“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”, US President Donald Trump wrote on social media last month after Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to the first phase of the so-called Peace Plan for Gaza. The same day, as Palestinians began the annual olive harvest in the West Bank, armed and masked Israeli settlers descended on the village of Aqraba, south-east of Nablus. They brandished batons and guns, attacking farmers and their supporters to prevent them from accessing the farms. On this day, as on all subsequent ones, these settlers were backed by the Israeli military. 
Two days later, on 11 October, 13-year-old Ayssam Jihad Ma’ala joined his family to help with the harvest. He was teargassed by the Israeli military. For a month, Ayssam lay in a coma, suffering from brain damage. He died on 12 November, joining the ranks of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem since October 2023. This is what “peace” looks like. 
“Peace” sounds like the cheering and applause that <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israelis-applaud-soldiers-accused-raping-palestinian-prisoner-court-hearing">echoed through the Israeli Supreme Court</a> in Jerusalem on 10 November. The reception was for two soldiers from Force 100, a special unit of the Israeli military, who face charges relating to the gang rape last year of a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert. The soldiers were caught on CCTV carrying out the rape.
According to a report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the detainee was so violently assaulted that he sustained a ruptured intestine, a torn rectum, broken ribs and damaged lungs. Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, responsible for overseeing Israeli prisons, described the accused soldiers as “our best heroes”. 
There have been other accounts of abuse at Sde Teiman. Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer granted access to the site last year, <a href="https://www.972mag.com/sde-teiman-prisoners-lawyer-mahajneh">told +972 Magazine</a>: “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”. A spokesperson for human rights organisation B’Tselem describes Sde Teiman as “the tip of the iceberg”. Discussing a B’Tselem report on Israeli prisons, titled “<a href="https://www.btselem.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell_eng.pdf">Welcome to Hell</a>”, Shai Parnes told Al Jazeera’s Simon Speakman Cordall last year:
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in sixteen different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.” 
Blessed are the peacemakers. 
Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, there has never been peace for the Palestinians. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which <a href="https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&amp;ItemID=5750">released an estimate</a> in May last year, some 134,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli state.
In 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/page/publications1">estimated that 3,624 Palestinians were killed and more than 100,000 injured</a>
over the previous decade. Of the killings, 87 percent were in Gaza, mostly during the 2012 and 2014 Israeli offensives, as well as in the Great March of Return demonstrations that started in 2018. Three out of four Palestinians killed during the decade were civilians, including 805 children. This is the status quo that our political leaders would have us believe is the basis for a peaceful future. 
The violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem has a purpose. Israeli politicians such as Naftali Bennet, the former prime minister, have referred to the policy of regular military offensives in Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. Before 2023, this referred to a policy of semi-regular bombings of Gaza as a method of restraining Palestinian national aspirations. The Gaza genocide since 2023 represents something else: an apocalypse of Old Testament proportions, enacted upon a besieged population, designed to settle the question. The goal is to smash the Palestinians in body and soul, once and for all.
“Peace” for the Israeli state and its backers in the West has only ever meant a pause in open warfare—a time in which they could get on with the somewhat quieter project of “everyday” ethnic cleansing and colonisation. In the West Bank, the Israelis have a longstanding project of creating “facts on the ground”—the expansion of Israeli-held territory in order to undermine the prospect of a Palestinian state. This project has been waged nonstop, through “peace” and war. 
“By the end of 2022, there were 483 Israeli occupation sites and military bases in the West Bank, including 151 settlements and 25 inhabited outposts that were considered as neighborhoods following established settlements, in addition to 163 settlement outposts, and 144 classified as other sites (industrial, tourists, service areas and Israeli army bases)”, notes the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics report. By the end of 2022, the number of Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank reached 745,467. 
Under the fog of the most recent war, Israel rapidly increased the number of settlements in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, <a href="https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population">has documented 121 new outposts</a> since October 2023, representing 40 percent of the 298 outposts established since 1996. <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165988">Another United Nations report</a>, covering June to September this year, finds that the Israeli state has approved more than 20,000 housing units in the occupied West Bank. The hope among Israeli officials is that the ceasefire in Gaza will allow them to take more and more of the West Bank.
The world’s major capitalist powers, such as the United States, aren’t religiously or ideologically invested in Israel conquering the West Bank. Nor is their sole focus the destruction of Palestine. Nevertheless, they do care about the strength of the Israeli state. And they care about profiting from death. The Wall Street Journal’s Middle East correspondent Benoit Faucon <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-gaza-war-has-been-big-business-for-u-s-companies-8830b54a">recently described</a> the “unprecedented arms pipeline from the US to Israel” over the last two years. The trade resulted in billions of dollars in profits for companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. 
Profits are just part of the picture, though. The global capitalist order is built on savagery. In an era of big power rivalry, Israel, the US and their defenders also have a project to normalise extreme violence. They carried out a genocide and now present themselves as peacemakers. If the status quo in Palestine is “peace”, and those responsible for it are the peacemakers, then damn them. We should never leave them in peace.

Vashti Fox

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

Ryan Stanton

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

In a timely response to Donald Trump’s phoney “peace plan” and Israel’s continual violations of the ceasefire agreement, the concluding session of a <a href="https://gazatribunal.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“people’s tribunal” on Gaza</a> was held in Istanbul, 23-26 October. Over the four days, an audience of hundreds, plus many more online, heard compelling testimony from dozens of experts and individual victims of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, including the mass murder, deliberate starvation and destruction of medical care, housing, the environment and other civilian infrastructure. The statement below was issued at the conclusion of the Gaza Tribunal hearing. All talks from the Istanbul session are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@GazaTribunal/videos">available on YouTube</a>.
--------------------
The Steering Committee members of the Gaza Tribunal issue this conclusion at a historic moment of darkness, but in a continuing quest for the light of justice. 
The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice. 
Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine. The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full. 
The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame. 
We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers. 
Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations. 
We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice. 
To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. 
Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:
“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...
“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”
Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. 
Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. 
Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. 
Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.
New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. 
A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. 
However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. 
Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york">the Red Flag editorial</a> following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke">outlines the subsequent developments</a>.
Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.
That is something to be built on.

Editors

The Mamdani moment

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.
“No Kings” went to the polls.
In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.
The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. 
<a href="https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/">Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania</a>, considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in <a href="https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/">Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat</a>.
The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.
According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power">economic and political headwinds</a> that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”</a> and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024.
In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from">2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated</a>.
Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.
In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.
Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.
<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/">The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today</a>. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.
Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its <a href="https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/">law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities</a>. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s <a href="https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/">anti-union “right to work” law</a>.
Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit">single-payer health care</a>. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.
In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech">his victory speech</a>. Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.
Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. 
Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.
What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.
Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/">1900s model of “sewer socialism”</a>. This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. 
But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.
Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left">so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats</a>. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal
that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”.
Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.
His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him.
In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html">nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”</a>. 
We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. <a href="https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways">Social democrat Eric Blanc may</a> consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.
In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner<a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-">, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)</a>. At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc">even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it</a>.
What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election">As Liza Featherstone put it</a>, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”.
While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails.
There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead.
Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.

Lance Selfa

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

Ben Hillier

Did Palestine set New York free?

SANTIAGO—Only six years ago, the left in Latin America was hailing the estallido social (social explosion) in Chile as a marker of a continental resurgence in the class struggle. Similar developments were occurring in Ecuador.
Fast forward to this year, and Ecuador’s leader, Daniel Noboa, was one of three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, along with Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Milei has just claimed a victory in the midterm elections and is preparing to extend the workday to twelve hours and make holiday leave an employer prerogative. Most emblematically, the political party-movement that for many represented the hopes of a sustained resurgence of popular struggles and a left political alternative, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, has completely imploded.
With the Cochabamba rebellion in 2000, the emergent political movement in Bolivia had re-awakened the left’s imagination and put the issue of movements “taking power” back on the debate stage. Bolivia became an international reference point. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power played out in all its messiness on this stage. In its early days, the MAS’s “democratic and cultural revolution” was celebrated as the success of a new model. In the 2009 elections, the MAS won 64 percent of the votes, which was unheard of in Bolivian political history. Then it won 61 percent in 2014 and a still convincing 55 percent in 2020. 
In August, the MAS lost 73 seats, leaving it with two in a lower house of 130. Bolivia is now back on the merry-go-round, like Brazil and Peru, of alternating centre-left and far-right regimes trying to resuscitate the neoliberal model. In Peru, the far-right-dominated coalition is taking no chances. On 24 October, the judiciary sentenced leftist congressional representative Guillermo Bermejo to fifteen years in prison for allegedly having ties to leaders of Shining Path, an outlawed guerrilla organisation. Bermejo was emerging as a potential presidential challenger. 
Enter Chile, Latin America’s model neoliberal regime and origin story of capitalist shock treatment economics under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89). For decades, Chile has been lauded by neoliberal ideologues for its so-called economic stability, market freedoms, competitiveness and innovation. The country boasts the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and is one of just four continental members of the World Bank’s high-income category. The 2025 Allianz Global Wealth Report ranks Chile 34th in the world, above Mexico (43rd), Brazil (45th), Colombia (49th), Peru (51st) and Argentina (55th).
Chile encapsulates the meaning of neoliberal “success”. In plain language, you find something that the national economy can produce and profitably sell on the world market, you squeeze the working class for every possible cent to maximise productivity, and bingo, economic growth (for some). Chile’s extractivist economy—highly specialised in and dependent on copper and lithium exports—has maintained high growth rates at the expense of manufacturing, and with a susceptibility to commodity price fluctuations and a generally weak currency, leading to high import prices.
The result of this neoliberal “success” is that Chile remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: only 28 of 151 countries with data collected in the World Inequality Database present worse than Chile. The richest 10 percent own 80 percent of all national wealth; the top 1 percent own half. Almost half of Chilean workers earn less than 600,000 pesos monthly, equivalent to less than A$1,000. Only 5 percent of workers earn more than A$4,000 a month. Yet the cost of living is not far off Australia, a litre of milk here setting you back around A$2. In addition, unemployment, at 8.5 percent, is high even by Latin American standards, and 26.2 per cent of employment is in the informal sector.
Not surprisingly, Chile’s “success” comes with permanent volatility—and not just economic. Working-class history here is steeped in struggle. Over the course of a century, it birthed several mass party organisations influenced or led by Marxists: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and the Popular Unitary Action Movement, to name a few.
This history casts a shadow over capitalist stability, so much so that post-dictatorship neoliberalism has relied on the calming influence of centre-left governments, which have held six out of eight presidencies since 1990. The two Pinochetista presidencies of Sebastián Piñera (2010-14 and 2018-22) both fuelled important estallidos sociales: the mass student-led protests of 2011 and the even bigger explosion of 2019, which demanded a new constitution. Both governments controlled by the traditional right in these years generated institutional crises for Chilean capitalism.
Chile heads into presidential elections this month with a sense of trepidation. On the one hand, the right has been gaining ground since the defeat of the 2019 estallido’s aspirations: while 80 percent of voters in an October 2020 plebiscite supported constitutional change, only 38 percent voted for the proposed new constitution the following year. Once students and the working class had been demobilised, the right took the initiative.
Since former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2022, the political situation has worsened. His centre-left government’s tepidness has increasingly emboldened the traditional right and invited the growth of a new radical far right. A recently published survey suggests that, in the five years since the estallido, the proportion of people identifying with right-wing ideas has increased from 18 percent to 38 percent. The shift is fundamentally due to the centre-left’s association with neoliberal politics sprinkled with piecemeal, symbolic and inadequate social measures.
Dissatisfaction with centre-left politics manifested clearly in the June primaries organised by the ruling centre-left block. The Communist Party’s candidate, Jeanette Jara (minister for labour and social provision in Boric’s government), trounced her main opposition, Carolina Tohá (from the Party for Democracy, a right-wing split from the Socialist Party) and Gonzalo Winter (from Boric’s Broad Front). Jara’s 60 percent reflected aspirations for a more decisive left-wing program.
In the historical spirit of the Communist Party, fearing a radicalisation that would split the Popular Front with the bourgeois political parties that are part of the current government, Jara’s campaign since June has largely followed the agenda set by the right. She has emphasised her anti-immigration and public security credentials while wooing the most right-wing elements in the governing coalition, in particular the Christian Democrats.
Jara will win the first round of the presidential elections but will likely face one of three right-wing candidates in the run-off: Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the Independent Democratic Union, representing the traditional, unreconstructed Pinochetista right and a mirror political reflection of the Chilean capitalist class; José Antonio Kast, from the far-right Republican Party; or Johannes Kaiser, founder of the radical far-right National Libertarian Party, styled along Trump and Milei lines but arguably more offensive.
Regardless of her opponent, Jara will come armed with a blunt instrument: a centre-left program incapable of fundamentally tackling the country’s social and economic problems and bound to a government associated with growing unemployment and underemployment, social spending cuts and the repression of mobilised opposition.
Jara’s opposition will be armed with a far-right, populist agenda that claims to understand the general discontent and promises a new, shinier nationalism, robed in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and blaming everyone but the capitalist class for the country’s problems.
In the global context of authoritarianism becoming the new normal of capitalist democracy, a victorious far right will double down on every channel of exploitation (pushing down wages, pensions and social spending) with a confidence that will not spare state repression, aiming to isolate the more politically advanced sections of the working class. If Jara wins, it will be “más de lo mismo” (more of the same), a continuing weight holding down the radicalisation of larger contingents of the working class, unable to resolve the problems borne of a model of accumulation nearing exhaustion, and fanning the spread of far-right ideas.
If Chile does elect a “communist” president, it will not signal any major change. However, it will create new contradictions and opportunities for the revolutionary left. The Communist Party is not the post-Marxist left of the Broad Front. The CP’s history, especially its role in the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s, ties it to a political memory that the new left cannot claim. That political memory is an important glue shared by the working class’s more combative and radicalised elements. Every high school and university student protest, every major workers’ struggle, all manifest this political memory.
This combativeness has barely got a look in during the presidential elections, bar the propagandistic interventions of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, running 23 candidates in the parliamentary elections, and the Maoist Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), whose presidential candidate has raised demands such as the nationalisation of the mines, an issue the centre-left won’t touch but which is critical to any meaningful left governmental program.
If Chile elects a far-right president, it will encourage the hawkish sensibilities of the Trump administration. US imperialism hopes to regain influence in Latin America in order to boost its global pretensions. An alignment of far-right governments in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia might even give a green light to the unimaginable—a US intervention in Venezuela. That would be a particularly complicated endeavour given that the Venezuelan military is not a ready-made proxy for imperialism.
The challenge for the revolutionary movement continent-wide is to build influence amid the instability of a spent economic model that creates a merry-go-round of governments, dissolving previously long-lasting parties and alliances, creating monsters in an instant, and seemingly scattering political memory in the whirlwind.
It’s a challenge that must be accepted.

Jorge Jorquera

The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries

So this is “peace”. 
Seven days after the ceasefire came into effect, a family of 11 were blown up by an Israeli tank shell. On 19 October, Israel bombed a Gazan school, a makeshift coffee house and the area around Al-Ahli soccer club. The International Court of Justice has just confirmed that Israel is still forcibly starving people in Gaza by refusing to allow in enough aid. Israeli troops occupy 60 percent of Gaza, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has explicitly argued for soldiers to “shoot children and donkeys” on sight if they are deemed to be in the occupied area. This, they tell us, is peace. 
There can be no peace for Palestinians while Israel exists. Israel is an expansionist state committed to ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is merely the latest—and particularly brutal—phase of annexations and forced displacement. Israel can do this with impunity because it is a crucial linchpin in Western domination of the Middle East and North Africa. 
In 2023, then US President Joe Biden repeated a line he first said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”. The Middle East and North African region is oil-rich, home to important trade routes and geopolitically vital. Without Israel, the US would have to maintain a significant—and unwelcome—military presence in the region to guarantee its interests. Instead, in Israel, it has a loyal ally that is well armed and belligerent. 
Israel has carried out a twofold process of ethnic cleansing since its creation in 1948. On the one hand, through intense, devastating wars that fundamentally alter the region’s balance of forces and geographic boundaries. The Gaza genocide has been one of these. Before, it was the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and others. 
These wars are coupled with a continuous strategy of annexation, imprisonment, displacement and periodic massacres. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. A Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning”. 
Ben-Gurion’s vision included all of occupied Palestine, as well as sections of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In its brutal 1967 war, Israeli forces took Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights at the same time as occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East and West Jerusalem. 
Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continue to argue for this expansionist vision, and have used this war to expand further into Lebanese and Syrian territory. In January, Israel began a new invasion of the West Bank and has carried out the largest expulsions there since 1967. More than 40,000 people have so far been expelled in Operation Iron Wall. Israel sent snipers into Jenin refugee camp, conducted home raids and mass arrests, and carried out aerial strikes. The Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams camps have been almost emptied. Hundreds of homes have been demolished, and the IDF has outlined a strategy to prevent destroyed roads and homes from being rebuilt. 
In late October, the Knesset passed a bill to annex the entirety of the West Bank, which even the Trump administration is not willing to support. But plenty in Israel do, which means Israeli encroachment in the West Bank could well accelerate in the near future. 
Our leaders talk of peace. In reality, we are witnessing the beginning of the brutality that is to come if the capitalists are allowed to blast their way through in the coming decades. 
Yet a different world is possible. The proof of this is every student who has protested, every grandparent arrested on terror charges to defend Palestine Action, and each of the Italian and Spanish workers who shut their countries down. We know that a radical workers’ movement can be rebuilt. The task of the resistance is to throw themselves into that project. We have to fight like hell with what we have, with a vision for a mass movement that can defeat imperialism and capitalism for good.

Jasmine Duff

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

While the grieving of Israelis has been a media spectacle over the past two years—revisited again and again each time Israeli hostages’ remains have returned to their families—the trauma of Palestinians now returning to their destroyed homes receives relatively little attention.
UNICEF estimates that over the past two years of Israel’s genocide, 28 children have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces every day on average. Let that sink in: a classroom of kids murdered each day.
You won’t hear much about the tens of thousands of grieving Palestinian families in the corporate media. Yet you will hear, again and again, about Israeli trauma, even as Palestinians continued to be killed in their dozens.
US President Donald Trump, addressing the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, claimed that the ceasefire deal he brokered will open a new “golden age” for the Middle East and end some 3,000 years of conflict. It was laughable.
Yet a largely uncritical Western media seriously pondered whether the Trump administration—which, like the Biden administration before it, provided the finance and weaponry to Israel as it carried out genocide—really was some great peacemaker.
The reality for Palestinians, however, is that the war is far from over. 
Israel continues to occupy 53 percent of Gaza, after withdrawing behind an invisible “yellow line”, and continues to prevent vital aid and recovery equipment from entering Gaza. In the first week of the so-called ceasefire, the Israeli army committed 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 
Imagine if it had been 97 Israelis killed. There would be no handwringing about the ceasefire holding. It would be wall-to-wall condemnations of Hamas and justifications for Israel to continue the genocide. In the Western media, Palestinian lives don’t matter.
Israel has returned the remains of 1,718 living and 150 deceased Palestinians from Gaza, along with 250 Palestinian political prisoners. However, 154 of these political prisoners were immediately deported to Egypt by Israel, according to Hamas, denying them reunification with their families. 
According to the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, documents that accompanied 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza reveal that they were held in the notorious Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert. According to photos and testimonies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/23/whistleblowers-allege-widespread-abuses-at-israeli-detention-camp-sde-teiman">published in the Guardian</a> last year, Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies. 
On 20 October, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials">the Guardian reported</a> that several of the recently returned victims were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. In one photo, a rope is fastened around a man’s neck. No identification accompanied the victims’ bodies, adding to their families’ grief and trauma.
Imagine for a moment the media reporting if Israeli hostages had been returned like this. The images should have provoked the kind of outrage generated by the revelations of torture by US troops of prisoners at <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/abu-ghraib-twenty-years-on">Abu Ghraib prison</a> in Baghdad in 2004. Yet these crimes received little reporting.
The reunification of 1,718 Palestinian detainees with their families in Gaza was news for a day. Many told their families of brutal treatment in Israeli prisons, including beatings and torture. But those are the “lucky” ones. Some 9,000 West Bank Palestinians remain in Israeli custody, having been kidnapped and transferred to Israel in breach of international law. More than 3,500 are “administrative detainees”, who have never been charged with any crime, while 2,763 are deemed “unlawful combatants” by the Israeli military, according to <a href="https://hamoked.org/prisoners-charts.php">Israel Prison Service data</a>.
Their families’ separation from loved ones—in many cases for years—and their encirclement and harassment by an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement, is not considered worthy of the media attention given to Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage on 7 October.
American journalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, is the latest to fall foul of the conservative media establishment. After being scheduled to address Australia’s National Press Club on 20 October, Hedges was informed that the event was cancelled. Everyone knows why: Hedges reports the truth, and the truth is embarrassing to Israel, Australia, and the corporate media.
In a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/chris-hedges-national-press-club/105913174">Late Night Live interview</a>, the ABC’s David Marr took Hedges to task for accepting an invitation from the Australian Friends of Palestine Association to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”. He claimed Hedges had compromised his credibility as a journalist by accepting such an invitation. 
This isn’t just a disgraceful slur against Hedges, but a racist attack on the Palestinians. If reporting the truth about what they face under the boot of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide is a mark against any reporter, the insinuation is that Palestinian oppression itself is some lie. In the Said Memorial Lecture, Hedges hit back:
 “October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
“The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state.”
The obfuscation and lies of Western politicians and their media mouthpieces have enabled and emboldened Israel, Hedges argued:
“The funding and arming of Israel by the US and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has imploded the post-World War Two international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.”
This loss of credibility—the exposure of the hypocrisy of the capitalists and their institutions—is perhaps the greatest achievement of our solidarity movement over the past two years. It should give us the strength to continue the fight for Palestine.
Nick Everett is the secretary of Friends of Palestine WA.

Nick Everett

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

More than 100,000 essential workers, including nurses, teachers, and firefighters participated in a “mega strike” on 23 October, in New Zealand’s most significant industrial action in 40 years. More than 3.5 percent of the country’s working population struck, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Workers were also protesting against ongoing cuts to public services by the right-wing government led by Prime Minister Christopher Luxson. 
Workers gathered in towns and cities across the North Island, tens of thousands protesting in Auckland and around 10,000 in Hamilton. Desiree Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, told RNZ
that the current pay offer for primary teachers from the government is “absolutely atrocious”. “$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like, let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”, she asked. 
Others pointed to collapsing health, education and emergency services as reasons for marching. While severe weather meant many could not gather outdoors in the rest of the country, those at home displayed their protest signs in their windows and on social media. 
In the lead-up to the strike, the government attacked unions and workers. The minister for public services, Judith Collins, published an <a href="https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/open-letter-people-new-zealand">open letter</a> in which she attempted to discredit the strike by portraying it as “politically motivated by the unions”, as well as whining that the government was “simply not earning enough to meet all these calls” (for wage increases). Collins penned this attack while <a href="https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360863664/trump-administration-happy-new-zealand-stepping-defence-minister-judith-collins">schmoozing with</a> top figures in the Trump administration, including tea with her “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MeqVK9m2U/?mibextid=wwXIfr">good friend” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem</a>. 
The government announced <a href="https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/national-security-brings-economic-benefits">plans</a> to spend an additional $9 billion on defence earlier this year, bringing spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2032. It has also found billions for police, tax cuts for landlords, the wealthy, and corporations.
Collins also claimed the unions were more interested in discussing Palestine than working conditions. Chris Abercrombie, president of the post-primary teachers associations (NZPPTA), clarified this was a reference to a motion moved at the last NZPPTA conference condemning the genocide in Gaza and stating that “peace is union business”.
While the government’s comments were meant to discredit the strike, they nevertheless reflect something positive about the political climate. Many workers in New Zealand have been politicised and some radicalised by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the government’s attacks on Māori, workers and the poor. This could be seen in the signs at various rallies, including “Toitū te Tiriti” (referencing a recent mass protest movement for Māori rights). Māori and Palestinian flags were also visible. 
David Phillips, station officer for Fire and Emergency NZ, responded to this attack when speaking to the rally in Auckland, saying; “Make no mistake, this is absolutely political. Last time we were on strike, it was a Labour government. It’s not about you ... This is about all politicians”, he said. “Your systems are broken.” 
Decades of attacks on unions from both sides of the political spectrum have undoubtedly led to this crisis, but many view this government’s viciousness as the last straw. Since being elected in 2023, the Luxson government has repealed fair pay laws, extended 90-day trial periods across more workplaces, introduced punitive measures for welfare recipients and cut spending on social services. 
The most recent <a href="https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/work-programmes/community/social-cohesion/2024-social-cohesion-indicator-report-final.pdf">Social Cohesion Report</a> from the Ministry of Social Development found that the number of people cutting back on fresh fruit and vegetables had increased from 23 percent in 2018 to nearly 48 percent in 2023; a quarter of people went hungry sometimes or often because of a lack of money. Just under 30 percent said they had put off or delayed visits to the doctor because of financial considerations, up from 25 percent in 2018 and 14 percent in 2014. 
More people are leaving the country than entering every year, overwhelmingly to Australia, where salaries are higher. The <a href="https://academically.com/blogs/nurse-salary-in-new-zealand/amp/">average salary</a> of a nurse in New Zealand is A$73,652, while in Victoria, Australia, the <a href="https://au.indeed.com/career/registered-nurse/salaries/Victoria">average</a> is $90,745. The 2024 OECD Teaching and Learning International <a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/results-from-talis-2024-country-notes_e127f9e2-en/new-zealand_0906a779-en.html">Survey</a> found that teachers in New Zealand worked the second-most hours in the world, behind only Japan. Many feel that public services will not function in a generation’s time as people either move overseas or into the private sector.
Workers in New Zealand are refusing to sacrifice their quality of life while corporate profits and defence spending soar. The mega strike showed their potential power and sent a message to those in power that they can’t rely on business as usual so long as workers’ lives and the services they rely on are trashed.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

The Mamdani moment

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

Did Palestine set New York free?

The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

‘This is absolutely political’: New Zealand rocked by mega strike

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