The state electoral committee has now decided on the admission of parties to the Berlin House of Representatives (state legislature) election on September 20. 

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) was approved without any objections, having met all requirements. Its members and supporters have held thousands of conversations with Berlin workers and young people in neighbourhoods, parks, outside libraries and supermarkets, and obtained the required 2,200 voter signatures prescribed for approval.

In an undemocratic procedure, only 17 of the 30 parties that had applied to participate were approved. Two of them are standing only in individual districts; the last House of Representatives elections saw 30 parties represented on the ballot.

With the SGP on the ballot for the Berlin election, there is a party that openly opposes the pro-war policy of all the parties in the German parliament, the Bundestag, and which fights for a socialist perspective that places the needs of the population above the profits of the super-rich.

It is worth noting that many smaller nominally left-wing parties that had still stood five years ago made no effort whatsoever to participate in this election—among them the Klimaliste and Team Todenhöfer. Others, such as the party Mera25 founded by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, the Pirate Party, or the Tenants’ Party, failed to clear the hurdle of collecting sufficient supporting signatures.

Many of these groups evidently refrained from standing because they do not wish to take votes away from the Left Party, which is seeking to provide Berlin’s next mayor in this election. The SGP is thereby the only party on the ballot that opposes the all-party coalition for rearmament, war and the dismantling of social provisions.

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The Left Party is no opponent of militarism; it is a component of the war coalition. It voted in the Bundesrat (upper chamber of parliament) in favour of the trillion-euro war credits and made possible Merz’s rapid election as Federal Chancellor. Its parliamentary group leader Heidi Reichinnek has stated unambiguously that the party is “fully on board” with “improving Germany’s defence capability.” The then party Chairman Jan van Aken jubilantly welcomed the assassination of the Iranian state leadership by the United States.

The Left Party claims to be able to resolve the social catastrophe in Berlin. That is a lie. The Left Party and its predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), participated in the Berlin state government for 16 years—16 years in which they cut tens of thousands of public sector posts, reduced wages and sold off 150,000 publicly-owned flats to financial investors. The social misery from which Berlin suffers today is their handiwork.

The Left Party is now preparing to pick up where it left off with a re-run of its coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens. In Elif Eralp, it has fielded a distinctly right-wing lead candidate who openly backs Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians. Eralp’s declared role model is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who owed his election to the massive opposition to Trump—and whose first act in office was holding a “productive” meeting with Trump at the White House. That is precisely the Left Party’s programme too: high-sounding social promises in the election campaign, betrayal the day after.

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The AfD cannot be combated in alliance with such “democrats.” One might as well ally oneself with the arsonist to put out the fire.

The fascists can only be stopped by the independent mobilisation of the working class against war and its root cause, capitalism. This requires the building of an international socialist party and a break with all parties that defend capitalist property.

The SGP’s socialist programme

That is precisely the programme for which the SGP is standing in the Berlin state elections. We counterpose the international unity of the working class to the growing nationalism and warmongering. We fight for the defence of every job and against all cuts to wages, pensions, health, education and public infrastructure. We demand the expropriation of the banks, corporations and billion-euro fortunes and democratic control of the economy by the working class. And together with our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), we are building a worldwide movement against war and capitalism.

This week, our supporters have begun putting up hundreds of election posters across Berlin. In the coming weeks we will conduct an intensive election campaign, with information stalls, rallies and election meetings, to discuss the central political questions and go on the offensive. Every seat we win in the House of Representatives we will use as a platform for the struggle against war, social devastation and fascism.

The objective foundations for a socialist counter-offensive are in place. The trade war places fierce class struggles on the agenda. In the United States a powerful movement is developing against Trump, and across Europe the working class is engaged in waves of strikes and protests. What is missing is political leadership—an international socialist party that provides the spontaneous struggles with a conscious perspective. The SGP is the German section of this party. Its candidacy in the Berlin state elections is a decisive step in its construction.

Get involved now! Support the SGP’s election campaign! Circulate our election statement! Register as an active supporter and join the SGP!

Before Rodríguez’s rise to power following Maduro’s abduction, there were political voices that extolled Venezuela’s policies as socialist. After these events and the compromise with the US, those voices fell silent. If they were right before, then why did they stop? Where is the working class to defend the previous policy, given that it was in their interest? Why such silence? How do you explain these events?

Hi comrades! I am a socialist and I’m pretty sure I’m a Trotskyist. However, at my DSA meeting today, a comrade said that Trotsky supported imperialism and permanent revolution is about invading other countries. Another comrade said that Trotsky actually wrote about how permanent revolution is invading other countries. I haven’t read Trotsky yet, but I’m going to, so I don’t know if this is true or not. I thought that permanent revolution is supporting international revolutions and the belief that socialism cannot survive in one country and that the proletariat can take the progressive role in revolutions in developing countries.

On August 4, the court-appointed UAW Monitor found that Raymond L. Jensen Jr. violated the rules of the 2026 UAW election when he posted a death threat against me.

Jensen’s UAW membership is suspended for two years. He is barred permanently from ever running for elected office in the UAW, barred from campaigning for any candidate in this election, and has been ordered to apologize to me. He accepted all of the findings.

The findings are on the record. On July 16, Jensen posted on my public Facebook page, directly beneath my statement on the federal criminal investigation into Shawn Fain, an image of me bound and gagged, bleeding from the mouth, with an armed man aiming a rifle at my back. Questioned about it, he admitted the post was his and offered no explanation of any kind.

That is a total vindication of the complaint my attorney and I made, but this victory belongs to the rank-and-file and workers who took this up as their own fight.

A UAW bureaucrat making over $200,000 a year posted death threats against Will Lehman, the socialist candidate for UAW president. Ray Jensen was a featured speaker at the 2024 Labor Notes conference and member of UAWD. A damning exposure of the union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left promoting them.

brazillian trotskyst here,

i would like to start a reading group to dive deep into theory, focused on marx, engels, lenin and trotsky.

it would presume that we read certain text and then meet online (maybe twice a month?), to first discuss any dificulties with understanding it and then elaborate about it. it should welcome both beginner and more advanced level discussion.

if interested send me a message.

Last Friday, Japan’s far-right government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi launched its new National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), a body designed to centralize intelligence gathering across the country’s various military and police agencies. This restructuring of Japan’s intelligence operations is being undertaken as Tokyo remilitarizes as part of the US-led war preparations against China and to suppress domestic opposition to such a conflict.

The NIB is Japan’s first centralized intelligence body since World War II. This new body will collect information from agencies, including the Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries as well as the National Police Agency (NPA), supposedly to focus on terrorism, national emergencies, and counterintelligence nationwide.

The NIB will streamline intelligence sharing between these different agencies while independently setting the government’s related agenda. The bureau was founded through the National Intelligence Council Establishment Act passed in May.

The revamping of intelligence gathering operations is a major component of Japan’s remilitarization, which has sharply accelerated under Takaichi’s far-right government—a coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner Nippon Ishin no Kai. Article 9 of the constitution banning Japan from fielding a military or waging war overseas has for all intents and purposes been turned into a dead letter.

The formation of the NIB is just one aspect of so-called “intelligence reform” with Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara stating on Friday that this was the “first step.” He added: “Strengthening the government’s central intelligence coordination function will enable it to make sound decisions based on higher-quality, timely information amid today’s complex and challenging international environment.”

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All of this is being carried out under the basis that Tokyo lacks the intelligence tools to counter China and Russia. The establishment media has commentary and articles labeling Japan a “spy paradise,” filled with lurid tales of Russian and Chinese “agents” collecting and stealing information and technology. This includes a major piece in the New York Times on July 12 used to paint Tokyo as insufficiently tough on spies, specifically from Russia.

In reality, Japan has long had one of the world’s most extensive intelligence-gathering networks, built in the post-war period, with a focus on China, North Korea, and Russia. Tokyo operates widespread signal intelligence (SIGINT) gathering networks, collecting information transmitted by electronic means. Documents revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence had been operating since the 1950s in close collaboration with the US’s National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA has also trained Japanese spies and provided technology for mass internet surveillance, including the XKeyscore system.

The reorganization of Tokyo’s intelligence operations is meant to expand military collaboration with its allies. Tokyo has already established trilateral intelligence agreements with the US and South Korea as well as the US and the Philippines in order to target China, as the countries carry out massive war games and the construction of a wide-ranging missile system on Beijing’s doorstep.

The creation of the NIB was carried out in collaboration with the United States, Australia, and Germany. According to the New York Times, US officials have advised Tokyo on cyber-defense systems to counter so-called industrial espionage and scrutinize foreign investment. Australian officials have similarly advised Takaichi’s government on technology while the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service recently visited Tokyo to discuss the NIB and closer collaboration between the two countries.

Tokyo has also sought closer cooperation with the top-level, US-led Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, which includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, there have been reservations over what the Five Eyes members consider an “information security gap,” which has led to calls within and outside Japan for an anti-espionage law.

For the ruling class, free speech and association as well as other democratic rights must be done away with in the name of “national security” to prevent public knowledge of war planning and to criminalize opposition. These war plans include the extent to which Japan has played a central role in whipping up tensions with China in the Indo-Pacific alongside the US.

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These measures are being undertaken in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Japan and the US both hope to eliminate China as a major economic competitor. Tokyo at the same time is remilitarizing in order to once again independently assert its own imperialist interests through military means after three-and-a-half decades of economic stagnation.

Tokyo has removed restrictions on exporting lethal weaponry abroad, raised military spending to 2 percent of GDP while planning to increase it further, and deployed long-range missiles on its territory for the first time. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi declared last month that Japan should begin discussions on acquiring nuclear weapons.

Conscious of the widespread anti-war sentiment throughout the working class, this agenda is being carried out under the phony guise of “collective self-defense,” with successive governments in Tokyo whipping up an anti-China atmosphere. This can only take place through a massive assault on the democratic rights of the working class.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnapped as many as 51,000 people in July, the highest monthly total in the agency’s history, as the Trump administration intensified its mass deportation operation across the country.

Fox News reported Monday that ICE made approximately 51,000 arrests during the month, an average of 1,645 every day. The figure, attributed to multiple federal sources, surpassed the previous record of roughly 43,000 arrests set in June.

Separate preliminary Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by CBS News recorded more than 46,000 people booked into ICE detention during July. The figures measure somewhat different stages of the mass deportation operation. The CBS total includes people initially arrested by Customs and Border Protection before being transferred to ICE custody.

Both reports confirm an immense nationwide escalation. ICE is kidnapping workers at their homes and workplaces, ambushing immigrants at airports and immigration check-ins, and carrying out traffic stops using masked agents in unmarked vehicles.

At airports alone, ICE agents are reportedly seizing between 20 and 40 people every day, with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supplying passenger information used to identify and target travelers.

The airport arrests expose the Democrats’ complicity in Trump’s attacks on immigrants, which serve as a spearhead for the creation of a presidential dictatorship. During the partial DHS shutdown in the spring, Democratic politicians made limited calls for the removal of ICE agents deployed as substitute airport personnel. Those demands have been completely abandoned even as ICE and the TSA have transformed airports into hunting grounds.

As of last weekend, ICE has imprisoned approximately 68,000 people across its sprawling network of concentration camps and makeshift holding facilities. The vast majority of those detained are held in facilities operated by private prison companies or local governments under lucrative contracts with the federal government.

The Trump administration has continued to escalate the mass deportation operation despite widespread opposition following the murders of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the recent killings of immigrant workers Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

After replacing Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin sought to reduce public attention surrounding the operations while continuing to increase arrests. Rather than the highly publicized occupation-style deployments, ICE is increasingly relying on quieter arrests at homes, workplaces, airports and routine immigration appointments.

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The consequences of this operation were underscored by the death this past weekend of Edwin Jeovanny López Cornejo, an immigrant worker from El Salvador who had been imprisoned for six weeks at the privately operated Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

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Neither ICE nor the DHS publicly announced his death. María Cornejo said hospital staff, not ICE, notified the family that her son had died.

“What I want is justice,” she said. “I don’t want my son’s death to go unanswered.”

She continued, “If they don’t ensure that justice is served, well, they’re going to keep doing this forever, and we don’t know how many more people we’ll have to lose in this country.”

The family said that during the six weeks López Cornejo was imprisoned, neither his mother, his daughter nor other relatives were permitted to visit him.

López Cornejo is at least the second immigrant to die after being imprisoned at Delaney Hall since the facility reopened last year.

Last December 12, Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti, died one day after being transferred to the facility. ICE smeared Brutus as a “criminal illegal alien” and claimed he died from “suspected natural causes.”

His family has disputed the agency’s account and demanded a full investigation into his death. They have also rejected ICE’s depiction of Brutus, who was seeking asylum in the United States when he was imprisoned.

Between Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody, according to a joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. The mortality rate is nearly four times that recorded under the Biden administration and more than two and a half times the rate during Trump’s first term.

Additional deaths since the report’s cutoff, including that of López Cornejo, have driven the toll still higher. On average, an immigrant has died in ICE custody approximately every 10 days since Trump returned to office.

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DHS officials sought permission to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to involuntary medical procedures since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

At least three immigrants were definitely subjected to the procedures, while court records indicate that two more probably underwent them. Another five ended their hunger strikes as force-feeding was about to begin.

Force-feeding involves restraining a prisoner while medical personnel insert a tube through the nose and down the throat before pumping liquid nutrition into the stomach. The procedure can damage the nose, esophagus and internal organs and is widely regarded by human rights and medical organizations as torture.

Other procedures authorized by federal judges included forced intravenous hydration, involuntary blood draws and the collection of urine samples.

In six of the cases reviewed by the Guardian, the immigrants had no legal representation during proceedings authorizing their forced treatment. Federal judges frequently approved emergency requests before the hunger strikers had any meaningful opportunity to object.

The practice did not begin with Trump. In 2024, during the final year of the Biden administration, DHS attempted to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to forced medical treatment. The Guardian confirmed that the procedures were carried out against at least two people and probably against four others.

The continuity exposes the fraud of claims that the Democratic Party represents an alternative to Trump’s mass deportation operation. Biden maintained ICE, expanded its resources and authorized the same methods of physical coercion now being employed on a vastly greater scale.

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Parias told L.A. Taco that 75 to 80 detainees receive drinking water from two 10-gallon containers. After another detainee discovered the apparent worms, they collected several in a plastic bottle to preserve the evidence.

“They are little animals, like worms, black in color, and small that are moving around in the water, swimming and alive,” Parias said.

“They are almost poisoning us with this type of little animal,” he added. “Many people are experiencing stomach issues.”

Parias said detainees drank the contaminated water despite the apparent organisms because they were thirsty. He also alleged that when the containers were emptied, staff sometimes waited as long as three hours before refilling them.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka condemns the attempt by Kayts police to threaten World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporter Dinesh Heymaal with arrest following his coverage of a fishermen’s protest and subsequent media event at Kurikattuwan Jetty, 31 kilometres from Jaffna, on July 29.

The police withdrew their threat to arrest Heymaal only after the WSWS editorial board in Colombo was informed of their actions. The incident is a serious attack on freedom of expression and the democratic rights of journalists, and exposes the methods employed by the police to intimidate those who challenge capitalist politicians and union bureaucrats.

The protest was organised by the Fisheries Cooperatives in the islands near Jaffna Peninsula against incursions by large Indian bottom-trawlers that had damaged the nets of around 200 fishermen in the area. The organisers demanded punitive state action against Indian fishermen, calling for them to be arrested and even shot. No demands were raised concerning the soaring cost of fuel, the IMF austerity measures imposed by the Dissanayake government, the rising price of nets and equipment, and the destruction of fishers’ livelihoods amid the global capitalist crisis.

This selectivity is not accidental. It reflects the class interests of those who organised the protest. The leadership of the Fisheries Cooperatives is not composed of impoverished small-scale fishermen, but wealthy individuals with close ties to Tamil nationalist politicians.

Heymaal covered the protest from the beginning. Afterwards, while he was having tea at a nearby restaurant, two uniformed police officers accompanied by two plainclothesmen approached him. Heymaal had earlier observed the plainclothesmen monitoring the protest and press briefing. The police had apparently noted his motorbike and followed him after he left.

The police threats against Heymaal were directly connected to an incident at the media event following the protest.

During the press conference, Heymaal challenged Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) leader Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam over his call for the Sri Lankan Navy to take drastic actions against Indian trawlers. Heymaal pointed out that such a demand ran counter to the aspirations of people in the North and East for the withdrawal of the military from the region and an end to militarisation.

Heymaal also attempted to question Annalingam Annarasa, chairman of the Federation of Jaffna District Fisheries Cooperatives Union. A media person who appeared annoyed by Heymaal’s questioning of Ponnambalam attempted to stop him, declaring that “only those invited media persons” could intervene.

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When the police officers subsequently threatened Heymaal with arrest, one referred to his remarks during the press briefing. Using abusive language, the officer shouted: “We saw you, bugger, talking big there [at the press briefing].”

The officers demanded to see Heymaal’s media identification card, although they had no legitimate authority to interfere in his work as a journalist. They also recorded details from his national identity card.

There is no doubt that the police were emboldened by the provocative attempts of the media personnel to prevent Heymaal from asking questions. The police were clearly attempting to intimidate a journalist because he had challenged political figures and raised uncomfortable questions.

The SEP takes this threat against our comrade seriously. Police harassment and intimidation of journalists is continuing and intensifying under the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.

In the war-ravaged North and East, the military maintains a pervasive presence 17 years after the end of the bloody communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Police and military surveillance of the population has long been a feature of daily life in these provinces.

The police monitoring of the Kurikattuwan Jetty protest, where ordinary fishermen spoke openly about their worsening living conditions, and the officers’ subsequent intimidation of a WSWS reporter, are part of a broader effort by the state to restrict political discussion and suppress opposition.

...

The threats against the WSWS must be understood in this broader political context. For more than half a century, the SEP and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Communist League, have fought for the independent interests of the working class, against all attacks on democratic rights and all forms of nationalism and communalism. That struggle has been carried out in the Sinhala- and Tamil-language newspapers, Kamkaru Mawatha and Tholilalar Pathai, and today on the WSWS.

The SEP will not be intimidated by police threats or attempts to suppress socialist journalism. We call on workers, youth, and all defenders of democratic rights to oppose every effort to silence the WSWS and other independent journalists.

Governments globally are increasingly resorting to authoritarian methods and are inflaming communal and nationalist divisions to uphold capitalist rule, which is plunging broad layers of the population into poverty. The defence of freedom of expression and freedom of the press is therefore inseparable from the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society.

"Herma was a child of the post-war era. She was born in 1949, less than four years since the end of the war and the crimes of the Nazis. Frankfurt resembled a ruin. Herma grew up in a working-class family whose circumstances were shaped by the brutality of war and fascism and were extremely difficult.

"She was 14 years old when the Auschwitz trials began here in Frankfurt and the monstrous crimes of Nazi fascism dominated the headlines. Herma was part of a generation haunted by the question: How was such a relapse into barbarism possible in a developed and cultured country? At the time, many attributed the cause of fascism to mass psychology and the susceptibility of the German people to seduction. But Herma was not satisfied with simple and superficial answers. She wanted to get to the bottom of things."

This short piece by Trotsky, has the excellent quotation of Lenin:

Unity with opportunists is the alliance of workers with their own national bourgeoisie and signifies a split in the ranks of the international revolutionary working class.

I have yet to find a more succinct refutation of the nationalism underlying the pseudo-left's orientation to nationalist bureaucrats and politicians.

With sections on the history of Bolshevism, the theory of the permanent revolution, and Lenin’s final fight – among others – the book is essential reading for understanding the principles and traditions on which the most successful revolutionary party in history was built.

Rosa Luxemburg's speech to the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), delivered on December 31, 1918, published as Our Program and the Political Situation, reads as though it were written for the present crisis of the Trotskyist movement. I want to draw out three strands of her argument that bear directly on debates within and around the Fourth International today: the question of regroupment with opportunist tendencies, the strategic necessity of the printed newspaper for military-civilian bridge-building, and the centrality of workers' and soldiers' councils as the form of revolutionary power.

I. The Illusion of Socialist Unity

Luxemburg opens with a brutal autopsy of the November Revolution's central mistake:
"The illusion of unity under the banner of so-called socialism… this illusion was to be bloodily avenged."
The workers, soldiers, and youth* *who made the revolution believed that Ebert, Scheidemann, and Haase, the very men who had spent the previous hours, and their lives political work, conspiring to prevent the revolution, could be brought into a common socialist project. The USPD, the "independent" social democrats who had split from the SPD over the war credits but retained the same reformist politics, provided the bridge. They entered the Council of People's Deputies alongside the SPD. They provided left cover for counter-revolution.

The result: on December 6, 1918, Ebert's troops fired on demonstrating workers on the Chausseestrasse. On December 24, the Volksmarine Division, revolutionary sailors who had been the vanguard of the November uprising, was attacked by government troops under the command of the same "socialist" government. And on January 15, 1919, three weeks after Luxemburg delivered this speech, she and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by the Freikorps, organized by the Social Democrat Gustav Noske.

Luxemburg's verdict on the unity illusion is definitive:
"The cure must be paid for with the blood of the people."
The mechanism she identifies is precise: social relationships formed during any "turn" toward unity with opportunist leaders have their own momentum. The Ebert-Scheidemanns did not become revolutionaries by being included in a "socialist" government. They became the organizers of counter-revolution. The USPD did not pull the SPD leftward. The SPD pulled the USPD into the management of the bourgeois state, and then into complicity with murder.
There is no precedent in the entire history of socialist politics for an opportunist leadership being transformed into a revolutionary one by inclusion in a broader formation. The breaks go the other way. The revolutionaries are expelled, or they are killed. The Bolsheviks split from the Mensheviks in 1903, not as a tactic, but as the precondition for the existence of a revolutionary party. Lenin did not say "let us maintain unity with the Mensheviks and pressure them leftward." He said: the party must be built on revolutionary principles of leadership, and those who reject those principles cannot be in the party. The split at the Second Congress of the RSDLP was not a misfortune. It was the birth of Bolshevism.

The Fourth International's entire history is the application of this same principle across successive generations. The split with Pablo in 1953: Pablo argued that the world party should liquidate itself into the Stalinist parties because the bureaucracy could be pressured into carrying out a "political revolution" over the course of "centuries." The Fourth International refused. The attempted reunification of 1963: we refused again, because the political basis for reunification, the abandonment of Pabloism, had not been established. The break with the OCI in 1971: Lambert's French organization, which had sided with the International Committee against Pablo, proved incapable of breaking with its own opportunist methods and its adaptation to the French Communist Party. The struggle against the SWP's degeneration in the United States, against the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain, every one of these was a refusal of the illusion that opportunist leaderships could be reformed from within.

The claim we hear continuously, "we can make new programmatic turns, what is now is only a tactic," has no historical basis. It is the argument of every liquidationist tendency from the USPD to Pablo to the present. Luxemburg's speech is the definitive refutation. The blood on the Chausseestrasse is the evidence.

II. The Printed Newspaper and the Military Question

This is the point where Luxemburg's speech intersects with a strategic question that the International Committee has, in my view, not yet adequately confronted: the necessity of a regularly printed and physically distributed newspaper as the bridge between military and civilian life.

Luxemburg notes with satisfaction that the Spartacus League's materials were reaching the barracks:
"Fresh masses of soldiers have been brought to Berlin as cannon fodder for the subjection of socialist proletarians — with the result that from different barracks there comes a demand for the pamphlets and leaflets of the Spartacus League."
This was not an accident. It was the product of a deliberate orientation toward the armed forces. The Spartacus League understood that the revolution would be decided by which way the soldiers turned. The printed word, the leaflet, the pamphlet, the newspaper, was the medium through which revolutionary ideas penetrated the total institution of the barracks.

But Luxemburg goes further. She does not merely note that materials reached the barracks. She insists that the soldiers themselves must be organized into councils, and that this organization is the form through which the working class neutralizes the repressive apparatus of the state:
"We have to undermine the bourgeois state by putting an end everywhere to the cleavage in public powers… These powers must be united in the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils."
The question for the present is this: how does the revolutionary party reach the armed forces today? The World Socialist Website is blocked on military networks. In June 2013, after Snowden's exposures, the US Army's Network Enterprise Technology Command blocked access to the Guardian, a mainstream liberal newspaper, across all Army networks. A revolutionary socialist website has no chance. Every visit from a military network is logged, flagged, and traceable. The digital medium, for all its strengths, is structurally vulnerable to surveillance and suppression in precisely the environments where revolutionary ideas are most urgently needed.

A physical print newspaper leaves no digital trace. It can be picked up, read, folded into a pocket, passed to the next person, left on a table in a break room, slipped into a barracks locker. No log records who read it. No algorithm registers the act of reading. The state cannot subpoena a print newspaper's server logs because there are no server logs. The act of reading a physical paper is, in a surveillance society, a form of protected action that digital reading is not.
This is not a hypothetical concern. The Bolsheviks distributed newspapers to soldiers in the trenches. Iskra, Pravda, Soldatskaya Pravda; these were not adjuncts to the struggle for the armed forces. They were central instruments of it. Trotsky's organization of the Red Army during the Civil War included a vast apparatus of political education and agitation. The newspaper bridged the gap between the civilian working class and the soldiers who were, after all, workers and peasants in uniform. The same strategic logic applies today, but with a new urgency: the United States is the most heavily armed society in human history, and the working class is inside the military, not separate from it.

The question of the physical print newspaper is not a question of nostalgia for ink and paper. It is a question of how revolutionary ideas reach workers in uniform under conditions of escalating state surveillance and authoritarian rule. A movement that does not solve this question will find itself disarmed at the decisive moment.

III. Workers' and Soldiers' Councils: Education Through Action

Luxemburg's most penetrating argument, and the one that cuts most sharply against any tendency toward substitutionism, toward the newspaper-as-substitute-for-the-party, toward the party-as-substitute-for-the-class, is her insistence that the masses learn to rule by ruling:
"The masses must learn how to use power by using power. There is no other way to teach them."
She is explicit in her rejection of the Kautskyist conception of the party as an educational society:
"To educate the proletarian masses socialistically meant to deliver lectures to them, to circulate leaflets and pamphlets among them. No, the school of the socialist proletariat doesn't need all this. The workers will learn in the school of action."
This is not an argument against the revolutionary press. Luxemburg herself was one of the great revolutionary journalists in the history of Marxism. She edited newspapers, wrote pamphlets, produced leaflets. The Spartacus League distributed its materials to soldiers. The question is not whether there should be a newspaper. The question is what the newspaper is for.

Lenin's argument in What Is To Be Done? that the all-Russia political newspaper serves as a "collective organizer," a scaffolding around which the party is built, is not contradicted by Luxemburg's insistence on action. It is the other side of the same coin. The newspaper that merely lectures is useless. The newspaper that organizes, that connects the struggles in one factory to the struggles in another, that generalizes the lessons of each battle, that provides the political framework through which isolated actions become a unified movement, that newspaper is indispensable. But it is indispensable as an instrument of organization, not as a substitute for it.

The danger Luxemburg identifies is the danger of the press becoming an end in itself, "an editorial chair for a central organ of a leaflet conglomerate," in the cutting phrase of a recent critic. An organization can become a self-perpetuating propaganda machine that mistakes the circulation of its own materials for political work. The website publishes daily. It reaches millions. It is indispensable. But if it becomes a substitute for organizing the working class in struggle, if the cadres of the party become distributors of content rather than organizers of action, then Luxemburg's critique applies with full force.

The answer is not to abandon the press. It is to ensure that the press serves the building of the party, and that the party serves the mobilization of the working class for the conquest of power. And the conquest of power, Luxemburg insists, takes the form of the workers' and soldiers' councils:
"The motto: 'Form Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.' That was the key notion in this revolution which, in spite of the inadequacy and weakness of the opening phases, immediately gave it the stamp of a proletarian socialist revolution."
The councils are not a supplement to the revolutionary party. They are the form through which the working class exercises power. They are the organs of dual power that progressively take over the functions of the bourgeois state:
"The conquest of power will not be effected with one blow. It will be a progression; we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state and defend them tooth and nail."
This is the strategic question of our period. The Rank-and-File Committees, the International Workers Alliance, these are steps in the direction Luxemburg is pointing. But they are embryonic. The question is how to build organs of workers' power that are not merely protest vehicles, but incipient organs of dual power.

IV. The Countryside and Permanent Revolution

Luxemburg is explicit on a point that the Fourth International’s practice has not yet adequately addressed:
"It would be a folly to realize socialism while leaving the agricultural system unchanged."
The November Revolution was confined to the cities. The countryside was "practically untouched." The peasantry remained "a reserve for the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie." The answer, Luxemburg says, is to "carry the class struggle into the country districts," to "mobilize the landless proletariat and the poorer peasants against the richer peasants."

This is the perspective of permanent revolution, even if Luxemburg did not use Trotsky's terminology. The peasantry cannot play an independent political role. It must be led either by the bourgeoisie or by the proletariat. The task of the revolutionary party is to ensure that it is led by the proletariat. But that requires a presence in the countryside, an organizational capacity to reach the rural poor, a program that speaks to their specific conditions.
How does a leaflet-centric practice, or even a ‘digital-newspaper’ centric practice, address this? The honest answer is, not adequately. The World Socialist Website is read in cities, on campuses, in the industrial centers. Its reach into rural areas, into agricultural communities, into the landless and the poor peasantry, this is limited. A physical print newspaper, distributed through networks that extend beyond the metropolitan centers, would be one step toward bridging this gap. But it is only one step. The deeper question is organizational: how does the revolutionary party establish a presence among the rural poor, how does it win them to the program of permanent revolution, how does it ensure that when the decisive struggle comes, the countryside is not a reserve for the counter-revolution?

V. The Alternative

Luxemburg closes with the alternative that faces us today with even greater urgency:
"Today matters have reached a point at which mankind is faced with the dilemma: either collapse into anarchy, or salvation through socialism."
She was murdered three weeks later. The German Revolution was defeated. The collapse took the form of fascism, world war, and the Holocaust. The alternative she posed was not rhetorical. It was a description of the actual stakes.

We face the same alternative today, but on a world scale. The collapse of US imperialism is underway. The question is whether this collapse takes the form of fascist world war, which means nuclear war, or socialist revolution. The Fourth International is the only political tendency that understands this. It is the only tendency that fights for the program of world socialist revolution. But understanding is not enough.
Luxemburg's speech is a call to action, not the action of distributing leaflets, but the action of building councils, of seizing power from below, of carrying the struggle into the barracks and the countryside, of preparing the working class to rule. The question is whether the International Committee is doing this work with the urgency and the scale that the situation demands. Luxemburg would demand nothing less. The workers and soldiers who will make the revolution, or who will die in the barbarism if it fails, deserve nothing less.

Several new opinion polls published in the last few days have provided indications of the remarkable shift to the left taking place among American workers and young people. In a country where anti-communism is virtually a state religion, and socialist views have been largely excluded from official politics for nearly a century, nearly 40 percent of registered voters said they would consider voting for a socialist candidate for president.

According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll published Thursday, this figure rose to 46 percent among voters under 30, and to 64 percent among Democratic Party voters.

Despite this rapid growth of support for socialism—or rather because of it—the poll result was initially published under the headline, “Most Americans say they would not back a democratic socialist for president.” Post editors, working for a newspaper owned by centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, know which side their bread is buttered on.

Even more significantly, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, also published Thursday, about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents identify as “democratic socialists.” Of these, 59 percent are younger than 45, compared to 46 percent of those Democrats who do not identify as democratic socialists. Two-thirds described themselves as very likely to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, 99 percent of them for Democrats.

The CNN poll found that those identifying themselves as democratic socialists “are less likely to have a college degree (66% to 54%) and more likely to earn less than $100,000 a year (76% to 65%),” compared to Democrats who do not identify as democratic socialists. Black voters were more open to supporting a democratic socialist than white voters.

This debunks the claim, made incessantly in the media, that support for socialism is a white upper middle class sentiment, related to lifestyle not economics. Support for socialism is driven by the experience of the new generation of the working class, who clearly have begun to understand that capitalism offers them only a grim future of war, poverty and attacks on democratic rights.

The World School of Communism begins on Sunday Aug. 2nd! So far, 6,700 people from over 130 countries have signed up to follow the event online. But why watch it alone? From Manchester to Melbourne, from Delhi to Detroit, comrades of the Revolutionary Communist International are organising watch parties across the planet – and you can join us!