Throughout the world, workers are engaging in strikes and mass protests over austerity, unprecedented levels of social inequality and the criminal response of capitalist governments to spread of the pandemic. This page will report on the latest developments in the class struggle throughout the world and provide a voice to workers and a means of organizing their struggles. At the same time, it will help workers draw the necessary lessons from the history of the class struggle and socialist movement for their battles today.
To be effective today, even the most basic forms of working-class resistance must be coordinated on an international scale. As the global class struggle escalates, the page will assist workers in building new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file factory and workplace committees independent of the unions, to defend themselves and coordinate their struggles across national borders.
The task of the WSWS is to assist the growing mass movement by providing the Marxist theoretical guidance and political perspective required to transform the spontaneous eruptions of social opposition into a class conscious and internationally coordinated revolutionary struggle for socialism.
According to a leaked report, there have been about 60 COVID infections at the FCA Jefferson North plant and at least two workers have died since May.
The drive by Texas Democrats to reopen Houston schools coincides with the platform of the Biden-Harris campaign, which fraudulently claim that this can be done “safely” while the pandemic spirals out of control.
After 26 years working for GM, Sergio Contreras was fired after he quarantined, challenging the efforts of the corporation to cover up COVID-19 outbreaks and continue production.
The push to reopen the largest district in the state, and seventh-largest in the country, takes place as the coronavirus pandemic is raging in Texas, which has over 881,000 confirmed cases and 17,646 deaths, the second highest numbers in the country.
India: Assam state railway workers demand festival allowance
Several hundred workers organised by the Northeast Frontier Railway Workers Union demonstrated at 52 work sites in several cities in Assam state on October 18 to demand the Durga Puja (religious festival) bonus. They threatened to stop the entire railway network if the government ignored their demand.
India: Haryana auto plant workers protest against labour laws
Workers from the Bellsonica Auto Component India (BACI) plant held a hunger protest outside the mini Secretariat at Gurugram, Haryana state, on October 15. Eight office bearers of the BACI employees’ union held an eight-hour hunger strike and were joined by other workers as they ended their shifts.
The demonstration was to protest the Indian government’s latest labour laws. The union claimed that the new legislation undermines workers’ rights, gives employers a free hand to exploit workers and would lead to an increase in contract labour.
Bangladesh: Port workers unions call off national strike without resolution
The Bangladesh Water Transport Workers' Federation (BWTWF) and the Bangladesh Lighterage Workers Union shut down the national strike of 200,000 water transport workers after three days without resolution to their charter of 11 demands.
The strikers were demanding payment of salaries in line with the government gazette announced in 2016, the issuing of landing passes, appointment letters and identity cards, the provision of food allowances for India-bound vessel workers and compensation of one million taka ($US11,798) for workers killed in workplace accidents.
Western Australian workers protest after worksite death
At least 2,000 construction workers and family members marched to the Western Australian parliament building in Perth on Tuesday to demand industrial manslaughter legislation promised by the States McGowan Labor government in 2017, and held up in the Upper House committee on technicalities, be passed urgently. The legislation increases financial and criminal penalties for those convicted of industrial manslaughter.
The protest came just one week after a 20-metre high glass and steel awning at Perth’s Curtin University collapsed killing 23-year-old glaziers apprentice Johnnie Hartshorn and leaving two more workers injured, one critically. The disastrous collapse could have killed and injured another two dozen building workers if they had not left for lunch off-site five minutes earlier.
Around the world, workers are rising up against the attacks by the capitalist class on their wages, standard of living and basic democratic rights. Millions are opposed to the drive to re-open schools, factories and other workplaces, sacrificing human life in the interest of private profit.
To provide these struggles with an independent organization and democratic leadership, the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party are building new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file committees, among autoworkers, teachers, warehouse workers and other section of the working class. Rank-and-file committees provide the means for workers to fight independently against both the companies, their union lackeys and their political representatives, and establish democratic control over production by workers themselves.
Rank-and-file committees reject the nationalist poison of the unions, which divides 'native' workers against 'foreign' workers and ensures the defeat of both. Instead, rank-and-file committees understand that workers all over the world have the same interests, and provides them the means for international discussion and collaboration.
The government and corporations are demanding a return to work in the midst of a pandemic, which is claiming thousands of lives every week. Their drive for profits takes priority over the health and safety of workers and their families.
In response to the emergence of a new cluster of coronavirus cases at the factory last week, the Faurecia Gladstone Rank-and-File Safety Committee, founded in August to oppose the spread of the contagion, inhumane working conditions and the systematic victimization of whistleblowers, has issued the following statement.
Our committee answers directly to the interests of the working class, not to the major corporations, their political representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties, or the teachers unions which have facilitated school reopenings.
Emma, a parent of primary school age children, said, “I could not agree more with all of you. How can anybody make schools safe? Even our primary school head said they couldn’t guarantee safety.
Autoworkers rank-and-file safety committees are teaming up across the country to restore the eight-hour work day, to oppose forced overtime, and to oppose the unchecked spread of COVID-19.
Rank-and-file safety committees represent and fight for the health of workers, in opposition to the demands of management and the profit principle, which are jointly defended by the companies and the unions. Committees will draw up detailed regulations and standards that must be monitored and enforced. Where conditions are violated, there must be a stoppage of work.
Core objectives of these committees include:
Controlling work hours and line speeds.
Guaranteeing personal protective equipment.
Ensuring safe and comfortable working conditions.
Enforcing regular testing.
Demanding universal health care and guaranteed income.
Ensuring the distribution of information.
Ensuring job security.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party stand ready to assist. Contact us today for more information.
This resolution was adopted unanimously by the membership of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States at its Sixth National Congress, which was held online from July 19 to July 24, 2020.
The irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist class and the working class finds its most obscene expression in the correlation between the number of dead, unemployed and impoverished, and, on the other side of the ledger, the explosive rise of share values on Wall Street.
This is the opening report delivered by David North to the 2020 International May Day Online Rally held by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International on May 2. North is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the US.
The characteristic of every great crisis is that it lays bare the contradictions that have accumulated and been suppressed for decades. All that is backward, anachronistic, corrupt, and, in the most profoundly objective sense, absurd and even irrational in the economic organization, social structure, political leadership and dominant ideology of the existing society is brutally and comprehensively exposed. The pandemic is such a crisis.
This work, first published in 1998, evaluates the bitter historical experiences of the working class with the trade unions and national liberation movements, and with Stalinism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and China.
This lecture, given by Nick Beams at the 1998 International Summer School on Marxism and the Fundamental Problems of the 20th Century, explains how the unprecedented global integration of production exposes the bankruptcy of the nation-state system and is preparing the way for new revolutionary upheavals.
This lecture by David North examines the causes for the betrayals of the trade unions in their hostility to the class struggle and socialism, and reviews the historical conflict between the trade unions and revolutionary Marxism. It was re-published in the 2014 book, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished 20th Century.
This speech by David North was the opening address at the Labor at the Crossroads Conference held by the Workers League, the forerunner to the Socialist Equality Party (US), in Detroit on June 18-19, 1992.
