This appeal was issued by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

The World Federation of Trade Unions issues a militant, class-oriented and internationalist call to its member organizations and trade unions around the world to make the 2nd International Day of Action of Dockworkers on Oct. 30, 2026, their own cause and support it.

The mobilization is taking place at a critical time, as military conflicts are spreading and war fronts are dangerously expanding and becoming interconnected, from Ukraine to the Middle East. The murderous state of Israel, with the support of the U.S., the European Union and NATO, continues its crime against the Palestinian people and escalates its military aggression against Iran and Lebanon, increasing the danger of an even broader conflict.

Behind the various pretexts lies the conflict among powerful capitalist states and the confrontation between the Euro-Atlantic bloc of the U.S. – NATO – EU and other imperialist centres over markets, energy, raw materials, trade routes and control of strategic infrastructure.

Imperialist wars are not a departure from the “normal” functioning of the capitalist system. They are the continuation of exploitation and competition by other means. Billions are being spent on armaments and the war economy, while wages are squeezed, social spending is cut, healthcare and education are commodified and exploitation reaches extreme levels, with exhausting schedules, including 13-hour working days and work seven days a week.

The peoples have nothing to gain from wars and the antagonisms of the imperialists. They are called upon to pay for profits, wars and the consequences of a new capitalist economic crisis, to sacrifice themselves for interests that are alien to their own, while business groups claim ever larger shares of the spoils.

Ports, railways, airports and transport infrastructure as a whole are being turned into critical hubs for the movement of weapons, ammunition, military equipment and troops. Workers are being pressured to become cogs in the war machine and accomplices in crimes against the peoples.

Dockworkers have already proved that, through organization, collective struggle and coordinated internationalist action, they can prevent ports from being turned into staging grounds for war. They can block the cargoes of death that fuel the Israeli state’s slaughter of the Palestinian people and the spread of war throughout the Middle East.

February 2026 action in 20 ports

On Feb 6, 2026, strike action was held in 20 ports across seven countries. In May, in Istanbul, trade union organizations from 35 ports formed a coordination network, which now encompasses more than 40 ports across the Mediterranean and Europe, with the participation of organizations from France, Greece, the Basque Country, Türkiye, Morocco and Italy, under the slogan: “Dockworkers do not work for war.”

On Oct. 30, trade unions will hold new militant actions and strikes. The common framework “Ports for Peace – Jobs with Dignity” links the struggle against imperialist war with the fight for Collective Labor Agreements, wage increases, stable employment, shorter working hours and substantive health and safety measures.

This is also linked to opposition to privatizations, subcontracted and temporary employment and the use of automation and artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs and intensify exploitation. Technological and scientific progress must serve to reduce working time and improve workers’ lives, not the profitability of the monopolies.

The experience of dockworkers has wider significance for workers in the metal industry and shipyards, railways, energy, telecommunications, transport and logistics. These sectors connect ports, industrial zones and military infrastructure and can play a decisive role in the common struggle against imperialist war and exploitation.

October 30 can mark a major new step in the international, militant coordination of the working class. From port to port, in every workplace and sector, from country to country, workers are sending the message that they will not choose between the camps of their exploiters, will not become cogs in their war machine and will not sacrifice their lives and rights for the profits of the monopolies.

No sacrifice for the profits and wars of the imperialists!

Long live the internationalist solidarity of the working class!

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) is an international federation of trade unions established on October 3, 1945. Founded in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the organization built on the pre-war legacy of the International Federation of Trade Unions as a single structure for trade unions world-wide, following the World Trade Union Conference in London, United Kingdom. The federation went from representing 48 million workers in 2005 to 105 million in 2022.

The post WFTU for Oct. 30 dockworkers’ antiwar action: No sacrifice for imperialist profits & wars! appeared first on Working Mass.

Editorial note: The following is a letter response to Hazel W.’s piece, “In Defense of Abolition.”

In July, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) amended its program to call for “abolishing the police and prison system.” Taken literally, that is a mistake. Society needs institutions to patrol and isolate the dangerous few. Even the most radical socialist societies understood this. For example, the Paris Commune — that libertarian-left experiment — had a prefecture of police. It established neighborhood watches and incarcerated thousands as “hostages of the people of Paris.” The commune is not proof of concept for prison and police abolition. It is stark evidence of just how foundational, including under socialism, those institutions are. Even the society you might least expect to have a carceral system did not go without them.

But the drafters of the DSA’s programmatic amendment tell us it isn’t literal. “Abolishing the police and prison system” is merely a shorthand. It translates roughly to “abolishing prisons and police as they exist under capitalism.” Hazel Williams, a driving force behind the amendment, assures this doesn’t foreclose “some community force under communism” that promotes accountability. She cites approvingly the Paris Commune that, according to Karl Marx, turned the cops into its responsible agents. In other words, according to Williams, there can still be “police” as we ordinarily use that word. She even leaves open the possibility of separating people “hellbent on committing violence” from those “they intend to hurt.” Separation, you say? That sounds an awful lot like prison.

Williams isn’t against, in ordinary English, “prisons” and “police.” She’s against prisons and police under capitalism, “as institutions of capitalist domination.” The issue, then, is not badged officers or constables. It’s capitalist domination that Williams truly opposes.

And that position is almost ubiquitous within the organization. The DSA, as the name suggests, is an avowedly socialist outfit. It opposes capitalism, which its program already makes abundantly clear. The very first line asks workers to “[i]magine… a future without capitalism.” Later, it states that its enemy is “the entire global system of capital.” Elsewhere, the program calls “for ending capitalist oligarchy.” If the amendment on “abolishing… police and prison” simply amounts to a disavowal of capitalism, it adds nothing.

But it’s worse than that, because the amendment isn’t mere surplusage. It sows confusion. Anyone reading “abolishing… police and prison” will understandably assume that cops and incarceration are a no-go. But, according to Williams, that plain meaning isn’t what the amendment is saying. Drafters made this disconnect all but inevitable. The amendment originally mentioned “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” Drafters “simplified” it to “abolishing the police and prison system.” Their simplification erased the words that carried the meaning.

Williams bristles at those who view abolition as “an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever” — and fair enough. That’s an unjustified interpretation. But expect a broader audience to interpret “abolish prisons/police” literally. That is the natural reading. If that’s not your message, you aren’t expressing yourself well. Don’t use a totalizing word like “abolition” unless you mean it.

Many leftists don’t mean it, but insist on using the word anyway. They’re married to it — and stuck in the haze of 2020. COVID-era progressivism didn’t birth abolition. The idea existed for decades, with the DSA officially endorsing it in 2017. But 2020 brought a peculiar obsession with slogans at the expense of clear, effective messaging. This milieu moved abolishing prisons and police from the academic fringes to the mainstream. Calling for abolition became so fashionable that, years later, people still insist on using the word despite its political toxicity.

Living in the most dangerous developed nation on Earth, vast majorities of Americans think that crime is a serious problem. Dismantling the criminal justice system will strike them as a surefire way to invite more danger into their lives. The DSA saying it wants to abolish prisons and police will thus dampen its appeal and fuel allegations of extremism. It’ll especially sabotage outreach to the working class, whose communities are most ravaged by crime. These people should be the DSA’s primary constituency, and are those whose interests its economic platform serves most. If it cannot get them on board, that spells doom for the movement. Abolition is bad policy. It may be worse politics, as evidenced by its underwater poll numbers, even among those who identify as very left-leaning.

Of course, public concern cuts both ways. Police malfeasance and squalid, overcrowded prisons are also legitimate and widespread worries. These are serious societal failures that, like crime, hit the working class hardest. But addressing those failures neither requires nor warrants eliminating prisons and police entirely. Reform is an option, and it’s what most Americans want. Polls show that the vast majority believe the police system is at least somewhat sound but needs improvements. Americans similarly admire how prisons isolate dangerous individuals and reject abolition while desiring better, more rehabilitative conditions. Plenty support shifting certain carceral funds toward welfare spending. These are demands the DSA could champion with broad support — and, to some extent, already does. Its program, after all, calls for “redirecting funding to public services.” But what follows — “as [a step] toward abolishing the police and prison system” — overshadows it.

The finalized amendment makes it sound like the DSA’s vision requires abandoning the most important tools of criminal justice. Democratic socialism in the public imagination, then, becomes even more anathema to safety and order. That not only reinforces a blatant falsehood but is a gift to the Right. Such generosity is unwarranted. “Abolition” is not a magic word. The DSA doesn’t have to use it.

And it shouldn’t. Eliminating prisons and police, which are socially necessary, is an unworthy goal. But, if you’re going to call for that anyway, at least mean it. The drafters don’t, yet still issue the call. It’s the worst of both worlds. For a medicine they aren’t prescribing, the movement suffers side effects all the same.

A testimonial from a comrade working their way through America’s war on the homeless.

The post  A Working-Class Testimony: From Grief to Homelessness and the Struggle for Stability appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Travis Covitz

Combining my long-standing interest in animal welfare with Gilded Age politics, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy caught my eye at the local library. This 2024 book explores the rise of the American animal welfare movement from the 1860s through the 1890s, looking at pets, livestock, scientific research, wildlife, circuses, and more.  Although I was frequently underwhelmed with the politics of the authors, I found this book quite thought-provoking. It is absolutely true that the relationship between the average American and different animals has completely transformed in the past 150 years. Anybody who wants to achieve social change should learn how this came to be. 

Today the street is considered the place of the car, but it has not always been that way. Our Kindred Creatures starts by asking us to turn back time to the birth of the American industrial city, where the street was shared by man and beast. Stray cats and dogs ran loose, covered in fleas and acting as a constant threat of rabies. Cattle, swine, and more were herded from the farms where they were raised to the butchers who processed them. Horses were, well, the workhorses, moving people, goods, and equipment across the city. Individual acts of cruelty and violence were the norm, not the exception, and Enlightenment philosophy decreed that these animals were unfeeling automatons. 

To tell the story of American animal welfare, the authors follow three main “heroes” of the movement. All three were white elites in New England. However, rather than leaning into the individualist narrative of social change, the authors consistently demonstrate that these people did not act alone, but used their influential, organized relationships to achieve widely-felt change. The structure of focusing on these three activists serves, rather, to compare and contrast their different tactics in the cause of animal welfare. Henry Bergh was a ‘vigilante’ who used lawfare to protect animals, George Angell was an ‘educator’ who fostered social clubs and magazines for animal welfarists to come together and share ideas, and Caroline White was an ‘innovator’ who helped establish the first animal shelter. Wasik and Murphy highlight the uniting feature of Romantic philosophy, and the other forms of activism these individuals took part in. White was involved in the suffragist movement and Angell became an anti-war advocate. The authors argue that the animal welfare movement came to be as a way for white elites to focus their good will after the success of abolition.

The authors themselves relied frequently on emotional appeals and vivid imagery to get their point across. I generally fall pretty evenly on the need for balance between emotion and reason, so I am not inherently opposed to emotion in a political argument, but it did frequently make me so activated that I had to put the book down. Wasik and Murphy clearly have a lot more experience with archives than with animals. They meander between animal welfare and animal rights, in a way that is unclear whether they are staying wholly committed to the Gilded Age context, or they are just that out of touch with modern animal use philosophy. Occasional leaps from the Gilded Age to today feel forced and politicized, rather than a genuine attempt to synthesize history. 

A phenomenon that I found quite interesting was the way in which anti-welfare politicians made use of the contradictions in animal welfare elitism. For example, labor rights were consistently pitted against the advancement of animal welfare, and some animal welfare legislation was fought specifically on the grounds that it would discriminate against immigrants. Animal welfarists also had a troubled relationship with paternalism and frontier colonialism. The whole concept of animal welfare is, arguably, paternalist in nature, ‘providing a voice for those without one’. Gilded Age animal welfarists who lamented the extinction of the bison saw it as an inevitable part of the march of progress – just as Manifest Destiny was inevitable – and the establishment of national parks, like Yellowstone, were acts of displacing indigenous nations. Wasik and Murphy do try to push back on this paternalism as a mis-step, but they themselves occasionally fall into the trap of valorizing animal ‘innocence’ over human ‘sin’. 

Despite the difficulties I had with some of the choices of the authors, I did really appreciate how this book sketched out Gilded Age activism. Seeing the way that clashes between Enlightenment ideals and Romanticism, the changing role of religion, and different ideas of ‘progress’ informed what was possible for changemakers was informative and allowed me to think more deeply about our own moment of social upheaval. I do not think this book is especially helpful for someone trying to learn about the animal industry, but it is a great read for someone wanting to learn more about Gilded Age politics.

The post Natural Progress and the Gilded Age: A Review of Our Kindred Creatures first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By: Travis Wayne, Fiona P

MEDFORD – On October 19, Tufts library workers organized with SEIU 888 rallied to demand union recognition in their fight for a contract that affords them fair and sufficient compensation to be able to live in Medford, Somerville, or anywhere else in Greater Boston. The Tufts library workers support major research infrastructure for the university, as well as community initiatives.

Six weeks before the October 18 rally, library workers — both librarians and other library staff — organized with SEIU 888 delivered their petition for unionization to Tufts University.

Library workers were joined by the other campus unions at both the march on the university and the rally on October 19. 32BJ SEIU and SEIU 509, both representing other parts of the campus workforce, mobilized their memberships in solidarity. One worker, Elizabeth McCall, reported to Working Mass that:

This feels like coworkers together coming together for a better world, for better lives.

While peer schools embroiled in their own struggles with their workers also face unions that may show solidarity with one another, the Tufts unions have been demonstrating that connection from day one of the SEIU 888 drive — showing good signs for coming battles with the university. It’s less clear whether this is more byproduct of rank-and-file connections between union siblings of different unions or the fact that all three parts of the workforce are represented by locals affiliated with the same parent Service International Employees Union (SEIU).

Other universities facing their workers do not face one international union organized into locals. The Harvard labor landscape is notably different, for example; at Harvard, the grad workers (HGSU) on strike are joined this fall by two other unions on campus simultaneously on strike, but neither of those unions are affiliated with the same parent (UNITE HERE Local 26, representing dining hall workers at Harvard, and HAW, representing Harvard academic workers).

Struggles for Wages and Healthcare

According to librarian Elizabeth McCall, the union seeks equilibrium for all workers – both librarians and other staff.

“By voting yes, by forming our union, and eventually entering ccontract negotiations, we want to see higher pay for our work, to make sure people are not working assignments not in their job duties, and so they aren’t working twelve hour days due to workload,” she said. McCall further elaborated to Working Mass:

I have coworkers that have children, and they sometimes live in other states, or in Lowell, or further, places that get so long to get to day-to-day. Coworkers of mine want kids and families in future but they don’t know how to save money for that, because the cost of living is so high around here, everything you make is going into something already.

At Tufts, not only do library workers, including but not limited to librarians, not get paid enough; they’re also subject to few holidays and opaque processes. One library worker was hired at thousands of dollars below the posted salary range, but when she appealed to her supervisor ended up in an advisory process that is not an option nor open for all library staff, leaving the workforce open to major exploitation and gaps in pay equity.

Another library worker, Jess, also discussed how options for healthcare have been threatened by the university, which would be much more difficult when those decisions must first be negotiated with the union. In late summer, Tufts announced a healthcare change to faculty, but not to staff just as impacted by healthcare changes. Jess was seeing a new medical practitioner only to have that coverage threatened with no warning. “As library staff, we want to come together and demand more,” she said.

Jess told Working Mass:

This is so important to demand a voice to the people that make the institution run. The library workers are here for everybody, at the Tufts community and beyond, and we want to support everybody, so we love to see the support as well.… I love where I work and would love to stay here, but the way things are going, I won’t be able to — and neither will my coworkers.

Management has countered the union by arguing that archives workers, in libraries with other staff in most cases, are not workers. Tufts is disputing the status of archive workers that SEIU 888 filed to include as part of the bargaining unit, even though they experience similar training and complete similar tasks in conjunction with other coworkers in the unit.

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass.

The post Tufts Library Workers Unionize with SEIU 888 appeared first on Working Mass.

Bernie joins Angie Nixon in Florida, Larry David joins DSA, and more in this edition of “Red All Over,” Democratic Left’s occasional news roundup.

The post October Surprise? Bloomberg’s $80 Million for Democrats Leaves Out Democratic Socialists appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA’s candidate for a Los Angeles congressional seat hopes to defeat a major recipient of AIPAC cash by making clear that U.S. imperialism comes at a cost to the well-being of Americans — and of people around the world.

The post Angela Gonzales-Torres Hopes to Bring International Solidarity to the U.S. House appeared first on Democratic Left.

The Columbus chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) extends our full support to Representative Ilhan Omar in the face of racist and xenophobic campaigns against her by the Trump Administration and the fascist right wing. The targeting of Rep. Omar escalated on Monday, October 12, with the unprecedented raid of her Washington, DC home by the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ).

The DOJ has claimed that it is investigating possible “immigration fraud” committed by Rep. Omar, a baseless conspiracy theory for which no evidence has ever been produced, even after years of targeting by the far right. But the real aim of the assault is clear: to vilify and silence Rep. Omar in the weeks before the midterm elections, create a pretext for efforts to deport her, and stoke further xenophobia and Islamophobia against Somali communities across the country.

The Trump Administration’s campaign of terror against Rep. Omar and our Somali neighbors, from ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis to its “Operation Buckeye” here in Columbus, is both a continuation and a serious escalation of the bipartisan targeting of all immigrants and refugees – with and without documentation.

While this policy of state xenophobia has especially characterized the last two decades, from President Obama’s role as the “Deporter-in-Chief” to President Trump’s openly fascist policies of mass deportation and attacks on birthright citizenship, it is a long-standing policy of the American ruling class. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Laken Riley Act of 2025, the scapegoating of immigrants and refugees has continually served to turn working people against each other, obscure our shared interests in organizing together, and deflect our class anger from where it belongs: the capitalist class that exploits us all. As socialists, we categorically reject these transparent attempts to divide us from our neighbors.

Representative Ilhan Omar continues to be one of the most principled fighters against imperialism and fascism in American politics, and her refusal to be silenced in the face of mounting attacks is an inspiration to all of us. Columbus DSA expresses our full and unequivocal solidarity with Rep. Omar, and we encourage everyone to share her asks for support in this fight.