Oligarchy

This political report for the week of March 1-7, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).

I. Imperialism and War: The US-Israeli War of Extermination Against Iran

The defining political reality of the week ending 7 March 2026 is the continuation and intensification of the criminal US-Israeli war of annihilation against Iran, which entered its second week with a mounting toll of devastation and an explicit escalation of imperialist objectives.

On 7 March, President Donald Trump declared publicly that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”—the most extreme formulation yet of American war aims, signalling the intention to wage permanent war until Iranian society is physically destroyed.[1] Trump spelled out the content of this demand in genocidal terms: surrender means either that Iran announces it, “or when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.” The White House simultaneously raised the prospect of direct deployment of US ground troops inside Iran. These are not the statements of a government seeking a diplomatic settlement. They are the declarations of an imperialist power pursuing regime change and the neo-colonial subjugation of a nation of 90 million people.

By week’s end, more than 1,200 Iranians had been killed, including 200 children, and over 12,000 wounded. Nearly 30 clinical facilities had been damaged and 10 forced to close. Israeli strikes had reopened a major offensive in Lebanon, with blanket evacuation orders issued for the Dahiyeh district of Beirut and Israeli ground forces crossing into southern Lebanon. The WSWS/SEP statement “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” framed the offensive as an expression of capitalist imperialist rivalry—chiefly the drive by US imperialism to reassert global hegemony against its rivals, above all China, and to seize control of the world’s principal oil-exporting region.[2] The assault was launched while US-Iranian negotiators were still meeting in Geneva—a deliberate deception exposing the pretence of diplomacy as a cover for aggression.

The most egregious single crime of the week was the torpedoing of the unarmed Iranian naval frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on 4 March—a war crime committed without warning in international waters, thousands of miles from any combat theatre.[3] The vessel had participated in India’s International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational MILAN 2026 exercises at Visakhapatnam, invited alongside 73 other nations including the United States. The exercise rules prohibited munitions. The IRIS Dena was unarmed and homeward bound when a US submarine attacked it without warning, sending more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The crime was then celebrated at a Pentagon press briefing by the Secretary of War himself. Confirmation that Australian naval personnel were aboard the submarine directly implicated the Albanese Labor government in the commission of a war crime.[4]

The complicity of imperialist governments was total. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared support for the assault, stating that Israel was doing “the dirty work… for all of us.” The G7 issued a statement casting Iran as the aggressor and greenlighting further escalation. France’s Emmanuel Macron deployed the carrier Charles de Gaulle and other assets to the eastern Mediterranean without a pretence of parliamentary debate. Britain’s Keir Starmer was exposed by leaked National Security Council documents as having been informed of the initial strikes more than two weeks in advance and as having worked with Washington to craft legal cover for British participation. Spain initially postured with anti-war rhetoric under Prime Minister Sánchez, then rapidly dispatched the frigate Cristóbal Colón to the eastern Mediterranean after Trump threatened to cut off US-Spanish trade—a graphic illustration of how bourgeois anti-war posturing evaporates the moment imperialist pressure is applied. Japan, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia similarly endorsed US and Israeli war aims. Washington announced that the US Navy would begin escorting commercial tankers through the Strait of Hormuz—a dramatic escalation placing American warships directly off the Iranian coast—while the US announced further medium-range missile deployments to the Philippines as part of the broader strategic encirclement of China.

The WSWS warned that oil price surges and shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz would deepen the global economic crisis, imposing severe costs through inflation, job losses, and intensified austerity. Asian markets took major losses, with semiconductor and export sectors particularly hard hit.

II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression

The war abroad proceeded in lockstep with an intensification of repression at home and across the capitalist world.

In the United States, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exposed the bipartisan character of anti-immigrant repression: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defended ICE killings and refused to apologise, while Democratic senators simultaneously resisted calls for the abolition of ICE and CBP. The Trump administration seized immigrant student Ellie Aghayeva from Columbia University, illustrating the militarisation of campuses. A Nashville journalist was detained by ICE while documenting immigration raids—a direct assault on press freedom and the suppression of coverage of state violence. Republicans exploited a shooting in Austin to inflame anti-Muslim hysteria and push for expanded DHS funding. ICE detention conditions continued to claim lives, with the death of immigrant detainee Nenko Gantchev in a Michigan facility exposing the Democratic Party’s “oversight” as a façade sustaining rather than restraining a murderous apparatus. Florida carried out the execution of Billy Leon Kearse, part of a resumed pattern of state executions targeting the poor and racialised. Charges against Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan were dismissed, but the politicised “China spy” witch hunt on campuses intensified—serving as a tool of geopolitical scaremongering.

In Germany, the Cologne Administrative Court handed a legal victory to the far-right Alternative for Germany, demonstrating that bourgeois legalism shields rather than curtails fascist organisation. Germany simultaneously announced plans for the largest military buildup on the European continent since World War II and advanced sweeping new restrictions on migrants and refugees. France’s state moved to designate Mélenchon’s LFI as “extreme left”—deploying legal categories to justify the repression of political opposition. Germany’s government also attempted to police political expression at the Berlinale film festival, censoring critical voices while promoting its own geopolitical line.

In Kenya, President Ruto’s government arrested a popular TikToker for satirical content and detained left activists including Communist Party leader Booker Omole. A Birmingham Labour council secured a High Court injunction to prevent solidarity with striking bin workers—proof that Labour administrations function as instruments of capitalist class power regardless of their electoral base.

III. Austerity, the Global Economy, and Class Attacks

The Iran war triggered immediate and severe global economic shocks whose costs landed on the working class. Oil prices surged sharply. Asian markets fell heavily, with semiconductor sectors and export industries facing supply chain disruptions. These consequences prefigure a deepening global economic crisis to be paid for through inflation, rising fuel costs, and intensified austerity.

In Philadelphia, a $2.8 billion “Master Plan” proposed shuttering 18 schools—the commodification of public education in service of capital. In Australia, the South Australian election exposed billions being funnelled into AUKUS war spending while public education and housing budgets collapsed. The housing crisis deepened as government pledges proved hollow and market-led demolitions displaced working-class communities.

Tech industry executives boasted about AI-driven mass layoffs, celebrating workforce reductions as shareholder value creation—automation deployed to eliminate jobs and intensify exploitation. The United Steelworkers’ refinery contract was exposed as locking in uninterrupted fuel flows benefiting oil company profits and, indirectly, the war itself. Canada Post’s proposed settlement, endorsed by union leadership, sacrificed job security to protect corporate interests. Severe drought in the US Southwest deepened conflicts over water rights, with environmental crisis produced by the capitalist profit drive being weaponised to discipline labour.

The WSWS placed these developments in the framework of capitalist crisis: war and austerity as twin fronts of the same ruling-class offensive, financed by cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, and every social programme workers depend on for survival.

IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal

The week documented significant episodes of working-class resistance alongside the systematic effort of union bureaucracies to contain and strangle that resistance.

In Lorain County, Ohio, 140 Job and Family Services workers entered their third week of strike action over wages, staffing, and healthcare.[5] Workers described being paid poverty wages so low that some qualified for the very social benefits they administered to clients. Starting pay was as low as $15 an hour for caseworkers handling Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare assistance. The UAW bureaucracy was exposed as isolating the strike and refusing to call for unified action with JFS workers across Ohio. Contract faculty at New York University announced an official strike date over wages, job security, and academic precarity. Entertainment industry workers continued their walkout against studios over pay, AI-driven job displacement, and conditions.

In Germany, the train drivers’ union leadership agreed to a contract imposing real wage cuts—a textbook act of bureaucratic betrayal, with the union apparatus functioning as a stabilising mechanism for capital against its own members. IG Metall leadership at Bosch moved to suppress internal opposition from workers challenging concessions. The Hanover trial of Deutsche Bahn over the death of rail apprentice Simon Hedemann put corporate cost-cutting on record as directly responsible for a young worker’s life.

Victorian early childhood educators in Australia struck for the second time in a campaign for pay parity and adequate staffing. Turkish miners broke through gendarmerie barricades and seized control of a mine in a militant wildcat action—demonstrating the latent social power of the working class when it acts independently of bureaucratic constraint. Workers’ struggle roundups across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific documented recurring disputes over wages, conditions, and privatisation at every point on the globe.

The US trade union bureaucracy’s silence over the Iran war was the subject of specific WSWS analysis. The AFL-CIO and the great majority of union federations issued no statements against the assault, leaving the working-class majority politically unorganised at the very moment when its industrial power—in ports, logistics, transport, and production—could be decisive in disrupting the war machine. In Quebec, trade union federations renewed their alliance with the Parti Québécois even as the PQ embraced anti-immigrant, pro-business, and far-right positions. The WSWS condemned this as a fundamental betrayal of class independence—channelling working-class anger into bourgeois nationalism that defends capitalist interests and legitimises anti-immigrant scapegoating. Ontario students protested cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, linking educational austerity to the broader class offensive.

V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and the Pseudo-Left

The week provided abundant and unambiguous evidence of the political bankruptcy of every reformist and pseudo-left formation.

Germany’s Left Party chairman Jan van Aken celebrated the assassination of Iranian leaders—“May Khamenei rot in hell”—while nominally condemning the war as criminal and illegal. The WSWS exposed this as the characteristic method of pseudo-left politics: verbal criticism combined with legitimisation of imperialism’s aims and outcomes. Spain’s PSOE-Sumar government demonstrated in miniature how the entire social-democratic tradition operates: Sánchez’s “No to war” posture collapsed the moment Washington applied economic pressure, exposing it as a political calculation to contain domestic opposition rather than a genuine break with NATO.

Venezuela’s Chavista leadership reached a diplomatic normalisation with the United States on terms handing Wall Street access to Venezuelan oil, gold, and critical minerals—reproducing dependency under the banner of “stability.” Australia’s Albanese Labor government endorsed the assault within three hours of Trump’s announcement, was directly implicated in the sinking of the IRIS Dena through AUKUS personnel, and used the ASEAN Special Summit in Melbourne to deepen Australia’s integration into US war planning against China. Congress voted down resolutions to restrict war powers, confirming that the US legislative apparatus—across both parties—has become an instrument of imperialist policy. Legalistic remedies within the framework of the bourgeois state cannot stop imperialist war. Baden-Württemberg’s state election campaign offered workers nothing but competing concessions to big business, confirming that electoral competition between bourgeois parties produces only distributional jockeying for capital’s benefit.

VI. The Revolutionary Tasks of the Working Class

The week ending 7 March 2026 demonstrates with stark clarity the inseparability of imperialist war, domestic austerity, state repression, and the betrayal of the working class by union bureaucracies and pseudo-left formations. Every capitalist government—“Labour,” “Socialist,” “social-democratic,” or conservative—is serving the same ruling-class interests: expanding militarism, imposing austerity, repressing dissent.

American workers captured the class consciousness at the heart of the anti-war sentiment: “We have more in common with the Iranian people than we do with billionaires.” Detroit autoworkers declared, “We shouldn’t be bombing people, period.” This sentiment must be developed into a politically conscious, internationally organised movement that breaks decisively from the trade union bureaucracies, Labour and social-democratic parties, and pseudo-left formations that have lined up behind imperialist war.

The WSWS and the ICFI call on workers and youth to build rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus, forge international coordination and join the Socialist Equality Parties to fight for the socialist and revolutionary strategy alone capable of stopping the war and overthrowing the capitalist system that produces it.

Footnotes

[1] “Trump demands unconditional surrender from Iran as war enters second week,” WSWS, 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/uxtr-m07.html 

[2] “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” WSWS / SEP National Committee, 2 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/02/ulqw-m02.html 

[3] “Mass murder in the Indian Ocean: The torpedoing of the IRIS Dena,” WSWS, 6 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/06/poyw-m06.html 

[4] “Australian naval personnel involved in US sinking of Iranian ship: Oppose the pro-imperialist Labor government and war against Iran!” WSWS / Socialist Equality Party (Australia), 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/bckg-m07.html 

[5] “Lorain County, Ohio family service workers strike enters third week: ‘We are fighting everyone’,” WSWS, 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/mxws-m07.html