The ceasefire in Gaza is bringing blessed relief to 2 million Palestinians whose lives have been made a living hell by Israel’s genocidal war. For now, Palestinians can wake without dreading imminent bombing. 
But nothing guarantees that Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will not resume attacks as it did when it broke a previous truce in March. Supporters of Palestine must demand complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from Palestinian territory and an end to military, economic and diplomatic relations with Israel. This is no time to be easing up on our demands.
Halting the violence is only the beginning. Western and Arab governments need to deliver large-scale humanitarian aid—food, water, medicine and housing supplies. They certainly have the resources: the United States has spent at least $18 billion arming Israel since the war began.
An end to the war demands more than only peace. US President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan keeps Gaza under Israeli control. The IDF may be “withdrawing” but still controls 60 percent of the territory, with no schedule for final departure. Even if fully enacted, this plan leaves a buffer zone in Israeli hands, granting control over supplies, movement and military incursions. Gaza remains the world’s largest open-air prison.
Under Trump’s plan, Palestinians lose any prospect of democracy. It installs a committee of unelected Palestinian technocrats and “international experts”, overseen by a “board of peace” chaired by Trump. No part of this scenario allows Palestinians to freely choose their future.
Even as Gaza’s ceasefire stands, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank proceeds unchecked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to intensify this process to keep far-right coalition partners happy, meaning further dispossession for Palestinians.
Given the appalling nature of Trump’s plan, the support of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong is no surprise. They lavish praise on Trump for “leadership” and “the biggest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more”. These are the same leaders who have stood behind Israel since the start. Satirical website the Onion sums up the result: “Israel agrees to go back to killing Palestinians on less frequent basis”.
Justice also means that those responsible for this genocidal war should pay for their crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. ICC member states must arrest them if they enter their territory.
Israeli leaders were supported by many, not just the United States and its allies, but also by governments in Russia, China, Arab and Muslim countries—whether supplying weapons, providing diplomatic cover or simply doing nothing. If Netanyahu belongs in The Hague, so do fellow war criminals Trump, President Joe Biden, British Labour leader Keir Starmer, Prime Minister Albanese and the complicit Arab and Muslim leaders.
The widespread complicity of governments with Israel reveals much about capitalist priorities. Capitalism breeds wars, tramples on human rights and destroys livelihoods. Trillions are wasted on weapons, while millions go hungry.
Governments backing Israel include democracies, dictatorships and military regimes—liberal, conservative and social democratic. Even supposed democracies have used Israel’s war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties at home. 
The genocide in Gaza exposes the reality of capitalism. Yet global resistance to the war has also pointed to an alternative. The mass antiwar marches since October 2023 show that millions of people will not simply sit back and watch as a genocide takes place. They have learned the power of solidarity on the streets. 
In recent weeks, workers’ power has come to the fore. Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla in early October has been the catalyst for mass strikes. In Italy, millions of workers and students took part in four days of mobilisations, including a 2 million-strong general strike and a million marching in the streets. On 14 October, Greek workers will be out in their millions; the day after that it’s the turn of workers in Spain. In every case, they are demanding, and through direct action halting, the movement of weapons for Israel.
These strikes arose from years of mass demonstrations against the war but also rising anger at government austerity.
Workers see the connection: the same forces behind war in Gaza are those cutting wages and services at home. A Greek socialist explained: “An Italian striker sent us a message and said, ‘The hand that bombs the Palestinians, is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces’, and that is really felt here”. This is why anti-austerity demonstrations in France that began on 10 September under the slogan “block everything” featured Palestinian flags alongside union banners. Struggle on each front helps the other: the Greek strike for Palestine on 14 October builds on big strikes against government plans to lengthen the working week.
Collective working-class power can stop wars and austerity. But lasting change requires much bigger socialist organisations, forging ties between progressive causes and putting workers at the centre. Protest matters, but strikes can grind the system to a halt—and ultimately, lead to its overthrow. That is what’s needed as capitalism drags society ever deeper into barbarism.

Tom Bramble

Ceasefire in Gaza: relief, but not enough

An illegal invasion unleashes mass slaughter in the Middle East. Western leaders clamber to justify the horror. Those responsible commit untold war crimes but never face prosecution from spineless international courts. When the occupation finally ends, airstrikes, disease and malnutrition will be estimated to have killed a million people.
This is not 2023 in Gaza. It’s 2003 in Iraq. The perpetrators are not the openly fascistic ethno-state of Israel, but the “civilised” rulers of Britain, the US, Australia and others like them. 
The chief ideological <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blair-defends-war-on-iraq/">spokesperson</a>
and international defender of this massacre was Tony Blair, British Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, whose notorious <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/8/dodgy-dossier-haunts-blair">“dossiers”</a>
claimed the Iraqi government was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
While the US provided the main military force behind the invasion, Blair supplied troops, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36712735">false justifications</a>
and rhetorical ammunition. Twenty-two years later and still dripping in blood and complicity, this butcher of Iraq is returning to the Middle East to oversee a so-called peace process in Gaza.
US President Donald Trump’s “20-point peace plan” for Gaza—a document that Blair himself <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/leaked-document-reveals-details-of-trump-peace-plan/105839640">helped</a>
to develop—specifically designates a role for the former prime minister. Under the proposal, he will serve alongside the US president on a transitional body that overrides any Palestinian representation and indefinitely dictates the future of postwar Gaza.
Disturbingly, the White House <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o">directs</a> this “Board of Peace” to “create modern and efficient governance that ... is conducive to attracting investment” into a low-tariff “special economic zone”. This is business shorthand for low wages, corporate handouts and violations of workplace rights.
Such a task could find no more enthusiastic enforcer than Blair. Indeed, Trump’s previous dystopian vision for a free-market Gaza “Riviera” first <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/06/tony-blair-think-tank-worked-trump-riviera-plan-for-gaza/">originated</a>
from the twisted hive mind of the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”, one of the ex-Labour leader’s numerous think tanks and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37416855">consultancy</a> firms.
Well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Blair government’s priority was “ensuring British companies benefit from any post-war reconstruction contracts,” as was <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/in-lead-up-to-war-u-k-officials-and-businesses-planned-on-dividing-the-spo">revealed</a>
in a 2002 telegram brazenly entitled “Iraq: Dividing the Spoils”.
Blair’s appointment is a deliberate message from the Trump administration that Western imperialism’s arch-criminals still reign supreme and that Gaza’s reconstruction will be pounced upon as a shameless profit-making exercise.
All this is familiar ground for Blair, whose ten years in government hinged on market deregulation and the privatisation of Britain’s public infrastructure. Upon losing power in 2007, Blair was immediately appointed as Middle East envoy by fellow warmonger George W. Bush, and turned his attention to merging his political responsibilities with private business ventures.
While serving in Jerusalem, Blair took up a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jan/10/blairjpmorgan">part-time position</a> as senior adviser with investment bank JP Morgan, for which he quickly brokered a deal between the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government and Wataniya Mobile to establish a privately run cell network in the West Bank, according to UK current affairs program Dispatches.
Jacobin magazine <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/09/the-ghoulish-post-politics-career-of-tony-blair">reported</a>
in 2017 that Blair had also used his connections as envoy to orchestrate the development of oil fields off Gaza’s shoreline under the aegis of the British Gas Group, another JP Morgan client.
All told, Blair has leveraged the political ties he developed as UK prime minister and peace envoy to win lucrative deals and amass a personal fortune of £60 million as of 2015, according to the Telegraph’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html">analysis</a>.
And while he continues to <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/tony-blair-putin-cant-use-iraq-to-justify-ukraine-invasion/a-65037323">insist</a>
that invading Iraq was about spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, he’s had no qualms accepting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/12/tony-blair-institute-continued-taking-money-from-saudi-arabia-after-khashoggi">sizeable donations</a> to his “Global Change” think tank from US-aligned dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/27/tony-blair-conflict-interests-middle-east">Gulf states</a>. He has long fostered personal and political ties with tyrants from Muammar <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/23/-sp-blair-gaddafi-letter-thanks-spy-cooperation-libya-uk-dissidents">Gaddafi</a>
to Hosni <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/tony-blair-mubarak-courageous-force-for-good-egypt">Mubarak</a>.
Whatever form Gaza’s postwar governance takes, this man’s involvement ensures Western and Israeli interests will be imposed on Palestinians as ruthlessly as decades of occupation and neoliberal ransacking were forced upon civilians in Iraq. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/29/tony-blair-gaza-strip/">Washington Post</a> last month, “the Israelis ... respect him”.
Tony Blair is an unindicted war criminal and foremost embodiment of rapacious capitalism. A gold-class seat in hell is waiting for him.

Ruby Healer

Tony Blair: war criminal in charge of Gaza peace

Most of us have lived most of our lives under a one-sided class war. 
The billionaires have built fortunes while the poor have been screwed. Governments the world over have bent over backwards to facilitate this. The result has been a world in which the rich stomp over everyone with few repercussions. The apex of this laissez-faire attitude to the abuse of power is Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. 
People have rebelled. In the 21st century, we have seen some truly enormous demonstrations: against the Iraq War, the Black Lives Matter movement, the climate strikes and now the global Palestine movement. 
However, a fundamental weakness of these movements has been the lack of action by workers. This is crucial because only the working class has the power to challenge the ruling class’s real source of power—its control over the economy. 
The decline in working-class activity had a devastating impact on the left. The idea that socialism was about building a mass popular movement of ordinary people who could unite and take power into their own hands was forgotten. Many socialists lost confidence that workers would ever move again. This helped open the space for the far right to masquerade as the new champions of the working class.
This is why what has happened in Europe has been so invigorating. 
On 3 October, a nationwide general strike shook Italy. Hundreds of thousands of workers shut down the country, demanding that their government cut all ties with the Israeli government.
This is unprecedented. General strikes aren’t unheard of in Italy, and particular sections of workers have taken strike action against militarism in recent history. But a mass general strike, backed by the mainstream unions, over a political issue like Israel’s war, is a different matter.
This action by workers grew out of the mass movement of blockades and street protests that has intensified in recent weeks. Since then, Madrid metalworkers have moved to take indefinite strike action over the links between their industry and the Israeli military. On 15 October, a massive demonstration is planned in Spain, various trade union federations planning strike action. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans are discussing the need for strike action to support Palestine. 
This marks a huge qualitative step forward both in the struggle to isolate Israel and in regenerating a radical working-class movement that can challenge capitalism. 
The genocide has “produced a new awareness, which took time and energy to take root, a lot of time, probably too much for those who are prisoners in Gaza, but which has distorted Western political coordinates”, argues the editorial of Italian magazine il manifesto. “[M]ultitudes in every corner of the planet are bringing together their apparently particular claims within a global paradigm that has found its own flag.” 
This is a watershed moment that demolishes much of the so-called common-sense thinking about workers and capitalism. 
For decades, it was common to think that the industrial working class didn’t exist any more, that white collar workers were, in the words of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the “salaried bourgeoisie”, that those who had insecure work were incapable of taking any action and that those workers who had stable employment wouldn’t take action because they were a privileged aristocracy bought off by the ruling class. The workers of the Western world were seen as the beneficiaries of the imperialist machinations of their rulers. Within the Palestine movement, it has been common to condemn them as “settlers”, complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians. 
The general strike in Italy shows what rubbish this all is.
The striking dock workers of Genoa, Livorno, Ravenna, Venice and other cities confirmed that, while automation has reduced the number of workers in these ports, it has not reduced their industrial power. Vast numbers of workers joined the strike from hospitals, schools and universities, confirming that these are central nodes of the modern economy. 
This revealed the latent power that the working class possesses, not just in Italy but around the world. It also reinforces the core arguments that socialists have made for why the working class is the force that can fight for human liberation. 
The working class encompasses everyone forced to sell their ability to work, no matter what that work is or whether the employer is a private businessperson or a government department. 
It is the activity of the working class that moves the gears of capitalism. Workers are concentrated in semi-automated industrial factories, in schools, hospitals and government departments, in the ever-expanding “knowledge” industry of universities, while others are dispersed into millions of smaller businesses, all of which are connected by intricate transportation, energy and communications systems.
Because workers are at the centre of this vast behemoth of global capitalism, they have the potential to understand the way in which the system facilitates genocides and exploitation, and the power to shut it down. After all, workers are not just cogs in the machine. They are humans who are inspired by the determination of others and appalled by moral tragedies like the genocide in Gaza.
We can see this in a direct way when the Genoa dock workers strike to stop their ports from being used to send shipments to Israel, or when Spanish metalworkers demand an inquiry into their industry over fears that European arms production is being used to help Israel. 
The potential for workers’ action against genocide goes beyond those whose work is immediately tied to Israel’s war machine. The general strike also showed how workers have the power to severely disrupt the businesses and governments that depend on their labour.
When workers are passive, the innumerable differences among them make it seem unlikely that they can move into united action. But once they do, it seems so obvious. This is because the action is based on something that really unifies people—their common experience as workers exploited by the capitalist system. 
The Italian events also reveal the dialectical relationship between the power of workers and the activity of other social groups. The general strike would not have occurred without the two years of activity by young people and the Palestine solidarity campaign. There has been an accumulated impact of the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in protests, despite the ebb and flow of the movement. This has produced the context in which left-wing workers felt more confident to take action, and in which the mainstream trade union leaders couldn’t hold back the tide. 
Italy also shows that to regenerate working-class self-activity, we need a sharp break with the established trade union leaders and the official left parties. 
Some socialists, scarred by the years of isolation, believe that the only way to rebuild working-class politics is by sucking up to union bureaucrats and reformist political parties. Often this is dressed up in talk about “united fronts” or “mass work”.
Yet the Italian general strike was not achieved because Palestine activists pleaded for trade union leaders to do the right thing. After a number of smaller left-wing union federations called for strike action on 22 September, pro-Palestine organisations and left-wing currents within the trade unions mercilessly and savagely criticised the mainstream trade union leaders who tried their hardest to avoid taking action. 
“The people protesting in the square, let’s be clear, literally can’t take it any more”, explained a statement from Unione Sindacale di Base, a left-wing union federation, “but since they have not found any support in the political and trade union world, they have remained silent for a long time, passively suffering the decay of political life, the decline of rights and the worsening of social conditions”.
It was not only the far-right government and the media that fundamentally misunderstood the shift in mass consciousness.
This is being repeated in Spain with the debates over the 15 October day of action. While smaller left-wing and regional union federations have endorsed the general strike call, the main Spanish trade union federations are trying to limit industrial action to only two hours. 
A key factor helping to facilitate action has been the militant activity of young people, particularly students. This has given a huge boost to all of those in the workers’ movement and the left pushing for more serious action against the resistance of the trade union leaders. 
This all has an echo of the past. When the workers’ movement and the radical left have gone forward, it has been in a form of a sharp break from the present and in revolt against established traditions and organisations. It can’t be otherwise. How else can we begin to break up the years of passivity and conservatism?
The events in Italy are exciting, but they also throw down a serious challenge to the left everywhere. 
The space to re-popularise the idea that workers are the agent of social change has grown larger. The actions in Italy didn’t come out of nowhere, and support for Palestine is not the only factor behind it. The cumulative impact of years of inequality, of militarism, of the elitism of the establishment, has shattered people’s confidence in capitalism. There is a strong polarisation across the world between progressive left-wing people who want to free Palestine, reject the far right and abolish the billionaires, and those who look to ultra-reactionary nationalist politics.
The possibilities are most obvious in Europe. Beyond the Palestine issue, there was a massive general strike in Greece in October against changes to the labour laws. France has been rocked by huge days of protests and blockades against its unstable neoliberal government. In Germany, there have been significant demonstrations against the far right.
The growth of left reformist parties is also an indication that a space has opened. La France Insoumise has shifted to the left in recent years and consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe, with almost 400,000 members. The German Die Linke party has grown from 58,000 to 112,000 this year. Some 800,000 people have signed up for Your Party in Britain.
These are the strongest signs in years that a revival of radical left and working-class politics is possible. The world is rapidly changing. Now is the time to seize the moment.

Jordan Humphreys

The revival of the radical left and working-class politics

“From there we came outside and saw the stars.” 
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
After two years, Israel’s genocidal campaign of bombing in Gaza could be over. In the days since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was signed in Egypt, videos have emerged of children roller-skating through the ruins of Gaza City and hundreds of thousands of people making the long march northward along Rashid Street to return to blasted homes and ravaged land.
For millions across the world who have fought for the Palestinians, time seems to have a different quality, no longer measured by videos of ashen limbs and wrecked bodies. While Palestinians rightly celebrate the reprieve, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s statement calling this ceasefire the “biggest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more” recalls the words of the Roman historian Tacitus: “They make a wasteland and call it peace”.
The fate of Gaza is being decided by the very people who imposed starvation and approved the bombing of homes, schools and hospitals. The global Palestine movement must push for the right of Palestinians to self-determination, not a future designed by their killers.
Of course, Israel could break the agreement—just as it did both previous ceasefires, in November 2023 and March 2025. Under the “Phase One” arrangement, Hamas will release all Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Israel will release thousands of Palestinians from its prisons, and the Israeli military will withdraw from cities. Once the Israeli hostages are released, Hamas will have no leverage left.
At this point, the ceasefire looks likely to hold. The US military is sending 200 troops to oversee it, unlike the last ceasefires. And key US regional aims have been met, with blows struck against Hezbollah and Iran. Gershon Baskin, a US negotiator, wrote for the Times of Israel
that Hamas agreed to something like the current deal in September 2024, and for more than a year, the outcome depended on whether the US government would push Israel to sign on. The role of President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration in this genocide must be remembered.
But it’s important for those who stand with Palestine to be clear that Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians will never end until Israel is defeated. Israel is fundamentally expansionist. Since its foundation, its rulers have aimed at the creation of Greater Israel, incorporation Gaza, the West Bank, and sections of Lebanon. In that sense, any ceasefire is only a pause and we can be certain that the barbarity will resume.
While President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan has been widely publicised, it’s unlikely to be fully implemented; a special economic zone among rubble and devastation is far from reality. Gazan analyst Muhammad Shehada said, based on discussions with mediators involved in the negotiations, that he’s certain the plan is a propaganda exercise.
While the details are yet to be settled, it’s clear that if President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu get their way, life in Gaza will remain unbearable for decades. Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was already an open-air prison, besieged by land, air and sea. Israel staged regular bombings and restricted construction materials, so rebuilding was impossible. Israel even calculated calories to allow in only enough food to keep people barely alive.
The West Bank is broken up into isolated villages, fenced off and blocked to control Palestinian movement. Israeli settlers regularly seize land and commit atrocities. Now, conditions are even worse. Half a million Gazans face famine, disease is spreading, and all of the key infrastructure has been destroyed. 
In an 8 October Fox News interview, Trump claimed that he phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu and told him, “Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi, they cannot fight the world”. Who is this world he’s referring to? Not the Western and Arab governments, which have watched the genocide play out without lifting a finger. Even small gestures like statehood recognition were won only by the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel hasn’t been fighting rulers; it’s been fighting the masses.
The movement for Palestine has opened the floodgates in country after country, unleashing workers and young people into the streets.
Israel and the US now have reasons to end the genocide. Hamas is militarily defeated and Gaza’s population is decimated. But the movement seems to have played a role in Trump’s push for an end, against Netanyahu’s wishes, and created a political cost to continuing. In silence, Netanyahu might have kept destroying Gaza and seizing the West Bank.
We can’t stop now. 
The Palestine movement worldwide must keep marching, striking, occupying and sailing for a complete end to genocide—not just what Israel started fast-tracking in 2023, but the longer-term genocide of Palestinians it’s been carrying out since 1948. Gaza must be rebuilt on Palestinian terms with freely given food, medicine and building supplies. The blockade must end. The illegal settlement of the West Bank and the apartheid system must be dismantled. War criminals must be held accountable.
But more is needed. An international working-class revolution must overthrow the capitalist system that produced this genocide. Every grave in Gaza is an indictment of the capitalist institutions that brought us here: from the market, which incentivises imperialist domination of oil-rich regions and rewards the creation and sale of weapons, to the capitalist governments built to put the flow of profits before every single human life. 
“Never again” means little in a system soaked in violence. Destruction of the oppressed has happened, again, before our eyes, and will again, unless socialists build a movement strong enough to finally replace capitalism with a system organised for collectivity and human liberation—a world where no-one wakes to the sound of bombing or the barrel of a gun. It’s time to step out of this hell and see the stars.

Jasmine Duff

The Palestine solidarity movement must continue

Italy’s Autumn of mass protests and strikes for Palestine boiled over into four days of rebellion following Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla. This culminated in a general strike and millions on the streets on 3-4 October. The explosion of popular struggle, with the working class and the strike now placed at its centre, accompanied by a mass, militant student movement, is a hugely significant development in the fight for Palestine, and the broader fight against the capitalist and imperialist system.
A rising tide of struggle in Italy has been set in motion since 1 September, when 50,000 people marched in Genoa to accompany the launch of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Genoa hosts one of Europe’s most important ports, and the protest sent off the Flotilla with mass support and a warning: if the Flotilla were attacked, then dockworkers, along with other workers, and backed by a mass movement, would strike and “block everything”—blocchiamo tutto! 
The declaration was initially made by the dockworkers organised in the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP). It was quickly taken up by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), one of Italy’s many so-called base unions which have been set up in recent decades to organise rank-and-file workers into class struggle in opposition to Italy’s traditional trade union federations which, like Australian unions, are dominated by institutionalised, do-nothing bureaucrats. 
The base unions directly organise only a small minority of Italian workers, so their ability to implement serious industrial action without the main union federations is usually very limited. But now, the boldness of the slogan—blocchiamo tutto—combined with rising anger at the situation in Gaza and the Italian government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, sparked a surge of energy, confidence and mobilisation. Along with the base unions and the growing calls for strike action, this has been fuelled by growing mass Palestine rallies, a youth radicalisation centred on high school and university blockades and occupations, and countless smaller actions, including rallies, local blockades, encampments and so on, often organised by Italy’s social centres. At the core of most of this upsurge in spontaneous activity are Italy’s various far-left and communist organisations.
The date was set for a general strike, called by the base unions, on 22 September. To try to undermine this call, and to give itself some much-needed left cover in the face of growing pressure, Italy’s main union federation, the CGIL, called a last-minute strike for 19 September. A cynical manoeuvre, this strike was not intended to be widespread, and indeed it wasn’t, outside of some transport and education workers. Yet, contrary to the wishes of the CGIL leaders, it helped to legitimise the idea of a general strike for Palestine, and helped to lay the basis for the success of the 22 September general strike.
This strike involved many more workers than 19 September and unleashed a confident mass movement prepared to defy the police and new anti-protest laws, to block ports, train stations, highways, schools and universities. Without the backing of the major union federations, many workers did not participate in the strike, or participated as individuals without much economic impact on their workplace. But the momentum was building.
With the attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla on 1 October, a new peak of mobilisation was unleashed. Snap protests drew thousands into the squares of every major city late at night and with no notice. I eventually found the tail-end of the protest in Florence, where hundreds were still in the square at 1am. In some bigger cities, clashes with police and blockades of stations and roads were already beginning and raging through the night.
Crucially, on the night of 1 October, the CGIL now backed the call for a general strike on 3 October. The momentum was such that there was no way they could avoid such a call at this point without losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the working class. Forcing the CGIL into such action was a major victory for the movement and ensured 3 October would be a historic day.
The day before, still in Florence at this point, I headed at 8am towards what I’d been told was going to be a university blockade. On the way, I happened to run into something else—hundreds of high school students standing in the street outside their school in the centre of the CBD. The entrance was being blockaded by a combination of school and uni students. The high school students seemed very happy about this situation, with support for Palestine ubiquitous among their cohort, and any waverers won over by the fact that this was much more exciting than school. They could name at least three other high schools in Florence alone that were also being blockaded that morning.
Half an hour later, and following people wearing keffiyehs, I found my way to the blockade of the University of Florence. The student activists had chosen the via Laura campus due to its ongoing ties with Israel. The entrance was blocked, and protesters chanted and made speeches outside. As more students arrived, many presumably expecting to go to class, they instead overwhelmingly joined the protest. When a critical mass was reached, the blockade became an occupation. Hundreds of students marched into classes to shut them down, chanting, singing and pulling the students out to join the protest. 
One of the songs was clearly a bit new and took a while to catch on, but soon hundreds were singing it on repeat. I was told it was an adaptation of a workers’ song associated with an important strike a few years earlier. Some of the lyrics translate as: “Forward together; united in the struggle; against imperialism; there will be victory!” A mass assembly was held to discuss the politics and organisation of the occupation, before the students then led a march into the city centre, stopping by every blockaded high school along the way, whose students joined the march. At the time of writing, the occupation at via Laura is ongoing.
That night, I joined another mass demonstration in Florence. This time, thousands marched through the city centre before heading to Florence’s main train station, Santa Maria Novella. Everyone knew what was coming: the night before, stations had been stormed and blockaded in Milan and Turin. We faced a line of fully decked-out riot police. As the crowd swelled and surged, a series of explosions rang out—smaller fire crackers thrown by protesters, I think, followed by thunderously loud explosions from police flashbang grenades. But no one was deterred; the crowd grew, the chants grew louder, and soon the police retreated. Thousands stormed in, occupying the train platforms and tracks. These scenes were playing out across Italy. A 24-hour strike on the railways began at 9pm that night.
The 3 October general strike is an incredible and perhaps unprecedented achievement. A purely political strike, and a general strike, carried out with massive, active participation, as a result of a surging movement from below, which was declared illegal by the Italian government, given no real support from any of the entire official opposition of the political establishment; and all for an international cause that does not seemingly directly affect Italian workers. And not just any international cause, but that of the Palestinians—a people systematically demonised and dehumanised as Islamic terrorists.
The general strike and mass mobilisations were a big victory over the far-right Meloni government, which serves the interests of Italian capitalism, the third biggest exporter of arms to Israel after the US and Germany. Like governments around the world, Meloni wants to impose further austerity on the working class to fund obscene increases in military spending. She derided the strikers as people just seeking a “long weekend”, and her government declared the strike illegal, threatening unions and individuals with repercussions. She also recently passed laws to punish protesters who block important infrastructure. This all failed miserably.
The CGIL reported the strike as a widespread success, with 60 percent participation. It was particularly strong in the education, transport and logistics industries, and among metalworkers. Mass demonstrations accompanied the strike, with perhaps 2 million people mobilising across the country, including 300,000 in Rome. Along with this went an enormous wave of blockades, often led by student activists who swarmed past police lines to block, occupy and shut down ports, train stations, major highways, even airports, warehouses and distribution centres, along with schools and universities. The blockades made the strike massively more disruptive. Long-distance trains, for example, were announced by the CGIL as not being affected by the strike. But occupations of the train tracks meant that everything was stopped—something I can attest to, as I was trying to get to Rome for the huge national demonstration the next day. I’ve never been so happy to wait several hours for a train!
It’s incredible to think that after all this frenetic activity, the very next day, 4 October, 1 million people took to the streets of Rome for Italy’s biggest demonstration since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I made it into town the night before, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs greeted me everywhere. The metro on the way to the protest’s starting point was packed with rally-goers—I remember thinking that there were more people on this single train, two hours before the march was even due to start, than I’ve been with at many Palestine protests over the decades.
It felt like the whole world was protesting there in Rome; a never-ending sea of humanity which, despite walking up and down for hours, I never saw the start or the end of. Every side street of the official march route was jam-packed. It was so big you could easily go and line up for a pizza and beer, sit for two hours, rejoin the demonstration and still be nowhere near the end of the march. As we marched past the Colosseum, I couldn’t help but think of the petty attempt of NSW police and Premier Chris Minns to stop us in Sydney from marching to the Opera House on supposed “security” and “safety” grounds. What a joke.
There are a few important points flowing from the events in Italy. First, the global complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has encapsulated so much about the morally bankrupt world we live in. In the last two years, every institution of this system has utterly debased itself in the service of genocide, from the Labor Party to the ABC, and so many more. In Italy, this includes all the so-called opposition parties. I say “encapsulated” and not revealed, because for so many workers and students, this system has already been failing them year after year, while its politicians and ideologues become less and less credible.
This partly explains the explosion of struggle in Italy. The banner of Palestine has become a symbol and a unifying rallying cry for everyone fed up with a system of shameless liars, hypocrites and murderers, who preside over an economic system of inequality which keeps us poor, locked out and with nothing to lose.
Second, while socialists have been saying for some time that Israel’s barbarism is a product of an entire sick system of capitalism and imperialism, and that the road to Palestinian liberation was inseparable from a working-class struggle against that system, nothing makes the case quite like a general strike. Italian workers and students have planted the flag, and it’s now up to the rest of the world to emulate these efforts. Mass, militant class struggle is the way forward for Palestinian liberation, and the liberation of us all.
Third, Italy shows that in circumstances of widespread discontent, a bold minority—in this case comprising relatively embryonic rank-and-file workers’ organisations and a radical student movement—with an orientation to mass action and class struggle, can galvanise millions into struggle and transform the situation, precisely because they called for militant, determined action. They didn’t do it by moderating their demands or sucking up to the likes of the Italian Democratic Party or the CGIL leaders, the rough equivalents of our Labor Party and ACTU. This should be a huge inspiration for us all, as it shows that a movement that is both mass and militant is not only what is needed, but is clearly possible.

Josh Lees

Italy’s general strike shows the way forward

Widespread government corruption in the Philippines meant that recent <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/mass-protests-rock-indonesia">mass protests in Indonesia</a> and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nepals-gen-z-revolution">Nepal’s so-called Gen Z revolution</a> resonated with Filipinos. Tens of thousands were expected at a nationwide protest on 21 September, coinciding with the anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos’ 1972 declaration of martial law, after corruption scandals related to flood control infrastructure projects took over the national spotlight.
However, many more turned out. The most significant rallies were held in Metro Manila, the national capital region consisting of sixteen cities. At Luneta Park in Manila, a symbolic site of the independence struggle from Spain, the morning crowd reached close to 80,000, according to organisers. Across town in Quezon City, an afternoon protest along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, commonly referred to by its acronym EDSA—a major highway at the centre of protests that ultimately brought down the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—reportedly grew to 100,000 people, including those who started at Luneta Park.
A smaller, younger crowd confronted police barricades along Mendiola Street and Recto Avenue, a road leading to the presidential palace, where police arrested more than 200. Locals have referred to the confrontation as the “Mendiola riots”, harking back to the state violence of the 1987 Mendiola massacre, when protesters demanding land reform were gunned down by security forces under the new democratic government of Corazon Aquino.
Protests began days before 21 September outside government offices and construction firms. University walkouts nationwide involving thousands of students, staff and service workers also occurred. For weeks, public hearings in the Senate and Congress investigating flood control projects saturated the media. Environmental NGO Greenpeace, using estimates from the hearings, calculated that 1 trillion Philippine pesos (around 26 billion Australian dollars) may have been lost to corruption since 2023. More than half may have come in 2025 alone, through ghost projects, half-done construction and substandard work, resulting in dike breakdowns that leave residents stranded in floodwaters during major storms.
Politicians and the companies to which they awarded flood control contracts are bound together as shareholders, campaign donors and/or family businesses. One illustration is the rise of the billionaire Discaya couple, dubbed the “King and Queen of flood control”, who own six construction companies—and 40 luxury cars worth around 465 million pesos (A$12 million).
The crisis has been dubbed “<a href="https://situationreport.net/commentary/kleptospirosis-when-corruption-becomes-a-public-health-crisis">kleptospirosis</a>”. Combining “kleptomania” (the irresistible urge to steal) and “leptospirosis” (a bacterial disease), the term refers to a public health emergency caused by rampant corruption. The monsoon season and frequent exposure to flooding across the country this year led to thousands of cases and numerous deaths from the disease. The National Kidney and Transplant Institute’s gym even had to be converted into an extension ward to accommodate the extra patients. Leptospirosis thrives in conditions of poverty: inadequate housing, unsafe water and limited health care. It is a recurring danger in a city with failing sewerage systems that frequently expose residents to knee-deep floodwaters.
Both the president and vice president voiced support for the protests, but they are hypocrites. With relatives in Congress and local government, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr (son of former dictator Ferdinand) and VP Sara Duterte (daughter of the last president, Rodrigo) hail from “fat dynasties”—families whose members hold several public offices simultaneously. 
Both received millions in contractor donations for their 2022 election campaign, despite provisions banning such graft. Their donors were rewarded handsomely. One Marcos sponsor, Quirante Construction, gained contracts worth a billion pesos (A$26 million) just a year after the election. The sole corporate donor of Sara Duterte’s campaign is linked to Genesis88, the top flood control contractor in Davao del Sur, a municipality on the southern island of Mindanao, with projects worth 2.9 billion pesos (A$75 million).
It’s not just Marcos and Duterte. According to a study published by Manila University’s Ateneo School of Government, 80 percent of congressional representatives and more than 50 percent of local government officials hail from political dynasties. 
The overarching demand of the 21 September protests was to jail the corrupt. However, those in the highest levels of government will not be held accountable without significant escalation. High-profile corruption scandals in the Philippines follow a predictable script: hearings are sensationalised, but the biggest thieves eventually get away thanks to their powerful allies. 
For example, the broadcasts of President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trials were one of the most watched programs on TV and led to mass protests along EDSA, triggering his ouster in January 2001. The disgraced ex-president was convicted of plunder and sentenced to life in 2007, but was pardoned a month later by his successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. 
Accused politicians often book VIP escapes to private hospitals abroad due to sudden bouts of illness. Arroyo was charged with plunder, attempted to fly to Singapore and spent almost five years in hospital detention until being acquitted in 2016 by her Supreme Court appointees. Beforehand, then-President Duterte gave his blessing by offering a pardon. Congressman Zaldy Co, at the centre of today’s controversy, went “missing”—until the House confirmed he was in the United States for medical treatment.
Mounting public pressure continues, however. In early September, the Senate president was removed; later, the speaker of the House resigned. The president announced that the government would not include new flood control projects in the 2026 national budget, redirecting funding to education and health. After 21 September, nearly 36 billion pesos (A$940 million) were reallocated to social programs.
The Philippines is one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia. But the political dynasties have ensured that the growth primarily benefits private corporations at the expense of the vast majority. Regarding the share of wages in the national economy, the Philippines ranks as one of the lowest in the region, at 35 percent—even lower than the capitalist haven of Singapore (38.5 percent). Further entrenching inequality, big business recently defeated proposals to raise the minimum wage by 200 pesos a day (roughly A$5). It is no wonder that the three richest Filipinos increased their wealth by 563 percent over the last decade, reaching 1.8 trillion pesos (A$47 billion). 
As revealed by the flood control scandals, profit-making and state politics are irrevocably linked, the political dynasties being organised precisely for that end. The setup made the Marcos and Duterte dynasties, alongside eighteen others, even fatter—securing “obese” status by obtaining five or more seats in the May midterm elections. 
Profits and political power are the lifeblood of political dynasties. Mass disruption of cities, campuses and workplaces—like in the <a href="can%20tip%20the%20balance%20by%20demanding%20to%20alleviate%20the%20impacts%20of%20rampant%20theft%20and%20for%20the%20freedom%20to%20organise%20for%20such%20demands.%20Taxing%20the%20rich%20can%20address%20intense%20inequality%20and%20rising%20cost%20of%20living%20while%20universal%20social%20protection%20and%20improvements%20in%20public%20services%20and%20wages%20are%20indispensable%20measures%20for%20environmental%20hazards%20to%20come.">“Block everything” movement</a> in France and Italy—is how profits and political legitimacy can be undermined. But the extensive influence and organisation of the political dynasties and their local machines remain key to their lasting electoral victories.
An enduring challenge to dynastic rule in the Philippines requires an equally powerful anti-capitalist political organisation, wielding its power in elections, on campuses, in workplaces and on the streets. The continuing outburst of mass action since September needs to be harnessed to the end of building the organisation and confidence of working people as they fight to ensure that public wealth goes to public good: securing concrete improvements in public services, infrastructure, wages and universal social protections. These are not only indispensable measures to protect against the environmental hazards to come; they would strike at class inequality, the foundation of the political dynasties.

Yen Llanes

Mass protests and ‘kleptospirosis’ in the Philippines

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
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Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

D. Taylor

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

Lance Selfa

Free speech under attack in the US

In the second week of September, a two-day strike and plant-gate sit-in at the Nile Linen Group in Alexandria forced management and officials from the Labour Ministry to concede to a <a href="https://manassa.news/en/news/27111">package of demands</a> after an infant died in her mother’s arms inside the factory. 
Workers said the mother—just ten days back from maternity leave—was blocked from leaving for emergency care because of punitive leave rules and a cost-of-living allowance clawback that effectively trapped her at work. Security forces ringed the free-zone compound, two workers were briefly detained, and management tried a “cool-off” lockout by sending everyone home. It backfired. Workers returned en masse to continue the strike, elected negotiators, and won commitments on an investigation, compensation and changes to pay and leave practices. By 15 September, production resumed following management’s written pledge to address demands.
The same week, <a href="https://revsoc.me/-50409">a wave</a> of labour unrest across upper Egypt’s sugar industry—Edfu, Kom Ombo, Armant and Dishna—subsided after weeks of stoppages over pay, arrears, hazard allowances, overtime and the non-application of state-announced minimum wage measures. Envoys from the regime-run General Federation of Trade Unions and local officials descended on plants, <a href="https://www.madamasr.com/2025/09/14/news/u/%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1-%D8%A5%D8%AF%D9%81%D9%88-%D9%88%D9%83%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A5%D9%85%D8%A8%D9%88-%D9%8A%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B6%D8%B1/">promising</a> October raises and a review “at the highest levels”. Some groups ended strikes under pressure, including threats of dismissal and state security referrals; others suspended action with explicit warnings they’ll down tools again in January at the start of the production season if promises aren’t honoured.
Read together, these two episodes show how shopfloor bargaining in 2025 is actually happening in Egypt: a combustible mix of desperation-driven action, security containment and last-minute fixes that arrive only after escalation. Even under today’s repression, strikes still force the state–capital nexus to bargain—grudgingly, temporarily, and case-by-case.
A slow, stubborn uptick
Granular national strike statistics are deliberately hard to come by, but we have credible signals from 2024-25 that collective action is ticking up despite the climate of fear.
The year 2024 saw a <a href="https://revsoc.me/workers-farmers/49598/">broad rise</a> in labour complaints and protest events, dominated by wage and minimum-wage issues amid currency collapse and runaway prices. Employers in both public and private sectors used exemptions and procedural loopholes to dodge mandated increases. Workers responded with petitions, stoppages, and plant-gate rallies that triggered targeted arrests, firings, and prosecutions.
Throughout 2025, according to my labour sources, the country has witnessed more than 70 strikes and protests spanning textiles, ceramics, sugar mills, retail, petroleum, chemicals, utilities, and education. Workers’ demands have centred on overdue wages, annual bonuses, enforcement of the minimum wage, and improved conditions, with large-scale actions including a 4,000-strong strike at Ceramica Inova and coordinated stoppages across Upper Egypt’s sugar industry. Employers and authorities frequently responded with repression—including arrests of T&amp;C and greenhouse workers, suspensions and investigations at El-Shorbagy, and dismissals of union leaders—while others sought to defuse unrest through Ministry of Labour-led mediation or emergency fund payouts.
This isn’t a <a href="https://merip.org/2007/05/strikes-in-egypt-spread-from-center-of-gravity/">2006-style explosion</a>. It’s an incremental curve—a rise in frequency and breadth from the post-2013 nadir, expressed as short, defensive, economic strikes that are extremely sensitive to local triggers (a fatal accident, unpaid arrears, a humiliating rule). Workers are calculating, not reckless: they end strikes when repression bites or when tangible wins are secured; they hold their fire until leverage peaks (e.g., the January sugar campaign season).
Why is it happening? Inflation, repeated devaluation cycles, and a wage floor that is either eroded by prices or not applied at all. Put bluntly, the cost of living has crossed the threshold at which fear of the police competes with fear of hunger. That’s the inflexion point at which Egyptian workers historically move from complaint letters to stoppages.
What the strikes tell us about the regime’s playbook
Policing first, bargaining later: plants are surrounded, entrances controlled, and small numbers are picked up early to chill momentum. Only when production halts and workers hold their ground do mediators appear—labour directorates, federation officials, MPs and governors.
Procedural fixes, not structural change: The “solutions” offered are narrowly tailored: suspend one manager, promise an investigation, pay a tranche of arrears, float a month-X raise. No change to the underlying enforcement vacuum on wages and safety, and no recognition of independent organising.
Time-buying. The favourite tactic is to defer: “October”, “three months”, “after the presidency’s review”, “at budget time”. That punt only works if workers disband, and in the sugar case, they explicitly set January as a hard deadline.
Free zones, not free unions: the Nile Linen case underlines how “export zones” pair hyper-discipline (leave rules, docked allowances, gate control) with weak inspection and security gatekeeping. It’s the quintessential model of privatised coercion under public cover.
Under the surface, though, the state’s posture betrays anxiety. When local stoppages reverberate—through national supply chains (sugar) or foreign-currency exports (textiles)—the case files travel “up”. That upward escalation is the workers’ leverage.
Labour lit the fuse in 2011
Egypt’s modern labour insurgency didn’t begin in Tahrir. It was forged on the shop floors of <a href="https://merip.org/2007/03/egyptian-textile-workers-confront-the-new-economic-order/">Mahalla</a> and across transport, civil servants and public services in the mid-2000s. Those strikes disoriented the state’s forces, birthed strike committees and then independent unions—most famously the <a href="https://flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/albums/72157607027521066/">real estate tax collectors’ union</a>—years before the revolution began on 25 January 2011.
When the 2011 uprising peaked, wildcat strikes in transport, textiles, steel and the public sector on 8-10 February <a href="https://arabawy.org/24959/permanent-revolution/">were decisive</a>. They took the revolution from square to system: from spectacle to shutdown. Within months, new federations and dozens of independent unions proliferated. For the first time in decades, Egyptian workers could credibly bargain outside the state’s official federation.
The revolution’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bread-freedom-social-justice-9781780324333/">social soul</a> was not a romantic abstraction; it was the organised power of workers to halt production. That force helped topple a president and briefly opened a window in which wages rose, corrupt managers were purged, and shopfloor dignity was renegotiated.
After the coup—how it was crushed
The 2013 military takeover set out to extinguish politics by decapitating the networks most capable of paralysing the state: political parties, youth groups, community organisations, and independent unions (including informal labour networks) inside workplaces.
Legal crackdown: protest and public-order laws criminalised assembly; the 2017 trade-union framework forced re-registration under state terms, starved or dissolved independents and restored de facto monopoly to the official federation, now coupled with <a href="https://eipr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/reports/pdf/a_lopsided_law_1.pdf">draconian restrictions on the right to strike</a>.
Security filtration: factory union committees were either purged or co-opted. Activists were harassed; labour leaders faced case-by-case <a href="https://revsoc.me/-50223">prosecutions</a> for “obstructing production” or “inciting”.
Managerial impunity: plant bosses learned that police would enforce internal discipline, from gate control to forced leave to lockouts dressed up as “maintenance”.
Wage theater: headline “minimum-wage” decrees and presidential “allowances” became PR covers, unevenly applied, easily dodged through exemptions or hollow claims on “inability to comply”.
The result was not a pacified labour force so much as a frozen one. From roughly 2014 to 2020, strikes became rare, brief and isolated. People still suffered; they just suffered silently. The state proved it could jail thousands, kill by example, and make union legalism a dead end.
Then prices did what police could not: they melted the freeze. The pandemic’s aftershocks, global food and energy spikes, and repeated devaluations pulled the last nails from household budgets. By 2022-25, the “no strike” equilibrium had eroded, not because repression eased, but because survival left no slack.
Where the movement stands now
This is not 2006-11 redux. Today’s labour fights are defensive and economic—not overtly political—focused on arrears, allowances, safety, childcare, meal stipends, shifts, and even the right to reach a hospital when a child is dying. They are short-cycle and local, measured in days rather than months unless the state stonewalls. They are also networked yet atomised: WhatsApp groups, ex-unionists and NGO veterans still share tactics and draft demands, but no national coordination with real teeth exists.
The risks are also clear: targeted arrests, mass firings, “disciplinary” dockings that erase the very raises you just won, and blacklist-style threats inside free zones. That’s why many stoppages end not in victory but with a warning and a date to resume if management backslides.
Sceptics will say that a few concessions here and there change nothing. They’re wrong. In Egypt’s current political economy, every shopfloor win—whether restored hazard pay, scrapped punitive leave rules, back pay for overtime, or a posted safety notice—has cumulative effects. Each gain raises the reservation wage, as even modest improvements, once normalised, set baselines that other plants imitate. They also expand the repertoire: once a plant has struck and survived, the next stoppage is less daunting and better organised. Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally not through manifestos.
This is countercyclical politics from below. While elite pacts revolve around asset sales, debt service and foreign backing, workers are quietly renegotiating the daily reproduction of labour. It is not glamorous, but it is how movements survive long winters.
The state dilemma
Egypt’s rulers face a structural contradiction they cannot ideologically resolve. They need exports and domestic production to secure foreign currency and sustain patronage. They need docile labour to offer investors predictable costs and avoid disruptive headlines. At the same time, they need public credibility that “the state cares” even as real incomes collapse.
They can’t have all three. When prices surge faster than wages, labour unrest becomes a cost of doing business. The regime compensates with selective coercion (to deter organisation) and transactional concessions (to keep assembly lines moving). That’s precisely what the September strikes showed.
The longer arc
Egypt’s labour movement ignited the 2011 revolution’s decisive phase by translating street protest into stoppage power. The counter-revolution understood this perfectly and built a system designed to defang workers: re-monopolise representation, criminalise assembly, make managers de facto police, and flood the airwaves with a cult of “order”.
For a while, it worked. But no authoritarian model can repeal arithmetic. When the grocery bill doubles while allowances vanish, plants don’t stay quiet forever. What we’re witnessing now is not a return to the old days—there is no national wave, no open federation, no safe civic space. It is a learning process under extreme constraints. Workers are rediscovering what they already knew: if you don’t stop the machine, nothing changes.
September’s strikes didn’t rewrite the system. They did something more important for the long haul: they showed thousands of workers, again, that the machine still stops when they decide it will.
That’s the line that matters in 2025. Not the fantasy that one grand strike will topple a militarised political economy, but the reality that incremental, repeatable, local wins—backed by credible threats to escalate when promises fail—are rebuilding the only power that ever made Egypt’s rulers blink.
The question for 2026 is not whether Cairo will suddenly allow free unions. It won’t. The question is whether, plant by plant, shift by shift, workers continue converting unbearable living conditions into precision strikes that win real money, real safety, and real dignity, and whether those informal networks begin talking to one another again. If they do, the regime will face a familiar headache: a labour movement that doesn’t need permission to breathe.
The Egyptian labor movement is alive, conservative in tactics, brutalized by context, and—because of the economy—becoming unavoidable again. The state can’t crush prices. That’s why it won’t crush strikes forever.
Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally rather than through manifestos.
First published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

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