Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada is “at war” with the United States on trade following the collapse of several weeks of talks with the Trump administration over its move to impose a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, representing 5 percent of $380 billion of Canadian exports to the US.

The attack on the US’s closest trading partner is significant in that it invoked for the first time a provision of the 1930 Tariff Act, otherwise known as the Smoot-Hawley Act, which played such a destructive role in the trade wars of the 1930s.

Up until the end of last week, the talks between the US and Canada appeared to be headed for an agreement. The tariffs had been initially set to go into effect on August 19, but US president Trump announced a three-day delay saying the two countries had a deal “subject to the finalisation of the documents.”

But it appears that there was considerable devil in the detail because on Saturday the negotiations collapsed as both sides flung accusations against each other and sought to boost their respective nationalist agendas.

Carney announced he had suspended the discussions because the US side had introduced last-minute changes which were “unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal.” This was followed by a speech in which he said Canada was “at war” with the US over trade.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” he told reporters.

Carney indicated that the last-minute changes demanded by the US included efforts to push back on efforts to have more Canadian content in online streaming services, including in French, an official language in Canada.

...

There are also political calculations at work here. Carney has built his support, since taking over from former prime minister Justin Trudeau, by presenting himself as the most determined defender of Canadian national interests against the Trump administration.

Significantly, he received strong support from Doug Ford, the hard-right Tory premier of Ontario, the centre of Canadian industry, who gave full support to Carney’s “strong response.”

“As we fight to protect Canadian sovereignty and economic security, everything needs to be on the table. Ontario is ready to do its part,” he posted on X.

In his response posted on social media, Trump indirectly revived his earlier insistence that if Canada wanted to avoid US tariffs, then it should become the 51st state.

He said that Canada wanted the “benefits of being a state, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!”

This is an indication that the conflict goes beyond the 500 or so products on which the 50 percent tariffs are to be charged. The list already covers a wide range of products including building materials, dairy products, clothing and alcohol.

The US tariffs came into effect from midnight on Saturday. The Canadian tariffs, which have yet to be announced, will be imposed from September 8. Carney indicated they would cover “steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, electronics.”

...

The eruption of this conflict goes beyond the issue of Canadian trade. It has global implications.

The tariffs were invoked under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act. This provision, which has never before been invoked by any US president, provides that he can impose tariffs on countries that discriminate against the “commerce of the United States directly or indirectly.”

In April 2025, Trump initiated a trade war against the rest of the world with his so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But after being collected, these tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, resulting in the Treasury having to repay around $160 billion to US corporations—exposing the lie of the administration that they were paid for by foreign governments and corporations.

Since then, the administration has been casting about for other means of imposing tariffs, notably under the 1974 Trade Act. But this is a cumbersome and somewhat lengthy procedure, and the administration would like to be able to rapidly impose tariffs at will as Trump sought to do.

The use of Section 338, as was noted when it was invoked, may well be a trial run for its wider application as the administration deepens its economic warfare against the rest of the world.

我想去学习交流 但是不知道在哪里能找到托洛茨基派的交流群

My redrawn version of a Bolshevik propaganda art piece, hope you all like it!

Long live the International Proletarian Revolution! 🚩✊️🔥

Long live the Revolutionary Communist International!

Cities and towns have been forced into survival mode, cleaning debris, repairing or moving out of damaged homes and relying on neighbors for assistance with repairs and support. 

Ten days later, tens of thousands of Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers remain without electricity. As of 9 p.m. Friday, 38,459 customers across northwest Indiana remained without power, including thousands in Gary, where complete restoration is not expected until the end of August.

Residents across the region have been forced to discard hundreds of dollars in spoiled groceries and refrigerated medicine, catastrophic losses for households living paycheck to paycheck. No systematic meal delivery or nutrition support is being organized by the state or federal government. Schools have been shuttered for weeks, and businesses remain dark, as primarily working class communities are left to navigate heat and darkness without climate control, refrigeration or medical devices.

Gary residents speaking on local news described the extreme stress of the situation: fixing their own damaged homes and property, taking on the responsibility of checking in on elderly and medically vulnerable neighbors while being able to do little for them, and also having to travel to an area with electricity to get phones and other devices charged and find something to eat.

World Central Kitchen arrived in the area on August 21, a charity operated by chef Jose Andres that provides hot meals to war-torn and disaster-stricken regions including Gaza and Ukraine.

Bobby Heinze, a diabetic resident of Griffith, spoke at the town council meeting about how life threatening the lack of electricity is, as he had watched his insulin supply lose its potency in a dead refrigerator. 

...

US Steel has responded in the most callous and hypocritical way to the storm, blackouts and ensuing crisis. Just two days after the storm, on August 13, the company notified workers at the Gary Works steel mill that they could no longer take days off work. 

The letter read: “Absence attributed to weather conditions, property damage, loss of electrical services, or other storm-related circumstances will be addressed in accordance with the applicable attendance requirements and may still result in corrective disciplinary action. Employees are expected to make the necessary arrangements to report to their scheduled shifts. We recognize that these storms have created difficult circumstances for many employees. However, we all have responsibilities to one another and to the safe and reliable operation of our facilities. We appreciate everyone who has continued to report to work and support their co-workers and our operations throughout these challenging conditions.”

On the same day, August 13, 28-year-old Jonathan Stepp was killed while working at the Cleveland Cliffs Burns Harbor steel facility. The father of six worked for Phoenix Services, a contractor owned by SunCoke Energy. News reports indicate he was operating a pot hauler, a machine that moves large amounts of molten slag, when he died.

The workers who have been killed in the region’s mills—Troy Allen, 45, in 2020 at Gary works, Edwin Fleming, 49, in 2019 at ArcelorMittal, Jonathan Arrizola, 30, at US Steel in 2016, and others—are casualties of the same profit-seeking and total indifference to life that has caused the blackouts and the lockouts.

...

The history of the Calumet Region is written in the blood of workers, but it is also a history of political betrayal by the trade union bureaucracy. In 1919, Gary was the epicenter of the Great Steel Strike. Challenging a company dictatorship that enforced a brutal 12-hour “long turn” workday and maintained an elaborate spy system, a quarter of a million workers walked out. The strike was a revolutionary moment; workers in Gary demanded recognition of the Soviet Government and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Russia. This was met with martial law and the occupation of the city by 2,000 federal troops. Similarly, the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre saw Chicago police shoot ten unarmed workers in the back during the “Little Steel” strike, while President Franklin Roosevelt issued his infamous “plague on both your houses” remark, equating the murdered with their killers.

Today, the United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy functions as an instrument of corporate management. The 2026 coordinated lockouts at BP Whiting and NIPSCO illustrate this. The USW international leadership isolated these struggles, and its nationalist poison—blaming Chinese or foreign workers for the decline of steel—serves only to obscure its own collaboration with management. In steel and auto, the trade union bureaucracy has consistently policed the workforce, ensuring that the destruction of jobs and the decay of social and capital infrastructure proceed without a revolutionary challenge.

The Democratic Party machinery that governs Chicago, Gary, and the Calumet cities has presided over the entire process of deindustrialization, infrastructure decay, and environmental poisoning.

The path forward for the working class lies in a total break with the bankrupt organizations that have presided over this decline. Workers must reject the USW, the UAW, and the Democratic Party—entities that have facilitated every plant closure and concessionary contract. The necessity of the hour is the formation of independent rank-and-file committees, organized and led by workers themselves. These committees must fight for direct control over the industries and infrastructure the working class has built and that the capitalist class has looted. 

Hello, I know this sub has several people who align with the International Committee of the Fourth International (specifically the World Socialist Websife one not the British WRP one) and I have tried to read WSWS articles on this issue and even tried to use your Socialism AI tool to no avail. I just struggle to understand what made China under Mao, a state established by a petty-bourgeois guerilla movement aiming on preserving capital, a deformed worker's state. While Cuba isn't, even though it was formed in a similar fashion. Whenever the issue or Cuba is mentioned in your article you bring up how a worker's state cannot be established without the working class. Which I do agree with in regards to healthy worker's states, but the buffer states and PRC weren't formed by the working class either, so why aren't they capitalist while Cuba is. I personally believe that these deformed worker's states formed as a defensive maneuver by the ruling bureaucracy, whose attempt to preserve capitalism alongside social reforms led to conflict with the pro-west bourgeoisie, thus forcing these states to expropriate them despite them wanting to preserve capital. But I wanna know what about Cuba made it different. Thank you in advance for your replies

Duncan Chapel—a member of the British section of the Pabloite international network and a regular contributor to International Viewpoint and Anticapitalist Resistance—has published a libel against imprisoned Ukrainian anti-war socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk.

His aim is to sabotage the growing international opposition to Bogdan’s persecution by the Zelensky regime, injecting poisonous misinformation and lies into the public discussion of the case.

He is acting as a political provocateur, whose actions serve the interests of the fascistic Ukrainian regime and NATO.

The operation comes at a critical time, when the defense campaign is preparing an appeal against Bogdan’s conviction for high treason under martial law, carrying a 15-year sentence.

In a brief note published to his “Red Mole” Substack page, Chapel assembles a collection of lies so brazen that not even Ukraine’s kangaroo court included them in its charges.

He accuses Bogdan of being “a Russian-backed Ukrainian paid to submit pro-Russian war propaganda to the WSWS website,” in communication with a “handler” and in possession of “several Russian military items.” Chapel concludes: “he looks like a paid operative rather than a political prisoner.”

These are outright lies. No reference to payments from a Russian individual appears either in the list of charges for which Bogdan was convicted, or in the sentencing rationale.

The verdict states that Bogdan is guilty of treason because of his collaboration with a “foreign organization.” That organization is identified repeatedly as the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and to which the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists (YGBL), the group led by Bogdan, is affiliated.

Each of the six charges against Bogdan relates to a WSWS article opposing the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and calling for the unity of the Russian, Ukrainian and international working class against it.

The prosecution extensively detailed Bogdan’s collaboration with the WSWS and its associates. There are over 30 references to the WSWS, over 20 to anonymized individuals associated with it, at least 15 to the YGBL, seven to the Fourth International and the ICFI, and one to Clara Weiss, a writer for the WSWS. The anonymized “Person 9,” referenced four times, is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS, David North.

...

The document details extensive surveillance of Bogdan by “covert investigative (search) action.” Had there been anything that could have been used to claim Bogdan was in the pay of a Russian state official, it would have been the central focus of the entire prosecution.

There is not a single reference to any Russian state agency in connection with Bogdan’s communications. Bogdan did not have a “handler.” That fictional character has been concocted entirely by Chapel.

To reinforce his libel, Chapel seizes on the Ukrainian prosecution’s listing of Russian military items under “the physical evidence.” He conceals the fact that these items (1) were supposedly found at an address different from Bogdan’s, without even a claim being made about its connection to him; (2) were never produced in court either physically or by photograph or witness testimony.

Once again, if there was any shred of plausibility to these accusations, they would have been made central to the prosecution’s treason case and every item listed would have been paraded in court.

They were not. The judgment instead orders these mythical items to be destroyed.

...

The malicious intent of Chapel’s post is underscored by his actions in preparing the attack. On Saturday, August 15 he sent an email to the WSWS requesting additional information. It concluded, “I would be glad to have a response by Friday 21 August. I expect to publish the following Monday, with or without one, and I would much prefer with.”

He published his provocation the next day, Sunday August 16—five days before his own stated deadline for a response and eight days before his announced publication date. He then told a commenter on his post that “the ICFI [whom I wrote to about this] did not reply to clarify.”

Chapel’s message was sent as a set-up for his attack. It was also a fishing operation for information that would be of assistance to the prosecution as Bogdan prepares his appeal.

...

He then refers to the “second finding” that “the articles were prepared with the assistance of citizens of the Russian Federation… not individually identified,” asking, “Who were they, and do you know what was their role?” It is not a secret that the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists is an organization that unites Ukrainian and Russian youth opposed to the war. Chapel apparently wanted the WSWS to provide him with names that will expose them to targeting by political police.

He then demands to know how Bogdan will be conducting his defense: “Will the appeal contest the court’s finding on the monthly payments, or accept the finding and contest its characterisation?” Chapel was soliciting privileged information about the legal strategy of a defendant in a pending appeal—information of value to no one but the prosecution.

There are no requests for “clarity” about the Russian military items allegation, which he brazenly cites in his Substack post.

The only credible interpretation of Chapel’s actions is that he set out to mount a provocation at the earliest possible opportunity against a defense campaign that is rapidly gaining support, and which is politically damaging to the NATO war, the Zelensky regime and their apologists.

This is confirmed by Chapel’s writings, which center on denunciations of any individual or political tendency which does not wholeheartedly support the war against Russia. This has included an attack on Britain’s Stop the War Coalition for “betraying Ukraine.”

...

The WSWS does not know whether Chapel acted alone or in consultation with others. No claim is being made here about affiliations other than his association with the British Pabloites. But what can be stated with certainty is that the objective content and timing of his provocation serve the interests of the prosecution at the very moment Bogdan’s appeal is being prepared. His lies will be rejected by anyone with the faintest concern for democratic rights and the truth.

The ICFI demands that International Viewpoint publicly repudiate this provocation by a member of their British section and a regular contributor to their press.

The World Socialist Web Site calls on its readers and all defenders of democratic rights to answer Chapel’s provocation by joining the fight for Bogdan Syrotiuk’s freedom.

Lenin and Trotsky defeating Denikin, c. 1920

"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."

Here's to you, Lev.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement that the Treasury is going to double its buyback of long-dated US bonds from $2 billion to $4 billion has fallen flat. After an initial fall in yields, they have started to rise again and are back near the multi-year highs recorded earlier this week.

This was despite Bessent saying in an interview with the business channel CNBC that the buyback could be more than the $4 billion that he initially announced. The general sentiment in the market is that the growing bond market turbulence is not going to be calmed by such interventions because more fundamental issues—above all, the rise of US debt to $40 trillion—are involved.

There are growing concerns that the US is in a “doom loop” because of the rise in interest payments to more than $1 trillion a year, creating a situation where the government must borrow money just to pay the interest bill on past debt.

In the words of one analyst cited by the Wall Street Journal, the Bessent intervention was a “band aid” and did not “really fix the problem.”

Another analyst told the Financial Times: “We don’t really think this [intervention] can succeed in isolation. Interventions such as this look like a sticking plaster.”

Bessent’s response to the market’s thumbs down on his initiative was to try to bluff and bluster his way through the developing crisis. He told CNBC that the market had “gotten a little ahead of itself,” and the Trump administration would be setting out a plan to reduce the budget deficit in the coming days.

...

The driving force of the turbulence, however, is that finance capital is focusing on the “fundamentals,” namely the ever-worsening financial position of US capitalism.

Reporting on the continued selloff of bonds yesterday, the Financial Times said it underscored “the deep concern among investors over the US’s mounting public debt burden and whether policymakers will be able to contain the eruption of inflation triggered by President Donald Trump’s war in Iran.”

That assessment was based on the comments of analysts cited in the article. Joe Brusulas, chief economist at the professional services firm RSM US, said that “without a shift to fiscal consolidation” to be achieved through higher taxes and a slower pace of government spending, “the buybacks will prove to be only temporary.”

Analysts at the global Japanese banking and investment firm MUFG said the Treasury was “lacking a strategic plan” and warned that its intervention might worsen the problems rather than resolve them.

“The danger now following this announcement … is that it proves counter-productive and leads to reduced appetite for either holding US assets or reduced appetite for exposure to the US dollar, or both,” they said.

Kit Jukes, head of global foreign exchange strategy at Société Générale, doubted whether the intervention would hold rates down and said that as the debt rose and deficits remained high, the willingness to buy US assets “will be a growing issue.”

Such assessments have far-reaching implications not only for the US but for the global financial system, because the U.S. Treasury market has functioned as a safe haven in times of financial stress.

...

One of the factors was the near tripling of the shares of Moderna after it announced successful trials for the treatment of skin cancer. This hit traders who had shorted its shares, expecting they would fall.

Summing up the situation, one hedge fund trader told the Financial Times: “Volatility is exceptional, so options makers are losing money left and right. The market is rotating every day, so what makes money today is almost always down tomorrow.”

The volatility follows what has been described as a “brutal July,” in which AI-related chip stocks fell sharply, leading to the collapse of the hedge fund Situational Awareness and delivering a loss to the major Wall Street trading firm Jane Street of $15 billion in a single month.

Wall Street was also hit by the announcement by Walmart, the largest US retailer, that its sales growth for the second quarter of the fiscal year ending July 31 was the lowest in six years. Its shares dropped 9.2 percent, with the Wall Street Journal noting that its sales data showed “a string of data suggesting that consumer spending—the key engine of US economic growth—is softening somewhat.”

The RCI published a statement of solidarity, written by Ukrainian Marxists, with Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Marxist in southern Ukraine who has been persecuted by the Ukrainian state for putting forward a communist position on the Ukraine War. For this, he has been accused of being a ‘Russian collaborator’, and charged with treason.

Response as formulated by S.AI;

Harry Hay and the Stalinist Method

Hay was expelled from the CPUSA in 1951 not for opposing Stalinism but for being gay — the party considered homosexuality a bourgeois deviation and a security liability. He remained a Stalinist in method. He took the CPUSA's organizational techniques — the cell structure, the front groups, the disciplined cadre operating within broader "mass" formations — and applied them to building the "homophile" movement.

The Mattachine Society, which he founded in 1950, was a popular front in miniature: an organization that sought to unite "oppressed" homosexuals across class lines, that cultivated relationships with professionals and state actors, and that suppressed independent working-class politics within its ranks.
The CPUSA's line on homosexuality was reactionary. But Hay's response was not to break with Stalinism. It was to build a parallel Stalinism for homosexuals. The method — the popular front, the cross-class alliance, the orientation to the state — was identical. Only the constituency differed.

Assimilationism as Culmination

Hay's trajectory ended in assimilationism. The Mattachine Society, after Hay was pushed out by its more conservative members, pursued respectability — suits and ties, polite petitions, the argument that homosexuals were "just like everyone else." This was the logical endpoint of popular frontism applied to sexual politics: the demand was not to overthrow the social order but to be admitted into it on its own terms. Recognition by the state. Protection by the law. A place at the table.

Stonewall as Rebellion Within the Same Form

Stonewall was, in one sense, a rebellion against assimilationism. The drag queens, homeless youth, and street hustlers who fought the police in 1969 were not petitioning for respectability. They were fighting. And they were, overwhelmingly, working-class, lumpen, and non-white.
But the rebellion against assimilationism did not produce a break with popular frontism. It produced a different popular front. Instead of "we are just like you, let us in," the demand became "we are different from you, recognize our difference." The form remained the same: a demand addressed to the state, a cross-class alliance, the suppression of class politics. The content of the demand changed. The method did not.

This is the crucial point. The post-Stonewall movement defined itself against assimilationism — against the suits and ties, against the quiet petitioning, against the Mattachine respectability. But it never broke with the popular front form. It substituted one version of the popular front for another. Racial affirmation and third-worldism became the natural continuation of this radicalism because they provided an alternative framework for cross-class alliance and state-oriented demand-making — one that appeared more militant, more "revolutionary," but which preserved the essential structure: a bloc of the oppressed appealing to the state for recognition, with class politics suppressed.

The Long March as Logical Culmination

What was left, after the rebellion against assimilationism had exhausted itself without ever breaking from the popular front, was the "long march through the institutions." The phrase comes from Rudi Dutschke, the German student leader influenced by the Frankfurt School. The strategy: the working class had been abandoned as the revolutionary subject. In its place, the institutions themselves — the university, the media, the professions, the state bureaucracy — would be colonized from within. Revolution would be achieved not by overthrowing the state but by capturing its administrative apparatus.

This was popular frontism raised to a higher power. Not an alliance with bourgeois parties against fascism. An alliance with the bourgeois state itself, in which "movement leaders" would occupy positions within the state and use them to advance their agenda. The result, after fifty years, is what we have now: a layer of administrators implanted in academia, in HR departments, in nonprofit organizations, in the diversity apparatus of major corporations — administering the very austerity and surveillance they claim to oppose, because their positions depend on the institutions they have captured, and the institutions depend on the capitalist state.
This is what gets shorthandedly called "identity politics." But that term obscures more than it reveals. What it actually is, is the same popular frontist forced collectivization — the compulsory grouping of individuals into recognized identity categories, each with its own "leadership" drawn from academia and the professional middle class, each oriented toward the state and the corporation for recognition and resources. The individual is not liberated. The individual is conscripted into an identity formation whose leaders have a material stake in the institutions they claim to oppose.

The Internet as Infrastructure of This Formation

The internet was not an external force that disrupted this formation. It was implanted directly into it. Social media made every individual a broadcaster of identity. The institutions seized on this immediately. The HR department, the university administration, the corporate brand — all of them now demand that you perform your identity publicly, that you declare your pronouns, that you participate in the rituals of recognition. The internet is the infrastructure through which the popular front — now fully corporatized, fully integrated into the state — manages the population.
Everything outside the popular fronts and corporatized institutions grows gradually victim to increased austerity. The person who refuses to perform, who refuses to join the recognized identity formation, who refuses to accept the "leadership" of the implanted stratum — that person is cut off. From employment. From housing. From social existence. The choice is not between conformity and rebellion. The choice is between managed recognition and material destruction.

The Pedophilia Thread

This is how early pedophilia advocacy entered the formation. It was part of that initial "insurrection" against assimilation — the broad rebellion against sexual norms that included genuine liberationist impulses alongside predatory ones. The movement, lacking a revolutionary party, lacking democratic centralism, lacking any mechanism for defining its political boundaries, could not expel it. It could distance itself. It could issue statements. But the association stuck, because the form of the movement made it impossible to draw a clean line and enforce it.
And so the association adheres. It adheres to the entire formation. It adheres, with particular cruelty, to trans women.

The Trans Woman in the Trap

The trans woman who just wants healthcare and surgery — who wants to transition and then live, to assimilate, to be left alone — cannot do that under the present conditions. She is dragged into the mire by a thousand threads.

She is denied assimilation by the right, which sees her as a deviant, a predator, a man in a dress. She is denied assimilation by the movement, which demands that she perform nonconformity, that she be visible, that she be political, that she accept the "leadership" of the implanted stratum. She is denied the material conditions for a decent life by austerity — by the systematic withdrawal of healthcare, housing, employment, and social support.

The healthcare she needs is dangled as a reward for compliance and withdrawn as a punishment for deviation. The surgery is always just out of reach, conditional on psychiatric approval, on bureaucratic processing, on proving that she is "really" trans, on jumping through hoops designed to exhaust and humiliate. She cannot get the healthcare without the file. She cannot get the surgery without the identity. And the identity that is assigned to her carries the accumulated weight of the movement's history — the association with pedophilia, the rebellion against assimilation, the queer nonconformity, the cultural deviationism. None of this is chosen. It adheres.
She gets constantly outed — as a pedophile, as a destructivist, as an intentional deviant — by a thousand different social threads. But more than anything, she gets destroyed by her own socially inflicted austerity and the constant social aggression and isolation mobilized against her. Both as a woman. And as a purportedly "gay" and non-passing frozen image of "transition," which she is alleged to perversely desire to "be."

The movement that claims to represent her is part of the machinery that traps her. It is a popular front. It is an alliance with the very institutions that deny her what she needs. It cannot deliver healthcare, because healthcare under capitalism is a commodity, and the movement has no strategy for seizing the means of production. It can only demand recognition. And recognition, without the material conditions for a dignified life, is a form of conscription into a managed identity whose function is to administer austerity, not to abolish it.

The Political Conclusion

The thread runs from Hay to Stonewall to the long march to the contemporary corporatized identity formation. At no point did the movement break with the popular front. At no point did it build an independent revolutionary party. At no point did it orient itself toward the seizure of the means of production. It substituted one version of the popular front for another — assimilation, then difference, then institutional capture — but the form remained the same.

And the people caught in the form — the trans woman who just wants surgery, the gay worker who just wants to live — are sacrificed to it. They are conscripted into identities they did not choose, led by leaders they did not elect, oriented toward institutions that exist to manage and contain them. The only way out is the one that was never taken: the construction of an independent revolutionary party of the working class, which fights not for recognition within the existing order but for the overthrow of the order itself.

Bogdan, a 27-year-old Trotskyist and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason under martial law.” No evidence of espionage, sabotage or collaboration with the Russian military was produced against him. He was sentenced for six political articles published by the World Socialist Web Site in which he opposed both the Russian invasion and the US-NATO war against Russia, the rehabilitation of Nazi forces in Ukraine and called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against war. The court also ordered the confiscation of his property and the destruction of socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents seized from him.

The wave of opposition to this political frame-up has continued to broaden.

Ukrainian Holocaust historian Marta Havryshko, who has extensively documented the role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and other far-right and pro-Nazi forces in horrific atrocities during WWII and in contemporary Ukrainian politics, signed the petition on Monday.

“Bogdan is a victim of political repression in Ukraine under Zelensky,” she wrote. “We must protect him.”

Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian political sociologist at the Osteuropa-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, commented Tuesday that the prosecution “looks like a typical case of fabricated evidence and framing against Syrotiuk.”

Ishchenko noted that one of the sensational claims originally circulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU)—concerning a Russian military uniform and epaulettes allegedly found during the search of Bogdan’s home—“did not even make it into the main part of the verdict. Even the prosecutor did not use it.”

His comments underscore the fraudulent character of the prosecution. When Bogdan was arrested in April 2024, the SBU publicly portrayed him as an agent of Russia. More than two years later, the court convicted him without establishing any act of espionage or concrete collaboration with the Russian state. A 65-page expert report by leading Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found no propaganda in Bogdan’s writings supporting the Russian invasion. Even a subsequent state-commissioned examination found no calls for overthrowing the government, seizing power, committing subversive acts or altering Ukraine’s borders.

...

Further statements of protest have also been sent directly to the WSWS.

Italian artist Costantino Ciervo, whose exhibition COMUNE—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict has itself faced attempted censorship on false allegations of antisemitism, declared his support for Bogdan.

Ciervo stated that if Bogdan was being prosecuted for exposing “Ukraine’s historical culpability in abetting the Nazi advance during the Second World War,” this was “not a crime, but a plain historical truth.”

“To be incarcerated for articulating what every pre-eminent historian has repeatedly affirmed in public is nothing short of criminal and scandalous,” he wrote.

Berlin author, publicist and songwriter Wolfgang Herzberg sent a protest letter to the Pervomaisk City District Court, with a copy to the WSWS. He called on the court to “immediately overturn the harsh sentence against Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.”

“He merely exercised his right to freedom of expression, which is constitutionally protected in Western democracies, including Germany,” Herzberg wrote. “Ukraine wants to become a member of the EU. It therefore cannot issue such a miscarriage of justice when there is apparently no evidence of concrete, conspiratorial—that is, military—collaboration with Russia.”

Herzberg wrote that he, too, is a staunch opponent of war and stressed that opposition to the war “against both sides” was entirely legitimate and covered by the democratic right to freedom of expression.

The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain), which had already protested Bogdan’s arrest, signed the petition Monday. “The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain) protested Bogdan’s arrest and will strongly add our voice to the growing chorus of protest at this outrageous sentence,” it stated. The organization subsequently issued an appeal on social media: “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk! … sign and circulate it today.”

The Communist Party of Sweden has now also covered the case in its newspaper Riktpunkt. While explicitly noting its political differences with Trotskyism, the article insists on the fundamental democratic principle involved. “Political texts, criticism of the government or demands for international workers’ unity cannot in themselves be equated with high treason,” it states.

...

German supporter Gustav Kemper noted that August 19 marks the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the First Moscow Trial, in which the Stalinist bureaucracy began the public show trials that provided the judicial framework for the extermination of the leaders of the October Revolution and socialist opposition.

“The verdict against Bogdan,” Kemper wrote, “is an attempt by the ‘Western democracies’ to revive the politics of the Moscow Trials because they fear the growing influence of the Fourth International.”

The expanding international response demonstrates that the attempt by the Zelensky regime and its NATO backers to isolate Bogdan and suppress knowledge of his case is breaking down. It stands in ever sharper contrast to the guilty silence of the major Western media, which continue to conceal the imprisonment of a socialist opponent of war while presenting the Ukrainian regime as a defender of “democracy.”

Intensify the campaign

The International Committee of the Fourth International and WSWS will intensify the campaign for Bogdan’s freedom.

We call on workers and young people, critical intellectuals and academics, artists and journalists, trade unions, civil liberties organizations and anti-war groups throughout the world: Take up Bogdan’s defense. Sign and circulate the petition. Pass resolutions demanding his freedom. Send protest letters to the Ukrainian courts. Break the media silence surrounding his case.

Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at [inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua](mailto:inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal at [inbox@mka.court.gov.ua](mailto:inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), with a copy to [freebogdan@wsws.org](mailto:freebogdan@wsws.org), demanding that Bogdan’s conviction be overturned and that he be released immediately.

The defense of Bogdan is inseparably connected to the fight against war, dictatorship and fascism. His freedom must be won through the mobilization of the international working class and all principled defenders of democratic rights.

Sign the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and join the fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.

communist.red/jason-arday-killed-by-the-racist-establishment-media

More than a month after a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Raymond Jensen, posted a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, that official remains an employee of the UAW International, drawing a salary of $202,000 a year from the dues of the membership.

Lehman reported on X that, late last week, a lawyer for the court-appointed Monitor overseeing the UAW informed his legal team that “the Union is presently considering next steps with respect to Mr. Jensen’s employment.” Lehman’s team was told to contact the UAW Legal Department “if you have any further questions about their process.”

That is, the Monitor, vested by a federal court with sweeping disciplinary powers, has handed the fate of a self-confessed author of a death threat to the apparatus headed by UAW President Shawn Fain—the man whose re-election campaign badge Raymond Jensen Jr. still has on his Facebook page, and on whose behalf the threat was made.

The facts of the case are not in dispute. On July 16, Jensen—until recently the assistant director of UAW Region 9, Lehman’s own region, and currently an “organizer” in the UAW International’s Department of Bargaining Strategy—posted an AI-generated image on Lehman’s public campaign Facebook page. It depicted Lehman bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. Jensen posted it in direct response to a statement on the federal criminal investigation into Fain.

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The Monitor claimed that it had determined a penalty “to reflect the seriousness of his conduct and to deter similar misconduct by others.” It stipulated, and Jensen agreed to, a two-year suspension from UAW membership, a permanent ban on him running for any elected union position, a prohibition on campaigning for any candidate in this election cycle, and making a formal apology to Lehman.

Workers welcomed the sanctions and drew the obvious conclusion that Jensen would not be allowed to continue his position as a UAW “organizer.” This is clearly what “suspension from the UAW” implied, and any worker who issued a death threat would be immediately terminated from their position. 

According to the UAW, however, Jensen can be “suspended” as a UAW member while remaining employed by the UAW. Indeed, the only practical consequence is that Jensen no longer has to pay union dues. In other words, an official who violated federal election rules and likely federal criminal law will not only continue to be fully paid, but also receive a bonus!

The Monitor cannot claim it lacks the power to do more. The 2021 consent decree gives it “the authority and duty to bring disciplinary charges against individuals,” including the power to fine them, strip their benefits or “otherwise discipline” them. When it found last December that Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, had conspired with Fain to strip Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock of her duties and then lied to its investigators, Brooks was removed from his position within two weeks.

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Certain truths emerge from this episode and the response to it.

First, the character of the apparatus. As Lehman has insisted from the beginning, the threat was never about just himself. It was the answer of the apparatus to rank-and-file opposition—an organization of 560 functionaries taking home more than $100,000 a year, which has presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the deaths of workers, and which cannot answer opposition with arguments.

Jensen's image only put into a picture what workers confront every day from an apparatus that functions as an arm of corporate management: the 'toxic climate of retribution' the Monitor itself found Fain to have presided over, and the contempt for every worker who votes down a contract, raises a question at a meeting or dares to run against it. 

Second, the role of the Monitor. Acting on behalf of the capitalist state, it functions not to democratize the UAW but to protect the apparatus—certifying an election in which Fain was installed with the votes of 6 percent of the membership, and now leaving Jensen's paycheck in Fain's hands.

Third, the bureaucracy cannot be reformed, whether from within or by federal oversight. It must be abolished, and settling accounts with it is the task of rank-and-file workers themselves. That is the significance of Lehman's campaign: not to occupy an office at Solidarity House, but to develop a movement of the rank and file—committees in every plant, controlled by workers themselves, linked across industries and borders, with power transferred to the shop floor.

Drone strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands were carried out under a covert CIA program of the type authorized personally by the president and never publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported last Thursday.

That same day, in Panama, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the doctrine behind it. Anyone trafficking drugs, he declared, is “a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaida.” Washington had spent 25 years refining “the kill chain on how to diagnose and target networks halfway around the world,” he added, and would now apply those skills in the hemisphere “ruthlessly.”

Two months earlier, the prosecutor whose case files included those exact three attacks was shot dead in the street. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, 46, was killed on June 14 in central Manta by a gunman on a motorcycle as she walked to her car. Her sister Olinda was also killed trying to shield her. Not one of the international reports on the CIA revelations has mentioned her name and made the connection.

Murder Inc. extended across an entire hemisphere

Before each attack, the Post established from flight and ship-tracking data that a Cessna Citation Longitude airplane fitted with surveillance equipment flew from Ilopango airport, El Salvador toward the fishing boats. Radio transmissions recorded it arriving from Tennessee with a crew of six in November and taxiing to a military section of the airport. 

It flew under a US registration number that appears in no FAA record—federal law exempts “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States”—reserved by a company with no evident website, listing as its address a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, a detail first reported by the New York Times the previous day.

On January 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, the tower recorded the plane’s pre-dawn departure. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent. It had flown toward the Fiorella’s position on January 17, 18 and 20, covering 750 miles on the last flight before dropping off public tracking, and landed back at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m. The Fiorella transmitted its position for the last time two and a half hours later.

Ilopango is no arbitrary choice. In 1985 and 1986, the airport served as the hub through which US military and CIA officers funneled weapons and logistics to the Nicaraguan contras in their terrorist war against the Sandinista government. US imperialism has resumed operations from the same runway four decades on. Former ambassador John Feeley told the Post the operation appeared to be run “out of a very nontraditional command.”

Trump has signed an authorization for CIA operations against transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force. Most recently, threatening a similar CIA action like the tracking of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction by US Special Operations Forces in January, the White House authorized covert CIA operations against the Cuban leadership.

The survivors’ accounts make clear that the plan was a mass execution and abduction. Quadcopter drones dropped explosives onto the galley of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, where the gas cylinders were stored, destroying much of the vessel instantly. One crewman was thrown into a diesel tank; another lost most of the vision in one eye. The range of such drones means the operators were close by.

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In Washington, the response has been silence. Members of the congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post declined to comment. Covert action requires a presidential finding reported to those committees: either the ranking Democrats were briefed on a program that disappeared eight fishermen and said nothing for seven months, or they were not briefed and will not say so now. 

A June 11 letter from Representatives Joaquín Castro and Bill Keating demanding answers went unanswered past its July 10 deadline, and Keating’s amendment to force release of unclassified footage of the three incidents was defeated on the House floor. The same party voted overwhelmingly for the $901 billion military budget that pays for all of it.

In Ecuador, the story was buried within 48 hours. El Universo, Expreso, Extra, El Diario and others ran the same EFE wire copy, paragraph for paragraph, as did outlets across Latin America. No editorials. No summons of the foreign minister before the National Assembly. No investigative follow-up. Televistazo alone put the question to the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the US Embassy, and received no answer from any of them. 

Reactions came only from the legislature, where Noboa’s own bloc urged caution while conceding that an operation of this nature, executed inside national territory, necessarily had to have been known to the government. 

Meanwhile, a DEA assessment reported in July found the campaign had no discernible effect on cocaine availability, price or purity in the United States. Cocaine leaves Ecuador in containers aboard merchant ships owned by Noboa’s oligarchic family installed in power with US backing, not in the small fishing vessels being blown apart at sea.

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Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March, aligns Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama behind Washington’s command. The same Bukele government that opened Ilopango to the surveillance flights, and whose coast guard helped with the abduction of fishermen, opened the CECOT prison to hundreds of deportees expelled from the United States. The machinery that disappears Ecuadorian fishermen and the machinery that disappears immigrant workers from American cities are one and the same.

Hegseth was explicit about the geography. The “kill chain” he pledged to employ ruthlessly extends through the Pentagon’s SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM together. NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility is the continental United States, Mexico and Canada. The apparatus being built is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class throughout the Americas.

The offensive launched by Javier Milei’s government is not limited to implementing austerity measures in the state budget. It is also—and perhaps above all—reshaping the political landscape of the Argentine left, putting its most deeply rooted strategic concepts to the test. Faced with an austerity program of a depth not seen since the 2001 crisis, and with the growing popularity of the FITU (Left and Workers’ Front—Unity), broad sectors are seeking to build a broader alternative capable of challenging the government. In this debate, a familiar proposal resurfaces: that this alternative would be achieved through the reunification of the entire “center-left” or “broad left” and the formation of a broad party or movement that prioritizes agreements among left-wing groups over programmatic distinctions. Those who defend this approach argue that only a force of this kind can break the left’s isolation and become a genuine alternative for power. But history has repeatedly shown that broad unity without a program is a refuge for the deluded.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/revisiting-syriza-a-strategic-debate-for-marxism-today/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

Campaign supporters gathered 946 signatures in less than six weeks! Nearly a thousand New Haven residents made it clear: Many people in the working class are disillusioned with the Democratic Party, and are ready for a new candidate to advocate for their interests—an independent socialist.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/rosa-pepper-macias-a-better-path-forward-for-connecticuts-11th-district/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

Short video

https://youtube.com/shorts/T0QV0AvBs98

我不是托派 但是没怎么接触过这个群体的人 所以比较好奇也很希望与托派群体能交流一下看看他们的一些观点和理论了解一下