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UPSURGE IN BOLIVIA: United Left Platform webinar on June 26
Upsurge in Bolivia: What It Means for the Fight Against MAGA and U.S. Imperialism
Jun 26, 2026 8:00 PM -
Workers’ Voice newspaper: June-July edition
Trump continues his assault on working and oppressed people: From the attack on voting rights to the environmental impact of the war on Iran to abortion rights to the struggles of immigrant meatpacking workers on the picket line, this edition is filled with insightful views on how working people are confronting the horrors of capitalism under the management of the Trump administration. Also in this issue read about migrant workers in Africa, the struggle against data centers, and the meaning of recent elections in Hungary.
The June-July 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy:
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The Iran War is not an accident
By CARLOS SAPIR
Nearly a month into the horrific U.S.-Israel assault against Iran, the ensuing military, political and economic crises appear to be spiraling out of the imperialists’ control. With Iran still controlling vital maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and imperialist forces continuing escalations of attacks against oil refineries and other civilian energy and water infrastructure, the global economy is reeling. Meanwhile, Iran continues to fire long-range missiles at a steady pace against Israeli, U.S., and British targets, even as its short-range drones take center stage in the battle over the Gulf.
Given the chaos, the idea that the invasion was due to either the unique stupidity of Trump, or that Trump was “tricked” by Israeli operatives into taking this course of action, is seductive for a large swath of people. But what these conspiracy theories miss is that, blunders included, the invasion of Iran has been fully consistent with decades of U.S. imperialist policy.
The bipartisan consensus behind imperialism
While the Democratic Party has criticized the conduct of the current war, its leaders nevertheless support the principle of attacking Iran. Since the abbreviated attack on Iran in June, DP leadership has egged Trump on toward confrontation with Iran, using playground-style nicknames in an apparent attempt to get under Trump’s paper-thin skin. But the imperialist agreement on Iran runs much deeper than just that, and its reflection in Europe can also be seen in the EU, British, French, and German governments cheerleading the initial strikes against Iran.
Dating all the way back to the coup against Mossadegh in 1953, imperialist states have worked together to frustrate and attack all attempts for Iran to assert its political or economic independence. While the Pahlavi-dynasty Shahs were willing accomplices for U.S. and British imperialism, these imperialists saw the 1979 Revolution and the regime that emerged from it as an obstacle and an enemy to their hegemony over the Middle East.
Though occasionally pivoting to tools of diplomacy rather than outright war, such as under Obama (and still nominally favored by the leaders of the EU), this approach was not a policy of peace but a continuation of war by other means, a proposal to integrate Iran directly into the framework of their imperialist economic hegemony, while unilaterally insisting on invasive checks and surveillance of its military capacity. While nuclear disarmament on a global scale would be laudable, that is not the goal of demanding that Iran concede its military capabilities while Israel, Britain, and the U.S. (the only country to have actually used a nuclear bomb at war) are allowed to militarize freely.
This is not to say that the U.S. has perfectly executed its war plans. It has made many obvious blunders in its attempt to subjugate Iran, including friendly fire incidents at the tactical level, failing to account for economic impacts at the strategic level, Trump making erratic comments, and the government generally failing to present a coherent propaganda line of what is happening. Some of this bungling has drawn criticism and denunciations from the allies and enemies of imperialism alike. But the military logic of the U.S.-led effort to isolate and dominate Iran has been a steady march toward war, with the main questions for the U.S. government being how and when, not if.
How Israel and Joe Kent serve U.S. interests
While the Democrats and conservatives fed up with Trump can try to salvage their own reputations by blaming this catastrophe of a war on Trump and his advisors’ stupidity, the MAGA crowd needs another scapegoat, and Israel is both a perfect fit and an eager participant in this capacity.
Israel’s conduct toward Iran has been no less despicable than that of the U.S., and it is rightfully a pariah in the eyes of the world for the waves of occupation, dispossession, and genocide that it has unleashed against Palestinians. But while the Israeli government and Trump’s government may have a different calculus for their ability to tolerate economic pain, popular discontent, and other pressures stemming from a given war, it is the longstanding policy of U.S. imperialism to bolster Israeli hegemony across the Middle East in order to further its own interests.
The Israeli air force continues to be entirely logistically dependent on U.S. industrial support, not to mention the broader economic and diplomatic support that the U.S. has continually lent Israel since the 1970s. For decades, U.S. presidents have recognized Israel’s role as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” and a counter-revolutionary attack dog ready and willing to strike against any threat to the continued expansion of U.S. and European hegemony across the region.
The fact that Israel will go ahead and launch attacks that the U.S. is not quite ready to carry out itself (at the moment, including an ongoing invasion of southern Lebanon) is a feature, not a bug. It lets the U.S. offload the blame for the most unconscionable acts of violence carried out to secure its hegemony.
This process involves officials like former Counter-Terrorism Director Joe Kent publicly denouncing the Israeli role, absolving the U.S. of wrongdoing in the process. The antisemitic implication that Israelis have secretly taken hold of the U.S. government is a further bonus for the far-right crowd that Kent is trying to sway; never mind that Kent himself has had much more direct control over U.S. (and by extension, Israeli) policy and practice than 99.9% of the Jewish population.
Israel, of course, has committed and continues to commit terrible crimes, and is rightfully condemned by people who oppose racism and imperialism everywhere. But the fact that it leads the charge of imperialism’s wars is not a sign that it secretly controls the U.S. government; it’s a consequence of the fact that the U.S. and other imperialist states intentionally cultivate relationships with racist, militarist states precisely because they are entrenched in a military logic that favors constant confrontation with forces that might oppose imperialism.
The U.S. government stands by Israel for the same reason that it stood by apartheid South Africa, by dictatorships across Latin America from Guatemala to Chile, and even by the Pahlavi Shahs in Iran. Defeating all of these regimes means stopping imperialism writ large, which is a struggle that must ultimately also be carried out inside the heart of imperialism itself.
By building a mass movement against imperialist war in the U.S. today, we can stop the heart of the machine that spreads racism and destruction throughout the world. Our goal is not just to replace the president with someone more “competent,” or to remove some imaginary cabal of Illuminati that’s secretly controlling everything. We need to build working-class opposition and political power that can uproot the imperialist war economy and rebuild from the bottom up.
Money for jobs and education, not for wars and deportation!
Hands off Iran! Hands off Lebanon! Free Palestine!
Photo: Bomb damage in Tehran. The Red Crescent reports that over 8000 civilian sites have been bombed by the U.S. and Israel in the war. (Majod Sheedi / Getty Images)
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Remembering Walid Khalidi, historian of the Palestinian cause
By SORAYA MISLEH
Walid Khalidi, a leading authority on the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe that began with the establishment of the racist and colonial State of Israel in 1948), passed away on 8 March at the age of 100. His legacy is essential for understanding the history and memory of Palestine.
His research is crucial for understanding the immense injustice that the Palestinian people have suffered for 78 years, and for combating the disinformation and dehumanization that sustain colonization, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Palestinians are confronted with anti-history on a daily basis in the form of false narratives that demonize their legitimate resistance, while they endure brutal national oppression. Understanding Palestinian history and memory is a vital step towards confronting this reality and achieving liberation.
Walid Khalidi, who was aptly called ‘the historian of the Palestinian cause’, provides us with his extraordinary research, particularly in two fundamental encyclopaedic works:
All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992) and Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians’ 1876-1948 (1984). The latter book contains a rich photographic record of Palestinian life and places prior to the Nakba, compiled from nearly 500 rare photographs.
In All That Remains, alongside a map of historic Palestine showing the locations of over 400 villages destroyed during the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias in 1948, there is detailed documentation of these villages before, during and after the Nakba.
One of those villages is that of my paternal family: Qaqun. Walid Khalidi is a key reference for many researchers and students, and his work formed the basis of my own research for the book Al Nakba: Um Estudo Sobre a Catástrofe Palestina (2017).
His work was instrumental in broadening my understanding of Qaqun, the village where my father, Abder Raouf, was born in 1935 and from which he was forcibly displaced at the age of 13. He referred to his village as a ‘paradise’ before the Nakba, and like millions of refugees, he described it lyrically. In this place of memory, he connected with his land, from which he had been torn away, and with the prospect of liberation and return.
Born in Jerusalem in July 1925, Walid Khalidi revealed the details of the Dalet Plan, which was drafted in the late 1940s and set out how the Zionist movement intended to carry out its final plan for ethnic cleansing. Plan Dalet sealed the fate of the Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948.
Although Walid Khalidi was a pioneer in researching and exposing the planned expulsion in order to establish the racist, colonial state of Israel, it was Ilan Pappé’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine that gained Plan Dalet greater academic recognition in Nakba studies.
However, in the introduction to his work, Ilan Pappé acknowledges that he drew from that source, and that Arab and Palestinian historians had already explored this path before him, explicitly mentioning the work of Walid Khalidi. But these voices had not been heard or considered credible.
Walid Khalidi, a professor at the universities of Oxford and the American University of Beirut, a researcher at Harvard, and the co-founder of the Institute of Palestinian Studies in 1963, may not have enjoyed the same international recognition, but he is widely respected by any serious researcher of the Palestinian question.
As is almost inevitable for Palestinians, Walid Khalidi combined academic knowledge with political commitment. For example, he resigned from the University of Oxford in 1956 following the French, British and Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal and joined the Palestinian nationalist movement.
In the political arena, he advocated for the so-called ‘two-state solution’ and went on to join the Jordanian-Palestinian joint delegation at the 1991 Madrid Conference. A few years earlier, he had served as a special advisor to the Arab League.
However, in a 1997 article marking the 50^(th) anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s recommendation to partition Palestine, Khalidi was unequivocal: “No, the 1947 UN partition was not the legally, morally, justly, balanced, pragmatic and viable ‘compromise’ formula that it is claimed to have been”.
Addressing the debate over whether the Palestinians should have accepted the partition, he questioned how a plan could be fair when more than half the territory was allocated to the creation of a Jewish state despite Jews representing less than a third of the population and owning only 7% of the land. Meanwhile, the Arab majority owned most of the land yet would be left with barely 45% of the territory.
In the same article, however, he refers to the negotiation process as a path, though he notes the ‘flaws’ of the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, stating:
‘No lasting reconciliation is possible if its ingredients are torn from their historical context and based on a misleading narrative of the past.’
Regardless of his seemingly defeatist view of what would be just, and his mistaken view of what would be possible—the ‘two-state solution’, which never aimed for anything more than a peace of graveyards — recognising the importance of Walid Khalidi means acknowledging his legacy, and valuing the history and memory recounted by the children of that land.
The legacy of Walid Khalidi will remain with us until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.
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Solidarity with the JBS meatpacking workers strike!
By N. IRAZU
On Monday, March 16, some 3800 workers in Greeley, Col., went on strike. Represented by UFCW Local 7, they are up against the Brazilian multinational JBS, which often markets its products under the Swift Beef Co. brand. JBS is a huge multinational that netted $22.6 billion in sales in 2025; in fact it is the world’s largest beef processing corporation. Not since 1985—the historic Hormel strike—has a major strike taken place in the meatpacking industry.
“We want to be treated like human beings,” JBS employee Deborah Rodarte said in a statement from the union.
The strikers deserve all of our support; it would be hard to find a sector of the U.S. working class facing a worse boss. JBS already made a name for itself in the United States last year when it was found liable for utilizing child-labor through third parties.
There are a plethora of reasons for which the workers represented by UFCW Local 7 voted 99% in favor of going on strike. The company’s measly proposal of a 2% raise over the length of the contract was a slap to the face. It did not remotely keep up with inflation or help wages match cost of living. Reimbursement for equipment is also central. In some cases workers can expect to pay $1,100 out of their own pockets to acquire the equipment necessary to perform the work they are hired to do!
Conditions on the shop floor, such as speedup of the production line, have also caused significant discontent. Workers filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming that on the second shift—with more Haitian workers than on the first shift—the speed of the line went from around 250-300 heads of cattle an hour to 390-420! Speedup is the practice of intensifying the labor of workers in order to extract more value from their labor in the same amount of time. This level of speedup turns an already fast-paced, grueling, and dangerous job into an unbearable situation in which the worker is forced to risk life and limb for the sake of filling up the bosses’ coffers.
On the line, workers are forced to keep hold of meat hooks on one hand and knives on the other for hours on end, plunging and slicing repeatedly for the duration of the shift. This strenuous repetition leads to hand injuries, such as limitations of the range of motion and full use of their hands. Meatpacking plants are regularly classified as one of the most dangerous and deadly jobs in the United States due to poor working conditions, lackluster safety regulations, and profit-driven productivity increases.
In an attempt to break the strike, JBS carried out an anti-union campaign. UFCW Local 7 has denounced this campaign as full of unfair labor practices, such as the intimidation of workers in closed-door, captive audience meetings—where shop stewards and union representatives were excluded. Workers were threatened with termination of their jobs unless they resigned from the union and crossed the picket line. The company also lied to workers about their rights to strike by threatening reprisals. All of these are illegal attempts to intimidate the workers into submission. The 99% approval of the strike demonstrates the resounding failure of their anti-union campaign.
The struggle by JBS workers in Greeley extends beyond the shop floor. The issues of immigration and human trafficking also play a central role in understanding the relationship between the JBS workers and the managers and owners. Meatpacking workers are a highly immigrant sector of the class, and close to 50 languages are spoken on the floor of the plant. In Greeley, a significant number of the workers are Haitian immigrants, protected by Temporary Protective Status (TPS), a program that is now under attack by the Trump administration.
“¡Huelga,!” meaning “strike!” in Spanish, is often heard on the picket line. This international composition of the workforce condenses into a single shop floor the often-spoken phrase, “Workers of the world, unite!”
Human trafficking and inhumane housing conditions are also part of this story. Immigrant Haitian workers, lured to work at JBS under the pretenses of free housing and dignified work, soon found themselves crowded into completely undignified living quarters. “A group of those workers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that “they were promised free housing but, upon arrival, were charged ‘to live in overcrowded, uninhabitable ’ conditions at the Rainbow Motel nearby.”
With both living and working conditions reaching unbearable levels, a worker compared his situation to slavery. His story was told in Mother Jones, “Auguste told me he can’t shake the humiliation. Every day at work, he walked through the slaughter side of the plant, where each cow has its own little holding pen, but he was expected to share a tiny space with five of his co-workers. He found himself thinking the cows had it better. ‘I feel like,’ he said, ‘I was being treated as a slave.’”
These conditions led to righteous anger boiling over into active resistance before the current strike was voted on. Some workers began “coordinating short work stoppages, letting beef slide by on the conveyor belt uncut and untrimmed while banging their meat hooks on the sides of the metal work stations to alert supervisors that the chain conveyor system needed to be stopped.”
The strike at JBS needs support from the entire labor movement. Fundraising for the strike, solidarity statements from our union locals, campus organizations, and civil liberties coalitions will all serve to build necessary support for the strike.
Already, CSP-Conlutas, a 3.5 million-member union federation in Brazil, has come out in support of the strike. As a Brazilian company, JBS already has a history of corruption and super-exploitation in their country, bribing politicians and artificially lowering wages. After UFCW Local 7 had taken the vote to go on strike, “CSP-Conlutas put out a statement praising and supporting the workers. They wrote that “the work stoppage by American workers fits into a broader working-class struggle against exploitation and capitalist greed.”
This strike takes place on a truly international, immigrant shop floor. The workers are on strike against an incredibly predatory company, fighting back against all the traditional abuses of the bosses, while the workers are under threat of repression and deportation by the Trump administration, to whom the owners of JBS donated $5 million during the inauguration. Deportation of combative meatpacking workers is a tool that has already been infamously deployed by the capitalists and their state in the past; we must keep an eye out to prevent it from happening again.
The meatpackers at Greeley, local and immigrant, speaking dozens of languages, are fighting as one against a multi-billion-dollar dragon. The workers are setting an important example for the entire labor movement. Their determination and grit demonstrates the tremendous contribution that workers with experiences from around the globe can make to rebuilding and strengthening unions in the U.S. And their strike suggests, in embryo, that concerted labor action can be elevated as one of the main tools utilized to defend all immigrants victimized by the MAGA machine.
To support the striking workers of UFCW Local 7, visit their website to donate to the strike fund. Solidarity forever!
Photo: Kevin J. Beaty / Denverite
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Trump’s fuel embargo worsens humanitarian crisis in Cuba
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER
Life for Cuba’s working people is rapidly deteriorating as the Trump administration squeezes the country into what Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has called a state of “economic genocide.” Events have been moving fast since Jan. 29, when Trump issued an executive order declaring that Cuba posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. policy. As a consequence of this manufactured “emergency,” he ordered that sanctions, including higher tariffs, be imposed on any country that supplied oil to Cuba.
Food is increasingly scarce, water pumps are often inoperable, and electricity blackouts can last for more than a day. The exemplary public health system, universal and free to all, is tottering. Medicines and medical equipment that are necessary to save lives are in short supply or only available for high prices on the black market. Ambulances lack fuel. X-rays, electrocardiograms, and other medical equipment no longer work. Many doctors have emigrated in search of decent wages.
Trump and his advisors appear for the time being to be calculating that their oil blockade will prove to be a cheaper, less risky, and more effective course of action in bringing the country to its knees than a direct military attack. Cuba has now received practically no imported oil in three months, though one or two tankers with Russian oil and gas are expected next week—in defiance of Trump’s embargo.
Even before Trump’s blockade was tightened, Cuba was facing an agonizing economic crisis. Most economic growth indicators have steadily declined since the COVID epidemic of 2020—which hampered Cuba’s tourist industry and cut off a major supply of cash. The primary cause of the shortages is undoubtedly the 65-year U.S. blockade, which has greatly obstructed international trade—both imports and exports—and constricted the growth of the country’s important hotel and hospitality sector. But bureaucratic and undemocratic measures, privatizations, drastic cuts in social spending, and the siphoning off of wealth by Cuban managers and officials have exacerbated the economic problems.
The power cuts and food shortages have sparked a certain degree of public protests in Cuba, including nightly banging on pots in some neighborhoods. On March 14, anti-government protesters attacked a Communist Party office in the northern city of Morón. Reuters and other news outlets posted videos that appear to show that a rally turned violent when protesters threw rocks through the windows of the building, and then dragged its furniture into the street and set it on fire.
Talks between the U.S. and Cuba: More economic adjustments?
By the beginning of March, talks had gotten underway between Trump administration stalwarts and top Cuban officials. The semi-formal talks included Secretary of State Rubio; to some degree, Trump himself appears to have weighed in. On the Cuban side, Raúl Castro’s nephew, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “El Cangrejo” (“the Crab”), was prominent.
On March 7, Trump told the press that his pressure tactics were working and that a deal with Cuba was imminent. “As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Trump said. He added, “Cuba’s at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil.”
On March 17, Trump gloated to reporters that “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba. … Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it.”
The same day, the media reported that Trump administration is insisting that Cuban President Díaz-Canel must step down from office. As part of the deal, said The New York Times, it appears that the Trump administration might be inclined to allow Raúl Castro and other members of his family to remain in Cuba. However, The Times pointed out, many Cuban-Americans in Florida, including some elected officials, have indicated that they would be unhappy with that decision.
What is the response of the Cubans to Trump’s death grip on their economy? On Feb. 1, a couple of days after Trump’s executive order, the Cuban ministry of foreign affairs gave a tentative but somewhat conciliatory response, pointing to what they called “constructive engagement” with the United States. But as the social crisis deepened, significant economic adjustments were announced.
On March 2, Cuban media reported that Cuban President Díaz-Canel had stated in a meeting of the Council of Ministers, “We must focus, immediately, on implementing the urgent, most necessary transformations that must be made to the economic and social model.” Díaz-Canel called on municipalities to manage issues such as foreign direct investment; economic partnerships between the state and non-state sectors; and investments with Cubans residing abroad. Two weeks later, on March 13, Díaz-Canel told the press that new measures would be instituted to “greatly facilitate” the ability of Cubans abroad to invest in the island’s economy. (Over 2 million Cubans have emigrated overseas in the last two years.)
This was amplified by Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, in an interview published by NBC on March 16: “‘Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies’ and ‘also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants,’ Fraga said in a sit-down in Havana, ahead of announcing the news to his country Monday night.”
Fraga said that the new economic reforms were aimed at creating what he called a “dynamic business environment.” The goal would be to revive a range of sectors, from tourism and mining to fixing and updating the power grid. “This extends beyond the commercial sphere,” added Fraga, who also serves as Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment. “It also applies to investments — not only small investments, but also large investments, particularly in infrastructure.”
The extent of these projected reforms remains to be seen. They would be added to a series of economic changes in recent years that have strengthened the capitalist market forces on the island. USA Today has termed the new economic measures “Cubastroika,” in reference to the radical economic readjustments undertaken in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, a few years prior to the complete restoration of capitalism. For example, in February, Cuba allowed the importation of fuel oil by private firms; the measure is one more fissure in Cuba’s state regulation of foreign trade.
As of May 2023, Cuba already had arrangements with some 327 foreign businesses from at least 40 nations to invest capital in Cuban entities. Of those, 56 were composed totally of foreign capital, while the rest were joint enterprises with the Cuban state. Some 50 foreign companies were operating in the Mariel low-tax “Development Zone.” Official figures in 2024 estimated that 1.6 million workers were employed in private enterprises, out of a workforce of about 4 million. And last year, joint enterprises with foreign capital were expanded in the hotel sector.
In 2024, for the first time, the privatized sector in Cuba surpassed the state-owned sector in sales of goods and services. Some 55% of sales took place in privately run entities, compared to 44% the year before, and as low as 4% in 2020.
Moreover, a sizable unauthorized private sector also operates in Cuba. Some of the informal private activity engages in the marketing of scarce products that have been pilfered from state-owned enterprises; imported by foreign-based travelers, such as family members, in their luggage; or purchased in dollar stores using cash remittances from abroad.
It should be clear that as the Cuban leadership’s program of “market reforms” is extended, it will further weaken the ability of the state to control even the sector of the economy still in state hands, while subjecting the economy to fluctuating and destructive market forces.
Moreover, if not vigorously counteracted by Cuban workers, such reforms will widen income levels and enlarge the privileged layer of the population that grows dependent on protecting private property and on gaining profits from privately employed labor power and buying and selling in the market. In the meantime, the suffering of the working class and poor increases, as less funding and attention goes toward health care, education, housing, and maintaining the “social basket” of food subsidies.
What does the Trump administration hope to gain?
In the meantime, the Cuban government’s talks with the Trump administration are still proceeding. The Miami Herald has reported that, according to Rubio, the state of the negotiations are now “very advanced.” He said that Washington believes that it is close to finding success in pushing the Cubans to “change their system.”
Rubio clarified at the time that Cuba “doesn’t have to change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next. Everyone is mature and realistic here.” But a few days later, after Fraga had spoken about opening the Cuban economy to more foreign investment, Rubio expressed a harder line: “… they have to change dramatically,” he screeched. “What they announced yesterday is not dramatic enough. It’s not going to fix it.”
The Trump administration is unlikely to be content with any piecemeal reforms to the Cuban economy and social structure. With little doubt, the U.S. would prefer to supplant the present Cuban government with one that is fully willing to grant major concessions to U.S. corporations while complying with the dictates of U.S. imperialism. In fact, that has been the goal of all U.S. administrations since the 1960s.
What would the United States achieve by opening Cuba fully to U.S. exploitation and domination? In the first place, they want to crush what remains of the socialist revolution and to erase its memory from Cuban workers and as an example for the oppressed people of the semi-colonial world to follow. The U.S. also hopes to acquire access to an island that dominates the sea entrance to the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, and the U.S. Gulf Coast, with good ports, and with a highly educated and skilled working class. Furthermore, the U.S. would like to get its hands on Cuba’s resources of cobalt (the third largest deposits in the world) and nickel (fifth largest in the world).
In addition, the Cubans might be forced to settle with many of the 5913 certified U. S. claims seeking redress for properties nationalized by the Cuban government following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. That number would include the U.S.-based families of big latifundists who want to get their agricultural lands back.
The U.S.-owned Cuban Electric Company represents the largest of these claimants. The list also includes three U.S.-owned oil refineries, three U.S. banks, the telephone company, and at least 21 sugar mills. Cuba originally offered compensation through government bonds at 2% annual interest, with payment to begin within 30 years. The hope was that this could be paid off through increased U.S. purchases of sugar, but the U.S. refused to comply.
Need for authentic workers’ democracy
Given the recent conciliatory pronouncements by Cuban officials in response to Trump’s clampdown, it appears unlikely that the Communist Party and the Cuban state will pull back from their course of increasingly opening the country to market forces. Even the Cuban leadership’s pledges to retain some sort of “socialist” framework in the country are not reliable—especially since some leading functionaries speak about following the Vietnamese or Chinese “models” that favor the capitalist market.
A key problem is that the working-class masses have only a very limited, unorganized, and indecisive voice in governmental decisions. Major policy decisions, such as the economic “reforms” enacted during recent decades are basically determined by the Cuban Communist Party (rather than by the ostensible governmental body, the National Assembly of People’s Power). The Communist Party is a rigid top-down organization, with little opportunity for organized dissent within it.
Opposition parties are banned. Government policies are often enacted after certain staged “consultations” with popular assemblies and the unions, and a few national referendums, but there is no authentic rule by democratic and independent workers’ organizations, while active opposition is generally repressed. The single trade-union federation has become bureaucratized, with hand-picked leaders loyal to the goals of the government; strikes are outlawed and street protests are put down by force.
Such repressive actions may serve to protect and perpetuate the power of the Cuban leadership, but they also serve to isolate it from any criticisms or corrections of misguided government schemes that might be expressed from among the working-class population. Ultimately, to safeguard their livelihoods and interests, working people in Cuba must supplant the current state apparatus with organs of real working-class democracy. This will require the construction of an authentic revolutionary socialist party, which fights to reinstitute a planned economy, reassert the monopoly of foreign trade, renationalize the economy under workers’ control, and rekindle the beacon of socialist revolution throughout Latin America and the world.
At this critical moment, in the United States and internationally, it is essential to express full solidarity with Cuba. We must demand that the Trump administration remove its economic sanctions against Cuba and renounce any attempt to disrupt the country and its government. Hands off Cuba! End the blockade! The world’s governments must facilitate bringing an emergency supply of oil, food, medicine, and other necessities to the Cuban people!
Photo: Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
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Private credit: Wall Street’s best idea since subprime loans
The world of private finance and the political struggles that make it up can be boiled down to two basic tendencies found within free market capitalism. On the one hand, all existing industries are slowly approaching unprofitability as competition drives down costs and new innovations to accelerate production run out, forcing financial institutions to speculate into new industries and find more profitable ventures to invest in and reap a profit. On the other hand, the speculative nature of financing new ventures leads to the possibility of bubbles and inevitably, crashes.
This push and pull reacts off one another as one crisis spurns another. If a big enough crash happens and threatens the entire system with bankruptcy, then regulators step in to try and “tame” the system through guardrails like a central bank, restrictions on lending, or bans on certain kind of financial investments. If profitability looks like it is in trouble, then the opposite can happen where regulations get suspended in the pursuit of propping up financial markets, or the captains of finance look for more profitable ventures outside of the traditional investing avenues. Most famously, banks over investing in high-risk mortgages known as subprime home loans became the trigger point of the Great Recession in 2008. Since the great recession, new laws have been passed to reduce the possibility of speculative crashes in the style of 2008. However, the decreasing rate of returns in U.S. finance has forced the hands of big investors to seek new avenues for higher profits, including one major new market known as private credit.
Private credit markets represent one of the fastest growing financial markets after the Great Recession. BNY estimates it has grown ten times in size from 2007, growing from ~$250 billion to nearly $2.5 trillion in market capitalization in 2023. The roots of this growth can be found in the Dodd-Frank act, a landmark post-2008 Wall Street regulatory bill. Dodd-Frank put stricter requirements on bank loans, requiring banks to hold more capital on their balance sheets rather than invest it, and put limits on banks’ abilities to invest in high-risk funds such as hedge funds or private equity. These requirements have made banks more stable, but less profitable. This leads to investors seeking higher returns through riskier investments such as private credit.
What is private credit?
Private credit loans are any loans extended to corporations that are done outside of the public market (where they would be subject to bond market regulations) and without the use of the bank (which would be subject to banking regulations). Since it is so unregulated, companies raising debt through private lenders need to offer higher interest rates to offset the additional risk that lenders are taking on, leading to higher payouts if the debtor does not default.
Morgan Stanley estimates that private credit investments can provide 10-year returns twice as high as high-yield public bonds, and three times as high as bank loans. This higher rate of return makes private credit an attractive investment for capitalist investors who were thwarted by the lower returns they were getting in the traditional finance sector post-2008.
Being unregulated also lends private credit to higher rates of fraud. First Brands, a conglomerate of automobile parts manufacturers with more than $12 billion in debts against less than $1 billion in assets filed for bankruptcy in 2025. The reason behind its high debt to asset ratio was its fraudulent pursuit of loans in the private credit market through lying to lenders, often either falsifying financial information or listing the same items twice as loan collateral to different lenders. Financial Times reports that the payout of the bankruptcy proceedings could lead to $200 million recovered from the $12 billion in outstanding debt.
There is also pressure on the borrowing side of the economy to increasingly seek private credit for investment. For speculative industries such as AI data center construction, private credit has extended more than $200 billion in loans to AI companies, with major loans to Meta, Oracle, and CoreWeave earmarked for building AI data centers. This buildout has become an albatross for private credit firms, as AI data center profitability is non-existent. For the biggest tech companies—like Amazon, Meta, and Google—there is still a large amount of profit and savings they can pour into construction directly or through paying down debt they are taking on. Middle to small-size tech companies such as Oracle and CoreWeave that have taken on private credit to build out their data centers are facing a much more existential risk for paying back what they owe and have both had their valuations halved since their peak on the stock market last year.
These risks are developing into systemic threats to private credit as a market, with private credit loan default rates hitting 9% in 2025. Two of the biggest private credit funds, Blackrock and Blue Owl Capital, have both stopped withdrawals from their funds due to the high volume of investor flight.
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was triggered by mortgage default rates hitting only 9%. While private credit remains a smaller part of financial markets than mortgage loans at roughly 1/10 the size, their specific exposure to growing markets such as AI represents a key strategic risk for financial markets, with the potential to spill into other sectors of the economy as corporations who took on too much debt either accidentally or fraudulently fail to pay back their lenders and trigger unwinds that threaten other sectors of the U.S. economy. The exposure to AI is especially salient, as the seven largest tech companies in the U.S. are responsible for most of the stock-market growth in the SP500 post 2008 and today make up 1/3 of the market capitalization of the 500 largest companies.
Understanding private credit, or any other highly financialized asset, is a headache for the average working person. This is intentional; as more obvious and easily scrutinized methods of investment become non-viable for immediate financial returns, investors find it necessary to plough social wealth into difficult to understand investments to hide what they are doing from the wider public. Most famously, collateralized debt obligations or CDOs were the chosen subprime mortgage investment vehicle in the lead-up to 2008, and an entire cottage industry of books and movies sprang up trying to explain what these even were.
Beyond the immediate risks to the U.S. and global economy, the incredibly complicated and difficult to understand nature of finance is a direct outgrowth of capitalist leaders trying to manage the inherent chaos of the free market, which inevitably trends towards lower profits as markets mature, and toward financial crises as speculation leads to over-production of un-needed commodities. Understanding how this system fully works is not really important for the biggest masters of capital. After all, only one banker actually went to jail in 2008; all the rest of the executives at the firms who went bankrupt in 2008 got golden parachutes in the form of huge severance payouts, while workers were told to foot the bill in the form of a bailout.
What is really needed as an alternative is worker’s democratic control of finance. At this point, less than 5000 banking corporations in the U.S. still exist in the U.S., with most of the assets concentrated in the top five banks. Since running an economy the size of the U.S. necessarily requires concentration of wealth management to centrally plan the economy, let’s be done with it and take control of the big banks and large private corporations through nationalization and place them under workers’ control. Investment decisions could be made through workers reviewing and proposing how to direct planning of the economy, and carried out through democratic votes on economic plans that involve informing and including the working class in the decision-making process of planning the economy, instead of leaving it to a small privileged caste that repeatedly squanders social wealth while hoarding more for themselves.
It has been less than 20 years since the Great Recession. The paltry reforms that Dodd-Frank introduced have failed to stop Wall Street from finding ways to gamble with the wealth of society. As working people stare down the barrel of another recession, the age-old question is repeated: “Socialism or Barbarism”? Behind one door awaits another bailout, more wars to boost domestic production, and a lower standard of living for working people, while capitalists hoard more of the wealth than ever before. Behind another door lies the opportunity for workers in the U.S. to begin to take control of their own economic destiny and set a standard for working people across the world. Capitalist politicians and media will try to convince workers that barbarism is the only choice when the next recession comes, so the responsibility lies with working people and socialists everywhere to raise demands for workers’ control of finance and industry.
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MAGA prepares a darker patriarchal order
By CHRISTINE MARIE
As the Trump administration unrolls a new imperialist war, working women must be prepared to fight a brutal gendered assault in the offing. In military actions like the war on Iran, the government daily burns up millions of dollars in fuel and destroyed weaponry, and moves quickly to get rid of non-military costs deemed expendable. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill set the pattern. Even before Washington had launched the war on Iran, the government had budgeted $1 trillion for war, while simultaneously cutting $1 trillion from funds previously won by working people for health, education, and housing support.
Now, with the cost of the Iran war approaching $1 billion a day, the MAGA forces are preparing to offload the costs of any social welfare benefits still intact onto the backs of individual working-class households.
How do the right-wing capitalist think tanks advise the government to do this? A deeply reactionary Jan. 8, 2026, Heritage Foundation report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” lays it out in painful detail. This policy document, a pendant to Project 2025, suggests that, for the MAGA crowd, the recent restriction of access to abortion and the bans on gender-affirming care for the trans community are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their patriarchal goals.
“Saving the Family” argues that the Second Wave of women’s liberation and the 1964 War on Poverty were the beginning of the destruction of America. The women’s liberation movement, by legitimizing the desire of women to go to college and develop skills for the kind of employment that would give them financial independence from the family, is here deemed a monstrous perversion. Because of that movement, they argue, women were less likely to get married early, and more likely to delay childbearing. The struggle for basic support for poor women, the authors claim, with obvious racist bias, was equally destructive, leading to families without fathers and dire social decay.
The solution, “Saving the Family” argues, is the restoration of a society anchored by a nuclear family, composed of one cis-gender man and one cis-gender woman. This patriarchal unit must function as a patriotic core of society, training wives and children to respect authority, imbuing a work ethic that will reduce the need for government social support, and producing warriors. To “save” this “family,” the report proposes “Manhattan Project” scale social engineering that includes cutting almost all supports going to unmarried women, eliminating student loans for college, providing cash stipends to women who bear children while in their 20s, delegitimizing “unmarried coupling” and no-fault divorce, and getting rid of surrogacy and gay marriage.
“Saving the Family” signals the opening of the most massive assault on the rights of women and the LGBTQI community since the Nazi era. Working women and their allies must be ready to create a fightback anchored by mass demonstrations in the streets, concerted labor action at points of production where it really hurts the bosses, and a decision to stay independent of the electoral machinations of the big business parties.
(Photo) Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
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Remembering Country Joe: A musician who sang for peace and justice
Joseph “Country Joe“ McDonald, a key figure of the psychedelic music scene in San Francisco and the 1960s counterculture, died of complications from Parkinson’s on March 7, 2026.
From the start to the end, Country Joe was a man of the left. He was born on Jan. 1, 1942, the son of two active members of the Communist Party USA, who named him in honor of Joseph Stalin. He grew up in Los Angeles in the post-war years and was exposed both to various progressive causes as well as the pervasive repression of the left during the McCarthy period. His father was brought before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and lost his job for his support of communist policies in the 1950s. His parents played a big role in his political development from childhood, but also left him alienated from his peers as a child due to the social stigma of these beliefs during the repressive McCarthyist Era.
Immediately after graduating high school, Joe enlisted in the Navy and served as an air traffic controller in Japan during the early 1960s. Upon his honorable discharge and return to the U.S., he got involved in the lively music and political scenes in California at that time. He published a small magazine as a student at Los Angeles State College called Et Tu, where his political beliefs quickly expressed themselves. He published the lyrics to one of his early compositions, “Epitaph for Three,” which memorialized three civil rights activists who were murdered in Mississippi during 1964.
McDonald then moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he got involved with the burgeoning folk music scene and intervened in numerous causes including civil rights, justice for migrant farmworkers, the free speech movement, and opposing the embargo against Cuba. McDonald formed another magazine there called Rag Baby, which combined political issues with music. The politics, magazines, and music were a joint endeavor for McDonald. He performed alongside other musicians at a variety of local protests and rallies, promoted the magazine and self-produced music at these rallies, and wrote songs that connected with the attitudes of the protesters.
Country Joe & the Fish
His most important musical endeavor came together in 1965 when he formed the band “Country Joe and the Fish.” The name for the band came from an obscure allusion to a quote by Mao Zedong that a revolutionary is a “fish who swims among the sea of the people.” Country Joe and the Fish, like so many other artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, made the transition from traditional folk music to electrified psychedelic rock music, and the band became one of the lynchpins of that scene, which shaped rock music across the world. The rise of both the counterculture and the New Left created a receptive audience for the new band.
CJ and the Fish made their greatest wave when they put out their track “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag.” This song presented an absolutely scathing critique of the Vietnam War, paired with a psychedelic reinterpretation of a ragtime theme. The instrumental has an upbeat and nostalgic feel combined with abrasive distorted electric guitar that undermines its sentimental and patriotic tone—very similarly to Jimi Hendrix’s reinterpretation of the Star Spangled Banner.
The instrumental detournement matches perfectly with the lyrical content of the song, which presents itself as a military recruiting pitch but is really a dark satire of the brutality of imperialist war. But unlike so many of the other Vietnam antiwar anthems, it is not a mellow call to give peace a chance. It moves beyond liberal pacifism to offer a biting critique of how working-class lives are destroyed for the sake of profit and political power for the capitalist class. The song exposes how militarism, anti-communism, imperialism, and capitalism are interconnected.
While the track didn’t top the charts, it became one of the most popular songs among anti Vietnam war activists. Beyond politicized circles, the legacy of the song has endured thanks to Joe’s acoustic performance of the piece at the singularly famous Woodstock Festival of 1969.
Both in CJ and the Fish and in his solo career in the following decades, Country Joe wrote and performed songs that critiqued systems of oppression from the left and sought to connect with the mass movements of his time.
The counterculture and the left
The 1960s counterculture is popularly remembered as a time of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” A minority—but a significant minority—of youth in the United States were searching for a different way of living, thinking, and doing that rejected the reactionary social and political mores that were common during the previous decade.
The consensus for this generation was progressive, though the counterculture, despite its affinity with leftist politics, sometimes found friction with it. Much of the organized left (often rightly) saw these youth subcultures such as the “hippies” as utopian, escapist, and eminently middle-class in outlook. A segment of the counterculture certainly focused on free living, fantastical spirituality, and hedonism while neglecting a confrontation with the stark political realities of the time.
But the counterculture had many faces, and Country Joe represented one of its most socially aware. McDonald and his band were paragons of the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture, and their psychedelic music is one of its purest reflections. Yet, instead of escaping into pure fantasy, they used the counterculture as a conduit for radical politics. The 1960s were a time of both profound social changes and deep radicalization across the world. Country Joe was one of those figures best able to bring together these distinct, but intertwined, processes.
From the start to the end of his life, Country Joe was a fighter for equality and justice for all. He saw himself as “moral support” for good causes. Far beyond the upheavals of the 1960s, McDonald continued to use his music to support progressive causes. He continued to participate in antiwar, environmental, and other progressive movements into the 21st century.
The best way we can memorialize Country Joe is to continue his work and the work of so many others like him. Both as organizers and as artists, we need to swim like fish among the people, engage and confront the realities of our time, and develop the fight for a better world. These are solemn tasks, but as Country Joe showed us, they can be fun too.
Photo: Country Joe sings at the Woodstock festival in 1969. (Michael Fredericks / The Image Works)
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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.
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Trump’s environmental rollbacks hurt the Black community
By BRIAN CRAWFORD
Upon returning to power, Donald Trump wasted no time in resuming his environmental destruction. With a stroke of his felt-tip pen, Trump revoked Executive Order 12898, the “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.
”As a result, no longer will the federal government address racial discrimination in environmental policy considerations.”
The Environmental Protection Agency closed the Office of Environmental Justice, as if to add another exclamation point to the administration’s racist polices. It allows corporations to continue to pollute in the Black community unchallenged. Even with significant evidence, Black communities rarely have received anything approximating justice, whether Trump was in the White House or not.
As was the case in his first term, Trump eliminated or weakened nearly a hundred environmental regulations, according to the Sierra Club. One of the more significant was the “endangerment finding” that provided the legal basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are the cause of the warming of the planet.
Regarding the “endangerment finding,” Samantha Gross and Ryan Beane write in a commentary for the Brookings institute: “They want to remove it root and branch in a way that will make it more difficult for future administrations to reverse.” The president and his administration argue that regulations hinder growth and place undue burdens on business.
EPA’s “endangerment finding” has its origins in the Supreme Court’s 2006-2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA. The agency argued that the Clean Air Act did not mandate it to enforce regulations to address climate change, and that causal links between global heating and greenhouse gases had not been established. The agency lost that argument; the court affirmed that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, qualify as air pollutants.
Two years later, the EPA accepted the scientific belief that greenhouse gases were health hazards and contributing to the climate crisis. In January 2026, however, the EPA reversed that finding, removing the legal basis for regulating emissions from vehicles. Previously, in 2012, the majority of the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that the agency does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to broadly limit greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would change the country’s power system.
The EPA “has a deplorable record of responding to discrimination complaints” (Equal Justice Initiative: “Environmental Injustice in the Black Belt”). In 2018, it dismissed a complaint against Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) for failure to address the effect of toxic and radioactive materials on poor Black communities. When the ADEM rescinded its civil rights policy, this became the basis for the EPA to dismiss the complaint. ADEM’s abolition of its policy raises the question: what environment is it managing? The same could be asked of EPA.
The city of Uniontown, Ala., (predominantly Black) has multiple environmental hazards that include coal ash containing arsenic and radioactive material, and numerous sources of water contamination. That should be more than enough evidence to pursue the case.
Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” which encompasses the region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is so named for its high rates of cancer. In 2023, Jeff Landry who served as Attorney General (now governor of Louisiana) sued to stop EPA from investigating environmental racism. The agency dropped the case. Governor Landry is a key ally of the state’s oil and gas industry.
St John the Baptist Parish exemplifies the racial history of the U.S. “As the regional economy has shifted from chains and plantation slavery to smokestacks and petrochemical plants,” the descendants of the former slaves who founded the cities bear the brunt (capitalbnews.org, “The Court Ruling that Guaranteed a Future of Environmental Racism”). In August 2024 a Trump-appointed federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled that the Department of Justice could not enforce the disparate impact requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The courts as an avenue to fight against environmental discrimination is becoming a much narrower street.
These communities must fight to survive. Scientific research established links between climate change and hazards to human health, as well as a correlation between the geographical proximity of predominantly Black communities near polluting industries and high rates of disease.
Exposure to particulate matter (PM2.5) is a significant contributor to a wide range of illnesses. PM2.5 are tiny particles, often emitted from oil and gasoline emissions, that enter the body through the respiratory system and into the bloodstream. Black communities are disproportionately affected by this exposure and are more likely to die than other racial and ethnic groups, according to a study conducted by Stanford Medicine. Proximity to polluting industries was the primary contributing factor to higher rates of disease. African Americans have historically been trapped in location populated by refineries, and other industrial polluters.
African American communities “suffer more from storms and flood events, extreme heat, infectious disease and disruptions to labor markets, all of which are occurring more frequently because of climate change” (clasp.org, “The Trump Administration, Earth Day and Environmental Racism”).
This is not a result of the neglect of one agency or even the malevolence of the government. It follows the logic of capitalist production. From primitive accumulation of capital, which snatched resources from native populations (and continues today), dispossession and displacement, forced labor, and the creations of ghettos and reservations all are features of capitalism. Affected communities are condemned to a slow death. They personify what is to come as the crisis becomes more acute. Trump is just the front man for this band of destroyers. He represents a system that extols the virtues of “creative destruction.” This is destruction for the sake of economic growth.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” wrote Edward Abby. To save the patient, radical medicine is necessary. Defeating environmental racism is a victory for the entire working class. We must demand an end to the system that like a metastatic cell dooms us and the planet.
(Top photo) Julie Dermansky. (Below) James Jordan.
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Epstein and the unity of the ruling class
By COCO SMYTH
Since the Miami Herald’s expose, “Perversion of Justice,” brought knowledge of the Epstein conspiracy to the mainstream in November 2018, we have entered a period in which elements of the most lurid conspiracy theories are revealed to be realities. Jeffrey Epstein, once referred to glowingly as a mysterious “New York financier,” was revealed to be the organizer of a massive pedophilia and sex trafficking operation servicing many of the most powerful figures of international capitalism—from politicians to CEOs and intellectuals.
Though the ruling class has tried to kill and bury the Epstein case through all possible means, its reverberations keep pulling it back up to the surface in all its grotesqueness. The shocking details of the case would have attracted mass interest in themselves, but the depth of the affair and the way in which it implicates and exposes the ruling class have ensured that it won’t leave public consciousness.
The Epstein case has incited a protracted crisis of legitimacy in which the facade of bourgeois society has slipped and revealed the true nature of the system to millions. It has exposed the linkages of capitalists across the world despite supposedly irreconcilable national and political divides. It has revealed that the ruling class stands above the law, and the principles of bourgeois law and order are nothing but a weapon against working and oppressed people and a shield for the political and economic elites. It has shown that the capitalists are willing not only to commit heinous crimes, but have the power and the will to cover them up.
The decadence and depravity of the ruling circles confirm the patriarchal and oppressive core of contemporary capitalist life. For the socialist movement, it is vital we both connect with the mass disillusionment incited by the waves of revelations, offer a framework for parsing their real significance and implications, and organize the outrage into effective resistance.
The state of the coverup
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump promised the speedy release of the Epstein files to throw a bone to his base and indict his Democratic opponents as participants and supporters of Epstein’s pedophilic sex trafficking ring. The Epstein case had already become a core element of the worldview of large swathes of Trump’s committed base, confirming to them how essential Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of the “deep state” really was.
During Trump’s first term, the popular QAnon conspiracy theory used the Epstein case as the rational kernel of a larger worldview that the world is presided over by a shadowy (Jewish) pedophile cabal, and Trump was on a secret mission to purge the government and society of these evildoers. The unhinged reactionary fantasy of QAnon only brought a minority of the Republican into active participation, yet many of its tenets seeped into the broader zeitgeist among the Trumpian base. Consequently, the deepening of the Epstein crisis and Trump’s undeniable connection to it have been one of the few things that have made Trump’s seemingly unassailable loyalty from his base waver.
Given this contradiction, the administration has fumbled incompetently for over a year trying every quick fix imaginable and failing to stop the legitimacy crisis. The start of Trump’s second term was accompanied by bold declarations by officials like Pam Bondi that all would soon be revealed. Mysteriously, they publicly walked back everything and claimed there was no Epstein list or files to disclose. Shortly thereafter, there was a big press event celebrating the disclosure of the files, when in reality documents that had already been released were just rereleased with more redactions than they had the first time.
Pressure mounted after this failed stunt and ultimately precipitated The Epstein Files Transparency Act. Signed on Nov. 19, 2025, the Act has put the Trump administration in a bind. Trump hoped for a party-line split to stymy the Act’s passage, but a large percentage of Republican representatives turned in favor of the Act. This brought the Act to Trump’s desk to be approved or rejected. If Trump allowed full disclosure, then the depth of his and many other ruling-class peoples’ associations with Epstein would be revealed to the world. If he didn’t disclose, then it would confirm to millions that he has something to hide and is covering for a pedophilic sex trafficking ring. Trump felt forced to sign, but hasn’t followed the letter of the law.
The government’s process of disclosure of the Epstein files has been just as incompetent and bungled as all the other phases of the crisis. Eventually, the administration finally released 3 million documents on Dec. 19, 2025, seemingly finally complying with the Disclosure Act. However, it was clear upon examination that there were excessive redactions, suggesting political reasons for the suppressed information. Even more galling, some survivors’ names were not redacted, opening them up to targeting and harassment. Furthermore, the 3 million documents released were not the full “Epstein files” demanded by the Transparency Act.
The administration had violated the Transparency Act, though there were no formal mechanisms to discipline or punish them. However, pressure continued to mount until the government was forced to release another 3 million documents in the next month.
The bitter struggle by the government to avoid disclosing the Epstein files has tarnished the reputation of the administration both nationally and internationally. It has even led Trump’s notoriously fanatical base to question why the man and the party who had demagogued about the case for so long suddenly had such cold feet.
The most obvious reason for the Trump regime’s vacillations is how implicated Trump is himself with Epstein. In the currently available documents, Trump’s name appears more than 38,000 times. There are many publicly available photos with the two together. Beyond that, it is very clear that Trump and Epstein were close associates, even friends. But there are even deeper considerations here than just for Trump to save his own hide..
What was Epstein’s operation?
Conspiracism has long been a major sideshow in the politics of the United States. For the most part, the conspiracy theories that animate the body politic tell us more about the segments of society that believe in them than reality—like the moon landing, the JFK assassination, or communist infiltration of American institutions. But sometimes the rumblings that the wider society dismisses as overactive imagination are just the early signs of a coming earthquake.
During the 1960s and ’70s, leftist organizers were confident that their organizations were being systematically undermined. This notion appeared as a farce to mainstream America, but the disclosure of COINTELPRO made it clear the problem was even greater than most activists had suspected. The disclosure of MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control program, made many of the wackier conspiracy theories appear tame by comparison.
Today, with Epstein, a hundred conspiracy theories have bloomed. The three questions these theories tend to revolve around are: what was Epstein’s operation, what were his aims, and who did he serve?
On the first question, despite obfuscation by the U.S. government, it is clear that Jeffrey Epstein was the head of a large-scale sex trafficking ring servicing the ruling class. During the first Trump administration, the government estimated there were 100 victims of Epstein’s rings. After the investigation was expanded during the Biden presidency, that number was expanded to over 1000. Yet, both administrations have carefully avoided identifying whom the trafficking ring was for besides Epstein. The current government has repeatedly contended that Epstein created the sex trafficking ring solely to service himself, a notion that’s patently absurd given the scale of the operation and the clear links many elites have had with that side of his activities.
Beyond that, it is clear from the files that Epstein also had his hands in financial speculation and offered advice on these questions to the elites. This aspect has come to a head in England, where the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and Labour Party politician Peter Mandelson have been charged for exposing state secrets in financial discussion with Epstein. The exact nature of these activities and why Epstein was considered an expert on these questions by the capitalists remain unclear. No prominent politicians or capitalists have yet faced charges anywhere in the world for their participation in sex crimes in relation to Epstein.
This brings us to the question of Epstein’s aims in engaging in large-scale sex trafficking. The most popular theory is that Epstein was the head of a blackmailing operation that gathered compromising information on many of the most powerful actors in contemporary capitalism. Other explanations include that he was just an amoral libertine and hedonist or that he was providing a service in demand in ruling circles for the money; however, neither of these latter two speculations seem to fit the facts as we know them.
Finally, and most contentiously, there has been wide debate about whom Epstein served. Given how large his trafficking ring was and the many indicators that it was also the basis of a blackmail operation, many have wondered if Epstein was in the service of one government or another. For the most part, the U.S. government has avoided addressing this question, though recently they’ve been pushing the narrative that he was a Russian asset, a notion little evidenced by the available files or the network he cultivated. In popular consciousness, the most common assumptions are that he served the CIA or Mossad. This is a factual question and can only be confirmed by full disclosure of relevant information related to Epstein. Though this is a question of interest, it’s not particularly salient for either our understanding or practical response to the Epstein Affair.
Epstein and the unity of the ruling class
There are many important aspects of the Epstein Affair. To really understand its full implications, though, we have to understand cliques like Epstein’s in the context of international capitalism. It would be easy to fall into the conspiracist logic that the whole ruling class is a pedophile cabal operating behind the scenes of the formal structures of “democratic” capitalism on the basis of the Epstein case. In the opposite direction we can easily downplay just how much cliques like Epstein’s say about the capitalist class and its real mode of operation.
The way we square this circle is by examining the peculiar unity of the ruling class under international capitalism. The capitalists themselves like to make us believe that the ruling class is permanently factionalized along many different lines in the same ways they want the working class majority to be. They promote antagonisms around nationality, political party, race, gender, and economic interest. By maintaining the illusion of irreconcilable differences between different sectors of the ruling class, they dissolve the recognition among the masses that there is any ruling class at all. In this narrative, there are no common ruling-class interests and therefore practice; there is instead sectional differences and antagonism. These differences skew across class lines—a worker and a capitalist can both vote Democrat or identify America’s interest as their own interest.
The apparent sharpness of these intra-ruling class antagonisms leads to head-scratching and cognitive dissonance for those looking at the Epstein Affair. In reality, international capitalism is comprised of a “band of warring brothers,” as Marx described it. On the other hand, there are real conflicts between the ruling class. Capitalists are in competition over profit and seek to use the state for their own personal and sectional interests. This can be a struggle for existence for capitalists—if they lose out to other capitalists, they could lose their positions as capitalists themselves.
But the structural level of capitalism cuts against these antagonisms. The capitalist state brings together all the competing capitalists into an organization that mediates their internal squabbles and provides them the ability to unite to oppress the working masses. Without this unity, they could not organize society under their collective control and society would either be dominated by constant strife or transformed through a revolution bringing the masses to power.
But there are a thousand other smaller ways that the ruling class achieves its unity. Beyond the immediate and obvious reasons for the ruling class to participate in Epstein’s crimes, the whole affair is an exercise in building the unity the ruling class requires.
Epstein and Maxwell were experts at bringing together capitalists, politicians, and intellectuals and strengthening their bonds. The sex trafficking was not just a quirk. By participating in despicable acts together with impunity and simultaneously creating the potential to compromise themselves as individuals, these ruling-class elements are bound together. We see this same phenomenon on a smaller scale with the ubiquity of hazing in college fraternities or rituals in secret societies and elite organizations. Common participation and knowledge of each other’s crimes gives them a deep investment in each other despite their differences. We can see the evidence of this in how Trump has talked softly about another close Epstein associate, Bill Clinton, during the latest flare up of the Epstein crisis despite his previously apparently implacable struggle against the Clintons on the political terrain.
The maturing of the crisis has revealed the solidarity between the whole ruling class, which in normal times is obscured by the daily conflict over everyday political issues. Whether the Epstein crisis will pass by with little effect or end in real accountability will depend on whether the working class can exploit the current fractures the ruling class is working to smooth over.
Socialism against the Epstein class
The whole course of the Epstein saga has been a dark example of world capitalism at work. Impunity, exploitation, sexual coercion, and coverups are daily realities of life within class society. That there are Epsteins, Maxwells, and their elite clients is sadly nothing new. What is new is the knowledge of the real workings of the ruling class and the mass outrage of millions across the world. For socialists, it is our duty to connect with this righteous anger and channel it towards the struggle for justice.
Our immediate demands are for full transparency and for justice for the multitude of survivors of Epstein’s crimes. It is thanks to the advocacy of these survivors at great risk to themselves that Epstein’s apparatus and the ruling class’s support for it have been revealed in all their brutality. All the capitalists and politicians who sexually abused women and girls must face the legal consequences that the bourgeois justice system promises but rarely delivers on. Getting justice will depend on continued exposure of the already publicly known crimes and pressuring the system to reveal all the information they have hidden to protect the ruling class.
The method to secure justice is through organized struggle. It is clear that public knowledge of the crimes and mass outrage are insufficient to win justice. We are seeing movement in this direction, particularly in Ohio, where Les Wexner, one of Epstein’s primary backers resides. Concerted organization has begun to put the heat on Wexner. Local leftist organizations and students have called rallies demanding justice and the removal of Wexner’s name from the many buildings that are adorned with it. Most notably, the Ohio Nurses Association and the AFL-CIO called a rally outside Wexner Medical Center to expose Wexner. Bringing unions into the movement and organizing workers and the community to strengthen the calls for justice will be essential to get trials or any other measures implemented.
Beyond the immediate demands of the moment, the Epstein Affair calls on us to wage a systematic struggle against world capitalism as a whole. The patriarchy and impunity of the ruling class are endemic features of capitalism and can only be mitigated as long as capitalism itself hasn’t been eliminated. The complicity and coverups of Epstein’s ring extends through all wings of bourgeois politics from the right to the left—from the Republican Party, through the Democratic Party, to the UK Labour Party. We need an independent and radical working-class party, which is committed to exposing every crime perpetrated by the ruling class and which seeks to encourage mass struggle by the working class to wrest power from our oppressors and exploiters.
Today, the unbridled decadence of the ruling class is recognized by the masses. We must turn this knowledge into action to win justice for the survivors and achieve a world where a Jeffrey Epstein is an impossibility. That world is socialism.
(Photo) Trump and Epstein. (Netflix)
