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.
We publish here Part 4 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here. Part 3 was published on February 27, 2026 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class (continued)
Tactics: Direct Action, Digital Organization, and the Irreplaceable Role of Revolutionary Leadership
The three waves exhibit a progression in tactical forms that reflects the changing technological environment of mass struggle without altering its fundamental political requirements.
Occupy pioneered the sustained occupation of public space as a form of political presence, consciously modeling itself on the imagery of Tahrir Square. The “people’s microphone,” horizontal decision-making, and assembly democracy expressed a genuine aspiration to overcome the alienation of bourgeois representative politics. But symbolic occupation could not threaten capitalist production or state power. It could only be tolerated until inconvenient, at which point it was cleared by coordinated federal instruction.
The Yellow Vests developed a more economically disruptive tactical repertoire: the blockade of circulation nodes, the weekly cadence of national mobilizations, the combination of symbolic and material disruption. France’s tradition of militant industrial action created real—if unrealized—possibilities for converting street protest into generalized strike action. The tactical innovation was real; the political ceiling remained identical. Without independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees capable of coordinating strikes across sectors and regions, the disruptive energy could not be converted into sustained, organized industrial action that would have posed a genuine challenge to state power. Such committees, independent of the union bureaucracy, are the organizational precondition for elevating local struggles into a revolutionary movement.[17]
The Gen-Z movements added the rapid mobilizing capacity of social media platforms, enabling the coordination of mass actions across vast geographic areas at speeds that made traditional institutional responses appear slow-footed. This digital dimension introduced new capacities and new vulnerabilities. The same platforms that enabled rapid mobilization also enabled state surveillance, intelligence infiltration, and the algorithmic manipulation of political content. More fundamentally, the substitution of social media coordination for political organization—viral hashtags for programmatic clarity, trending topics for theoretical development—produced movements whose apparent technological strength masked a structural weakness: the inability to translate street power into sustained industrial action through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage.
The “leaderless” framework promoted by theorists like Zeynep Tufekci and Paolo Gerbaudo performs an ideological function related to the reactionary theory of Chantal Mouffe’s left populism. By celebrating the organizational forms of networked protest—horizontal assemblies, social media coordination, the absence of formal leadership—these theorists elevate into a political virtue what is objectively a political deficit. Lenin’s analysis in What Is to Be Done? (1902) retains its full force against the spontaneism celebrated by theorists of “leaderless” movements: spontaneous working-class anger, however militant, does not generate socialist consciousness; it is the raw material that revolutionary political leadership must organize and direct.[18] The “leaderless” ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it conceals the leadership that actually operates—whether of NGO-funded coordinators, pseudo-left academics channeling energy into reformist avenues, or the bourgeois politicians who ultimately harvest the political fruit of mass insurgency.
Programme: The Reformist Horizon and its Necessary Transcendence
All three movements articulated genuine and legitimate grievances with concrete “programmatic” demands. Yet all three remained, in the absence of revolutionary leadership, within a reformist political horizon that left the fundamental question—who controls the means of production, and in whose interests?—systematically unaddressed.
Occupy’s demands centered on redistribution, corporate accountability, and the reduction of economic inequality. The Yellow Vests called for lower fuel taxes, higher minimum wages, the restoration of public services, and various forms of direct democracy. The Gen-Z movements demanded the withdrawal of specific IMF-dictated tax measures, the end of corruption, and the removal of individual heads of state. All these demands expressed authentic material needs. None of them, in the absence of a program for working-class political power, pointed beyond the framework of bourgeois rule.
Left-populist tendencies within each movement—drawing on the theoretical framework elaborated by Mouffe in For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018) and given organizational expression by Podemos in Spain and France Insoumise—framed these demands as a struggle of “the people” against “the oligarchy,” a formulation deliberately designed to incorporate sections of the bourgeoisie into a cross-class “progressive” bloc while excluding the perspective of working-class political independence and socialist expropriation.
The WSWS analyzed the bankruptcy of this framework through its comprehensive coverage of the Syriza and Podemos experiences. Syriza’s capitulation to the EU-IMF troika (EC, ECB, IMF) within months of its January 2015 election victory[19] and Podemos’s entry into coalition government with the PSOE to implement the austerity it had promised to oppose[20] are not exceptions to the left-populist rule but its most perfect expressions. History has delivered its verdict: ten years after Syriza’s 2015 betrayal, Greece remains mired in poverty with intensified exploitation; four years after Podemos entered government, the far-right Vox party emerged as a major force in Spanish politics. The pseudo-left’s claim that workers must “go through the experience” of these parties before advancing to socialism has been exposed as a murderous lie whose consequences have been catastrophic for the working class.[21]
The genuinely revolutionary programme is the programme of permanent revolution—the only programme that corresponds to the objective interests of the working class in the epoch of imperialism. No democratic task, no elementary improvement in the material conditions of the working class, can be secured on a lasting basis without the conquest of state power by the working class, the expropriation of the capitalist class, and the extension of socialist revolution beyond national borders. The partial demands of Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z movements can serve as transitional demands—points of departure for mass mobilization—only if they are embedded in a programmatic framework that identifies capitalism as the enemy and poses the question of workers’ power at the center, as elaborated in the ICFI’s foundational programme documents.[22]
Differences that register: Social Composition, Geography, and Revolutionary Intensity
Having established the essential political homology of the three waves—their common ideological limitations and programmatic deficits—it is necessary to register the differences that carry strategic implications.
Social composition: Occupy was dominated overwhelmingly by urban, often-educated layers of the precarious middle class concentrated in metropolitan centers. It reflected genuine mass discontent but was organized and led largely by socially privileged layers within the broad “99%. The slogan of “99 percent” elided the divisions within that 99 percent between the working class and the upper-middle strata whose class interests diverge sharply from those of workers. The Yellow Vests drew a geographically and socially broader base—provincial workers, commuters, pensioners, small proprietors—reaching deeper into the actual working class outside metropolitan milieux. The Gen-Z movements combined student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian participation on a scale neither Occupy nor the Yellow Vests achieved: Sri Lanka’s general strikes, Kenya’s successive wave strikes, and Bangladesh’s garment-worker participation despite union-bureaucratic demobilization expressed authentic working-class militancy of a qualitatively higher order.
Geography and the neocolonial dimension: Occupy and the Yellow Vests occurred in imperialist countries—the United States and France respectively—where the immediate political demands did not include the overthrow of IMF debt peonage or liberation from neocolonial exploitation. The Gen-Z movements occurred overwhelmingly in former colonial and semi-colonial countries where this dimension is central: the IMF stands immediately behind the specific tax measures and austerity programs that triggered mass protests, and the question of imperialist domination is inseparable from the question of domestic capitalist exploitation. This adds to the Gen-Z movements a dimension that links national democratic grievances directly to
the international socialist revolution, confirming Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution in its twenty-first-century application.
Revolutionary intensity: Occupy was suppressed while still in embryonic form, never forcing a regime change or a serious rupture in state power. The Yellow Vests subjected the French ruling class to sustained pressure but did not threaten the fundamental stability of its political institutions. The Gen-Z movements, by contrast, drove heads of state from office, forced the collapse of governments, and in Sri Lanka generated a general strike drive that showed the potential to shake the entire structure of bourgeois rule. This heightened revolutionary intensity makes the absence of Trotskyist leadership all the more catastrophic in its consequences. The gulf between the objective revolutionary situation and the subjective capacity of the working class to take power—what the ICFI has consistently identified as the crisis of revolutionary leadership—is expressed with particular acuity in the Gen-Z experience.
The Pseudo-Left: An International Political Current, Not a Collection of Local Accidents
Any serious analysis of the three waves must confront the role of pseudo-left organizations not as a collection of locally specific political traps but as the expression of a coherent international political current whose function—whatever the subjective intentions of its participants—is the containment of working-class revolutionary energy within limits acceptable to capitalism.
The ISO in the United States, the various Pabloite networks that promoted Syriza and Podemos across Europe, Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League, the Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines, Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party—these organizations share a common political method regardless of their specific national contexts. The theoretical genealogy is explicit: Chantal Mouffe directly advised both Podemos and Mélenchon’s France Insoumise; her partner Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist elaboration of “hegemony” theory has influenced pseudo-left groups across three continents; the International Socialist Tendency provided intellectual legitimation for Syriza’s trajectory while blocking Marxist criticism of its capitulation.
As the WSWS warned in its analysis of pseudo-left containment strategies, these tendencies serve as a “reservoir for capitalist ideology within the ‘left,’” defending trade-union bureaucracy and social-democratic compromises rather than a revolutionary program.[15] Their middle-class composition, their material dependence on foundations and nonprofits, their rejection of working-class revolutionary politics, and their promotion of spontaneity and “leaderlessness” all serve the single function of blocking the emergence of authentic socialist leadership. Workers and youth who participate in mass movements must understand this pattern not as a series of coincidences but as the expression of a determinate class interest.
The Aragalaya in Perspective: Sri Lanka 2022 and the Global Pattern of Gen-Z Revolt
The 2022 Aragalaya — Sri Lanka’s mass uprising of April through July — was not primarily a protest against the Rajapaksa family’s corruption or mismanagement, though popular anger at the regime’s criminality was genuine and explosive. It was the expression of the terminal crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism under conditions of global capitalist breakdown. Decades of foreign debt dependency, subordination to the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, and the utter bankruptcy of every bourgeois political formation — the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, the United National Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and their various parliamentary combinations — had produced a social catastrophe in which fuel, medicine, and basic foodstuffs disappeared from the shelves. The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic disruption unleashed by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine accelerated the collapse of foreign exchange reserves and forced the government to default on its debt. Between April and July, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets across ethnic lines — a fact of profound political significance in a country whose ruling class has systematically exploited Sinhala and Tamil chauvinism for seven decades as its primary instrument of mass division. Two general strikes, on April 28 and May 6, in which millions participated, demonstrated with unmistakable force the potential power of the working class when it moves as an independent social force. Rajapaksa was driven from office and forced to flee the country on July 13, 2022. At that moment, the labor bureaucracy had already isolated the struggle and the working class was without leadership.
Protesters fill the streets of Colombo ahead of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation. (Photo: Sakuna Miyasinadha Gamage |From asiafoundation.org)
The pseudo-left organizations and trade union bureaucracies understood their task with a clarity proportional to the revolutionary danger the uprising posed. Their decisive function was not to advance the movement but to contain it: to ensure that the immense social energy erupting from below was channeled into a political framework that preserved bourgeois rule. The Frontline Socialist Party — Sri Lanka’s principal pseudo-left formation — promoted the demand for an “interim government” as the movement’s central political objective. This demand, however radical it sounded in the mouths of those advancing it, was not a call for workers’ power but an invitation to a section of the discredited parliamentary establishment to replace another under conditions of mass pressure. The trade union confederations called and controlled the two general strikes — limiting them to single-day actions, carefully isolating them from the movement at Galle Face Green, and at no point advancing demands that could challenge the fundamental capitalist order: repudiation of the IMF debt, nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy under workers’ control, or the formation of independent organs of working-class power. The middle-class protest forces concentrated at Galle Face Green, for their part, reproduced in Sri Lankan conditions the identical “no politics, no leadership” framework that characterized Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — directing mass anger at the persons of the Rajapaksas rather than at the capitalist state and the imperialist domination that had produced the catastrophe. The ICFI warned with precision throughout this period: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves, and there is no solution to the immense social problems within the existing social order.
The political consequences of this combined betrayal unfolded with an inexorable logic that ICFI analysis had forewarned and precisely identified. With the working class politically disarmed and demobilized within the “interim government” framework advanced by the pseudo-left and trade union bureaucracy, parliament was free to act on behalf of the ruling class. Ranil Wickremesinghe — six-time prime minister, organic representative of finance capital and the comprador bourgeoisie, the politician whom not a single constituency had endorsed for presidential office — was installed as president by parliamentary vote on July 20, 2022. His mandate was explicit and has been executed without deviation: enforce the IMF’s austerity program, restore bourgeois order, and suppress working-class resistance. The Essential Public Services Act was wielded against striking workers. IMF conditionalities — privatization, regressive taxation, cuts to public services — were implemented under conditions of systematic repression of labor rights. The attack on the Galle Face encampment, the criminalization of protest, and the systematic persecution of activists who had led the uprising followed in sequence. What the masses had achieved in revolutionary form — the removal of a head of state — was thus converted through the mechanism of pseudo-left betrayal into its precise opposite: the installation of a more disciplined and more ruthless enforcer of the same IMF program the uprising had sought to overthrow. The Aragalaya confirmed the ICFI’s assessment that “the critical issue is that of political leadership,” and that spontaneity alone — however militant — cannot overcome the organized political capacity of the bourgeoisie and its pseudo-left auxiliaries to contain and divert mass revolutionary energy.
Video shows protesters at Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya mass uprising chanting slogans demanding resignation of president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in July 2022
The Sri Lankan experience illuminates with particular clarity the global pattern of Gen-Z revolt analyzed throughout this essay, and deserves recognition as the paradigmatic case — the template, as the WSWS established, from which the subsequent uprisings in Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, and elsewhere descended. Every essential element of the global pattern is present in concentrated form: the objective crisis produced by IMF debt peonage and imperialist domination; the explosive intervention of youth and workers across social and ethnic divisions; the decisive role of the two general strikes in revealing the working class as the social force capable of resolving the crisis; the systematic intervention of pseudo-left and trade union bureaucratic forces to channel the movement into a bourgeois-preserving “interim government” framework; the deliberate suppression of demands that could challenge capitalist property relations; and the installation of a new government whose primary task was to enforce the same IMF program the uprising had repudiated. The “leaderless” and “no politics” character of the Galle Face movement — celebrated in pseudo-left and liberal commentary as democratic spontaneity — performed in Sri Lanka the identical ideological function that Tufekci, Gerbaudo, and Mouffe perform in academic registers: it severed the connection between the genuine revolutionary impulse of the masses and the programmatic framework — permanent revolution, independent working-class political mobilization, the building of the ICFI — that alone can carry that impulse to its necessary conclusion.
The question posed by the Aragalaya — and posed with equal urgency by every Gen-Z uprising from Nairobi to Dhaka, from Colombo to Manila — is therefore not whether the masses are capable of revolutionary action. The two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, and the storming of the presidential residence on July 9, provided a definitive answer to that question. The question is whether the working class possesses the political instrument — the revolutionary Marxist party, armed with the Theory of Permanent Revolution, organized as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and fighting for the perspective of international socialist revolution — without which the objective revolutionary capacity of the masses is systematically transformed, through the mediation of pseudo-left betrayal, into its opposite: the consolidation of the very capitalist order the masses sought to overthrow.
Lessons and Strategic Conclusions
The comparative analysis of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z uprisings in the backward countries yields strategic conclusions of the utmost importance.
Extra-parliamentary revolt is a necessary but radically insufficient condition for social transformation: The ruling class has demonstrated—across all three waves—that it can survive even the most massive and determined popular uprisings, provided the working class lacks the political instruments to translate spontaneous street power into social power.
The construction of independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees is the decisive organizational advance: Such committees can coordinate strikes across sectors and regions, connect immediate economic demands to broader political objectives, and create the federated structures through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, built by the ICFI, represents the organizational expression of this strategy on an international scale.
The political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and factions is non-negotiable: This means not only rejection of openly pro-capitalist parties but the political exposure and defeat of pseudo-left organizations that channel mass discontent back into bourgeois management.
Internationalization of the struggle is a strategic necessity, not a supplementary aspiration: The simultaneous eruption of mass revolt across multiple countries in the Gen-Z wave—and the common mechanisms of its betrayal across those countries—demonstrates that the crisis is global and the response of the working class must be equally global. Strike actions and defensive measures must be planned to hit the economic and political levers of capitalism simultaneously in multiple countries to break the ability of national ruling classes to isolate rebellions. The construction of genuinely internationalist revolutionary parties, organized as sections of the ICFI, is the precondition for transforming national eruptions into a global challenge to capitalist rule.
The struggle for socialist consciousness in the working class and among revolutionary youth is the precondition for revolutionary success: As Lenin insisted and as a century of revolutionary experience has confirmed, the working class requires not the absence of political leadership but the highest quality of political leadership–disciplined revolutionary parties armed with the program of permanent revolution, organized as sections of the world party of socialist revolution. The “leaderless” ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it leaves them at the mercy of forces whose interests are inimical to those of the working class.
The common thread running through Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z wave is a deepening of objective class discontent and the repeated opening of political spaces that the ruling class cannot close merely by repression or token reform. The critical historical task is to convert this recurring insurgency into organized, conscious socialist struggle under independent working-class leadership. That task—the construction of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution—is the most pressing political obligation of our time.
[20] World Socialist Web Site, ‘Podemos enters Spanish government: (8 January 2020) “On Tuesday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez officially formed a coalition government with the pseudo-left Podemos party, the Spanish ally of Greece’s pro-austerity Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”).” <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/08/pode-j08.html>
This political report for the week of February 22–28, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
I. Imperialism and War: The Accelerating Drive Toward Catastrophe
The week ending 28 February 2026 was dominated by the ever-sharpening US imperialist drive toward a military assault on Iran. Despite public claims of ongoing “talks,” the Trump administration has amassed a massive armada in the Middle East — carriers, aircraft, and logistical assets repositioned for what US officials described as a “sustained, weeks-long” campaign. The WSWS made clear that the diplomatic theatre serves as cover: Trump, in his State of the Union address, escalated threats against Tehran while menacing the American working class at home with authoritarian consolidation. The WSWS issued an urgent anti-war call, demanding that the international working class mobilise independently of all bourgeois parties to halt the march toward catastrophe.[1]
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier now deployed off Iran in formation during Rim of the Pacific exercises in July 2022. [Photo: Canadian Armed Forces photo by Cpl. Djalma Vuong-De Ramos]
The week also saw Indian Prime Minister Modi in Tel Aviv, deepening the India-Israel strategic axis — intelligence, defence, and security cooperation — directly as Washington and Tel Aviv were preparing their assault on Iran. New imperial alignments are accelerating the globalisation of warmaking. Canada’s Liberal government, meanwhile, declared it would not establish diplomatic relations with Iran “unless there is a regime change,” endorsed sanctions, and promoted the exiled monarchist Reza Pahlavi — subordinating itself entirely to Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s imperialist agenda. Ottawa simultaneously released its Defence Industrial Strategy, accelerating military procurement and tying Canadian industry more tightly to the machinery of war.[2]
Japan’s newly elected far-right government moved to expand security and military measures, aligning with US strategic objectives in Asia, while New Zealand’s right-wing commentariat openly floated political union with Australia to consolidate military capacity. Globally, the ruling classes are on a war footing, converting civilian society into a war machine on the basis of capitalist austerity.
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan provided a vivid illustration of this contradiction: remarkable athletic achievement was poisoned by nationalist chauvinism and commercialisation. Massive protests erupted against the presence of ICE and the Trump administration at the Games; dockworkers’ strikes delayed arms shipments; athletes publicly criticised ICE from international platforms. These internationalist impulses demonstrate the real social forces that can be mobilised — but they require conscious socialist political leadership to be transformed into sustained anti-imperialist action.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
The Trump administration continued its drive toward authoritarian rule. Reports confirmed that Trump allies are preparing executive orders to seize administrative control over US midterm election structures — a direct attack on democratic procedures. Epstein files naming Trump as an attacker were deliberately withheld by the DOJ, demonstrating how the ruling class uses legal instruments to protect the powerful while pursuing lawfare against the working class and its fighters.
The criminalisation of dissent intensified. Two Pennsylvania high school students remained imprisoned for four days after an anti-ICE protest; the “Quakertown 5” face felony charges designed to terrorise youth into silence. In Australia, police confiscated an anti-genocide placard at a Ramadan festival in Lakemba, using expanded “hate speech” legislation to police political expression. The apparatus of state repression is being normalised, step by step, against migrant defenders, youth protesters, and any expression of anti-war, anti-genocide sentiment.
Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani filed a civil rights lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act against Zionist Betar USA for violent attacks and organised intimidation on US campuses. While legal action can play a tactical role, the WSWS insists that mass working-class mobilisation — not reliance on bourgeois courts — is the essential instrument for defending democratic rights and the safety of oppressed peoples.
Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, was named acting director of both NIH and CDC by the Trump administration. This centralisation of public health authority in a figure associated with deliberate mass-infection policy coincides with surging measles cases and plummeting vaccine confidence. The politicisation and evisceration of public health institutions to serve capitalist accumulation exposes the ruling class’s readiness to treat the working class as expendable.[3]
III. Austerity, Economic Warfare, and AI-Driven Job Destruction
The IMF hailed Sri Lanka’s economic programme as a “success story” even as its austerity agenda deepens poverty, unemployment, and social devastation across the island. IMF “success” means the triumph of capital over the working class: the enforcement of debt repayment to international creditors at the expense of living standards, public services, and human dignity.
Australian logistics software maker WiseTech announced the elimination of roughly 2,000 jobs, citing AI automation. This follows the broader pattern of corporate layoffs accelerating to Great Recession levels. Capitalists are deploying AI not to liberate human labour but to discipline the workforce, destroy jobs, and protect profits. Workers must organise to demand social solutions: shorter working hours with no loss of pay, public investment in socially necessary employment, and democratic oversight of technological change.[4]
Greece’s main trade union confederation, GSEE, was engulfed in a corruption scandal, reinforcing its record of collaboration with governments on austerity. Institutional union corruption is not an aberration but a structural feature of bureaucracies that have integrated themselves into the management of capitalism.
Argentina’s contested labour reform vote and the abrupt shutdown of a tire factory laid bare the betrayal by bureaucratic unions and pseudo-left formations that failed to defend jobs. In New Zealand, a union pushed through a pay cut for 12,300 health workers. The pattern is consistent across continents: union apparatuses act as industrial policemen for capital, containing militancy and delivering concessions.
IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
The most politically significant labour development of the week was the abrupt suspension of the four-week strike of 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii. UNAC/UHCP bureaucrats shut down the strike without a contract, ordering members back to work while claiming there was “movement at the table” — a classic bureaucratic manoeuvre to demobilise a powerful working-class action at the very moment its leverage was greatest. The WSWS sharply condemned this betrayal and called for the formation of democratic rank-and-file committees to continue the fight, link up across sectors, and resist both management and union sellout.[^5]
In Los Angeles, 30,000 school support workers — custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and paraprofessionals — voted overwhelmingly to authorise a strike over pay, staffing, benefits, and safety. This vote is an expression of the eruption of working-class resistance to austerity gripping the United States. Union bureaucracies will seek to contain and negotiate away this power; the urgent task is to build rank-and-file committees and cross-sector coordination to transform it into decisive action.
UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman called for solidarity with Turkish miners who launched wildcat strikes over pay and safety, linking labour struggles across borders and demonstrating the potential for internationalist rank-and-file politics. His campaign — which continued to attract broad working-class support — was targeted by DSA-linked slanders, exposing once again the pseudo-left’s role in policing acceptable labour politics and shielding bureaucratic structures from genuine rank-and-file challenge.
The week’s workers’ struggle roundups — covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific — documented rising strike militancy in healthcare, transport, education, and logistics. These struggles reflect shared material conditions under capitalism: austerity, inflation, understaffing, and management offensives. Their success depends on democratically organised, international rank-and-file coordination and a political programme that directly challenges the capitalist state.
V. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
The Epstein files affair continued to expose the systematic protection of ruling-class criminals by the state. DOJ’s suppression of documents naming Trump as an attacker is not a bureaucratic oversight but a political decision to safeguard the powerful. Simultaneously, a Drop Site investigation revealed that a sophisticated Israeli surveillance and security system was installed at an Epstein-controlled Manhattan apartment building — pointing to the intersection of intelligence operations, criminal networks, and the ruling class.
In the South Pacific, former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama was arrested on charges of inciting mutiny, a symptom of the political instability convulsing ruling establishments across the globe as capitalist crisis deepens. In Britain, Labour suffered a crushing wipe-out in the Gorton and Denton by-elections, with the Greens making substantial gains at Labour’s expense — reflecting mass disaffection with Labour’s pro-capitalist management, even as the Greens offer no genuine alternative.
South Australia’s Labor government ran its election campaign on support for property developers, austerity, expanded policing, and militarisation — indistinguishable in substance from its conservative rivals. Labor parties internationally have completed their transformation into straightforward managers of capitalist crisis.
VI. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
The week provided a sharp illustration of the foreword to the German edition of Where is America Going?, published by the WSWS: Trump is not an aberration but the political weaponisation of oligarchy and capitalist decomposition. The fight against fascism and war demands a complete break with bourgeois parties — including not only the Republicans but the Democrats, Labor, the Greens, and the entire spectrum of reformist and pseudo-left formations that channel working-class anger back into the institutions of capitalist rule.
The corruption of the GSEE in Greece, the shutdown of the Kaiser strike by UNAC/UHCP bureaucrats, the DSA’s slanders against Will Lehman, the South Australian Labor government’s developer-friendly programme, and the British Labour wipe-out in by-elections all express a single political truth: the existing leaderships of the labour movement, and all self-styled “left” alternatives within the parliamentary framework, cannot and will not defend the working class.
The IMF’s praise for Sri Lanka’s “success” while social crisis deepens is the economic counterpart to this political reality. Technocratic austerity managed by bourgeois institutions — whether right-wing or nominally social-democratic — inflicts suffering on the working class while protecting capital and imperialist creditors.
The necessary response is independent working-class political organisation on an international basis, rooted in the Trotskyist programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International: for socialist policies that prioritise human need over profit, for the expropriation of the banks and major corporations under workers’ control, for international solidarity against imperialist war, and for the construction of a revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class to power.
Prepared by theSocialist.lk on the basis of WSWS.org coverage for the week ending 28 February 2026.
We publish here Part 3 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class
The Arab Spring — Historical Precursor and Political Object Lesson
The Arab Spring of 2010–2011 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) constitutes the decisive historical precursor to the successive waves of extra-parliamentary revolt examined here and its political lessons penetrate the entire subsequent history. It was not a single homogeneous movement but a global eruption of mass social unrest driven by the structural crisis of world capitalism—rising inequality, mass unemployment, and collapsing living standards—whose politics were shaped by the collision of profoundly antagonistic class forces: a radicalising working class and poor, large layers of youth and petty-bourgeois activists, sections of the middle class seeking political space and a greater share of the spoils, and competing fractions of the national ruling classes including military cliques and Islamist parties. What began as mass popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes rapidly became a battlefield where different class forces and bourgeois factions contended to shape outcomes in their own interests.
Demonstrators celebrate in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the announcement of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed Tamarod campaign each sought to channel mass anger into their respective bourgeois projects rather than into an independent working-class overthrow of the capitalist state. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) analysis of the Egyptian experience established, the so-called liberal and pseudo-left organisations played a decisive counterrevolutionary role, with Tamarod leaders standing at the side of coup commander General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as he announced the military takeover—an outcome those organisations had materially prepared.[1] The political demands advanced spontaneously in the streets—bread, jobs, dignity, an end to corruption, democratic rights—expressed
genuine and profound social need, but social and democratic demands do not automatically constitute a socialist programme. Where organised revolutionary working-class leadership was absent, liberal, Islamist, and petty-bourgeois currents filled the vacuum, offering alternative programmes that in every instance preserved capitalist property relations and imperialist domination.
A central feature of the Arab Spring was its spontaneity: sudden mass mobilisations, general strikes, and occupations that burst through the limits of existing organisations and terrified ruling classes globally. This spontaneity was simultaneously a strength—demonstrating the capacity of the masses to act independently and with enormous force—and a structural limitation that proved fatal to the revolutionary potential of the uprisings. Without a revolutionary working-class party and without organs of working-class power—factory committees, rank-and-file unions, neighbourhood councils—spontaneous movements remain vulnerable to appropriation by better-organised bourgeois factions or to demobilisation through absorption, exhaustion and repression. As Nick Beams argued in his contemporaneous analysis of the Egyptian upheaval in February 2011, the army and bourgeois forces were able to reassert control precisely where the working class lacked a political and organisational leadership capable of transforming mass revolutionary energy into state power.[2] Egypt possessed, in the strike waves that brought down Mubarak, the objective social power to make a socialist revolution; what it lacked was the subjective instrument—the revolutionary party anchored in the masses and fighting for the perspective of international socialism—without which that power could not be directed to its necessary conclusion. The result, confirmed by a decade of subsequent experience, was a military dictatorship under el-Sisi more brutal than the one the revolution had overthrown.
The Arab Spring exerted a direct ideological and tactical influence on Occupy Wall Street (2011), while simultaneously exposing the political pitfalls that Occupy would reproduce in the specific conditions of the imperialist center. The vivid demonstration that mass occupations of public space and horizontal assemblies could galvanise broad popular sympathy gave Occupy its tactical model and its initial political confidence. But the Arab Spring also disclosed, for those with eyes to see, the precise vulnerability that “leaderless” spontaneous movements carry within themselves: without a socialist programme and independent working-class organisation, mass insurgency is systematically channelled back into bourgeois institutions or reformist dead-ends.
The WSWS identified this danger at the outset of Occupy’s emergence, documenting the efforts of ex-left figures and Democratic Party operatives to absorb the movement into the 2012 Obama electoral campaign—precisely the mechanism of bourgeois reabsorption that had disfigured the Arab Spring’s political outcomes in country after country.[3] The strategic question the Arab Spring posed, and which Occupy failed to resolve, was the same question that confronts the Gen-Z movements from 2022: whether mass protests aim at symbolic disruption and awareness-raising within the framework of bourgeois politics, or whether they are directed toward building independent working-class organisation—general strikes, rank-and-file committees, industrial coordination—capable of fighting the economic power of capital and posing the question of state power. From a revolutionary internationalist standpoint, only transforming spontaneous mass energy into a socialist political programme and durable proletarian (industrial) organisation—linking democratic struggles to the working class’s capacity to seize power—can convert the recurring insurgency of the oppressed into a force capable of overthrowing capitalist rule.
Common Roots: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement (Gilets Jaunes, 2018–2020), and the Gen-Z uprisings constitute three successive and qualitatively escalating waves of mass extra-parliamentary revolt. To treat them as unrelated or merely sequential phenomena is to miss the most important truth they disclose in common: all three are expressions of the same underlying and deepening contradiction of world capitalism—the contradiction between social production organized on an ever more integrated and global scale, and its subordination to private ownership and profit that concentrates wealth in ever fewer hands while condemning the vast majority to insecurity, impoverishment, and precarity.
Each wave erupted from a specific conjuncture of that general crisis. Occupy responded to the 2007–2009 financial crash and the naked reassertion of Wall Street power through the Obama administration’s bank bailout program, which transferred trillions in public funds to the architects of financial ruin while working-class families lost their homes, their jobs, and their savings. The WSWS observed at the time that the Occupy movement expressed “the class struggle reemerging as the basic historical force,” and that it “foreshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.”[4]
The Yellow Vests erupted in November 2018 when Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax—a levy deliberately designed to shift the costs of the energy transition (away from fossil fuels) from corporations onto workers and the provincial poor—rendered unmistakable the class character of the “En Marche” (the centrist, liberal party of Macron) project presented to the electorate as post-ideological (that the era of class politics and ideological conflict was over) technocratic modernization.
The Gen-Z wave erupted when the accumulated wreckage of forty years of neoliberal restructuring, the devastation of COVID-19, the economic warfare of the US-NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine, the IMF’s debt-peonage regime across the backward countries, and the accelerating climate crisis made survival itself a political question for tens of millions of young people across multiple continents simultaneously.
Their common political character follows directly from these shared material roots. All three registered a profound mass rupture with parliamentary politics, with the established parties of both nominal “left” and right perceived as equally complicit in exploitation, and with the trade union bureaucracies and institutional mediators that had long managed and dampened class struggle. The “We are the 99 percent” of Occupy, the Yellow Vests’ visceral contempt for the “Parisian elites” in their media chambers, the Gen-Z movements’ blanket dismissal of all established political formations as corrupt beyond reform—these slogans express not political immaturity but a genuine and deepening crisis of bourgeois political legitimacy that no cosmetic reform or change of government personnel can address.
Politics: Anti-Establishmentism, “No Politics,” and the Populist Trap
Despite their common anti-establishment character, the three waves exhibit significant differences in political composition that must be analyzed with precision rather than collapsed into an undifferentiated “new social movements” category.
Occupy Wall Street: The Middle-Class Rehearsal
Occupy was dominated from its inception by a predominantly middle-class social milieu concentrated in metropolitan centers—New York’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Boston, and their counterparts in London and other imperialist cities. The Occupy movement explicitly drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, with organizers from Canadian magazine Adbusters declaring: “Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”[ABC News] The movement’s imagery—the occupation of Zuccotti Park echoing Cairo’s Tahrir Square—and its timing, coming months after the Egyptian Revolution’s triumph, established a direct lineage. As the WSWS observed at the time, “From the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt, to mass demonstrations in Israel and social eruptions in Europe, the class struggle has reemerged as the basic historical force.”[5]
Occupy protests in New York City (Image from wsws.org)
The movement emerged from anarchist organizations, in particular the Adbusters, which explicitly invoked “the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic” as its organizational model while stripping that model of its class content. The “99 percent” slogan, however appealing as an expression of popular anti-oligarchic sentiment, was politically designed to obscure rather than sharpen the fundamental class division between the working class and the affluent upper-middle strata from which Occupy’s leadership was drawn.[6]
The political consequences of this class foundation became visible in the role played by pseudo-left organizations, above all the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Despite its nominally socialist rhetoric, the ISO worked systematically to subordinate
Occupy to the AFL-CIO trade union apparatus and channel its energy toward Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. As the WSWS documented in contemporaneous coverage, the ISO “is attempting to stifle the protest movement by helping to bring it under the control of the AFL-CIO and the rest of the trade union apparatus,” praising corrupt union officials—among them AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CWA’s Bob Master, both fresh from betraying the Verizon strike—while concealing their role in imposing concessions on workers.[7]
The ISO’s promotion of “no politics” and “no leadership” served to create precisely the political vacuum the Democratic Party rushed to fill. The WSWS warned with prophetic accuracy: “Many of the groups involved in Wall Street demonstrations have echoed the position of the indignados in Spain and Greece that there should be ‘no politics’ and no leadership. The call for ‘no politics’ amounts to a rejection of a principled and coherent political alternative to bourgeois politics and the capitalist two-party system—that is, to socialist politics. It plays directly into the hands of the Democratic Party, which will move to fill the political vacuum.”[8] This is precisely what occurred. The coordinated federal-local police crackdown that destroyed Occupy’s encampments in November 2011—documented by the WSWS as a nationally organized operation involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces across multiple cities[9]—revealed the ruling class’s settled determination to tolerate no sustained challenge to capitalist order, however embryonic. The ISO’s subsequent dissolution and absorption of its dominant faction into the Democratic Socialists of America merely formalized the political trajectory it had pursued within Occupy from the outset.
The Yellow Vests: Broader Social Base, Sharper Edge, Same Political Ceiling
The Yellow Vest movement expressed a sharper social radicalism and a considerably broader working-class social base than Occupy. Its geographical and social centre of gravity lay in provincial France—among commuters, pensioners, small proprietors, precarious workers, and the rural and peri-urban poor hit by transport costs, the decline of local public services, and the accelerating erosion of wages under neoliberal restructuring. This diffuse, provincial social composition—rooted in layers of the working class and lower middle strata most directly exposed to the costs of the “modernization” celebrated by Macron’s metropolitan enthusiasts—gave the Yellow Vests a broader geographic reach and a more direct material confrontation with capitalist rule than Occupy’s metropolitan concentration had permitted.
Its tactics were correspondingly more disruptive. Weekly nationwide actions, roundabout and toll-road blockades, the occupation of commercial arteries, and confrontations with riot police in Paris and provincial cities created real costs for capitalist circulation and subjected the French ruling class to sustained political pressure of a kind Occupy’s symbolic square occupations had not achieved. At certain moments, the Yellow Vest movement intersected with strike waves—teachers, health workers, transport workers—creating the real possibility, if never the organizational reality, of a fusion between mass street protest and organized industrial action.
FILE PHOTO: A view of the Place de la Republique as protesters wearing yellow vests gather during a national day of protest by the “yellow vests” movement in Paris, France, December 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo
This possibility was systematically blocked. The French trade union confederations worked methodically to prevent any convergence between the Yellow Vests and the organized labor movement.[10] Left-populist tendencies within and around the movement framed demands in the idiom of “the people versus the elites”—calls for referenda, wealth redistribution, and stronger national welfare provisions—that avoided identifying the systemic enemy: the capitalist class and its state, not merely its more visibly corrupt or arrogant individual representatives.[11] Macron’s government survived. The Yellow Vests dissipated. The underlying social crisis intensified.
The Gen-Z Wave: Global Scale, Revolutionary Intensity, Identical Political Deficit
The Gen-Z uprisings represent a qualitative escalation in both geographic scope and revolutionary intensity. Occurring simultaneously across multiple countries of the former colonial world, they combined militant student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian intervention through strikes and industrial action. Sri Lanka’s two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, in which millions participated across ethnic lines, demonstrated the decisive power of the working class when it acts as an independent force.[12] Kenya witnessed successive waves of strikes by teachers, healthcare workers, civil servants, and transport workers erupting in the wake of the initial Gen-Z protests.[13] The scale of political disruption—heads of state driven from office, parliaments stormed, governments collapsed—surpassed anything Occupy or the Yellow Vests had produced.
Nepal Gen-Z protests. Image Courtesy of Kathmandupost.com
Yet the political framework within which these movements operated reproduced in these countries of belated capitalist development the identical dynamics that had contained and betrayed Occupy and the Yellow Vests in the imperialist centers. Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League, justifying the absence of leadership on the grounds that “the government is actively looking for leaders,” created a political vacuum filled by Raila Odinga and the trade union bureaucracy.[14] The Communist Party Marxist-Kenya promoted defense of the 2010 Constitution—drafted by the ruling class with British and US funding—thereby channeling mass anger into bourgeois-democratic illusions. BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines aligned with bourgeois anti-China factions, subordinating working-class politics to the strategic imperatives of US imperialism’s Indo-Pacific confrontation.[15]
The pseudo-left’s international character was not incidental: these organizations participate in the same international political current—representing affluent middle-class layers whose material interests require the preservation of capitalism while managing working-class discontent—that the ISO embodied in the United States. They celebrate spontaneity to avoid building revolutionary parties. They promote “people power” and “anti-corruption” to obscure class divisions. They align with bourgeois opposition forces presented as “progressive” alternatives. As the WSWS has consistently warned, these tendencies serve objectively as a reservoir for capitalist ideology within the “left.”[16]
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: “The social and political outlook of those at the core of the protests—including anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Street—was fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the ‘99 percent’ slogan itself was an effort to obscure the deep social divide between the working class and the more privileged sections of the upper-middle class, for which these groups spoke.”
This political report for the week of February 8–14, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
Demonstrators hemmed in by NSW Riot Squad Police at Sydney Town Hall, February 9, 2026
1. Imperialism and War
Preparations for War Against Iran
The United States has repositioned substantial military assets—including the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group, additional aircraft and logistics infrastructure—to prepare for what officials describe as a “sustained, weeks-long” military campaign against Iran. This build-up accompanies tightened sanctions and continued diplomatic manoeuvring, with high-level Trump–Netanyahu conclaves coordinating strategy and escalatory rhetoric toward Tehran. The repositioning signals an expectation of reciprocal strikes and prolonged regional confrontation, occurring alongside sharp transatlantic diplomatic tensions at the Munich Security Conference.
This military mobilisation represents imperialist decision-making divorced from democratic accountability, driven by competition for regional dominance and resource control. War preparations will deepen social misery both in Iran and across the region while accelerating global polarisation. The working class internationally must mount independent anti-war mobilisations: strikes, mass actions and political organisation to block military adventurism and the domestic austerity that invariably accompanies rearmament spending.
Complicity in Israeli Genocide
Israeli policies in the West Bank have escalated dramatically, with expanded settlement construction, tightened movement restrictions and explicit annexationist measures designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” German officials, including Parliament President Klöckner, visited Israel in what amounts to tacit endorsement of genocidal policies, signalling Berlin’s political alignment with Israeli security doctrine. Meanwhile, Australian police violently suppressed mass protests opposing Israeli President Herzog’s state visit to Sydney, deploying riot squads, horse charges and kettling tactics that left demonstrators—including filmmaker James Ricketson—bloodied and arrested. Labor governments imposed protest bans and extended police-state powers to protect visiting war criminals.
These actions confirm that European and allied governments are active accomplices in imperialist aggression. The suppression of dissent through state violence exposes the class character of bourgeois democracy: when challenged on fundamental questions of war and genocide, ruling elites deploy repression regardless of party labels. Workers must oppose their own governments’ participation in imperialist crimes through international solidarity and industrial action, not appeals to the very state institutions orchestrating repression.
Militarisation and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry
Germany is transforming a regional airport into a military fortress as part of NATO’s eastern-flank expansion, deepening preparations for imperialist confrontation. The Munich Security Conference revealed sharp US–EU tensions over strategy, burden-sharing and confrontations with Russia and China, exposing fissures within NATO alliances. Social-democratic parties across Europe are converting wholesale to pro-war positions: Germany’s SPD is drafting a programme stressing military readiness and “national strengthening,” while conscription plans advance despite youth opposition organised by socialist student groups.
Inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies the danger of global conflict as capitalist powers compete for markets, resources and geopolitical advantage. Workers must oppose their own governments’ militarism and build international solidarity to prevent war profiteering and the conversion of Europe into a staging ground for imperialist confrontation.
2. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
Criminalisation of Dissent
Türkiye imprisoned 77 members of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP) and placed six Left Party members under house arrest, with charges relying on informant testimony that conflated legal party activism with terrorism. Evidence presented in court included routine political literature such as copies of The Communist Manifesto. In Australia, new “prohibited hate group” laws echo 1951 Cold War-era attempts to ban communism, while Queensland’s LNP government matched Labor by banning “prescribed phrases” at protests. Princeton University abruptly cancelled a scheduled discussion by Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, implementing new policies to limit campus dissent and free speech.
These measures demonstrate how bourgeois states weaponise counter-terror and hate-speech legislation to criminalise legal socialist organising and suppress opposition to imperialist policy. The expansion of police-state powers is bipartisan: Labor and conservative governments alike deploy repression to defend capitalist interests. The defence of democratic rights requires mass working-class mobilisation and political independence, not reliance on bourgeois courts or appeals to the same state apparatus orchestrating repression.
Immigration Enforcement as State Terror
ICE operations have intensified across the United States, with mass workplace raids targeting Amazon Flex drivers in Michigan, meatpacking workers in Colorado facing deportation threats to break strike authorisations, and routine abductions dwarfing media-sensationalised individual kidnapping cases. The Department of Justice moved to gut asylum rights through regulatory changes designed to accelerate deportations. At the Dilley detention centre, a toddler’s near-fatal medical neglect case exposed life-threatening conditions and systematic denial of care. Palestinian detainee Leqaa Kordia suffered a delayed medical emergency after one year of detention at a Texas ICE facility.
Immigration detention operates as a racist, punitive apparatus designed to discipline precarious labour and fragment working-class solidarity. Deportation threats function as employers’ weapons to intimidate workers and prevent collective action. The defence of immigrant workers requires workplace solidarity committees, mass mobilisation against detention regimes and political organisation that links immigrant rights to broader working-class struggles against state repression.
Police Violence and Authoritarian Measures
Minnesota police rioted against protesters outside the Whipple Federal building, deploying indiscriminate baton charges and mass arrests. NSW riot police violently attacked demonstrators opposing Herzog’s visit, with eyewitness accounts documenting kettling, horse charges and denial of medical attention to injured protesters in custody. Massive security operations in Milan deployed snipers and heavy policing against protests opposing Trump administration presence at the Winter Olympics, though dockworker strikes delayed arms shipments and athletes publicly criticised ICE.
State violence is escalating to protect imperialist policy and criminalise dissent. The international coordination of repression—from Australia to the United States to Europe—reveals the class function of bourgeois states under crisis. Defensive mobilisation requires united working-class action and democratic organising, not appeals to the institutions wielding violence.
3. Austerity and Economic Warfare
Corporate Restructuring and Worker Attacks
Stellantis recorded a $26 billion charge tied to its electric-vehicle strategy reversal and simultaneously delayed plant reopenings, cut dividends and pushed buyout schemes affecting American workers. UPS is preparing a second driver buyout program while planning 30,000 layoffs in 2026, shifting labour costs despite sustained profitability. BYD’s Xi’an high-voltage electrical equipment factory imposed steep cuts to piece-rate bonuses that reduced many workers’ take-home pay below 2,000 yuan monthly, provoking wildcat strikes met with police repression.
Corporate crisis is weaponised to intensify exploitation: immense private wealth accrues to billionaire owners while workers face precarious pay, forced exits and degraded conditions. Buyout programmes and “voluntary” redundancies are designed to weaken collective strength and force exits that erode bargaining power. The strategic response requires coordinated rank-and-file mobilisation, rejection of unilateral management schemes and international solidarity to resist the global race to the bottom.
Public Service Destruction
The UK lost WHO measles elimination status due to falling vaccination rates and deliberate public-health neglect—a direct outcome of neoliberal austerity that prioritises profit over population health. New Zealand’s capital faces environmental disaster from a massive sewage leak, exposing capitalist underinvestment in essential infrastructure. Los Angeles authorities moved to dismantle federal oversight of homelessness as the crisis deepens, shifting responsibility to avoid redistributive demands. A UN report warned of global “water bankruptcy” affecting billions, with scarcity and contamination exacerbated by private control of resources and climate breakdown.
The rollback of public health, infrastructure and essential services is rooted in the capitalist drive to divert social resources toward private accumulation and war preparation. Restoring public goods requires mass working-class pressure to force socialised control, democratic planning and international cooperation—issues only resolvable through political struggle against capitalist property relations.
Trade War and Economic Coercion
Trump threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge as part of escalating economic warfare against Canada, weaponising infrastructure to extract concessions. New Zealand’s coalition government fractured over the India Free Trade Agreement, with populist objections masking the reality that such deals serve corporate profit and intensify wage competition, privatisation and precarious labour.
Economic warfare is an extension of imperialist diplomacy. Free-trade agreements deepen exploitation and cross-border wage competition while populist nationalism channels working-class anger into reactionary scapegoating. Workers on both sides of borders must unite internationally to resist bourgeois brinkmanship and oppose both neoliberal trade regimes and chauvinist diversion.
4. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
Healthcare Workers’ Resistance
Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian overwhelmingly rejected a tentative agreement that the New York State Nurses Association attempted to force through via an illegitimate snap vote, continuing their strike under rank-and-file defiance. The Kaiser healthcare workers’ strike expanded as 3,000 pharmacy and laboratory workers joined 31,000 already on strike, significantly widening disruption. San Francisco’s 6,400 educators struck for the first time since 1979, drawing mass rallies and broad community support before union bureaucrats and Democratic Party figures brokered a tentative agreement that concedes austerity and fails special-education demands.
These struggles expose the gulf between rank-and-file militancy and union apparatus. Bureaucratic sellouts are imposed to protect political ties with the Democratic Party and stabilise capitalist rule. The NYSNA’s snap-vote manoeuvre, the attempt to isolate Kaiser strikers and the intervention of Nancy Pelosi to contain San Francisco educators all demonstrate that union leaderships function as barriers to sustained class struggle. Winning safe staffing, liveable wages and healthcare as a social right requires democratically elected strike committees, strike pay drawn from union assets, expansion of strikes across facilities and sectors, and political independence from both union bureaucrats and bourgeois parties.
Industrial Militancy and Betrayal
Refinery workers denounced the United Steelworkers’ national pattern deal as a sellout prioritising corporate interests, with BP Whiting workers facing isolation if concessions are accepted. The UAW hailed a Volkswagen Tennessee contract as “historic” amid rank-and-file criticism that gains are modest and concessions linger. Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks rank-and-file activist, launched a campaign for UAW president demanding abolition of the Solidarity House bureaucracy and creation of workplace committees. In Norway, a union organised a sham strike that imposed financial burdens on members while failing to press management, forcing workers to pay for bureaucratic theatre.
National pattern agreements and bureaucratic compromises fragment struggle and normalise concessions. Union apparatuses routinely betray workers by containing mobilisation, isolating militants and deferring to management. The necessary alternative is democratic coordination across plants, refusal of bureaucratic imposition and preparation for escalated, coordinated strike action under workers’ control.
International Worker Struggles
Tens of millions of Indian workers joined a one-day national strike against the Modi government’s labour “reforms” and removal of employment guarantees, though participation remained politically confined by Stalinist-linked federations channelling dissent toward bourgeois opposition parties. Peru saw mass protests uniting transport workers, students and families of state-repression victims against austerity and violence. Colorado meatpacking workers authorised strike action over dangerous conditions despite ICE deportation threats. High school students in Carson, Royal Oak and Detroit suburbs staged walkouts protesting ICE raids, authoritarianism and war, joining broader youth mobilisations.
These struggles demonstrate the international scope of working-class resistance and the potential for cross-generational, cross-border solidarity. However, episodic protests and one-day token strikes cannot substitute for sustained, politically independent organisation. Without rank-and-file leadership breaking from nationalist and reformist containment, such mobilisations risk canalisation into bourgeois electoral channels or bureaucratic dead-ends.
5. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
Revelations tying Lord Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein networks have engulfed Keir Starmer’s Labour government, producing resignations and police inquiries. Jeremy Corbyn called for a Chilcot-style inquiry while insisting much remain shielded on “national security” grounds, demonstrating the political bankruptcy of Corbynism: seeking establishment solutions that protect state secrets and preserve bourgeois stability rather than mobilising independent working-class opposition. Leaked Epstein files implicate Trump and other political figures, with testimony at the Bondi hearing exposing cover-ups and secret “domestic terrorist” lists targeting dissidents. The FBI identified billionaire Leslie Wexner as a co-conspirator in 2019 but took no action.
The Mandelson-Epstein scandal exposes intimate links between political elites and the financial oligarchy, revealing how the ruling class operates with systemic impunity. Parliamentary inquiries and legalistic remedies cannot break oligarchic power because state institutions exist to shield ruling-class crimes. Only mass working-class mobilisation and independent political organisation can hold elites accountable and overturn the structures protecting them.
6. Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Corbynism and Pseudo-Left Opportunism
Internal battles within Your Party saw factional purges and contrasting programmes, with Zarah Sultana’s Grassroots Left emphasising parliamentary reform and alliances with NGOs, unions and identity-based coalitions. Corbyn’s historical record of accommodation to Labour’s Blairite right and Sultana’s reformist trajectory both reproduce illusions that have repeatedly failed the working class. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference signals her full integration into establishment foreign-policy circles, providing pseudo-left cover for imperialist strategy.
Corbynism’s “broad church” historically subordinated the left to Blairite interests; Sultana-style reformism proposes parliamentary solutions that will capitulate under capitalist crisis. Figures like AOC function to contain working-class anger within bourgeois institutions. Objective economic developments—globalisation, financial oligarchy, declining profitability—have rendered social-democratic reformism impotent. Only revolutionary organisation rooted in workplaces, independent of bourgeois parties and grounded in international socialist strategy, can defend social rights.
Stalinist Betrayal
The Communist Party Marxist–Kenya published a diatribe openly defending Stalin and endorsing Stalinist historical falsifications while aligning with reactionary bourgeois regimes. The Turkish Communist Party held a mass Ankara rally glorifying Stalinist figures and promoting revisionist Soviet narratives. In Venezuela, Morenoite currents formed alliances with Stalinist parties supporting bourgeois nationalist regimes through electoral manoeuvres.
Praising Stalin today is not abstract historiography but a political programme that betrays working-class independence by subordinating socialist aims to bourgeois nationalism and petty-bourgeois interests. Stalinist tendencies function as props for capitalist regimes, providing pseudo-left legitimacy for reactionary policies and undermining international solidarity. Trotskyism remains the necessary continuity of revolutionary Marxism against both Stalinist bureaucratic liquidation and nationalist illusions.
Electoralism and Municipal Dead-Ends
DSA-aligned councilmember Nithya Raman entered the Los Angeles mayoral race presenting symbolic progressive rhetoric while actual policy remains confined within bourgeois constraints. New York City Mayor Mamdani announced symbolic tax-the-rich rhetoric while cutting homelessness support, prioritising market interests. The military-aligned Bhumjaithai Party won Thailand’s election through defections and right-wing consolidation, reflecting the bankruptcy of nominally “democratic” bourgeois parties.
Electoral manoeuvres cannot substitute for independent workplace organisation. Symbolic reforms and progressive branding deflect from fundamental class conflict while subordinating working-class demands to capitalist institutional limits. Parliamentary routes have been exhausted; only mass organisation and direct working-class action can secure social rights.
7. The Revolutionary Alternative
The week’s events confirm a central reality: global capitalist crisis produces simultaneous assaults on living standards, democratic rights and international peace. Imperialism drives toward war in the Middle East while intensifying repression domestically. Austerity destroys public services and infrastructure. Corporate restructuring weaponises crisis to deepen exploitation. Elite criminality operates with systemic impunity.
Against these attacks, working-class resistance is mounting: nurses rejecting bureaucratic sellouts, educators striking, refinery and meatpacking workers authorising action, youth walking out against ICE terror, millions in India protesting labour destruction. Yet episodic militancy remains fragmented and politically contained by union bureaucracies, reformist parties and pseudo-left opportunism.
The strategic answer is the independent, international organisation of the working class around a Trotskyist programme: democratically elected rank-and-file committees in every workplace and school; coordination across industries, borders and continents; political independence from all bourgeois and reformist parties; and the construction of a mass revolutionary party to expropriate the oligarchy, end imperialist war and place social power in workers’ hands. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the Socialist Equality Parties organise this political work. Workers seeking to connect their struggles to organised resistance can join at https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/sep/us/join.html.
This political report for the week ending 07 February 2026 is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
President Donald Trump smiles after signing a spending bill that ends a partial shutdown of the federal government in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
The week ending February 7, 2026 witnessed an intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry, the acceleration of domestic repression in the United States, and a global surge in working-class militancy met with systematic betrayal by trade union bureaucracies. From preparations for regime change in Iran to mass strikes in healthcare and education, the international crisis of capitalism manifested in parallel assaults on democratic rights, living standards, and public services. This report synthesizes key developments across four domains: imperialist war preparations and geopolitical realignment; the consolidation of authoritarian rule and state repression; capitalist austerity and economic warfare; and the eruption of class struggle against union bureaucratic containment.
I. Imperialism and War: Escalation Toward Iran and Regional Realignment
European Powers Line Up Behind Regime Change in Iran
European governments openly aligned with Washington’s escalation toward regime change in Tehran. The EU placed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on its “terror” list while European leaders—including Germany’s Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—publicly backed US threats and prepared rhetoric for a “transition” in Iran. This coordination followed prior US and Israeli strikes and represents strategic repositioning by European imperialism to secure access to energy resources and geopolitical influence.
Core analysis: The WSWS situates European actions as integral to imperialist rivalry and the scramble for markets and spheres of influence. Liberal imperialism cloaks predatory aims in “humanitarian” language, but the underlying logic is capitalist competition driving preparations for inter-imperialist war. Only an international working-class anti-war movement grounded in revolutionary socialist politics can halt the slide toward regional and global conflagration.
Turkey Attempts Mediation as NATO Ally
As US preparations for possible military action against Iran escalated, Turkey sought to mediate between Washington and Tehran. Ankara’s diplomacy aimed to limit regional destabilization while protecting Turkish geopolitical and economic interests, revealing the contradictions of a junior NATO power attempting to maneuver within imperialist rivalry.
Core analysis: Turkish mediation is not peaceful diplomacy but a junior imperialist power managing fallout from US militarism. Imperialist competition, not negotiation, drives the crisis; only international working-class anti-war mobilization can block regional war.
Merz’s Gulf Tour: Alliance with Dictators for German Great Power Politics
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz toured Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE—meeting personally with Mohammed bin Salman and pledging strategic partnerships, arms deals, and energy cooperation despite documented human rights crimes. The visit frankly asserted German great-power ambitions subordinating all ethical concerns to capitalist and geostrategic interests.
Core analysis: Imperialist states ally with dictators to secure energy and markets. Workers must oppose rearmament and foreign-policy adventurism through an international socialist program that rejects nationalist accommodation to imperialism.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
Trump Administration’s Assault on Democratic Norms
Federal Election Seizure Plans: President Trump publicly urged federal takeover of state election administration and directed FBI operations in Fulton County, Georgia, threatening to “nationalize” elections in targeted cities. These moves signal preparation to rig or cancel the 2026 elections.
Core analysis: This represents an overt break with democratic norms by sections of the capitalist state preparing for dictatorship. The principal obstacle to a coup is the working class; the necessary response is independent political mobilization through rank-and-file organizations and preparation for general strike, not reliance on the Democratic Party.
Federal Purges: The administration announced sweeping purges of federal civil service employees, replacing career officials with political loyalists to centralize control—measures framed as rooting out “disloyalty.”
Core analysis: Politicized purges characterize authoritarian consolidation, removing institutional checks on presidential power. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class organizing and mass political resistance.
Racist Provocations: Trump posted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, one in a series of overt racist provocations from the White House designed to mobilize racist sentiment, terrorize minorities, and divide the working class.
Mass Surveillance Infrastructure
The Trump administration expanded mass-surveillance networks—databases, facial recognition, cross-agency sharing—to track immigrants and political protesters, integrating private tech contractors into state repression apparatus.
Core analysis: Surveillance is a political tool to suppress dissent and enforce social control for the oligarchy. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class mobilization and dismantling surveillance apparatuses through mass action.
Immigrant Repression and Detention Center Horrors
Measles Outbreak at Dilley: A measles outbreak tore through the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, confining hundreds of asylum-seeking families and children. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and rationed medical care created conditions for rapid spread amid a nationwide measles resurgence (2,267 confirmed cases in 2025) following mass purges at HHS and CDC.
Core analysis: The outbreak demonstrates Trump’s program of criminalizing and caging migrants while dismantling scientific public health, subordinating life to profit and political repression. Both Republican and Democratic parties share complicity in detention regimes and public-health defunding.
Vindictive Deportation: After protests forced the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Dilley, DHS filed a motion to expedite deportation proceedings against his family—vindictive state repression designed to terrorize immigrants and suppress dissent.
ICE Workplace Raids: ICE conducted workplace raids including at an Amazon facility in Hazel Park, Michigan, weaponizing enforcement to intimidate immigrant and non-immigrant workers alike, deepen labor discipline, and facilitate corporate flexibility.
University Republican Club Calls for Assassinations
The Illini Republicans at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign posted on Instagram celebrating political killings and calling for assassination of opponents; the administration refused discipline, citing “protected speech.”
Core analysis: This evidences deepening fascist and white-supremacist currents fostered by capitalism resorting to political violence. The university’s selective “free speech” shields reactionary violence while repressing left protests. Defense of democratic rights requires independent working-class mobilization against both fascism and the bipartisan state protecting it.
Repression of Nurses and Protesters
New York Nurses Arrested: At least 13 striking nurses were arrested outside Greater New York Hospital Association headquarters on Day 25 of their strike, with NYPD riot units deployed amid pressure from Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul to end the action through emergency orders facilitating out-of-state replacements.
Core analysis: The arrests demonstrate state readiness to use force defending corporate healthcare interests. Union bureaucracy’s containment strategy isolates nurses; expansion of the strike, full strike pay, and national coordination through rank-and-file committees are essential.
Mamdani’s Betrayal: DSA Mayor Embraces Police State
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani praised an NYPD shooting of a 22-year-old Bangladeshi man experiencing a mental-health crisis and endorsed Governor Hochul’s strike-breaking measures, revealing continuity with pro-police policies despite earlier populist branding.
Core analysis: DSA-style figures integrate into the capitalist state, converting electoral radicalism into administrative collaboration with police and oligarchy. The working class must not be misled; independent organization and rank-and-file control are essential.
III. Austerity, Economic Warfare, and Capitalist Crisis
US Economic Warfare Against Cuba and Venezuela
Cuba Blockade: The US energy blockade threatened Cuba with humanitarian “collapse” as the UN Secretary-General warned of imminent crisis. Washington’s executive order threatened tariffs on countries supplying Cuba with oil; Mexico and other suppliers faced pressure to cease shipments, precipitating blackouts and shortages.
Core analysis: The blockade constitutes genocidal imperialist coercion aimed at regime overthrow, with complicity from regional bourgeois governments and nationalist-left leaders who capitulate. Only international working-class solidarity can oppose imperialist economic warfare.
Venezuela Privatization: Following the US abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s interim authorities rapidly overhauled hydrocarbons law, opening oil to foreign control and subordinating resources to US and corporate interests.
Core analysis: This exposes the failure of chavismo and bourgeois-nationalist projects that cannot defend resources or working-class gains under imperialism. Only working-class revolution and international socialist policy can break imperialist domination.
Corporate Layoffs Accelerate to Great Recession Levels
January job-cut announcements by US corporations tripled, with large tech, media, and retail firms leading the wave. The increase signals renewed corporate restructuring and mass unemployment approaching Great Recession scale.
Core analysis: Layoffs flow from falling profitability and overaccumulation; corporate efforts to restore margins enforce political choices subordinating labor to capital. The response must be mass industrial organization, strikes, and rank-and-file committees defending jobs and fighting for nationalization under workers’ control.
Washington Post Slashes Newsroom: The Washington Post eliminated roughly one-third of its newsroom (over 300 jobs), closing entire desks while billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s wealth surged. This media purge is part of capitalist restructuring and concentration of cultural power under the oligarchy, using “efficiency” rationales to mask political decisions shrinking independent journalism.
1,200 GM Layoffs in Canada: General Motors ended the third shift at its Oshawa plant, laying off approximately 1,200 autoworkers as part of production rationalization.
Austerity Across Multiple Fronts
Australia: The Labor government drove up housing prices through developer-friendly policies, cut arts funding (forcing Writers Victoria to close), raised interest rates deepening household debt crises, and approved National Cabinet measures removing tens of thousands of children from disability support. Labor also pressed ahead with demolition of Melbourne public housing towers, displacing residents under privatized redevelopment schemes.
UK: A major charity reported deepening poverty under the Starmer Labour government, documenting rising food insecurity, housing stress, and benefit shortfalls. Starmer’s administration implements austerity while claiming respectability.
SNAP Cuts: Trump administration changes to SNAP eligibility set 2.4 million people at risk of losing food assistance by 2034, shifting the burden onto working people to finance corporate and military priorities.
Homeless Death in Kalamazoo: A homeless man froze to death in Kalamazoo, Michigan while the city allocated $515 million to build a new arena—a stark juxtaposition of social neglect and pro-business public spending.
Kaiser Permanente Medicare Fraud
Kaiser agreed to a $556 million settlement over allegations of inflating Medicare Advantage risk scores, generating roughly $1 billion in alleged overpayments—while claiming inability to meet demands from striking healthcare workers.
Core analysis: “Non-profit” healthcare corporations are profit-driven entities using public funds for private gain. Fraud settlements are routine costs of business while frontline workers and patients suffer austerity.
IV. Class Struggle and Union Bureaucratic Betrayal
Healthcare Workers’ Strikes
Kaiser Strike Enters Third Week: The strike by 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers continued into its third week, with 4,000 pharmacy and lab workers (UFCW) preparing to join. Management pursued legal and PR strategies while union bureaucracy sought localized talks fragmenting the struggle.
New York Nurses: 15,000 nurses remained on strike facing threats of permanent replacement, with escalated repression (arrests, state emergency orders) and union bureaucracy retreat toward concessions.
Boston Nurses: Despite an overwhelming strike vote, the union bureaucracy left 650 nurses at Boston Medical Center Brighton working, fragmenting leverage and isolating the struggle.
Core analysis: Healthcare strikes contain the embryo of a national movement defending public health, but unions seek containment. Only rank-and-file organization could transform disputes into unifying working-class struggles. The fight centers on whether workers accept permanent understaffing or build nationwide, worker-led movements.
Education Workers’ Mobilization
San Francisco Teachers’ Strike: 6,400 educators in San Francisco Unified School District voted overwhelmingly to strike over chronic understaffing, poverty wages, unaffordable healthcare costs, and class-size caps—the first district-wide walkout since 1979.
Core analysis: The strike occurs amid obscene regional inequality driven by tech billionaires and Democratic-party austerity. Union bureaucratic entanglement with Democrats must be broken; independent rank-and-file committees should link educators across districts for statewide and national action.
Ann Arbor: Educators worked under expired contracts amid massive cuts and restructuring.
Australia: The WSWS called for building rank-and-file committees among educators and students to oppose mass job cuts, course closures, and integration of universities into the military-industrial complex under the Universities Accord.
Industrial Workers’ Struggles
Birmingham Refuse Workers: Over a year into indefinite strike action, Birmingham loaders and drivers opposed pay cuts up to £8,000 and abolition of safety roles, facing intimidation, court injunctions, agency labor, and £33 million council deployment to break the strike—backed by the Starmer government declaring a “major incident.”
Core analysis: This is a test case for Starmer’s austerity drive and labor bureaucracy’s capacity to contain conflict. The dispute can only be won through independent rank-and-file organization, democratic worker control of strategy, and national solidarity exposing government use of state power to enforce austerity.
USW Refinery Sellout: The United Steelworkers announced a tentative national agreement for 30,000 refinery workers offering 15% over four years with no binding protections against AI or job cuts; rank-and-file anger erupted over the perceived betrayal.
Core analysis: The WSWS denounced the USW bureaucracy’s sellout and called for immediate formation of elected rank-and-file refinery committees to reject the deal, coordinate national strike, and use union assets to sustain prolonged action.
Royal Mail: The Communication Worker Union’s Martin Walsh attacked rank-and-file initiatives calling for nationwide fightback against the Optimised Delivery Model and asset-stripping, collaborating with EP Group management.
German Public Transport: Verdi leadership limited warning strikes over pay and conditions, negotiating incremental deals rather than escalating militant potential.
Pattern of Bureaucratic Containment
Teachers’ Unions Suppress Resistance: Teachers’ union bureaucracies issued directives forbidding participation in anti-fascist walkouts and protests, framing suppression under “student safety” and contractual pretexts.
Core analysis: Union bureaucracies act to preserve capitalist order by containing rank-and-file militancy and preventing cross-sector solidarity. Democratic rank-and-file committees are essential to defend educational professionals’ rights and broader anti-dictatorship mobilizations.
International Labour Developments
Mediterranean Dockworkers: Dockworkers across Mediterranean ports planned coordinated protests opposing use of port infrastructure for military logistics and arms shipments.
German Hospital Workers: Strikes and protests spread across regions over understaffing, wage stagnation, and cost-cutting as patient safety deteriorates.
University of Sheffield Lock-out: Management locked out staff adhering to action short of striking, withholding pay—an unprecedented enforcement of unpaid labor to punish industrial action.
V. Elite Criminality and Systemic Corruption
Epstein Files Expose Ruling Class Impunity
The DOJ released millions of Epstein-related documents revealing extensive elite contacts; the Trump White House sought to minimize revelations while DOJ downplayed prosecution prospects and redactions selectively protected prominent individuals. Materials implicated UK figures including Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew, threatening Starmer’s “clean-government” stance.
Core analysis: The files expose systemic criminality and class impunity at capitalism’s summit. The ruling class protects its own through legal cover-ups and media manipulation. Justice cannot be delivered by capitalist courts or parties; accountability requires mass political mobilization of the working class and dismantling oligarchic power.
Financial Oligarchy and Fed Appointment
Wall Street figures rallied to secure Kevin Warsh’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve, demonstrating fusion between state power and financial oligarchy. Central-bank appointments serve capitalist interests by stabilizing conditions for private profit rather than defending working-class living standards.
VI. Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Colombian President Petro’s Capitulation
Colombian President Gustavo Petro visited the White House for talks with Trump days after military threats related to Venezuela, signaling sharp realignment with pledges of collaboration, intelligence sharing, and economic cooperation.
Core analysis: Petro’s capitulation confirms the bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalist “lefts” attempting reforms within imperialist frameworks. His turn toward Washington facilitates US neocolonial objectives and suppresses independent working-class alternatives.
Costa Rica Election
A Trump-aligned, right-of-centre candidate won Costa Rica’s presidency, displacing traditional pink-tide forces and marking electoral weakness of reformist nationalist-left projects.
Core analysis: This exposes the failure of nationalist or reformist regimes to defend working-class interests; only independent socialist politics rooted in the working class can offer an anti-imperialist alternative.
Conclusion
The week’s developments confirm the WSWS analysis: capitalism’s crisis is driving simultaneous escalation toward imperialist war, consolidation of authoritarian rule, intensification of austerity, and explosion of working-class resistance. The central political question is leadership: will struggles be contained and betrayed by union bureaucracies and bourgeois parties (including their pseudo-left appendages), or will workers build independent, democratically controlled rank-and-file committees capable of coordinating international resistance?
The necessity of the hour is the construction of an international socialist movement of the working class, organized independently of all capitalist parties and union apparatuses, and guided by the program and perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only such a movement—linking healthcare workers, educators, refinery workers, dockworkers, students, and immigrant communities across national boundaries—can halt the drive to dictatorship and war, defend democratic rights and living standards, and open the road to socialist transformation of society.
Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The publication of “The Socialist”, the monthly digital magazine of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), represents a politically significant development in the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement in South Asia. It marks a conscious assertion of the international revolutionary perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and a decisive break from the nationalist and opportunist practices that have undermined the development of the Trotskyist movement in Sri Lanka.
The central task confronting the SLLA is to struggle for the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of the global fight waged by the ICFI. The launching of thesocialist.lk on March 11, 2023, was an initial step in developing a consistent Marxist analysis of political, economic, and cultural developments, and in educating workers and youth in the principles and program of world socialist revolution. Following the split in the SEP-Left in July 2024 and the expulsion of the nationalist faction that had abandoned the defense of Trotskyist principles and socialist internationalism, thesocialist.lk became the theoretical organ of the SLLA. The subsequent establishment of The Socialist magazine in October 2025 represents the further political and theoretical evolution of this work. As a development beyond the website, the magazine provides a structured, monthly forum for elaborating the perspectives of the ICFI, extending their reach among the urban working class, rural youth, and oppressed masses. It signifies not merely the continuation but the deepening of the fight to build revolutionary socialist leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia, inseparably linked to the international struggle of the ICFI for world socialist revolution.
The Socialist is not simply a new publication. It represents the crystallization of an internationalist Marxist orientation rooted in the recognition that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka and South Asia must be grounded in the global revolutionary strategy elaborated by the ICFI. It is the conscious effort of the SLLA to reestablish the Trotskyist political line—based on the historical lessons of the struggle against Pabloism and all forms of nationalist opportunism—and to intervene in the class struggle with theoretical clarity, class independence, and revolutionary optimism.
Historical Continuity: From the WSWS to The Socialist
The launching of The Socialist is historically and politically connected to the founding of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) by the ICFI in February 1998. As David North explained at the time, the WSWS was not merely a new publication but the product of profound theoretical and political clarification that emerged from the ICFI’s struggle against the opportunism of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain.
The WSWS arose from the recognition that the globalization of capitalist production—the integration of the world economy into a single productive system—had rendered all nationally limited political programs reactionary and obsolete. The epoch of globalized capitalism required the building of a world party of socialist revolution, unified by a single international perspective and program, capable of leading the struggles of workers across all national boundaries. The traditional forms of printed party press, limited by the constraints of national distribution, were inadequate to this new historical stage. The Internet, as the most advanced means of global communication, provided the ICFI with a powerful instrument to reach, educate, and politically unify the international working class.
The decision of the SLLA to launch The Socialist as a digital magazine continues and extends this internationalist orientation. It expresses the determination to utilize the most advanced forms of communication to bring Marxist theory, historical analysis, and revolutionary strategy to the broadest layers of workers and youth—particularly those isolated from political education by material deprivation, linguistic barriers, and the decades-long betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism, and trade union bureaucracies.
The Political Meaning of the Digital Form
The digital PDF (portable document format) or other e-book format of The Socialist is not merely a technical convenience but corresponds to profound social and technological transformations. It is rooted in an understanding of the objective changes in the material conditions of communication and the class struggle.
Over the past decade, the spread of mobile Internet technology and smartphones has reached deep into Sri Lankan and South Asian society. Even in remote rural areas, millions—including working-class mothers, students, and rural youth—regularly access and share digital documents through WhatsApp and other social media platforms. Educational materials, government documents, newspapers and instant news are increasingly circulated in digital form. This represents not simply technological change but a transformation in the means by which information and ideas are disseminated and consciousness is formed.
This development provides the material foundation for the SLLA to bring the program of the ICFI directly to workers, rural youth, and the oppressed masses. The Socialist can be read and shared instantly by thousands, overcoming barriers of geography, poverty, workplace restrictions, and the limitations of traditional print distribution networks and high costs. It creates the possibility for the revolutionary program of the international working class to reach social layers that have been politically dominated for decades by bourgeois nationalism, Stalinist and Maoist parties, trade union bureaucracies, and communalist politics.
However, it must be emphasized that technology itself is not politically neutral, until it remains under the control of the bourgeoisie. The spread of digital communication is a product of capitalist development—an expression of the extraordinary productive forces created by human labor under capitalism. But these same forces, which hold immense progressive potential, remain imprisoned within the capitalist system, serving its interests. The revolutionary use of technology requires conscious political directions based on Marxist theory and the fight for the independent interests of the working class.
In this regard, The Socialist bears immense political significance: it harnesses modern technology under the guidance of the Trotskyist program to educate and mobilize the working class and oppressed masses for the socialist transformation of society. In doing so, it directly advances the SLLA’s central strategic task—the building of the Socialist Equality Party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership—by forging a conscious revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural youth, peasantry, and oppressed middle-class layers1 under the leadership of the proletariat.
The Crisis of Leadership and the Failure of the RCL/SEP
The launching of The Socialist must be situated within the historical experience of the the Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) —above all, their failure to build a genuinely mass revolutionary party rooted in the working class and capable of winning the rural youth and oppressed masses to the revolutionary socialist program of the international working class. This historical deficit, rooted in political retreats and opportunist adaptations, underscores the decisive importance of The Socialist as an instrument for reestablishing the Marxist foundations of the movement and preparing a new generation for the tasks of revolutionary leadership.
During the critical period of 1987–1990—marked by mass youth upheaval in the South, civil war in the North and East, and state terror —the RCL confronted a decisive test. Despite formally defending the international program of the ICFI, the party failed to develop the necessary political and organizational strategy to reach and win over the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil— and oppressed layers to the Trotskyist program.
This failure was not primarily a question of tactical errors or insufficient resources. It flowed from a deeper pragmatic adaptation to the framework of national politics and a fundamental skepticism regarding the revolutionary capacity of the working class and rural masses of Sri Lanka and South Asia as a region of backward countries—a retreat from Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution back toward the very Menshevik conceptions against which that theory had been elaborated. The practice of the party leadership revealed an effective abandonment of the perspective that the working class in a backward, belated capitalist country such as Sri Lanka could lead the democratic and socialist revolution, replacing it with a passive expectation that socialist revolution must first triumph in the advanced capitalist centers before the workers of Sri Lanka, India or Bangladesh, for instance, could seize power—a regression to the pre-1905 schema that Trotsky had decisively refuted through his analysis of combined and uneven development under imperialism.
The theory of Permanent Revolution, verified by the experiences of the Russian Revolution and subsequent struggles in colonial and semi-colonial countries, establishes that in countries of belated capitalist development, the democratic and national tasks historically associated with bourgeois revolutions cannot be achieved under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie in such countries arrives on the historical stage too late, bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and terrified of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class and peasantry. Only the working class, leading the rural poor and oppressed masses, and linking the struggle for democratic rights to the fight for socialism on an international scale, can resolve the fundamental problems facing society.
The RCL’s failure to orient systematically toward the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil—flowed from an unprincipled adaptation to the nationalist political climate dominated by petty-bourgeois movements such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the South and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)2 in the North. The JVP, combining Sinhala chauvinism with violent hostility toward the working class, was able to build a mass base among disoriented and radicalized rural Sinhala youth precisely because the RCL had no sustained orientation or presence in these layers3. From 19834 onward, Sri Lankan politics and the class struggle—both in the North and South—were increasingly dominated and mediated by the unresolved Tamil national question, which the bourgeoisie exploited to divide the working class, militarize society, and suppress independent proletarian struggle. In the North and East, the RCL’s initial sympathizing with the LTTE— under the opportunist patronage of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which pressured sections of the ICFI to adapt to bourgeois-nationalist movements—constituted a political betrayal of the Tamil youth. By endorsing the LTTE’s claim to represent a ‘liberation movement’ for national self-determination of Tamils, and supporting a separate Tamil Eelam, the RCL ceded the leadership of oppressed Tamil youth to a petty-bourgeois-nationalist organization, which fought for a bourgeois program. The WRP’s uncritical support for the LTTE prevented any examination by the RCL of the politics of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups and thus helped to strengthen their influence among Tamil youth. Consequently, these political positions led to RCL’s failure to win Tamil youth of the North over to the revolutionary party, and, on the other hand, to earn the wrath of Sinhala rural youth of the South, who joined the JVP. In the early-1990s, the SEP leadership misleadingly claimed the ICFI’s rejection to support separatism—a 180-degree turn from the pre-1986 position—as an abandonment of the defence of the right of nations to ‘self-determination’, thus effectively refusing the essential content of this democratic right of the oppressed Tamil people. This further entrenched the loss of confidence of the Tamil youth, the poor and working people toward the SEP as a revolutionary party that could lead them to solve the national question.
This dual failure—its inability to penetrate the rural Sinhala youth and its capitulation to Tamil bourgeois nationalism—left the RCL unable to politically combat either the JVP or the LTTE, allowing both movements to fill the vacuum created by the RCL’s withdrawal from its revolutionary tasks. The consequences were bloody, and irrevocable. From the early 1990s onward, this crisis deepened, with SEP’s limited interventions—concentrated narrowly on the urban sections of the working class—being largely inadequate to gather a mass base in the working class. The traumatic legacy of JVP fascism and state terror, the massive global impact of the capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the protracted civil war that the bourgeoisie used to polarize the working class on communal lines, the rise of postmodern and anti-Marxist currents in academia that disoriented a generation of youth, the emergence and increasing influence of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left tendencies, and the consolidation of bourgeois nationalist and racialist parties over the rural masses and oppressed middle classes through electoral and parliamentary manoevers—all of these processes further isolated and demoralized the SEP leadership, leading to a lack of political confidence in the possibility of winning the working class and the oppressed middle-class youth to the program of Marxism, thereby accelerating its drift away from the mass movement of the working class and the oppressed5.
Historical legacy of petty-bourgeois radicalism and its pressure within the FI
This retreat of the RCL—and later the SEP—must be analyzed within the broader world-historical process that prepared the ground for revisionism within the Fourth International (FI) itself.
From the third decade of the twentieth century onward, the international working class suffered a series of catastrophic defeats arising from the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism: the Social Democratic betrayal that began with the vote for war credits in August 1914 and culminated in drowning the German November Revolution of 1918-1919 in blood; the failure of the German revolution in 1923; the defeat of the British General Strike in 1926; the catastrophic betrayal of the Chinese Revolution in 1927; and above all, the coming to power of Hitler in January 1933—a defeat that signified the definitive transformation of Stalinism into a counterrevolutionary force and necessitated the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
The post-World War II period witnessed the temporary restabilization of world capitalism through agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, the Marshall Plan, and the Bretton Woods system, which vastly expanded the field of operation for bourgeois nationalist movements and petty-bourgeois radical tendencies throughout the colonial world. Mao Zedong’s victory in China in 1949, achieved through peasant-based forces rather than the urban proletariat; the waves of decolonization bringing to power figures such as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah; the Cuban Revolution of 1959, where Castro’s guerrilla movement nationalized industry without a Trotskyist party or the conscious mobilization of the working class; the Vietnamese defeat of French and American imperialism under Stalinist leadership; and the proliferation of guerrilla movements throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia—all commanded enormous authority among radicalized workers, youth, and intellectuals, creating the illusion that socialism could be achieved through non-proletarian forces and rendering the Fourth International’s patient work of building revolutionary parties apparently sectarian and obsolete.
It was precisely this political climate that generated revisionist pressures within the Fourth International, culminating in Pabloism, which, as David North explains in The Heritage We Defend, represented “liquidationism all down the line”—the repudiation of the hegemony of the proletariat and the reduction of the Fourth International to a pressure group within Stalinist, Social Democratic, and bourgeois nationalist organizations, proclaiming that these forces would be compelled by objective circumstances to play a revolutionary role. The 1953 split led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) under James P. Cannon’s leadership in defense of orthodox Trotskyism.
Vladimir Lenin giving a speech in Moscow, Leon Trotsky is in the background (1920)
Although the International Committee waged a principled and historically vindicated struggle against Pabloite liquidationism, defending the theoretical and programmatic foundations of Trotskyism and insisting on the necessity of building independent revolutionary parties of the working class, individual sections within the ICFI— the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, which capitulated to Pabloism a decade later, reunifying with the Pabloites in 1963 on the basis of glorifying Castroism and thereby repudiating the entire historical and theoretical conception of socialist revolution developed by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) and subsequently the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, notwithstanding the political leaps forward achieved by the ICFI in a relentless and principled struggle against the betrayals of the opportunist leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Britain in late 1980s—proved vulnerable over time to the nationalist pressures and to the national consciousness of the working class and the petty-bourgeoisie, and resorted to practical adaptations to the existing political framework dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. This vulnerability manifested itself in RCL/SEP not through explicit programmatic revisionism—the party claimed to formally uphold the theory of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program—but rather through a growing disjuncture between the revolutionary principles embodied in official documents and the party’s concrete political practice and orientation.
The SEP leadership profoundly distorted the essential lessons drawn by the International Committee from its protracted struggle against the Workers Revolutionary Party’s national-opportunist degeneration. That struggle established that the political independence of the working class—the foundational principle of revolutionary Marxism reaffirmed through the battles against Pabloite liquidationism—demands the systematic construction of the revolutionary party as the conscious political leadership of the proletariat through active intervention in the class struggle, not the dissolution of that party into Stalinist, social democratic, or bourgeois nationalist formations. The WRP’s betrayal consisted precisely in the liquidation of independent revolutionary perspective into adaptation to alien class forces: it subordinated sections of the Fourth International to bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East and repudiated the theory of Permanent Revolution as the strategic foundation for building Trotskyist parties in the colonial and semi-colonial world. The SEP leadership, however, inverted the meaning of political independence. Where the WRP liquidated the party through opportunist alliances with non-proletarian forces, the SEP isolated the party from the working class and oppressed masses through sectarian abstention from the concrete work of party-building. They transformed political independence from a perspective demanding bold leadership in workers’ struggles—requiring systematic struggle to establish the party’s authority among workers, rural youth, plantation laborers, and the urban oppressed middle class through theoretical education combined with practical initiative in the class struggle—into a rationalization for passive propagandism divorced from systematic revolutionary work.
This gap between programmatic orthodoxy and revolutionary practice expressed itself in a retreat from the uncompromising struggle against Sinhala chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and bureaucratic trade unionism within the workers’ movement; a failure to build the party as a genuine mass organization rooted in the factories, plantations, working-class neighborhoods, and among the radicalized rural and unemployed youth of both North and South; and an abandonment of the systematic application of the Transitional Program to the concrete conditions facing the Sri Lankan proletariat and oppressed masses. This sectarian deviation—manifesting as passive commentary upon events rather than fighting for active leadership within them—represented an opportunist adaptation to the immense pressure exerted by decades of bourgeois nationalist hegemony over the Sri Lankan masses and the apparent authority of the petty-bourgeois radical movements and trade unions. The distorted lessons rationalized the party’s retreat from its historical responsibility to forge the political alliance of the Sinhalese and Tamil working class and rural poor under the banner of international socialism, thereby abandoning the struggle to establish the political independence of the Sri Lankan proletariat from the influence of all variants of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, and preparing the conditions for the party’s transformation into a propaganda circle incapable of leading the revolutionary struggles of the working class and oppressed rural toilers.
The Inverse form of National Opportunism of the RCL/SEP
The retreat from systematic work to build a mass revolutionary party among the rural youth and oppressed masses expressed, at its core, skepticism about the validity and applicability of the theory of Permanent Revolution to the conditions of Sri Lanka and South Asia. This erosion of perspective led not merely to tactical errors but to a profound strategic regression. In place of an active struggle to forge the political unity of the working class with the oppressed rural and middle layers under a single internationalist program, the leadership lapsed into passive propagandism—issuing programmatically orthodox statements in a ritualistic manner that substituted abstract formulations for concrete revolutionary practice—and thereby revealed a fundamentally sectarian character, divorcing Marxist theory and positions from their necessary embodiment in systematic intervention in the class struggle. The opportunist leadership which abandoned theoretical principles in practice, exposed its sectarian character by hiding behind theoretical orthodoxy, while refusing to engage in the concrete work of building the party among the masses.
Such a retreat constituted and opened the door to opportunist adaptations to the political environment dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces—a tendency that can be referred to as the inverse form6 of national opportunism, a type of passive opportunism peculiar to the leadership of a revolutionary party of a country of belated capitalist development. In practice, it meant yielding the initiative to the very revisionist and nationalist tendencies—shaped by decades of Stalinist, Maoist, Pabloite, and petty-bourgeois radical betrayals—that had disoriented and fragmented the revolutionary movement internationally. By abandoning a determined and irreconcilable struggle to apply the theory of Permanent Revolution to the concrete conditions of Sri Lanka, the SEP leadership steadily isolated itself from the working class and the oppressed masses, forfeiting their political confidence and, thereby perpetuating its own stagnation and compounding its political degeneration and internal putrefaction.
The SEP’s inadequate intervention in working-class struggles— in the backdrop of growing intensification of class struggles in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of an international phenomenon—flowed from its retreat from systematic struggle to build independent revolutionary organization in the factories, plantations, and workplaces. The trade union bureaucracy—controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that subordinate workers to nationalist politics—functions as the organizational instrument through which the nationalist political climate dominates the working class. The SEP’s historical failure to build revolutionary alternatives—independent rank-and-file action committees— in the workplaces meant workers remained under the ideological and organizational stranglehold of these bureaucratic apparatuses, which systematically block unified, independent class action and reinforce reformist illusions and ethnic divisions. This is a further manifestation of inverse opportunism: not adaptation to the bureaucracy through collaboration, but accommodation to its dominance through the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work among the workers themselves.
The Theoretical and Political Foundations of the SLLA
The SLLA was formed precisely to overcome this legacy of nationalist opportunism and political passivity. Its work is based on a return to the fundamental principles of Trotskyism—the theory of Permanent Revolution, proletarian internationalism, and the necessity of building the independent revolutionary party of the working class.
Central to this work is the understanding that the socialist revolution in Sri Lanka cannot be completed within a national framework. The Sri Lankan economy, like all economies in the epoch of imperialism, is integrated into the world capitalist system. The crises confronting workers and oppressed masses—economic collapse, social inequality, authoritarian rule—are manifestations of the global crisis of capitalism. Their resolution requires the international unity of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.
This means that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka is inseparable from the struggles of workers in India, throughout South Asia, and internationally. It requires breaking the working class from all forms of nationalism—Sinhala, Tamil, or any other communal identity—and uniting workers across ethnic, religious, and national lines on the basis of common class interests.
It also requires forging a revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural poor, agricultural workers, impoverished peasants, and oppressed middle-class layers. This is not a question of tailoring the socialist program to accommodate the prejudices or limited outlook of these layers, but of systematically explaining how their fundamental interests can only be achieved through socialist revolution led by the working class.
The rural masses in Sri Lanka and South Asia face deepening immiseration—landlessness, indebtedness, destruction of traditional livelihoods, and rural unemployment. These are not isolated “rural problems” but expressions of the crisis of world capitalism and the subordination of agriculture to the profit interests of agribusiness monopolies and imperialism. The solution lies not in nationalist or populist programs of land reform or rural development within capitalism, but in the socialist reorganization of agriculture as part of a rationally planned economy under workers’ control.
Similarly, educated youth from rural and small-town backgrounds—products of the expansion of public education who confront unemployment, poverty wages, and social dead-ends—represent a potentially revolutionary force. The recent Gen-Z protest movements testified to their revolutionary potential. Without the intervention of a revolutionary party armed with Marxist theory, this discontent and radicalism is channeled into reactionary nationalist, religious fundamentalist, or fascistic movements, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.
The SLLA’s orientation to these layers is not based on romantic glorification of the peasantry or petty-bourgeoisie—the hallmark of Maoist, populist, and Pabloite revisionism. It is based on sober Marxist analysis: these layers, objectively ruined by capitalism and incapable of independent political action, can play a progressive historical role only under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party, fighting for a socialist program.
The Socialist as an Instrument of Revolutionary Education
The Socialist is a central instrument in this political reorientation. By systematically disseminating the perspectives of the ICFI, historical analyses of past struggles, and Marxist analysis of contemporary political and economic developments, it aims to educate a new generation of revolutionary cadre and raise the political consciousness of broader layers of workers and youth.
The magazine’s digital format ensures that this material reaches precisely those layers the RCL and SEP failed to reach systematically—rural youth, oppressed middle-class layers, and workers isolated from traditional centers of political organization. Through The Socialist and theSocialist.lk the SLLA works to:
Clarify the class nature of the economic and social crises confronting the masses and expose the bankruptcy of all nationalist, populist, and reformist solutions;
Educate workers and youth in the historical lessons of the struggle for Trotskyism—particularly the fight against Pabloism and the defense of the theory of Permanent Revolution;
Analyze contemporary political developments, mainly of Sri Lanka and other countries of South Asia, from the standpoint of the interests of the international working class;
Counter the influence of bourgeois, Stalinist, and petty-bourgeois pseudo-left ideologies;
Build political bridges between the revolutionary party (SEP) and the broader masses of the oppressed classes.
This is not propaganda in the abstract sense, divorced from the living class struggle. It is education combined with revolutionary intervention—the development of Marxist consciousness as an essential component of building the revolutionary party and preparing the working class for the seizure of power.
Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Revolutionary Education
The rapid development of Internet technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—more accurately understood as augmented intelligence— presents both opportunities and challenges for the revolutionary movement. AI systems—products of collective human labor and scientific knowledge accumulated over generations—express the enormous productive capacities developed under capitalism. However, like all productive forces under capitalism, in the hands of the capitalist class, they exist in contradiction with the social relations of private property and are employed primarily for profit extraction, the automation of jobs to increase unemployment and drive down wages, mass surveillance, the development of weapons of mass destruction, and the generation of sophisticated propaganda. The tech monopolies that control AI development guard their systems as private property, extracting enormous profits while workers who produce the data and perform the labor that makes AI possible are driven into poverty.
For the revolutionary movement, advances in AI technology have opened a new epoch in revolutionary education, translation, archiving, international communication, and organization. These tools make possible the rapid translation of ICFI documents into multiple languages, support deep historical research and rigorous analysis, and vastly expand the capacity to disseminate Marxist literature to workers and youth across the globe.
However, the use of AI technology must be under the conscious direction and intervention of the revolutionary party, guided by Marxist theory, not subordinated to the logic of capitalist technology companies or based on techno-utopian illusions. The decisive factor is not the technology itself but the political program and class perspective that guides its use.
The SLLA’s use of digital publication for The Socialist is thus part of a broader Marxist approach: utilizing advanced productive forces developed by human labor to advance the consciousness and organization of the working class for the revolutionary transformation of society.
It is on this perspective that the SLLA welcomes the launch of “Socialism AI,” the artificial-intelligence platform developed by the ICFI as a decisive and enormous advance in the political education and intellectual arming of the international working class7.
Building the World Party: Internationalism in Practice
The Socialist must be understood as part of the world press of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Its initial publication in Sinhala is another important step in building the revolutionary press that transcends national and linguistic divisions. Future editions in Tamil and English will extend its reach throughout South Asia, strengthening the political unity of the working class across ethnic and national lines.
The fundamental principle remains that stated by Trotsky in ‘Open Letter for the Fourth International: To All Revolutionary Working-Class Organizations and Groups’ (1935): “Under all conditions, especially during a revolution, it is impermissible to turn one’s back upon the toilers for the sake of a bloc with the bourgeoisie. It is impossible to expect and demand that the duped and disillusioned masses will fly to take up arms upon the belated call of a party in which they have lost confidence. The proletarian revolution is not improvised by the orders of a bankrupt leadership. The revolution must be prepared through incessant and irreconcilable class struggle, which gains for the leadership the unshakable confidence of the party, fuses the vanguard with the entire class, and transforms the proletariat into the leader of all the exploited in the city and countryside.”
This means, in accordance with the theory of Permanent Revolution and its application to the conditions prevailing in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia:
Recognizing that in countries of belated capitalist development such as Sri Lanka, the bourgeoisie has demonstrated its absolute incapacity to resolve the fundamental democratic tasks—the national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, and the establishment of genuine social and democratic rights. Only the working class, leading the oppressed rural masses, can achieve these historically necessary transformations, which must inevitably grow over into the socialist revolution.
Rejecting categorically all conceptions of intermediate stages between bourgeois rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Between the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe regime and workers’ power, between the bankrupt programs of the JVP, Front Line Socialist Party (FSP) and pseudo-left, and the revolutionary Marxist program of the ICFI, there exists no middle ground. The alliance of the working class with the peasantry, the rural toilers and the oppressed middle-classes can be realized only through irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national bourgeoisie and all forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism.
Exposing the reactionary and historically exhausted character of all nationalist ideologies—Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and every variety of communalism and identity politics—as programmes that subordinate the working class to rival factions of the capitalist class and imperialism, thereby blocking the path to the resolution of both the democratic and socialist tasks.
Understanding that the democratic demands of the masses—for national equality, land reform, an end to autocratic rule, and social justice—cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. In the epoch of capitalist decay, democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs but stem directly from one another. The slogans for the democratic aspirations of the masses, must be indissolubly connected to the struggle for workers’ power and the expropriation of capitalist property.
Forging the unity of Sri Lankan workers with Indian workers and the working class throughout South Asia and internationally, on the basis of a common revolutionary program. The tasks confronting the Sri Lankan working class—from resisting IMF austerity to defending democratic rights—are inseparable from the struggles of workers across the region against their own exploiters and the global system of imperialism.
Building the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) and the sections of the ICFI throughout South Asia as genuine mass revolutionary parties—rooted in the working class, leading the rural masses and oppressed middle classes, armed with the programme of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Programme—capable of leading the coming revolutionary struggles to victory under conditions of deepening imperialist crisis and intensifying class struggle.
The tens of thousands of youth who have recently demonstrated through the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka and similar mass movements in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere their readiness to challenge corrupt regimes must be won to an understanding that their democratic and social aspirations can be realized only through the socialist revolution led by the working class. This requires the patient development of socialist consciousness through systematic political education, theoretical clarification, and the building of revolutionary organization—not capitulation to spontaneism, petty-bourgeois radicalism, or the illusion that the masses can achieve their aims without overthrowing capitalism and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
A Return to Permanent Revolution
The launching of The Socialist marks a conscious political correction of the nationalist deviations that undermined the work of the RCL and SEP. It expresses renewed confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class and oppressed masses in these countries, based not on wishful thinking but on Marxist analysis of the objective crisis of world capitalism and the necessity of socialist revolution. The fight against the inverse form of national opportunism requires not simply an organizational turn to intense daily work in the class struggle, but first and foremost a definite and conscious return to the programme of permanent revolution and the principles upon which the Fourth International was founded.
By employing digital technology to overcome barriers between urban and rural, between different linguistic communities, between the working class and oppressed middle-class layers, the SLLA works to realize in practice the Marxist conception that socialist revolution is an international process uniting all oppressed layers under the leadership of the proletariat and its revolutionary party.
The Socialist, along with theSocialist.lk website, thus stands as both a theoretical and practical instrument in the fight to build the ICFI sections in South Asia, educate a new generation of Trotskyist cadre, and prepare the working class for the revolutionary struggles that will decide the future of humanity. It reaffirms the living continuity of Trotskyism in the twenty-first century and represents a decisive step forward in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia.
Join SLLA! Build SEP!
ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, A letter from David North to Keerthi Balasuriya, 25 September 1987. ↩︎
“The LSSP’s degeneration had profound political consequences. By abandoning the struggle to unify workers on a socialist perspective, the LSSP left the working class and oppressed masses with no alternative to communalist politics and directly contributed to the rise of racially-based organisations—petty bourgeois formations such as the LTTE and the Sinhala chauvinist JVP in the south.” Wije Dias, ‘The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka replies to a supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, WSWS (29 September 2000) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/09/ltte-s29.html ↩︎
ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, Contribution by David North at RCL Congress, 6-9 November 1990. ↩︎
The state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom took place at the end of July 1983, which triggered the intensification of racist civil war that lasted till May 2009. ↩︎
A forthcoming series of essays by the SLLA will illustrate these historical truths in greater detal. ↩︎
This retreat into adaptation to the national political climate, in place of building independent revolutionary leadership of the masses, constitutes an inverse form of opportunism because this peculiar tendency manifests specifically in revolutionary leadership of backward countries—countries of belated capitalist development where the bourgeoisie, arriving late to the historical stage under imperialist domination, proves organically incapable of resolving the democratic tasks (national independence, agrarian revolution, democratic rights, resolution of national oppression) that it accomplished in classical bourgeois revolutions. Sri Lanka exemplifies such a backward country in Trotsky’s theoretical sense: capitalist development occurred under colonial subjugation and continues under neo-colonial subordination to imperialism and the world market; the national bourgeoisie, tied to imperialism and terrified of the masses, cannot resolve the Tamil national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, or establish genuine democracy and independence. These unresolved democratic questions consequently dominate the political terrain, creating conditions where, as Trotsky demonstrated, democratic and socialist tasks interpenetrate rather than separating into historical stages. Under these specific conditions—exemplified throughout South Asia—inverse opportunism emerges as a systematic pattern: the revolutionary party retreats from building systematic organization among radicalized rural youth (allowing the JVP and LTTE to dominate); retreats from systematic intervention in working-class struggles (leaving workers under the stranglehold of trade union bureaucracies controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that enforce ethnic divisions and reformist illusions); and oscillates between opportunist adaptation to petty-bourgeois nationalist movements and sectarian isolation from the democratic struggles of the masses. In each manifestation, the common thread is the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work to build independent proletarian leadership—a retreat that accommodates the nationalist political climate not through active collaboration with opportunist forces, but through organizational passivity that allows bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies to dominate the working class and oppressed masses. National opportunism is the abandonment of proletarian, international strategy in favour of alliances with political reliance upon bourgeois, petty‑bourgeois or nationalist forces inside a given country or region. In the case of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Healy, Banda and later Slaughter, degeneration into this took concrete form as a consistent substitution of proletarian independence by collaboration with bourgeois regimes, nationalists and even reactionary state actors. ↩︎
In order to enhance Socialism AI with the complete historical record of the political work of the RCL/SEP, the SLLA proposes to feed the system with digital copies of the complete volumes of Kamkaru Mawatha, the propaganda newspaper of the RCL/SEP published from 1972 to 1998 . ↩︎
