By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka. SEP is the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
Sangeethsan (Sangeethsan Facebook page)
On a day (June 2) that should have passed unremarkably in Kilinochchi, the Jaffna District Crime Detective Bureau, acting through Chavakacheri police, arrested a 24-year-old musician. His name is Ganesh Kumar Sankeethan (Sangeethsan) — known by his stage name “HipHop Sangee” (YouTube Channel name) — and his crime, according to the state, was uploading songs that the police allege indirectly glorify the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was remanded for two weeks under Section 3(h) of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), his lawyer K. Sayanthan verified.
Sangeethsan, a rapper, has earned widespread recognition within the local Tamil hip-hop community for compositions that combine social commentary with cultural storytelling. Many of his works are available through his social media accounts. Before we go any further, let us consider what one of those songs contains. It is not vague cultural expression or ambiguous artistic metaphor. It invokes அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — the term used in Eelam Tamil political culture to refer to Velupillai Prabhakaran. It speaks of the Tiger flag arriving in triumph. It honors the மாவீரன் — the Great Heroes, the fallen LTTE cadres — by name and by the imagery of their sacrifice. It calls on them to return and build the nation. It invokes கார்த்திகை — November — the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual mourning of the LTTE dead, as its emotional and symbolic landscape: flowers are brought to the fallen, their weeping families cry out to them, and the dead are called back to build the nation.
These are the lyrics of a young man from a war-ravaged district who grew up surrounded by grief, who found in music a way to articulate what his community has been undemocratically forbidden to say openly since May 2009.
We state these facts not to hand ammunition to those who want Sangeethsan kept in a cell. We state them because this article is committed to a principle that the Sri Lankan state and its chauvinist supporters on social media are equally committed to destroying: that honest politics must begin with the truth, not with convenient omissions. The question before us is not whether Sangeethsan’s lyrics express a political program we endorse. They do not — and we will explain why, plainly and without condescension, in the paragraphs that follow. The question before us is a different and more fundamental one: does any democratic society have the right to imprison a 24-year-old for the political content of his songs?
The answer is no. Unequivocally, no.
Freedom of political expression — including the freedom to express a politics that is wrong, mistaken, or even one that others find deeply objectionable — is a right that the working class defends with the greatest vigilance, with one principled and non-negotiable exception: fascist speech and fascist organization. We defend such expressions not because all political ideas are equally correct, but because the repressive legal machinery constructed to silence Tamil grief today is the same machinery that will be turned on striking workers, protesting students, and anyone else who challenges the authority of the capitalist state tomorrow. This is not a theoretical warning. It is the documented history of the PTA, other security laws and essential services laws in Sri Lanka, which have been used against Sinhala rural youth, students, Muslim youth, Tamil journalists, plantation workers, electricity workers and port workers with equal and indiscriminate brutality.
This article is not written primarily for those for whom what we discuss here is their daily experience. It is written for Sinhala youth, for middle-class families in Colombo and Kandy and Galle, for workers on plantations and in factories, who have been told their entire lives that the Tamil question was settled in May 2009, that “terrorism” was defeated, and that any sympathy for Tamil political expression is a conspiracy against the nation. It is written for those who, upon seeing Sangeethsan’s lyrics circulated on social media, may have felt the trained reflex: Tiger flag, Prabhakaran, Tamil Eelam — this is exactly what the PTA is for.
It is written to ask: who taught you to feel that reflex? Who benefits from it? And what has it cost you — not as a Sinhala person, but as a worker, as a young person, as someone whose living standards are being destroyed by the same state that is filling its remand prisons with Tamil youth and artists?
A Ban Designed Not to Fight Terror, But to Manufacture It
The formal proscription of the LTTE has been maintained continuously since the government of Mahinda Rajapakse banned it by gazette in January 2009, just months before the military’s final offensive ended the civil war. A final gazette in 2011 consolidated and extended this proscription to cover “related activities.” Every government since — Sirisena’s, Wickremesinghe’s, Gotabaya’s, and now Dissanayake’s JVP/NPP government — has maintained this framework intact.
When the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposed the original 2009 ban, it explained with precision what the ban was actually for. The statement issued at the time noted that the ban “has no direct bearing on the LTTE — the government is already waging war against the Tamil separatist organisation.” It warned that the decree’s sweeping powers to proscribe organisations “connected with or representing” the LTTE could “immediately be used against the Tamil National Alliance, a parliamentary political party.” And it predicted, with complete accuracy, that “such broad definitions, however, could be applied to any organisations, including political parties, trade unions or student bodies, that are regarded as opponents of the government.”[1]
Seventeen years later, those warnings have been borne out in case after case. The PTA has been used to imprison Tamil detainees for years without trial, to torture a young Muslim poet named Ahnaf Jazeem for writing verse that condemned ISIS and imperialist war, and to harass Tamil journalists. The JVP/NPP government — elected on a promise to abolish the PTA — has already used the Act against Muslim youth who expressed opposition to the Gaza genocide. In August 2025, the Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID) questioned a Tamil journalist who reported on mass graves in the North. The new Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) being drafted to replace the PTA reproduces its essential features while expanding the scope of what can be defined as a “terrorist act” to include actions that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to do or abstain from doing any act” — language that could criminalize strikes, protests, and any form of organized resistance.
The instrument changes. The purpose remains identical: to place in the hands of the capitalist state an infinitely elastic legal weapon that can be pointed at anyone, at any time.
The Criminalization of Memory is Not an Accident
To understand why a 24-year-old rapper from Kilinochchi sits in a remand prison for singing about Tamil Eelam, you have to understand what kind of region Kilinochchi is, and what kind of wound the state is insisting must never be named.
Kilinochchi was the administrative capital of LTTE-controlled territory. It was also the site of some of the most intense fighting and civilian displacement in the final years of the war. The surrounding region of the Vanni was the theater of the last stages of a conflict in which, according to United Nations estimates, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. The survivors of that catastrophe — the families who lost fathers, mothers, husbands and children, who spent months in detention camps, who rebuilt lives from rubble — now live in a society where any public expression of that experience can be treated as a criminal act.
Sangeethsan is not a terrorist. He is a young man who grew up in the aftermath of that catastrophe, processing it in the only way artists know how: through music. To understand what is really at stake — politically and morally — we must read what he actually sang, and then ask not whether we agree with every word, but whether any democratic society can justify locking a young person in a remand cell for singing them.
This is not incidental to the logic of the PTA. It is the logic of the PTA. The state knows perfectly well that a military revival of the LTTE is structurally impossible and virtually non-existent. There is no evidence of serious LTTE organizational infrastructure, no military command, no armed force in the field. The proscription is maintained not because the LTTE poses a threat, but because the legal apparatus of the proscription remains extraordinarily useful — for precisely this: to convert political grievance into criminality, to transform memory into evidence, and to force the Tamil population into a permanent condition of political silence under pain of imprisonment.
This is what the SEP observed in August 2022, when the Wickremesinghe government, in the very same extraordinary gazette in which it delisted some Tamil diaspora groups for diplomatic purposes, continued to maintain the proscription framework: “The continued proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups is part of ongoing efforts by one government after another to whip up Sinhala chauvinism and discrimination against the country’s oppressed minorities. Facing the mass opposition of workers and the poor, the crisis-ridden Wickremesinghe regime is determined to keep communal tensions alive and deepen the repressive measures.” [2]
The pattern is consistent across every government of the post-independence era. The names change — UNP, SLFP, PA, UPFA, SLPP, JVP/NPP. The policy does not. This is not an accident. This is the function that communalism has always served in Sri Lanka: as the SEP noted in its analysis of 60 years of post-independence history, “Six decades of independence have brought ordinary working people nothing but communal conflict, deepening social misery and increasingly anti-democratic methods of rule.” The beneficiaries of that dynamic have never been ordinary Sinhala working people. They have been the ruling class, which has used ethnic division to rule a fractured country and impose economic policies that serve capital at the expense of all working people, regardless of their ethnicity.[3]
Read the Lyrics — Then Ask the Right Question
Let us be honest about what Sangeethsan sang in the song that we referred to above. His lyrics are not ambiguous cultural nostalgia. They invoke அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — a term that in the context of Eelam Tamil political culture refers unambiguously to Velupillai Prabhakaran. They speak of a Tiger flag arriving in triumph. They use the term மாவீரன் (Maaveeran) — Great Hero — the specific honorific reserved for fallen LTTE cadres. They invoke the month of கார்த்திகை (Karthikai/November), which is the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual commemoration of the LTTE’s dead. They call upon the heroes to “come back” and “build the nation.” They speak of warriors whose “sulfur-scented bodies blended into the wind” — the gunpowder of the battlefield rendered as the smell of sacrifice. This is explicitly a song of mourning for, and celebration of, the LTTE’s slain fighters and their leader. The lyrics read, in part:
The Tiger flag of our Elder Brother is arriving, make way and clear the path!
Tamil Eelam dances in roaring triumph, his name echoes in every direction!
O great heroes who died protecting the soil, time shall never forget you!
Come back, come back, please come back again, to display your bravery and to build the nation! [most approximate English Translation]
These sentiments, as expressed, justify no arrest. We understand the content of it because any serious political analysis must begin with reality. But we unequivocally say that the 24-year-old youth from Kilinochchi should not be imprisoned for writing and singing this song.
Sangeethsan’s song is not fascist speech. The working class does not defend fascist speech — it demands the prosecution of fascist outfits and their financial backers. This distinction is not arbitrary. It is rooted in the nature of fascism itself: unlike any other political tendency, however wrong, fascism does not seek to win political argument — it seeks to annihilate the very conditions under which political argument is possible. Sangeethsan’s song is the very expression of a grief-stricken and oppressed people rendered in music. But this legal machinery, constructed to silence Tamil grief and working-class resistance, is never — without a single exception in the entire post-independence history of Sri Lanka — the machinery turned against the Sinhala chauvinist and communalist outfits that the ruling class courts, funds, and shelters precisely when the class struggle sharpens. The Bodu Bala Sena’s incitement of anti-Muslim pogroms, the Sihala Urumaya’s ethnic provocations — none of these drew the ferocity of the PTA. The state does not point its anti-terror machinery at the forces of communalism. It points it at the forces of class struggle. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire point.
To genuinely serve Tamil youth — and to speak honestly to Sinhala workers who need to understand what is happening — we must ask the harder question that state repression is designed to prevent anyone from asking: What does it mean that a generation of Tamil youth in Kilinochchi and Jaffna and Mullaithivu genuinely love Prabhakaran and genuinely mourn the LTTE’s dead?
It means something real and painful. As already said, these young people grew up in the rubble of a bloody war. They grew up in a region under continuous military occupation, where soldiers still control Tamil lands, where surveillance is a fact of daily life, where their elders were disappeared, where mass graves continue to be discovered. They grew up in districts where, even before the 2022 economic collapse, poverty levels in Mullaithivu district reached 40 percent. In this reality, Prabhakaran is not a political program to them. He is a symbol of the idea that someone, once, stood up and fought back.
The grief is real. The anger is legitimate. The desire for dignity is not only human — it is politically necessary. And the passion that Tamil youth pour into songs like Sangeethsan’s is the raw material of a generation searching desperately for something to believe in.
The question that our revolutionary movement poses is therefore not: “How do we suppress this passion?” The question is: “Why is this passion flowing into Tamil nationalism instead of socialist politics?” And the answer to that question leads us directly back to the Colombo ruling class — and to the specific responsibility of the Sinhala working class and its potential for genuine solidarity with Tamil workers and the poor. The state that criminalizes Sangeethsan’s song is not only persecuting Tamil youth. It is actively working to ensure that their passion never finds its correct political destination.
Who is being Deceived, and Why
Here we must speak directly to the Sinhala readers of this article — especially to young people who, when Sangeethsan’s arrest was discussed on social media, may have felt that instinctive reaction: he shouldn’t have been singing about Tamil Eelam, that’s LTTE territory, what did he expect?
That reaction is not yours. It was installed in you.
For decades, the Sri Lankan ruling class and its corporate media have conducted a systematic program of militarization of the society and political conditioning. Sinhala children grew up with a version of national history in which the Tamil struggle for democratic rights was, from its very origins, portrayed as a foreign conspiracy and a terrorist project. The legitimate grievances that produced the Tamil national movement — the systematic language discrimination of 1956, the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, and 1983, the deliberate exclusion of Tamils from state employment and university admissions — were erased from public consciousness. In their place was substituted a permanent security narrative of fear mongering: we are under threat, we must be vigilant, any sympathy for Tamil identity is sympathy for terrorism. War has been rationalized as necessary, and the military has been glorified as “war heroes” (Rana Viru), ready to be deployed against any struggle of the working class united across ethnic divisions.
This communalist project was never a natural outgrowth of Sinhala culture or Buddhism. It was a deliberate political construction, launched by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 as an electoral strategy to outbid the conservative UNP, and then reproduced by every faction of the ruling class because it served a vital class function: it prevented the Sinhala and Tamil working class from recognizing their common interests and uniting against the system that exploited them both.
The result can be seen today on TikTok, Facebook, and X. The moment a Tamil artist, journalist, or ordinary citizen uses the vocabulary of their own history — “Tamil Eelam,” “homeland,” “genocide,” “accountability”, “war crimes”, “commemoration” — sections of Sinhala social media erupt in denunciation. These users do not consider themselves tools of the state. Many of them are themselves suffering from the same economic devastation — unemployment, inflation, the IMF’s austerity measures, collapsing public services — that Tamil workers in the North and East are suffering. They have been successfully redirected. The enemy they have been given is not the class that rules them, but the neighbor who speaks a different language and carries a different wound.
Here is the dialectic that the ruling class has maintained for seven decades, and which it is essential for Sinhala workers and youth to understand: Sinhala chauvinism produces Tamil nationalism, and Tamil nationalism, in turn, reinforces Sinhala chauvinism. Each tendency is the mirror image and the fuel of the other. When Colombo discriminated against Tamil language rights in 1956, it created the conditions for Tamil political mobilization. When that mobilization was met not with redress but with pogroms, it created the conditions for Tamil armed separatism. When Tamil separatism launched attacks on Sinhala civilians, it was used by the Sinhala ruling class to justify yet more state terror against Tamils — and to intimidate Sinhala workers who might otherwise have seen through the charade. And when the state now arrests a 24-year-old for singing about Prabhakaran or Tamil Eelam, it ensures that another generation of Tamil youth will conclude — understandably, though incorrectly — that there is no path forward except through Tamil nationalism.
The LTTE’s political program was the program of an aspiring Tamil bourgeoisie, not the Tamil working class. As the ICFI analysis of the LTTE’s defeat made clear, the LTTE was utterly incapable of making a political appeal to Sinhala workers precisely because its perspective was based on ethnic struggle rather than class struggle — and its denunciations of the entire Sinhala population for the crimes of the Colombo government ensured that the very working-class unity that could have changed everything was permanently foreclosed.[4] The LTTE’s violent attacks on ordinary Sinhalese civilians served the same reactionary purpose as the government’s Sinhala supremacism: to divide the working class along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines and thereby strengthen the hand of Sinhala chauvinist forces in Colombo. The LTTE’s military defeat in 2009 resolved nothing. It left the Tamil masses with their democratic rights still denied, their land still occupied, their poor still impoverished — and their youth still searching for a political direction.
That is the political vacuum into which songs like Sangeethsan’s speak. They should not be criminalized and suppressed. They should be answered — with a socialist program that offers Tamil workers what Prabhakaran could never offer: genuine unity with the Sinhala and Muslim working class in a common fight against the capitalist state that oppresses all of them.
The State that Imprisons Sangeethsan will come for You Next
This is the point that must be grasped most clearly by Sinhala workers and youth who might be tempted to view Sangeethsan’s arrest as a Tamil problem, not their problem.
The PTA was enacted in 1979 to suppress Tamil militant organizations. But, it was never only about Tamils. It was used to bloodily suppress the JVP uprisings of 1988–1990 — killing tens of thousands of oppressed Sinhala rural youth. It has been used against Sinhala journalists, trade unionists, and political opponents. And under the JVP/NPP government that came to power promising to abolish it, the PTA has been invoked against Muslim and Tamil youth and it has used the Essential Public Services Act against electricity workers who protested and postal workers who struck.
The logic is identical in every case: the same state apparatus that defines Tamil cultural expression as “terrorism” will define your strike, your protest, your social media post criticizing the IMF as “terrorism” whenever it becomes convenient. The elastic definitions being written into the new PSTA — acts that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to abstain from doing any act” — are not aimed at a nonexistent LTTE or any other such outfit. They are aimed at the working class. All of it. Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim.
The infrastructure of surveillance and military occupation maintained in the North and East since 2009, nominally to prevent an LTTE revival, serves a second function that should be legible to any honest observer: it is a standing model and template for the kind of state control that the ruling class intends to extend southward as the social and economic crisis deepens. A state that has kept an entire population under military surveillance for seventeen years after the end of a war, that imprisons a 24-year-old musician for his song lyrics, is a state that has long since abandoned any pretense of democratic governance.
The Way Forward: Unity of the Working Class against the Capitalist State
Sangeethsan must be released immediately and unconditionally. The charges against him must be dropped. The PTA should be abolished, and its successor legislation, the PSTA — which is the same weapon with a new label — should not pass. The military occupation of the North and East must end. All political prisoners held under these laws must be freed.
These are not Tamil demands. They are the demands of the entire working class, because the democratic rights of any section of the working class are the democratic rights of all of it.
The Socialist Equality Party, in which we, the SLLA, represent a revolutionary tendency, has maintained this position without deviation since its founding as the Revolutionary Communist League, through the entire 26 years of the civil war and its aftermath. We opposed the communal war when the JVP was supporting it. We defended Tamil democratic rights when the trade union bureaucracies were silent. We campaigned for the release of Tamil detainees held without trial under the PTA when no other political party would. And we have always done so on the basis of a clear class analysis: not because we gave political support to the LTTE’s separatism — which program represented the interests of a section of the Tamil bourgeoisie, not Tamil workers and farmers — but because the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the unity of the working class, and because Tamil workers and farmers could defend their own interests only by uniting with Sinhala working people in a common struggle against capitalism.
To Tamil youth who love these songs, who light candles in November and weep for the Maaveerar: your grief is not misplaced, and your passion for dignity is a political resource, not a pathology. But Prabhakaran’s program failed — not because he was betrayed by the international community or outgunned by the army, but because a separate Tamil capitalist state could only ever reproduce the poverty and exploitation that Tamil workers already endure, in a new flag’s colors. The answer to discrimination and communal oppression is not to be found in a separate state, but in the unification of the oppressed in a common struggle for socialist revolution. The state that murders Tamil aspirations with the PTA is the same state that destroys Sinhala workers’ living standards with IMF austerity. Your enemy is not the Sinhala worker in a factory in Colombo. Your enemy is the class that rules them both. The revolutionary tradition that actually fought for your rights — that opposed the communal war when the JVP was cheering it on, that campaigned for Tamil political prisoners when no other party would, that demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East — is the Trotskyist tradition of the Socialist Equality Party. That is the tradition worthy of your passion and your fight.
The arrest of Sangeethsan is not an isolated incident. It is the latest manifestation of a strategy that has defined Sri Lankan capitalism since independence: divide the oppressed along ethnic lines, criminalize the memory of the oppressed, and use the machinery of anti-terrorism law to suppress any movement that threatens the rule of capital. Every government has played this game. The JVP/NPP, which rode to power on the wave of the 2022 Aragalaya uprising with promises of democratic reform, is playing it now.
The answer to this strategy is not Tamil separatism, which has proven a dead end that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Nor is it Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, which has served as the ideological cover for every act of state terror. [5] The answer is the political unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers, organized independently of all factions of the capitalist class and all its parties, fighting for the common program of socialist internationalism that addresses the interests of all working people against the IMF’s austerity, against militarism, against the entire apparatus of communalist state repression. This unity demands an unconditional and outright refusal to be trapped by the communal divisions that the ruling class has imposed on all of us.
Free Sangeethsan Now! Abolish the PTA—No Replacement! Build the united socialist movement of the working class!
[5] Tamil separatism, however mistaken its program, arose as a response to systematic national oppression. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism is the ideology of the oppressor nation’s ruling class — it is supremacist in its very foundations, asserting the primacy of Sinhala Buddhist identity over all other communities as a justification for state discrimination, pogroms, and military terror. “Chauvinism” is the Marxist term of art for aggressive, supremacist nationalism deployed in the service of a ruling class — named after Nicolas Chauvin, the symbol of blind, belligerent national superiority. It carries the correct political charge that “nationalism” does not, in relation to Sinhala Buddhist class hegemony.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
Mawpiya Sevana Home engulfed in flames. Image courtesy of nagalandpost.com
On the evening of June 3, 2026, fire consumed the Mawpiya Sevana care facility in Batagoda, Anguruwatota, near Horana in the Kalutara District. Twelve residents — elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities — died. Eight more were severely injured. Seventy-one human beings were packed into a building designed for fifteen. The first instinct of the bourgeois press, the political establishment, and the state apparatus is to render this a story about regulatory failure: the home was unregistered, the owner has been arrested, the Defence Secretary visited the ruins. Officials speak of stricter enforcement, mandatory inspections, and compliance frameworks. A proprietor sits in remand custody. The machinery of bourgeois law performs its theatre of accountability.
We reject this framing entirely. The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are not a regulatory scandal. They are a systemic indictment — the concentrated and visible expression of what capitalist society does to human beings who can no longer be profitably exploited.
The Fundamental Logic: Discarded Lives
To understand this tragedy scientifically, one must begin with the logic of capital itself. Under capitalism, the value of a human being — in the brutal calculus of the system — is indexed to their capacity to generate surplus value. The worker sells their labour power; capital extracts from that labour power more value than it returns in wages; the difference constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the system. This is the elementary truth established by Marx in Capital and confirmed by every hour of every working day across the planet.
What, then, of those who can no longer labour? What of the elderly, the severely disabled, those living with serious mental illness? In the language of capital, they are unproductive. They generate no surplus value. They are, from the standpoint of the system, a cost — a drain on resources that could otherwise be directed toward accumulation. Capitalism does not produce sentimentality toward those it cannot exploit. It produces neglect, abandonment, and, at the sharp end of underdevelopment, mass death.
This is the political truth behind the twelve corpses at Mawpiya Sevana. These were human beings whom the system had already written off. They had no social security worth the name. They had no public institutions capable of housing and caring for them with dignity. They were deposited — warehoused — in an overcrowded, unregistered private facility, in a building designed for fifteen, because their families, themselves workers ground down by decades of austerity, had no alternative. The capitalist state knew this was happening. It tolerated it, because the alternative — a publicly funded, adequately staffed, universally available system of elder care and disability support — would require precisely the kind of social expenditure that the ruling class and its international creditors have placed beyond political possibility.
The IMF and the Deliberate Dismantling of Social Provision
This brings us to the immediate political context, which is inseparable from the structural one. Sri Lanka is presently in the grip of one of the most savage austerity programs in its history, administered under the direct supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The 2022 foreign debt default and the social explosion that swept former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power opened the door to an IMF bailout — and with it, the full subordination of Sri Lankan economic and social policy to the demands of international finance capital.
Every government since — from Wickremesinghe to the present JVP/NPP administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — has functioned as a transmission belt for IMF dictates. The 2026 budget allocates a staggering 4.5 trillion rupees (450,000 crores Rupees. Approximately US $13 billion) for debt servicing alone — money extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and the rural poor and transferred to international bondholders, banks, and multilateral creditors. To meet this obligation, the government has slashed public expenditure across every social domain: health, education, welfare.
The health system is collapsing under the pressure of these cuts. Public hospitals run out of essential medicines — insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, psychiatric medications. Patients wait over a year for MRI scans and die during the wait. Nurses are so overworked and under-resourced that they have no chairs to sit on. The government’s own health minister, confronted with the medicine shortage, told patients to “buy them from the cheapest places.” This is not negligence. This is deliberate policy, enforced under IMF conditionality and praised by international financial institutions as evidence of “fiscal discipline.”
Into this landscape of deliberate social destruction, the question of elder care and disability support does not even register as a policy priority. The JVP/NPP government moved in late 2025 to slash the Aswesuma welfare program — a meagre cash transfer scheme paying between 5,000 and 17,500 rupees per month (approximately US$16 to $57) to the disabled, the elderly, kidney patients, and the extreme poor. Even this minimal safety net is under attack, with the World Bank pressing for a reduction in the number of beneficiaries and a JVP minister publicly declaring that welfare recipients should “feel ashamed” — calling it “legal begging.” As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has noted, this language carries chilling historical echoes: it frames the destitute not as victims of a system, but as parasites upon it.
It is in this context that Mawpiya Sevana existed. The state did not build, fund, or staff adequate public residential facilities for the elderly and the disabled — not because it lacked the administrative capacity to do so, but because the entire fiscal framework of Sri Lankan capitalism, as restructured by the IMF, prohibits such expenditure. The government allocates debt repayments nearly nine times the health budget. There are simply no resources directed toward the systematic, universal care of those who cannot work. In their place, a black market of unregistered, unregulated, overcrowded private facilities fills the vacuum — precisely because working-class and poor families, themselves crushed by falling real wages, rising prices, and the destruction of social services, cannot provide the full-time care that the state refuses to provide.
The State Knew, and the State Did Not Care
It would be politically dishonest to attribute what happened at Mawpiya Sevana to ignorance or inattention on the part of state authorities. The Director of the National Secretariat for Elders has confirmed that the facility was known to the authorities, that it was unregistered, and that it had previously been warned to comply with regulations. Officials knew. They did not act, not because the machinery of enforcement was insufficiently developed, but because the state had no institutional alternative to offer the residents. To shut down Mawpiya Sevana without providing a publicly funded substitute would have been to condemn seventy-one people to destitution or homelessness. The state permitted the facility’s continued operation because the alternative — genuine social provision — is structurally excluded by the political and economic priorities of the ruling class.
This is the functioning logic of the capitalist state in an underdeveloped country operating under IMF tutelage. It is not an aberration from the normal functioning of the system. It is the system functioning normally. The capitalist state in Sri Lanka — as in every neocolonial country — is not an instrument of social welfare. It is an instrument of capital accumulation, debt repayment, and the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. Those who cannot be exploited — the elderly, the severely disabled, those with serious mental illness — fall outside this framework entirely. They are residue. They are waste. The system does not know what to do with them except minimize the cost of their existence and, when they die in preventable fires, process the deaths through the criminal justice system to defuse political pressure.
The Feudal Supplement and Its Limits
In the absence of any meaningful social security system, the burden of care for the elderly and disabled in Sri Lanka — as throughout the countries of the periphery — falls on the feudal-cultural obligations of family and kinship networks. Sons and daughters are expected to provide, to sacrifice their own economic lives, to absorb the cost that the state refuses to bear. This system of informal social reproduction (provision of public goods — healthcare, education, social security — necessary to maintain a productive workforce) does not represent cultural high standards. It is a structural necessity for capital: it permits the ruling class to avoid the costs of social reproduction that workers in more developed capitalist countries extracted through generations of struggle — pension systems, public health systems, residential care facilities, disability support.
But this feudal supplement is itself being eroded by the same forces of capitalist development and austerity that make it necessary. As real wages collapse — down 24 percent in the public sector and 14 percent in the private sector since 2022, according to World Bank data — working-class families have fewer resources to provide informal care. Emigration, driven by economic desperation, separates families across continents. The nuclear family unit, under the pressure of capitalist commodity (property) relations and austerity, cannot substitute for the collective social infrastructure that only a socialist society can build and sustain.
The result is the proliferation of informal, unregistered, unregulated private facilities like Mawpiya Sevana — a catastrophic market response to a catastrophic social failure. People with nowhere to go, and nowhere else to put their relatives, are concentrated in buildings not designed to hold them, run by proprietors operating outside any regulatory framework, because the regulated, publicly funded alternative does not exist. The owner of Mawpiya Sevana now faces criminal charges. He may be guilty of negligence. But the system that created the conditions in which he operated — the IMF, the successive Colombo governments, the entire apparatus of neocolonial austerity — faces no charges at all.
The Question of Political Responsibility
The JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake bears direct political responsibility for the conditions that produced this tragedy. This is a government that came to power presenting itself — fraudulently — as a movement of the working people, invoking the language of “people’s power” and social transformation. Its actual record is one of ruthless implementation of IMF directives, attacks on welfare recipients, the deployment of the military against striking postal workers, the invocation of Essential Services legislation to suppress workers opposing privatization, and the systematic underfunding of health and education.
But responsibility does not end with the current government. Every government that has administered Sri Lankan capitalism since independence — the SLFP, the UNP, the SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP — has presided over the gradual destruction of whatever social provision existed and its replacement with the “free market”: privatization, commercialization, the withdrawal of the state from any domain of social reproduction that cannot generate profit for capital. The entire political establishment is complicit. The opposition parties — the SJB, the SLPP, the UNP — offer only “token criticisms” while accepting the IMF framework in its entirety.
The trade union bureaucracies, which claim to represent the interests of working people, are equally implicated. They have systematically suppressed independent workers’ action, called off strikes on the basis of empty promises, and functioned as transmission belts for the very governments and institutions that are dismantling social provision. Their loyalty is to the capitalist system, not to the workers they nominally represent.
The Only Answer: Socialist Transformation
The twelve people who died at Mawpiya Sevana on June 3, 2026, cannot be brought back. But the conditions that killed them can, and must, be ended — not through regulatory reform, not through stricter enforcement of existing laws, not through the arrest of a single proprietor, but through the socialist transformation of society.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the programme of the International Committee of thenFourth International (ICFI), insist on this with complete clarity: there is no solution to the crisis of elder care, disability support, public health, or any other domain of social reproduction within the framework of capitalism and IMF austerity. The resources required to build a genuine, universal, publicly funded system of care for those who cannot work — the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill — exist. They are being extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and transferred to international creditors in the form of 4.5 trillion rupees in annual debt repayments. They are being accumulated by the corporate elite whose tax rates the JVP/NPP government has left intact. They are being hoarded in the offshore accounts and investment portfolios of those who profit from the exploitation of Sri Lankan labour.
These resources must be expropriated — through the repudiation of the foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of production to serve human need rather than private profit. Public residential care, universal healthcare, free education, disability support, and social security for the elderly are not luxuries. They are social rights, achievable only through the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.
This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class — against the JVP/NPP government, against the IMF, against the entire capitalist political establishment, and against the trade union bureaucracies that serve as its labour lieutenants. It requires the building of rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, plantations, and communities, independent of all capitalist parties and institutions, coordinating a unified movement for a workers’ and peasants’ government committed to a socialist program.
The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are a concentrated expression of a social order in terminal crisis. The answer to them is not to manage that crisis more humanely — it is to end it, through the international socialist revolution that the Fourth International was founded to advance.
We, the SLLA demand: full public accountability for the deaths at Mawpiya Sevana; immediate public funding for a universal system of residential care for the elderly and disabled; the cancellation of IMF debt obligations and the reallocation of all debt-servicing funds to social provision; and the expropriation of the major banks, corporations, and private hospital networks under democratic workers’ control.
This political report for the week of March 22–28, 2026, is compiled by theSocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
I. Imperialism and War: The Iran Catastrophe Deepens
The dominant political development of the week was the further catastrophic escalation of the US-Israeli war against Iran, now entering its fourth week. On Saturday, 22 March, President Trump posted an ultimatum on his social media platform demanding that Iran “fully open, without threat, the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours,” threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power infrastructure, beginning with its largest power plant. The WSWS characterised this as a threat of genocidal violence without precedent in the post-World War II era, comparable only to the Truman administration’s nuclear ultimatum to Japan in 1945.[1]
The scale of the threat was not rhetorical. The Damavand Combined Cycle Power Plant — Iran’s largest, located 35 kilometres from Tehran’s centre — supplies electricity to approximately ten million people. Any strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran’s sole operating commercial reactor, risks catastrophic radioactive release. The IAEA Director General has warned that even severing the facility’s power supply lines could trigger a reactor meltdown. Iran responded by declaring all US and Israeli energy infrastructure across the region as legitimate targets, with Gulf states whose populations depend on electricity-powered desalination plants facing a potential humanitarian catastrophe of their own.
By week’s end, the trajectory had moved unambiguously toward ground invasion. Trump, in an interview with the Financial Times, declared openly: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon was preparing for “weeks of ground operations,” and approximately 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were reported to be readying for deployment. The 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force — a 3,000-strong rapid-deployment brigade — was identified by the New York Times as a candidate force for seizing Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth provided the clearest statement of the administration’s actual position: “We negotiate with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran.” This cynical formulation — coupling public talk of negotiations with accelerating military preparations — exposes the character of US imperialism: diplomacy as a screen for war, with mass violence as both means and end.
In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered a further expansion of the “security zone” in the south. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since the Israeli ground assault began on 2 March. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Three journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine. Human rights documentation through Day 25 of the Iran war recorded at least 6,530 killed, including 640 confirmed civilians.
The WSWS insists that these are not individual acts of militarist excess but the systematic expression of a capitalist imperialist order in deep crisis, using war to secure control of energy resources, chokepoints and global hegemony. The Newroz 2026 statement of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi (Turkey/SEP) — issued on 22 March — placed the war in this broader framework, linking imperialist aggression against Iran, Lebanon and Gaza to the political interests of regional bourgeoisies and the strategic requirements of US world dominance. The statement called for the building of rank-and-file committees across factories, ports, mines, hospitals and schools, the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East, the closure of NATO bases including those in Türkiye, and the formation of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.[2]
II. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Spain provided the week’s starkest illustration of pseudo-left capitulation to imperialism. The PSOE-Sumar coalition — which weeks earlier had revived the “No to war” slogan associated with the 2003 anti-Iraq War mass movement — announced a €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine following a meeting between Prime Minister Sánchez and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing Spain’s total commitment to approximately €4 billion. The frigate Cristóbal Colón was simultaneously dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. A token €5 billion social subsidy package — temporary tax cuts and a symbolic rent freeze attempt — was offered as political cover.[3]
The manoeuvre was transparent. The PSOE-Sumar government made this announcement against the backdrop of an unprecedented wave of industrial action across Spain: a nationwide doctors’ strike involving more than 175,000 workers, a three-day national railway strike, airport ground handling stoppages threatening to paralyse Easter travel, regional education strikes — with Catalonia’s culminating in more than 100,000 people on the streets of Barcelona — and general strikes in the Basque Country on 17 March. The working class in struggle was answered with rearmament and tokenism.
The WSWS is unequivocal: PSOE-Sumar’s anti-war posture was never anything other than a political calculation to contain domestic opposition. Its rapid re-integration into NATO war logistics — complementing Spain’s earlier facilitation of US strikes on Iran — exposes the class interests that animate such formations. Sumar, positioned as the “left” partner of the coalition, is identified as a direct instrument of imperialism, channelling dissent into manageable parliamentary terrain while voting through military budgets and suppressing class struggle.
Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) received analogous treatment. Its call for “global people’s power” against the Iran war — superficially radical in rhetoric — was subjected to sharp political critique as pseudo-left opportunism. The FSP’s initiative, the WSWS argued, reflects a nationalist parliamentary logic that accommodates bourgeois parties and dissipates class power through appeals that refuse to break with the capitalist state. The SEP insists that genuine anti-war struggle must be grounded in proletarian internationalism and independent socialist organisation.[4]
III. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights
The Trump administration continued its domestic militarisation offensive during the week. ICE deployments to airports in force — framed publicly as immigration enforcement — were characterised by the WSWS as a deliberate erosion of democratic norms and a rehearsal for the normalisation of federal paramilitary presence in civilian public life. The SEP connects this directly to the war drive: the same oligarchic project that prosecutes imperialist war abroad constructs the police state apparatus at home.
Australia’s Labor government provided a parallel illustration of bourgeois democracy’s hollowing out. Having lost a High Court ruling on offshore detention, the Albanese government circumvented the decision by transporting former asylum seekers to Nauru. The SEP described this as demonstrating the capitalist state’s readiness to flout its own legal constraints in order to uphold racist border regimes — which serve both capitalist labour market requirements and imperialist geopolitical alliances.
Cuba’s humanitarian crisis deepened further as a nationwide blackout struck the island amid US restrictions blocking incoming Russian fuel shipments. This is imperialist economic warfare targeting working people directly, using energy denial as a weapon of coercion.
The German city of Duisburg maintained its entry ban against Mohamedou Ould Slahi — the Mauritanian — a Guantánamo survivor and author, in a measure that exemplifies the integration of state repression, anti-democratic precedent and the ongoing brutalisation of those processed through imperialist detention machinery.
IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
Class struggle intensified across multiple fronts, with the trade union bureaucracy consistently functioning as the principal obstacle to the conversion of industrial militancy into political power.
In London, more than 300 Unite members at Stagecoach’s Bow garage struck for four days (19–22 March) against punishing rosters, inadequate rest breaks and dangerous fatigue — conditions forcing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Stagecoach mounted a systematic strikebreaking operation, importing replacement drivers from other cities and billeting them in hotels. Unite responded by sabotaging the action: officials called off a coordinated strike at Lea Interchange Bus Company — a Stagecoach subsidiary a few miles away — and declared a “win” based on a three-year deal pegging future increases to CPI rather than the previously demanded RPI, while leaving victimisation of union reps unaddressed. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union simultaneously suspended rolling stoppages by 1,800 London Underground drivers for closed-door talks.[5]
The WSWS analysis is direct: the union apparatus acts not as an instrument of working-class power but as a managerial layer whose function is to contain, fragment and ultimately defeat industrial resistance. The strategic response is the formation of rank-and-file committees that link garages and sectors, set non-negotiable safety demands, coordinate unified action, and raise the demand for democratic workers’ control of public transport.
In Australia, Tasmanian teachers conducted rolling statewide strikes over real-wage cuts and deteriorating conditions — the third round of action since September 2025 — while the AEU bureaucracy deliberately staggered the action by region (northwest on Tuesday, north on Wednesday, south on Thursday) to minimise its impact and prevent coordination with the simultaneous Victorian teachers’ strike. The tactic is well-established: token industrial action that creates the appearance of struggle while preserving the bureaucracy’s role as negotiating intermediary and absorber of militancy.[6]
Spain’s strike wave — the full breadth of which crossed healthcare, transport, rail, education and the public sector — demonstrated the objective depth of class anger. The Catalan education strike, supported by 90 percent of educators and culminating in 100,000 on the streets of Barcelona, is among the most significant educational mobilisations in recent Spanish history. That this emerged simultaneously with the PSOE-Sumar government’s announcement of a billion-euro military package for Ukraine underscores the central political contradiction: the same government which presides over real wage cuts and social austerity now channels resources to militarism while deploying union bureaucracies and its pseudo-left partners to contain the resistance.
V. Economic Warfare and Global Instability
The week’s economic developments were inseparable from the war drive. The Iran conflict’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of global oil passes — continued to generate financial turbulence across Asian markets. The imperialist war is simultaneously a political project and an act of structural economic destabilisation that strikes workers internationally through energy price inflation, supply chain disruption and currency volatility.
Cuba’s energy crisis — intensified by US restrictions on Russian fuel shipments — illustrates how imperialist economic coercion operates as a form of warfare targeting entire populations. The IMF, which had previously lauded Sri Lanka as an austerity “success story,” continued to provide ideological cover for the social devastation its programmes produce. These are not disconnected crises but expressions of the same capitalist order in its period of accelerating decay.
VI. The Revolutionary Tasks
The week’s events collectively underscore the axis of ICFI/SEP political analysis: war, dictatorship, austerity and bureaucratic betrayal are not separate phenomena but interlinked expressions of the capitalist system’s terminal crisis. Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum is not an aberration but the language of a ruling class prepared to obliterate the infrastructure of a nation of 90 million people to secure strategic and economic objectives. The pseudo-left formations — PSOE-Sumar, the FSP, the trade union bureaucracies — function consistently to contain and divert the social opposition that these conditions generate.
The correct working-class response — as the WSWS insists — is the building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities, international coordination through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, political independence from all bourgeois parties, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International to provide the revolutionary socialist leadership that the objective situation demands.
This political report for the week of March 8-14, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
I. Imperialism and War: The US-Israeli Assault on Iran Enters Its Third Week
The dominant political fact of the week was the accelerating and catastrophic escalation of the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran, now in its second and third week. The situation compels the sharpest analysis: this is not a limited military operation but the most dangerous eruption of imperialist aggression since the Second World War.
The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak]
The week opened with Pentagon statements and press reports confirming that the Trump administration is actively preparing a ground invasion of Iran. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on 13 March that the Navy would begin escorting commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, within direct range of Iranian anti-ship missiles — placing American forces on the threshold of open naval combat.[1] Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in language stripped of all diplomatic pretence, declared the Strait “will not be allowed to remain contested.” By 14 March, the WSWS confirmed preparations for what it characterised as a potential Gallipoli-scale ground campaign that would engulf the entire region and carry a real risk of nuclear escalation.[2]
The human toll already documented is staggering. A Pentagon investigation, corroborated by open-source analysis and reported by the WSWS on 12 March, confirmed that a US Tomahawk missile struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab on 28 February during the opening strike package, killing at least 150–175 schoolgirls aged 7 to 12.[3] Trump responded not with accountability but with a brazen lie, telling reporters the school was destroyed by Iran. By 11 March, the total death toll had surpassed 1,255, with over 12,000 wounded and nearly 20,000 civilian structures damaged, including 77 healthcare centres and 69 schools. Iran remains under near-total internet blackout. Israel simultaneously launched a renewed ground incursion into Lebanon, ordered the evacuation of over 100 villages and the entire Dahiyeh district of Beirut, and has killed more than 600 people and displaced 800,000. Gaza’s total siege was intensified on 1 March with the closure of all border crossings.[4]
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz within days of the war’s outbreak on 28 February. Shipping traffic has plummeted more than 90 percent. Zero LNG tankers passed through in the week under review. The four largest container shipping lines in the world — Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM — have suspended all operations. Oil surged above $120 a barrel, and the International Energy Agency described it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.[5] Global financial markets experienced wild swings throughout the week, with oil shocks cascading into bond markets and risk-asset volatility threatening systemic instability.
European imperialism joined the coalition. On 12 March, the WSWS documented how France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Greece moved to deploy warships toward the Middle East, with Macron announcing the Charles de Gaulle carrier would ultimately participate in “restoring freedom of navigation” through the Strait — in all but name, a declaration of war against Iran by the European powers.[6] On 12 March, German Foreign Minister Wadephul visited Israel, publicly endorsing US-Israeli war aims. The UN Security Council, on 13 March, passed Resolution 2817 condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes while entirely failing to condemn the US-Israeli bombardment; Russia and China abstained, allowing the resolution to pass, exposing the imperialist character of all these multilateral institutions.
The WSWS ICFI emergency webinar on 10 March convened thousands internationally to outline a socialist anti-war strategy. The SEP and IYSSE held an urgent public meeting in Colombo on 17 March to explain the geo-strategic roots of the assault and to build the foundations of an independent international working-class anti-war movement.[7] Workers and students across Sri Lanka were interviewed by SEP and IYSSE campaigners, showing deep opposition to the war and Sri Lanka’s own exposure as a conduit for US imperialism, documented by a leaked US State Department cable revealing that Colombo acted at US and Israeli insistence to detain Iranian sailors and restrict their return.[8]
II. Working-Class Opposition to the War and Bureaucratic Containment
The breadth of working-class opposition to the war was documented in a series of significant WSWS reports. London postal workers at Mount Pleasant Mail Centre and bus drivers at West London garages spoke candidly with SEP campaigners. Workers made the direct connection between imperialist war and capitalist exploitation: “We’re fighting this war for the banks,” said one bus driver; “They treat Iran as a petrol pump,” said another.[9] Workers identified the need for a general strike but raised the central obstacle: union bureaucracies and the threat of scabbing.
Thousands marched in central London on 8 March, but the WSWS exposed how the Palestine Coalition — Stop the War, the PSC, CND — directed this mass anti-war energy into futile appeals to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and parliamentary pressure, reproducing the same political dead end that allowed the Gaza genocide to proceed and now facilitates Britain’s participation in the Iran assault.[10] Workers’ testimony at the demonstration expressed far sharper sentiments — “it’s always money and power” — than the platform politics of reformist organisers.
The same crisis of leadership was exposed in the response of British trade union bureaucracies. Eighteen union general secretaries issued a joint statement condemning the war but called only for diplomacy and appeals to government, making no call for workplace action, no strike, no industrial disruption. The TUC similarly confined itself to platitudes. The WSWS identified this as a classical function of the union apparatus: containing and defusing opposition while channelling mass sentiment back toward the very institutions that enable war.
The UK Labour government of Keir Starmer moved simultaneously to ban the Al-Quds Day march in London — an authoritarian measure against mass anti-war protest — and to slash asylum rights and expand anti-migrant enforcement, fusing war policy with internal repression and xenophobia to discipline the working class.
The Jacobin magazine was criticised by the WSWS for publishing commentary that soft-pedalled opposition to the war and subordinated anti-war rhetoric to accommodation with US imperialist strategy — a clear example of the pseudo-left’s function in disarming the working class politically. Similarly, New Zealand pseudo-left forces organised a meeting titled “No War With Iran” that provided platforms to Labour, the Greens and union officials — figures who have actively supported NZ’s integration into US military alliances.[11]
In the United States, Detroit autoworkers interviewed by the WSWS gave expression to a deepening politicisation: workers compared Trump and Hegseth to Nazis and linked rising fuel prices and job insecurity directly to imperialist war. “The working class has to stop the war,” one worker stated, adding that if the Italians could hold a general strike, Americans could too.[12] The bipartisan character of imperialism was starkly confirmed: 21 House Democrats provided the decisive margin to pass a $1.2 trillion spending bill funding the military through September 2026, and leading Senate Democrats expressed the private conviction that Iran “ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily.” The US media simultaneously normalised strikes, massacres and war crimes.
III. Austerity, Corporate Offensive and Class Struggle
The week provided stark evidence that the capitalist offensive against the working class intensifies in direct proportion to the escalation of war.
Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume announced a further intensification of the company’s jobs massacre: 50,000 positions to be eliminated in Germany alone, broken down as 35,000 at the core VW brand, 7,500 at Audi, 1,900 at Porsche and 1,600 at the software subsidiary Cariad. The IG Metall works council chair Daniela Cavallo immediately signalled her support, even floating armaments production as a future for threatened plants.[13] The WSWS draws the necessary conclusion: this is a class offensive in which the trade union apparatus functions not as a defender of workers but as a co-manager of capitalist restructuring, with IG Metall representatives personally enriched for their services as supervisory board members.
In the US healthcare sector, the six-month strike by 750 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan, continued under intense management strikebreaking and pressure from the Teamsters bureaucracy to settle on employer terms. Simultaneously, approximately 10,000 Corewell Health nurses across Michigan voted on strike authorisation over essentially identical issues of unsafe staffing, wages and patient safety — a potential combined struggle of nearly 11,000 healthcare workers that the Teamsters apparatus has deliberately prevented from forming.[14]
BP Whiting refinery workers overwhelmingly rejected a six-year concessionary contract that would have cut wages by $8–10 per hour, eliminated roughly 100 jobs, expanded contractor use and permitted AI implementation without protections. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees called for national coordination to defeat the employer’s attempt to use Whiting as a pattern for the industry.[15] Colorado meatpacking workers announced a coordinated strike — the largest in the sector in 40 years — over pay, safety and contracts, demonstrating significant industrial leverage in critical supply chains.
At the University of California system, 40,000 academic workers had voted 93.3 percent for strike authorisation but were kept on the job by UAW Local 4811 officials even after contracts expired on 1 March. Around 600 picketers at Berkeley and 300 at UCLA held “last chance” pickets to no avail — the UAW bureaucracy prioritised institutional accommodation over enforcing the democratic mandate of its members. In San Diego, deep education budget shortfalls produced hundreds of classified layoffs; union leaders, having previously authorised strikes, called them off and enabled the cuts to proceed. The UK Labour government’s SEND “reform” — gutting support for children with special educational needs — was exposed as a classical austerity attack dressed in the language of “efficiency.”
Tesla’s Grünheide plant in Berlin saw IG Metall-backed works council candidates defeated in elections, signalling real erosion of bureaucratic control and a potential opening for genuine rank-and-file organisation.
IV. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights
The authoritarian dimensions of the ruling class’s response to social crisis deepened across multiple fronts during the week.
The Trump administration nominated far-right Senator Markwayne Mullin to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a move that won tacit bipartisan accommodation including from sections of the Teamsters leadership — a demonstration of how the union apparatus colludes in the expansion of the repressive state. Trump also moved to push federal voter suppression and anti-transgender legislation, using “culture war” pretexts to divide and weaken the working class.
ICE arrested dozens of Amazon Flex couriers — predominantly immigrant gig workers — in southeast Michigan, using enforcement actions to discipline a precarious and fragmented workforce. Letters from detained children at a Texas immigration facility described nine months of abuse and conditions amounting to torture. Canada’s Liberal government maintained the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US, forcing asylum seekers back into a country conducting mass deportations.
The Academy Awards, the BAFTA and Brit Award ceremonies all became sites of cultural censorship: broadcasters cut or bleeped artists’ anti-genocide statements, reflecting coordinated ruling-class pressure to enforce ideological conformity on imperialist war. The Toronto Film Critics Association faced internal collapse over the same censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. In Kazakhstan, authorities demolished a building historically associated with Leon Trotsky — an act of state erasure of revolutionary memory reflecting the reactionary character of post-Soviet nationalist regimes.
Istanbul’s elected Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu faced politically motivated trials in Turkey — instruments of the bourgeois state used to suppress political opposition while maintaining the fiction of democratic legitimacy.
V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and Pseudo-Leftism
The week provided abundant evidence of the political bankruptcy of all forms of reformism and pseudo-left politics in the face of imperialist war and capitalist crisis.
In Germany, the SPD suffered a major collapse in the Baden-Württemberg state elections — the logical outcome of years of administering austerity and rearmament while posturing as a workers’ party. This is not an isolated setback but a symptom of the organic crisis of social democracy across the capitalist world. The parallel trajectory of the UK Labour Party — waging imperialist war, banning protests, cutting migrant rights and attacking SEND provision — confirms that these parties are instruments of capitalist rule, not vehicles for reform.
Argentina’s President Milei delivered a reactionary congressional address, with pseudo-left forces offering complicity or silence — exposing once again how middle-class “left” formations capitulate before reaction when it is in power. In New Zealand, the Labour Party and Greens issued perfunctory criticisms of the Iran war while continuing every policy that integrates New Zealand into US strategic structures. Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit militarised Latin America under US leadership, with comprador regimes across the hemisphere lining up behind Washington.
The six-year anniversary of COVID-19 was marked by the WSWS with a sober reckoning: the pandemic’s enormous ongoing death toll and the media’s near-total silence reflect the ruling class’s deliberate abandonment of public health as a social responsibility — the same logic now governing the conduct of a war that has killed over a thousand civilians and destroyed hospitals, schools and healthcare infrastructure in Iran.
Summing-up
The week ending 14 March 2026 crystallises the historical crisis of the capitalist system with extraordinary clarity. The US-Israeli war on Iran is not an aberration but the concentrated expression of imperialist rivalry, capitalist decline and the drive of the ruling class toward authoritarian rule at home and military barbarism abroad. The massive scale of opposition — in London and Frankfurt, among US autoworkers and nurses, among students in Australia and Sri Lanka — demonstrates the objective social force that exists to stop the war. What is missing is not mass sentiment but revolutionary political leadership. The building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces, independent of union bureaucracies, and the construction of sections of the ICFI as the political leadership of the international working class is not an abstract prescription — it is the urgent requirement of this historical moment.
