This political report for the week of February 22–28, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
I. Imperialism and War: The Accelerating Drive Toward Catastrophe
The week ending 28 February 2026 was dominated by the ever-sharpening US imperialist drive toward a military assault on Iran. Despite public claims of ongoing “talks,” the Trump administration has amassed a massive armada in the Middle East — carriers, aircraft, and logistical assets repositioned for what US officials described as a “sustained, weeks-long” campaign. The WSWS made clear that the diplomatic theatre serves as cover: Trump, in his State of the Union address, escalated threats against Tehran while menacing the American working class at home with authoritarian consolidation. The WSWS issued an urgent anti-war call, demanding that the international working class mobilise independently of all bourgeois parties to halt the march toward catastrophe.[1]
The week also saw Indian Prime Minister Modi in Tel Aviv, deepening the India-Israel strategic axis — intelligence, defence, and security cooperation — directly as Washington and Tel Aviv were preparing their assault on Iran. New imperial alignments are accelerating the globalisation of warmaking. Canada’s Liberal government, meanwhile, declared it would not establish diplomatic relations with Iran “unless there is a regime change,” endorsed sanctions, and promoted the exiled monarchist Reza Pahlavi — subordinating itself entirely to Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s imperialist agenda. Ottawa simultaneously released its Defence Industrial Strategy, accelerating military procurement and tying Canadian industry more tightly to the machinery of war.[2]
Japan’s newly elected far-right government moved to expand security and military measures, aligning with US strategic objectives in Asia, while New Zealand’s right-wing commentariat openly floated political union with Australia to consolidate military capacity. Globally, the ruling classes are on a war footing, converting civilian society into a war machine on the basis of capitalist austerity.
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan provided a vivid illustration of this contradiction: remarkable athletic achievement was poisoned by nationalist chauvinism and commercialisation. Massive protests erupted against the presence of ICE and the Trump administration at the Games; dockworkers’ strikes delayed arms shipments; athletes publicly criticised ICE from international platforms. These internationalist impulses demonstrate the real social forces that can be mobilised — but they require conscious socialist political leadership to be transformed into sustained anti-imperialist action.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
The Trump administration continued its drive toward authoritarian rule. Reports confirmed that Trump allies are preparing executive orders to seize administrative control over US midterm election structures — a direct attack on democratic procedures. Epstein files naming Trump as an attacker were deliberately withheld by the DOJ, demonstrating how the ruling class uses legal instruments to protect the powerful while pursuing lawfare against the working class and its fighters.
The criminalisation of dissent intensified. Two Pennsylvania high school students remained imprisoned for four days after an anti-ICE protest; the “Quakertown 5” face felony charges designed to terrorise youth into silence. In Australia, police confiscated an anti-genocide placard at a Ramadan festival in Lakemba, using expanded “hate speech” legislation to police political expression. The apparatus of state repression is being normalised, step by step, against migrant defenders, youth protesters, and any expression of anti-war, anti-genocide sentiment.
Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani filed a civil rights lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act against Zionist Betar USA for violent attacks and organised intimidation on US campuses. While legal action can play a tactical role, the WSWS insists that mass working-class mobilisation — not reliance on bourgeois courts — is the essential instrument for defending democratic rights and the safety of oppressed peoples.
Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, was named acting director of both NIH and CDC by the Trump administration. This centralisation of public health authority in a figure associated with deliberate mass-infection policy coincides with surging measles cases and plummeting vaccine confidence. The politicisation and evisceration of public health institutions to serve capitalist accumulation exposes the ruling class’s readiness to treat the working class as expendable.[3]
III. Austerity, Economic Warfare, and AI-Driven Job Destruction
The IMF hailed Sri Lanka’s economic programme as a “success story” even as its austerity agenda deepens poverty, unemployment, and social devastation across the island. IMF “success” means the triumph of capital over the working class: the enforcement of debt repayment to international creditors at the expense of living standards, public services, and human dignity.
Australian logistics software maker WiseTech announced the elimination of roughly 2,000 jobs, citing AI automation. This follows the broader pattern of corporate layoffs accelerating to Great Recession levels. Capitalists are deploying AI not to liberate human labour but to discipline the workforce, destroy jobs, and protect profits. Workers must organise to demand social solutions: shorter working hours with no loss of pay, public investment in socially necessary employment, and democratic oversight of technological change.[4]
Greece’s main trade union confederation, GSEE, was engulfed in a corruption scandal, reinforcing its record of collaboration with governments on austerity. Institutional union corruption is not an aberration but a structural feature of bureaucracies that have integrated themselves into the management of capitalism.
Argentina’s contested labour reform vote and the abrupt shutdown of a tire factory laid bare the betrayal by bureaucratic unions and pseudo-left formations that failed to defend jobs. In New Zealand, a union pushed through a pay cut for 12,300 health workers. The pattern is consistent across continents: union apparatuses act as industrial policemen for capital, containing militancy and delivering concessions.
IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
The most politically significant labour development of the week was the abrupt suspension of the four-week strike of 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii. UNAC/UHCP bureaucrats shut down the strike without a contract, ordering members back to work while claiming there was “movement at the table” — a classic bureaucratic manoeuvre to demobilise a powerful working-class action at the very moment its leverage was greatest. The WSWS sharply condemned this betrayal and called for the formation of democratic rank-and-file committees to continue the fight, link up across sectors, and resist both management and union sellout.[^5]
In Los Angeles, 30,000 school support workers — custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and paraprofessionals — voted overwhelmingly to authorise a strike over pay, staffing, benefits, and safety. This vote is an expression of the eruption of working-class resistance to austerity gripping the United States. Union bureaucracies will seek to contain and negotiate away this power; the urgent task is to build rank-and-file committees and cross-sector coordination to transform it into decisive action.
UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman called for solidarity with Turkish miners who launched wildcat strikes over pay and safety, linking labour struggles across borders and demonstrating the potential for internationalist rank-and-file politics. His campaign — which continued to attract broad working-class support — was targeted by DSA-linked slanders, exposing once again the pseudo-left’s role in policing acceptable labour politics and shielding bureaucratic structures from genuine rank-and-file challenge.
The week’s workers’ struggle roundups — covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific — documented rising strike militancy in healthcare, transport, education, and logistics. These struggles reflect shared material conditions under capitalism: austerity, inflation, understaffing, and management offensives. Their success depends on democratically organised, international rank-and-file coordination and a political programme that directly challenges the capitalist state.
V. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
The Epstein files affair continued to expose the systematic protection of ruling-class criminals by the state. DOJ’s suppression of documents naming Trump as an attacker is not a bureaucratic oversight but a political decision to safeguard the powerful. Simultaneously, a Drop Site investigation revealed that a sophisticated Israeli surveillance and security system was installed at an Epstein-controlled Manhattan apartment building — pointing to the intersection of intelligence operations, criminal networks, and the ruling class.
In the South Pacific, former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama was arrested on charges of inciting mutiny, a symptom of the political instability convulsing ruling establishments across the globe as capitalist crisis deepens. In Britain, Labour suffered a crushing wipe-out in the Gorton and Denton by-elections, with the Greens making substantial gains at Labour’s expense — reflecting mass disaffection with Labour’s pro-capitalist management, even as the Greens offer no genuine alternative.
South Australia’s Labor government ran its election campaign on support for property developers, austerity, expanded policing, and militarisation — indistinguishable in substance from its conservative rivals. Labor parties internationally have completed their transformation into straightforward managers of capitalist crisis.
VI. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
The week provided a sharp illustration of the foreword to the German edition of Where is America Going?, published by the WSWS: Trump is not an aberration but the political weaponisation of oligarchy and capitalist decomposition. The fight against fascism and war demands a complete break with bourgeois parties — including not only the Republicans but the Democrats, Labor, the Greens, and the entire spectrum of reformist and pseudo-left formations that channel working-class anger back into the institutions of capitalist rule.
The corruption of the GSEE in Greece, the shutdown of the Kaiser strike by UNAC/UHCP bureaucrats, the DSA’s slanders against Will Lehman, the South Australian Labor government’s developer-friendly programme, and the British Labour wipe-out in by-elections all express a single political truth: the existing leaderships of the labour movement, and all self-styled “left” alternatives within the parliamentary framework, cannot and will not defend the working class.
The IMF’s praise for Sri Lanka’s “success” while social crisis deepens is the economic counterpart to this political reality. Technocratic austerity managed by bourgeois institutions — whether right-wing or nominally social-democratic — inflicts suffering on the working class while protecting capital and imperialist creditors.
The necessary response is independent working-class political organisation on an international basis, rooted in the Trotskyist programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International: for socialist policies that prioritise human need over profit, for the expropriation of the banks and major corporations under workers’ control, for international solidarity against imperialist war, and for the construction of a revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class to power.
Prepared by theSocialist.lk on the basis of WSWS.org coverage for the week ending 28 February 2026.
[1] WSWS, US planes flood UK bases in preparation for attack on Iran https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/22/adkd-f22.html ;
WSWS, Washington preparing military strikes against Iran https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/10/wpjo-f10.html
[2] WSWS, “Canada’s Liberal government backs imperialist regime change in Iran” — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/23/zllb-f23.html
[3] WSWS, “Great Barrington Declaration author Jay Bhattacharya takes control of CDC as measles cases surge” — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/23/zgqh-f23.html
[4] WSWS, Artificial Intelligence in the entertainment industry and the necessary socialist response https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/26/bdjz-a26.html
[5] WSWS, “UNAC/UHCP bureaucrats shut down Kaiser Permanente strike without a contract” — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/24/aidf-f24.html
