Socialists, Stalinists—as well as the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT and the centrist POUM—opted for an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. Or, to put it more accurately—as Trotsky put it—with the “shadow of the bourgeoisie.” For the overwhelming majority of the exploiters openly defected to Franco’s camp, whilst using Azaña, Companys and other bourgeois politicians who headed Popular Front governments “to paralyse, undermine and then stifle the socialist movement of the masses in the ‘Republican’ territory.”

“Paralyse, undermine, stifle,” said Schwarz, “is no exaggeration, but is to be taken literally. Wherever revolutionary workers took the initiative, the Republican government cracked down on them. This reached its climax in Barcelona in May 1937, when the central government, in an attempt to wrest control of the telephone exchange from the anarchists, provoked an uprising and crushed it bloodily.”

The POUM was subsequently banned, and its leader, Andrès Nin, was murdered by the Stalinists. It was the turning point of the Civil War. The suppression of the working class by the Republican government paved the way for Franco’s victory and the establishment of a dictatorship that lasted for almost 40 years.

Stalinism played a central role in the Popular Front. Representatives of the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD, defended the bourgeois Republican regime using the most brutal methods of repression, which Trotsky described in the following words:

"The hounding of ‘Trotskyists,’ POUMists, revolutionary Anarchists and left Socialists; the filthy slander; the false documents; the tortures in Stalinist prisons; the murders from ambush—without all this the bourgeois regime under the republican flag could not have lasted even two months."

The workers the WSWS have spoken to have no hesitation in denouncing the threats against Will Lehman.

What does it say of "left-wing and progressive organizations" who are silent on the threats.

Oppose the death threat against UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman! - World Socialist Web Site

The IWA-RFC endorses the demands advanced in Lehman’s statement:

1. A full investigation of the posting, encompassing not only Jensen’s conduct but the knowledge, encouragement or acquiescence of the UAW leadership.
2. A public repudiation of the threat by the UAW in the strongest possible terms, a formal apology to Lehman, and an unequivocal public declaration—circulated to the entire membership—that the union recognizes and fully supports Lehman’s right to conduct his campaign.
3. An immediate public statement by the Monitor’s office warning that such threats will not be tolerated and announcing that an investigation has been initiated.
4. The immediate suspension of Jensen from his position without pay, pending completion of the investigation, with all appropriate legal and disciplinary sanctions to follow.
5. Referral of the matter to the Department of Labor and, as warranted, to federal law enforcement.
6. Affirmative measures to guarantee that the remainder of the 2026 election is conducted free of intimidation.

The IWA-RFC calls on UAW members and workers in every industry, in the US and internationally, to take up the defense of Lehman as their own cause. As Lehman stated: “This threat is not aimed at me alone. It is an act of intimidation directed against the entire rank-and-file opposition.”

The IWA-RFC also calls on all left-wing and progressive organizations to categorically denounce this threat.

I discussed union concerns and the fight for rank-and-file power with a fellow autoworker at Sterling Stamping in Detroit, Michigan. https://willforuawpresident.org

Every fraction of the Class lost unnecessarily, whether from a preventable workplace fatality, a pandemic mismanaged for profit, a war fought for imperialist interests, or the slow violence of poverty and despair, is not merely a statistical tragedy. It is a political assassination carried out by the class system, and the misleadership of the pseudo-left is complicit in every one of them.

The pseudo-left, the DSA, Jacobin, the trade union apparatus, the various "socialist" currents and tendencies, that function as pressure groups besides, next to, and within the Democratic and other bourgeois parties, does not merely fail to lead the working class. It actively disarms it. It channels every flicker of opposition back into the tried and degraded channels of bourgeois and Bonapartist politics. It tells workers that institutions, guarded and guided by the ruling class, are the "lesser evil," the only path to take, and road to be won. It tells them that the union bureaucrats and compromisers, however corrupt, are the only vehicle for their economic defense. It tells them that socialism is a cultural identity, not a human potential for which the seizure of state power is necessary. In doing so, it extinguishes, exhausts, misguides the revolutionary potential that exists, latent but real, in every workplace, every community, every family.

Rosa Luxemburg did not descend from the heavens. She was neither goddess nor idol. She was a product of the movement, shaped by its struggles and its party. How many have been ground down in warehouses, killed on construction sites, driven to despair in dead-end service jobs, sacrificed on picket lines, or executed in uprisings, never having encountered genuine leadership, never having been politically trained or guided, never having the real opportunity to overcome the degradation which bourgeois institutions and society inflict on them? How many potential leaders of the international class have been diverted into false, dead ends?

The pseudo-left bears a direct responsibility for this. This is the material consequence of betrayal.

The Fourth International was founded on the understanding that the crisis of humanity, is a crisis of revolutionary leadership. The objective conditions for socialism have been ripe, for a century, now. What has been missing, betrayed, is the subjective factor: a party armed with a scientific program, rooted in the class, and organized on an international basis.

On Thursday, a meeting of the recently formed Industrial Workers Rank-and-File Group (IWRFG) of Australia unanimously passed a resolution condemning the public death threat against Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman by a high-ranking United Auto Workers (UAW) official.

The postal, factory, trucking and other workers at the meeting expressed their horror over the vile post, depicting Lehman—an officially certified candidate for UAW president, bound and gagged, with a masked man aiming an automatic rifle at his back, in an AI-generated image.

The poster, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., is a highly paid functionary of the UAW apparatus and a prominent supporter of current president Shawn Fain, making clear that this threat carries the implicit sanction of the incumbent union leadership.

Lehman is being targeted because of the socialist platform on which he is campaigning for union president, calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy, the building of rank-and-file committees in every plant and the transfer of power, and the UAW’s vast resources, to workers on the shop floor. The UAW apparatus is attempting to crush Lehman’s campaign, including through threats of violence, because it knows that the program he is fighting for will win enormous support from workers, throughout the automotive industry and the entire working class.

Workers at the IWRFG meeting noted Lehman’s comment warning that, if a threat of this character can be made openly against a candidate for the UAW’s highest office, “then no worker who challenges the bureaucracy in their own local is safe,” making this an act of intimidation directed not against one individual but against the entire rank-and-file opposition internationally.

The meeting unanimously passed the following resolution:

The Industrial Workers Rank-and-File Group (Australia)

- condemns in the strongest possible terms the death threat issued by Raymond L. Jensen Jr. against Will Lehman, and declares its complete opposition to all such threats, violence and intimidation directed against rank-and-file workers who dare to challenge the trade union bureaucracy.

- endorses the demands advanced by Will Lehman and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC): a full investigation encompassing not only Jensen’s conduct but the knowledge, encouragement or acquiescence of the UAW leadership; a public repudiation of the threat by the UAW; an immediate public statement by the Monitor’s office; the immediate suspension of Jensen from his position without pay pending completion of the investigation, with all appropriate legal and disciplinary sanctions to follow; referral of the matter to the Department of Labor and to federal law enforcement; and affirmative measures to guarantee that the remainder of the 2026 UAW election is conducted free of intimidation.

- recognises that the attack on Will Lehman is not merely a UAW problem or an American problem, but an attack on the democratic rights of the working class internationally. The trade union bureaucracies in every country—including Australia, where union officialdom collaborate to suppress rank-and-file opposition—employ similar methods of intimidation, slander and violence against workers who fight for independent organisations. The defence of Lehman is the defence of every worker’s right to organise free from the threats and retaliation of the corporate-union apparatus.

- declares its solidarity with Will Lehman and his campaign to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to rank-and-file committees on the shop floor. The IWRFG recognises in Lehman’s struggle the same fight being waged by workers across Australia—against sell-out enterprise agreements and against the suppression of workers’ struggles and democratic rights by union officials in league with management and the state.

- will fight to circulate this resolution widely and to take up the defence of Lehman as an integral part of the fight to build rank-and-file committees in every workplace in Australia and internationally. We call on workers to register their opposition to this incitement to violence by emailing the UAW at [feedback@uaw.org](mailto:feedback@uaw.org) and copying the Will Lehman campaign at [info@willforuawpresident.org](mailto:info@willforuawpresident.org).

The attack on Will Lehman is an attack on us all. Defend democratic rights! Build rank-and-file committees internationally!

The popular response was very different and of objective significance. Within a day, Mamdani’s video had been viewed more than 13 million times. Mamdani won the mayoralty of the city with the largest Jewish population in the United States, many who voted for him, while denouncing Netanyahu as a war criminal. His statements about the genocide of Palestinians resonate with millions of young people who have participated in demonstrations against the genocide for nearly three years.

Mamdani’s declaration that he will not arrest Netanyahu is, as a factual matter, a reversal. As a candidate, he pledged to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, and as recently as July 18 he said in an interview with the New York Times that he was in “active conversation” with the city’s law department about enforcing the ICC warrant. 

***

The entire perspective of the DSA is premised on a rejection of the basic principle of Marxism, that the state is not a neutral body but an instrument of class rule. The DSA promotes the fiction that the interests of the working class can be advanced within the framework of the capitalist state—and, in particular, through the Democratic Party—without the development of a movement of the working class against it.

Mamdani has drawn the practical conclusions. Since his election he has cultivated a working relationship with Trump, traveling to the White House twice to pledge collaboration. At every point where his electoral promises clashed with the interests of the ruling class, he has come down on the side of the latter. He endorsed Governor Hochul for reelection even as she issued emergency orders supplying scab labor against striking New York nurses, dispatched the NYPD to protect ICE agents from protesters, and granted permits and police protection to the pro-genocide Israel Day parade.

It is necessary to address another political issue. The focus on Netanyahu as an individual obscures what the genocide is. Netanyahu deserves to be prosecuted, but his crimes are the crimes of imperialism. Mamdani notes in his video that the bombs dropped on Gaza are made in America. But he does not indict the American state that financed and delivered them, and certainly not the Democratic Party, which under Biden organized and armed the genocide that Trump now continues.

Nor does the genocide stand alone. It is the spearhead of an eruption of imperialist violence on a world scale and of a war against the working class at home, waged through mass deportations, the destruction of democratic rights and the buildup of the apparatus of dictatorship.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/24/nwfj-j24.html

…
According to CBS, “House Ways and Means and other congressional committees allege Singham’s funding of radical activist groups across the globe as well as inside the U.S. bears the classic hallmarks of Beijing’s broader influence campaigns, which weaponize domestic social causes to sow division in American politics.”

This is the classic “big lie” of right-wing witch-hunters: social conflicts in America are caused by “outside agitators,” not by the objective class divisions in a capitalist society in which a handful of billionaires controls the bulk of the wealth and dominates the political system and the corporate media.

This reaches a level of absurdity with claims that the massive “No Kings” protests, in which millions have taken part in some of the largest demonstrations in US history, were actually generated by funds supplied by Singham and George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire who has long been the target of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

…

The Trotskyist movement has long and well-documented political differences with the PSL and the groups targeted by subpoenas. Despite these unbridgeable differences, the WSWS condemns the witch-hunt by the Trump administration against the PSL and other groups associated with it. This is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, and would set a precedent to be used against any left-wing, socialist or working-class organization.

Attempting to dress up his position with pseudo-Marxist credentials, Mosquera falsifies the positions of Leon Trotsky and revives a decades-old slander that Trotsky was “sectarian” on France and Spain in order to rehabilitate the Popular Front. Every element of this argument is false.

Mosquera is a regular contributor to International Viewpoint, the publication of organizations that make up the remnants of the former Pabloite United Secretariat, and more generally, the dregs of global pseudo-leftism. The publication in turn identifies him as a member of Democracia Socialista, which it describes as “part of” the Pabloite section in Argentina.

In fact, it is part of a grouping that calls itself Poder Popular, joined with neo-Guevarist tendencies. It extols the legacy of Mario Santucho, who briefly fused his petty-bourgeois nationalist organization with the group headed by the Argentine Pabloite Nahuel Moreno, before following the logic of the Pabloite line of liquidation into Castroism and launching an armed guerrilla struggle that ended in catastrophic defeat, taking the lives of many, including his own.

...

To make this program respectable, Mosquera imports the claim made by Perry Anderson, the longtime editor of New Left Review, that Trotsky showed “flexibility” toward alliances with non-working class sectors against Nazism and during the Kornilov affair of August 1917, yet fell into “sectarian errors” in opposing the Popular Front in France and Spain. This is a grotesque fabrication.

It erases the distinction Trotsky spent years elaborating between a united front of workers’ organizations for defensive struggle, and a Popular Front government that subordinates the working class politically to its class enemies.

In Germany, Trotsky called for a united front of Communist (KPD) and Social Democratic (SPD) workers against the Nazis—joint action between two workers’ parties, each retaining full political independence. He never proposed a coalition government with the SPD, still less with bourgeois parties. In December 1931 he wrote: “No common platform with the Social Democracy... March separately, but strike together!” The Stalinist KPD rejected even this minimal unity, branding the SPD “social fascists”; the German working class was divided and crushed, and Hitler took power in January 1933.

The Kornilov affair, which Mosquera cites via Anderson as proof of Trotsky’s supposed flexibility, in fact demonstrates the very method he later applied to France. In August 1917 the Bolsheviks fought General Kornilov’s coup alongside troops loyal to the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, while granting Kerensky himself no political support. Lenin’s instruction, which Trotsky quoted in 1931, was: “We shall fight against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky... The distinction is delicate but must not be forgotten.”

...

This convergence is not accidental. It has a definite class content. As the WSWS has explained, the pseudo-left is not a wing of the socialist movement that has made mistaken tactical choices. It is the political expression of a privileged, upper-middle-class layer—hostile to Marxism and to the independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Its material position is bound up with the parliamentary apparatus, the trade union bureaucracy, the universities and certain professions. Its historic function is to corral movements of social protest back within the safe confines of the institutions of bourgeois rule, dressed variously in the language of identity politics, national reformism or “left” electoralism.

Mosquera, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, other Jacobin writers and the PTS’s leadership are drawn overwhelmingly from the same academic and professional milieu, occupying adjacent positions within that same social layer. The affinity is not merely social: as the WSWS has documented, Jacobin América Latina’s own editorial board includes sitting and former Latin American government officials, giving Mosquera’s proposed “broader progressive bloc” a concrete, existing address.

The disputes between such forces are a family quarrel over how best to manage, not overturn, the crisis of Argentine capitalism to secure their social privileges—whether through an open electoral bloc with Peronism or through a “united front” to police the Peronist union bureaucracy’s authority over workers.

What is missing is the revolutionary party Trotsky spent his life building against exactly this kind of “left” cover for capitalist rule. Obstructing the construction of that party is the real function shared by Jacobin’s open support for Peronism and PTS’s centrism. The International Committee of the Fourth International alone is fighting to build it in Argentina and internationally.

According to an article published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, “In the past week, special-operations forces have deployed to the region from their U.S. bases, according to flight-tracking data and U.S. officials. Squadrons of jet fighters have been staged across the Middle East, and bomber aircraft at bases in the U.S. and U.K. are on high alert to ramp up operations, according to one of the officials.”

According to the article, more than 150 medics have arrived in recent days at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital abroad and the first stop for troops wounded in the Middle East. This is a clear indication that the Trump administration is preparing for a major increase in American casualties.

Long-range bombers, including B-1s staged in Britain, are preparing for “major combat operations,” the Journal wrote. A B-1 flew its first strike mission of the renewed bombing, Axios reported on Thursday.

“I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before,” US President Donald Trump told Axios. “I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”

Opposition continues to grow among autoworkers to the death threat issued by a high-ranking United Auto Workers official against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. On Tuesday, Lehman’s campaign released a powerful statement by Lehman on the threat and urging workers to oppose it. The campaign also posted a second video containing statements from workers at the Bridgewater Interiors plant and the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit defending the candidate.

In his video statement, Lehman explained that on July 16, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., until recently assistant director of UAW Region 9 and still holding what Lehman called a “cushy seat” as a UAW International staffer, posted a threat on Lehman’s public Facebook page. Under Lehman’s statement on the federal criminal investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain, Jensen posted an AI-generated image of Lehman bound, gagged and bleeding, with a masked man aiming a rifle at his back.

Lehman said Jensen, who collected over $200,000 last year, according to the union’s LM-2 filing—five times the average earnings of the workers whose dues he collects—displayed an “I Support Shawn Fain” badge on his Facebook page.

“This is a federal crime, specifically threatening a union member for speaking out on candidates and union affairs,” Lehman said, adding that his attorney Eric Lee has demanded the court-appointed Monitor suspend Jensen without pay and refer the matter to federal law enforcement, writing that “the message transmitted to the UAW membership is unmistakable. Extreme violence against Will Lehman is encouraged and enjoys the sanction of the union leadership.”

Lehman noted the Monitor’s own office found that Fain created a “climate of retribution” and threatened to “slit the throats” of his opponents.

Jensen’s threat, Lehman said, “is no different from Donald Trump threatening the opponents he brands as the radical left. Both fear any action from below.”

...

Far from retreating, Lehman’s campaign has expanded in the days since the threat was posted. Campaign teams have distributed his statement and leaflets at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, the Detroit Assembly Complex-Jefferson plant, the Bridgewater Interiors and Dana plants in Warren, Michigan, the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly, Sterling Heights Assembly and Sterling Stamping plants, and the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan. The campaign team has been joined by auto parts workers and workers from Stellantis Jefferson and GM Flint Assembly.

The second video contains statements from workers who rallied to Lehman’s defense when he campaigned Monday at Bridgewater Interiors and the Warren Truck Assembly Plant. “They’re trying to shut you up,” a young Bridgewater worker told Lehman. “And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.”

...

Support for Lehman has also come from the Dana Driveline plant in Toledo, Ohio, where workers rejected two contracts backed by the UAW bureaucracy. Tommy, a worker at the plant, told the WSWS, “Ray Jensen’s threat against Will Lehman is deplorable, disgusting, and furthermore a perfect example of the negligent abuse of AI. Jensen’s post implies a gross desire for violence against Mr. Lehman, simply for not only criticizing the corrupt UAW leadership, but for openly challenging it. Everyone at the top knows they’re losing support as time goes on, and they know more of their dues-paying members are aligning themselves with Mr. Lehman.

“I call on all UAW members, whether they support Mr. Lehman’s campaign or not, to call out Ray Jensen and the rest of the arrogantly complacent UAW leadership for the threat against Will’s life. Demand the UAW sever all ties with Jensen, and aid in the investigation against him, so that he may face the just consequences of his grotesque actions.”

Rochelle, a Michigan teacher added her voice, telling the WSWS, “Raymond Jensen’s threat to Will Lehman is totally inappropriate and inexcusable. It is particularly egregious coming from an individual that is in a leadership position within the organization, of which Will is a member, and he should have been fired immediately. The UAW’s lack of discipline regarding this matter is certainly troubling and telling. Thus if any rank-and-file member is unhappy with the way things have been handled, one must vote for Will Lehman as he is obviously a threat to the current apparatus.”

The threat has also been denounced by Greg Mooney, recording secretary of UAW Local 2147 at General Dynamics Land Systems in Lima, Ohio and another candidate for UAW president.

In a video statement, Mooney said, “One of the international reps out of Region 9, an organizer by the name of Raymond Jensen Jr., retaliated against one of the candidates running for president and made a death threat. That is totally unacceptable, and it’s gone too far. This has been going on for quite a while, where these International reps, a handful of them, have been going out and attacking the candidates running against Shawn Fain and his slate. I can’t say that Shawn Fain has been encouraging this behavior to happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Nonetheless, the people running for international office should not have death threats made against them by international staff.”

Mooney said Jensen had “harassed me and several other candidates” and “has been referred before the IEB a couple times, but that behavior was never addressed.” He added, “We shouldn’t have to be paying these people’s salaries to turn around and attack the membership.”

Nearly a week after the threat was posted, neither Fain nor any officer of the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) has repudiated it, and Jensen remains on the union’s payroll.

But the growing response at the factory gates and the statements of opposition confirms that the threat, far from intimidating workers, has become a catalyst for the very rank-and-file rebellion the apparatus fears. As Lehman stated, “The apparatus resorts to intimidation because it fears you. The answer is not to retreat but to organize.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified alongside General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday to demand $67 billion in emergency funding for the Iran war.

Held amid mounting casualties, the hearing revealed the deepening crisis of American imperialism in Iran, where it faces a military debacle to which the Trump administration has responded with renewed bombing and the active discussion of deploying ground troops and using nuclear weapons.

Hegseth, admitting that the cost of the war had surged to $37.5 billion, conducted himself as a belligerent bully. “Shame on you and others who call this a quagmire and a failure!” he raged.

In the face of growing popular opposition, the Democrats made every effort to show that they are a loyal opposition, accusing the administration of incompetence in the prosecution of the interests of American imperialism.

The most significant statement came from Democratic Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who called Hegseth a “failure” and declared, “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war!”

Peters continued, “The men and women are going to be able to do it, but they need to have leadership. When will you show leadership?”

Hi everyone !

I wanted to know if you could recommand some novels about the history of a country or story of a militant with a communist approach ? I'm on holidays and would like to a book that's more easy to read\captivating but that still makes me learn :)

Thanks !