This Perspective was published in the World Socialist Website Site on 06 October 2025.
Today marks two years since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. Before the eyes of the entire world, the Israeli government—armed, financed and defended by every imperialist power—has carried out a campaign of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation. At least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 20,000 children, and the entire population has been repeatedly displaced.
Displaced Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza carry their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, after the Israeli army issued evacuation orders from Gaza City. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi]
In order to launch this long planned genocide, Israel used as its pretext the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, in which a few thousand fighters with small arms, possessing no armored vehicles or aircraft, breached the Israeli border without resistance. To claim that Israel, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence networks in the world, was taken completely by surprise by a few thousand Hamas fighters is a despicable fiction.
As the events of the past two years have shown—in Israel’s assassinations of foreign leaders, military officers and scientists—Israeli intelligence has penetrated every state and movement in the region. Indeed, within months of the October 7 attacks, newspaper accounts revealed that Israel possessed the entire Hamas battle plan but orchestrated a deliberate stand-down of its troops stationed on the border.
The genocide that followed was the premeditated outcome of 75 years of brutal oppression, the implementation of the “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem.” It has exposed before the entire world the bankrupt and reactionary character of Zionism. The Israeli state has shown itself to be a murderous instrument of imperialism.
While carried out by Israel, the genocide has been a joint operation of world imperialism. Every imperialist government, from Washington to London, Paris and Berlin, together with the entire media, justified the Israeli assault on Gaza. A hideous double standard was adopted, in which any act of mass murder by Israel, which illegally occupies Gaza, was justified, while any effort at resistance by the Palestinians was demonized as “terrorism.”
Opposition to the Israeli state was slandered as “antisemitism,” in an exercise that the WSWS referred to as “semantic inversion,” in which “a word is utilized in a manner and within a context that is the exact opposite of its real and long-accepted meaning.” This became the framework for a brutal and escalating assault on democratic rights, in which opposition to genocide has been criminalized. The attempt to equate opposition to the genocide with hatred of the Jews, is, in any case, negated by the prominent role played by Jewish people around the world in mass demonstrations.
The United States has been Israel’s key weapons supplier, funneling unlimited amounts of deadly military gear to fuel the slaughter. But Germany, France, Britain and others have all contributed their share to the bloodbath. Moreover, they have all purchased billions in Israeli government bonds to help finance the murderous military machine they also armed.
Underscoring the fact that these crimes have been facilitated by the major North American and European powers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was allowed to defend his actions from the podium of the United Nations last month, even though an arrest warrant against him for war crimes is outstanding.
The imperialists back the genocide as a central component of their drive to secure control over the oil-rich Middle East, part of a global eruption of imperialist war targeting Russia and China. Their support for the genocide has demonstrated that they are ready to deploy any and all means to secure for themselves access to markets, raw materials, labour and geostrategic influence.
This imperialist plunder has culminated in Trump’s “peace” plan, which proposes robbing Palestinians of all their rights by creating a neo-colonial protectorate under the control of America’s would-be Führer and his bagman, the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair. If Hamas follows Trump’s demand to accept this arrangement, the Palestinians will be expelled to make way for a US-controlled trade corridor through the Middle East. If they refuse, Israel will get the green light to slaughter the remaining Palestinians en masse.
A particularly foul role in this process has been played by the bourgeois nationalist regimes of the Middle East. The entire history of the 20th century has shown the incapacity of any form of nationalism to secure the democratic and social rights of the working class. The despicable role of these governments culminated in their embrace of the “peace” plan promoted by Trump, which completely repudiates the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
The genocide in Gaza has provoked mass revulsion and opposition throughout the world. Over the past two years, tens of millions have participated in demonstrations spanning every continent, from Europe and the Americas to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Trump’s plan to turn the Middle East into a US fiefdom on the bones of the Palestinians, and Israel’s violent seizure of the Sumud aid flotilla, have ignited a new and broader wave of protest.
In recent days, millions have filled the streets of Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Colombia and Argentina. In Italy, action initiated by dockworkers, who refused to load weapons for Israel, triggered a one-day general strike of more than 2 million workers and a million-strong march in Rome. Though still limited by the trade union bureaucracies and appeals to the Meloni government, these actions point to the immense potential power of the international working class to halt the genocide.
One day of coordinated strike action has shaken Trump’s closest European ally. An organized, global industrial and political movement of the working class could stop the imperialist war machine in its tracks. Nothing less than a mass, international movement of workers can end the genocide and block the extension of American imperialism’s drive for domination—from Gaza to a wider war aimed at Iran, Russia and ultimately China.
The development of opposition to the genocide must be guided by an understanding of the political lessons of the past two years. The central lesson is the total bankruptcy of all appeals to governments of the imperialist powers. They are not the instruments for halting genocide but its perpetrators and enablers.
The perspective of a two-state solution has failed. Only the unification of all the peoples of the Middle East can lead to a viable future. The Israeli state has proven to be a historical monstrosity, resulting in demoralization and degradation. The Israeli working class must repudiate the poisonous ideology and politics of Zionism, reject the reactionary dystopia of the “Jewish state” and strive for the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers in the struggle for the United Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
In a lecture delivered on October 24, 2023, three weeks after the beginning of the genocide, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North explained:
In the final analysis, the liberation of the Palestinian people can be achieved only through a unified struggle of the working class, Arab and Jewish, against the Zionist regime, as well as the treacherous Arab and Iranian capitalist regimes, and their replacement with a union of socialist republics throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the entire world.
This is a gigantic task. But it is the only perspective that is based on a correct appraisal of the present stage of world history, the contradictions and crisis of world capitalism and the dynamic of the international class struggle. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are tragic demonstrations of the catastrophic role and consequences of national programs in a historical epoch whose essential and defining characteristics are the primacy of world economy, the globally integrated character of the productive forces of capitalism, and, therefore, the necessity to base the struggle of the working class on an international strategy.
Two years later, there are growing signs of a global resurgence of working class struggle. The Trump administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship is bringing it into head-on conflict with the working class in the United States, despite all efforts by the Democrats to sow complacency and passivity. President Macron in France is unable to form a stable government, amid mass opposition to his demands for austerity to pay for remilitarisation. Starmer in the UK and Merz in Germany have no popular support whatsoever.
Internationally, there has been an explosion of popular anti-government struggles, led by “Generation Z”—in Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Madagascar.
The development of this opposition along revolutionary lines requires that workers break free from the control of the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with their pseudo-left defenders, who work to contain and dissipate opposition. This requires building new, democratic organizations of class struggle—rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood—to coordinate and lead a unified international offensive of the working class.
Workers, students, youth and all opponents of Zionism and imperialism must fight for:
An immediate halt to all weapons shipments to Israel;
A comprehensive boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel;
The prosecution of all US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes;
An end to state repression of anti-genocide protesters and the repeal of all anti-demonstration laws;
Immediate, unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza by all available routes.
These demands must spearhead the broader movement already developing in the working class internationally. The same governments that funnel weapons of death to Israel are erecting dictatorial forms of rule at home to suppress opposition to oligarchic rule, mass impoverishment and the drive to world war.
The genocide in Gaza has laid bare the historical dead end of the capitalist system itself. The “normalization” of genocide is the product of a system that has exhausted any progressive role. It is accompanied by the normalization of fascism, the normalization of military-police dictatorship, the normalization of world war and oligarchic rule.
The perspective that must guide the working class is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The democratic and social aspirations of the oppressed can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, for the conquest of power.
The critical task is the building of a new revolutionary leadership to guide this struggle. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, fight to unite workers and youth across all borders in a single movement against capitalism, for the establishment of workers’ governments and the socialist reorganization of the world economy to meet human need, not private profit.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Website on 08 October 2025.
After hitting record highs throughout this year, the price of gold continues to surge and has now passed $4,000 an ounce, taking its rise this year to more than 50 percent after a 12 percent increase for September alone.
Gold bars are shown stacked in a vault at the United States Mint on July 22, 2014 in West Point, New York [AP Photo/Mike Groll]
The gold price surge is a sign of growing uncertainty and doubts over the stability of the international monetary system based on the US dollar as the global currency. As a Wall Street Journal article noted, the gold price “has surged this year more than it did during some of America’s biggest crises” including the 2007–2009 recession and the onset of the pandemic.
Back in June, as the gold surge was accelerating and it had become the second-largest reserve asset held by central banks after the dollar, surpassing the euro, an article in the Financial Times (FT) described it as the “world’s refuge from uncertainty” and pointed to the broader implications of its rise.
Bullion, it said, had “made a roaring comeback, not just among speculators and so-called gold bugs who mistrust paper currencies, but even among the most conservative investors in the world” and that “in a febrile political era, when many of the core assumptions about the global economy are being questioned, gold has once more become an anchor.”
In the four months since these lines were written all the processes it identified have intensified.
The key “core assumption,” not only being questioned but increasingly eroded, is the capacity of the US state and its financial institutions to provide a stable foundation for the international monetary order based on the US dollar as a fiat currency after US president Nixon removed its gold backing in August 1971.
While this process has accelerated under the second Trump presidency it was already well underway before he arrived on the scene.
It has been fueled by the ongoing crises in the US financial system, expressed most sharply in the financial crisis of 2008 and the freezing of the US Treasury market in March 2020 when, for a number of days, no buyers could be found for US government debt, supposedly the safest financial asset in the world.
A central factor in the latest gold surge has been the escalation of US government debt. It now stands at more than $37 trillion. For more than a decade the rise in debt—used to finance wars, tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations as well as government bailouts—was able to proceed almost unnoticed because of the ultra-low interest rates maintained by the Fed.
But after the rate rises started in 2022, the interest bill has become an increasing drain on government finances, such that it has risen to almost $1 trillion annually and is set to become the biggest item in the US budget, surpassing even military outlays.
This has meant that the global monetary system is based on the currency of the most indebted country in the world, whose credit rating has been downgraded by all the three major rating agencies and which needs to borrow money just to pay the interest bill on past debts.
The policies of the Trump administration are working to exacerbate these underlying tensions within the global financial system.
A major blow came with the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” of April 2, through which the Trump regime upended what had remained of the post-war international trading order. The “liberation day” measures led to a spike in Treasury yields combined with a fall in the value of the dollar—a rare occurrence.
Since then, in the trade “deal” with Japan and the proposals of the Trump regime for South Korea, the tariffs have been revealed as the mechanism for standover demands by the US for the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the US under the direct control of the administration.
As part of his drive to establish a personalist dictatorship, combined with the moves to establish martial law in major US cities, Trump has moved to try to take direct control of the Fed. This has sparked concerns that its political independence will be effectively ended, sparking concerns in international markets about financial stability leading to an increasing turn to gold as a safe haven.
And the latest surge has been spurred on by the US government shutdown initiated by Trump as part of a drive to sack hundreds of thousands of government employees and axe whole departments.
As Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury official and now the US chair of the think-tank OMFIF told the FT back in June: “Gold’s rise in part reflects the administration’s undermining of the properties underpinning dollar dominance.”
Sobel said that attacking institutions such as the Fed and the courts while “threatening to add massively to debt and deficits through the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ and being an unreliable partner to our allies and partners” had all undercut the dollar’s status.
Others have gone further in their analysis, describing the shift into gold as a move “back to the future.” As the latest surge was getting underway in the middle of the year, Randy Smallwood, chief executive of a precious metals company, told the FT: “It wouldn’t surprise me if, in 20 years, when you take an economics course, there will be a discussion about the 60-year experiment from 1970 to 2030 on fiat currencies, and how it failed.”
In an earlier period, such comments might have been dismissed simply as the outlook of “gold bugs.” Not so today.
Even before the latest actions by Trump, central banks had begun to move. In each of the past three years, they have bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold, hitting record levels. The bulk of the purchases have been by countries not closely aligned with the US such as China, India, and Turkey. But the rise of gold to be the second-largest reserve asset is an indication that other central banks are heading in the same direction.
The shift is extending to the private sector with the move by investors into gold-backed exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The World Gold Council has reported that $13.6 billion flowed into these funds in September, bringing the total so far this year to $60 billion—a record.
The significance of this shift is reflected in an analysis by Morgan Stanley. The traditional benchmark for investor allocations is 60 percent of funds in equities with 40 percent in bonds. But it suggested that the split should be 60/20/20. That is, gold should have an equal weight with bonds.
Significantly, such is the uncertainty around the financial position and indebtedness of all the major economies—the debt-induced turmoil in France is a case in point—that the move out of the dollar is being accompanied by growing uncertainty about other currencies. As one analyst at a metals trading firm told the FT: “People are looking to short the dollar, but they are not quite sure what currency to purchase—that uncertainty leads you straight to gold.”
And while the gold issue may appear to be simply a market phenomenon—investors trying to capitalize on the surge, others seeking a hedge in times of uncertainty, on top of the concerns of central banks, it goes deeper than that.
The entire fiat monetary system that has prevailed for the past 50 years and more—the foundation for the functioning of the global capitalist order—is starting to unravel, and that will have major economic, financial and political consequences.
This statement was published originally in the World Socialist Web Site on the 19 September 2025.
In the week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration has escalated its conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship.
The policy of the Trump regime was spelled out clearly by fascist strategist Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s closest political allies. “If we are going to go to war,” he declared, “let’s go to war.” The Trump administration is waging a war—against the population, against democratic rights, against Constitutional government.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
This war is being conducted within the framework of the public deification of Kirk. Over the past week, the White House has spearheaded a campaign to ban all criticism of the Trump administration. Workers, including teachers, airline staff and others, have been fired for critical social media posts about Kirk.
On Wednesday, ABC/Disney announced that it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!, after Kimmel made mild, accurate remarks on Monday about the political exploitation of Kirk’s killing. The move followed an explicit directive from the White House and its enforcers. FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Chair Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Nexstar and Disney, desperate to protect multibillion-dollar mergers and profits, rushed to comply.
In interviews Thursday, Carr declared that Kimmel’s suspension was not the “last shoe to drop,” calling for a “massive shift that’s taking place in the media ecosystem.” On the same day, Trump himself declared that regulators should revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air “negative coverage” of him.
The critical question now is: What must be done to stop this drive to dictatorship? In answering this question, it is necessary to identify the political context of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the Constitution, the class and economic interests that underlie the actions of the government, the social force that has the power to defend democratic rights, and the political strategy and program upon which the fight against Trump must be based.
First, it is necessary to put aside all self-deluding hopes that what is unfolding is anything less than a drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, based on the military, police, paramilitary forces and fascist gangs. The essential purpose of the glorification of Charlie Kirk has been to provide a martyr symbol to galvanize the most reactionary forces in the country.
As the World Socialist Web Site has warned, the Hitler admirers in Trump’s inner circle, such as Vice President JD Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, are working off the playbook written by the Nazis. Kirk is the Trump regime’s “Horst Wessel” (the name of a murdered storm trooper) and the assassination is their equivalent to the infamous Reichstag Fire, the burning of the German parliament building, which was seized upon by Hitler to claim absolute power in March 1933.
The cancellation of the Jimmy Kimmel show is yet another action based on the tactics of the Nazi regime. Any form of speech, including jokes, that was deemed insulting to the honor and dignity of Hitler was treated as a criminal offense that merited drastic punishment. The “Heil Hitler” salute became an obligatory form of greeting, even between friends.
Second, Trump is not acting on his own. However grotesque his individual qualities, he represents the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy. Here again, the parallels to Nazi Germany are chilling. It is a historical fact that Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the resources provided to the Nazi movement by leading German capitalists. Once in office, Hitler’s brutal regime served the interests of German banks and corporations, and they supported his dictatorship.
If anything, the alliance of Trump and today’s financial-corporate oligarchy is even more intense than that which prevailed in Nazi Germany. It can be described, without exaggeration, as a love affair. In the midst of Trump’s assault on democratic rights, he was feted last week at a White House dinner, where a gang of mega-millionaires and billionaires sang his praises. An even more obscene spectacle was staged this week at Windsor Castle in Britain. Seated next to King Charles III, Trump was feted at a state banquet by a retinue of oligarchs, including Tim Cook of Apple, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ruth Porat of Alphabet, financiers Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America.
Third, underlying the public reverence for Trump are cold-blooded economic and political calculations. The staggering concentration of wealth in an infinitesimal segment of the population is not compatible with democratic forms of rule. The rich are convinced that the defense of their wealth and their unrestricted exploitation of the working class is incompatible with democracy. Dictatorship is their preferred form of political rule.
However, the oligarchy’s reasons for supporting the overthrow of whatever remains of American democracy extend beyond their uncontainable lust for ever greater heaps of money and personal wealth. The American ruling class is acutely conscious of and terrified by the existential crisis of the capitalist system. It is aware that the national debt—now approaching $40 trillion—is unsustainable.
The oligarchs are convinced that a massive assault on the living standards and even the lives of the working class is necessary. All the social reforms extending back to the Progressive era of the first two decades of the 20th century, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the Great Society of the 1960s must be ended. Critical programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are to be all but eliminated. The war on medicine—to the point of ending vaccinations against COVID, measles, mumps, polio, whooping cough, and other deadly illnesses—is aimed at substantially raising infant and child mortality and lowering life expectancy.
The wiping out of regulations that provided any sort of protection against injury and death in factories, mines, depots, shipyards, and other workplaces is a major objective.
Yet another factor in the political calculations of the capitalist elites is the geo-political crisis confronting American imperialism. The protracted deterioration in the global economic and strategic position of the United States has reached critical dimensions. The rise of China and the development of an alliance of states challenging American hegemony cannot be stopped except through war. The militarization of the United States demands ever greater expenditures, which, in turn, intensifies the pressure to slash social expenditures and wages. Moreover, the preparation and launching of wars requires the violent suppression of domestic political opposition.
These are the objective factors that underlie the collapse of American democracy. Trump’s policies are those of the ruling class. This is not to ignore the specific pathological features of his personality and that of his MAGA cabal that impart to this regime its particularly degenerate character. But even if the workings of actuarial statistics were to suddenly remove Trump from the scene, it would not halt the drive to dictatorship. The war on democracy and the working class would continue.
This objective cause of the breakdown of democracy is verified by the fact that parallel processes are being manifested in all major capitalist countries. Throughout Europe neo-fascist parties are gaining strength. The drive toward dictatorship is a global phenomenon.
Fourth, the correct identification of the source of Trump’s war against the working class leads to critical political conclusions. The starting point of any serious struggle against dictatorship is a break with the Democratic Party. To rely on the Democratic Party to oppose Trump is to guarantee defeat.
The Democrats are, like the Republicans, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the corporate-financial oligarchy. What they fear above all is not the rise of fascism but the eruption of a mass movement from below that threatens the foundations of capitalist rule. This accounts for the Democratic Party’s cowardly capitulation to the fascist glorification of Kirk and its feckless response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and all the previous dictatorial decrees issued by Trump.
The prostration of the Democratic Party was exposed when the US Senate unanimously approved a resolution marking October 14, Kirk’s birthday, as a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.” Not one Democrat, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, had the courage to object. It would have been sufficient, and politically correct, to oppose the assassination on principled grounds, i.e., that the killing of one or another despicable figure serves absolutely no progressive interest, that it sows confusion among workers and youth and that it plays into the hands of the reactionaries.
But to sanction the elevation of Kirk—a man whose record of racism, antisemitism, opposition to civil rights, and promotion of authoritarian violence is well documented—as a national hero is obscene. Yet Sanders and the Democrats joined in this sanctification.
The next day, 90 Democrats, including the party’s leadership, voted with Republicans in the House to pass a resolution “honoring the life and legacy of Charles Kirk,” praising the fascist provocateur as a martyr for “freedom” and “civil discourse,” and a “fierce defender” of “life, liberty, limited government, and individual responsibility.”
Fifth, the development of the struggle to defeat Trump must be based on the mobilization of the multimillioned working class—the social force that has the power, if mobilized on the basis of a correct political strategy, to defeat Trump and drive him from office.
The key elements of this strategy are:
1) The complete political and organizational independence of the working class from the Democratic Party and its collaborators and apologists, i.e., the DSA, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the myriad middle class organizations and individuals who believe that shouting obscenities on various social media platforms will stop Trump. These are the methods of frustrated liberals who hope that their hysterical rhetoric will move the Democratic Party to fight Trump.
2) The building of a new form of organization that can unify the working class and mobilize its vast industrial and economic power against the Trump regime. This new form of organization proposed by the Socialist Equality Party consists of rank-and-file committees. They must be established in every factory, workplace, school and neighborhood to organize resistance to Trump’s dictatorship. These committees must become centers of resistance, uniting all sections of the working class (in industry, logistics, transport, restaurants and fast food, social services, legal defense, education, arts and culture, entertainment, medicine, health care, sciences, computer technology, programming and other highly specialized professions) and student youth against Trump’s fascist government, the complicity of the Democrats, and the broader assault on democratic rights and living standards.
The building of rank-and-file committees is essential to break the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucracies, which function as industrial police for the corporations and utilize their power to block every form of resistance by the working class. Power must be transferred from the offices of the bureaucratic parasites to the workers on the shop floor and job sites, where decisions on all matters of strategy, policy and action can be made democratically by the working class.
These rank-and-file committees, spreading across all workplaces, will create new centers of coordinated social power upon which the defense of democracy throughout the country can be based. The mobilized working class will be able to inspire with confidence and unify all the now disparate elements of protest in a massive social movement against the hated government led and controlled by capitalist oligarchy.
3) This movement, led by the working class, requires a program that accurately reflects socio-economic realities and corresponds to the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. The capitalist oligarchy has declared war on the working class. The necessary response is the declaration of war by the working class on capitalism, which must result in the socialist reorganization of society. This entails the establishment of public ownership and democratic control by the working class of major industries, banks, utilities and natural resources. Moreover, the obscene levels of wealth concentrated in the approximately 900 billionaires must be expropriated. The 400 richest Americans alone hold a combined wealth of $6.6 trillion, which represents a growth by more than $1 trillion over the previous year. The concentration of so much money and power is a social malignancy that kills democracy.
4) The most important element of this strategy—upon which the implementation and realization of all previous elements depends—is internationalism. No effective struggle can be waged by workers in the United States unless their actions are coordinated and aligned with the struggles of the global working class. The threat of fascism is an international phenomenon. The capitalist ruling class of every country has its own version of Trump and even Hitler. American workers must repudiate the reactionary, outdated and self-defeating ideology of nationalism, which is the primal evil that instigates the racism and ethnic hatreds utilized by fascism. It is not an accidental coincidence that Trump launched his drive for dictatorship by unleashing a savage assault on immigrants. The deprivation of their democratic rights was only the first stage in the overthrow of the Constitution. The masked ICE agents who prowl through cities are the vanguard of the fascist paramilitary that Trump is planning to unleash against all sections of the working class.
An inseparable corollary of the fight for the international unity of American workers with their class brothers and sisters beyond the borders of the United States is irreconcilable opposition to US imperialism, militarism and war. The Gaza genocide carried out by the Zionist regime, which has to a great extent been carried out with weapons provided by the United States, reveals the barbarism of which capitalism is capable. The mass murder of Palestinians sanctioned by all the imperialist powers is an anticipation of what the capitalist oligarchs are prepared to inflict against the workers in their “own” countries.
It flows from this internationalist strategy that the rights of immigrants must be defended against the criminal and inhumane policy of deportation. The principle of birthright citizenship, inscribed in the Constitution, must be defended without compromise. Further, the class-conscious worker rejects the insidious and cruel distinction between the “native” and “foreign born.” Moreover, sanctions and tariffs imposed by the Trump administration must be opposed. The working class cannot defend its jobs and interests by supporting economic nationalism, which is entirely reactionary in an era of the global integration of production. The working class can advance its interests only by demanding the tearing down of national boundaries, which not only strangle the development of the productive forces but also lead mankind down the terrible path to nuclear world war.
Even before Trump began his second term and launched his drive for dictatorship, the Socialist Equality Party issued a call for the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). This initiative has not only been vindicated. Its development has acquired burning urgency.
5) The strategy, organization and action that are necessary to defeat Trump, defend democratic rights, and prevent fascism and war will not emerge spontaneously. This program must be fought for. But the determination that is required to take up and wage this fight is incompatible with pessimism and demoralization. These moods lead to paralysis. Moreover, pessimism is invariably connected to a superficial and false appraisal of reality. The Democrats, the unions and the media cultivate the myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done. This is a lie. What is lacking is not mass opposition but, rather, a political strategy to guide and organize the struggle against Trump’s assault on democratic rights.
The Socialist Equality Party advances this program as the basis for the struggle against Trump and the degenerate oligarchy which he represents. Our program is not for the pessimists, the skeptics and the demoralized, but for the fighters among workers, students, youth, professionals, artists and intellectuals. There is no time to lose.
We call on all workers and young people who agree with this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Party, mobilize the power of the working class, defeat the conspiracy of the oligarchs and fight for a socialist future without fascism, genocide and war
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
Reposted below is the ICFI Statement published in the World Socialist Web Site on 13 August 2025.
The International Committee of the Fourth International welcomes with pride and enthusiasm the establishment of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International) as the Turkish section of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
The formation of the section of the ICFI in Turkey is an event of immense historical significance. Although it was on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo) in 1933 that the call for the building of the Fourth International was issued, the establishment of the SEP marks the first time that a party has been formed in Turkey based on the internationalist program and principles of Trotskyism.
The establishment of the Turkish section is the outcome of an intense and systematic process of theoretical, historical and political clarification. The foundations for the formation of a Trotskyist party in Turkey were laid by the late comrade Halil Celik, who initiated political discussions with the International Committee. Halil’s contact with the ICFI and his commitment to building its Turkish section resulted from his conclusion, drawn from years of painful experience with various forms of Pabloite opportunism, that relentless political struggle against these tendencies was necessary.
In 2014 the ICFI formally endorsed the efforts of comrade Halil, who had begun the education of a group of young socialists in the history of the Fourth International, to establish a section in Turkey. In 2018 the Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu (Socialist Equality Group) was formed.
Halil Celik (1961-2018)
Halil undertook the translation of major publications of the International Committee into Turkish. He wrote:
In a country where the working class and socialist movement in general have been dominated by Stalinism, Maoism and petty-bourgeois nationalist tendencies for decades, these books are of prime importance in developing socialist consciousness among workers and youth. Publications of the contemporary Marxist literature produced by the world Trotskyist movement in Turkish, we believe, will contribute to laying the theoretical and political foundation for the building of the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
Despite his untimely death on December 31, 2018, Halil had by then recruited and educated a cadre of Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu that was determined to carry forward the fight for Trotskyism.
In June 2022 the SEG submitted its application to join the ICFI. The resolution motivating the application stated:
The building of a revolutionary party in any country is possible only on the basis of an international perspective, program and party. The only solution to the major problems in Turkey, which is in a critical position in terms of global geopolitics and class struggle, is the international socialist revolution. The founding of the SEP (Turkey) will be an expression of the global expansion of the ICFI, the only political tendency that assumes the task of solving the great historical problems.
The International Committee accepted the application of the SEG. This posed before the Turkish comrades the challenge of elaborating the historical foundations and principles of the new section. As there had never been a Trotskyist party in Turkey, this required the most exacting political work. It demanded not only a thorough assimilation of the history of the Fourth International, but also an analysis and explanation of the complex political and strategic issues that confront the Trotskyist movement in Turkey.
While pursuing this theoretical work, contributing significantly to the editorial work of the World Socialist Web Site, and continuing their ambitious program of publishing critical works of the International Committee, the SEG undertook important political initiatives to expand the political presence of the ICFI. Of particular importance was the SEG’s organization, beginning in 2023, of annual meetings on the island of Büyükada to commemorate the life and work of Leon Trotsky.
In April 2025 the International Committee voted to approve the transformation of the SEG into the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi and its recognition as a section of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. This vote was taken following a careful review of the organization’s document, The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Turkey).
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal held its founding congress in Istanbul on June 13-15, 2025. In addition to the historical document, the SEP also adopted a Statement of Principles and a constitution. In accordance with Turkish law, the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal was obligated to apply in Ankara for formal recognition as a party by the state. The official certification was received in August.
In a video statement announcing the formation of the SEP, posted on the World Socialist Web Site, its national chairman Ulaş Sevinç states:
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi is unlike other political parties. We are part of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. We reject all forms of nationalism and fight for the international unity of workers, who have common interests and enemies worldwide. We reject petty-bourgeois identity politics, recognizing that the fundamental division in society is class-based.
All fundamental problems facing humanity are global problems stemming from the capitalist system. Since one cause of these problems is private ownership of the means of production and another is the division of the world into economically obsolete nation states, the solutions must also be international. The working class, as an international class, is the only social force capable of implementing these solutions. Rather than pursuing a “multipolar” capitalist world, the alternative to the nation-state system that leads to imperialist war and genocide is a federation of world workers’ states that will eliminate borders.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is the most striking manifestation of the barbarism of the capitalist system and the decay of all parties defending it. As with other critical issues, it has become clear that the Palestinian question cannot be solved within the existing capitalist nation-state system. The same applies to the Kurdish question, which is an international issue. The only valid, progressive solution to these questions is a Socialist Federation of the Middle East, which will be established through the revolutionary mobilization of workers of all nationalities.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi unequivocally rejects the “lesser evil” policy and fights for the political independence of the working class. This means rejecting class-collaborationist “popular front” politics, which subordinate the working class to bourgeois parties and interests.
Regardless of their differences, all capitalist parties are in complete agreement on two fundamental issues: allegiance to imperialism and hostility toward the interests of the working class. For this reason, by their very nature, they cannot resolve any fundamental political issues, including the Kurdish question. They cannot establish a democratic regime, ensure social equality, or pursue an anti-imperialist foreign policy. As Leon Trotsky explained in his theory of permanent revolution, these tasks fall to the working class in the struggle for socialism. That is, the struggle for democracy is inextricably linked to the struggle for socialism.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi rejects the capitalist establishment parties and the pseudo-left parties that claim there is no alternative to collaborating with them. We call on workers and youth to build the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi as their own revolutionary party.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi is a “party of history.” Our party stands in the tradition of classical Marxism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, as well as the tradition of the October Revolution of 1917. Since its founding in 1923, the Trotskyist movement has defended and developed this tradition against Stalinism, whose “national socialism” betrayed the revolution in the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy’s “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism that led to the collapse of the USSR; against Social Democracy, whose reactionary program of reforming capitalism has failed; and against petty-bourgeois nationalism, which results inevitably in capitulation to imperialism and defeat.
The aim of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi and the International Committee of the Fourth International, with which it is in political solidarity, is summed up in the following statement of Trotsky, founder of the Fourth International: “… the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited through the socialist revolution.”
Join us in this struggle that determines the fate of all humanity. Visit sosyalistesitlikpartisi.org, review our documents, and join the party!
The foundation of the Socialist Equality Party in Turkey extends the work of the Trotskyist movement into a country that stands at a key strategic juncture of not only global geopolitics but also of the international class struggle. The massively powerful multi-national proletariat of Turkey is destined to play a gigantic role in the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
Moreover, the raising of the banner of Permanent Revolution by our comrades in Turkey will inspire a new generation of workers and the most principled elements among the youth and intellectuals in the “emerging” countries of the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. The political bankruptcy of the national bourgeoisie—i.e., its subservience to imperialism and inability to satisfy either the democratic aspirations or social interests of the masses—is vindicating every day the insistence of the Fourth International that the future of humanity depends upon the socialist revolution and the transfer of power to the working class.
Long Live the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi!
Long Live the International Committee of the Fourth International!
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 10 September 2025.
Acting as a cultural arm of Canada’s imperialist ruling elite, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) will be rolling out the red carpet Wednesday for the world premiere of a film about the events of October 7, 2023 that provides propaganda cover for Israel’s genocide against the Gaza Palestinians.
The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, from director and producer Barry Avrich, is entirely silent about the Israeli state’s decades of brutal oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, and the violence and terror it has inflicted on the residents of Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. The documentary film’s lens is exclusively focused on the efforts of retired Israeli Major General Noam Tibon to rescue family members caught up in the October 7 Gaza Palestinian uprising against the Zionist regime, which for more than 15 years had subjected them to a brutal and ongoing economic blockade.
The film presents Tibon as an heroic figure. While Avrich emphatically—and laughably—claims the film is “non-political,” the not-so-subtly inferred message is that Tibon personifies the “plight” and “courage” of the Israeli people.
The documentary centers on Tibon’s obstacles in reaching his family, who had come under fire during the attack, when Palestinian fighters entered Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which lies less than one kilometer from the Gaza border. Tibon responded to a text from his son and, as the film’s website breathlessly puts it,
With no time to spare, Noam and his wife, Gali, embarked on a ten-hour mission across a country under siege to save their family… Noam navigated ambushes, roadblocks, and a collapsing security system in a relentless race against time.
The film is described in the synopsis given by TIFF as “a profoundly human story about courage, family, and the power of love in the face of unimaginable terror.”
This is foul Zionist propaganda. The constructed and entirely contrived narrative treats the events of October 7 entirely outside of history—as if they fell from the sky. Its narrative frame conforms to a “T” with that of the Israeli state and its western imperialist backers: the Hamas-led uprising was “unprovoked.” Indeed, Avrich submitted his film to TIFF under the title “Out of Nowhere.” It was the festival organizers, clearly in the interests of obscuring the film’s pro-Zionist line, who persuaded him to rename it The Road Between Us.
Anyone who has followed the decades-long persecution of the Palestinians by the Israeli regime can only feel outraged by claims that Israel, which has been armed to the teeth by Washington and its allies, was a “country under siege” in October 2023. Since 2006, Israel had effectively maintained Gaza as an “open-air prison,” repeatedly bombing and terrorizing its population, not to mention the systematic seizures of Palestinian land and episodes of mass ethnic cleansing going back to the very formation of Israel in 1948.
Nor can there be any other legitimate response but hostility to complacent references to “courage” and “family” after almost two years of a non-stop genocidal onslaught by Israel, backed by the imperialist powers, on the Palestinians, whose families have been torn apart, massacred, starved and left destitute. The only “unimaginable terror” is that carried out by the IDF against Gaza’s population.
The attempt by TIFF to wash the blood of the Palestinian people from the IDF by finding a “hero” among its senior ranks could not have served as a better piece of propaganda for the Netanyahu regime if they had paid for it themselves. To tout such a film as a legitimate artwork is as repugnant today as claiming that Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda efforts were a legitimate expression of life during the Third Reich.
There are many issues a serious documentary about October 7 could have taken up, including interrogating the conditions that caused hundreds of Palestinian fighters to embark effectively on a suicide mission, and the reasons for the alleged and thoroughly unconvincing state of “unpreparedness” of the Israeli military and intelligence.
The Zionist state and military boast about their technological capability and skill at every turn when it serves their ideological and political purposes. But world public opinion is supposed to believe they found themselves entirely blind-sided in October 2023.
Extensive evidence suggests that elements high up in the Zionist regime were aware of the Islamist Hamas’ plans for October 7 well in advance, and chose to ensure that Israel’s security forces stood down to create a pretext for a long-planned onslaught on Gaza to ethnically cleanse its population and seize the tiny enclave, to implement, in fact, the “Final Solution” of the Palestinian question. After the uprising began, the IDF invoked the so-called “Hannibal Directive,” which allows the military to kill Israeli civilians rather than let them be taken hostage.
The decision to screen the film at TIFF, which has reserved the 1,800-capacity Roy Thompson Hall for Wednesday’s premiere, has nothing to do with questions of artistic merit. On the contrary, the sordid process by which the film, initially excluded from one of the world’s most important film festivals, became a—if not the—marquee event of TIFF 2025 underscores the central role that financial and Canadian imperialist foreign policy interests play in the festival management’s decisions and those of the country’s other major cultural institutions.
The phony furor over TIFF “censorship”
On August 12, media reports emerged that TIFF had reversed its decision to screen The Road Between Us at this year’s festival, citing legal concerns that some of the footage recovered from captured GoPros by Hamas fighters had not been cleared for use, as well as a “potential threat of significant disruption.”
These reports met with an immediate outcry of protest from the Zionist lobby in Canada, quickly joined and encouraged by the political elite and right-wing press.
On August 13, Toronto City councillors James Pasternak and Brad Bradford issued a joint statement on X, declaring, “TIFF should not be banning or censoring films and should respect the freedoms of the arts community,” and concluding that the decision to cancel was a “moral failure.”
The very next day, TIFF capitulated to this reactionary campaign, now less than 48 hours old, and announced it would ensure the film would be screened during what is the festival’s 50th edition. With The Road Between US’s producers, explained TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, “We have worked together to find a resolution to satisfy important safety, legal, and programming concerns.”
This quick retreat did next to nothing, however, to appease the film’s ruling class promoters, who in the name of denouncing TIFF censorship, lashed out at the supposed intolerance of anti-Gaza genocide protesters.
The National Post gave feature coverage to an op-ed penned by Sharren Haskel, who self-identifies as Israel’s “Canadian-born” deputy foreign minister. She voiced her outrage that TIFF sought “the ‘approval’ of terrorists,” who carry out “murders, rapes, and kidnappings,” and charged the festival with complicity “in silencing the truth.” She also slammed the Carney government for its empty announcement it would recognize a Palestinian state.
Canada, like the US and the other imperialist powers, is a key supporter of the Gaza genocide. Whether under Mark Carney or Justin Trudeau before him, the Liberal government has backed Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza and rampage across the Middle East to the hilt, shipping tens of millions of dollars in weaponry to Israel, while clamping down ruthlessly on anti-genocide protests at home.
Within Canada’s film industry the most prominent public statement of support for the screening of The Road Between US’s came from Susan Reitman Michaels, sister of the late producer/director Ivan Reitman, whose family is a major benefactor of TIFF. The family donated land for the home of the festival, the TIFF Lightbox complex in downtown Toronto.
In an open letter Michaels wrote, “The irony is unbearable. My family’s gift of land to TIFF was intended as a memorial to my parents’ faith in freedom of expression, only to see that very principle eroded… What it looks like, and feels like, is the silencing of a Jewish voice at a time when Jewish voices are already being marginalized.” As intended, the letter elicited a thoroughly stage-managed “torrent of outrage,” with the festival reportedly receiving 60,000 emails objecting to the initial cancellation of the film.
The hypocrisy of Michaels and the other would-be warriors for “free speech” is staggering. None of them batted an eyelid, but on the contrary cheered on the political establishment when it systematically smeared and sought to intimidate hundreds of thousands of Canadians who participated in anti-genocide protests over the past two years. Anti-genocide activists calling for an end to Canadian imperialism’s supply of military equipment to Israel have faced arrest and harassment by the police, and in some cases the loss of their employment. The few voices who raised any criticism of the genocide within the political establishment, like former NDP member of the Ontario legislature Sarah Jama, were politically sidelined and silenced.
Moreover, the claim to be defending rights of “freedom of expression” on the one hand, while invoking the special rights of wealthy benefactors to influence programming decisions, reveals the class character of the objections.
In announcing the festival’s renewed commitment to screen The Road Between Us, TIFF CEO Bailey issued a cowardly mea culpa. “I want to apologize,” he declared, “for any hurt, frustration, or disappointment that our communication about the film has caused, and for any mischaracterizations that have taken root. We’re working now—and we will be for a while—to clarify things and to repair relationships.”
Bailey offered his fawning and, frankly, disgusting reassurance:
I want to be clear: claims that the film was rejected due to censorship are unequivocally false. Both TIFF and the filmmakers have heard the pain and frustration expressed by the public and we want to address this together.
The “pain and frustration” were not expressed by “the public,” but by TIFF’s wealthy donors, the Zionist lobby, and powerful sections of the corporate and political elite—many of them the very same forces who last year demanded that TIFF cancel screenings of a documentary that humanized Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
It should be remembered that TIFF has a record of celebrating Zionism and Israel. In 2009, eight months after one of the Israeli military’s murderous assaults on Gaza, the film festival decided to honor Tel Aviv as the first city to be the subject of its new program, “City to City.” The decision provoked widespread outrage and protest.
Avrich, a Montreal-based filmmaker, has less than convincingly sought to talk his way out of any political intention behind his decision to make the film. Avrich told an interviewer for Deadline, “This film is not about politics, it’s about humanity, family and sacrifice.”
Avrich and the IDF Major General Tibon used a joint interview with the Globe and Mail, published September 6, as an opportunity to double down on this transparent falsification, presenting their film, in the postmodernist jargon so prominent in artistic and academic circles, as simply one “story” among others. In a remark that reveals at best his indifference towards and more likely support for the greatest crime of the 21st century so far, Avrich blandly told the Globe that he was just “a guy in Canada who is attracted to a great story… I didn’t see anything outside that story.” The same line was taken by Tibon, who adds in the same interview that ”we didn’t say one word of politics.” Anyone who believes a word of this rubbish …
When the Globe interviewer gave them the opportunity, to say something about the plight of the Palestinians and the ongoing genocide, both Avrich and Tibon pointedly refused to do so.
An artist unmoved by genocide and who, in the face of the systematic destruction of an entire people, “didn’t see anything outside” the fate of a senior officer in this machinery of mass murder and his immediate family, deserves only contempt. This is not a matter of artistic freedom. Rather, it reflects a tendency to revel in a kind of cold indifference to mass human suffering cultivated within a privileged layer of the middle class, whose expanding stock portfolios and bank balances are tied up with the eruption of imperialist wars over the past three-and-a-half decades, culminating in the Gaza genocide as part of a rapidly developing third world war.
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 07 September 2025.
In the wake of a huge police crackdown and thousands of arrests, the protest movement that erupted in Indonesia late last month has largely subsided, but none of the basic issues that fuelled the widespread demonstrations have been resolved.
The immediate trigger for the protests was the decision to pay a huge monthly accommodation allowance of 50 million rupiah ($US3,045) to the 580 parliamentarians of the House of Representatives (DPR)—10 to 20 times the minimum wage paid to millions of workers struggling to survive.
The lavish allowance was emblematic of far deeper concerns and opposition stemming from the immense social gulf between the country’s wealthy few and their political representatives and the vast majority of working people. Moreover, the social crisis facing broad layers of the population, particularly young people, is only worsening as economic growth slows and unemployment rises. The jobless rate for youth has hit 16 percent, forcing many into poorly paid, casual work.
Protesters clash with the police during a protest against lavish allowances given to parliament members, in Jakarta, August 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana]
The protests dramatically escalated after the callous killing of a young ride-share motorbike rider Affan Kurniawan on August 28. He was run over by an armoured police vehicle amid a mass mobilisation of police, including the notorious, heavily-armed BRIMOB. In the following days, angry protesters clashed with police, attacked government buildings and stormed the homes of prominent political figures including Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, the architect of the budget cuts that set off protests earlier in the year.
Facing a deepening political crisis, President Prabowo Subianto delayed a planned trip to China. He appeared at a press conference on August 31, flanked by leaders of the main political parties, to appeal for calm, declaring he understood “the genuine aspirations of the public.” At the same time, however, he ordered “the police and military to take the strongest possible action” against purported looting and destruction.
The protests involving thousands were not limited to the capital Jakarta but had spread to major cities throughout the country, including Surabaya, Surakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Yogakarta in Java; Banda Aceh, Padang and Medan in Sumatra; as well as Makassar and Kendari in Sulawesi, Palangka Raya in Kalimantan, and Manokwari in West Papua.
At least 11 people died in the clashes with the police and military, hundreds were injured, and another 20 protesters are missing, according to the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence. More than 3,000 people have been arrested.
Confronting a police crackdown, the protests subsided last week but the anger has not. Smaller protests continued. Last Wednesday, hundreds of women from the Indonesian Women’s Alliance (IWA) marched to the parliament building in Jakarta wielding brooms to “sweep away the dirt of the state, militarism and police repression.”
Last Thursday, a student demonstration led by the All-Indonesian Students’ Union (BEM SI) took place outside the parliament, where its central coordinator Muzammil Ihsan read out a list of demands, including the reduction of parliamentary allowances, complete reform of the national police and parliament, the release of all those arrested and the creation of 19 million jobs.
On the same day, members of the Labor Movement with the People (GEBRAK) held a protest in a major road in Jakarta also demanding the complete reform of the police and parliament.
On Thursday evening, a delegation of student leaders was invited to meet ministers at the Presidential Palace but reportedly walked out of the talks after being told they had to consider “the nation’s development” in making any demands.
Last week, a grouping of activist organisations drew up a list of 17 short-term “people’s demands” to be implemented by Prabowo and the government by last Friday along with eight longer-term ones. The deadline, however, passed with few of the demands being met or partially met.
In a bid to quell widespread anger, the parliament did announce the axing of the housing allowance that initially sparked the protests. The announcement was left to the parliamentary speaker Puan Maharani. She is the daughter of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—the only parliamentary party that is not part of the Prabowo government.
On the same day, Co-ordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto suggested that the government would carry out various stimulus measures to boost jobs and incomes—including wage subsidies for those earning less than 10 million rupiah a month, a program of public works, tax exemptions and steps to prevent mass lay-offs. But under conditions of a slowing economy that will be further hit by Trump’s tariffs, these proposals have the character of empty promises.
No steps have been taken to rein in the police and military. The only action taken against the police has been against low-level officers involved in the widely publicised killing of ride-share worker Affan Kurniawan. The officer in charge of the vehicle that struck Kurniawan has been dishonourably dismissed, and another received a seven-year demotion.
These measures are unlikely to assuage popular anger and resentment. Imran, a food delivery driver, told Al Jazeera that “inequality” was the root cause of the mass protests, “including economic inequality, educational inequality, health inequality and unequal public services.”
Referring to the government and parliament, he said: “They are not concerned about our fate. They should be present to resolve the problems facing the community, not fan the flames. These protests arose from the community’s poor economic conditions.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Rahmawati, a housewife, said that public anger had “finally exploded …because we feel like no one cares about us… What we want is for them [politicians] to care about us and our needs. Every year, the price of basic foodstuffs rises and never goes back down again. Groceries are becoming more and more difficult to afford.”
Significantly, the protests in Indonesia reverberated more broadly throughout South East Asia as workers and young people confront very similar economic and social problems, exacerbated by slowing economies. Protests took place last week in support of those in Indonesia, including in Malaysia and Thailand.
Thai students hung a banner on an overpass near Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok declaring “Thailand stands with the people of Indonesia” and called for justice for those protesters killed during police crackdowns.
In Thailand, a social media poster called Yammi shared instructions on how to order meals for Jakarta-based ride-share and food delivery motorbike riders. Revealing sympathy not just with the protesters but the difficult and dangerous conditions facing poorly paid riders, the post went viral in the region and internationally. Donations came in from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, as well as Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The protests have provided a glimpse of the explosive social tensions that have built up in Indonesia as well as the broader region and will only intensify amid growing global economic turmoil.
