The Spark

“Voluntary Agreement”—With a Gun Held to Their Heads

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In March, 9,000 immigrants “volunteered” to “self deport”—in other words, return to the country from whence they came.

Things haven’t improved in those countries. U.S. capital still dominates their economies. Gangs still roam working class neighborhoods in Haiti, putting everyone’s life at risk. Civil war continues to rage in Sudan, after more than a decade. Ukraine is still beset by war. Countries like Guatemala, where some migrants come from, still have 7-year-old children working in the fields.

Many of the people agreeing to “self deport” have roots in the U.S., having worked here for years. Some know no other family than the brothers, sisters, and children they have here.

Some asking to leave have a claim for “humanitarian” protection, because they could be killed where they come from, having led strikes, for example, or taking part in demonstrations against a military dictatorship.

Almost all of them were picked up in one of the dragnets carried out by ICE, which grabbed them off the street as they dropped their kids at school, or which raided their workplace. The largest share of them—over 70%—have no criminal record of any kind. They just happened to be in ICE’s crosshairs one day.

Ever since that day, they sit in detention centers, waiting for their cases to be heard.

What does it say about the conditions they are being held under in the U.S.A. that they now “volunteer” to go back?

Many of the detention centers are housed in old prisons, like Leavenworth in Kansas, or North Lake in Michigan. Some have been set up in mammoth field houses, or tents, some in old warehouses. But regardless of the kind of facility, they are wretched hellholes.

Congress has documented over 1,000 reports about unsafe and dangerous conditions, filthy and unsanitary dining spaces, lack of working toilet facilities, spoiled food, lack of medical care for severely ill or injured people, unfilled prescriptions for vital medicines—plus violent abuse of those who complain. A woman breast-feeding at one facility had her infant snatched away from her.

Since Trump took office, 44 people died in one of these detention centers, 31 in 2025, another 13 so far in the first three months of 2026. They did not die of old age, but of severe mistreatment.

Many of those big centers are run by private, for-profit prison companies. Given the logic of capitalism, worse conditions mean better profit.

In July 2025, Todd Lyons, ICE’s Acting Director, issued a memo declaring that “illegal” immigrants should no longer be allowed bond, while they are waiting to present their case in an immigration court. With the average wait for a hearing now hitting four years, most people could expect to be locked up indefinitely, under intolerable conditions.

The Migration Policy Institute said: “People are being coerced to volunteer to leave, even when they have potentially a lawful right to stay.”

It’s extortion—pure-and-simple extortion. But it’s also part of a terrorist policy carried out by the U.S. government. It did not start with Trump.

Trump, in fact, has not carried out more expulsions of immigrants than Biden did. Trump uses the same private prison companies that Biden did—just more of them. The long waiting period to even get a hearing goes back to Biden’s administration. What is different with Trump is that everything is done as a violent public spectacle.

The same number of immigrants is expelled, but Trump publicizes the expulsions, aiming it at all the others who remain. Trump might as well come right out and say it: “Work hard and shut up.”

The ICE roundups and the detention centers are threats aimed at the 15 million immigrants without papers—and at tens of millions more who are perfectly legal. In reality, they are aimed at everyone who works here: immigrant or native-born, brown, black or white, woman or man.

Guns targeting one part of the working class will turn their fire on the whole working class.

The International Imperialist Order Is Unravelling

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. seems to have deeply miscalculated in launching its war on Iran. The war is not going well for the U.S. And it appears to be spelling the end of the post-WWII international order.

Whatever reason the U.S. had for attacking Iran at this precise moment (and no one should think that it’s because of the whims of one man or the direction of a much smaller country, Israel), the U.S. and the world economy are now in a position that they were not in a few months ago. The Strait of Hormuz is now effectively closed, and this closure is controlled by Iran. Before the war, the Strait was open and ships passed freely. Now, even after weeks of bombing that killed much of the Iranian regime’s leadership, Iran still has the capability to attack any ships passing through the Strait, and any other Gulf country, should the U.S. decide to bomb Iran again.

The U.S. seems to be left without any good choice as far as advancing its interests is concerned.

Either it could walk away and declare “victory,” leaving Iran in control of the Strait; or it could resume bombing Iran, risking a retaliation on ships and oil facilities in the Gulf; or it could invade with ground troops—starting a war that could last for years.

Any which way, the damage to the world economy will be, and already is, irrevocable. And U.S. capitalism, while asserting itself, at the same time demonstrates its limits.

Beyond that, the rest of the world is now left to wonder what to expect of the U.S. Since WWII, the U.S. has set itself up as the cop of the world, the force that would police the international imperialist order for all of the smaller imperialist powers. They all got rich, at the expense of the rest of the world, with the U.S. at the helm.

Now, the U.S. government has openly declared that it will no longer play that role for the rest of the great powers. It has openly told them that they are on their own.

This turn has been a long time coming. It started before Trump came into office, and in fact it’s baked into the workings of capitalism itself. The system produces capitalist classes based in different countries, depending on their own nation states to advance their interests, each with their own individual armed forces built to do so. Biden made his own moves in this process with the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which among other things was a protectionist boondoggle for U.S. and other companies to build inside the U.S. and receive lots of government money for doing so. This was a veiled attack against manufacturers based in other countries. Trump just replaced the carrot with the stick when he started implementing tariffs on much of the world, including U.S. allies.

European and Asian countries, supposedly U.S. allies, are left wondering how they will get the oil that they need out of the Persian Gulf—and not just oil, but fertilizer, plastics, minerals, and much else that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

They seem to have two choices now: They can negotiate with the regime in Iran; or they can build up their own navies and start to challenge that impasse in their own national interests, risking a wider war and eventually even conflicts between each other for control or rights through the Strait and other choke points for supply chains around the world.

This is only one reason why this conflict can be seen as the flashpoint for a wider war and potentially the next world war.

The U.S. (and Israeli) attack on Iran seems to have called the question on the whole international order. If so, there is no going back.

Trump keeps telling us that the war is over … but if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait, he’ll start again to bomb them back to the Stone Age … or he has a deal with Iran that will reopen the Strait … or none of that matters, and the U.S. can survive on its own oil production. Blah blah blah. A new thing every day.

Trump clearly has no answer to the dilemma confronting the U.S. ruling class, the dilemma now tying up the world economy and pushing it to a massive recession or worse. A dilemma that he and the U.S. state forced upon the world.

And, in the middle of all this, we can see how much Trump seems to care about it—as he headed off to China to be feted by Xi Jinping in a massive state visit, traveling the country and receiving gifts of rose seeds from Xi (to be planted in the now paved-over White House Rose Garden?)

Trump himself may not care. He may just be focused on the next shiny thing that makes him feel important. But the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, will suffer the consequences of this growing conflict between the great imperialist powers.

Chicago Park District Camps: Not Nearly Enough Places

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Chicago Park District has long offered desirable summer camp programs for kids. These programs have a reputation for being affordable, safe, well-staffed, and educational.

But for years, registration has been crazy. To get their kids signed up, parents lined up early, camped out, or tried to find the fastest internet connection they could, but the programs are unavailable for most working-class parents who can’t take a day off to sign their kids up for camp.

This year, the Park District announced with great fanfare that they had overhauled the registration process. And perhaps the website was easier to navigate. But most programs still filled up the first minute registration was available.

The basic problem isn’t the registration system—it’s that there aren’t enough places for all the kids who need summer camp!

Chicago is a very rich city. Putting kids in camp helps their development, helps their parents, and keeps them out of trouble.

It should be a no-brainer to fund enough places for every kid who needs one. But somehow, the money always seems to go into the pockets of those already rich, instead of for the programs like summer camp that working-class kids need.

Health Insurance Is Disappearing

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Between people being kicked off Medicaid and people no longer able to afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act, a growing number of people in this country no longer have health insurance.

This is the richest country in the world. The money exists for healthcare for everyone!

Government’s Attack on Southern Poverty Law Center Is a Defense of Racism

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On April 21, the U.S. Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes. The crux of the accusation is that the SPLC used donations to pay informants in white supremacist groups, and that some of the money the SPLC gave them went to fund the hate it claimed to be combating.

The SPLC made its name investigating and organizing legal cases against groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC also publishes information on various hate groups—it lists over 1300 in the United States.

In addition to the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations, the SPLC calls out groups that push the idea of “white genocide” or other ridiculous claims that white people are the “real victims” of racism. It also calls out groups that spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, or organize anti-immigrant militia groups, as well as those that spread hate against gay, lesbian, or transgender people.

The government’s prosecution of the SPLC is unprecedented. It gets no funding from the government, and no donors have accused the group of defrauding them. The SPLC did run an operation to cultivate informants in some of the hate groups it studied, and up to 2023, paid some of those informants for the information they provided. The Justice Department makes vague reference to “crimes” that this money was used to fund but lists nothing specific. And paying informants is a standard practice of the Justice Department itself! The SPLC even shared information it got from these informants with the FBI, which then used it to bring a number of prosecutions, including under Trump.

The Justice Department’s claims that “there is nothing political about this indictment” could not be further from the truth. In recent years, Republicans have become increasingly critical of the group for “unfairly” calling Christian and other conservative organizations extremist hate groups. Never mind that these groups increasingly spout the kind of hate that the SPLC calls out!

In reality, the attack on the SPLC is a defense of the far-right groups and ideas that the SPLC targets. The capitalist class has an increasing interest in defending those who promote racism, the targeting of immigrants, the scapegoating of transgender or gay people, and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. And they have an interest in going after groups like the SPLC that expose those hate groups and their ideas.

A Protest Begins

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A warehouse in Washington County, in western Maryland, was purchased without knowledge of anybody but county commissioners. It is supposed to be used by ICE to house between 500 and 1,500 immigrants in detention. A small number of activists in nearby Hagerstown have been protesting.

The county is majority Republican but the state is majority Democrat. The Democratic attorney general brought suit to stop the detention center on grounds that an environmental analysis was not done. In April, there was a temporary injunction to stop the project.

The warehouse is more than 800,000 square feet, equal to more than ten football fields and right now has four toilets. The activists are trying to argue that both water and sewage will be a challenge if this project goes through. The board of county commissioners made it harder to protest at its meetings after some protesters began to come to speak on the warehouse issues.

Yet if the project goes through, not only will water and sewage and emergency fees go up, the county will not collect taxes on the property. The federal government does not pay property taxes when it has a government usage for a property it buys.

Altogether this warehouse, and others like it being purchased by ICE around the country, will cost money in every state budget and make for worse conditions for immigrant detainees everywhere. Isn’t that the point?

Cuba: A People Strangled by the U.S.

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is translated from the May 15 issue, #3015 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

While Trump is embroiled in the war he launched against the Iranian regime, he is also targeting the island of Cuba. He suggested that an American aircraft carrier could besiege Cuba “on the way back from Iran” and signed an executive order on May 1 expanding the list of U.S. sanctions against Cuba.

The island has been under embargo since 1962. Cuba has been suffocated since January by the U.S. oil blockade, which deprives it of energy, in addition to all other essential goods such as medicine. Without oil, Cuba can’t generate electricity, which is vital to daily life. Hospitals can’t function. Gas stations don’t even have fumes. Transportation is reduced to barely a crawl. Major international airlines have canceled all their flights. This deprives the island of its main source of income and its only source of dollars: tourism.

The Cuban economy never recovered from the halt in tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Now it has ground to a halt yet again. Tens of thousands of Cubans have lost their jobs. They are unable to support their families. The prices of the few goods still available have skyrocketed. A quart of cooking oil now costs a quarter of the average salary. Poverty and a lack of prospects are accelerating the exodus of the population. Since 2020, two million people have left—a quarter of the population—often clandestinely, to try their luck elsewhere in Latin America.

If Trump is so relentless in his attacks on Cuba, and especially on the poorest segment of its population who bear the greatest brunt of the embargo, it’s not because this small island represents “an extraordinary threat,” as he repeatedly claims. Cuba has lacked ballistic missiles ever since Soviet missiles were installed in 1962 and then quickly removed. Its army carries only outdated equipment.

But what Trump cannot accept—like every American president since John F. Kennedy—is that the people of a country located just 90 miles from Florida were able to overthrow a pro-American dictatorship and replace it with a regime that stood up to imperialism and brought some progress and dignity to its people.

That was over 65 years ago. Since then, Fidel Castro and the generation that seized power and embodied independence from the U.S. in the eyes of the world have departed. Deprived of Soviet support, suffocated by the American embargo, and subjected to an authoritarian regime, the island has steadily sunk deeper into poverty. But for Trump and his administration, that’s not enough. They want to overthrow a regime that is heir to a popular uprising. This would mean Cuba reverting to being the “American brothel” it was before 1959.

High School Students from Africa Detained

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ICE detained two high school students from the Republic of Congo outside their school in Mississippi on April 21, accusing them of violating their student visas. But thousands of community members pressured authorities to release them.

For decades, federal law has made it difficult for foreign youth to study at public high schools. They can’t stay longer than a year. They have to pay thousands of dollars as “tuition.” The school must be on a list of federally approved schools.

The Makoka brothers had studied for two years at private, historically black boarding school Piney Woods, which draws at-risk and foreign youth and is on the list. But last summer they asked to transfer to a public school, Hancock High School. It is not on the list. But the private school did not inform anyone that the transfer voided their visas.

ICE agents claim someone “reported that there were two African kids at Hancock.” Ten ICE vehicles swooped in. Agents grabbed the brothers and sent Max, age 15, to a group home in Texas. They sent Israel, age 18, to a detention camp in Louisiana.

As in Minneapolis, the arrests hit a nerve. The area around Hancock is 85% white and is considered conservative. But the outgoing and athletic Makoka brothers are popular. Classmates and teachers immediately wrote letters in protest. Around 3,100 people mostly from the area signed a petition demanding their release. Politicians up for reelection quickly championed the brothers. ICE released them after nine days! They need to find another school, and Israel is forced to wear an ankle monitor, but they are back in their community.

Frantic Election Rigging

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Donald Trump, who regularly charges his opponents with rigging elections, has been frantically doing his own election rigging, including by pressuring states under Republican control to redraw Congressional district maps to boost Republican chances of preserving their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It started with Republicans in Texas last year. So, the Democrats in California hit back with their own redistricting campaign to try to stay even, or even gain a small advantage.

Of course, redrawing election maps by both parties to gain political advantage has been going on practically forever. As politicians often say, it isn’t the voters who choose the elected officials, it is the political bosses who choose the voters. What else can you expect from a corrupt and avaricious system designed to serve the interests of the capitalists, oligarchs and plutocrats?

In late April, the U.S. Supreme Court, with a 6–3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents, put its own thumb on the scales in favor of Trump and the Republicans. It said that courts will no longer rule on whether electoral districts are discriminatory, a longtime Republican goal. This gave the green light to Republican politicians in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee to rush to redraw their own electoral maps in their bid to pick up a few more seats in the upcoming elections.

But not all Republican politicians have gone along with this political trickery, obviously out of fear that it could backfire against them with voters. Earlier in the year, the state government of Indiana, where the Republicans have a majority, had already refused to follow Trump’s directives and implement any new redistricting. In mid-May, the Republican politicians in South Carolina and Mississippi also resisted Trump’s pressure and threats to redraw the electoral map.

At least some Republican politicians are deciding not to attach themselves too tightly to the fading Donald Trump bandwagon, given that polls show increasing parts of the electorate blame Trump for the worsening economic crisis, the extremely costly war in Iran, and the much-hated ICE witch hunt against immigrants.

Ordinarily, Trump’s fading in the polls would benefit the Democrats in the November midterm elections. But that is not at all sure, since the Democrats themselves have been so discredited by their own policies that benefit the capitalist class, and by their own attacks on the population when they are in office. It got to the point that in the 2024 election there was a big increase in the number of Black and Latino voters who chose Trump and the Republicans, racist demagogy and all.

In fact, increasing numbers of voters, especially younger voters, are fed up with both parties. According to recent Gallup polls, there are more independent voters, who don’t belong to any party, than in the Republicans and Democrats combined!

This shows that there are more openings for revolutionaries, who want to see the working class change the society, to use elections in order to reach out and explain that another road is not only possible, but absolutely necessary.

420,000 Trees Ripped Out for Capitalist Profit

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is giving peach growers in California’s Central Valley 9 million dollars. No, not to grow peach trees, but to destroy them. And no, there is nothing wrong with the trees.

The growers are destroying 420,000 peach trees because the company that has been buying the peaches, Del Monte Foods, closed its two canning facilities in California. Left with more than 50,000 tons of peaches without a buyer, the growers will pull the peach trees to plant another crop.

Growing peaches requires an upfront investment. It takes up to 10 years for planted trees to bear their full load of fruit, which they then provide for another 10 years or so. So, Del Monte had been signing 20-year contracts with growers. But now the company deems canned peaches not profitable enough, which it blames on changing consumer habits and an increase in tin can costs due to Trump’s tariffs.

Del Monte has been a big name in fruit and vegetable distribution for 140 years. But the company and its various divisions have been sold about a dozen times in the last 40 years, including to private equity firms, which saddled Del Monte with a lot of debt in the process.

In July 2025, Del Monte filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to work out an agreement with the lenders of its over 900-million-dollar debt. But bankruptcy laws allow the owners of the company to just walk away from their obligations to the 70 peach growers Del Monte had made 20-year contracts with. Not to mention all the jobs that have disappeared—the Modesto cannery, for example, one of the two canneries Del Monte shut down, had alone employed about 1,800 people, including seasonal workers.

Thanks to lobbying with Washington politicians, the growers are getting some of their losses back—paid for by taxpayers. By working people, that is, who will also be facing the same high food prices, if not even higher, at the store. And an enormous number of perfectly good peach trees are destroyed in the process—all so that more profit can keep flowing into the bank accounts of big capitalists.

It’s long past time to send this extremely wasteful system to the waste basket.

RAM: Non-Profit’s Work Exposes the U.S. Health Care Hoax

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Remote Area Medical (RAM) is a non-profit organization that provides medical care to anyone who needs it—for free. No insurance needed, not even an ID. No questions asked. RAM sets up about 90 clinics a year, typically for two or three days each, across the U.S.

There is only one problem: so many people come to RAM’s “pop-up” clinics that many can’t get the care they need. A recent segment of the CBS program 60 Minutes shows hundreds of people lining up outside a three-day RAM clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee, days before it opens. The patients have driven hundreds of miles. They sleep in their cars at subfreezing temperatures, for three nights or more, until the clinic opens.

About half of the patients have no insurance. Others have insurance they can’t use because of high co-pays and deductibles. The vast majority are there for eye or dental care—services insurance plans usually don’t even cover.

About 1,200 people are there for dental; and some of their stories are heart-wrenching. There is the construction worker who lost his teeth to a work accident and companies refuse to hire him, saying he must be a meth addict. There is a young man who insists that the dentist pull all of his teeth, even though some can be saved, because he has no access to dental care otherwise. RAM technicians provide dentures to 24 patients just over that one weekend.

The vast majority of RAM staff are volunteers—nearly 900 of them that weekend in Knoxville, coming from all over the U.S. The money needed for the paid staff and supplies comes from donations. The clinics are set up where available—in libraries, warehouses, even animal stalls.

RAM started out 40 years ago, to fly health care workers and supplies to remote, isolated villages in the Amazon rainforest. Soon, it extended its services to that other health care desert called the USA. Today, 90% of RAM’s work is in cities and towns across the U.S.

A recent Gallup poll found that one in every three Americans cuts back on food, gasoline or electricity, or borrows money, to pay health care bills. Some forgo health care altogether. And it’s expected to get worse. Cuts to Medicaid have already caused an estimated three million people to lose health insurance, with millions of others certain to follow in coming years.

And on top of that, the federal government has ended subsidies for individuals buying health insurance, while insurance companies have doubled premiums.

RAM’s mobile clinics show none of that is necessary; that affordable health care is possible for all of us. And RAM volunteers show that the problem is not the people. Health care workers at all levels do their job, and will go above and beyond it, to meet their patients’ needs. The problem is the health care industry’s relentless profit drive.

Ocean-Going Shipping and Prices Going Up

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel went up at the pump, a place called the Strait of Hormuz made the news. A part of the global maritime highway, it became publicized that 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through this transport chokepoint.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway between Iran, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, is one of seven or eight major maritime chokepoints in the world.

Information about ocean-going container ships and tanker ships may not be trending on social media, but the hidden role played by ocean-going vessels in the global economy is being illuminated by the blockade.

In the interconnected capitalist world, much of what people need, to live a life on this planet, gets transported on the ocean—in or on a ship. It can take a month or more for goods to get from port to port.

At one point or another, 80% of international trade, by volume, is carried by sea.

During the price increases and shortages of the COVID pandemic, global supply chains were revealed. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is revealing that global shipping is the backbone of global trade. And the workers on these ocean-going vessels, the sailors, are the backbone of shipping.

Every time you see a train hauling containers and every time you see a semi-truck hauling a metal shipping box, ocean-going shipping was likely a part of that process.

The world is an interconnected economic whole. The problem remains that the billionaire class controls what the globally connected working class makes possible.

Texas: Politicians Step Up Attacks on Muslims

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When right-wing commentators in Texas began to attack a real estate development in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, calling it names like “an Islamic stronghold” and “Sharia City,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott jumped on the bandwagon. The development was “structured in a way that requires anybody who bought a lot there to abide by Sharia law,” Abbott said.

It was a lie. The development had no religious requirement whatsoever. It’s just that the developers happen to be Muslim. But the die was cast. State agencies launched investigations against the development. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed two lawsuits, seeking to ban the project. The Department of Justice of Donald Trump, who himself has often attacked Muslims, launched its own investigation—which it quickly closed without finding anything to hold against the development.

Candidates running in Texas primaries have made this anti-Muslim smoke-and-mirror show a central theme of their campaigns. Republican legislators in the state have also stepped up anti-Muslim rhetoric. The state’s two senators, John Cronyn and Ted Cruz, have repeatedly said things like, “Sharia law has no place in American courts.” These demagogues pretend that Muslims are “taking over Texas.” Never mind that Muslims make up less than one percent of the state’s population.

But the attacks haven’t stayed at the level of words. January 6 “insurgent” and right-wing “influencer” Jake Lang went to a mosque in the area with copy of the Koran stuck inside a dead pig’s head.

The threat of racist violence never lurks too far behind the politicians’ words, as the history of the U.S. amply shows.

UAE Leaving OPEC

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is translated and excerpted from the May 5 issue, #230 of Lutte Ouvrière / Arbeidersstrijd (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in Belgium.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was formed by the union of six emirates (small kingdoms) in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, with guidance by England. They joined OPEC in 1967.

OPEC was founded in the 1960s by countries which were poor at the time. Oil was one of their main resources. Their aim was to keep a larger share of oil wealth, since big American and European oil companies took most of the profits. OPEC member countries try to coordinate how much oil they produce, in order to keep prices high. [ …]

In the last few years of wars in the Middle East, the UAE adopted a more directly hostile posture toward Iran, including militarily, while other Gulf states sought a middle ground.

By leaving OPEC, the UAE’s main goal is to make more money by making more oil. Its production—a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s—has been held down by OPEC quotas.

But this decision also reflects a distancing from Saudi Arabia and a rapprochement with Israel and the U.S. The UAE continued its partnership with Israel, while Saudi Arabia stepped back after October 7, 2023. This rapprochement allowed the UAE to receive Israeli anti-missile weapons, for example.

More broadly, the UAE aims to pursue a policy independent from other Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. In the wars in Yemen and Sudan, the two countries have supported opposing sides.

The UAE’s exit from OPEC is motivated by the desire to produce more oil, and to assert its own policy in the region: more independence from Saudi Arabia; closer ties with Israel and the U.S.; and more direct opposition to Iran.

Japan: “No War”

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is translated from the May 15 issue, #3015 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Nearly 50,000 people in Tokyo and thousands more in other cities in Japan demonstrated on May 3 against war and the militarization of Japan.

This mobilization follows others since the beginning of the year, such as on March 19 when Donald Trump visited Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Takaichi represents the most nationalist wing of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan almost continuously since 1955. On taking office last October, she accelerated the country’s rearming. She has striven not to antagonize Trump since the start of the U.S. war against Iran, even though Japan depends heavily on oil imported from the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused by the U.S. attack has had serious consequences for Japan’s economy. Trump cited Japan among the countries that he thinks should do more to ensure freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz instead of “making the U.S. do it all.” Takaichi cited Japan’s constitution and responded that Japan cannot do everything it wants while still complying with the law.

The May 3 demonstrations commemorated the entry into effect of Japan’s constitution in 1947. It was drafted under American occupation and stipulates that Japan renounces war and will not maintain offensive armed forces. In fact, this piece of paper did not stop the creation of a genuine army, the “Japan Self-Defense Forces,” which has around 250,000 active-duty troops and tens of thousands of reservists, plus submarines, fighter jets, and anti-missile systems.

Japan has an army like any other country does, but it is cloaked in symbolic legal restrictions. In seeking to amend the constitution, Takaichi aims to take a step toward formalizing this national army and facilitating its participation in military alliances and in armed conflicts. This reform policy follows massive rearming and nonstop increases in the military budget, at the expense of social programs.

Protesters chanted slogans like “Hands off the constitution,” “No one should be sent to war,” and “Money for public services, not for weapons,” to express their refusal to be drawn into current and future wars. Japan endured terrible destruction during World War II, including the two U.S. atomic bombs in 1945. A significant portion of the population refuses to let a new generation suffer the atrocities of war.

Brazil: Unacceptable Conviction

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is translated from the May 15 issue, #3015 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

In Brazil, Zé Maria—president of the United Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado, a Trotskyist party), labor activist, and organizer of the metalworkers’ strikes in 1978 under the dictatorship—was sentenced on April 28 to two years in prison. He had given a speech denouncing the Israeli government and the military’s crimes in Palestine, and had affirmed his solidarity with the Palestinian people.

His conviction is intended to silence those who denounce the bloody and colonialist policies pursued by Israeli governments for the past 75 years. More broadly, it is also an attempt to intimidate everyone who opposes the crimes of imperialism.

Lutte Ouvrière affirms its support for Zé Maria, and protests against this unjustified conviction.

Russia: A “Conflict Heading toward Its End”?

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is translated from the May 15 issue, #3015 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated Russia’s 1945 victory over Hitler’s Germany with a small-scale military parade on May 9.

Usually, Russian authorities continue the tradition of the Stalinist regime and make a point of celebrating the victorious outcome of the “Great Patriotic War” with great fanfare, holding the war up as an example to the population. But this year, endlessly parading troops and the latest Russian military technology past the Kremlin was out of the question.

Did the Kremlin fear that Kyiv would demonstrate its drones’ capacities by disrupting the festivities? Even with a “dual air defense system” deployed, Putin preferred not to push his luck. Ukrainian forces had just successfully launched an air attack on one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, more than 500 miles inside the front.

Putin has boasted nonstop about the power of his army, repeating his “victory will be ours” slogan used on recruitment posters for so-called volunteers. But the Russian population knows too well that Ukrainian drones and missiles regularly strike border towns, refineries, ports, and arms depots, sometimes deep inside Russian territory. People see clearly the cost of the war, even in less impoverished regions with fewer “volunteers” to fight and die in Ukraine. They see a steep erosion of their purchasing power due to inflation following the explosion in military spending.

In this climate, Putin preferred to deliver a less warlike and more reassuring speech. He said he is convinced the conflict “is heading toward its end.” To those with doubts—proof that he knows their numbers are growing—he affirmed: “I am firmly convinced that our cause is just.”

This changes nothing on the ground. Even during the “three-day truce” announced for May 8 and 9, with the agreement of Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the fighting did not stop. And it will continue—as will the destruction and deaths on both sides this war has caused for more than four years.

Putin is well aware that he is mired in a seemingly endless war from which he sees no way out where he could still claim victory. At the same time, Zelenskyy is in a similar pickle. He is forced to continue the war just to maintain his grip on power. His only supporters, the European Union powers, condition their “aid” on the war dragging on.

So, the carnage continues. The Russian authorities know this will inevitably fuel discontent. Measures which the Kremlin justifies by claiming they are needed to protect the population from the enemy, like shutting down the internet and blocking access to unregulated social media, are provoking grumbling, even in circles which previously would never challenge the regime.

How long will these poorly disguised police measures, accompanied by increased repression against anything that moves, be enough to keep the lid on the cauldron of discontent?

Thousands Stuck on Ships in the Persian Gulf

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. war with Iran has stranded more than 800 ships in the Persian Gulf. These ships are crewed by more than 20,000 sailors, who are now stuck in what amounts to a vast watery prison.

These sailors make global trade function. Under ordinary conditions, they spend months at a time away from their homes and families for on average about $2000 a month. Almost all of them come from countries that are not directly involved in the war: Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia. The money they send home is often vital for their families’ survival, and for the economies of their home countries.

These sailors are now paying the direct price of this war. About 30 ships have been hit by drones or missiles, and so far, at least ten sailors have died.

On top of the risk of violence, after two months, the sailors trapped in the Persian Gulf are running out of food, water, medications, and other basic supplies. “Day by day, our stock of food and water is depleting,” one sailor told the Wall Street Journal. “I worry for my life … the situation is very bad.”

Some shipping companies are not even paying their trapped sailors—the International Transport Workers Federation reports that they have received about 1000 requests for help over missed pay. Some smaller shipping companies are even threatening bankruptcy—which would leave their sailors completely in the lurch.

Working-class people all over the world, like these sailors and their families, are the ones who pay when the rulers of the world start wars for their own ends.

“Voluntary Agreement”—With a Gun Held to Their Heads

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of May 10, 2026.

In March, 9,000 immigrants “volunteered” to “self deport,” in other words, return to the country from whence they came.

Many of the people agreeing to self deport have roots in the U.S., having worked here for years. Some know no other family than the brothers, sisters and children they have here.

Some asking to leave have a claim for humanitarian protection, because they could be killed where they come from, having led strikes, for example, or taking part in demonstrations against a military dictatorship.

Almost all of them were picked up in one of the dragnets carried out by ICE, which grabbed them off the street as they dropped their kids at school, or which raided their workplace. The largest share of them, over 70%, have no criminal record of any kind. They just happened to be in ICE’s crosshairs one day.

Ever since that day, they sit in detention centers, waiting for their cases to be heard.

What does it say about the conditions they are being held under in the U.S.A. that they now volunteer to go back?

Congress has documented over 1,000 reports about unsafe and dangerous conditions, filthy and unsanitary dining spaces, lack of working toilet facilities, spoiled food, lack of medical care for severely ill or injured people, unfilled prescriptions for vital medicines plus violent abuse of those who complain. A woman breastfeeding at one facility had her infant snatched away from her.

Since Trump took office, 44 people died in one of these detention centers, 31 in 2025, another 13 so far in the first three months of 2026. They did not die of old age, but of severe mistreatment.

Many of those big centers are run by private, for-profit prison companies. Given the logic of capitalism, worse conditions mean better profit.

In July of 2025, Todd Lyons, ICE’s Acting Director, issued a memo declaring that illegal immigrants should no longer be allowed bond, while they are waiting to present their case in an immigration court. With the average wait for a hearing now hitting four years, most people could expect to be locked up indefinitely, under intolerable conditions.

The Migration Policy Institute said: “People are being coerced to volunteer to leave, even when they have potentially a lawful right to stay.”

It’s extortion, pure-and-simple extortion. But it’s also part of a terrorist policy carried out by the U.S. government. It did not start with Trump.

Trump, in fact, has not carried out more expulsions of immigrants than Biden did. Trump uses the same private prison companies that Biden did, just more of them. The long waiting period to even get a hearing goes back to Biden’s administration. What is different with Trump is that everything is done as a violent public spectacle.

The same number of immigrants is expelled, but Trump publicizes the expulsions, aiming it at all the others who remain. Trump might as well come right out and say it: “Work hard and shut up.”

The ICE roundups and the detention centers are threats aimed at the 15 million immigrants without papers and at tens of millions more who are perfectly legal. In reality, they are aimed at everyone who works here: immigrant or native-born, brown, black or white, woman or man.

Guns targeting one part of the working class will turn their fire on the whole working class.

Culture Corner: The Mountains We Call Home and There’s Still Tomorrow

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Book: The Mountains We Call Home, the Book Woman’s Legacy by Kim Michele Richardson, 2026

This is the third book in a series about the book women of the Appalachian hills of Kentucky. Starting in the 1930s, the women, on mule-back, delivered books to remote hills and hollows, and fought illiteracy, ignorance and despair.

The main character has blue skin, a rare genetic condition. Laws put her in jail for marrying a white man. In this book, it is now the early 1950s, and you see life in a women’s prison. You see women locked up for defending themselves, for being in bad company, for mental illness, for resisting racism.

In the 1950s they used jail, violence, forced sterilizations, electric shock and lobotomies to try and control defiant women. Eventually she escapes and ends up migrating to Detroit. Along the way, in and out of prison, she never stops fighting ignorance and illiteracy and bringing hope and dreams of a better world to all.

Film: There’s Still Tomorrow, an Italian Film Directed by Paola Cortellesi, 2023, Streaming Free on Kanopy, or $3.99 on Amazon

This award-winning film depicts the events of 1946 Italy after the end of WWII, from the viewpoint of a working-class family in Rome. Filmed in black and white, you get a sense of what it was like to be a woman in a country just emerging from economic hardship, war, fascism and male patriarchy. The movie revolves around the mother receiving a mysterious letter which she hides away.

The film shows the family stuck in abusive relationships, living in close proximity to knowing neighbors, trying to maneuver harsh economic times. The daughter thinks nothing will ever change. Can the future be any better? The mother leads the way.

Los Angeles: The Disappearing Movie Industry Jobs

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a collapse in entertainment industry jobs in California, and nowhere do the workers feel the pain more than in Los Angeles, the historic center of the movie industry. By some estimates, available film production jobs in L.A. have gone down by 60% between 2021 and 2025.

Behind the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, the workers who make the movies have always endured job insecurity and unpredictable work hours. But today’s crisis seems deeper and longer-lasting. Thousands and thousands of workers needed to produce movies—carpenters, cameramen, light and sound technicians, writers, editors, animators and workers in many other classifications—are struggling to pay their bills and keep their homes. Many of them are working other jobs. Some are moving to other parts of the country—IF they can pick up and go, of course.

Commentators point out that the big Hollywood studios have moved production out of L.A., first to other states like New Jersey and Georgia, and then to other countries like Britain, Australia, Croatia and Hungary—because wages and production costs are lower there, and studios also get big handouts from the governments of those states and countries.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Film production has declined also because of conscious choices companies made. In the early 2020s, there was a boom in production when streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max, in competition with each other, were producing lots of TV series to sign up more and more subscribers. But once the customers and profits flowed in, the boom gave way to bust. The same companies shifted gears and sharply cut down the number of movies and shows they produce.

And sure enough, big studios’ profits are up. In fiscal year 2025, Disney reported a record operating income (profit before taxes) of 17.6 billion dollars. The company’s net profit was even more impressive: 12.4 billion dollars, a 250% increase from 2024! Netflix had a great year too, with an operating income of 13.3 billion dollars, 28% higher than in 2024. Warner Brothers’ 2025 operating income of 1.7 billion dollars may look modest in comparison, but it was still a 220% increase from 2024.

In this capitalist system, all decisions concerning production are made by a handful of big capitalists, just to increase their own profit. Workers will have job security only when capitalism is replaced with a system that puts the needs of the population above the profits of a few.

Rural Maryland: Special Needs Students Ignored

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years, thousands of children with severe disabilities who live on Maryland’s Eastern Shore have not had their special needs met because there are not enough special needs schools.

One third of Maryland counties are east of the Bay Bridge, but only one of Maryland’s 70 special needs schools. This spring, a three-year campaign by local people finally shook some money from the state legislature. Now three institutions each propose to build a special needs school on the Eastern Shore.

How High the Stock Market, How Low the Number of Jobs

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every day the financial journalists and TV announcers talk of how well the economy is doing, how high the stock market is going, how low unemployment is. Yet in the first few months of 2026, the largest companies in the U.S. have laid off hundreds of thousands of workers. That will mean a million fewer people working if this pace keeps up for all of 2026.

Amazon let 16,000 workers go from corporate headquarters, after laying off 14,000 a few months earlier. Citibank got rid of 20,000 employees. Heineken cut 5,000 people. UPS has said 30,000 jobs will go this year. Even financial firms like Coinbase and Crypto, supposedly bringing in billions of dollars, are laying off more than 10% of their work forces.

This war is not a new one: it is how bosses have always made money, by laying off some workers and having the ones left do two people’s work. The balance between the bosses and the workers only changes when working people fight back.

2026 Spark Conference

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Spark organization held its annual conference in April to discuss its work and set a political perspective for the coming year. In preparation for the conference, we discussed documents, two of which appeared in Class Struggle 126, titled, “On the March to War,” and “Conclusions.” In addition, the first two articles in this edition of Class Struggle magazine, “Domestic Report, Parts 1 and 2,” were also discussed in advance. The next two documents, “Political Report, Parts 1 and 2,” were presented verbally at the conference.

The documents and reports were accepted unanimously by the members in attendance, which we think is important because it shows the general agreement and confidence in the Marxist program on which the Spark has been constructed since its beginning.

Domestic Report, Part 1: The Affordability Crisis

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been focusing their upcoming election campaigns on what they call the Affordability Crisis. In fact, the very term “affordability crisis” trivializes what is really happening, making it appear as if it’s simply a problem of cutting back on a morning latte or a Netflix subscription. But by citing this crisis, the politicians give themselves an opportunity to make all kinds of empty promises facing the elections.

In reality, price hikes have exploded on the very basics of what people need to survive, including housing, food, transportation and healthcare, putting them increasingly out of reach for large parts of the working population. Housing is one of the most important indicators of the problem. Over the last four decades, the increase in rents has drastically outpaced wages. Currently, over 12 million U.S. households are considered “severely cost-burdened.” That means they spend half, if not more, of their income on rent and utilities, leaving little left to pay for other necessities. These rent increases have also led to a big increase in homelessness. Millions of workers in sectors like construction, services, or retail no longer have stable housing. They live in cars, shelters, or motels, along with their families. Close to two million children are counted as homeless by school districts around the country—a number experts consider to be the tip of the iceberg. And more than half of the homeless are now the elderly. When low wage workers are no longer able to work, most lack adequate retirement savings that would allow them to rent an apartment.

One reason for this crisis is that it is not profitable for companies to build new affordable housing. And this crisis is made much worse because much of the housing stock that does exist is being bought up by huge financial groups, such as hedge funds, private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts. That includes millions of single-family homes, as well as apartment complexes and trailer home parks. At the same time, what little remains of affordable housing in most cities is being knocked down in order to make way for luxury real estate developments and playgrounds for the rich, leaving people with few if any choices of where to live.

There is also a terrible crisis in healthcare, as healthcare costs have also exploded upward at a rate that is three times faster than wages. This has left approximately 16 million people, ages 18–64, without any health insurance coverage, with higher rates of uninsured workers in such highly profitable industries as agriculture, construction, and hospitality. But the crisis doesn’t stop there, since having insurance coverage is not a guarantee of actually getting healthcare. The number of workers with “inadequate” insurance exceeds 100 million. So, millions—who do have health insurance—often delay medical care due to high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles relative to their income, and they often face high medical debt and terrible financial hardship. This forces one-third of U.S. adults to cut back on food, utilities and gas in order to cover health care costs. And one-half of all adults have put off life events, such as changing jobs or having children, because of escalating medical costs.

Increasingly, healthcare is nothing but a giant suction pump for money controlled by a handful of companies. These include UnitedHealth Group, Elevance Health (formerly Anthem), CVS (Aetna), and Centene Corporation. These companies started as insurance companies, and then transformed themselves into vertically integrated monopolies that dominate almost every aspect of healthcare. The biggest of these companies, UnitedHealth Group, for example, has risen to become the fourth largest company in the country, based on sales, and the seventh largest in the world. UnitedHealth Group’s tentacles extend from insurance to its pharmacy, clinical, data and other operations through no less than 3,000 subsidiaries. One of these subsidiaries, Optimum Health, is a for-profit company now employing 10% of all the doctors in the country.

Food prices have also skyrocketed over the last five years at rates that are much higher than inflation. Almost 50 million people, including 15 million children were considered by the U.S. government to be “food insecure,” that is, they do not have enough to eat on a regular basis. These price increases are imposed by a handful of companies that dominate agricultural production, distribution and sales, including seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery. And those monopolies themselves are dominated by global investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard that are top shareholders across nearly all major agribusinesses, further consolidating power through institutional ownership.

Finally, 104 million U.S. residents do not have access to reliable transportation, since they cannot afford a car in a country where there is almost no public transportation and at a time when housing costs are forcing more workers to live far from economic centers where they can find work or go to school. The cost of a new car, at an average of over $50,000, is so high, especially adding in interest payments, it is now unaffordable for about 80% of the population. Even used car prices are now averaging $25,000, pushing them out of reach for most people. Today, the average price of a used car is more expensive than what new cars cost just 15 years ago! Besides that, all the other costs of owning a car have gone up just as fast: the monopolies and financial companies that dominate auto parts, insurance, tires, accessories, and fuel have imposed huge price increases.

This means that in 2026, tens of millions of workers, working long hours, can no longer afford the bare essentials. Most of the rest of the working class is facing an increasingly uphill battle not just to stay afloat, but if one ill-timed crisis hits, to stay alive. The very class that produces everything and makes everything run is increasingly being thrown into the pit of pauperism.

Meanwhile, the capitalist class has greatly increased its profits and wealth. “Soaring Profits and Stocks Funnel More of GDP Toward Companies, Their Top Employees and Shareholders…” announced the headline in the Wall Street Journal on February 12. The article goes on to show that profits now gobble up twice as much of the overall economy as they did in 1980. The article also shows that those profits were taken directly out of what the article calls “labor compensation,” whose share of the economy has dropped precipitously.

Today, a tiny, tiny minority has accumulated unimaginable wealth. According to The New York Times (March 2), the wealth of the richest one percent of the population in the U.S. has now reached over 55 trillion dollars, which is more than the entire economies of the U.S. and China combined. At the top of the heap stand the billionaires, whose numbers have grown from 269 in 2000 to more than 900 in 2025, with 88 billionaires added in just the last year, a real Billionaire Boom. The wealth of the very richest of the billionaires, Elon Musk, is now closing in on a trillion dollars.

This stupendous growth in wealth of the capitalist class is the flip side to the rapid impoverishment of the working population. The capitalists continue to build their fortunes by cannibalizing the living standards of the working population, leading to ever greater decay and decline for most of the population and for the society as a whole.

Such a worsening of the workers’ situation is caused by the very workings of the capitalist system. This is what Marx concluded in his pamphlet, entitled, “Value, Price and Profit,” when capitalism was still in its ascendency: “… the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favor of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit.…” And while Marx said that the workers should never give up resisting against “the encroachments of capital,” he added that “the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!””

How much more true Marx’s conclusion is today, in this period of capitalism’s degeneration, reminding workers of the inability of reforms, of “guerilla fights” to overcome the miseries the system imposes on them, at the same time looking toward the possibility that the working class can reconstruct society.

Artificial Intelligence and Jobs

One of the big attacks against the working class is said to be coming from the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is already being blamed for mass layoffs.

In fact, numerous studies over the last months show that companies are using AI just as an excuse to cut their workforces. As a research briefing from Oxford Economics that came out in January concluded, “By framing layoffs as a technological pivot, companies can present themselves as forward-thinking innovators rather than businesses struggling with cyclical downturns.” By falsely trumpeting their use of AI, companies want to get speculators in the stock market to bid up their stock market price. Of course, they also use it as an excuse to hold down hiring, and spread fear in the workforce in order to get workers to accept an increased workload.

Just as false are all the reports from the news media blaming AI for what they call “the jobless expansion,” that is the lack of available jobs, especially for young people trying to break into the job market, while profits and the wealth of the capitalist class continue to soar.

The problem is not the technology itself, but the fact that the capitalist class controls the technology for its own interests, for its own power, for its own wealth, at the expense of the working class and the whole population. A gun can be used to kill people, or it can be used for self-defense or liberation. It’s just a tool, and how it is used depends on who is using it. And so is AI. It’s just a tool. And it is really too early to know how effective a tool it will be. But right now, workers have every reason to fear how the capitalists will use AI, that whatever happens, they will pay for it with their jobs.

Certainly, that’s what happened in the past. Capitalists used new technology to cut jobs to the bone in one branch of the economy and workers didn’t just lose their jobs, but their lives were ruined. But that didn’t mean that jobs disappeared. New jobs opened up in other branches. As Marx wrote in the 1850s: “As soon as machinery has set free a part of the workers employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new channels of employment and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original victims, during the period of transition, for the most part starve and perish.”

This is what has happened over and over again in the U.S. In the early 20th century, for example, more than half the U.S. population still lived on the land. Then as more modern machinery was introduced into farming, the farmers, the farm hands, and tenant farmers either left the farms, or were driven from the land. Many might never have found a steady job. But those who did most often found jobs in sectors that didn’t exist before, starting with growing basic industry and manufacturing in the big cities. When the capitalists took advantage of big productivity gains by shedding industrial manufacturing jobs, jobs in the growing service sector opened up. Today, 60% of the people with jobs are working jobs that didn’t exist in 1940.

This process is not automatic, not especially in this day and age of worsening economic crisis, with its specter of economic collapse, overlaid with growing militarism and the threat of global war. The big problem is not the technology, but who controls it. Today it is controlled by the capitalist class.

This is the dead end in which capitalism has put its own society, and with it, those who produce the goods and services the whole population needs. But it’s not enough for the working class to be aware of the disasters that capitalism prepares for it. It needs to feel its own capacity to extricate itself and all of society from capitalism’s trap.

As insignificant, as minuscule as we are today, this necessity is what justifies our existence, and the existence of all those who strive today to bring a revolutionary party into being.

Domestic Report, Part 2: The Move toward World War III

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps, the U.S./Israeli war on Iran was set in motion by Benjamin Netanyahu, flattering a self-important Donald Trump, tricking him to fall in behind Israel’s war.

Or maybe the war was set in motion by Trump, like one of those extortionate tricks he brags about in The Art of the Deal, his own special negotiating strategy. (“We’ll stop bombing you if you give up.”)

Or maybe this war, which Trump baptized “Epic Fury,” was another spectacular diversion, one of the hundreds Trump has tossed out ever since his inauguration, to take all eyes off the Epstein files.

Or was it the result of a personal pique, a tantrum Trump threw because he felt “cheated” out of the Nobel Peace Prize?

In fact, you can find all of these inanities—and many more like them—littering the “Opinion” pages of the sober American press that speak for U.S. capital (The New York Times, et al). Yes, Trump and Netanyahu are egomaniacs—and worse. But pop psychology doesn’t explain why this biggest, most powerful, absolutely predominant imperialism decided to go to an unprovoked war.

This latest war on Iran is being called a “war of choice.” What seems to disturb most commentators is that the U.S. didn’t have to go to war against Iran. The U.S. hadn’t been attacked, There was no immediate threat of attack. And even Trump’s chosen head of the U.S. intelligence apparatus testified to Congress that there was no indication of a foreseeable threat. But U.S. imperialism did go to this war, it chose to go, it was not pulled in, it made a completely free, conscious choice to go.

In other words, the choice to go to war against Iran was a choice dictated by policy—not just Trump’s policy, but the policy of the American state. It was a keystone of a long-range global offensive by U.S. imperialism, intended to check those countries that had flirted with slightly independent policies. The attack on Iran, like that on Venezuela before, is a way to clear the ground for the battles that lie ahead, that is, for the war that even now is generalizing, World War III.

Today, according to The Guardian, more countries than at any time since World War II have their own troops engaged in fighting outside their own borders. In the last year alone, the U.S. has bombarded seven countries, before the latest attack on Iran: Yemen, Somalia, the first bombardment of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela. To some extent, U.S. Special Forces carried out raids in Colombia and Mexico, in addition to their kidnapping in Venezuela. Cuba has been cut off from Venezuelan and Iranian oil, while Trump declares: “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba in some form. Whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it.” Maybe that’s only another one of Trump’s “negotiating tactics”—like his claims on Canada and Greenland, or maybe it’s a direct threat like the ones he aimed at Iran and Venezuela while pretending to negotiate with them.

But world war is not just a total of all the wars. The question is what additional wars do they promise?

All of this came after two ongoing wars, one which weakened Russia, the other which opened more of the Middle East to Israel’s control. It’s true those wars were set off by Russia’s own invasion of Ukraine, attempting to break NATO’s choke hold, and by Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians. Regardless of who “started the war,” after four years of war in Ukraine, Russia’s military has been stripped to the bone by the enormous loss of soldiers in battle, and its state debt has rapidly overwhelmed Russia’s financial system. And the devastation wreaked on Gaza reinforced the threat that Israel poses in the Middle East.

The question left unanswered in all this is where the antagonism between the U.S. and China is going. China may be a really important trading partner for the U.S., but it is also its most important competitor. The contradiction inherent in this has still to play out, but that doesn’t make it less important. China may not have been brought directly into the latest scrimmaging in the Middle East, but it promises to be impacted by these wars nonetheless. Crippling both Venezuela and Iran, Trump clearly intended to control where their oil goes, preventing it from nourishing China. After the first U.S. attack on Iran 9 months ago, and even more after the attack on Venezuela, China drew the obvious conclusion and stocked up, storing half a year’s supply of oil. But the U.S. perspective lies far past half a year into the future.

From day one, this war in the Middle East has expanded. Under cover of the supposed threat posed by Iran, Israel used massive bombing to clear southern Lebanon of Hezbollah, and of Lebanon’s people. And Iran, viciously attacked, unable to reach the U.S. with its military technology, began to pull countries around the Persian Gulf into the war. Not only had they provided the U.S. with land for its bases in the Middle East. They were an important center of oil and gas production and/or transmission, which impacted also fertilizer for the world’s crops and helium for the production of semi-conductors.

By clogging shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran expanded the war into an economic war, which not only threatened the African and Asian nations most dependent on Middle East oil, it also risks shaking the financial system of the whole globe. The Middle East today plays a really important role in the world’s economy, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are among the most important of imperialism’s financial centers, being totally integrated into that system.

Even if the U.S. finds itself in a good situation facing another oil shortage because of its domestic production, the international trading framework may well come back to haunt it. It may find itself bogged down in a long war of attrition, one of those “forever wars” that Trump had promised his base not to be trapped in.

The war that is even now generalizing is developing within the framework of the long term economic crisis. Despite its predominance, the U.S. financial system has been piling on debt. The production of goods and services is becoming an ever smaller share of the U.S. economy, which increasingly turns around speculation. War may be a necessary product of capitalism, a consequence of the economic crisis, but war itself stands to aggravate the economic crisis.

World War III comes out of today’s existing relations of power. It does not start out as a fight between several competing imperialisms, fighting against each other to divide up much of the rest of the world, as the earlier world wars did. Rather, the U.S., which came out of World War II as the predominant economic and military force, looks to impose or reinforce its order on the rest of the world. What alliances the U.S. will form to carry out the war are not necessarily those it has rested on before. What enemies it had may not find themselves on the other side as the war develops.

The U.S. has long spent more on war than its biggest competitors combined. In 2024, U.S. outlays equaled that of its top nine competitors. The total amount the U.S. spent in 2026 was supposed to reach slightly less than one trillion dollars before the attack on Iran shuffled all expectations. But Trump’s upcoming 2027 budget called for an astounding 50% increase. (All of this is according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies.)

Authoritarianism at Home

The other important preparation for a war of global magnitude has been the steady development of an authoritarian regime, organized today around the one figure who has been busy pasting his name on everything he can find in Washington, including the new one-dollar gold coin.

Trump spent his first year in office of this, his second term, attacking, trying to isolate and hold in check any entity, any person who might provide or express some opposition to his policies: that is, law firms which defended “unpopular” clients, civil liberties lawyers, universities and their research arms, professors, public school teachers, media groups, reporters, newspapers, journalists, unions to some extent, even cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center or the Smithsonian museums, particularly their historical units, and regulatory bodies. The National Parks have been a particular target, given that materials passed out or posted in the parks can convey some sense of the actual history of the Civil War, or the attacks on Native Americans, or earlier wars with Canada or Mexico.

Trump has used federal agencies as a kind of personal detective force, keeping check on any opposition. For example, the IRS and the FHA were used to build a case of fraud against the chair and another member of the Federal Reserve.

He has swamped the court system itself with damage suits or criminal cases widely expected to fail, but in the meantime, they cost the individual or organization being sued or charged time and money—over 4,000 of them in this term alone. Most of them have been ruled against by lower courts, but this just elevates the suit or the case to the next, and then the next level of the judiciary, and then perhaps to the Supreme Court, which has discovered a new way to support Trump by passing on the cases that come before it, refusing to issue a substantive judgment.

Of course, this kind of judicial obfuscation didn’t start with Donald Trump, but he has elevated it to an art, as he would be the first to say, if he were to write another book (or, to be exact, to find another ghostwriter to do it).

On the other hand, Trump’s administration has ignored court orders telling them to desist from one or another project. For example Homeland Security deports people before any hearing.

Migrant roundups were promoted as a TV spectacle. Every night, TV news was filled with shocking images of raids on migrants in their homes or workplaces. Squads of masked men in military uniforms in Los Angeles, without insignia or anything to identify them, stepped out equipped with automatic weapons ready to fire or batons ready to herd their targets. In Chicago, armed men disembarking from a military helicopter entered a building through the roof, dragging people from their sleep and forcing them to wait hours in the street—men, women, children, elderly grandmothers in their nightclothes, handcuffed, lined up, to be taken by bus to some unknown destination. In Georgia, a Hyundai factory was raided, all their employees, legally admitted technicians from South Korea—making it seem the plant would be closed, only to see them released a few days later.

And all of this came before the execution-style murders in Minneapolis.

These actions, orchestrated like a television campaign, were designed to terrify the people who are not rounded up. Despite all the hype surrounding the roundups, there are still almost 15 million undocumented immigrants in the United States (according to the Pew Research Center): those who work in agriculture in California or other western states, in small shops in Chicago and the Midwest, or in the factories of Asian automakers in the South. The importance of these deportations is not so much a question of numbers. Obama, in fact, carried out deportations at a much faster pace than Trump did, but Trump has turned them into a political spectacle.

But Trump was walking a fine line. He was spreading images of raids to appease his base’s desire to get rid of the foreigners “who are taking American jobs”; but the economy can function only thanks to the work of millions of immigrants, and this limits what he has been ready to do.

Trump may have stepped back somewhat after the fiasco which was Minneapolis, but he’s always seemed to know how far he can push something. Up until now, the American bourgeoisie has given little sign that it might shut down Trump’s act. So far, his methods have worked rather well for them.

The issue of ICE is larger than the question of the immigrants it continues to round up today. In theory, the U.S. military is constitutionally prohibited from operating within national borders—though it has done so in the past, for example, when it suppressed a march of homeless veterans in 1932, or when, during the 1967 urban riots, the 82^nd Airborne Division patrolled the streets of Detroit. Even the National Guard isn’t supposed to enter civilian areas unless a state governor or city mayor requests it. By sending ICE agents into cities just on his own say-so, without any legal justification, Trump has set some new precedents that can be useful in the midst of social unrest. And by building a new network of concentration camps widely in the country, by ignoring any claims on civil rights, Trump shows the direction in which this society is going.

What we are witnessing today is certainly not fascism, a term often misused. Nor is it even comparable—yet—to the repression of the McCarthy era, when large numbers of people were imprisoned, lost their jobs, homes, and benefits, lost friends, lost their citizenship, and/or had their children taken away because of the causes they championed—or because of the causes their adult children championed. Some were killed.

But, at the very least today, there is a growing authoritarianism, which could take different forms in the future and intensify very rapidly. Trump has already effectively staked out for himself the powers held by previous war-time presidents, giving it his own special twist, via his nightly missives posted on Truth Social, a site where truth is in short supply, but where implicit threats of violence and judicial scapegoating loom large.

Up until now, this all has stayed within a carefully measured (somewhat legal) limit. That has not stopped Trump from issuing comments that might well be taken as an incentive to commit violence by some of his followers—some of the same ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, but were subsequently pardoned by Trump for their efforts. Marjorie Taylor Green wasn’t the first to find herself in the cross hairs of Trump’s diatribes. But even this former staunch, solidly right-wing supporter had to worry about her and her family’s safety when Trump took to social media to call her disloyal.

By summer and even more by October, Democrats were trying to capitalize on the popular discontent with Trump that turned around many different issues. They organized a day of protests in cities of all sizes, even in small towns. The goal was clearly to keep the population’s more generalized anger focused on Trump, reducing it to his alleged attempt to establish himself as a dictator. Even though many people brought different signs to the protests, the one demand common across all of them was “No Kings!”

Interestingly enough—there were no banners or posters bearing the party’s colors. Known members of the Democratic Party appeared in all the marches, but they didn’t appear as its organizers. Was this the Democrats’ way to mobilize voters against Trump at a time when popular support for the Democrats was even lower than Trump’s declining approval ratings? Maybe.

Popular resentment toward Trump did make itself felt in the November elections, albeit on a limited scale since they were primarily local. Democrats won statewide victories (New Jersey and Virginia), as well as a referendum in California. These are traditionally Democratic states, but the size of their margin was remarkable.

Finally, there was one result that the media talked about and that excited much of the left: candidates who called themselves Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won the mayoral elections in New York City and Seattle. Whatever they meant by the label, and whatever the left took it to mean, they ran as Democrats and aligned their policies with those of other liberal Democratic mayors. The DSA is a far cry from a return to the days of Eugene Debs. But the result was enough to trigger a cascade of vitriol from Trump against the supposed communist threat—that is, until, the following week, when Zohran Mamdani visited the White House and courted Trump. Ultimately, Trump and Mamdani described themselves as “two guys who grew up in Queens and understand each other well.” They certainly do.

Finally, Trump’s electoral base is showing some signs of fracturing. The trigger for supporters of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement was Trump’s maneuvers to prevent the release of the Epstein files, which Trump himself had claimed a few years earlier contained the names of members of the “elite,” of the “rich,” who had sexually abused children. For many MAGA supporters, this was a red line that could not be crossed. Other issues also arose. Perhaps the most significant was Trump’s refusal to renew the Medicaid extension and health insurance subsidies. As pointed out by Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—once Trump’s most ardent supporter in Congress—even her family was complaining about the impending loss of their health insurance. In fact, the cuts to health coverage disproportionately are affecting residents of Republican-led states compared to those in Democratic states. Ultimately, the vote to release all of Epstein’s files was almost unanimous. But this unanimous decision was reached only because Trump knew he had lost the vote.

The unease in his base was reinforced when Trump’s belligerent actions in the Caribbean upset the isolationist tradition deeply rooted in rural areas. Despite his campaign promises to end ongoing wars and not start new ones, first there was Venezuela, and then Iran. Important people who spoke for MAGA—Steve Bannon, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, for example—found it difficult to swallow what had become Trump’s wars.

From Minneapolis to Antifa Trial

It’s difficult from our situations cut off from everyday reality in Texas to know the practical reality of the supposed “Antifa trial” held in Forth Worth Texas. And it’s obvious we won’t know from the press coming out of Texas. But there are certainly some conclusions we can draw from it.

The Justice Department claims that a nine-member “cell” of Antifa, which was recently convicted of charges that included rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction and attempted murder of a police officer and officers at the ICE Prairieland Detention Center. Seven others plead guilty last year of reduced charges of providing material support to terrorists—providing testimony for the trial. One of those convicted, who apparently was carrying a gun, a legally registered gun—imagine that, carrying a gun in Texas, who would have thought it—shot the officers, but everyone with one exception was convicted of the same charges.

Had they or some of them styled themselves Antifa? They might have. There certainly are some young—and not so young—people today who act as though by their own resources, they can stop the growth of right wing and racist gangs.

But the point is, this was a trial aimed at throwing everything in the book at a group of people who had almost certainly not done nearly or even all of what they were charged with, but had opposed government policies.

At the end of the trial, Pam Bondi said, “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last.” Trump said, “We are getting rid of the Left.” We should take his threat seriously.

Minneapolis has an almost diametrically opposed importance. We don’t need to recount here all the developments over that several month period. What is important for us is to realize how quickly it can happen that people organize themselves—in fact how they used their own collective experience, using the organizations they were already part of: neighborhood associations, churches, unions, block clubs, gardening clubs, professional associations, school classes of all sorts, workgroups, etc. Their activity rested on the people who surrounded the people who decided they had to do something. Yes, they might have used the internet, or even occasionally posted on social media, but what gave them possibilities was all of what these people had done before the movement broke out, all of the people they knew, all of the activities they had been part of, etc., that is, their networks. And what probably let them jump quickly into action was the experience many of them had had during the movement surrounding the death of George Floyd.

This is not to say that a “soviet” was built up. Not at all, and those who organized, even if most were workers, did not approach the question as workers.

But the fact of this kind of organization is what differentiated the events in Minneapolis from what happened before in Los Angeles and Chicago.

In one sense, we already had foreseen the situation we face today. But only in one sense. On the practical level, we are being thrown into a situation none of us ever knew before. That’s all the more reason to look to the experience of those who came before us. The COVID look-down was the opportunity to study those experiences. Hopefully, some of us did that.

Political Report, Part 1: War and Economic Crisis

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

World events are speeding up. With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, we are no longer in a period leading up to World War III. We are now in World War III’s opening stages.

This war, as we say in the Domestic Report, is different than the two previous world wars. Those two wars were fought between imperialist powers. Out of those wars, the U.S. emerged as by far the dominant power. Now, the U.S. is going to war again on a world scale as the unquestioned, dominant imperial superpower. It is either systematically attacking any regime or peoples that are at all independent or defiant, or else the U.S. is fomenting wars by proxy.

Just look at all the wars. To the west of the war in Iran, Israel, the U.S.’s chief client state and enforcer in the Middle East, has been carrying out a series of wars against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as a similar type of war in southern Lebanon. Israel is fighting these wars, by the way, with strong U.S. support of all kinds.

To the northwest of the war in Iran, there is the war between Russia and Ukraine. This war is always presented as a war of aggression by Russia. And certainly, that is partially true. But the Russians were not alone in their aggression. Ever since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the U.S. had been pulling the former soviet republics into its own orbit. But for the U.S., the big fish was Ukraine. Both because of its size, as well as its economic importance, the U.S. saw Ukraine as a bullet that it could aim at the heart of Putin’s Russia. The U.S. knew that by swinging it away from the Russian sphere of influence and bringing it under the U.S. military and economic umbrella, it would provoke a war.

So, first the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine that instigated a civil war, and then built up the Ukrainian army to fight Russia. Once Russia invaded, the U.S. did everything it could to keep the war going, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and of Russians. In fact, for the U.S., the Ukraine war was always a proxy war aimed at weakening Russia. On top of that, in the Western Hemisphere the U.S. overthrew the Venezuelan government, and has been choking Cuba by almost completely cutting off its fuel supply. Meanwhile, in Asia the U.S. and its allies have been surrounding China with military forces. Wars feed on each other. With the decision to go into Iran, they bleed together into one giant conflict, just like the other two world wars.

These wars follow their own logic. Trump tried to end the war in Ukraine. The U.S. had gotten control over much of Ukraine’s vast resources and wealth. Trump even got a cut. And the U.S. had sufficiently weakened Russia. But the war continues, outside of anyone’s control.

One focus of the U.S. war against Iran has been a relatively small body of water 30 miles wide and 100 miles long, called the Strait of Hormuz, which is located right in the middle of the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf with oceans and continents around the world. Out of the Strait of Hormuz flows a major part of the production of the oil and gas that powers the world economy, along with some of the raw materials that are vital for agricultural and industrial production in the global economy. All this shipping through the Strait of Hormuz illustrates just how much the world economy and the fate of all humanity are tied together.

War Benefits Only the Capitalists

Under a different kind of society, a society run in the interests of humanity, the fact that the world economy is so interconnected would be a benefit, a sign of advancement and progress.

But we live in a capitalist society, based on the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class for its own profit, including an ongoing war that the capitalist class carries out over who controls every piece of that economy. So, we have a highly developed economy, or at least the makings of a highly developed economy, on one side—and chaos, death and destruction on the other side. All because a tiny, tiny minority, the capitalist class, is in charge.

So, during this present war, under this present irrational society, this little body of water, the Strait of Hormuz, has been made a chokepoint in a fight to the death. And this involves not just the U.S and Israel against Iran. All of the greater and lesser powers in Europe and Asia are also implicated in this fight. As for the two big rivals of the U.S., Russia and China, they have been quietly aiding the Iranian regime to one degree or to another. It is certainly in their interest to keep the U.S. superpower tied down and occupied by this war. For Putin, as U.S. commentators never stop reminding us, this war has been a bonanza, since Trump lifted the embargo on Russian oil and gas in a desperate move to slightly relieve the oil shortage. So, all the powers are there. It’s a world war in miniature. And tied to this power struggle is the fate of hundreds of millions and even billions of people, who face the prospect of a widening war, as well as deteriorating economic and social conditions.

Certainly, as we’ve said, this new world war looks a lot different than World Wars I and II, especially for the role played by the United States. The U.S. entered those earlier wars—at least formally—only after they had been raging for many years. During those other two wars, the U.S. leaders even gave the appearance of being on the defensive. Before they got into those wars, the U.S. rulers tried to reassure the public that this country was above the fray. Today, the U.S. leaders are acting the exact opposite. It is the U.S. that is the unabashed aggressor in every case, directly or indirectly.

Special Conditions of Development in U.S.

The U.S. is a relatively recent world imperialist power. It only began its imperialist outreach in earnest in the early 20th century, that is, after the whole world had already been seized and divided by the earlier imperialist powers. So, the United States entire imperialist development has been at the expense of those earlier imperialist powers. It started against Spain, during the Spanish American War in 1898 when the U.S. seized Cuba. It also secured the Philippines and the province of Panama in the Republic of Colombia and finished digging the Panama Canal. The canal gave the U.S. entry to the Pacific Ocean, China and the continent of Asia, since most of U.S. industry was still concentrated in the east of the country. As Trotsky explained in a speech given in July 1924, “The entire pull of the United States, more correctly its main pull, is in the direction of China with its population of 400 million and the country’s countless, uncharted and limitless resources. Through the Panama Canal, American industry has opened up a waterway for itself from the east to the west, shortening the distances by several thousand miles.”

The U.S. capitalist class has had its eye on China for a very long time.

The U.S.’s special conditions of development, especially its geography, gave the U.S. big advantages over its imperialist rivals. In many ways, the U.S. is like a gigantic island in relation to the Old World groupings on the planet, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on both coasts. As Trotsky explained, “This is an island, which at the same time, possesses all the advantages of Russia—her vast spaces. Thanks to its colossal distances, the U.S., even without a fleet, would be almost invulnerable to Europe or Japan.”

These geographical advantages served as a protection against invasion. It allowed the U.S. government to get away with maintaining a small army and navy up until it entered World War I. And after that war, the government shrank the army again, until the military buildup preceding U.S. entry into World War II. It also allowed the U.S. to enter both wars at a time of its choosing, that is, only after the wars had raged for several years.

These wars were essentially imperialist wars to redivide the world between imperialist powers. In the case of World War I, the U.S. waited three years before intervening. In the case of World War II, the U.S. waited more than two years from its official starting date. By staying out of the wars for several years, the U.S. allowed both sides of competitors to U.S. imperialism to greatly destroy each other.

Of course, even as the U.S. held itself out of the bloody fighting, it avariciously fed those wars with its industry and avariciously intervened in order to help crush its most likely and dangerous competitors—even as it pretended to be morally superior to its competitors. As Trotsky commented in 1924, “This is one of the most interesting paradoxes, one of the most curious jokes of history—jokes from which we did not and do not derive much merriment. American imperialism is in essence ruthlessly rude, predatory, in the full sense of the word, and criminal.”

Sounds a lot like Trump, doesn’t it?

Out of those two wars, the U.S. emerged as the preeminent imperialist power. That didn’t usher in a period of peace, a Pax Americana or the American century, as most commentators say. On the contrary, in the decades that followed World War II, there were more wars, often instigated by the U.S. imposing its rule.

After World War II, the U.S. did not demobilize as it did after past wars. The U.S. went from World War II straight into the Cold War, against the Soviet Union, the one big power that had emerged from World War II that was able, at least to a certain extent, to resist U.S. imperial domination. With the formation of NATO, the U.S. brought the lesser imperial powers under its wing. While a hot war never broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as the main enforcer of imperialist domination, the U.S. carried out a series of bloody wars and invasions, to name a few of the biggest: the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan, the Iraq War. These wars are well-known. Also well-known are all the coups and military dictatorships the U.S. imposed in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But what is perhaps not as well known is that the process of redivision of the world that was carried out during the two world wars continued after World War II. That is, the U.S. continued to gain domination over the lesser imperial powers, against its supposed allies, the British, French, German and Japanese, both economically and militarily.

The U.S. Is a Colonial Power

First of all, the U.S. grabbed more of their former colonial empires and spheres of influence, in Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa, which the smaller imperial powers were unable to maintain. Look at the Middle East. Before World War II, it had been dominated by the British and French. After the war, it was the U.S. that gradually took it over. Iran, for example, had been very valuable to the British Empire, especially because of its oil. But British imperialism was too weak to confront the crisis in Iran in 1953, when the Iranian government led by Mohammad Mossadegh tried to nationalize the oil industry. So, the British called on the U.S. CIA, which joined British intelligence, MI6, to foment a coup d’état. After that, for the British, there was no going back. The British were forced to cede a big chunk of Iranian oil and gas to U.S. oil companies. The U.S. also put in place the new dictatorship of the Shah in Iran and tried to use it to impose U.S. control over the rest of the Middle East, along with Israel, which also had previously been under British rule.

One can say the same thing about Southeast Asia, including Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos—which had been a former colony of France. After the French lost the war in Viet Nam in 1954, it was the U.S. which took over the war and its responsibilities. And even though the U.S. was eventually driven out of Viet Nam in 1973, and its puppet government collapsed in 1975, the U.S. eventually was able to return to Viet Nam through investment and trade.

U.S. imperialism also came to dominate the economies of the lesser imperial powers to a much greater degree. And U.S. imperialism used its domination to make the lesser imperialisms pay a much bigger price for the economic crises that began to hit with ever greater force starting in the early 1970s. The U.S. used the manipulation of the U.S. currency, the dollar, in order to gain advantage over its competitors. The U.S. is able to do this because as the dominant imperial power, the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency, that is, the dollar is the accepted form of currency when companies in different countries trade between themselves. That means that big companies the world over, along with their governments and central banks, have to stock up on dollars to make sure that they are able to meet their obligations. But the dollar is not under their control. It is under the control of the U.S. imperial power. As U.S. Treasury Secretary under Nixon, John Connally, famously said to the Europeans and Asians during one such manipulation, “It’s our dollar and your problem,” meaning that if other imperial powers don’t like what the U.S. is doing with the U.S. currency manipulation, they can jump in a lake.

Another example of the U.S. domination over the lesser imperial powers is the famous energy crises of 1973 and 1979, in which the price of oil zoomed up. The news media and politicians blamed these crises on the oil exporting countries, especially the Arab exporting countries in often blatantly racist campaigns. But behind the scenes, it was U.S. imperialism that was pulling the strings. For the supposed energy crisis was a way to make the European and Asian competitors of the U.S. pay much higher prices for energy that they imported. Meanwhile, the U.S., a major producer of oil and gas in its own right, saw the value of the U.S. oil companies’ holdings in the U.S. increase greatly—thus, giving U.S. imperialism a big advantage over its European and Asian competitors.

Here is another example of how U.S. imperialism lords over the lesser imperial power. Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, Japanese imports were blamed for the mounting U.S. trade deficit, the decline of U.S. auto and steel production. Once again, the media and the politicians, accompanied by the usual experts, churned out their racist propaganda. Rising Sun, a blockbuster novel by Michael Crichton, warned forebodingly of the Japanese takeover of America. But just as the blockbuster movie based on the book, starring Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery, was coming out, the U.S. imposed treaties on Japan that contributed to a massive financial crisis and recession in that country, crises that the Japanese economy has never fully recovered from.

And finally, more recently, right after the U.S. instigated the Russia-Ukraine War, the U.S. imposed an embargo on Russian oil and gas. By cutting off the supply of cheap Russian oil and gas to the big European economies, it forced them to depend upon much more expensive energy from the Middle East, as well as the U.S. This hit the German economy especially hard, pushing it into a steep recession, while the U.S. oil companies laughed all the way to the bank. The Nord Stream pipeline which brought Russian natural gas to Western Europe was even blown up. What a mystery, replied the Biden administration innocently. They asked who would ever do such a thing? Well, nobody bothered to investigate because everyone knew that the U.S. was behind it.

Trump’s Policies

It’s exactly one year since Liberation Day, the day when the Trump administration announced a whole series of enormous tariffs on friends and foes alike. The news media treated Liberation Day as an outrageous break with U.S. policy. “Who would ever think that an American president would treat U.S. allies so badly?” it was said. But it isn’t a break with what previous presidents have done. On the contrary, the U.S. hasn’t stopped taking advantage of its dominant economic position. It hasn’t stopped redividing the world in order to grab more of the profits from its competitors. It has never stopped its economic war. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

For the U.S. capitalist class, it is just at the beginning of transforming the economy into a war economy. This is not because of lack of spending. The U.S. military budget has doubled since 2000. In 2026, it is running at slightly over a trillion dollars. As was noted in the domestic report, this is more than what the next nine countries spend on their militaries, combined. But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. military is at all ready for war, or that the major weapons makers that swallow much of that budget, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrup Grumman and Boeing, are ready to massively invest in weapons production. In 2023, for example, Lockheed Martin and RTX spent a combined total of $19 billion on stock buybacks, compared with just $4.1 billion on capital expenditures, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

As people noted in the discussions, the U.S., Israel and other U.S. allies in the region were not ready for the Iranian response, as the relatively cheap Iranian drones and missiles time after time overwhelmed the very expensive U.S. interceptors. This was hardly a surprise since the Russians had been using Iranian drones for years in the war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainians came up with their own drone program, which they have relied upon heavily. In our document, “On the March to War,” there are plenty of examples of how the French capitalists refused to invest in their own wars and how there was a lack of response by the French state apparatus to this, just like in the U.S. As the document says, “In this area, as in others, the bourgeois government gives free rein to shareholders and capitalist bargaining, and is truly incapable of truly anticipating and planning.” These are the same kinds of institutions that are sending the working class to the slaughter the world over.

The U.S. war against Iran is already exacerbating the impact of economic crisis on the working class even in this country in countless ways. And this is only the beginning. As the war goes on, the costs will continue to skyrocket. Working people are suffering and sacrificing, people not able to afford both fuel and food, people having to go deeper in debt just to pay their bills. It’s gotten so bad, even the news media has been forced to cover it. And for what? This war, which is costing something like two billion dollars per day, represents an enormous transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class. And not just for the military contractors. We have seen in recent years how companies take advantage of inflation to boost their own prices and profit margins to sky-high levels. It became known as greedflation. Today, oil and chemical companies are doing the same thing. They are immediately boosting prices on older stocks of fuels, chemicals and fertilizers that they had, long before the war broke out.

In the future, things are bound to get worse. How much worse? Just look at what’s happening right now in some Asian countries, like Bangladesh and the Philippines, where there are sudden shortages of vital fuel, leaving people stranded, often with nothing to eat, waiting for hours on line to get a few liters of gas, only to be told that the gas station is all out. There have already been stories of gas station attendants being murdered by the enraged public. That can be our future here, as the capitalist class in this country pursues its wartime agenda and drags society down into barbarism.

We Pay the Cost

Finally, these wars are almost certainly going to set off huge financial crises of all sorts. Even before the wars, the entire financial system was close to buckling under mountains of debt, public and private. As the cost of the wars and the military budgets increase by leaps and bounds, military spending will continue to crowd out the little bit of spending still left for the working population and the poor, for health care, education, housing, nutritional programs, not to speak of funding just to keep up the infrastructure. But that won’t be even close to enough to stop the government from accumulating mountainous new levels of debt. As it is, the federal debt is close to 40 trillion dollars.

This rise of this debt has nothing to do with funding the budgets, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or whatever else the news media and politicians complain about. The government takes on this debt in order to fund the priorities of the capitalist class, starting with military spending, which we have seen is an important source of wealth for the capitalists. Even the interest on the debt, which alone costs over a trillion dollars every year, which is just about as big as U.S. military spending, is taxpayer money that goes directly to the capitalist class. For the capitalists, it’s a source of easy and supposedly safe income. But in the event that the value of all that debt craters, because of the rapidly increasing costs of financing the wars, it could set off an enormous financial collapse. Because U.S. government debt also underpins the entire global financial system.

In the world of corporate finance there are all kinds of time bombs, ready to go off. What the news media calls shadow banking, that is, high-interest corporate loans—the equivalent of subprime loans—had been a rising star for quick profits for big financial companies and institutions. In just a few years, the amount of risky, subprime loans to corporations had increased to over three trillion dollars. But over the last year, there have been mounting numbers of bankruptcies. Outright corporate fraud has been one reason. Another important reason is the chaotic shift in the market for computer software because of the rise of AI. The fear is that a lot of software companies, that had taken out these subprime loans, may soon be rendered out of date and driven into bankruptcy. So, no one wants to be holding their debt. And there has been a rush to the exits, in a kind of run on the bank.

This financial crisis had already begun to look like the beginnings of the subprime mortgage crisis, back in 2007 and early 2008, before the Iran war hit. The new financial chaos brought about by the war could very well be the final nail in the coffin. And this financial collapse could cause a much bigger collapse, just like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 caused a chain reaction in the entire global financial system.

But that’s not all. Waiting in the wings is Artificial Intelligence, or as it is known—AI. I am not going to go into any details about it. Just to know that, more than anything, the trillions of dollars poured into AI data centers has been a huge source of profits, wealth and power, for a few companies and a handful of billionaires. It’s also been a huge source of debt. But so far, every time a company announces a new, higher, target for borrowing and investing in AI, the stock price has risen on the news, making the billionaires richer—at least on paper. But anyone with any sense can see that all the hype looks suspiciously similar to the hype that accompanied earlier financial bubbles, during the dot-com era of the late 1990s, and the housing bubbles in the decade that followed. The difference is that the AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bubble and four times bigger than the housing bubble. These things never turn out well.

This feeds into a vicious cycle. War exacerbates financial and economic crisis. Those crises, in turn, further heighten and exacerbate capitalist competition. And that competition leads to more war, more destruction, more mass murder and more economic chaos.

That’s the future presented to us by a society run by the capitalist class. It’s a future of barbarism. The only way out of this is for the working class to find and build the organization it needs so that the working class can finally end capitalist class rule over society, and build a different kind of society, a society based on the needs of all humanity.

Political Report, Part 2: To Resist Trump’s Threats

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Trump’s Immigration-Roundup Spectacle

The first point to be made is that Trump did not expel more immigrants in 2025 than either Biden or Obama did in comparable periods. In fact, Obama holds the recent record for the total number expelled—two million. It’s why he got the nickname, “Deporter in Chief.” To see the real record holder in expulsions, go back to a still earlier Democratic administration, that of Bill Clinton who deported almost 12 million people during his two terms. Trump, despite all the talk, expelled barely over half a million (540,000) in 2025.

In other words, all three attacked immigrants, but within certain precise limits. What is different with Trump is the highly publicized way in which his administration carried out the expulsions.

Trump put himself forward as being “tough on immigrants.” It supposedly is his “signature” policy, and it certainly was one of his big campaign issues in 2024, allowing him to play up to reactionary attitudes in the population.

Once in office, his anti-immigrant tirades got louder and more demeaning, with talk about grabbing “the worst of the worst,” the people from “shithole countries.”

There were raids out in the open, on city streets—overt, loud raids—and in workplaces during the workday.

There were and are bombastic threats, but also real violence, and the organized gangs of ICE.

There is organized cruelty. Almost five million people who were picked up in such raids were still waiting at the end of 2025 for a hearing in front of an immigration judge, and the wait is getting longer, since Trump’s administration has slashed the number of judges by almost 20%. Right now, the average waiting time for a hearing is estimated to be on the order of four and a half years. Some of those picked up—the ones whose family is able to find them and able to get a lawyer—manage to be released, awaiting the hearing. But with deportation hanging over their heads, their lives are disrupted, often their jobs are lost. More are stuffed into one of the large ICE holding facilities, then shifted to another before their families could find them—or put in local jails, scattered all throughout the country, in rural areas, far from any contact with family, etc.

With flashy names like “the Surge,” the Trump administration pushes to make and distribute made-for-social-media videos—featuring the gangsters of ICE, noted for their lack of identification, for the use of face masks, and their weapons held as if on a patrol in a jungle somewhere.

This is not just Trump’s personality, as vicious as he is. And it’s not just an appeal to his base—which it is.

Most significantly, it is a way to make immigrants cower—not only those deemed illegal, but everyone, including even those recently granted citizenship.

In other words, anyone can be picked up, so shut up, work hard, take lower wages with no complaint! Otherwise, you could be picked up and sent to one of these holding tanks.

Stripped down to its essentials, this is terrorism carried out by the state against the most disadvantaged part of the working class. The spectacle the Trump administration carried out is effectively a threat, a way to control this large part of the working class—both those who are “legal,” and those who are not.

Of course, it’s not the only way to control. Reagan opted for a carrot-and-stick policy: an immigration reform was passed that gave “a road to citizenship” to some of those who were not legal, but it took many years to attain legal status. The promise of gaining status if you kept your head down and followed all the rules was an ax hanging over every immigrant’s head while they were waiting. George H.W. Bush pushed through a similar “reform” in 1990, giving the possibility to more people, but long waits still hung over immigrant heads.

It was a very small carrot and a very large stick. Today, Trump discarded the carrot. But the goal was the same: to keep a large, significant part of the working class—for the most part low-waged—to keep it tightly controlled, and the whole working class weakened.

Incomplete Labor Supply

This is one of the very few countries that was born a country without much of a labor force—or at least the potential of a labor force. There were no peasants who could be driven off the land in the 1700s, for example. The indigenous peoples in the Northern Hemisphere for the most part lived collectively, often as nomads, and were not easily put to work under control.

The lack of a labor force explains slavery, not the vicious way it functioned, but the fact that early capital, searching for a way to produce the first big commercial crops, allowing trade to develop, sought out labor. The answer found was the slave trade. Of course, the slave trade itself also provided the first big accumulation of capital.

Insufficient labor in a territory where land was still relatively free for the taking also explains immigration in the 1800s. A good part of the labor force had to be imported.

Today there are about 52 million people who are foreign born. This total is about 16% of the population, which is its historically highest share. This 16% is younger than the rest of the population, in general, more able to work, with fewer who are too old to work.

It’s obvious that if larger numbers were expelled, the economy itself would suffer. In some cities, particular industries would be seriously limited, or even shut down—hotels, food, landscaping, construction, hospitals. In other areas of country, more than half the workforce is either immigrant without papers, or else with a vaguely “legal status” that says they might be able to apply at some point.

So no, the bourgeoisie isn’t interested in getting rid of the immigrants, certainly not of most of the 14 or 15 million people who are without legal status.

What would happen if the state apparatus really tried? Trump’s immigration point man, Stephen Miller, set a goal of deporting two million a year—but even with all the push, they hit just over half a million. This isn’t incompetence, but awareness of what the capitalist class wants.

A Threat Aimed at the Whole Population

It needs to be said that all this bombast and violence is aimed not just at immigrants, but at the whole laboring population. In the first place, the attacks on the immigrants weaken the whole working class, especially to the extent that workers do not feel a commonality of interests.

But there is a political aspect, also. Supposedly the constitution says the military can’t be used internally to the country. In fact, it doesn’t really say that. But it’s been interpreted by courts and by legislation to mean that.

By rushing in ICE, a military force if there ever was one, Trump is setting a precedent, not a legal one, but a social one. The attacks may be directed against some of the most disadvantaged parts of the population, but they are aimed at bringing the whole population to accept a precedent that the military will have police functions inside the country.

Armed thugs may drive you off the streets of your city, they may break down your door, grab you off the street for no reason, arrest you because they don’t like the way you look, keep you in a holding facility, ignoring your supposed legal rights. Large parts of the black population may know this kind of reality already, but others don’t. Renee Good’s smiling face, reassuring the ICE thug who is about to kill her, speaks to what people are learning now in the streets where ICE is rampaging.

After Minneapolis, Trump stepped back—not because he wanted to rein in ICE, but because the wrong social precedent was being set.

What Made Minneapolis Different?

First of all, we should say, we don’t know exactly how the movement developed in Minneapolis, and not much even about Los Angeles and Chicago, where some of us live.

But based on media accounts, and that’s all that we or most people have, it appears that a massive and citywide mobilization developed in Minneapolis in response to the attempts of ICE to terrorize the population. It almost seems as though the Trump administration, running into some isolated problems in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, may have decided to make Minneapolis the show piece of what could happen to people who resist. Certainly ICE brought many more troops into Minneapolis than the numbers in Chicago and L.A., and Minneapolis is a much smaller city.

Based on interviews with people who were active, it seems that the first people involved in Minneapolis, confronted by the massive attack by ICE, went back to the organizations they already knew to get help. They went to their neighborhood club, or the women’s circle they belonged to, or their garden club. In church on Sunday morning they stood up and asked for people to join them. Or at work, they talked to fellow workers, or they went to their union meeting—even their writing class: Renee Good was in the poetry club.

The increasing size of the demonstrations, even their growing determination, seemed to rest on people, very ordinary people bringing out the people they knew. It wasn’t a typical “leftist” demonstration. Did they communicate on social media? Of course, but they also used whistles, and they worked face-to-face, pleading with others in the networks of people they knew.

It’s not just that it took courage to stand up to ICE and the Border Patrol thugs who had weapons held at the ready—although it did. But it seemed to develop in a way that allowed it to become almost citywide. And ICE saw itself overwhelmed by the numbers who came out.

Comrades in Chicago and Los Angeles had seen people in their city react and move to protect their neighbors. Yes, many places where there were open raids in the street, something like that developed.

We weren’t trying to establish a ranking, or which city did more, which one was better. Rather, we wanted to discuss something which maybe lets us understand our own work better

How long did it take to build the response in Minneapolis? A week or two? For many of the people who spoke about what they did, it seemed overnight. That’s because many of them brought out all the people they already knew. Their confrontations with ICE rested on all the things they had done before with the people they already knew.

We don’t know why it became so big and important there, more or less citywide, so rapidly. But we can know a little about how it happened. It rested on the work, on the lives already lived of all these people, the ones who found the way to pull so many other people with them.

There was another issue. Remember, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. There had been many demonstrations there, five years before, running up to the trial. Loose organizations had gotten set up as the issue dragged on. Many of the people interviewed about the current struggle said that when ICE came in, they contacted the people they knew from the George Floyd demonstrations. Some of them talked about resurrecting the organizations that had developed in 2020, but had seemed to disappear.

In other words, the things you do are not necessarily lost when a movement dies. The networks of people you build don’t necessarily disappear.

The Texas Antifa Trial—Another Dot on the Road to Reaction

Sixteen people were charged in Fort Worth, six were brought to plead to lesser charges, one had all charges dropped, and nine were convicted of multiple charges, the most important of which, in political terms, was “providing material support to terrorists.” One was also convicted of attempted murder.

Those who pled out apparently had to say something or did say something in their court appearance about the political inclinations of the others.

A few apparently called them Antifa, whatever they meant by that, and however that piece of information was pried out of them.

The trial was presented as a “bringing to justice” of the “North Texas Antifa Cell.”

Maybe the seven who got off didn’t know the nine put on trial. Maybe even some of the nine didn’t know each other before the July 4^th when they demonstrated against ICE.

Did all of the nine call themselves Antifa? Or some of them? Or none? We don’t know.

Maybe some did the things they were accused of—throwing firecrackers or deflating a tire on an ICE vehicle or painting graffiti on an ICE jail. But if that were the basis of terrorism, every kid in the country would stand charged with terrorism!

Some seemed to have owned guns—in Texas, if you can imagine that, in a country where there are said to be—what is it?—three times as many weapons as there are adults?

Some may have organized a “Socialist Gun Club”—supposedly legal in Texas, even though it was brought into the trial as some kind of proof of who knows what.

Some apparently talked to each other on the phone about how they would make a “noise demonstration” on July 4 at the ICE jail—and were recorded saying such a dastardly thing.

But none of that explains the terrorism charge. And we shouldn’t believe that if they hadn’t done X, Y or Z, they would have been acquitted. The feds wanted to make a political example of what could happen to people who stand out in opposition to government policies. None of the nine had been sentenced (as of April 3), but they face terms as high as 10 years to life imprisonment.

This is not just Trump, not just Texas. We need to reckon with the fact we’ve been moving along a long, steadily worsening, increasingly reactionary path, going back to 1975. Trump, as avaricious for gold as he is, is only a logical dot along that path.

Antifa—if such a thing did exist in Texas—is also a logical product of such a period, but with or without Antifa, there is no individual answer to the situation we are going to face.

Our possibilities will rest with the organizations the working class sets up, and with the roots that our organization and ourselves have been able to put down in the working class.

War and Election

The U.S. war in the Middle East is defining everything today, the problems workers here face, the money not spent on education, cuts in medical plans, the price paid for gasoline or computer chips … but war is also defining the future we will live in. We will not escape what is happening through the world.

This war, World War III, is our generation’s war. What happens to us, what work we will do, all of it will be conditioned by it.

We are going to face what organizations before us had to respond to: that is, to say exactly what this war is, whose class it serves and what is the answer to it, that is, revolution.

The organizations that wanted to avoid the consequences of saying that, ended up defending the previous world wars as “wars for democracy.” Organizations trying to avoid that found a way to be “neutral” when the wars in Korea and Viet Nam broke out—wars they called wars between competing imperialisms, that is, between the giant U.S. superpower and what they called the puppet of Soviet imperialism in Korea.

Today it is still easy here to be opposed to a U.S. war, to stand up out in the open and say we stand opposed to the criminal U.S. war against Iran.

Today.

But at some point, it won’t be easy. And maybe sooner than we think. Maybe the Texas trial shows us that things could be changing, we don’t know how rapidly.

The atmosphere will not remain so free and easy as it has been.

In any case, right now, and for as long as we push to use it, we have two main ways to express our opinion—in the workplaces through our bulletins, our newspaper, our journals, and we cannot let the pressure coming from our work in the unions keep us from doing that.

But also, and this year especially, we will have our election campaigns.

Workers cannot stop war by voting against it—and we will not say that. But by voting for candidates for Working Class Party, voters will be able to show to other parts of the working class that there is a fraction of our class unwilling to be imperialism’s foot soldiers, nor its supporters, a fraction that wants their class to fight for all the things they need, including an end to imperialism’s wars.

We also have to denounce all the ways we are being herded into support for this looming world war. We have to point them out, not let them slide.

Beyond that, we have to do the work now with all the people around us who may be candidates with us, or who will help in our campaigns. We have to work with them now, when it may not be so obvious to some of them, we have to get them to see why this issue is so vital.

OK, that’s a very general statement, and we have to work out carefully what we say in the next few weeks: Los Angeles’ campaign was already seven weeks of gathering signatures and now two months of a primary electoral campaign.

But we will make the question of the war our focus, its impact on working people, and the possibilities the working class has to respond to it. This has to be central to our campaign this year, in all the cities. We need to carry out the very same campaign in all our cities.

United States—Europe: Rivalries between Imperialist Brigands

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #254, March 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.

While President Donald Trump’s foreign policy initiatives may appear disorganized, they clearly follow a plan: to reaffirm the hegemony of American imperialism in a number of areas and territories without any need for formalities. This was evident in the offensive to bolster his claims to Greenland by opposing the Europeans.

For several weeks, Trump asserted that he was prepared to use all means, including military force, to compel Denmark to cede control of Greenland. Following these threats, Trump was able to announce on Wednesday, January 21, at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland, that “the framework for a future agreement” on Greenland had been reached with NATO Secretary General, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

The United States therefore did not need to deploy an armada to Greenland, and probably never considered doing so. In response to Trump’s threats, several European states did send a total of around forty soldiers to Greenland to show their solidarity with Denmark, including about fifteen soldiers from France and a similar number from Germany. But these troops didn’t even stay for forty-eight hours. The United Kingdom announced the deployment of a single officer.

In response, Trump brandished a new weapon by threatening these states with a 10% increase in tariffs starting February 1, and a 25% increase from June 1. Seeking to maintain the image of a head of state capable of standing up to Trump, Macron spoke of using the “trade bazooka,” a set of retaliatory measures consisting of limiting certain imports from the United States and restricting access for American companies to European public procurement markets. But neither he nor the vast majority of his European counterparts wanted to engage in an escalation, and all sought instead to de-escalate the situation. This episode demonstrated once again how powerless European leaders were in the face of American pressure.

After the Davos announcement, tensions subsided as quickly as they had risen. Trump was able to assure everyone that he had never intended to use force and lifted all threats of tariffs, but his usual tactic of slamming the table before engaging in negotiations is part of his typical approach. As leader of the world’s greatest power, he doesn’t care about tact. Ultimately, European leaders may have been offended by the lack of consideration shown toward them, with a brutality reminiscent of the treatment they themselves display toward the poorest countries.

When Trump declares, “We need Greenland for our national security, and we will take it,” it’s not the whim of a delusional billionaire. This island, the size of Western Europe and populated by only 57,000 inhabitants, has long been the object of American desire.

As early as 1867, U.S. President Andrew Johnson offered to buy Greenland and Iceland from the Kingdom of Denmark for seven million dollars. When the Danes refused, that sum was used that same year to buy Alaska from Russia.

Greenland, a Long-Time Object of Desire

As recently as 1946, under the presidency of Truman, the United States offered Denmark 100 million dollars in gold and rights to develop oil fields in Alaska to exchange for Greenland. The offer was rejected.

Greenland owes this persistent interest to its strategic position and its mineral and energy resources. According to a report by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), it contains resources “comparable to those of well-established mining regions such as Australia, Canada and Scandinavia,” rare earths, lithium, graphite, titanium and other strategic minerals.

Aware of the challenges posed by their exploitation in extreme conditions, beneath thick layers of ice, GEUS is betting that with “declining resources and strong future demand for critical raw materials, Greenland’s deposits could become more economically viable in the future.” As for Trump, it’s worth adding that while he may deny climate change, he still knows how to capitalize on it for opportunities and profit. The melting ice does indeed offer hope, in the more or less distant future, for the development of these deposits, as well as the opening of new maritime routes bypassing the American continent to the north. And this hope is enough to whet appetites and fuel rivalries, because controlling a territory can prevent a competitor from doing so in the future.

In the case of Greenland, the United States has consistently obstructed other countries’ exploitation of its resources. To take just recent history, when an Australian company acquired ownership of the Kvanefjeld rare earth mining project in the south of the island in 2007 and progressed with feasibility studies, the United States repeatedly exerted political pressure to try to oust it. When the Chinese company Shenghe Resources became one of the project’s largest shareholders in 2017, the United States, citing national security concerns, collaborated with Danish politicians to pressure Greenland into adopting new environmental standards for mining in 2021. These standards directly led to the suspension of what was then the largest mining project outside of China.

Such interference is not an isolated incident, but part of a systematic U.S. strategy to prevent competitors from accessing Greenland’s critical minerals. Even without the land titles that obsess former real estate developer Trump, U.S. control over the island is very real.

The American Military Presence

This control is accompanied by a military presence in Greenland dating back to World War II. Following the signing of an agreement with the Danish government, in exile after the German invasion, American soldiers were deployed there as early as spring 1941, even before the official entry of the United States into the war.

In 1951, a new agreement authorized the American government to establish an airbase at Pituffik, then called Thule, in the northwest of the island. The Inuit, who had inhabited Greenland long before its colonization by Denmark, were never consulted. Within a few months, as reported by geographer and explorer Jean Malaurie, who was present at the site, thousands of men, ships, and aircraft had erected a military complex on the icy desert, equipped with radar and runways, capable of accommodating, among other things, bombers carrying nuclear weapons. The inhabitants of the village of Thule were deported 150 kilometers further north, to a few barracks hastily constructed by the Danish government.

In the mid-1950s, the Thule site housed up to 10,000 personnel, making it one of the largest American bases outside the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, its personnel numbers have decreased considerably, now limited to approximately 150 military personnel, but it remains an important component of the American satellite surveillance system. One of the key issues in the negotiations underway in Davos could be the authorization of the creation of new military installations that would be officially placed under American sovereignty.

Since returning to power, Trump has declared that Greenland is “vital to the Golden Dome we are building.” This phrase refers to a missile interception system inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome, integrating powerful radars and satellites, intended to protect the entire American continent. This new version of “Star Wars,” first discussed during the presidency of George W. Bush, would be astronomically expensive: 175 billion dollars, according to the White House, and more likely several trillion dollars, according to a study by a research service of the U.S. Congress.

Beyond the issue of Greenland’s mineral resources, the United States’ interest in this Arctic region is also part of the military capacity-building plans developed by Pentagon generals in preparation for a confrontation with Russia, and especially with China. But the United States’ European competitors are also being asked to comply with American ambitions.

European States under Constant Pressure from the United States

Since the Greenland crisis, many commentators have expressed concern about the attitude of American leaders, capable of turning against their European allies to the point of threatening them militarily. In fact, this is not new. Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State between 1973 and 1977, summed up more than a century of American history, punctuated by wars against European states, by declaring: “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

At the end of the 19th century, rapidly expanding American capitalism clashed with the colonial empires of its European rivals. The United States went to war against Spain in 1898 to seize Cuba and the Philippines, territories over which it imposed its domination without needing to make them colonies in a formal sense.

During World War I, while the United Kingdom, France, and Germany fought for control of the world, the United States initially allowed the European powers to kill and weaken each other, contenting itself with trading and lending money to the Anglo-French side. Then, in 1917, after three years of carnage, they intervened against Germany, which seemed to be gaining the upper hand over its adversaries.

This monstrous slaughter, which exhausted European states both in terms of lives and resources, victors and vanquished alike, allowed the United States to establish itself as “the master of the capitalist world,” a phrase used by Trotsky in a speech delivered in 1926. He continued: “What does American capitalism want? … [it] is seeking the position of world domination; it wants to establish an American imperialist autocracy over our planet. This is what it wants. What will it do with Europe? It must, they say, pacify Europe. How? Under its hegemony. And what does this mean? This means that Europe will be permitted to rise again, but within limits set in advance, with certain restricted sections of the world market allotted to it. American capitalism is now issuing commands, giving instructions to its diplomats. In exactly the same way it is preparing and is ready to issue instructions to European banks and trusts, to the European bourgeoisie as a whole.… It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations. This means that it will specify just how many tons, liters and kilograms and just what materials Europe has a right to buy and sell.”

When, during World War II, the United States once again went to war against Germany, the real objective was not to “defend democracy against Nazism,” but to advance their interests and impose their domination on the entire planet.

The only state they were unable to bring under their control during this period was the Soviet Union. The 1917 revolution in Russia had enabled the working class to seize power, expropriate the bourgeoisie, and build its own state. This state successfully resisted the interventions of all the capitalist powers and the attempts at overthrow they provoked. However, weakened and isolated following the failure of all other proletarian revolutions, it suffered bureaucratic degeneration, and the new ruling layer, with Stalin at its head, had as its sole objective to be accepted by imperialism. American leaders were thus able to forge an alliance with the USSR to prevail against Germany. In the aftermath of the war, they were forced to recognize the USSR’s role in maintaining order in the eastern part of Europe, where occupation by the Soviet army prevented the outbreak of workers’ revolutions. But, in reality, the American leaders did not accept that any part of the world could escape their control. From 1947 onward, it was the “Cold War” against the USSR. The allies of American imperialism had to fall under its control.

NATO, the Armed Wing of the United States

Created in 1949, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was the Western bloc’s military alliance against the Soviet bloc. To counter it, the USSR established a similar organization, the Warsaw Pact, in 1951. While NATO’s Secretary General has traditionally been a European since its inception, the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has always been held by an American general. Nothing in the NATO statutes explicitly provides for this division of roles, but the United States has never considered it any other way.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to the end of the Warsaw Pact, but not NATO. On the contrary, NATO welcomed new members from the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. This policy of gradually encircling Russia ultimately led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine in 2022, in an attempt to keep it within his sphere of influence.

The United States also used NATO to intervene in 1999 against Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, and then from 2001 onward in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of European soldiers were deployed. Trump recently referred to their role with his usual nonchalance, declaring: “They stayed out of the fighting.” But approximately a thousand of them died participating in the longest war waged by American imperialism.

To pander to his mostly isolationist electorate, Trump never misses an opportunity to declare that NATO brings little to the United States. He carefully avoids mentioning the markets that this integrated military organization guarantees to American arms industries. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, Trump demanded that Alliance members increase their contributions to 5% of their GDP [gross domestic product] by 2035. These additional billions will largely swell the order books of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other American arms manufacturers. European leaders readily agreed to this American demand, all the more so because they themselves are engaged in a policy of “rearmament” and increased military budgets. When the Spanish Prime Minister expressed a desire to evade this obligation, he drew the ire of all the summit participants, who unanimously proclaimed that discipline must be respected within the Alliance. European states want to be ready to wage “high-intensity warfare,” to use the expression employed by military leaders, but they do not intend to oppose American oversight, and perhaps they cannot.

Europeans Reduced to a Pittance

The United States is therefore far from disengaging from NATO. Since the recent reorganization of military positions, made public on February 6, the command of naval forces is held by an American officer, whereas this position had traditionally belonged to a representative of the British Royal Navy. The United States, which already led the land and air forces, has thus further strengthened its control over NATO’s military apparatus, an organization it still considers a military instrument serving its interests.

The war in Ukraine provided the United States with an opportunity to further reduce the market share granted to its European competitors. Its capitalists were able to seize control of entire sectors of the Ukrainian economy. Its corporations grew wealthy through the supply of weapons and other equipment. And the United States took advantage of sanctions on Russian gas and oil to force its European competitors to become dependent on U.S. sources.

During the same period, in August 2022, U.S. President Biden passed a 400 billion dollar plan, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), to encourage foreign companies to produce in the United States by offering them subsidies. The U.S. government then sent emissaries to Europe to directly approach major corporations and persuade them to relocate their factories, offering to handle almost all the necessary procedures.

A further escalation occurred in this trade war when, in April 2025, Trump, back in the White House, announced a general increase in tariffs on goods imported into the United States. All countries, as well as the largest corporations, sent representatives to Washington to negotiate their terms of access to the American market, a crucial outlet for European capitalists. Some even traveled there in person, such as the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, who went to plead his case directly with Trump.

After several months of negotiations between the U.S. administration and representatives of the European Union (E.U.), a trade agreement was finally reached in July 2025. Most E.U. exports to the United States are now subject to a 15% tariff, and even 50% for steel and aluminum. For their part, the Europeans took no retaliatory measures and decided against raising tariffs. For the most part, they expressed satisfaction, essentially believing that it could have been worse and that they had no choice but to comply with this decidedly demanding ally.

The E.U. also had to promise 600 billion dollars in investments in the United States and $750 billion in energy purchases over the next three years, a symbolic capitulation that allowed Trump to claim victory.

After more than 70 years of a supposed unification process, the European bourgeoisies have been unable to overcome their divisions and create a single state. The European Union is merely an alliance—hard-won, incomplete, and always subject to challenge—between states that remain primarily concerned with defending the particular interests of their national bourgeoisies. Competing with one another, the bourgeoisies of Europe are utterly incapable of resisting the dictates of American imperialism, more than ever “the master of capitalist humanity.”

The Main Enemy of Workers Is within Their Own Country

The working class should not support either side in this confrontation between capitalist powers, for it is the first victim. Everywhere, it is the workers who pay the price for capitalist competition, finding themselves deprived of all resources, of housing, and of healthcare. If the economic war between capitalists leads to a general escalation of military conflict, governments will not hesitate to mobilize young people and send them to die on the battlefields. As in the past, during previous world wars, colonial wars, and military interventions that have bloodied every continent in recent decades, nationalist rhetoric and lies about the need to defend the homeland or democracy will serve to mask the fact that workers and the lower classes will be sent to die for the interests of industrialists, financiers, and arms dealers.

As Trotsky wrote in 1926, the clashes of imperialist interests are “pregnant with wars and with the greatest revolutionary convulsions,” and in every country, workers will have to defend their own interests against those of their bourgeoisie. To put an end to this bankrupt capitalist system, they will have to seize power and expropriate the bourgeoisie. The working class will then be able to implement its program of social transformation and build a society organized in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the greatest number.

The Results of Lutte Ouvrière in the Municipal Elections

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #255, April 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.

Lutte Ouvrière presented a total of 280 slates in the March 15 elections. This included 266 slates of candidates in 243 different municipalities, thirteen Parisian arrondissements, three Marseille sectors, and seven Lyon arrondissements. We also had slates in the 14 constituencies of the Lyon Metropolitan Area. Our slates were present in 38 of the 42 municipalities in the country with more than 100,000 inhabitants, as well as in several dozen medium-sized cities, and they addressed 10 million voters, or approximately 21% of the electorate. For the first time, we presented slates in the towns of Hérouville-Saint-Clair (Calvados), Périgueux (Dordogne), Douai (Nord), Goussainville (Val-d’Oise), Bar-le-Duc (Meuse), Lorient (Morbihan), Méru (Oise), Lormont (Gironde), Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône), and Kourou (French Guyana). The Trotskyist organization Combat Ouvrier (Internationalist Communist Union) presented six slates—one in Martinique and five in Guadeloupe (both French departments in the Caribbean)—compared to three in 2020. They obtained a total of 1,574 votes (2.47%).

Our slates included some 11,000 candidates, almost all of them workers: factory workers, office workers, warehouse workers, home care aides, hospital staff, security guards, etc. While a number of these candidates were from the work, family or neighborhood circles of Lutte Ouvrière militants, many others were met during door-to-door operations organized over several months in working-class neighborhoods.

Admittedly, our results, detailed on our website and in our weekly publication, are very much in the minority, just like those obtained in the legislative and presidential elections. Lutte Ouvrière received a total of 79,440 votes, or 1.29% of the votes cast. In 2020, during the previous municipal elections, they received 44,762 votes, or 1.46%, when voter turnout was very low. These scores are admittedly modest, but here and there they exceed 5%, even 10% of the vote, as in Audincourt (16.02%) and Hérimoncourt (17.61%) in the Doubs department, Fourmies (13.25%) in the Nord department, Clermont (21.48%) and Margny-lès-Compiègne (17.81%) in the Oise department, and Le Grand-Lucé (10.07%) in the Sarthe department.

The good scores obtained here and there are often linked to local circumstances, with the Lutte Ouvrière slate, for example, being the only opposition slate. In any case, all these figures reflect our presence, and it is noteworthy that in the various municipalities, we often obtain our best results in polling stations in working-class neighborhoods. We now have 24 municipal councilors, compared with 16 in 2020.

These small numbers show that, in a context marked by the rise of reactionary ideas, a communist and revolutionary current can be present, through great effort, in major urban areas and many medium-sized cities. Even as a very small minority, the militants of Lutte Ouvrière are there to denounce the march toward war, the capitalist stranglehold on society, the decline of the working class, and the divisions maintained between French and foreign workers. And there are tens of thousands of workers ready to vote for slates defending these ideas—in other words, to vote for their camp.