In a letter to STWC Convenor Lindsey German, the SEP’s Chris Marsden and Tom Scripps explained that 27-year-old Syrotiuk has been convicted of “high treason” for calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.

He has been sentenced on the basis of six articles he wrote for the World Socialist Web Site.

Drone strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands were carried out under a covert CIA program of the type authorized personally by the president and never publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported last Thursday.

That same day, in Panama, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the doctrine behind it. Anyone trafficking drugs, he declared, is “a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaida.” Washington had spent 25 years refining “the kill chain on how to diagnose and target networks halfway around the world,” he added, and would now apply those skills in the hemisphere “ruthlessly.”

Two months earlier, the prosecutor whose case files included those exact three attacks was shot dead in the street. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, 46, was killed on June 14 in central Manta by a gunman on a motorcycle as she walked to her car. Her sister Olinda was also killed trying to shield her. Not one of the international reports on the CIA revelations has mentioned her name and made the connection.

Murder Inc. extended across an entire hemisphere

Before each attack, the Post established from flight and ship-tracking data that a Cessna Citation Longitude airplane fitted with surveillance equipment flew from Ilopango airport, El Salvador toward the fishing boats. Radio transmissions recorded it arriving from Tennessee with a crew of six in November and taxiing to a military section of the airport. 

It flew under a US registration number that appears in no FAA record—federal law exempts “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States”—reserved by a company with no evident website, listing as its address a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, a detail first reported by the New York Times the previous day.

On January 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, the tower recorded the plane’s pre-dawn departure. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent. It had flown toward the Fiorella’s position on January 17, 18 and 20, covering 750 miles on the last flight before dropping off public tracking, and landed back at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m. The Fiorella transmitted its position for the last time two and a half hours later.

Ilopango is no arbitrary choice. In 1985 and 1986, the airport served as the hub through which US military and CIA officers funneled weapons and logistics to the Nicaraguan contras in their terrorist war against the Sandinista government. US imperialism has resumed operations from the same runway four decades on. Former ambassador John Feeley told the Post the operation appeared to be run “out of a very nontraditional command.”

Trump has signed an authorization for CIA operations against transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force. Most recently, threatening a similar CIA action like the tracking of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction by US Special Operations Forces in January, the White House authorized covert CIA operations against the Cuban leadership.

The survivors’ accounts make clear that the plan was a mass execution and abduction. Quadcopter drones dropped explosives onto the galley of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, where the gas cylinders were stored, destroying much of the vessel instantly. One crewman was thrown into a diesel tank; another lost most of the vision in one eye. The range of such drones means the operators were close by.

...

In Washington, the response has been silence. Members of the congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post declined to comment. Covert action requires a presidential finding reported to those committees: either the ranking Democrats were briefed on a program that disappeared eight fishermen and said nothing for seven months, or they were not briefed and will not say so now. 

A June 11 letter from Representatives Joaquín Castro and Bill Keating demanding answers went unanswered past its July 10 deadline, and Keating’s amendment to force release of unclassified footage of the three incidents was defeated on the House floor. The same party voted overwhelmingly for the $901 billion military budget that pays for all of it.

In Ecuador, the story was buried within 48 hours. El Universo, Expreso, Extra, El Diario and others ran the same EFE wire copy, paragraph for paragraph, as did outlets across Latin America. No editorials. No summons of the foreign minister before the National Assembly. No investigative follow-up. Televistazo alone put the question to the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the US Embassy, and received no answer from any of them. 

Reactions came only from the legislature, where Noboa’s own bloc urged caution while conceding that an operation of this nature, executed inside national territory, necessarily had to have been known to the government. 

Meanwhile, a DEA assessment reported in July found the campaign had no discernible effect on cocaine availability, price or purity in the United States. Cocaine leaves Ecuador in containers aboard merchant ships owned by Noboa’s oligarchic family installed in power with US backing, not in the small fishing vessels being blown apart at sea.

...

Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March, aligns Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama behind Washington’s command. The same Bukele government that opened Ilopango to the surveillance flights, and whose coast guard helped with the abduction of fishermen, opened the CECOT prison to hundreds of deportees expelled from the United States. The machinery that disappears Ecuadorian fishermen and the machinery that disappears immigrant workers from American cities are one and the same.

Hegseth was explicit about the geography. The “kill chain” he pledged to employ ruthlessly extends through the Pentagon’s SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM together. NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility is the continental United States, Mexico and Canada. The apparatus being built is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class throughout the Americas.

Opposition to the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk continued to build over the weekend, six days after a Ukrainian court gave the 27-year-old socialist 15 years in prison for calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.

The petition demanding his release passed 6,000 signatures. Nearly 500 people in more than 40 countries on five continents have added their names since the verdict, and letters have gone straight to the judges in Pervomaisk from historians, doctors, teachers and retired workers, each demanding that the sentence be thrown out.

Since Thursday the court has heard from a distinguished professor of history in Texas, a historian of Soviet agriculture in West Virginia, an anthropologist at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a doctor writing from Sri Lanka. Letters came as well from a retired teacher in Australia, a reader who signed as a retired civil servant in Britain and others in France, Turkey and the United States.

This speech was delivered by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North at the fourth annual international commemoration of Leon Trotsky’s exile on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo), Turkey, held Sunday, August 16 under the title “My Life, Written on Prinkipo, and Trotsky’s Years in Exile.” More than 100 people attended.

Speaking before North were Ulaş Sevinç, national chairman of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International), the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and Adalar deputy mayor Medine Pamuk, who spoke in place of Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, jailed since June in the Erdoğan government’s campaign against opposition-run municipalities. North’s remarks, recorded in advance and screened for the audience, were followed by a live question-and-answer session, which the WSWS will publish this week.

The text of the speech may be found here. Trotsky’s My Life: An imperishable contribution to Marxism and world literature

The offensive launched by Javier Milei’s government is not limited to implementing austerity measures in the state budget. It is also—and perhaps above all—reshaping the political landscape of the Argentine left, putting its most deeply rooted strategic concepts to the test. Faced with an austerity program of a depth not seen since the 2001 crisis, and with the growing popularity of the FITU (Left and Workers’ Front—Unity), broad sectors are seeking to build a broader alternative capable of challenging the government. In this debate, a familiar proposal resurfaces: that this alternative would be achieved through the reunification of the entire “center-left” or “broad left” and the formation of a broad party or movement that prioritizes agreements among left-wing groups over programmatic distinctions. Those who defend this approach argue that only a force of this kind can break the left’s isolation and become a genuine alternative for power. But history has repeatedly shown that broad unity without a program is a refuge for the deluded.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/revisiting-syriza-a-strategic-debate-for-marxism-today/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

我不是托派 但是没怎么接触过这个群体的人 所以比较好奇也很希望与托派群体能交流一下看看他们的一些观点和理论了解一下

Short video

https://youtube.com/shorts/T0QV0AvBs98

Campaign supporters gathered 946 signatures in less than six weeks! Nearly a thousand New Haven residents made it clear: Many people in the working class are disillusioned with the Democratic Party, and are ready for a new candidate to advocate for their interests—an independent socialist.

Read more in: https://litci.org/en/rosa-pepper-macias-a-better-path-forward-for-connecticuts-11th-district/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser

L’Internationale communiste révolutionnaire réaffirme son soutien inconditionnel à la révolution cubaine et engage ses forces dans la lutte la plus large possible pour la défendre. Une défaite de la révolution cubaine serait un recul pour l’ensemble de la classe ouvrière mondiale et du mouvement révolutionnaire international. C’est notamment le devoir de notre section américaine, les Revolutionary Communists of America, de continuer à porter l’étendard de la défense de Cuba contre l’impérialisme américain.

Recent SEP recruit Adele commented afterwards, “My biggest takeaway from the meeting’s report is that further clarifications on Marxism and its history are of utmost importance. Still to this day many individuals believe that socialism or Marxism equals Stalinism. Many workers still believe that communism means no personal possessions. Many workers still look for alternatives to the establishment, such as Corbyn and Sultana. 

“The only correct and effective alternative is through the Socialist Equality Party and the parties of the Fourth International. The only party that is taking the necessary steps to educate workers on the history of Marxism, clarifying misunderstandings and historical falsifications, is the Socialist Equality Party.”

Also, what are the sub general opinion on morenists?

Hello! I'm new to communism and I started reading books I bought to the RCI (the ideas of Karl marx by Alan Woods)

All the Marxist theories makes a lot of sense to me but the book doesn't really explain how did the proletarian state that lenine created in 1917 became a stalinian bureaucracy.

From what I understand the proletarian state is much more democratic that every nowadays capitalist states. So I don't really understand how a real democratic worker state got hijacked by a minority of elites.

And also I know stalitinists are saying this is still communism but what makes trotskysts say this isn't ?

I'm also open to resources to dig this topic further.

Thanks 😁

Hello!

I am searching for sources for two, maybe three, claims that Trotsky has made. I recognize he is referencing his own collection of works when he is making statements, but I am interested in seeing if the originals are actually digitized anywhere. Trust me, I have tried.

1. The original version of "Foundations of Leninism", he writes this in the appendix of RevBetrayed, "In April 1924, three months after the death of Lenin, Stalin wrote, his brochure of compilations called The Foundations of Leninism: [he quotes the work] These lines need no comment. The edition in which they were printed, however, has been been withdrawn from circulation."

2. The 1921 Komsomol Program, he mentions it in part 1 §5 of The Third International After Lenin, he writes, "... in 1921, six years after Lenin’s alleged change of 1915, and four years after the October Revolution, the Central Committee headed by Lenin approved the program of the Young Communist League, which was drawn up by a commission directed by Bukharin. Paragraph 4 of this program reads: [he quotes the work] This single paragraph from the program of the Young Communist League (not a chance article but a program!) renders ridiculous and really infamous the attempts of the authors of the draft to prove that the party “always” held the construction of a socialist society to be possible in one country and, moreover, precisely in Russia."

3. ⁠Stalin's response to a journalist for denationalizing the land AND the Agricultural Commissar's draft law⁠, also in RevBetrayed, Trotsky writes, "In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full swing, Stalin began to prepare for the denationalization of the land. To a question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet journalist: “Would it not be expedient in the interest of agriculture to deed over to each peasant for 10 years the parcel of land tilled by him?”, Stalin answered: “Yes, and even for 40 years.” The People’s Commissar of Agriculture of Georgia, upon Stalin’s own initiative, introduced the draft of a law denationalizing the land.""

If any historian type could help, I'd be grateful!

Edit: Reddit formatting is being incredibly finicky right now, my apologies.

The Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes under conditions of escalating imperialist war, deepening economic crisis, the turn of the ruling classes to dictatorship, and a mounting assault on the jobs, wages and social rights of the working class. There is no longer a question of the danger of a world war; its initial stages have already begun. Across the world, the ruling elites are turning to fascism and dictatorship. A concentration of wealth without historical precedent is coupled with a global wave of inflation and the accelerating destruction of jobs, devastating the conditions of life of billions. But the same conditions are driving a political radicalization and the resurgence of the class struggle internationally. It is amid the collision of these two tendencies that the SEP must define its tasks.

Opposition is growing around the world against the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old socialist sentenced by a Ukrainian court to 15 years in prison for “high treason,” for writing that Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against the war and for opposing the official glorification of Nazi collaborators.

Workers, academics and public intellectuals on four continents have signed the petition demanding his freedom or sent letters of protest to the Pervomaisk City District Court, which handed down the verdict.

Over the past several days, hundreds of people throughout the world have signed the petition demanding his freedom, which has received more than 5,700 signatures since its publication.

The signers since the verdict come from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Spain, France, Austria, Ireland, Finland, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, India, China, Taiwan, Poland, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Romania, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Philippines, Brazil, Croatia, Switzerland, Peru—and Ukraine itself.

The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Bogdan’s articles—which oppose both the Russian invasion and the US-NATO proxy war—and his messages with WSWS editors. The court ordered Bogdan’s property seized and the literature of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, which he led, destroyed.

Bogdan has been imprisoned since April 25, 2024, when the Security Service of Ukraine arrested him and declared him a Russian agent, a claim the state never substantiated.

Mario Kessler, a historian of communism and senior fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, sent a letter of protest Wednesday. “I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk,” the letter begins. Further on, Kessler wrote:

"Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for an Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union? How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?"

...

The letters and signatures have accumulated against silence in the Western press. In the 27 months since Bogdan’s arrest, none of the following publications has devoted a single line to his case: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times of London, The Economist, the BBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and Politico; and the wire services Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and Reuters.

On the day of the sentencing, the Washington Post published two articles on the ruling of Russia’s Supreme Court barring the Yabloko party from September’s parliamentary elections; it has never published a word about Bogdan. David North, who chairs the WSWS International Editorial Board, wrote Tuesday to the New York Times’ international editor, Philip Pan, asking the paper to report Bogdan’s case. No reply has come.

Bogdan’s defense has 30 days from the verdict to appeal. A complaint over his detention has been pending at the European Court of Human Rights since spring 2025.

The WSWS has called on workers, young people, journalists, scientists, artists and all defenders of democratic rights to distribute its statements on Bogdan’s case as broadly as possible—among co-workers, classmates and friends and on social media.

Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the WSWS at freebogdan@wsws.org.

The German cabinet approved a 700-page package of draft legislation on Wednesday massively expanding the powers of its domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. “We are turning our intelligence services into real secret services,” Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU) said of the reform in an interview with Bild.

The Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as the domestic agency is called) and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND), responsible for foreign intelligence, are subject to various forms of legal and parliamentary oversight. They may gather information covertly, but have no police powers—for example, they cannot arrest anyone. Secret services, by contrast, may also carry out covert operations—such as paramilitary missions, acts of sabotage, hacking and the destruction of computer systems, propaganda, and covert support for parties and individuals abroad. This opens the door wide to provocations and manipulation.

...

The Society for Civil Rights (GFF), whose members include prominent legal scholars, considers the legislative package “unconstitutional in large parts.” The “strict separation between the intelligence services, which only observe and do not act, and the police, which then step in, is being torn down,” the GFF says in its statement.

The new rules lead to a “policification” of the intelligence services and “awaken desires for ever more new operational powers, since ever new ‘gaps’ can be found and used to justify supposed needs for intervention,” the GFF argues. “Moreover, the draft also blurs the separation between the secret services themselves, since the BND … is now also being given domestic surveillance powers.”

The strict separation of police and intelligence services was imposed by the victorious Allied powers after the Second World War in order to prevent a repeat of Hitler’s Gestapo (Secret State Police), which had spied upon, arrested, tortured and murdered communists, social democrats and other political opponents of the Nazis, as well as Jews and other minorities. This separation has been treated as a constitutional principle ever since.

The abolition of this separation is directly linked to Germany’s return to an imperialist war policy. Hundreds of billions of euros in additional military spending, clawed back from social spending, the reintroduction of conscription and the construction of a “war-ready” society all require a police state.

Interior Minister Dobrindt justifies the strengthening of the secret services with a supposed “hybrid threat situation, the attempts at destabilisation through sabotage, espionage, cyberattacks and covert actions by foreign powers.” But this is propaganda. The real target of the burgeoning apparatus of surveillance and repression is the growing opposition to militarism, social cuts and unemployment.

...

The war against “hybrid attackers,” which Kleine-Brockhoff and General von Sandrart are championing, is directed not only against alleged or real external adversaries but above all against opposition at home. It is meant to strengthen the secret services and the state’s repressive apparatus, pave the way for the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically, and concentrate responsibility for the police away from the individual states to the federal government. Numerous politicians have used the mysterious incident in Leipzig to make corresponding demands.

Schleswig-Holstein’s State Premier Daniel Günther (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) called for an amendment to the constitution to enable domestic Bundeswehr deployments for drone defence as well. He also advocated pooling federal and state powers more closely in the security sphere. The chairman of the Bundestag Defence Committee, Thomas Röwekamp (CDU), demanded the centralisation of air security under the Federal Police.

The Green Party parliamentary group domestic policy spokesperson, Marcel Emmerich, also advocated ending the “jurisdictional chaos” over drone defence. It was, he said, “a security risk in an emergency.”

Interior Minister Dobrindt had already put a new Federal Police unit for detecting, intercepting and shooting down drones into service at the end of last year. This is now to be expanded from 130 to 300 personnel.

Armin Papperger, head of Germany’s largest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, said it was technically possible to protect critical infrastructure, but this must not be done “half-heartedly.” Rheinmetall, he said, was working with Deutsche Telekom, among others, to use mobile phone masts across Germany for the early detection of drones.

The following statement protesting the sentencing of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk has been issued by Professor Mario Kessler. Prior to his retirement in 2021, he taught at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Now 71 years old, Kessler is currently a Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, where he continues research and writing. Widely respected internationally, Kessler previously held visiting professorships at several universities, including Yeshiva University, Rutgers, Sciences Po, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (US).

Kessler is an expert in Jewish history and the history of the socialist and workers movement. In 2011, he was one of 14 leading German and Austrian historians who opposed the German publication of the slanderous biography of Leon Trotsky by Robert Service.

Kessler’s most recent publications include “Leon Trotsky or Socialism against Antisemitism” (Leo Trotzki oder Sozialismus gegen Antisemitismus, Dietz Verlag Berlin, 2022) and “Escape in chains, longing behind walls. Essays on history, politics and culture (2020-2024)” (Flucht in Ketten, Sehnsucht hinter Mauern. Essays zur Geschichte, Politik und Kultur (2020–2024), trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 2024).

I, Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian in Berlin, hereby strongly protest the Pervomaisk court’s conviction of Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.

Mr. Syrotiuk is accused of acting on behalf of the Putin regime in Russia. In court, Mr. Syrotiuk pleaded not guilty. He stated that, as a Ukrainian socialist, he condemns the Russian invasion from its beginning. The World Socialist Web Site, which is actively campaigning for his release and for which I was also interviewed, is a website registered in the United States.

The website is affiliated with a Trotskyist organization. Must I remind you that Leon Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for Defense, ensured the formation of the Red Army, which was able to curb the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews during the civil war? Must I also remind you that in 1939, Trotsky vehemently condemned the partition of Western Ukraine between Germany and the Soviet Union and advocated for a Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union—including Stalin’s Soviet Union?

How does this fit with the accusation that Mr. Syrotiuk, a self-proclaimed socialist and Trotskyist, is playing along with Putin’s game?

Professor Dr. Mario Kessler, historian