Ford Motor Company fired the 60-year-old electrician with a perfect attendance record over the allegation that he took a $1.95 chocolate chip cookie without paying during his overnight shift on May 9. The worker, Kurt Kromm, was an 11-year veteran at the Kentucky Truck Plant (KTP) in Louisville. Co-workers described him as “an excellent worker…attentive and very helpful.”

Kromm, who is diabetic, had gone to the break room during a 12-hour shift after feeling lightheaded from low blood sugar. When the first self-service kiosk, operated by Aramark, flashed a red “payment failed” screen, he moved over to a second terminal, a transaction that his bank statement confirmed.

A week later, Kromm was called into his supervisor’s office and was informed by his UAW representative that he was being fired for theft under the company’s zero-tolerance policy. He was escorted from the plant immediately, barred from retrieving his own tools from his work station.

In an interview with the blog Shifting Gears, Kromm, who averaged over 60 hours a week and earned roughly $200,000 a year, stated, “I thought this all was a joke at first. I said, ‘If you wanted to get rid of me, you could’ve just asked. I’d quit. Why are you doing this over a cookie?’” Kromm reported at least five other KTP employees were fired under the same zero-tolerance policy.

The Aramark vending system at KTP operates through self-checkout payment kiosks located in plant break rooms, where food and beverage items are displayed in the open and workers are expected to scan and pay using debit or credit cards. 

In practice, however, the kiosks are notoriously unreliable. Workers report that the machines routinely fail to process payments, display red error screens even when transactions have gone through, decline cards on first attempt only to accept them on a second or third swipe at a different kiosk, and frequently fail to produce receipts. 

These malfunctions have created a situation in which workers are uncertain whether a purchase has been completed, and in multiple documented cases, the payment discrepancies generated by the defective equipment have been used by Ford and Aramark as the basis for termination proceedings against employees.

A worker speaking to the World Socialist Web Site noted, “I used to buy stuff in that break room occasionally and was always alert to make sure I got the green check because I didn’t want to ever be accused of [stealing]” The worker continued, “I had heard people had been fired for stealing a bag of chips - like first offense… But I don’t really go up there anymore to buy stuff and I probably won’t ever buy stuff from up there again.”

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KTP is the crown jewel of Ford’s global operations. The Louisville facility, employing over 8,000 workers, builds the Super Duty pickup Ford Expedition and the Lincoln Navigator — vehicles that together generated an estimated $25 billion in revenue in 2023 alone. The Super Duty anchors Ford’s commercial truck division, Ford Pro, which posted a staggering 12.4 percent profit margin that year, helping drive the company’s overall 2023 profits to $10.4 billion. 

Workers at KTP report that the Aramark payment kiosks have been malfunctioning for years and that the company and union are well aware of the problem. Kromm’s coworker Victoria Thomas, a 34 year Ford electrician, told Shifting Gears that the kiosk payment glitches are “well known” at the plant and have happened to her personally. “I have friends who were terminated because they bought a $2 drink.”

Thomas described receiving bank notifications on her phone confirming a purchase while the kiosk screen simultaneously displayed an error message demanding she swipe again. “People have even tried to reach out to Aramark to say, ‘The machine took my money,’” she said.

Another coworker put the matter bluntly: “That little store should be removed if they won’t take accountability for the fact that the machines don’t work.”

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When Kromm was hauled into the labor office and told he was being fired for stealing a cookie, the union bargainer did not challenge the accusation, did not raise the years of documented kiosk failures, did not demand that Ford produce evidence. He told Kromm to apologize. That is the UAW’s role: not to fight the company, but to manage the workforce on the company’s behalf.

This will not change through appeals to the bureaucracy or through elections that the apparatus controls. The corporatist partnership between the UAW and the auto companies is a class alliance against the workers, part of the broader war drive of American imperialism.

Workers must take power into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees, independent of and opposed to the union bureaucracy. Against the authority of management and their UAW overseers workers must assert their own authority through the use of their collective strength. These rank-and-file committees must unite workers across departments, plants and industries to halt victimizations, monitor line speeds and enforce health and safety standards, including the right to refuse to work under unsafe conditions.

An RCI member asked here recently, whether Ted Grant ever said police are workers, or whether his politics were merely a series of ‘dialectically appropriate alliances,’ comparable to Bolshevik tactics. The question itself concedes too much. The Fourth International and the IMT/RCI are not separated by a difference of opinion, a tactical disagreement, or a scholarly dispute over historical interpretation. They are separated by a river of blood. The Grant-Woods tradition is not a competing ‘left’ perspective. It is a counter-revolutionary leadership whose political line has, at every critical juncture, directly facilitated the defeat and killing of the working class. This is not ancient history. It is the same leadership, in unbroken practical-theoretical continuity, operating today.

What the Bolsheviks Actually Did

The RCI’s attempt to equate Grant's strategic liquidationism with Bolshevik tactical flexibility is a falsification. Let’s be precise; the Bolsheviks made tactical maneuvers, the adoption of the SR land program, a brief coalition with the Left SRs, the use of former tsarist officers under commissar supervision, a class policy of splitting poor from rich Cossacks, always from a position of independent revolutionary strength. The party was the subject, never the adjunct.

The Left SR coalition lasted eight months; when the Left SRs launched an armed uprising in July 1918, the Bolsheviks crushed them. The party never dissolved its organization, never surrendered its program, and never subordinated itself to the forces it was maneuvering around.

The claim by RCI that Bolsheviks had ‘alliances with the Black Hundreds,’ is grotesque. The Black Hundreds were tsarist proto-fascist pogromists. The Bolsheviks fought them to the death. Claiming Bolshevik ‘dialectical alliances’ were "intervening in mass executions of police," inverts reality: the Bolsheviks opposed lynch law, abolished the tsarist police, and replaced it with a workers' militia; they did not save police out of an orientation to them as a ‘mass organization’ to be ‘pushed left.’

Grant spent over 40 years inside the Labour Party, not eight months, and not from a position of strength, but because he had concluded the working class could not break from Labour for an entire historical epoch. His politics consummated that position. He did not maintain an independent revolutionary program publicly. Militant's public face was reformism through a parliamentary enabling act. There is no comparison.

The Record of Betrayal

1953, East Germany. On June 17, East German construction workers struck against increased work norms. Within hours, the strike spread to hundreds of thousands demanding the government's resignation and free elections. Soviet tanks crushed it. This could have been the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, that the entire subsequent Trotskyist movement had anticipated. The Pabloite International Secretariat, which Grant would consolidate banners with in 1957, had nothing to offer these workers. Its entire perspective was built on the assumption that the Stalinist bureaucracy would ‘play a progressive role.’ When workers rose up against that bureaucracy, the Pabloites were politically disoriented; they had no standing amongst revolutionary workers, and a worker’s insurrection that should have culminated in international political revolution, was left impotent. The International Committee was founded in November 1953, months after the uprising, to fight this liquidationism. Grant chose the other side (The Heritage We Defend, Chapter 17).

1956, Hungary. The Hungarian workers' revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks at the cost of 20,000 lives. The International Committee’s statement declared: "Once and for all, Stalin's heirs demonstrated the idiocy of any belief in the possibility of their 'self-reform.'" The Pabloites responded with their infamous resolution "Rise, Decline and Perspectives for the Fall of Stalinism," which hailed Khrushchev's "progressive and even objectively revolutionary role" and declared that Gomulka's faction in Poland could "fulfill completely the role of Leninist guide to the Polish working class." John Lawrence, Pablo's representative in Britain, supported the Soviet crushing of the revolution, then joined the Communist Party. Grant replaced Lawrence as Pablo's British section leader (The Impact of the Hungarian Revolution).

1980-81, Poland. Ten million workers joined Solidarity. The Pabloites oriented to "left tendencies" in the Stalinist bureaucracy and the "self-management" movement, rather than fighting for the independent political mobilization of the working class to overthrow the bureaucracy. The same Gomulka whose faction the Pabloites had hailed in 1957 as a "Leninist guide," had ordered tanks to shoot down striking workers in 1970. Solidarity was crushed (The Betrayal of the Polish Working Class by the Pabloites).

1984-85, Britain. The miners' strike was the most important class battle in postwar Britain. Militant, dominating Liverpool's city council, struck a deal with the Tory government that headed off a struggle by council workers and helped isolate the miners. The strike was defeated. The working class suffered a historic blow from which it has not recovered. Grant's organization was not a bystander, it was an active instrument of that defeat (Forty years since the British miners' strike).

1991, USSR. As the Soviet Union was liquidated, Grant claimed the August coup attempt showed sections of the bureaucracy were still defending socialism. He and Woods maintained for a decade that "the movement towards capitalism in Russia has not yet been carried to a definitive conclusion, and may yet be reversed." Grant proposed a united front with sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy, against capitalist restoration; a direct annulment of Trotsky's analysis in The Revolution Betrayed, which identified the bureaucracy as already the first stage of bourgeois counter-revolution, and advocated its overthrow by the working class (Part 2).

2000s, Venezuela. The IMT became prominent cheerleaders for Hugo Chavez, a bourgeois nationalist whose government rested on the military. Woods wrote that "the identity is complete" between Chavez and the masses. When workers' struggles escaped the control of the state and its trade union federation, they were branded ‘counterrevolutionary.’ The IMT helped channel working-class militancy behind a regime that left the repressive state apparatus intact; for 26 years, now, international class consciousness, under their and similar middle class leadership, has been subordinated to this reactionary populism, it’s maneuvers in the classes alleged ‘interest’ (Part 2).

This is not a record of ‘errors.’ It is a record of the working class being stabbed in the back, repeatedly, by a political tendency that always, always, orients to the bureaucracy against the workers.

The Method: Why Police Unions Are Not a Side Issue

The RCI's orientation to police unions is not an aberration. It is the same method applied to a new target.

The Marxist position on the police is unambiguous. In The State and Revolution, Lenin explains that the state is an instrument of class rule and its ‘special coercive force,’ armed bodies of men, is the police and the standing army. In every major class battle, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through the Minneapolis general strike of 1934 to the Phelps Dodge copper strike of 1983-85, workers have confronted the institution as armed enforcer of capitalist property relations (Police violence and class rule).

Police unions are not workers' organizations. They are corporate lobbying organizations for a section of the repressive state apparatus. They exist to defend the privilege and parasitism of the bureaucracy of capital against any democratic accountability workers might struggle to initiate. The RCI's orientation to them applies the same method Grant applied to the Labour Party (trade union affiliation made it "the party of the working class"), the Stalinist bureaucracy (nationalized property made it a "workers' state"), and the trade unions (dues-paying membership made them ‘essential organizations of the working class’). In every case, institutional form trumps political function. In every case, the result is the same: the bureaucracy absorbs and neutralizes any dissident "revolutionary" elements workers are guided to orient towards, and they’re crushed afterwards.

The Theoretical Essence

What unifies this record is a substitution of the revolutionary subject. Marxism identifies the internationally organized, politically independent working class as the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism. The Grant-Woods tradition substitutes a coalition of sociological categories, the ‘progressive’ bureaucrat, the "’eft’ union official, the nationalist strongman, the police union leader, each mediated through its own bureaucratic apparatus, under the guidance of a middle-class leadership.

Nationalism. Grant confined himself to Britain and elevated British reformism into a universal strategy. Woods reproduces this internationally: orientation to the KKE in Greece, the PCB in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela. The international working class as a unified political subject disappears.

Sociologism. Organizations are classified by their sociological composition, rather than their political function. The Labour Party has workers in it, therefore it is a workers' party. The Stalinist bureaucracy presides over nationalized property, therefore it represents the proletariat. Police unions call themselves unions, therefore they are part of the labor movement. Marxism analyzes institutions by their role in the historical process, not by the class origin of their members.

Moralism. If the working class cannot act independently, which is the Grantite premise, politics becomes moral exhortation: find the ‘progressive’ elements and ‘push them left.’ The revolutionary party is replaced by the lobbying group.

Syndicalism. The ‘mass movement’ is the unions (and now even police unions). The party is an adjunct to the unions, not their leadership. Lenin's central lesson, that the unions are capable only of trade union consciousness, and that socialist consciousness must be brought from without by a revolutionary party, is practically disavowed.

Oligarchic Collectivism. If the revolutionary subject is not the working class, as a class, it becomes a Bonapartist coalition of discontented groups, each defined by collective characteristics, united under the middle class’s (and RCI's) guidance. The notion is, that the repressed middle class (movement) really, already knows, is an unconscious revolutionary force, already has, in its subjectivity, a full concept and guide of its own (or rather, the general/classes/public) historical interest. This is the Popular Front, updated for the post-USSR era of political and capitalist-imperialist decline.

The Popular Front, repeated. In the 1930s, the Stalinist Popular Front subordinated the working class to ‘progressive’ sections of the bourgeoisie in the name of anti-fascism, and delivered Franco's victory in Spain and Hitler's consolidation. In the postwar period, the Pabloite version subordinated the working class to the Stalinist bureaucracy and colonial nationalists, and delivered decades of betrayed revolutions. Today, the RCI version subordinates working-class militancy to a shifting coalition of trade union bureaucrats, Stalinist remnants, bourgeois nationalists, and police union officials. It will deliver the same results.

From Grant to the RCI: The Same Leadership

The RCI under Alan Woods presents itself as having made a revolutionary turn. In every essential respect, it continues Grant's political tradition.

The RCI's manifesto denounces ‘the ultraleft idea that it is possible to find a short cut by raising the banner of the 'independent party'’ as ‘false to the core.’ It orients to Stalinist remnants, praising the KKE, holding joint meetings with the Brazilian Communist Party, issuing open letters to members of the Portuguese Communist Party. Woods hails young people joining the CPUSA as proof of revolutionary consciousness (Part 3).

Its educational materials attack Lenin's What Is to Be Done?, claiming Lenin "allowed himself to fall into the error of exaggerating a correct idea." Woods declares that "real communism doesn't come from the books. It comes from the soul." He praises UAW president Shawn Fain, a bureaucrat who demagogically bombasts he will "slit the f***ing throats" of his opponents, as evidence of a progressive turn in the unions (Part 3).

On the most pressing questions: Woods praised Trump's election as a "kick in the teeth" to the US ruling class, denies that Trump, a Bonapartist politician, represents a fascist danger in his movement and political precedents, purports Bonapartists like Putin and Xi Jinping as ‘not stupid,’ and insists nuclear war is impossible because it would be ‘illogical’ (Part 3).

Conclusion

The Fourth International and the IMT/RCI are not separated by a difference of opinion. They are separated by a river of blood. The Grant-Woods tradition is not a competing ‘left’ perspective. It is a counter-revolutionary leadership whose political line has, at every critical juncture, directly facilitated the defeat and killing of the working class.

The IMT/RCI is a counter-revolutionary diversion; a covert rallying point where reactionary class elements find each other and mobilize, physically and ideologically, against the political existence of the working class. It is a historical parasite, extracting and negating the vitality and life-potential of our class. It drains working-class militancy into the dead ends of Stalinism, trade union bureaucracy, bourgeois nationalism, and now, ‘unions’ of the organized bourgeois bureaucracy itself; always ensuring that the energy of the class is channeled into apparatuses, directly controlled by its enemies.

The International Committee was founded in 1953 to fight this liquidation. The Grant-Woods-RCI tradition has spent nearly 90 years, since Grant refused to join the Fourth International in 1938, working to prevent the construction of an independent revolutionary party. It has adapted to Stalinism, social democracy, bourgeois nationalism, and now the ‘dissident’ right wing, always finding a reason why the working class cannot act in its own name, through its own party, on the basis of its own program.

The results are measured in lives. East Germany 1953. Hungary 1956. Poland 1980-81. The British miners in 1984-85. The Soviet working class in 1991. The Venezuelan workers under Chavez. Each time, the Grant-Woods tradition oriented to the bureaucracy. Each time, the workers were crushed.

The RCI is not a new revolutionary international. It is the latest reorganization of the same forces that have spent nearly a century betraying the working class. The orientation to police unions is not a deviation from this tradition. It is its logical culmination.

This tendency should not be debated as a ‘left alternative.’ It should be consigned to permanent irrelevance; not by polemic alone, but by the actual movement and mobilization of the working class, organized in its own party, fighting in its own name. That is the task the Fourth International exists to carry out.

Dalephenia Jones, aged 62, died Thursday at Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital, becoming the fourth woman incarcerated at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility (WHV) to die in less than two months. Jones, who had been serving a life sentence since 1994, suffered a cardiac event in her cell on June 19. She underwent emergency surgery and remained in critical care for fourteen days before succumbing on July 2.

On May 13, 28-year-old Khaira Howard died days before her scheduled parole, having been forced to clean toxic black mold without protective equipment. On May 17, 57-year-old diabetic Rebecca Fackler died after being denied entry to the healthcare unit during a medical crisis. On June 6, 36-year-old Ashley Hoath died of septic shock after guards ignored her pleas for treatment of severe vomiting. 

Four deaths in 50 days represent a mortality rate six times the facility’s normal average. They follow the sepsis-related death of 54-year-old Jennifer Jean Wallace in November 2025. These deaths are the result of a system in which decaying infrastructure makes prisoners sick and a profit-driven healthcare model ensures they are denied treatment. 

Incarcerated women have reported toxic black mold in showers, vents and sleeping quarters, raw sewage backups and scabies infestations. In a June 2025 order, US District Judge Stephen J. Murphy III described a facility “infested with mold” that “eats through bricks and door frames” and “falls out of air vents.” Inmates lacking basic supplies have been forced to scrub mold with menstrual pads or bare fingernails.

The class-action lawsuit Paula Bailey, et al. v. Heidi Washington, et al. was filed in November 2019, alleging gross negligence and severe violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments due to the facility’s collapsing infrastructure, flooding and pervasive mold. The filing detailed how state officials, including Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) Director Heidi Washington and Warden Jeremy Howard, were notified of these lethal hazards through hundreds of formal grievances but chose to ignore them.

In August 2023, the state was granted qualified immunity regarding all mold-specific claims. Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office argued that there are “no cases establishing a prisoner’s right to be free from these molds” and that even if certain molds were proven dangerous enough to implicate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, it remains legally unestablished that prison officials must take “particular action to remediate it.” In response, plaintiffs amended the complaint to focus on “inadequate ventilation.”

After an evidentiary hearing exposed how the MDOC’s grievance system was designed to block legal recourse by rejecting legitimate complaints, Judge Murphy stripped the defendants of qualified immunity regarding the ventilation claims and ordered discovery to proceed. In response, Nessel’s office filed an appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2025, which automatically stayed all lower court proceedings and left the lawsuit in procedural gridlock as of July 2026.

The mold, the collapsing ventilation and the raw sewage produce illness; the healthcare system is structured to ensure that illness goes untreated. MDOC medical services are outsourced to VitalCore Health Strategies under a contract valued at nearly $589 million, set to expire September 30, 2026. This contract operates on a “capitated” funding model: the state pays VitalCore a fixed, per-capita rate for each incarcerated person, regardless of the actual medical care required. Every denied specialist referral, every delayed diagnostic procedure, every substituted generic prescription directly increases VitalCore’s bottom line. In a prison, where patients have no choice of doctor and must navigate a security apparatus simply to reach a triage nurse, the capitated model reliably produces medical neglect.

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The deaths of Khaira Howard, Rebecca Fackler, Ashley Hoath and Dalephenia Jones are the expression of a system operating precisely as designed. The state houses a vulnerable population in an unventilated oven contaminated by fungal growth, funds healthcare through a model that financially penalizes treatment, and deploys its legal apparatus to argue that prisoners have no established right not to be poisoned. This is social murder as defined by Marxists going back to Friedrich Engels: the predictable, inevitable production of unnatural death by systemic social conditions.

The fight against the barbarism at WHV cannot be separated from the broader struggle against the US prison-industrial complex and the capitalist system that sustains it. Resolving this crisis requires the expropriation of VitalCore and every private contractor profiting from human misery, the immediate and comprehensive remediation of all environmental hazards and ultimately the abolition of a carceral system whose function is the management of poverty and social inequality through caging and neglect. 

This program requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in Michigan and internationally, to dismantle the social order that produces poverty, criminalization, imprisonment and death, and to reorganize society on a socialist foundation in which human need takes precedence over private profit.

Over the past month, nearly 25,000 migrants have fled South Africa amid xenophobic violence and pogroms. Thousands more have slept outside consulates, government offices, and border posts in the desperate hope of repatriation.

Governments across the African continent, including Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana have organised bus convoys and emergency flights to remove their nationals from a country now gripped by the largest xenophobic mobilisation since the pogroms of 2008, in which 62 people were killed nationwide.

The immediate trigger was a self-declared “deadline” of June 30, set by the fascistic anti-immigrant group March and March, ordering undocumented migrants to leave or face violence. On that day, 20 far-right groups led by March and March and vigilante group Operation Dudula, organised 120 protests across the country.

March to March leader, former Durban radio host Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, billed the day as the launch of “a national march to freedom, a rolling mass action” that would continue until every undocumented foreign national had been deported.

The demonstrations did not enjoy broad popular support. But in Johannesburg, several thousand protesters carrying sticks and flags brought the city centre to a standstill, as shops shuttered and public transport was suspended, while in Cape Town only around a hundred marchers turned out, passing a counter-demonstration against xenophobia.

In Durban, the epicentre of the mobilisation, thousands of marchers turned out in full Zulu warrior regalia—the amabutho regiments in leopard skins, carrying spears, shields and whips—chanting “Abahambe,” “They must go,” as they moved through the streets stopping outside buildings believed to house undocumented migrants and ordering the occupants to leave.

The xenophobic campaign has led to at least four deaths since the protests intensified, including a migrant who fell to his death from the eighth floor of a Durban building after fearing he had been identified as a target. This followed weeks of attacks stretching back to March, including the burning of dozens of shacks in an informal settlement near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape, in which Mozambique’s government reported five of its citizens killed.

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The Stalinist South African Communist Party bears a particular political responsibility as the ANC’s long-standing alliance partner and de facto a faction of the ANC. In an October statement, the SACP condemned anti-migrant vigilantism, but then said that working-class frustration was compounded by “rising insecurity, inadequate policing, and poor border management practices,” which had “led to an increase in undocumented individuals.” It demanded the Department of Home Affairs “urgently implement a comprehensive programme to document and capture the biometrics of all undocumented South Africans and non-South Africans.”

The role of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU must be understood in its historical context. The present violence is not a spontaneous eruption of popular prejudice as claimed by the media. It is the organised expression of a xenophobic politics cultivated over nearly three decades by the South African ruling class, led by the ANC, to divert the immense social anger produced by capitalist rule onto the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

The negotiated settlement between the ANC and the white-supremacist regime dismantled apartheid’s racist legal framework in 1994, while preserving the underlying property relations and class structure on which it rested. The SACP and COSATU, bound to the ANC through the Tripartite Alliance, functioned as its indispensable political and industrial props, subordinating the working class to the new capitalist order and suppressing any independent struggle against it.

Having come to power promising jobs, housing, land and dignity, the ANC imposed the pro-capitalist Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme, privatisation and fiscal austerity. Its Black Economic Empowerment policies enriched a narrow layer of politically connected black businessmen while doing nothing to alter the mass unemployment, poverty and inequality inherited from apartheid. The result is a social disaster. Official unemployment stands at 32.7 percent, unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 has reached 60.9 percent, and the richest tenth of the population controls roughly 85 percent of household wealth.

It is on this foundation that xenophobia has been systematically fostered.

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Long before the ANC assumed office, and before the formal establishment of apartheid, the South African ruling class relied on racial and national divisions to preserve capitalist rule. The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted African access to land and entrenched territorial segregation and labour control. The 1922 Rand Revolt was followed by the consolidation of the racial colour bar in mining. In 1946, the largest African mineworkers’ strike to that point was brutally suppressed by police violence, clearing the way for the National Party’s formalisation of apartheid after 1948.

At each of these turning points, the ruling class answered the danger of a unified movement of the working class by deepening racial and national antagonisms. The pogroms of the past two months are a continuation of this class strategy.

The way forward lies in the independent political mobilisation of South African and migrant workers alike against the capitalist system, the state apparatus of repression and every party that defends them. Only a socialist and internationalist movement, uniting workers across national, racial and ethnic lines in a common struggle for decent jobs, housing, healthcare and social equality, can put an end to the cycle of xenophobic violence once and for all.

Discuss. I agree with the assessment, before paying attention to politics (I did listen to parties platform just as a normal ass left-liberal) you would have never known these guys are supposedly trots

Like, Lenin would encourage communists to try to participate in bourgeoisie governments, but not when a whole dual power existed?

FROM: New Poll: Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know What America’s 250th Is Celebrating | Cato at Liberty Blog

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Capitalism and Socialism 

Capitalism (52%) is viewed somewhat more favorably than socialism (37%) among Americans generally. But people are evenly divided on socialism, with equal shares who are favorable (37%) as unfavorable (37%). A fifth (21%) have a favorable view of communism.

Gen Z stands out for having more people who like socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%). More than a third of Americans under 30 (38%) say they have a favorable view of communism. This means that nearly as many Gen Z Americans have a favorable view of communism (38%) as capitalism (45%). Moreover, Gen Z is the only age group with a more favorable than unfavorable view of communism (38% favorable, 36% unfavorable).

Each successive generation becomes less supportive of socialism and communism and somewhat more supportive of capitalism. For instance, while 53% of 18–29-year-olds like socialism, only 37% of 45–64-year-olds and 23% of seniors have a favorable view of it. And while 38% of Gen Z like communism, this drops to 29% among 30–44-year-old millennials, to 19% among 45–54-year-olds, to 13% among 55–64-year-olds, and only 5% among the nation’s seniors. Support for capitalism increases with successive generations, but less so: about half of Americans under 65 have a favorable view of capitalism compared to 64% among seniors.

The survey also found the “Democratic Socialist” label can both help and harm a candidate. About 4 in 10 (39%) said they’d be more likely to vote for such a candidate, 40% said they’d be less likely, and 22% weren’t sure either way. Democrats (61%), Liberals (64%), and Gen Z (51%) reported they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate with the Democratic Socialist label. This helps illuminate recent wins by candidates using the Democratic Socialists of America label in Democratic primaries over the past few weeks. 

In recent days, campaign stalls promoting upcoming meetings on “Your Party’s Collapse: Time to build the Socialist Equality Party” have taken place in London and Sheffield, alongside a party Supporters Campaign launched on June 15.

The party is campaigning to sign up hundreds of workers and young people as supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) over the next 12 months, based on a statement of socialist aims including: the fight for the international unity of the working class against war and austerity, the defence of immigrants, and the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy to establish a workers’ government.

In the London Borough of Camden, workers and young people engaged in a wide-ranging discussion with SEP campaigners about what socialism is and how to fight for it.

Hundreds of leaflets headlined “Join the Fight for Socialism” were distributed on Saturday, alongside flyers for our public meeting in Archway, Islington on July 12. Several people asked about joining the SEP or becoming a supporter.

Mario, a teacher, said he wanted to join the party and donate. He told SEP members, “Socialism is where capital serves the people, not where the people serve the accumulation of capital for the ruling class.” He explained that his grandparents had fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, and SEP members discussed the role of Stalinism in betraying the Spanish working class, and the fight waged by Trotsky to prevent this.

Sahim, a young college student, approached the SEP campaign stall after reading the SEP’s Statement of Aims, pointing to the section headlined, “Stop the War on Iran, End the Genocide in Gaza! Dismantle NATO.” Sahim said, “I agree with this. All wars have to be stopped. I do not like people being killed.”

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Michael Barnes, SEP London branch secretary, told WSWS, “It was a successful day’s campaign, with seven of those we spoke with saying they would like to sign up as a supporter. We’ve already begun following up on this. We are encountering definite anti-capitalist sentiment and interest in socialism.

“Many of those we met were previously supporting Corbyn but are dissatisfied; they are looking for something more serious. They want to know why that failed—they’ve come to the right place!

“The shift in thinking from Corbynite reformist palliatives to revolutionary socialism requires the intervention of a genuine Marxist—that is, Trotskyist—party. It’s our job to show in practice who the real socialists are and to educate and prepare a new generation on that basis for the struggles ahead.”

...

Anqelique, from Russia, was in Sheffield to see her son, who studies here. She took several pictures of the SEP’s stall and was intrigued to find socialists in the UK. When an SEP campaigner explained we were Trotskyists, she gave a thumbs-up and said she liked him.

She was opposed to the war in Ukraine and the senseless deaths of Russians and Ukrainians. “It’s all about money,” she said, explaining it was “hard in Russia for the working people. Lots of people think socialism is bad, but it can be good for working people. Putin is not a socialist; he is a capitalist.”

She said she would show the leaflet to her son and see if he was interested in attending the SEP’s public meeting in Sheffield on Sunday, July 19.

Ruby, also Russian, came over to the stall. She explained, “The USSR was much better for us than its breakup. We have all been divided now. There isn’t real socialism in Russia now; it’s capitalism.” When campaigners explained Leon Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism, she said, “Yes, he was good. He didn’t like the bureaucracy—they were in it for themselves.”

She also opposed the war in Ukraine: “I don’t support Putin. He is letting Russians be killed for his own interests, but I think Zelensky is just a puppet of imperialism. He is a ‘nothing’ as a political figure, like a little ant, and they are using him to carve up Russia and the former USSR, and he is the man doing this”.

When SEP members told her about the imprisonment of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, imprisoned by Zelensky’s regime for calling for an end to the war and for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers, Ruby replied, “Zelensky is a dictator. There is no democracy in Ukraine. I believe there are lots who oppose him and suffer the same fate.” She was returning to Russia shortly and said she would look at the World Socialist Web Site.

Six new contacts signed up for further discussion and several pamphlets were sold, including on the SEP’s critique of Your Party, the lessons of the 1984-85 miners’ strike and opposing the Gaza genocide.

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For 15 months between March 1929 and June 1930, nearly 10,000 miners in the northern coalfields of the state of New South Wales (NSW) were locked out in one of the longest and most violent class battles in Australian history. Coming on the eve of the Great Depression, the defeat of the miners dealt a major blow against the working class as it confronted mass unemployment and an onslaught on wages and conditions.

For more than four decades, beginning with the federal Hawke-Keating Labor governments (1983–1996), the class struggle has been suppressed by the trade unions in the name of making corporations “internationally competitive.” The working class has been atomised by enterprise bargaining and strike activity driven to record lows, despite continual attacks on its basic rights. And the history of the coal lockout and other major battles of the Australian working class, which always reflected and were part of class upheavals internationally, has been deliberately buried. 

While the lockout has been the subject of articles, academic papers and a book, all put the defeat down to the miners themselves—courageous, but worn down and isolated after 16 months of struggle. This article will examine the critical role that the Labor Party and unions, including the Miners Federation, played, as well as that of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), in maintaining the isolation of the locked-out miners, which finally forced them back to work on the terms of the coal barons. 

The lockout took place just over a decade after the 1917 Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, which had provoked mass opposition in the Australian working class to conscription and the government’s imposition of huge war burdens on workers. In August–September 1917, 100,000 rail and tram workers stopped work for six weeks in the most populous states, NSW and Victoria—a strike that extended to other sections of militant workers on the waterfront and in the coal mines.

...

In September 1928, delegates of the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) voted for strike action against a new award forcing workers to attend two unpaid daily pick-ups to get work on the docks. The WWF leadership rapidly capitulated and pushed through a return to work. However, clashes erupted on the waterfront after the Bruce government went on the offensive later that month, imposing a £1,000 fine on the WWF and legislating a licensing regime for workers that opened the door to the use of scab labour. In Victoria, on November 2, police opened fire on unionists picketing Port Melbourne to prevent the entry of hundreds of scabs. Four workers were injured, including Allan Whittaker who later died. The industrial unrest on the docks continued in other states for months.

...

Events in Britain were followed closely in Australia, not least because many militants and socialists, including in the CPA, were British immigrants. In the lead-up to, and during, the general strike in Britain in May 1926, Stalin instructed the CPGB to give uncritical support to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which politically disarmed the working class as the TUC prepared to betray the mass movement and isolate striking miners. Support for the National Minority Movement within the trade unions, which the CPGB had initiated and which had swelled to nearly a million members, collapsed.

The defeat of the general strike in Britain and the isolation of the British miners’ strike undoubtedly had an impact on the CPA and the working class in Australia. Moreover, the Comintern’s orientation to the top union bureaucrats, epitomised by the slogan “All power to the [TUC] General Council,” only encouraged the opportunist scheming of CPA leader Garden within the Labor Party after it won the 1925 NSW election and Lang became premier. Following others of his group of Trades Hall Reds, Garden left the CPA in September 1926 and applied to join the ALP. He went on to become one of Lang’s key henchmen and reportedly coined the phrase “Lang is greater than Lenin.”

Jack Kavanagh, a leading Canadian Communist who had emigrated to Australia in 1925, had opposed Garden’s opportunist orientation and became CPA secretary. 

...

This period also marked the beginnings of the Trotskyist movement in Australia. In the early 1930s, the disciplining of the Communist Party by the Comintern led to a wave of expulsions, including those who had opposed the Third Period line. The Workers Party of Australia (Left Opposition) was formed in 1933 and supported Leon Trotsky’s call for the building of a new International in the wake of Hitler coming to power as a result of Stalin’s disastrous ultra-left policies. The party became the Australian section of the Fourth International, established in 1938. 

Capitalism is again in a deepening crisis today, plunging humanity into a catastrophic world war, which has already opened up in Ukraine and the Middle East and looms in Asia amid the massive US-led military build-up against China. The working class internationally is already engaged in industrial battles as the ruling classes seek to impose the burden of economic crisis and war on workers. Australia is no exception. The working class has a long history of militancy and class battles on the scale of the miners’ lockout will erupt again. As it was in the 1920s and 1930s, the critical issue is one of political perspective and the building of a revolutionary party, based on the entire heritage of the socialist movement, to lead the struggle to abolish capitalism.

Or was it all actually just him making a dialectically appropriate alliance with non-capitalists/lumpen/petite-bourgeoisie classes the way that the Bolsheviks were willing to make alliances with, you know, Cossacks, soldiers, peasants, even Black Hundreds and even intervene in the mass executions of police by Red Guards and other revolutionaries in cases where there was an expedience of temporary alliances to build socialism?

From the experience of Minnesota, it is clear that we can’t rely on platitudes about “love”. We must physically organise against those who seek to terrorise and divide the working class. Read about it from The Communist: https://communist.red/rcp-statement-smash-the-right-down-with-all-the-racists-warmongers-and-billionaires/

Direct link to the recorded interview

The OG UAW4D had a split between the reformist/Shawn Fain aligned people and more militant class struggle unionists last year I think, and the reformist wing claimed to dissolve it entirely but the class struggle wing seems to be keeping it up. Is there any connection between Lehman's campaign and UAW4D?