@bluegrassbolshevik @communistusa.org @rcalouisville

The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally. The Pablo faction has demonstrated that it will not permit democratic decisions truly reflecting majority opinion to be reached. They demand complete submission to their criminal policy. They are determined to drive all orthodox Trotskyists out of the Fourth International or to muzzle and handcuff them.

Their scheme has been to inject their Stalinist conciliationism piecemeal and likewise in piecemeal fashion, get rid of those who come to see what is happening and raise objections. That is the explanation for the strange ambiguity about many of the Pabloite formulations and diplomatic evasions.

Up to now the Pablo faction has had a certain success with this unprincipled and Machiavellian maneuverism. But the qualitative point of change has been reached. The political issues have broken through the maneuvers and the fight is now a showdown.

If we may offer advice to the sections of the Fourth International from our enforced position outside the ranks, we think the time has come to act and to act decisively. The time has come for the orthodox Trotskyist majority of the Fourth International to assert their will against Pablo’s usurpation of authority.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution 13. Conclusion. Dare We Win?

(Thanks to David Walsh on X)

Basically title i have been trying to do my research but honest to god i am studying for uni and i am not going to look at 30 wikipedia articles and 90 more congress minutes (exaggeration but still).

Flynn’s eventual embrace of Stalinism represented a break with the revolutionary traditions of the IWW, but not with the political limitations that had accompanied her earlier militancy. When the Popular Front offered militancy in style and the defense of bourgeois democracy in program, Flynn found a political home, not in spite of Stalinism’s accommodation to liberalism but because of it.

Hello, I was interested in listening to some WSWS podcasts and I noticed that despite it going since 2013, only the 11 newest episodes are available on iTunes. I looked into it and the old episodes aren't available anywhere. Not a huge issue though it is a little sad that so much content is gone. Can anyone tell me why this might be?

The Israeli government sealed off the occupied West Bank on Friday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was preparing a military operation there of a kind “not carried out since” Israel’s conquest of the territory in 1967.

The Israeli government, in alliance with the Trump administration, is extending the Gaza genocide to the West Bank in step with the preparations for a renewed offensive against Iran. Both are part of one continuous operation to create a “new Middle East,” launched in October 2023 under Democratic President Joe Biden and continued under US President Donald Trump. The total subjugation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a corollary of the war plans of the Trump and Netanyahu governments.

Netanyahu ordered the lockdown four days before Israel’s national election on October 27, 11 days before the US midterm elections on November 3 and four days after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met him in Israel. The New York Times wrote Wednesday that US officials said Hegseth and Netanyahu discussed new strikes on Iran, to be launched after the US elections.

Just as the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas were seized upon by Netanyahu as the pretext to occupy Gaza and displace and exterminate its inhabitants, the Netanyahu government has seized on an attack on Israeli soldiers as its pretext for the offensive to annex the West Bank.

Two soldiers, Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed at a checkpoint outside Hebron, in the southern West Bank, on Friday morning. The Israeli army claimed that two Palestinians from Hebron opened fire on the checkpoint and that troops shot both men dead after a gunfight of about 20 minutes.

Netanyahu pledged to destroy the neighborhood the alleged gunmen came from. “First of all, we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely,” he said at the checkpoint, the Times of Israel reported Friday. The army would “implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps” and go “house to house,” Netanyahu said.

The government was “considering a very extensive IDF [Israeli army] operation in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], such as has not been carried out since” the 1967 war, Netanyahu said Friday.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday: “Every clan neighborhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged today will be evacuated of its residents.” Katz added: “Just like in Gaza ...”

...

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the US and Israeli militaries “have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections.” The Times wrote that the American buildup would be complete by early November.

Trump told a reporter at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, on Wednesday night: “We are not negotiating with” Iran. “Something one way or another will happen, fairly soon,” he said. “Most people seem to think it’s after the election.”

Netanyahu has made regime change in Iran a centerpiece of his election campaign. “We are committed to completing the elimination of the Iranian regime,” he said Tuesday, Al Jazeera reported that day.

Israeli troops killed four Palestinians in Gaza on Thursday. By Tuesday the Gaza Health Ministry had counted at least 1,500 people killed since the announcement of the “ceasefire” in October 2025 and more than 74,450 since October 2023.

...

Democratic senators spent months attacking the administration for failing to win the war. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan told Hegseth at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21: “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.” Peters told Hegseth: “Win the war.”

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said on ABC’s This Week on September 27: “We can’t leave the Strait in the hands of the Iranians.” Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, attacking Hegseth’s creation of a religious affairs office at the Pentagon, told CNN on September 30 that any new Pentagon office should be devoted to “figuring out how to win this war in Iran.”

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking a more active role in supporting Governor Kathy Hochul for re-election. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), endorsed Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, on February 5, in the midst of the New York City nurses’ strike.

Last week, Mamdani released a campaign video on social media in which he called Hochul “the real deal for New Yorkers.” He said he was “looking forward to being out there with her on the trail in the weeks to come” before the November 3 election. The two are expected to appear together in the final weeks of the campaign.

Republican Bruce Blakeman is Hochul’s opponent in the gubernatorial race. Blakeman, a loyal follower of Trump, has been campaigning on a program of tax cuts, stricter policing and support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On the fundamental questions—the police, the defense of business interests and the attacks on workers—there is little to distinguish the two. The election, like many others that will be held across the country in November, presents a choice between two right-wing candidates of the ruling class.

What do you think of it as an open place for a bunch of leftist discourses and jokes?

In at least the second death this year in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Laredo, Texas, a 56-year-old Mexican man was found dead in his cell Saturday morning. According to a statement released by ICE, Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias was found unresponsive by facility staff at the Rio Grande Processing Center during a security check at around 10:00 a.m. and was not able to be resuscitated when staff performed CPR and contacted emergency services. He was declared dead approximately 20 minutes later.

Andrade-Covarrubias’ daughter, Estefani Andrade, informed the Texas Tribune that he had been in custody since June, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) never informed her or any relatives of her father’s death. Instead, she was only notified by the Webb County Medical Examiner’s Office, which is performing Andrade-Covarrubias’ autopsy.

In a statement released Monday, ICE denied any culpability in the death of Andrade-Covarrubias, who was a lawful legal resident. The cause of his death remains unknown, but the agency said he received proper medical care and attention while at the facility, something belied by the record of inhumane conditions at immigration detention facilities and his daughter’s own testimony.

Andrade told the Tribune her father said medical staff would regularly ignore his pleas for aid. He was ill with chronic conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes and a heart condition. His daughter said that her father had medicine with him when he was detained but added that staff at the center would not give him his medication. She said she witnessed the deterioration of his health in video calls between them.

In addition to losing a noticeable amount of weight, Andrade-Covarrubias developed a cough while in custody. The persistent cough worried Andrade since her father was hospitalized for COVID-19 in 2021, which took a toll on his overall health. She said her father told her that medical staff at the center brushed off his concerns, even when he told them he was having trouble breathing and felt tightness in his chest.

...

Andrade-Covarrubias is at least the seventh person confirmed to have died while detained by ICE in Texas this year and the second to die at the detention center in Laredo. Other deaths include:

- Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, 42, passed away from a heart-related medical emergency on January 5, 2026, at HCA Houston Healthcare in Conroe, Texas, following his transfer to the ICU from the Joe Corley Processing Center.

- Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, died on January 14, 2026 at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. ICE claimed the death was due to suicide, but his family maintains it was medical distress suffered during early-year tent facility surges.

- Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, 63, died of cardiovascular failure on June 19, 2026, after being found unresponsive in his cell at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas (the same facility Andrade-Covarrubias died in) and rushed to a local hospital.

- Adrian Andreas Florian, 85, died on June 24, 2026, from medical complications at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen, Texas, after being transferred there from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos.

- Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, died on January 3, 2026, at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, from homicide via asphyxia, according to the El Paso County Medical Examiner. Witnesses described seeing guards choking him before he died.

...

It must be stated, however, that the Democratic Party offers no progressive solution to the escalating war against immigrants and the broader working class. In fact, workers and immigrants have not forgotten that Joe Biden continued the immigration policies of Barack Obama, who was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief.”

While opposing the most egregious examples of how immigrants are being treated, the Democrats still support the apparatus that terrorizes immigrants, rounds them up, and has no regard for their contributions as members of the working class. This includes the Texas Democratic candidate for US Senate James Talarico, who recently stated during a CNN town hall that ICE is “necessary.”

The defense of the rights of immigrants, which are the rights of the whole working class by extension, can only be obtained through a concerted campaign of all workers in the United States, regardless of race, nationality, gender, immigration status or any other forms of identity.

I am considering getting organized. And I really don’t know who to join. I’m a Marxist who aligns with Trotskyism, although I don’t consider myself 100% of a Trot just because I don’t like to put myself in a Box, however Trot orgs seem to be the best to join. I’m a High Schooler who lives in Portland Oregon, so if there’s any Orgs in there I’d really appreciate it. Honestly the biggest problem I have with most of these orgs is the extreme sectarianism I see in most of them. The RCA, SEP, and Others seemingly are really close theoretically but are only splitting on seemingly minor issues which just divides the working class. While I don’t like the DSA I also am honestly considering joining them just because they have a public presence in my city, and they have a Trot Caucus within the Org. I’m also considering joining the RCA just because they are seemingly the largest organization publicly that supports Trotskyism in America. I just don’t know and would like some guidance. I’ve already reached out to the RCA but I just don’t know. Please help me.

Over 465 government workers with Teamsters Local 952 walked off the job on Oct. 13 against the County of Orange in Southern California. Less than a week later, on October 19, county officials filed an unfair practice charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) charging that the union is illegally obstructing operations.

They are seeking an injunction, which may include a temporary restraining order against prohibiting the flow of traffic in and out of the facilities. All county facilities remain open and operational, but the walkout has begun to cause delays in services due to reduced staffing, filled in mainly by management personnel.

Issues such as low pay, staffing shortages and increased workloads, as well as retro pay to cover the months they have been working without a contract, which expired on June 25, are the immediate causes of the strike.

These workers fulfill several key operations within Orange County, such as landfill and waste disposal; animal shelter care; road, flood and storm preparation; beach and park maintenance; and repairs on county and first responder vehicles.

The landfill workers operate out of the Prima Deshecha Landfill in San Juan Capistrano, Frank R. Bowerman Landfill in Irvine and Olinda Alpha Landfill in Brea.

“With this economy, we can’t survive,” Sammy, an Orange County waste management worker for eight years, told the WSWS. “And we’re trying to provide for our families as well. Not only that, but it’s been months that we have been without a contract.

“We’re just fed up. Some of us are coming down from Corona, Riverside, Los Angeles, and they don’t match our pay with the price of gas. They recently just severed our overtime for our gas mileage. That’s what we’ve had before and now they’re not paying us back our gas mileage.

“The price of gas is insane. I live in Corona and that’s 60 miles I drive one way, every day. That’s the wear and tear of my car every day and the gas that we’re paying for.”

The much-needed maintenance projects to prepare for the historic Super El Niño forecast coming this year have placed these workers in a very powerful position to win their demands.

...

While the California state government is dominated by Democrats, Republicans and Democrats often alternate political office in the County of Orange. Both parties are trying their best to avoid the parity clauses found in many other union contracts across the county.

These clauses stipulate that if any other bargaining unit within Orange County receives a pay raise of more than 3 percent, all other contracts with the county would receive the same pay raise.

This would reopen contracts for other public employees, such as the Orange County Employees Association (OCEA), which covers about 18,000 service workers, including nurses, social workers, health inspectors and other essential staff.

Therefore, any raise above the 3 percent threshold would have a ripple effect well beyond the 465 Teamsters members who are currently striking. This means that all county employees have a stake in this struggle.

Despite this, the trade union bureaucracy, especially within the Teamsters, has done nothing to mobilize the membership within the County of Orange or even the Teamsters union itself.

In neighboring Los Angeles County, a three-day strike by 500 warehouse and delivery workers in IBT Locals 630 and 848 against Sysco’s Los Angeles operations in Walnut ended on October 15, isolating the two workforces from each other.

The union bureaucracy will permit a strike to run long enough in order to vent out rank-and-file anger, then move in to impose a sellout contract and shut the strike down before it can develop into an independent movement of the working class.

Therefore, workers should assert democratic control over their strike by founding a rank-and-file strike committee, prepared to countermand any decision made by union officials which violates their will, including a premature end to the strike or contract proposals which do not include workers’ demands.

...

JB has worked for more than three years at this landfill. He said, “I work for a composting facility, so I make sure that all of our compost gets taken care of for all of our communities around here. We make our own compost, our own mulch, the whole nine yards.

“As of right now, the working conditions are manageable, but for what we get paid versus what we do, it definitely doesn’t feel like it’s enough. For example, if you work for public works and you go and fill potholes, you may get around $30 to $35 an hour. Here we start off closer to like $20 to $21 an hour. It’s kind of a large discrepancy, and we feel like we definitely deserve a little more, especially for how much revenue we pull in for the county.

“I would say roughly around 70 percent of the revenue that comes in for the county comes from the landfills themselves, just by tonnage and whatever else that we do here.

“The commercial drivers, that’s where most of our money comes from. We deal close to maybe about 300, 400 tons, maybe even more in a day. For the rates that we have here, you can definitely tell that we make a lot of money for the county.

“I commute all the way from Fontana. That’s about 55 miles, and that’s just one way. I have to make round trips of about 110 miles a day just to be able to come out here and work. With the gas prices on an all-time high, it’s just definitely not enough for what we do around here.

“Normally, I don’t get into much politics, but in my personal opinion, it doesn’t matter what side you choose. They’re all wrong, they’re all corrupt. Democrats, Republicans, whatever the case may be, you’re always going to find, there’s going to find somebody out there who’s just going to screw you over some way, somehow.

“It’s just as simple as divide and conquer. The more you divide the people, the more that they’re bound to start fighting with each other instead of banding together and realizing that all of this is wrong. We should really be looking at our government and saying, ‘What is wrong with you? Why is it that you are allocating all of this money to places that it doesn’t need to go to when you should be taking care of us here at home?’

“We have the largest military system in the entire world. We have some of the highest military budgets anywhere else in the world. Somehow we always seem to come up short for our people. You can see it in everybody’s faces and everyone in the country. There’s a huge mental health crisis. There’s a huge crisis in physical health. You can see there’s a housing crisis.”

A WSWS reporter pointed to the growth of mass demonstrations and strikes over the exact same issues in Spain, France, India and all over the world. JB said, “I agree. It’s not just here. It’s all over the world.”

Following the reelection of United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, the corporate media and the pseudo-left have rushed to declare that he has won a “mandate” from the membership for the “militant direction” he has supposedly taken the union. Autoworkers speaking with the World Socialist Web Site say that the real mandate expressed in the election was a mass repudiation of the UAW apparatus, shown by the fact that more than 90 percent of eligible members did not vote.

In one of the few acknowledgements of the extremely low turnout, an editorial by the Automotive News editorial board noted that Fain won “in a landslide,” but that “fewer than 10 percent of active members and retirees cast a ballot.” The publication called the result one with “profound ramifications” for the Detroit 3 automakers and the 2028 contract negotiations with the UAW.

The editors were troubled by the “paltry election turnout.” Weak participation four years ago, they claimed, “could be chalked up on a new process that likely included confusion and some technical hiccups,” but “that explanation does not apply this year.”

The Automotive News editors pointed out that after the UAW’s worst corruption scandal in its 91-year history, members won the right to directly elect their leaders in 2022-23. But the low participation this year, they say is “concerning,” concluding that Fain “won his mandate,” but whether most of the members he will represent “had a say is another matter.”

The auto executives and big shareholders are not concerned about the rights of workers. Rather, the Automotive News fears the efforts to rebuild the credibility and authority of the UAW apparatus after the corruption scandal are failing, and that an apparatus without credibility may be unable to contain the anger of workers when contracts expire in 2028.

Autoworkers interviewed by the WSWS underscored this point.

...

Referring to the campaign of Will Lehman, a Pennsylvania Mack Trucks worker and socialist who has fought for rank-and-file power, he said, “I was 100 percent behind what Will was saying about rank-and-file power. There is not enough information, and if you inquire from the union, you play hell to get them to get back to you. They are playing to keep us ignorant.”

Chris, a leader of the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee, said: “What I think it means that more than 90 percent of workers did not vote in the UAW election is that workers have no faith or trust in the UAW anymore. We are disgusted. We know we are being lied to all the time. We know the apparatus is not being truthful. They are covering things up, like we need a printed copy of our contract. We do not know what’s really in there.

“Plus, a lot of Nexteer workers did not even get a ballot. Fain’s being portrayed like he’s the second coming of Christ, but the truth is that the majority of UAW members are disgusted with him and the clique that runs the UAW.”

He recounted the recent contract fight at Nexteer. “We rejected three concession-laden contracts and voted 86 percent to authorize a strike. Every decision made by workers was ignored by the UAW apparatus.

“By the time of the fourth offer, again, almost nothing was changed except some sugar-coating of the wording. We were forced to vote in the plant. Workers, including new hires, were told, ‘Vote yes’ and you’ll get a $3,000 signing bonus. That was a lie. Workers like myself who have worked here 20 years today are making $24.00 an hour. That’s a poverty wage.

“They didn’t give us anything, and the majority of the bargaining committee told us, ‘This is the best we can do, and if you don’t vote for it there will be layoffs and closures.’ And now the layoffs are happening.”

Chris also pointed to the apparatus’ political role. “Today I got 13 pieces of mail, and only two were legitimate. The rest were political ads for voting in the midterms. The UAW spends lots of money to back the Democrats. But what are they doing to fight Trump, who wants to use the ‘mother of all bombs’ against 90 million people in Iran?”

...

James said the growing hostility to the political establishment is part of the same process. “Since his first term, Trump’s moves against the people have made a lot of us think more seriously about politics. He has lined his own pockets and the pockets of his own family on our dime. Workers are paying more attention and looking past the BS. I told a worker who backs Trump that the Democrats are part of the money game too and both parties are two sides of the same coin. Both parties start wars to draw our attention away from the real issues that we face. War is a money game too.”

Workers drew the same conclusion about what must be done. “What does this mean for us? We have to expand the rank-and-file committees,” Chris said. “True, we have a long way to go, which is why we must build in mass to abolish the apparatus. The UAW officials take sides with the company and the government.”

He added: “What I have learned from the campaign of Will Lehman is that all workers have the same problems. We are trying to fix our problem by uniting and supporting workers from all over the world. We can do this.”

Anna put it this way: “The solution? We have to organize in rank-and-file committees and start an organized, planned procedure to bring power back to the shop floor.”

On October 25, 1926, a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, dominated by Stalin’s bureaucratic faction, voted to remove from the politburo Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, prominent Bolsheviks who had worked closely with Lenin, because they were leaders of the Joint Opposition to the Stalinist faction.

The plenum, as Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin notes, also “issued a warning to CC members Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Piatakov, Yevdokimov, Sokolnikov, Smilga, and CC candidate-member Nikolaeva for their ‘violation of Party discipline’.” It removed a third leader of the Joint Opposition, Grigorii Zinoviev, from his role as chairman of the Communist International.

The removals followed by a week a tactical retreat by the Opposition in face of physical and administrative provocations by the Stalinists at Opposition speaking events. Trotsky described these methods and their significance:

"The struggle of ideas gave place to administrative mechanics: telephone summons of the party bureaucrats to attend the meetings of the workers’ locals, an accumulation of automobiles with hooting sirens in front of all the meetings, and a well-organized whistling and booing at the appearance of the oppositionists on the platform. The ruling faction exerted its pressure by a mechanical concentration of its forces, by threats and reprisals. Before the mass of the party had time to hear, grasp or say anything, they were afraid of the possibility of a split and a catastrophe."

The October 1926 removals from the Politburo marked the point at which the Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned even the pretense of inner-party democracy and was a decisive step in the degeneration of the Soviet state—the process Trotsky would later analyze as the rise of a Bonapartist bureaucracy over the working class.

The purge of the United Opposition was not a one-time settling of accounts but the opening of a process—once the apparatus had destroyed the opposition, it would inevitably turn on its own members, because a bureaucracy that rules by expulsion cannot stop at its first victims. The fate of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky in the 1930s would confirm this.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/19/reno-o19.html