading the protests have become continuous.

    The May Day raids were undoubtedly one of the most widespread. Journalists and the independent press are hamstrung by fines and physical threats. Thousands of people were detained and hundreds were arrested. Imamoğlu’s lawyers were detained, and not only that, lawsuits were filed against the lawyers’ lawyers. The legal dissolution of the CHP is still on the Palace’s agenda. Freedom of protest, which is a constitutional right, is prevented by arbitrary bans. Young people are suspended from school.

    The Palace is trying to buy time until the summer by creating debates to change the agenda in parallel with its attacks. The Minister of Health started a debate over the definition of “family.” The Minister of National Education reopened the headscarf debate and tried to pit the religious against the secular. The debate regarding the use of C-sections in childbirth was brought to the agenda. On the one hand, there is the peace process with the Kurds. On the other hand, there are crackdowns on sects that do not support Erdoğan. There are discussions that put the principle of secularism into question.

    The Palace does not hide that it wants to ensure the absolute power of the right. It would not be wrong to say that it has somehow managed to unite its masses. In a process leading to elections, it is certain that they will attempt to ensure that the order remains unchanged, by force and fraud if necessary. However, they can neither hide the destruction of the economic crisis nor the lawlessness of the political coup. Further, Erdoğan has been given the power to dismiss any officer he wants from the army with a simple decree. Meanwhile, despite all their shows of strength, they are becoming more economically and politically dependent on imperialism. They are regressing from being the playmaker in Syria to the subcontractor of U.S. imperialism and the Gulf oligarchies.

    Although Erdoğan’s partner, the MHP, objects from time to time, the coalition has not yet cracked. U.S. imperialism constantly reiterates its support for Erdoğan. There are no clear signs of a rupture in the forces within the regime either. The most obvious crack appears within the capitalist bloc. However, the detentions, arrests, and threats against the bosses who support Imamoğlu intimidate the other wing of the bourgeoisie.

    It is possible to liken this situation to the dynamic experienced by Belarus. Similarly, the protests against electoral fraud, demands for freedom, and youth protests slowed down at first because the labor movement did not actively participate in the struggle, the state bureaucracy did not crack, and the support of Russian imperialism remained strong. Then the regime took the initiative and suppressed the opposition with a wave of arrests and violence.

    It would not be wrong to say that Turkiye is experiencing a similar situation. The difference is that Turkiye has a democracy, albeit a distorted one, and a well-established and resilient opposition culture. Left forces are actively on the streets. Although the prisons are full, there is no widespread fear in the mass movement. It would not be wrong to describe the situation as a stalemate.

    In summary, although the mass movement maintains its morale, the regime continues its stubborn repression in order to increase despair. The wall of fear has been breached, but there is still a pause. Erdoğan’s political coup has been slowed down a bit, but it has not stopped yet. The mass movement is angry, brave but retreating. Exams have started at universities. Schools will close. Summer vacation is coming.

    Possibilities in the struggle

    University and high school youth are on the streets after many years. After the 1980 military coup, it would not be wrong to say that these are the most massive student protests. Their creative actions often bring them face to face with the security forces. However, the harsh wave of arrests, disproportionate violence, and expulsions by the state are slowing down the movement. There is no centralized political leadership, even though they coordinate among themselves. Young people want to live freely without fear of the future. They hate Erdoğan and the Palace; they advocate for the release of Imamoğlu. And of course, they want to live freely without interference in their way of life. We need more coordination to unite the student movement and a program of action that directly targets the regime.

    The Kurds, another dynamic force in the country, have retreated organizationally with the newly started peace process. Although they officially express their opposition to the arrests and trustees, in practice they are cautious both because of the right-wing extremists participating in the protests and because they are afraid of disrupting the peace process.

    The labor movement is silent in the face of the political coup. There are struggles against unemployment, the rising cost of living, and deteriorating working conditions. But they are not yet widespread. The regime is preventing the labor movement from taking to the streets, sometimes by compromise, sometimes by force. There are workplaces where the regime forces the bosses to reach an agreement with the workers. Bought union bureaucrats also serve the regime. Unions with an orientation towards struggle are under threat of arrest.

    The regime is on edge despite its strength from the security bureaucracy. The economy has gotten worse after Imamoğlu’s arrest. With its room for maneuver shrinking, it is relieved to have the support of the U.S., EU, and Russian imperialisms, but it is unclear whether it will be able to secure its spoils in the fight for division in Ukraine and Syria. At the very least he hopes to win construction contracts.

    As a result, the regime has entered an irreversible path and is ready to commit all sorts of evil to keep its power. The majority of the people, especially the youth, hate it. This makes the Palace even more aggressive. But this is not enough to bring it down. A wave of strikes to accompany the youth actions is what would break up all the coalitions in the Palace. This is the direction things are going in; the fire is heating up in the industrial zones. Even if the summer vacation is Erdoğan’s hope, if the expected worker raises do not come in July, a wave of struggle that will shake the palace may come from the grassroots.

    The Erdoğan regime is shaking but it will not fall easily. The mass movement needs a patient, persistent struggle. It needs a united class-based political leadership and an action program independent of the CHP. It is necessary to focus discussions and struggles on building this alternative.

    Photo: Protest in late March following the arrest of Imamoğlu. (Osan Kose/ AFP / Getty)

    , ,

  • URGENT APPEAL: Release Ukrainian left-wing prisoners!

    For the release of left-wing activists and defenders of Mariupol,

    DENIS MATSOLA and VLADISLAV ZHURAVLEV

    For more than three years, the Ukrainian prisoners of war who participated in the heroic defense of Mariupol, Denis Matsola and Vladislav Zhuravlev, have been held in Russian captivity.

    Both are not only marines of the 501st Battalion, but also well-known left-wing activists who have spent years consistently fighting for human rights, social justice, and against all forms of authoritarianism, from Putin to the Ukrainian oligarchic regime.

    Denis Matsola is a publicist, political scientist, human rights activist, and former member of the independent left-wing student union “Direct Action” and the organization “Social Movement.” In Crimea, he defended the environment, supported the Crimean Tatar resistance movement, and, after the occupation, assisted the Ukrainian army. Working in Kyiv and Lviv, he participated in the evacuation of civilians, documented war crimes, and published analyses.

    Denis voluntarily joined the army in 2021, convinced that defending Ukraine is also a fight for the future of social justice and freedom.

    Vladislav “Iskra” Zhuravlev is an anarchist, artist, and volunteer. Before the war, he was active in grassroots cultural and social initiatives, spoke out against political repression in Crimea, and publicly supported autonomy, solidarity, and self-government. Since 2017, he served in a marine battalion, which he later invited Denis to.

    Today, both are in Russian captivity in inhumane conditions. Zhuravlev is being held in complete isolation, without communication with the outside world, and Matsola has been held in solitary confinement for over two years, where he is deliberately being starved. There is confirmed information about torture, as a result of which his health has severely deteriorated. Their lives are under direct threat.

    This case clearly demonstrates that those captured by the Russian regime are not “neo-Nazis,” as claimed by the Kremlin and Stalinist propaganda, but rather representatives of the people: workers, soldiers, activists of various persuasions, including leftists, socialists, and anarchists.

    It is precisely this ideological and social diversity of the Ukrainian resistance that testifies to its truly democratic and popular character. The Kremlin is not fighting an ideology, but rather the will to defend freedom itself.

    *****

    We URGENTLY call on the Ukrainian authorities:

    Denis Matsola and Vladislav Zhuravlev must be immediately included on the priority lists for exchange and everything possible must be done to secure their release;

    We urge international human rights organizations, governments of democratic countries, and left-wing and anti-authoritarian movements around the world to demand an end to torture, a guarantee of the basic rights of prisoners of war, and to use all political and media mechanisms to pressure the Russian Federation.

    We call on progressive social and political organizations to support the publicity campaign to inform the public and denounce these conditions. Because silence is no longer an option.

    Denis and Vladislav are the faces of the resistance who  fight for the country’s freedom and a more just social future. Their release is our common responsibility.

    *****

    In Ukraine, the General Coordination Command for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, established under the responsibility of the Office of the President of Ukraine, handles issues of prisoner exchange.

    It includes representatives from the Ministry of Defense, the Main Intelligence Directorate, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Supreme Rada.

    This headquarters coordinates all stages of preparation and implementation of exchanges, including list formation, logistics, and interaction with international organizations. See their website: https://koordshtab.gov.ua/ Email: koord@gur.gov.ua

    , ,
    ,

  • Trump, the Gulf monarchs, and genocide in Palestine

    By M.A. Al GHARIB

    U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Middle East astonished many observers in sidelining Israel. Trump agreed to a captive release deal with Hamas, an end to the hostilities with Yemen’s Ansar Allah (often known as the Houthi movement), a restart to nuclear program talks with Iran and a start to talks with the new Syrian leadership, along with  massive trade and military deals with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in the presence of the titans of the U.S. bourgeoisie—all without Israeli involvement.

    Does this mean that the U.S. is “abandoning” Israel? No. Zionist colonialism still plays an important role in snuffing out the embers of any progressive challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. However, with a more assertive Arab Gulf on the back of a rising China and an intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry, the calculations of U.S. and western imperialism must recalibrate important aspects to the “special relationship” with Israel.

    This does not by itself mean that Palestinian liberation is any closer. Neither the Gulf nor Europe, and least of all the U.S., care about this. However, almost two years into the Israeli genocide against Gaza and escalating land-grabs in the West Bank, anti-Zionist movements face an Israeli regime that is more vulnerable than ever.

    The Houthis bring U.S. imperialism to heel

    The first thing to mention is that, as we discussed in a previous article, the Houthis have presented ferocious resistance to the U.S.-Israeli axis. Since then, it has become clear that the U.S. bombing campaign has not become a resounding victory for them. According to Houthi leaders, it was the U.S. who reached to them to end hostilities, with the U.S. side even dispensing with the demand that the Houthis stop their military campaign in support of Gaza.

    As reported on Electronic Intifada, the Houthis subjected two U.S. aircraft carriers to daily bombardment and, since Oct. 7, 2023, had downed nearly 30 reaper drones. The defense campaign mounted by the armed group also received support from mass protests in Yemen against the U.S. bombardments, which were targeting civilians for the most part.

    Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abu Nima pointed out that Trump ignored Israel on his trip earlier in the month to the Middle East, which shows that the U.S. can pursue its own interests when it sees them at odds with those of Israel. In the background of the Houthi deal are both Iran and Palestine.

    Israel has been trying for decades to drag the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran. However, it seems that even Trump and his retinue recognize that a bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic would set off a war and that, as the right-wing TV commentator Tucker Carlson has put it, would be “America’s war.” Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, admitted last month that there is a pathway to a civil, peaceful nuclear program if Iran wants it. In this, he was echoing Trump, who emphasized that the only thing Iran can’t have is a bomb (implying that Iran doesn’t have to dismantle its entire nuclear program). In short, the U.S. has been signaling to Israel that it will not fight this war for them. Shortly prior to these statements, a Houthi bomb landed near Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

    The U.S. isolation of Netanyahu has been repeated across major Western capitals, from Madrid to Paris to London and even Berlin, all of whom now see Israel as an obstruction to the business deals they want to conclude with the Gulf and the wider Global South. This realization cannot be disconnected from the emerging “multipolar” sphere of international politics in which China and Russia are on the ascendant. Across the West—which it should always be mentioned, has mostly supported the Israeli genocide—a Netanyahu-led Israel increasingly appears to be an irrational actor and a threat to business stability.

    Escalating genocide in Palestine

    However, none of this means that the U.S. is “abandoning Israel.” There was some speculation that the Houthi success and the desire to avoid war with Iran would incentivize Trump to pressure Netanyahu to end the slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. There is no evidence of this at the time of writing. Indeed—and it is almost inconceivable to say this, so gargantuan have been the Israeli crimes in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023—the past month we have seen an even more horrific escalation in the Israeli annihilation campaign.

    Aside from a brief mention during his Gulf trip of the suffering of Gazans, Trump has proceeded as usual, turning a blind eye to the monstrosity of the Israeli campaign, which has even provoked unusually sharp criticism from Zionism’s most enthusiastic European supporters.

    However, this has been a change in tone rather than substance. As Mouin Rabbani recently explained, Europe continues to fully support Israel in terms of weapons, intelligence, and logistics. Adding insult to injury is the pathetic attempt by the U.S. and Israel to (sort of) pretend that they will deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. In reality, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is meant to circumvent (the already problematic but important) UN aid regime. For Zionist-colonialism and its U.S. patron, it fulfills instead two important functions. It is a windfall for contractors, a “human-rights-washing” venture, to subject Gazans to Israeli and mercenary surveillance; and it allows the mass murder and starvation to continue unabated. Even the GHF’s head, Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine veteran, quickly saw through the thin fog of deceit behind this sham and, by May 27, had quit.

    Meanwhile, the situation in the West Bank continues to worsen after months of ongoing IDF bombings and raids along with settler pogroms. As the journalist Ben Ehrenreich recently reported in a devastating article, the situation all across the West Bank is so bleak that even activists with years of experience in the nonviolent movement are now either giving up hope or seeing armed resistance as their only option. The latter seems especially true of the youth. This is not out of any hope that armed resistance will bring liberation but more as a means of survival. Others, young men especially, seem resigned to a fate in which they will inevitably die under IDF-settler attacks. If they’re going to die anyway, the logic goes, they might as well go down fighting. Moreover, with IDF and settler violence the worst that it’s ever been (see Tulkarem and Jenin refugee camps, now in ruins), West Bank Palestinians see Gaza as their future too.

    Role of the Arab Gulf monarchies

    Liberal-bourgeois commentators have framed the recent meetings between Trump and the leaders of the Gulf states—particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—through the idea of “corruption.” Indeed, corporate heads who prostrate themselves to Trump will undeniably reap massive profits from the Trump-GCC axis. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, agreed a deal for Starlink to provide internet to Saudi-based  companies and is on the verge of doing so for Emirates Airlines, while Musk’s Neuralink, which manufactures implantable brain chips, is in discussions with the Abu Dhabi health service. VY Capital, a Dubai-based firm, backs at least five of Musk’s projects. Musk is only one of dozens of executives from the largest U.S. companies, prominently featuring tech and banking, who accompanied Trump to the Gulf. This is on top of the $600 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, one of the largest in history.

    However, to focus on the personalities of the principals—the “corrupt” Trump and the princes, etc.—is misleading. It is to miss the role of the Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, in propping up U.S. imperialism. As the Marxist geographer Adam Hanieh has shown, Gulf petrodollars have played two all-important roles since the period of oil nationalization in the early 1970s: giving the U.S. access to cheap foreign capital and reinforcing dollar dominance. In return, the U.S. folded the Gulf states into their Cold War security architecture, and the monarchies have generally played the role of reliable clients. Indeed, they have been as important as Israel has been to the U.S. agenda of ensuring regional stability, smashing progressive movements along with potential challengers to U.S. hegemony in Western Asia and the Indian Ocean.

    With China now consolidating its position as the main US antagonist, the Gulf states represent a far more important arena of inter-imperialist rivalry. The Gulf states, as Hanieh discusses, control around $800 billion in foreign reserves, higher than those of India, and their sovereign wealth funds are valued at almost $5 trillion. Indeed, according to a very solid analysis in Jacobin, to the U.S., the economic and political benefits of the alliance with the Gulf offer far more advantages than those with Israel.

    As the inter-imperialist rivalry heats up, the Gulf region becomes even more central to imperialist calculations, and with this, “Israel is going to wield less strategic utility for the United States, who have no vital interests in the volatility intertwined with the Netanyahu era, such as a war with Iran. … The United States also prefers a reconfiguration that can protect its financial and long-term strategic interests, having accepted that endless military interventions in the Middle East prove deleterious.”

    Conclusion

    The U.S. and the wider West’s tensions with Netanyahu do not mean that they, or their Gulf counterparts, care about Palestine and Palestinians. Indeed, the role of the Gulf monarchies vis-a-vis Palestinian liberation has been similar to their approach to other Arab popular and progressive movements—at best, a managerial role, at worst a bulwark of reaction. This might explain why the devastation in Gaza and the West Bank goes on with mind-boggling monstrosity. The Gulf regimes, like their U.S. patrons and their European counterparts, care about business, not human rights, and least of all proletarian liberation.

    This means, more than ever, that disrupting and dismantling the Zionist colonial state will come from Palestinian steadfastness combined with external pressure. This has been the BDS strategy since its emerged in the mid-aughts. It has meant local Palestinian actors’ deploying the moral justness of Palestinian liberation to give confidence to international solidarity movements. These movements maintained their principled stand against their governments’ complicity and silence on the genocide. External pressure carried by a democratically organized, bottom-up mass movement, led by the working class, and not the misguided adventurism of individual terrorism, is more than ever the path forward.

    • For a free, secular, and socialist Palestine!

    • For a proletarian mass movement to dismantle Zionism and colonialism!

    Photo: Trump meets with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Royal Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 13. (Alex Brandon / AP)

    , , , , , ,

  • A wave of strikes and protests rocks Panama

    {:en}

    By LENA SOUZA

    Workers, youth, and popular and Indigenous groups in Panama are spearheading an escalating wave of social protests in response to reforms proposed by José Raúl Mulino’s government. Roadblocks, demonstrations, and strikes are increasing throughout the country, centered on defeating Law 462, which reforms social security.

    The demands also include rejecting the Panamanian government’s agreements with the United States regarding the Panama Canal and the surrender of the country’s sovereignty. Additionally, they oppose the proposal to reopen the copper mine in Donoso-Colón, which closed after large demonstrations in 2023.

    Protests against the pension reform, which had been ongoing for several months, became more radical after Feb. 12, 2025. On that date, thousands of Panamanians took to the streets to protest the government’s proposed changes to the pension system. They were violently suppressed after workers, led by Suntracs (the Union of Construction and Related Industry Workers), blocked one of the capital’s main avenues. Police used tear gas on protesters and arrested around 500 people, leaving at least 16 injured.

    May 1 also saw widespread mobilization, with protests in several cities across the country. Currently, construction, teaching, and banana workers, who have been protesting since April, have been joined by health professionals and popular and indigenous movements in forming a front of resistance to current government policies [3].

    Government repression has not intimidated the resistance

    Since April 23, teachers have been on an indefinite strike against pension reform. The Panamanian Teachers’ Association (Asoprof) denounces Law 462 for compromising the right to retirement and deepening the precariousness of education.

    Despite the salary cuts announced by the Ministry of Education on May 12, the movement remains strong. “We will continue despite the intimidation,” said Fernando Ábrego, leader of Asoprof. Construction workers, who have been on strike since the beginning of the year, have also denounced a government campaign of criminalization, which includes freezing their accounts and imprisoning their members.

    At a meeting of the sectors involved in the struggle on Sunday, May 11, the union’s secretary general called on workers to remain united, firm, and disciplined until Law 462 is repealed. Banana workers organized in Sitraibana (the Union of Workers in the Banana Industry, Agricultural Companies, and Similar Industries) have also been on strike for three weeks in the province of Bocas del Toro.

    Nurses from the National Association of Nurses of Panama (ANEP) announced a gradual strike starting May 19. Indigenous peoples, through the National Coordinating Committee, announced their support for the national strike beginning May 12. In addition to the strikes, activists in several provinces, including Veraguas, Chiriquí, and Bocas del Toro, have maintained permanent blockades, demonstrating the strength of the mobilization.

    All of these groups are showing their rejection of the government’s measures and their support for workers and students, who have organized marches and demonstrations to express their opposition to Law 462 and demand its repeal.

    Pension reform is an attack on rights

    Passed in March 2025, Law 462 is seen as a gift to financial capital. It raises the retirement age and paves the way for the privatization of social security. Estimates indicate that pensions could be reduced by up to 30%. All of this was accomplished through a rushed and undemocratic legislative process.

    Organizations fighting against the law argue that it “masks” the increase in the retirement age and undermines social security by implementing an individual account model. They demand the repeal of the law and a return to a system based on solidarity and defined benefits.

    Submission to imperialism and environmental plunder

    The neoliberal offensive of the Mulino government is also evident in its desire to reopen the Cobre Panamá mine, which is operated by the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals. This desire is evident even after the large demonstrations in 2023 that forced the Supreme Court to close the mine and revoke the contract. Resuming the project would be a direct attack on the environment and the rights of communities.

    This is also a struggle for the country’s sovereignty. In April 2025, Mulino signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States granting U.S. troops access to Panamanian air and naval facilities. This reignites the debate on Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal and the role of imperialism in the region. This topic is explored in Alejandro Iturbe’s article “The U.S. wants to regain its ‘backyard.’” (Also see: “It’s Panama’s Canal” by Carlos Sapir on this website.)

    Who is José Raúl Mulino?

    Mulino took office as president of Panama on July 1, 2024, after winning the election and replacing Ricardo Martinelli, who was disqualified from running due to corruption convictions. To understand Mulino, it is important to know Martinelli’s history of corruption.

    Martinelli was Panama’s president from 2009 to 2014 and has a long history of accusations and prosecutions for corruption and abuse of power. After the Supreme Court of Panama issued an arrest warrant for Martinelli in 2015, accusing him of illegal espionage and embezzlement of public funds, he fled to the United States. He was arrested there in 2017 and spent a year in prison before being extradited to Panama in June 2018 to face the charges.

    In August 2019, Martinelli was acquitted of espionage and embezzlement charges related to the “Pinchazos” case, resulting in his release from house arrest.

    In July 2023, he was sentenced to 10 years and eight months in prison and fined $19 million for money laundering in the “New Business” case. After the Panamanian Supreme Court upheld the sentence in February 2024, Martinelli sought asylum at the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama City, alleging political persecution. At the time of writing, Colombia has granted Martinelli political asylum, and the Panamanian government has authorized his transfer to Bogotá.

    Mulino, the newly elected president, has a history of repressing popular protests, including violent actions against strikes and demonstrations, during his tenure as security minister in Martinelli’s government.

    Despite the corruption scandals involving Martinelli, Mulino’s election is an expression of the capitalist economic crisis. It highlights the distortion represented by bourgeois democracy, which ideologically manipulates workers and the poor, making them believe they are making decisions while keeping the representatives of the rich in power.

    Mulino’s election demonstrates the continuity of authoritarian and repressive policies against social and union movements, consolidating a government aligned with the interests of economic elites and imperialism.

    This situation reinforces the need to build a socialist alternative representing the interests of the working class and confronting the power structures established by the capitalist system.

    Support the Panamanian struggle!

    The rebellion in Panama is not only against a law but also against a system that commodifies social rights, hands over national sovereignty to imperialism, and represses those who fight back. The working class, youth, and people of Panama are setting an example of courage, unity, and willingness to fight.

    We call on all working-class organizations and the international left to express solidarity with the struggle in Panama. It should serve as an inspiration for all of Latin America.

    Sources:

    [1] Follow the example of the struggle in Panama — International Workers League.

    [2] Massive Protest in Panama Against Pension Reform: The Executive Seeks to Raise the Retirement Age, Página 12.

    [3] Popular sectors in Panama to continue strike against insurance law — Prensa Latina News

    [4] Popular sectors in Panama to continue strike against insurance law — Prensa Latina News

    [5] “The United States Wants to Regain Its ‘Backyard’” — International Workers League

    [6] Former Panamanian president convicted of corruption granted asylum in Colombia

    [7] Colombia Grants Political Asylum to Former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli

    , ,

  • Palestine needs mass action, not lone wolves

    {:en}

    By CARLOS SAPIR

    On May 21, two staffers employed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., were shot dead while leaving a pro-Israel professional networking event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. A suspect, Elias Rodríguez of Chicago, was arrested at the scene. Less than a week later, U.S. officials announced that they had apprehended a U.S. citizen, Joseph Neumayer, who had allegedly plotted to firebomb the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.

    How do we understand these incidents, and what is the path forward for the movement in solidarity with Palestine in these circumstances?

    Jumping to predictable conclusions

    The Trump administration wasted no time in denouncing the shooting in Washington as antisemitic terrorism. This claim was echoed in the big-business media—such as The New York Times. Zionist hawks went on to call for repression of pro-Palestine demonstrations. Simultaneously, they cast blame on the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the ANSWER coalition, left organizations that the suspect reportedly had brief contact with almost a decade ago.

    The immediate impact of the assassinations is clear: it provides a basis for increased repressive measures against Palestine solidarity activists. Never mind that there is zero indication that the attack was motivated by hatred towards Jews, rather than the clearly expressed outrage against the horrific massacres committed by the Israeli state, or that the deaths of two Israeli government staffers are a rounding error compared to the tens of thousands of Palestinians already killed by Israel’s unrelenting sieges of Gaza and the West Bank and its indiscriminate bombing campaigns in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

    The PSL and ANSWER, which have organized countless Palestine solidarity actions, including repeated marches on Washington, now have to contend with accusations of inciting or even committing terrorism, which could obstruct their organizing efforts.

    Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who published the suspected shooter’s manifesto, has faced direct intimidation from the FBI, and it is probable that any other individual or group with a public profile linked to the suspect will be facing similar or greater pressure from the feds.

    The attacks on Israeli and U.S. embassies accelerate an already existing process of demonization and criminalization of pro-Palestinian speech and political activity. These are immediate drawbacks that have already been incurred. So what is left of the political direction charted by these vigilantes?

    Reading the manifesto

    The purported shooter’s manifesto is a short document. It lucidly identifies its motivation as a response to the state violence committed by Israel with the direct support of the United States. It notes that this violence has existed for decades, but that the U.S. public’s awareness of its scope and unconscionable nature has only recently shifted. But despite noting a pattern of impunity between the butchers of Gaza and those who carried out similar violence in the genocide of the Mayan people in Guatemala or during the Vietnam War, it is silent on the political framework that has played accomplice to these crimes. “Imperialism” and “empire” do not appear in the manifesto, nor does “capitalism.”

    The manifesto likens its author to the would-be assassin of Robert McNamara in 1972 on a boat off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, several years after McNamara had stepped down from his role as Secretary of Defense and butcher of Vietnam. The value of this action, according to both the 1972 assailant and the 2025 shooter, was to simply show McNamara that “his history wasn’t so fine, was it?” when cornered man to man. After surviving his encounter, McNamara would proceed to spend his next nine years continuing to abet imperialism in his capacity as the president of the World Bank Group, followed by a comfortably luxurious life as a trustee of various big-name U.S. institutions before dying peacefully at home in 2009.

    The shooter’s manifesto further theorizes its action to be an “armed demonstration,” a next step after “peaceful demonstration” has supposedly failed. It sees the intent of mass protest as simply a way to muster public opinion in view of politicians who then are expected to act on it, rather than a way to amass forces among the working-class public to mobilize their economic power against the war machine.

    It echoes the rhetoric of the Weather Underground in its insistence that it is necessary to “bring the war home” and to “escalate,” while the state’s only goal is to stop this from happening and to convince the public that this is not an effective strategy. This, regrettably, is a fatal misunderstanding of the aims of the capitalist state, the methods it has employed for decades of “counter-terrorism” activity, and the strategies that actually help opponents to build power.

    “Counter”-terrorism and the war brought home

    It’s worth noting that the scattered bomb attacks perpetrated by the Weather Underground did not play a pivotal role in ending the Vietnam War. Nor did similar tactics adopted by like-minded “urban guerrilla” groups in Europe win any significant victories against imperialism despite endless rounds of “escalation” by groups that became more and more insular. Historical evidence suggests, in addition, that the forces of the state are actually on much stronger footing when dissidents resort to terrorist tactics, and in fact have spent significant resources to explicitly push left and Muslim individuals and groups toward more violent confrontations with the state in order to better isolate and repress them.

    We now know that during the Cold War, the state forces of the U.S. and Britain adopted a “strategy of tension” in Italy, forming neofascist terrorist cells while also clandestinely encouraging terrorism by left-wing cells in order to discredit the Italian Communist Party and Italian Socialist Party and prevent them from entering government. While there were also sincere leftists who advocated armed actions during this period, it is significant that the forces of imperialism did not see left-wing terrorism as a threat, but rather as an opportunity. The result is today remembered as the “Years of Lead” (“Anni di Piombo,” late 1960s to early 1980s) in Italy, which experienced a contraction of popular political organization and an overall weakening of the left.

    Meanwhile, stateside, it was FBI informants like Richard Aoki who encouraged the Black Panther Party to adopt a posture of armed confrontations with the police, ultimately leading to the arrest of its leadership and the destruction of the organization.

    While the 21st century archives of the FBI and CIA have yet to be revealed, it is evident that the FBI adopted a similar strategy as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” The partial records already obtained by researchers and  activists suggest that state agencies have engaged in a campaign of infiltration and entrapment of would-be radicals, steering them toward ill-planned terror plots that end with the duped perpetrator’s arrest.

    No evidence has appeared at this time demonstrating government involvement in these recent attacks. Nevertheless, it has consistently been the case that the state apparatus sees dissident violence as an opportunity to benefit from. The circumstances of the attacks, meanwhile, further underline that they did not include much consideration for even the immediate and obvious consequences of their actions.

    Media reports suggest that the D.C. shooting suspect effectively turned himself in following the shooting, telling staffers at the nearby Jewish Museum to call the police. In Tel Aviv, the would-be bomber inexplicably spat on a guard at the embassy before sprinting away, leaving behind a backpack full of Molotov cocktails—seemingly the only evidence at the time that would have tied him to any more serious criminal activity—before returning to his hotel, where he was soon apprehended by Israeli police. This erratic behavior does not suggest that these individuals arrived with a clear plan and strategy, but rather that, in the face of the immense suffering inflicted by Israeli forces against Palestine, with U.S. support, they fell prey to the idea of committing half-baked felonies with little thought of what would happen afterward (or in the Tel Aviv case, even before it).

    Escalator ahead, exit left

    As we face a government that openly fantasizes about the prospect of deploying the military to quell domestic protests, that in fact says that the country is already actively experiencing an “invasion” by immigrants and thereby justifies the use of wartime laws and the removal of all civil liberties, it should be abundantly clear that the state wishes for nothing more than “to bring the war home,” and to use the said “war” as an excuse for more and more heavy-handed repression. While it is true that the just desserts of war have on several occasions led to successful revolutions, these transformations did not occur thanks to a handful of terrorists “bringing the war home” by bombing state or civilian infrastructure: Whether we look at the Russian Revolution, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the defeat of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, or elsewhere, we see not the actions of a few arsonists and assassins but rather the role of mass mobilizations of a broad populace dissatisfied with war, occupation, and its results.

    The impulse to “escalate” is understandable in the face of a genocide and the intransigence of the U.S. government despite people’s outrage. After having marched and called your congressperson to no avail, what else is there left to do? The mistake in the logic of escalation is to see resistance as a fundamentally individualist task: I marched and I called my congressperson and nothing happened; therefore I must now pick up the gun because that’s the only way I get to weigh in on who lives and who dies. Even if that “I” of one were to be replaced with a group of a few dozen, or even hundreds of dedicated activists, it falls far short of the masses that can and must be won over to win political change. It misses the understanding that political work for popular struggles is a question of mass mobilization and collective action: the marches in the past few years have been large and impressive mobilizations that have only just begun the task of setting people into motion.

    We carry the legacies of successful struggles that were fought and won in part because they recognized that individualist terrorism and assassinations are a dead end. We cannot allow ourselves to look at a crowd of 10,000 or even 100,000 and say, “this is the extent of people who are willing to stand up for Palestine.” These rallies are but stepping stones to mobilizations of millions, which include the full weight of labor unions as well as yet unorganized workers who bring these political questions into their workplaces, and in doing so wield real political power, and not just the barrel of one gun.

    Drawing: The accused shooter, Elias Rodríguez (seated at left), at his arraignment in court. (Reuters)

    , ,
    ,

  • We need planned production to stop plastic pollution!

    By B. COOPER

    Plastic pollution is one of the major environmental problems we face on Earth today and will be a challenge for generations to come. Plastic pollution is pervasive in our environment and our bodies. Forbes, a mouthpiece of big business, recognizes the threat, and Food & Water Watch lists microplastics on its top five threats to safe drinking water.

    All major industrial nations make plastic. The main inputs for plastic production are a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, making its production cheap for fossil fuel economies. Due to its cheapness and versatility, corporations use plastics for virtually all packaging, and in almost all consumer products. The profit motive crowds out any concern for sustainability or public health considerations, prioritizing cheap and convenient over safe or durable. In short, because of capitalism we live in a highly dangerous situation.

    The only certain way to stop plastic pollution and begin the process of cleaning the planet is to stop plastic production at the source. This requires a planned economy where all plastic producers, recycling companies, and adjacent industries are nationalized under workers’ control. Working people can decide how to manage a just transition away from plastics, fossil fuels, and war without undermining needs such as health care and transportation, and we can do so better than the billionaires. We must make rational decisions soon about how and where plastics should be used, or else we will sleepwalk into tragedy.

    The scope of the problem

    Plastic garbage exists in huge refuse piles all over the planet, including the well-known Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a 1.6 million square kilometer area of the ocean where tiny particles of trash are collected by ocean currents and float “decomposing” in the water. Of course, this is not the only place plastic pollution collects; there are countless landfills and “natural” refuse zones all over Earth. There are also uncounted instances of plastic being burned.

    Much of this plastic pollution has broken down into unseen microplastics, defined as pieces that are smaller than a fingernail, but can be as small as five nanometers in size. For comparison, 0.1 millimeters is still 100,000 times longer than one nanometer. These microplastics have accumulated in the human body by eating polluted fish, drinking polluted water, breathing polluted air, and by skin contact with plastics. It has been found in rivers, oceans, soil, crops, etc.

    Microplastics are pervasive in the extreme. You, dear reader, have plastic in your body. Research has found that everyone consumes the equivalent of a credit card each week by ingesting, breathing, and touching plastics. You did not need to drink brown-looking water or eat credit cards to get it there. Microplastics don’t just come from landfills, as any plastic we drink, cook, build, or play with can shed these particles. Testing has revealed microplastics in most human tissues, including the human brain, which has been found to be in higher concentrations for those with a dementia diagnosis. Other health effects potentially include hormone problems, fetal complications, and heart disease.

    Listing all sources of microplastics is out of our scope here but it is worth mentioning polyester, nylon, and latex clothing, which contribute a substantial amount of microplastics to the water each time they are washed. Corporations produce more and more polyester-based clothes due to their cheapness. Cosmetics and cigarette butts are also substantial sources of microplastics. While virtually all drinking water is contaminated to a degree, bottled water has higher concentrations of microplastics, as do all drinks bottled in plastic.

    Plastics and nature

    Plastics are not biodegradable like paper and are less stable than most metals. Therefore, when plastics “decompose” all they are really doing is breaking into smaller, and ever smaller, pieces. This has led to the total infiltration of microplastics into the human body and the ecosystem.

    Plastics are made from hydrocarbons extracted from refining crude oil. In chemistry they are called monomers (single molecules) and are bound together in strings of molecules called polymers. Different polymers can be used to make different plastics. Life on Earth did not evolve to use these polymers and hence they are not biodegradable. They are suspected to take over 500 years to disappear if not longer. As a result, the continued production of plastics by humans leads only to an ever greater amount of space, originally for biology, being taken up by inert plastic matter… microbes in our bodies as well as microbes in the soil cannot metabolize it.

    But can’t plastics be recycled?

    Some 91 percent of all plastic ever made was not recycled. It remains in landfills, the ocean, or in unseen particles all around us. Even if it was recycled, the process would not totally eliminate the risk of plastics shedding microscopic particles.

    Part of the problem is logistics. For convenience and profitability, capitalism worldwide produces plastic for every conceivable use, yet major governments such as the U.S. and China have not enforced strict enough regulations on its plastic disposal, nor have municipal governments provided robust enough infrastructure to handle the amount and variety of plastics that consumers come across.

    Further, the 9% of recycling that does happen is often outsourced to workers in the global South, under questionable conditions and miserable pay. Shipping this plastic overseas involves further carbon emissions.

    Most types of plastic aren’t recyclable at all. Most recyclable plastic is either PET (water bottles) or HDPE (jugs). Corporations have printed the types of plastic on the bottom or sides of products but this is of little help when municipalities don’t have the will or means to properly separate the types of plastic or make this reality clear to consumers. There are also a dozen other types of plastic that instantly become garbage upon creation. Clear plastic wrap, styrofoam, microplastics in cosmetics, and polyester clothing cannot be recycled.

    Bioplastics are an example of plastics made from sources other than fossil fuels. In principle, they are biodegradable. In practice, however, this is not always true, while this category represents an insignificant portion of the world’s plastics. Again, it comes down to cost. Bioplastics are not profitable for oil companies, who have a need to sell the byproducts of crude oil refining.

    The plastic industry and fossil fuels

    Recycling is useless when corporations don’t bother to make recycled products. 90% of plastic products are primary plastics. This is cheaper than making recycled goods, and more kinds of products can be made with primary plastics than with recycled ones. Besides, most recycled plastic goods are partially made with primaries.

    Plastics pollution is as much the fault of the fossil-fuel industry, which in the search for profits has slyly marketed crude oil byproducts in the form of fossil-fuel-derived plastics. Since the end of World War II, plastics have been developed and marketed by the fossil-fuel industry so that this (then brand new) technology could make a profit. Getting the planet off of fossil fuels, and off of fossil-fuel-derived plastics is the same challenge.

    In 2023, humans produced 413.8 million metric tons of plastics. Plastic production in 2010 was 270 million metric tons, and production has consistently increased every year. The biggest producer of plastics is China, with approximately 33% of production, followed by the rest of Asia with 20%, North American countries with 20%, and then Europe with 17%. Global capitalism’s supply chain, as it stands, demands that all industrialized countries participate in the production and sale of plastics—to the long term detriment of human health.

    Production—and not mere littering or bad consumer choices—is the source of the pollution. It is here that the problem must be examined. No littering laws, while essential, aren’t at all sufficient, and asking consumers to buy “green” is an insult when corporations only produce and provide plastic products, provide food in plastic packaging, and continue to make plastic clothes! Go to any grocery store in the United States and try to find a loaf of bread not wrapped in plastic!

    Plastics and capitalism

    The overproduction of plastics threatens human, animal, and plant health and adds tremendously to our existential risk. Plastics in themselves are not an inherent evil, but the capitalist system has incentivized an addiction to plastics in almost everything and has created a self-destructive cycle of waste, while the plastic industry is inherently linked to the fossil-fuel emissions driving climate disruption.

    Corporations (and the rich people who own them) choose plastics for different reasons. Sometimes plastic is an essential component of technology. This is particularly true for hospitals and computers. But most times, as with packaging, food storage, or clothing, plastic is chosen not because it is the safest or most effective material for the job but rather because it is cheap. Often new technology, such as asbestos, has been pursued with little or no regard for long-term consequences, and only years later do we learn how harmful it is to human health. Plastic is a modern example, but far more pervasive than asbestos.

    Cost effectiveness is one of the only senses in which capitalist production—i.e., production of commodities for sale to a market, with the goal of generating private profit from the exploitation of labor power—is “rational.” It is precisely this “rationality” that has led to a world of planned obsolescence, disposable plastic products, and millions of people with the ability to consume products but no way of controlling how they are actually made. Those who control the process of production—the capitalist class—do so to make money, not to fulfill human needs.

    Once we learn of the dangers of microplastics, does it remain rational to produce polyester or polyurethane in increasing amounts? Is this rational when we have no means of recycling the stuff and produce essentially millions of tons of toxic waste that are destined to poison bodies for generations? There are many more reasons to limit than to increase plastic production.

    We should not trust the masters of big business to find a way out of our current mess. Working people must take up the mantle of economic and environmental planning and grab the major industries out of billionaire control.

    Nationalize industry under workers’ control!

    What is needed? In the short term, plastic production itself must be drastically reduced—if not eliminated—and restricted solely to what is absolutely essential. In the medium term, the economy must be re-organized to work without fossil fuels and without plastics—a daunting, but necessary task. Finally, the long-term goal, which is unlikely to be finished in our lifetimes, is to clean the planet of pollution and heal bodies damaged by microplastics and other pollutants.

    Given the sheer scope of what’s needed, and how we got here, it would be delusional to assume that “business as usual” will allow us to find a solution. “Business as usual,” i.e., capitalism, if not stopped, will result in our lives becoming much worse. Only a democratically organized socialist economy could begin the process of stopping plastic pollution. What would this look like in practice?

    In the first place, all plastic producers, recycling companies, and adjacent industries should be nationalized. Nationalization of these industries is the first step that is needed to begin cutting the production of plastic and planning the re-organization of the economy. The corporations who make this trash should not have the “freedom” to produce it anymore, full stop. But this in itself is not enough.

    Secondly, and more importantly, such nationalizations should take place under the directive of a workers’ government, a government in which the working people have a direct say in how (and why) an individual business, a factory, a municipality, or the entire country is run.

    Furthermore, such a government would exclude the millionaires and billionaires and the duplicitous political group of elephants and donkeys they fund. It would be the most democratic government in history because the dictatorship at the workplace (and in turn the dictatorship of the whole class of rich people over working people) would end. A workers’ government in the United States would be the organization of the millions of workers all over the country towards rational economic planning to serve their needs, and not the requirements of capitalists.

    Currently, workers are forced by the capitalist economy to get a job in industries that produce things we don’t need and—in the case of plastics—are actively harmful to life. We go to work every day and produce, for example, plastic bottles for soda, and these get sold to customers to drink, introducing plastics into their body, then to get discarded at landfills. This is not good for us or the Earth. Despite this, the demands of the capitalist economy, and the profit drive of the owners of corporations, and our own need to pay for rent and food, drive us inexorably to make toxic products!

    There are, of course, a million other examples, besides plastic bottles, of toxic production. But other things, like latex or nitrile gloves in hospitals, can’t be eliminated immediately. Workers will be capable of deciding what makes sense here. For example, we could trade plastic drinking bottles for glass, while guaranteeing that medical plastics are made until a better solution is found. Many decisions like this must be made, and rational economic planning will allow us to accomplish these steps while preparing for the future.

    The advantage of nationalizing industry under workers’ control and systematic planning would mean that for the first time we would be able to re-organize production to stop producing what is killing us and put our labor towards what would improve life and make it more wholesome. That is the goal of socialism.

    Nationalized production under workers’ control would end the anarchy of the labor market by guaranteeing a job to all and guaranteeing income in the intervals between work. After we have shut down the plastic blow-molders of the world, the blow-molder operators would be able to pursue a new job without the uncertainty of unemployment that would be a guarantee under capitalism. As long as capitalism exists the ability to work a given machine (or work at all!) is a privilege given by the boss. Under a workers’ government the union or factory committee on the shop floor would now have total control of how the factory is run. The union could become a means for the workers to debate about how to re-allocate work to reduce the working hours for everyone.

    With rational planning, a workers’ government would be the greatest “job creator” on Earth, as millions of jobs will be needed to repair the planet and also increase production of what’s really needed. Once we stop producing plastic-wrapped food, plastic packaging, and stop fossil fuels, new solutions will be needed to fill the void, and that means jobs!

    Plastic is still a technically useful material, of course. A workers’ government would need to consult with scientists and engineers about how to best use the material in industry, as well as household products, safely (if at all). Corporations under capitalism already hire scientists and engineers to make the cheapest and most profitable products. These experts can also be hired by the workers, with an important twist: under rational planning, the safety and quality of consumer products would increase as we overcome the planned obsolescence and disposable products of capitalism.

    For this future to happen, a revolutionary change has to occur in the consciousness of the working class. We need to stop identifying ourselves with the nation states that are preparing for war, and with the various confidence men who prey on our insecurities and fears. We must have our own policy and our own party. It is within our abilities to run the world, and that this world will be better than the capitalist dumpster fire we see today.

    • Stop the production of plastics NOW! For recyclable and biodegradable alternatives!

    • Organize the widespread collection and safe disposal, or storage, of plastics!

    • Emergency measures NOW for environmental cleanup!

    • Put industry, commerce, and the banks under workers control! For a planned economy to stop climate disruption!

    • For a reduction of working hours without a reduction in pay! Guaranteed employment for all!

    Sources

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/2025/03/13/the-invisible-threat-how-microplastics-are-poisoning-our-health-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33130380/

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

    https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/microplastics-long-legacy-left-behind-plastic-pollution

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33130380/

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-arent-we-losing-our-minds-over-the-plastic-in-our-brains/

    https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2024/02/427161/how-to-limit-microplastics-dangers

    https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/whopping-91-percent-plastic-isnt-recycled/

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-its-so-hard-to-recycle-plastic/

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production-of-plastics-since-1950/

    https://newrepublic.com/post/192660/trump-fbi-charge-climate-organizations?fbclid=IwY2xjawI-3uFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUGRhWW_YqsWqSgUhrCi4YsHCGWLB7ggwm_nSq7MC9ZhL5UMI29jnyOrcw_aem_1eWAM3YTx9tmUMoJemeuvA

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-plastic-straws-pollution-oceans-packaging-e64e2671bbf7f8a8abaec0d5a491f7de

    , , ,

  • Victory Day and the false ‘anti-fascism’ of Putin’s regime

    By DEMIAN VINNICHENKO

    The victory over Nazism in World War II has long been central to the state ideology of Russian imperialism. The Kremlin has transformed the war into a holy crusade, cynically exploiting it to justify new acts of aggression, which are, of course, the antithesis of the anti-fascist struggle.

    Following the Nazi invasion of 1941, the war of the peoples of the USSR became a just struggle of a workers’ state—though it was corrupted by the Stalinist bureaucracy—against the fascist aggressor. The resistance of the Ukrainians, in particular, was an important factor in the subsequent defeat of Nazism. They joined the army en masse, organized a partisan movement, and defended Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkiv. Other peoples also made a colossal contribution: Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Jews, Tatars, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Chechens, and many others.

    However, Putin remains silent on this, trying to usurp the victories of these still-oppressed nations. He also hides the fact that Nazi expansion began with the “Stalin-Hitler Pact” to divide Poland in 1939. The two dictators then attempted to divide Europe.

    Putin’s police state is the new pillar of counterrevolutionary world imperialism, which is why Trump is trying—with all his might, and so far without success—to reach an agreement with Putin.

    Putin’s “anti-Nazi” rhetoric masks ultra-reactionary tendencies: the cult of the autocrat, oligarchic capitalism, Great Russian chauvinist ideology, and the medieval obscurantism of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian dictator actively promotes the same chauvinist ideology that Lenin harshly criticized. This explains why Putin hates Lenin so much, accusing him of “planting a bomb under Russia” and “creating Ukraine.”

    When announcing the start of the “Special Military Operation” (SVO), Putin stated that his goal was to “denazify” Ukraine. Russian media repeats the mantra about “Nazis” in Kyiv and presents Ukraine as a “fascist state,” but this clumsy rhetoric does not withstand the slightest bit of criticism. The Ukrainian government is a bourgeois democracy in which the far right was defeated in the 2019 elections and Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin and speaks Russian, was elected president.

    Furthermore, Putin’s “denazification” campaign has only strengthened the Ukrainian far right’s position. In the midst of war, the far right has gained new “legitimacy” as the main specter of Putin’s propaganda and has finally emerged from its marginal position.

    Russia’s annual Victory Day parade is becoming an increasingly grotesque display, disconnected from the tragic experience of the war of liberation against Nazism. It has transformed from a ritual of mourning into an exhibition of imperial weapons. Rather than appealing to memory, this parade appeals to obedience and the willingness to die for imperialist goals, accompanied by the sounds of marches, fanfares, and televised propaganda celebrations. It is not about history but its falsification for the sake of a war of conquest.

    The real anti-fascist struggle is being waged today in Ukraine—not in parade positions, but in trenches, destroyed cities, volunteer brigades, and workers’ union meetings. The working class constitutes the basis of the resistance. Anti-fascism emerged from its inception as a response to capital’s attempts to repress the emancipatory aspirations of workers.

    Even in Germany, the anti-Nazi resistance included workers, underground circles of intellectuals, and anti-fascist officers who risked their lives to sabotage the Third Reich’s war machine, though it was brutally repressed.

    Similar partisan movements are occurring in today’s Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine. There, railways are being sabotaged, military registration and enlistment offices are being set on fire, and leaflets are being distributed and walls are being painted with messages against the war and invasion. This is happening despite the threat of torture and long prison sentences.

    In light of these events, international workers’ solidarity with Ukraine is growing stronger. Workers from different countries are expressing their support for Ukraine. European and U.S. dockworkers have refused to unload Russian ships carrying military equipment. Trade unions are organizing humanitarian aid, and statements condemning Putin’s aggression have been heard at conferences and forums. Port workers’ actions are particularly illustrative: “Workers around the world strongly oppose the Russian invasion, including thousands of dockworkers who show solidarity with the Ukrainian people and contempt for Putin’s aggression.”

    It is clear today that the true heirs of the anti-fascist struggle are not the cynical rulers of the Kremlin, who hide behind the banner of victory while committing acts of aggression, nor the Trump administration in the United States. Rather, they are ordinary people who resist violence and dictatorships. Their actions directly continue the work of those who, 80 years ago, challenged the Nazi plague.

    Progressive forces must not only oppose Putin’s aggression but also the growth of neo-fascism and right-wing populism in Europe, which is, incidentally, very sympathetic to Putin’s regime. It is also necessary to combat the intense rearmament of NATO countries, which are not seeking to help Ukraine, but rather to encourage chauvinism in their own ranks.

    One form of imperialist oppression cannot be defeated by condoning another. This is why a true anti-fascist—especially a socialist—will oppose Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, his supported dictators in Syria and other countries, and the Zionist genocide and occupation of Palestine led by Netanyahu.

    Freedom for all peoples! Death to empires!

    , , ,
    , , ,
Exit mobile version