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The Wang Fuk Court Fire in Hong Kong: A crime of global capitalism

The catastrophes of Wang Fuk Court and Grenfell Tower are spectacular and tragic eruptions of the miserable, and entirely preventable, world housing crisis. They are not mere excesses, nor failures of regulation, they are an inescapable part of capitalism.

The UN committee found the death toll in Israeli custody to be “abnormally high and appears to have exclusively affected the Palestinian detainee population” and noted that “to date, no state officials have been held responsible or accountable for such deaths”.

Jean Shaoul

Alan Gelfand, whose lawsuit against the US government led to the exposure of high-level agents of the FBI and Soviet secret police in the Socialist Workers Party, died Wednesday, October 29, in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old.

David North

Eighty years after the unprecedented crimes of the Wehrmacht and Hitlerite fascism, the ruling class is once again pursuing a massive rearmament program that breaks with all post-war restrictions and is systematically preparing Germany for a third world war—with Russia as its main target.

Johannes Stern

Workers Struggles: The Americas

Workers at the Gabriel Passos Refinery in Brazil say they will continue their walkout for equal pay, while some 50,000 workers marched through downtown Montreal on Saturday to protest government policies.

Rebellion begins against IG Metall union at Bosch in Germany

Growing anger over mass redundancies and wage cuts has produced an open revolt against IG Metall. At Bosch in Schwäbisch Gmünd, workers are now moving to establish their own independent organisation to defend jobs and living standards.

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

This week in history: December 1-7

UN report tallies world toll of AIDS; Indonesia invades East Timor; US military evacuates Pyongyang; Saudi forces capture Medina

“From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished”

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution

Audiences cannot help but grasp the relevance of the film’s subject—a population revolting against tyranny and despotism in the name of equality and inalienable rights.

Tom Mackaman

Brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto declared national hero

The declaration that the mass murderer Suharto is a national hero is a statement of intent by the capitalist class and should be treated by the working class in every country as a serious warning.

Joseph Scalice

50 Years since the Canberra Coup: A Marxist assessment

In Australia, a purportedly stable capitalist parliamentary democracy, this entire democratic facade was thrust aside in 1975 in response to what was a potentially revolutionary upsurge of working-class struggles amid a period of acute crisis of capitalism internationally.

Mike Head

German unions silent over their state visit to Israel

The German unions secretly sent a forty-person delegation to Israel to demonstrate solidarity with the Zionist Histadrut amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This revealing silence exposes the alignment of the German trade unions with Berlin’s war agenda.

Marianne Arens

Rolling strikes continue in New Zealand

The trade unions are preparing to impose pay settlements of 3 percent increases or less, well below the soaring cost of living.

John Braddock

Death toll reaches 128 in horrific Hong Kong apartment fire

Two hundred people remain unaccounted for as emergency crews continue search, recovery and support operations in the catastrophic and preventable 43-hour fire at the Wang Fuk Court residential complex in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong.

Kevin Reed

Divisions in US Fed opening up

A December rate cut is starting to look increasingly unlikely as concerns grow over a possible AI bust.

Nick Beams

Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi defies Turkish state’s intervention on its program

The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, which was officially established in August in Turkey, received a letter from the Supreme Court of Appeals Prosecutor’s Office demanding that it change its program. It categorically rejected this political intervention.

Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal

Lecture to the SEP 2025 Summer School

The Gelfand Case: 1978-1982 (Part 1)

This lecture traces how Alan Gelfand’s principled efforts to investigate evidence of state infiltration in the SWP were met by censorship, intimidation, and an unconstitutional expulsion that set the stage for his landmark civil rights lawsuit known as the Gelfand Case.

Norisa Diaz

2025 Summer School. Lecture 9, Part 2

Hansen builds a world network of agents

This lecture examines the international operations of the US Socialist Workers Party under the direction of Joseph Hansen, exposed as an FBI agent by the Security and the Fourth International investigation.

Andrea Lobo

Kshama Sawant runs for Congress posing as an independent socialist

Kshama Sawant’s congressional campaign is an effort to channel workers’ growing opposition to the existing system back into Democratic Party reformism and away from the revolutionary fight against dictatorship and capitalism.

David Fitzgerald

Capitalism failing on all 45 indicators of climate progress

The United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2025” shows the planet is on course for 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by the end of this century based on current policies.

Thomas Scripps

Mass struggles against rising unemployment in Turkey

Textile companies have profited for decades from government subsidies and intense worker exploitation. Now, these companies are eliminating jobs and trying to seize accumulated wages and compensation, pushing workers to resist.

Barış Demir

Turkish government detains prominent journalists

Political arrests, operations targeting journalists, and growing attacks on press freedom are steps taken by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to use the judiciary to build an authoritarian regime.

Barış Demir

The CDC embraces bogus claims of autism-vaccine links

At the direction of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has embraced the unfounded claims of right-wing anti-vaxxers that childhood vaccines may be linked to autism.

Benjamin Mateus

Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War

Their testimonies are first-hand accounts of war crimes perpetrated by the self-proclaimed “the most moral army in the world”, flatly contradicting the IDF’s insistence that it operates in accordance with international law and takes measures to minimise civilian harm in its genocidal assault on Gaza.

Jean Shaoul
Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war

Underlying the interlinked crises of the capitalist system is an oligarchy that subordinates all of society to profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. The fight against the oligarchy is by its very nature a revolutionary task.

Wolfgang Weber (1949-2024): A revolutionary intellectual and fighter for Trotskyism

Wolfgang devoted over 50 years of his life to building the Trotskyist party and fought tirelessly politically and theoretically for the independence of the working class.

The Gaza genocide and the death of Aaron Bushnell: What are the political lessons?

This lecture was given by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Tuesday, March 12.

84 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky

Trotsky's assassination was the greatest political crime of the 20th century. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was the leader of the 1917 October revolution in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, and the preeminent strategist of world socialist revolution.

One Hundred Years Since the Death of Lenin

January 21 marked 100 years since the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. This page includes a collection of essays reviewing the life and ideas of the great Marxist theoretician, founder of the Bolshevik Party, and co-leader of the Russian Revolution.

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Texas A&M University bans “race and gender ideology”

The fascistic administration of Governor Greg Abbott, at the behest of Trump, is seeking to ensure that the approximately 1.6 million students attending public universities in Texas only come into contact with instructional material acceptable to the far right.

Josh Andrews

Stop the censorship of anti-fascist meetings at Berlin universities!

While students face ever greater restrictions on their right to freedom of expression, German universities themselves are by no means neutral. They increasingly take sides with German militarism and defend far-right political positions.

International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Germany)

A socialist perspective against genocide, world war and fascism

Students are returning to universities this October under extraordinary conditions. The IYSSE is distributing this statement at the beginning of the semester at universities in Germany and calls on students to join us in building a mass movement against war and capitalism among workers and young people.

International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Germany)

David Neita: January 5, 1948 – October 30, 2025

David Neita, who played a leading role in the Workers League (predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party) during the 1970s, died on October 30 in Los Angeles at the age of 77.

David North

The fight against fascism requires a fight against capitalism and war!

Having twice voted with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in favor of a brutal policy of sealing the borders against refugees, the conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) parliamentary groups in the Bundestag are prepared to accept the far-right party as a government partner.

Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei
NOW AVAILABLE
COVID, Capitalism, and Class War: A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic

Mehring Books, the publishing arm of the Socialist Equality Party (US), is proud to announce the publication of Volume 1 of COVID, Capitalism, and Class War: A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic, a compilation of the World Socialist Web Site's coverage of this global crisis.

Read the introduction

Analyzing a World in Chaos from an Island of Tranquility

This speech was given by David North at the second international commemoration of the work of Leon Trotsky on Büyükada (Prinkipo), Turkey, during the first period of his exile from the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1933.

David North

On the anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky

Eighty-four years ago today, on August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of the Stalinist secret police, the GPU, in his villa in Coyoacan, Mexico, where he spent the final three years of his life as a political exile.

David North
Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century

The essays in this book, though written over the span of more than 40 years, are connected by a central argument: Leon Trotsky was the most significant figure in the history of socialism during the first four decades of the twentieth century, and his legacy remains the critical and indispensable theoretical and political foundation of the ongoing contemporary struggle for the victory of world socialism.

Order your print or epub version of the book from Mehring Books today.

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Statement of the Editorial Board
For a Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Inquest is necessary to break through the cover-up, lies and misinformation that have been used to justify policies responsible for the avoidable deaths of millions.

Find out more
25 years since the death of Vadim Rogovin

Vadim Z. Rogovin (10 May 1937 – 18 September 1998) was a Soviet Marxist sociologist and historian. Working in close collaboration with the International Committee of the Fourth International, Rogovin helped lay the foundations for the Trotskyist movement’s fight against the post-Soviet school of historical falsification, including in his six-volume Was There an Alternative? This page collects major essays and commemorations on Rogovin as well as links to his own writings.

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The Wuhan lab lie: “Weapons of mass destruction” redux

In an uncanny instance of history repeating itself, the lies used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on false claims about “weapons of mass destruction” are being used to promote the United States’ unprecedented military buildup around China.

Andre Damon

A discredited conspiracy theory about the origins of COVID-19

The Wuhan Lab Leak slander being resurrected to bolster US war drive against China

The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Department of Energy has shifted its opinion on the origin of the coronavirus to it being most likely a result of a lab leak. However, unnamed sources who have read the report indicate the evidence is of low confidence.

Benjamin Mateus

Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics

More than one hundred years after the formation of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Marcus Garvey's legacy remains highly relevant in the struggle to overcome efforts to divide the working class along racial lines.

Lawrence Porter
Wije Dias: A fighter for Trotskyism (1941-2022)

Comrade Wije Dias, the longtime general secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka), died in Colombo on July 27, 2022. This exhibit includes two tributes to Wije by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North as well as a selection of Wije’s most significant articles and speeches.

Forty-five years since the assassination of Tom Henehan (1951-1977): A Revolutionary Life

October 16 marked the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, a member of the Political Committee of the Workers League—the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in the US. We are republishing here a tribute delivered by David North at a meeting in 1997.

Timeline of thirty years of war: The historical background to the US-NATO conflict with Russia

This interactive timeline presents some of the most important events that have brought humanity to the brink of World War III. It includes links to critical articles and statements produced by the International Committee of the Fourth International over the past 30 years.

View the Timeline

Marxism in the academic’s imagination

Two new books on Marx and Marxism

What both books avoid is precisely what Marx insisted upon: that the liberation of humanity requires the political independence of the working class and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Tom Mackaman
The fight for Trotskyism and the political foundations of the World Socialist Web Site

The WSWS is publishing the report delivered by David North 25 years ago, on February 1, 1997, motivating the proposal to end publication of the SEP’s printed newspaper and replace it with an international website; as well as North’s reply to the National Committee ‘s discussion of the proposal.

The Wang Fuk Court Fire in Hong Kong: A crime of global capitalism

The catastrophes of Wang Fuk Court and Grenfell Tower are spectacular and tragic eruptions of the miserable, and entirely preventable, world housing crisis. They are not mere excesses, nor failures of regulation, they are an inescapable part of capitalism.

Erik Long
WSWS Review
Thirty years since the dissolution of the USSR

Review the most critical essays, lectures and letters produced by the ICFI in the course of its intervention in response to the crisis of Stalinism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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