This political report for the week ending 07 February 2026 is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
President Donald Trump smiles after signing a spending bill that ends a partial shutdown of the federal government in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
The week ending February 7, 2026 witnessed an intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry, the acceleration of domestic repression in the United States, and a global surge in working-class militancy met with systematic betrayal by trade union bureaucracies. From preparations for regime change in Iran to mass strikes in healthcare and education, the international crisis of capitalism manifested in parallel assaults on democratic rights, living standards, and public services. This report synthesizes key developments across four domains: imperialist war preparations and geopolitical realignment; the consolidation of authoritarian rule and state repression; capitalist austerity and economic warfare; and the eruption of class struggle against union bureaucratic containment.
I. Imperialism and War: Escalation Toward Iran and Regional Realignment
European Powers Line Up Behind Regime Change in Iran
European governments openly aligned with Washington’s escalation toward regime change in Tehran. The EU placed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on its “terror” list while European leaders—including Germany’s Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—publicly backed US threats and prepared rhetoric for a “transition” in Iran. This coordination followed prior US and Israeli strikes and represents strategic repositioning by European imperialism to secure access to energy resources and geopolitical influence.
Core analysis: The WSWS situates European actions as integral to imperialist rivalry and the scramble for markets and spheres of influence. Liberal imperialism cloaks predatory aims in “humanitarian” language, but the underlying logic is capitalist competition driving preparations for inter-imperialist war. Only an international working-class anti-war movement grounded in revolutionary socialist politics can halt the slide toward regional and global conflagration.
Turkey Attempts Mediation as NATO Ally
As US preparations for possible military action against Iran escalated, Turkey sought to mediate between Washington and Tehran. Ankara’s diplomacy aimed to limit regional destabilization while protecting Turkish geopolitical and economic interests, revealing the contradictions of a junior NATO power attempting to maneuver within imperialist rivalry.
Core analysis: Turkish mediation is not peaceful diplomacy but a junior imperialist power managing fallout from US militarism. Imperialist competition, not negotiation, drives the crisis; only international working-class anti-war mobilization can block regional war.
Merz’s Gulf Tour: Alliance with Dictators for German Great Power Politics
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz toured Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE—meeting personally with Mohammed bin Salman and pledging strategic partnerships, arms deals, and energy cooperation despite documented human rights crimes. The visit frankly asserted German great-power ambitions subordinating all ethical concerns to capitalist and geostrategic interests.
Core analysis: Imperialist states ally with dictators to secure energy and markets. Workers must oppose rearmament and foreign-policy adventurism through an international socialist program that rejects nationalist accommodation to imperialism.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
Trump Administration’s Assault on Democratic Norms
Federal Election Seizure Plans: President Trump publicly urged federal takeover of state election administration and directed FBI operations in Fulton County, Georgia, threatening to “nationalize” elections in targeted cities. These moves signal preparation to rig or cancel the 2026 elections.
Core analysis: This represents an overt break with democratic norms by sections of the capitalist state preparing for dictatorship. The principal obstacle to a coup is the working class; the necessary response is independent political mobilization through rank-and-file organizations and preparation for general strike, not reliance on the Democratic Party.
Federal Purges: The administration announced sweeping purges of federal civil service employees, replacing career officials with political loyalists to centralize control—measures framed as rooting out “disloyalty.”
Core analysis: Politicized purges characterize authoritarian consolidation, removing institutional checks on presidential power. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class organizing and mass political resistance.
Racist Provocations: Trump posted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, one in a series of overt racist provocations from the White House designed to mobilize racist sentiment, terrorize minorities, and divide the working class.
Mass Surveillance Infrastructure
The Trump administration expanded mass-surveillance networks—databases, facial recognition, cross-agency sharing—to track immigrants and political protesters, integrating private tech contractors into state repression apparatus.
Core analysis: Surveillance is a political tool to suppress dissent and enforce social control for the oligarchy. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class mobilization and dismantling surveillance apparatuses through mass action.
Immigrant Repression and Detention Center Horrors
Measles Outbreak at Dilley: A measles outbreak tore through the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, confining hundreds of asylum-seeking families and children. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and rationed medical care created conditions for rapid spread amid a nationwide measles resurgence (2,267 confirmed cases in 2025) following mass purges at HHS and CDC.
Core analysis: The outbreak demonstrates Trump’s program of criminalizing and caging migrants while dismantling scientific public health, subordinating life to profit and political repression. Both Republican and Democratic parties share complicity in detention regimes and public-health defunding.
Vindictive Deportation: After protests forced the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Dilley, DHS filed a motion to expedite deportation proceedings against his family—vindictive state repression designed to terrorize immigrants and suppress dissent.
ICE Workplace Raids: ICE conducted workplace raids including at an Amazon facility in Hazel Park, Michigan, weaponizing enforcement to intimidate immigrant and non-immigrant workers alike, deepen labor discipline, and facilitate corporate flexibility.
University Republican Club Calls for Assassinations
The Illini Republicans at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign posted on Instagram celebrating political killings and calling for assassination of opponents; the administration refused discipline, citing “protected speech.”
Core analysis: This evidences deepening fascist and white-supremacist currents fostered by capitalism resorting to political violence. The university’s selective “free speech” shields reactionary violence while repressing left protests. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class mobilization against both fascism and the bipartisan state protecting it.
Repression of Nurses and Protesters
New York Nurses Arrested: At least 13 striking nurses were arrested outside Greater New York Hospital Association headquarters on Day 25 of their strike, with NYPD riot units deployed amid pressure from Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul to end the action through emergency orders facilitating out-of-state replacements.
Core analysis: The arrests demonstrate state readiness to use force defending corporate healthcare interests. Union bureaucracy’s containment strategy isolates nurses; expansion of the strike, full strike pay, and national coordination through rank-and-file committees are essential.
Mamdani’s Betrayal: DSA Mayor Embraces Police State
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani praised an NYPD shooting of a 22-year-old Bangladeshi man experiencing a mental-health crisis and endorsed Governor Hochul’s strike-breaking measures, revealing continuity with pro-police policies despite earlier populist branding.
Core analysis: DSA-style figures integrate into the capitalist state, converting electoral radicalism into administrative collaboration with police and oligarchy. The working class must not be misled; independent organization and rank-and-file control are essential.
III. Austerity, Economic Warfare, and Capitalist Crisis
US Economic Warfare Against Cuba and Venezuela
Cuba Blockade: The US energy blockade threatened Cuba with humanitarian “collapse” as the UN Secretary-General warned of imminent crisis. Washington’s executive order threatened tariffs on countries supplying Cuba with oil; Mexico and other suppliers faced pressure to cease shipments, precipitating blackouts and shortages.
Core analysis: The blockade constitutes genocidal imperialist coercion aimed at regime overthrow, with complicity from regional bourgeois governments and nationalist-left leaders who capitulate. Only international working-class solidarity can oppose imperialist economic warfare.
Venezuela Privatization: Following the US abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s interim authorities rapidly overhauled hydrocarbons law, opening oil to foreign control and subordinating resources to US and corporate interests.
Core analysis: This exposes the failure of chavismo and bourgeois-nationalist projects that cannot defend resources or working-class gains under imperialism. Only working-class revolution and international socialist policy can break imperialist domination.
Corporate Layoffs Accelerate to Great Recession Levels
January job-cut announcements by US corporations tripled, with large tech, media, and retail firms leading the wave. The increase signals renewed corporate restructuring and mass unemployment approaching Great Recession scale.
Core analysis: Layoffs flow from falling profitability and overaccumulation; corporate efforts to restore margins enforce political choices subordinating labor to capital. The response must be mass industrial organization, strikes, and rank-and-file committees defending jobs and fighting for nationalization under workers’ control.
Washington Post Slashes Newsroom: The Washington Post eliminated roughly one-third of its newsroom (over 300 jobs), closing entire desks while billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s wealth surged. This media purge is part of capitalist restructuring and concentration of cultural power under the oligarchy, using “efficiency” rationales to mask political decisions shrinking independent journalism.
1,200 GM Layoffs in Canada: General Motors ended the third shift at its Oshawa plant, laying off approximately 1,200 autoworkers as part of production rationalization.
Austerity Across Multiple Fronts
Australia: The Labor government drove up housing prices through developer-friendly policies, cut arts funding (forcing Writers Victoria to close), raised interest rates deepening household debt crises, and approved National Cabinet measures removing tens of thousands of children from disability support. Labor also pressed ahead with demolition of Melbourne public housing towers, displacing residents under privatized redevelopment schemes.
UK: A major charity reported deepening poverty under the Starmer Labour government, documenting rising food insecurity, housing stress, and benefit shortfalls. Starmer’s administration implements austerity while claiming respectability.
SNAP Cuts: Trump administration changes to SNAP eligibility set 2.4 million people at risk of losing food assistance by 2034, shifting the burden onto working people to finance corporate and military priorities.
Homeless Death in Kalamazoo: A homeless man froze to death in Kalamazoo, Michigan while the city allocated $515 million to build a new arena—a stark juxtaposition of social neglect and pro-business public spending.
Kaiser Permanente Medicare Fraud
Kaiser agreed to a $556 million settlement over allegations of inflating Medicare Advantage risk scores, generating roughly $1 billion in alleged overpayments—while claiming inability to meet demands from striking healthcare workers.
Core analysis: “Non-profit” healthcare corporations are profit-driven entities using public funds for private gain. Fraud settlements are routine costs of business while frontline workers and patients suffer austerity.
IV. Class Struggle and Union Bureaucratic Betrayal
Healthcare Workers’ Strikes
Kaiser Strike Enters Third Week: The strike by 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers continued into its third week, with 4,000 pharmacy and lab workers (UFCW) preparing to join. Management pursued legal and PR strategies while union bureaucracy sought localized talks fragmenting the struggle.
New York Nurses: 15,000 nurses remained on strike facing threats of permanent replacement, with escalated repression (arrests, state emergency orders) and union bureaucracy retreat toward concessions.
Boston Nurses: Despite an overwhelming strike vote, the union bureaucracy left 650 nurses at Boston Medical Center Brighton working, fragmenting leverage and isolating the struggle.
Core analysis: Healthcare strikes contain the embryo of a national movement defending public health, but unions seek containment. Only rank-and-file organization could transform disputes into unifying working-class struggles. The fight centers on whether workers accept permanent understaffing or build nationwide, worker-led movements.
Education Workers’ Mobilization
San Francisco Teachers’ Strike: 6,400 educators in San Francisco Unified School District voted overwhelmingly to strike over chronic understaffing, poverty wages, unaffordable healthcare costs, and class-size caps—the first district-wide walkout since 1979.
Core analysis: The strike occurs amid obscene regional inequality driven by tech billionaires and Democratic-party austerity. Union bureaucratic entanglement with Democrats must be broken; independent rank-and-file committees should link educators across districts for statewide and national action.
Ann Arbor: Educators worked under expired contracts amid massive cuts and restructuring.
Australia: The WSWS called for building rank-and-file committees among educators and students to oppose mass job cuts, course closures, and integration of universities into the military-industrial complex under the Universities Accord.
Industrial Workers’ Struggles
Birmingham Refuse Workers: Over a year into indefinite strike action, Birmingham loaders and drivers opposed pay cuts up to £8,000 and abolition of safety roles, facing intimidation, court injunctions, agency labor, and £33 million council deployment to break the strike—backed by the Starmer government declaring a “major incident.”
Core analysis: This is a test case for Starmer’s austerity drive and labor bureaucracy’s capacity to contain conflict. The dispute can only be won through independent rank-and-file organization, democratic worker control of strategy, and national solidarity exposing government use of state power to enforce austerity.
USW Refinery Sellout: The United Steelworkers announced a tentative national agreement for 30,000 refinery workers offering 15% over four years with no binding protections against AI or job cuts; rank-and-file anger erupted over the perceived betrayal.
Core analysis: The WSWS denounced the USW bureaucracy’s sellout and called for immediate formation of elected rank-and-file refinery committees to reject the deal, coordinate national strike, and use union assets to sustain prolonged action.
Royal Mail: The Communication Worker Union’s Martin Walsh attacked rank-and-file initiatives calling for nationwide fightback against the Optimised Delivery Model and asset-stripping, collaborating with EP Group management.
German Public Transport: Verdi leadership limited warning strikes over pay and conditions, negotiating incremental deals rather than escalating militant potential.
Pattern of Bureaucratic Containment
Teachers’ Unions Suppress Resistance: Teachers’ union bureaucracies issued directives forbidding participation in anti-fascist walkouts and protests, framing suppression under “student safety” and contractual pretexts.
Core analysis: Union bureaucracies act to preserve capitalist order by containing rank-and-file militancy and preventing cross-sector solidarity. Democratic rank-and-file committees are essential to defend educational professionals’ rights and broader anti-dictatorship mobilizations.
International Labour Developments
Mediterranean Dockworkers: Dockworkers across Mediterranean ports planned coordinated protests opposing use of port infrastructure for military logistics and arms shipments.
German Hospital Workers: Strikes and protests spread across regions over understaffing, wage stagnation, and cost-cutting as patient safety deteriorates.
University of Sheffield Lock-out: Management locked out staff adhering to action short of striking, withholding pay—an unprecedented enforcement of unpaid labor to punish industrial action.
V. Elite Criminality and Systemic Corruption
Epstein Files Expose Ruling Class Impunity
The DOJ released millions of Epstein-related documents revealing extensive elite contacts; the Trump White House sought to minimize revelations while DOJ downplayed prosecution prospects and redactions selectively protected prominent individuals. Materials implicated UK figures including Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew, threatening Starmer’s “clean-government” stance.
Core analysis: The files expose systemic criminality and class impunity at capitalism’s summit. The ruling class protects its own through legal cover-ups and media manipulation. Justice cannot be delivered by capitalist courts or parties; accountability requires mass political mobilization of the working class and dismantling oligarchic power.
Financial Oligarchy and Fed Appointment
Wall Street figures rallied to secure Kevin Warsh’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve, demonstrating fusion between state power and financial oligarchy. Central-bank appointments serve capitalist interests by stabilizing conditions for private profit rather than defending working-class living standards.
VI. Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Colombian President Petro’s Capitulation
Colombian President Gustavo Petro visited the White House for talks with Trump days after military threats related to Venezuela, signaling sharp realignment with pledges of collaboration, intelligence sharing, and economic cooperation.
Core analysis: Petro’s capitulation confirms the bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalist “lefts” attempting reforms within imperialist frameworks. His turn toward Washington facilitates US neocolonial objectives and suppresses independent working-class alternatives.
Costa Rica Election
A Trump-aligned, right-of-centre candidate won Costa Rica’s presidency, displacing traditional pink-tide forces and marking electoral weakness of reformist nationalist-left projects.
Core analysis: This exposes the failure of nationalist or reformist regimes to defend working-class interests; only independent socialist politics rooted in the working class can offer an anti-imperialist alternative.
Conclusion
The week’s developments confirm the WSWS analysis: capitalism’s crisis is driving simultaneous escalation toward imperialist war, consolidation of authoritarian rule, intensification of austerity, and explosion of working-class resistance. The central political question is leadership: will struggles be contained and betrayed by union bureaucracies and bourgeois parties (including their pseudo-left appendages), or will workers build independent, democratically controlled rank-and-file committees capable of coordinating international resistance?
The necessity of the hour is the construction of an international socialist movement of the working class, organized independently of all capitalist parties and union apparatuses, and guided by the program and perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only such a movement—linking healthcare workers, educators, refinery workers, dockworkers, students, and immigrant communities across national boundaries—can halt the drive to dictatorship and war, defend democratic rights and living standards, and open the road to socialist transformation of society.
We publish here Part 1 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.
“Gen Z” Madagascar supporters wave the skull and crossbones flag during a gathering at May 13 Square in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
From the streets of Dhaka to Nairobi, from Colombo to Kathmandu, from Manila to every corner of the former colonial world—from Morocco to Peru, from Madagascar onward—a wave of youth-led uprisings has shaken the global capitalist order between 2022 and 2025. These movements have captured global attention with their scale, militancy, and apparent spontaneity. In September 2024, in Bangladesh, millions, predominantly angry youth, marched demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina1. In Kenya, the largest and most sustained protest movement since its Independence from colonial Britain took place from June 20242 to last month, where Generation Z (Gen-Z) protesters stormed parliament and brought President William Ruto’s government to the brink of collapse over his proposed austerity law. Sri Lanka’s youth occupation of Galle Face Green in July 2022 forced President Gotabaya Rajapakse to flee the country. Nepal saw its government toppled amid deadly street battles last September. Last month, the Philippines witnessed its largest demonstrations in two decades, while, on October 14, Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina was toppled following a mass popular mobilization and subsequent military intervention. These movements unfolded alongside hundreds of mass demonstrations—mobilizing millions across Europe and around the globe—against Zionist Israel’s genocide in Gaza, against the Trump administration’s preparations for a presidential dictatorship in the United States, and against the growing belligerency of imperialism around the world.
In Bangladesh, the military installed Muhammad Yunus, a banker with close ties to Western imperialism, who immediately announced “robust and far-reaching economic reforms”—a transparent code for savage International Monetary Fund austerity. In Kenya, late opposition leader Raila Odinga, who had postured as champion of the masses, joined hands with Ruto’s government to implement the identical policies the protests opposed, while the country was designated a US “major non-NATO ally”. Sri Lanka’s uprising delivered power to Ranil Wickremesinghe, a pro-IMF stooge who ruthlessly enforced austerity using police-state repression. Nepal’s protests were exploited by the military to install a technocratic interim government headed by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, sidelining all political parties while maintaining capitalist rule.
For the millions of youth who risked their lives in these struggles, the outcomes represent devastating betrayals. The fundamental questions facing the working class and the oppressed masses remain unresolved: How can youth secure jobs, education, and a decent future? How can democratic rights be defended against increasingly authoritarian regimes? How can the stranglehold of imperialist finance capital be broken? Most urgently, as the United States and NATO prepare for catastrophic wars against Russia and China, how can the working class and youth prevent themselves from becoming cannon fodder in conflicts that serve only the interests of rival capitalist powers?
The answer lies not in the “leaderless”— so, fundamentally pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist— mythology promoted by pseudo-left organizations, nor in the anti-corruption frameworks that channel mass anger into support for one bourgeois faction against another. It requires understanding why these movements, despite their revolutionary potential, have been systematically hijacked by forces defending capitalism. It demands a return to the theoretical foundations established by Leon Trotsky in his Theory of Permanent Revolution and defended by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) against decades of Stalinist, Maoist, and Pabloite revisionism. Above all, it necessitates the independent political mobilization of the working class under revolutionary leadership—the building of sections of the ICFI in every country to wage the struggle for world socialist revolution.
Global Gen-Z uprisings and their betrayed outcomes
The Gen-Z protest movements of 2022-2025 follow a remarkably consistent pattern across continents, revealing not isolated national phenomena but expressions of a single global crisis of capitalism.
Sri Lanka 2022 provided the template. Between April and July, hundreds of thousands took to the streets as skyrocketing prices, fuel shortages, power-cuts, fertilizer cuts and crop destruction, and medicine scarcity made life unbearable. The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic disruption from the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine had devastated global supply chains. Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves collapsed, forcing the government to default on its debt and halt vital imports. Mass protests erupted with demands that President Rajapakse resign—”Gota Go Home”—and that all 225 parliamentarians be removed, in which millions drawn from rural and urban poor participated across ethnic lines (except for the fact that the struggles could not gather support largely from the youth of Jaffna in the North of the country and from the up-country estate workers primarily because they saw no regime change in the South would solve any of their fundamental problems, and not necessarily due to the stronghold of discredited bourgeois Tamil nationalists and the trade union bureaucracy operating within those communities). Trade unions were compelled to call two limited one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6, demonstrating the immense power of the working class when it intervenes. Rajapakse was forced to flee the country on July 13, 2022.
But the political leadership of the movement remained in the hands of trade union bureaucrats, the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), youth proxies of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and middle-class groups at Galle Face Green, all of which subordinated the working class to demands for a transitional “interim government” that would preserve capitalist rule. Parliament was thus able to install Wickremesinghe, who imposed the IMF’s austerity program with an iron fist, using draconian legislation including the Essential Public Service Act to suppress worker opposition. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned at the time: “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves,” and that “there is no solution to the immense social problems and an end to the suppression of democratic rights within the existing social order.” However, the SEP’s forces remained limited, and it was not yet in a position to provide the mass revolutionary leadership necessary to mobilize a general strike and transform the popular uprising into a struggle for workers’ power. The decades-long betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism and nationalist trade union bureaucracies, and Pabloism within the Fourth International, had systematically undermined working-class consciousness, which in turn pressured the party into alienation, and prevented the emergence of a mass Trotskyist party capable of leading the working class, youth, and oppressed layers of the middle class in a united revolutionary offensive.
Bangladesh 2024 witnessed a similar trajectory compressed into explosive weeks. In July, university students organized under Students Against Discrimination began protesting a regressive job quota system. When Hasina’s government responded with murderous violence—unleashing police, military units, and Awami League thugs who killed scores of students—the protests escalated dramatically. By early August, millions were marching to Dhaka, expressing not merely anger over the quota system but accumulated rage over grinding poverty, massive inequality, and ruthless exploitation in the garment industry that produces billions in exports. The military, unable to contain the uprising, forced Hasina to resign and flee to India on August 5.
The military immediately installed an interim administration headed by Yunus, whose “close connections with US and European imperialist powers” were emphasized even in mainstream coverage. The Bangladesh National Party and Stalinist parties grouped in the Left Democratic Alliance pledged their full support. Throughout this upheaval, the trade unions and pseudo-left forces, including the Workers Party of Bangladesh, worked systematically to prevent the working class from intervening as an independent force with its own program3. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) correctly analyzed: “Workers and their families joined the student-initiated protests. However, they did so as individuals, not as a class, using strikes and other weapons of class struggle and advancing their own demands.”
Kenya’s Gen-Z insurgency in June-August 2024 represented perhaps the most politically advanced of these movements. Youth unemployment reaching 67 percent, combined with IMF-dictated tax increases in the Finance Bill 2024, ignited mass protests demanding President William Ruto’s resignation. The movement transcended the tribal divisions that the Kenyan ruling class has stoked for decades to weaken the working class4. On “Bloody Tuesday,” June 25, police opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens as they stormed parliament. Over 60 would die in the uprising, with scores abducted by security forces.
Protesters scatter as Kenya police spray water cannon at them during a protest over proposed tax hikes in a finance bill in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, June. 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
Ruto tactically withdrew the Finance Bill, but this concession only exposed the underlying conspiracy among the ruling class. In August, Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)—which had postured as opposition—joined Ruto’s government5. The Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), led by Francis Atwoli, and influential Christian and Muslim clergy backed this coalition government. Austerity policies continue, the military has been deployed against civilian protesters for the first time in Kenyan history, and the country was designated a US “major non-NATO ally” by the Biden administration, positioning it as a proxy force in Washington’s preparations for war with China.
The subsequent strike wave by teachers, transport workers, healthcare staff, and civil servants demonstrated the potential for working-class power. Yet COTU and the Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) worked tirelessly to prevent these strikes from becoming a political challenge to the regime, insisting instead on “no politics” and “leaderless” organization that left the field open for bourgeois forces6.
The uprisings in Nepal (September 2025) and the Philippines (September 2025) confirmed that this pattern extends across Asia. In Nepal, protests triggered by a government ban on 26 social media platforms and fueled by deep resentment over the lavish lifestyles of “nepo kids”—the children of politicians exposed through viral videos—left at least 51 dead. The homes of prominent politicians including former prime ministers were vandalized and set ablaze. Parliament was stormed and burned. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was forced to resign, but the outcome was a technocratic interim government headed by Karki, with the military playing a decisive role behind the scenes. As the WSWS reported, Chief of Army Staff Ashok Raj Sigdel “warned that the military would be forced to declare a state of emergency if no political solution would be found,” compelling party leaders to consent to parliament’s dissolution.
The Philippines saw its largest demonstrations in two decades, with 100,000 rallying in Manila on September 21—the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law7. The protests were triggered by exposures of massive graft in flood control infrastructure—involving billions stolen through kickbacks to officials and fraudulent contracts. Yet the political character of these protests was “markedly middle-class.” Stalinist organization BAYAN and the pseudo-left Akbayan party led separate rallies, both increasingly aligned with bourgeois factions hostile to China and integrated into Washington’s war preparations. President Marcos Jr. announced his support for the protests “as long as they were peaceful,” attempting to contain any genuine threat to its rule.
Madagascar (October 2025) demonstrated the pattern’s most dramatic expression, with President Andry Rajoelina forcibly removed and exfiltrated by French military aircraft. The uprising erupted in late September when chronic power and water shortages—leaving over 75 percent of the population subsisting on less than €0.80 per day outraged—triggered protests led by the Gen Z Mada formation. When authorities arrested two city politicians who had planned a demonstration on September 25, protests spread rapidly across the island. The regime responded with murderous repression: at least 22 killed, hundreds injured, a dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed, and the appointment of General Zafisambo as Prime Minister on October 6 in a desperate militarization that only deepened the crisis.
On October 14, the CAPSAT military unit—which had itself backed Rajoelina’s rise to power in 2009—toppled him through a coordinated intervention. Colonel Michael Randrianirina announced the dissolution of the Senate and High Constitutional Court while maintaining the National Assembly, providing constitutional veneer to what was fundamentally a coup. Most revealing was French imperialism’s direct role: on October 12, Rajoelina fled aboard a French aircraft in an operation coordinated with Paris and approved by President Emmanuel Macron. The company facilitating his escape, TOA Aviation, was the same that had enabled fugitive automotive boss Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn’s extralegal flight from Japan. Macron emphasized “constitutional order” without condemning repression, exposing France’s concern not for democracy but for protecting strategic interests in Malagasy energy, telecommunications, and rare earth minerals.
The Malagasy Trade Union Solidarity collective, comprising about fifty unions, called a general strike demanding Rajoelina’s resignation and wage increases after a freeze since 2022, while calling on the Church and local elites for “dialogue”. The opposition parties Tiako i Madagasikara (TIM) and Malagasy Miara-Miainga (MMM) positioned themselves as alternatives. This was essentially an opportunistic role, “channeling popular anger into the narrow framework of institutional negotiations while safeguarding the foundations of capitalism.”8 The military intervention aimed to defend bourgeois order and preserve the interests of imperialism and the national bourgeoisie, replicating the pattern observed in Egypt and Tunisia 2011 where “the supposed neutrality or support of the army served to defuse mobilization, restore bourgeois order, and ensure the continuity of the capitalist system under a new facade.”
Across all these movements, certain features recur with striking consistency: economic crisis driven by IMF austerity and capitalist breakdown, and chronic social inequality; massive youth and middle-class participation; violent state repression; the promotion of “leaderless” organization by pseudo-left groups; the systematic blocking of independent working-class political action by trade union bureaucracies and parties based on the petty-bourgeoisie; and outcomes that serve imperialist strategic interests while intensifying the exploitation of the masses.
Reposted below is the article published on wsws.org here on July 04, 2025.
The House of Representatives gave final approval to President Trump’s tax and spending bill Thursday, with a 218-214 vote that fell nearly along party lines. Republicans backed the legislation by 218-2 and all 212 Democrats opposed it.
The bill cuts taxes for the wealthy by $3 trillion, slashes more than $1 trillion from social spending on Medicaid and food stamps and pours $300 billion more into military violence abroad and domestic repression, particularly against immigrants.
Trump plans to sign the legislation Friday morning in a fascist-style ceremony drenched in Fourth of July hoopla, topped off with a flyover by B-2 bombers, the same warplanes that he ordered to attack Iran barely 10 days ago.
The bill was unchanged from the version passed by the Senate two days before, despite the clamor from the fascistic House Freedom Caucus that it did not sufficiently cut the federal deficit, while more than a dozen Republican “moderates” deplored the cuts, particularly in Medicaid, as too large.
In the end, however, nearly every Republican fell in line with the dictates of the White House, with Trump threatening to purge anyone who voted against his principal legislative initiative by supporting primary challengers against them. Underlying the political bullying was the deluge of online threats against anyone who might oppose the bill, including threats of violence.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, addressing the House just before the vote, delivered an anti-communist tirade in which he declared that the United States was the first country to be founded on religious principles, pointing to the slogan “In God We Trust” embossed on the wall of the chamber (put up not by the Founding Fathers but by the McCarthyite witch-hunters of the 1950s and early 1960s).
As the WSWS explained when the bill passed the Senate:
The bill is one of the largest transfers of wealth from workers and the poor to the oligarchy in US history. It calls for $930 billion in cuts to the Medicaid program, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will deprive 11.8 million low-income and disabled workers of medical care.
It also includes $285 billion in food stamp cuts, a 20 percent reduction in a program on which 40 million Americans rely to feed themselves and their families. Nearly 11 million people, including 4 million children, could lose food assistance.
While the Democratic Party claimed to oppose the bill and every Democrat in the House and Senate voted against it, there was no serious effort by the party leadership to mobilize popular opposition.
The Democrats did not call a single protest in Washington or in any way alert the American population to the onslaught against their living standards and right to access healthcare services that this legislation authorizes. Instead, they engaged in a handful of futile gestures on Capitol Hill.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered an eight-hour and 32-minute “speech” opposing the Trump bill, breaking the previous record for such a performance, but this only delayed passage in the House until Thursday afternoon. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did even less, making a parliamentary point of order that led to a change in the name of the bill, which the Republicans wished to call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” in tribute to Trump’s sloganeering.
The real attitude of these gentlemen to the fascist in the White House was demonstrated in the weeks leading up to the passage of the tax and spending bill.
In the Senate, Schumer intervened to break a parliamentary deadlock over a so-called Continuing Resolution, legislation required to provide funds to keep the government running. He led a group of Democrats to give the Republicans a 60-vote majority needed for passage.
In the House, Jeffries mobilized a majority of the Democratic caucus to vote against a resolution to impeach Trump for ordering air strikes on Iran without seeking congressional authorization, let alone the constitutionally required declaration of war.
If the congressional arithmetic were reversed, with Democrats holding a narrow majority in each house over the Republicans, the Democrats would not even have attempted to push through their supposed priorities over Republican opposition.
It should be recalled, for example, that the Biden administration was unable to enact either an increase in the federal minimum wage, significant debt forgiveness for college student loans, or measures to curb police violence after the nationwide protests against the police murder of George Floyd, because one or two right-wing Democratic senators blocked the legislation.
The spinelessness of the Democratic Party cannot by itself explain the passage of this monstrous legislation. The Democrats were responding to their real constituencies, Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, and not to the working people whom they claim to defend.
The corporate oligarchs wanted the Trump tax cuts, enacted in 2017 and set to expire at the end of this year, made permanent. The legislation guarantees the 21 percent corporate tax rate and includes a treasure chest of other pro-corporate provisions that allow giant companies and billionaires to pay taxes at lower rates than factory workers and school teachers.
There is considerable discontent on Wall Street that the tax cuts will be financed largely through borrowing, since the spending cuts are to be phased in over a 10-year period and in any case do not come close to the $4 trillion windfall for the wealthy. But it is well understood that the cuts in Medicaid and food stamps are only a down payment, and that even more savage cuts are being prepared in future years, targeting Social Security and Medicare, the two largest social spending programs.
As to the military-police aspects of the legislation, roughly equal sums of about $150 billion each are provided for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS funds will go to finish building the wall on the US-Mexico border begun during Trump’s first term, and to build a network of concentration camps to detain the millions of immigrants Trump and his fascist aides Stephen Miller and Tom Homan plan to round up and expel.
The Pentagon funds will be used at least in part to begin work on Trump’s proposed anti-missile program. This is not a “defensive” measure but a direct preparation for nuclear war, since it would encourage a US nuclear attack on a foreign antagonist, such as Russia or China, in the illusion that the US would survive a retaliatory strike.
The Democrats have said virtually nothing about either measure, because they support the massive build-up of both the US military machine and the apparatus of domestic repression directed against immigrants and the working class as a whole. They have criticized Trump only for his most overtly fascistic methods of attacking immigrants, and for his shifting the focus of US foreign policy away from the war against Russia in Ukraine and towards the Middle East and China.
There are a raft of anti-democratic measures incorporated into the 950-page bill, which the WSWS will analyze in the coming days. One provision stands out immediately: The bill authorizes the Trump administration to terminate all federal funding for healthcare services through Planned Parenthood clinics. That is a longstanding demand of the fascist right, which seeks to bankrupt Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortion services, by cutting off funding for its non-abortion healthcare operations as well.
