9+ hour, 21+ min ago (1743+ words) This is the first part of the lecture "The Gelfand Case: 1978-1982" delivered by Norisa Diaz and Tom Carter, to the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on the history of the Security and the Fourth International investigation. The suit named as defendants the heads of the US Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the SWP, and the SWP leaders instrumental in his expulsion. At the convention, Gelfand raised his concerns to SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes and noted that, as an attorney, the documents appeared legitimate to him. Barnes told Gelfand that the documents were in fact true, and that their contents represented a part of the party's history that was supposedly known to many. He claimed that Hansen's meetings with the FBI were to gather information on Trotsky's assassination, and assured Gelfand…...

11+ hour, 54+ min ago (1138+ words) November 19 marked 15 years since an explosion ripped through the underground Pike River Coal mine on the remote West Coast of New Zealand's South Island. Twenty-nine workers were trapped in the mine. For five days, the company management, police and government officials told the families and the public that a rescue operation was being planned. Then, on November 24 there was a second underground explosion and police declared that there was no longer any chance of finding survivors. Government regulators from the Department of Labour (now WorkSafe) knew about the conditions at Pike River but did not shut it down. The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU, since renamed E t) also knew, but it kept quiet and allowed workers to continue to enter the mine day after day, risking their lives. In response to the royal commission's findings, then prime minister John…...

17+ hour, 13+ min ago (595+ words) The main parliamentary parties, led by Labour, are banging the drum for preparations for war with Russia, regardless of the immediate outcome of the conflict in Ukraine. Not a day goes by without the Labour government intensifying preparation for such a catastrophic war. This is taking a public form in the run-up to the government's autumn budget to be delivered this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. While essential social and health services are to be further starved of resources and transformed into revenue streams for private capital, arms spending is to surge to at least "101 billion. Speaking last week in Downing Street, Defence Secretary John Healey fed a media frenzy over the presence near UK waters of a Russian research vessel Yantar, which he accused of monitoring the UK's undersea cables. Healey hailed Labour's role in re-integrating the British military…...

11+ hour, 24+ min ago (1140+ words) The World Socialist Web Site invites workers and other readers to contribute to this regular feature. Health workers across Uruguay carried out a 24-hour protest-strike November 18, including marches and rallies demanding budget increases for the public healthcare sector. The protest took place as the National Legislature was voting on next year's budget. In Montevideo, the strikers rallied at city hall and then marched on to Uruguay's government house, known as the Executive Tower, with signs and chants demanding higher wages, and better working conditions, including an end to contingent work, and lowering the retirement age. The strikers also called for the restoration of Social Security and lower medical costs for the poor. Government workers belonging to the State Workers Union (ATE) went on a 24-hour national strike November 19, against Argentine President Milei's proposed "labor reform." In Buenos Aires strikers joined…...

8+ hour, 54+ min ago (671+ words) This week, one of the most aggressive military manoeuvres of the postwar period took place in Berlin. Under the codename'Bollwerk B'rlin, the government deployed 250 heavily armed soldiers of the Guard Battalion in underground railway tunnels and on an abandoned industrial site to train for urban warfare and operations against opponents in urban terrain. Officially, the exercise was intended as "preparation for a state of defence." In reality, it marks a qualitative escalation of domestic militarisation. It is part of the systematic preparations by the ruling class for war abroad and repression at home. At the same time, developments in Germany cannot be viewed separately from events in the United States. There, the fascist President Donald Trump is attempting to establish an openly dictatorial regime; mobilising military and paramilitary units in city centres to crush the growing opposition to his oligarchic…...

9+ hour, 57+ min ago (563+ words) We encourage all postal workers to contact the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee at'[email protected]'or by filling out the form at the end of this article. The deal'which involves both the Urban and RSMC bargaining units'was struck in total secrecy. The union, moreover, is refusing to provide the membership with a single concrete detail of its contents. Nonetheless, CUPW has halted all remaining job action during Canada Post's most profitable period of the year as the winter holiday shopping season kicks into high-gear.' Canada Post and CUPW confirmed Friday that "all strike or lockout activities are suspended" while lawyers formalize the "agreement in principle," and that no details will be released until tentative contracts are concluded. Management and the Carney Liberal government know exactly what the "agreement" contains; postal workers, whose livelihoods are being bartered away, are on the other…...

8+ hour, 7+ min ago (254+ words) What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington." "John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 24 August 1815. From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Without consuming, it winds its progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed and discovers that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it. It is as if these events and people, slumbering for a quarter millennium,…...

7+ hour, 41+ min ago (795+ words) More than 3,200 Boeing defense workers in the St. Louis area voted Thursday to accept a five-year contract, ending a 15-week strike that had shut down production of fighter jets and weapons systems critical to the US war machine. The 68 to 32 percent vote came after workers had rejected four previous company offers. Those rejections were a sign of militancy and defiance, but the critical element allowing the company to end the strike was its isolation by bureaucracy of the International Association of Machinists, which allowed Boeing to starve workers into submission. The strike was part of a significant upsurge in the class struggle in recent months. This includes strikes by tens of thousands of healthcare workers on the west coast at Kaiser Permanente and UC Health, as well as healthcare strikes in New Orleans, Minnesota, Wisconsin and western Michigan. Other strikes…...

9+ hour, 31+ min ago (930+ words) Last week Wall Street feverishly anticipated the quarterly revenue and profit results from Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Would the results exceed expectations and quell the growing fears that the AI boom is a bubble which may soon burst with major consequences? They were published after Wall Street had closed on Wednesday and were above forecasts with a 62 percent increase in revenues to $57 billion in the three months to the end of October and forecasts of even more to come in the current quarter$65 billion, some $3 billion more than expectations. When trading opened on Thursday Nvidia's shares jumped by 5 percent with the tech-heavy NASDAQ index and the S&P 500 recording significant rises. But it was a different story by the end of the day. Nvidia's share price was down 3.2 percent and the gains…...

6+ hour, 55+ min ago (411+ words) Barely a month in office, Japan's new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has triggered a diplomatic row with Beijing over her remarks in parliament on November 7 suggesting that Japan would automatically be involved in any military conflict between China and Taiwan. Far from subsiding, the battle of words has escalated over the past fortnight with mounting economic repercussions. The phrase has a precise legal meaning within "collective self-defence" legislation passed in 2015 by the government of Shinzo Abe allowing Japanese military deployment overseas in "a survival-threatening situation." No previous post-World War II Japanese government, even that of the militarist Abe, has publicly indicated that Tokyo would go to war with Beijing over Taiwan. Takaichi, a prot'g' of Abe, is pursuing a similar policy. Just a week after being installed, she met with Trump aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier at the…...