India-Pakistan conflict threatens nuclear catastrophe

Keith Jones

In this photo released by Inter Services Public Relations, smoke erupts on mock target after Pakistani army artillery fires shell during military exercises in Tilla Field Firing Range, in the Jhelum district, Pakistan, Thursday, May 1, 2025. [AP Photo/Inter Services Public Relations]

India and Pakistan, South Asia’s rival nuclear powers, are on the brink of all-out war. Such a conflict would be catastrophic, not only for the region’s 2 billion people, but for the entire world. An India-Pakistan war could rapidly escalate into nuclear annihilation and draw in other major powers, particularly the United States and China.

Pakistani Defence Minister Khwaja Asif has repeatedly warned that Pakistan—whose population is one-sixth and economy one-tenth the size of India’s—could be compelled to use its nuclear arsenal. Last Wednesday, following India’s large-scale missile attack involving over 75 warplanes, including advanced Rafale jets, Asif stated that if India “imposes an all-out war on the region … then at any time a nuclear war can break out.”

Only on Saturday—after four days of intense cross-border missile strikes and artillery exchanges centered in but not limited to the disputed Kashmir region—did New Delhi and Islamabad agree to a truce. Whether the ceasefire, first announced by US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, will hold is in serious doubt.

Almost immediately, both sides accused each other of violating the ceasefire, each claiming to have gotten the better in the fighting. New Delhi and Islamabad have also exchanged provocative, communally charged allegations of deliberately targeting civilians and religious sites.

India remains adamant that all measures adopted after it blamed Pakistan for the April 22 terrorist attack in Indian-held Kashmir will stay in effect. These include suspending participation in the Indus Water Treaty—a move Islamabad has condemned as an “act of war,” warning it threatens Pakistan’s agriculture, food supply and power grid.

What is certain is that the world has come perilously close to the first-ever all-out war between nuclear-armed states.

These developments must be understood as part of a broader breakdown in global inter-state relations. World geopolitics is increasingly dominated by escalating trade conflicts, a global rush—led by the United States and other imperialist powers—to implement massive rearmament programs, the eruption of regional wars, the imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza and the “normalization” of nuclear brinkmanship.

India and Pakistan have faced repeated war crises, notably in 2016 and 2019, when Washington backed New Delhi’s efforts to “change the rules of the game” by launching illegal cross-border strikes against Pakistan. However, last week’s military clashes were the most intense in decades, involving large-scale fighter jet dogfights, strikes on air defense systems and, for the first time, drone and cross-border missile attacks.

India and then Pakistan deliberately crossed each other’s red lines. India’s May 6–7 assault struck multiple targets deep inside Pakistan’s Punjabi heartland. As fighting escalated, both sides targeted military bases, including, according to Islamabad, an Indian attempt to strike the air base near Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Reports suggest one or both sides may have used ballistic missiles capable of carrying tactical nuclear warheads.

Both countries possess tactical and strategic nuclear weapons capable of incinerating the other’s major population centers. Were that not chilling enough, a 2008 study found that even a limited exchange involving just 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs—totaling 1.5 megatons—could trigger a catastrophic global “nuclear winter.”

As Richard Rhodes explained in the 2012 edition of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan

would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, [causing firestorms that] would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.

An estimated 20 million would die immediately from the blasts, fire and radiation, followed by up to a billion deaths from mass starvation.

Workers should treat with contempt the efforts by Trump and his minions to exploit Washington’s belated calls for de-escalation in the Indo-Pakistani conflict to bolster the fascist president’s cynical pretense of being a champion of peace.

This is not just because Trump is enabling Israel’s efforts to complete the genocide in Gaza through renewed military assault and deliberate starvation, threatening Iran with “obliteration,” escalating Washington’s confrontation with China and pushing a $1 trillion defense budget. American imperialism’s role in South Asia—as everywhere—is incendiary.

For more than two decades, Washington has prioritized integrating India into its military-strategic offensive against rising China. To this end, both Democratic and Republican administrations have extended major strategic concessions to New Delhi while dramatically downgrading relations with Pakistan.

The Indo-US “global strategic partnership” has emboldened the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in its confrontational stance toward Pakistan, while pushing Islamabad to deepen its alliance with Beijing. This includes collaboration on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, aimed at providing China with alternatives to US efforts to blockade vital Indian and Pacific Ocean chokepoints.

The Indo-Pakistani confrontation is thus increasingly intertwined with US imperialism’s efforts to thwart China’s rise, magnifying the explosive character of both conflicts. A full-scale war between India and Pakistan would threaten to upend the Eurasian geopolitical order, drawing in the US and China and transforming a regional clash into a global conflagration.

It is a measure of the recklessness of the imperialist ruling classes, confronted with the deepening crisis of world capitalism and a resurgence of global class struggle, that Washington ignored the South Asian war crisis until India and Pakistan were locked in a rapidly escalating cycle of tit-for-tat military strikes that is spiraling toward disaster.

In his recently published memoir, Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State during Trump’s first term, recalls that in 2019 India’s then-foreign minister told him that New Delhi believed Pakistan was preparing to deploy nuclear weapons—and was readying its own arsenal in response.

Pompeo wrote:

I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019.

Yet as recently as last Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance, who visited New Delhi last month to deepen the Indo-US anti-China military alliance, blithely stated that the Trump administration was not concerned with the escalating war in South Asia, because the conflict was “fundamentally none of our business.”

Under the Biden administration, the contours of a US-initiated global war took shape through the US-NATO-instigated war against Russia, the US-Israeli campaign to impose a “final solution” to the “Palestinian question” and the redrawing of the map of the Middle East, and the intensified US war drive against China.

Now Trump, the embodiment of oligarchy, dictatorship and imperialist violence, has accelerated the collapse of inter-state relations through his global trade war and expanding list of annexation targets—from Canada and Greenland to the Panama Canal and Gaza.

But all the imperialist and lesser capitalist powers are following the same path, locked in a ruthless struggle for control over markets, resources and strategic territories. This drive is propelled by the same essential contradictions that gave rise to the two world wars of the last century.

NZ government blocks “pay equity” claims for hundreds of thousands of workers

Tom Peters

New Zealand’s right-wing coalition government last week passed the Equal Pay Amendment Act, which is designed to make it much harder—perhaps impossible—for workers in female-dominated professions to claim that they are underpaid because of gender-based inequity.

New Zealand Workplace Relations Minister Brooke Van Velden [Photo: Facebook/Brooke Van Velden]

The amendment was announced on May 6 by Workplace Relations Minister Brooke Van Velden, from the far-right ACT Party. It was rushed through parliament the next day under anti-democratic “urgency” provisions to limit public discussion and scrutiny. 

The legislation is part of the government’s austerity regime, which involves brutal cuts to healthcare, education and welfare, a virtual pay freeze across the public sector, and thousands of layoffs. Its aim is to increase the exploitation of the working class, divert more public money to the super-rich, and to fund a vast increase in military spending to prepare for war.

Van Velden told reporters the government was “not taking money from anybody”—a transparent lie. In the same media conference, she said the new pay equity framework would lead to “very real and significant cost reductions.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed that money set aside in the budget—to be announced on May 22—to settle pay equity claims can now be reduced. He expected the government to save “billions of dollars.”

The government has cancelled 33 pay equity claims that were being negotiated under the old system, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly in the public sector. The unions involved will be forced to reapply under the new thresholds. 

The largest outstanding claim covers 94,000 teachers in the primary, secondary and early childhood sectors. It was lodged under the previous Labour Party-led government at the end of 2020 and negotiations have dragged on for years.

The new law changes the definition of work “predominantly performed by female employees.” It states that 70 percent of the workforce must be women (up from 60 percent under the previous law) and that this must have been the case for at least 10 years. In high schools, 63 percent of teachers are women, meaning that they may be barred from re-submitting a pay equity claim.

The government has also removed the ability for previously settled claims—including for nurses, social workers, librarians and aged and disability carers—to be regularly reviewed and adjusted.

For new claims, there are much stricter criteria for assessing whether “sex-based undervaluation” of workers exists in a given profession. Claimants’ work must be compared with “work that is the same or substantially similar” to that performed by men or by a majority-male workforce.

Van Velden criticised pay equity claims which compared librarians with mechanical engineers, and social workers with air traffic controllers. She said this was “muddying the waters” between sex-based discrimination and pay gaps that were caused by other things such as “market forces.”

The law change has triggered widespread anger, with thousands of people joining protests across the country last week outside the offices of government MPs. A petition by the unions calling for the amendment to be reversed gained more than 65,000 signatures by Sunday night.

The opposition Labour Party, the Greens and the union bureaucracy, however, are working to prevent an organised movement by the working class against austerity. They are telling workers to wait for the next election in 18 months.

Labour’s workplace relations spokesperson Jan Tinetti told the BHN podcast that people should “get behind” Labour, the unions and their allies. “Together we can fight this and we can make a difference, and we can be so much stronger in 2026 to win that election and put this right again,” she said.

Former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark (1999-2008) shared a post on X stating: “When the parents, partners and children of women in the workforce vote in 2026 we will remember this moment.”

Jacinda Ardern’s 2017-2023 Labour Party-led government heavily promoted pay equity deals, mainly as a means to subordinate workers to the union apparatus and suppress a broader movement against low wages and austerity. 

Thirteen pay equity deals were reached, the most significant covering about 30,000 nurses in public hospitals. The nurses received pay rises of between 18 and 20 percent in 2023. While not insignificant, this followed decades of near-frozen wages under successive Labour and National-led governments, enforced by the union apparatus. 

That settlement, touted by Labour and the unions as a “historic” achievement, is already being undermined through a new round of wage cuts. Nurses have been offered a pay rise of just 1.5 percent over a two-year period, which is well below the increase in the cost of living. Nurses held two part-day strikes in December 2024, but since then the New Zealand Nurses Organisation has organised no action and remained silent on the negotiations.

Notwithstanding the pay equity settlements, the Ardern government presided over a worsening social crisis, including increased homelessness and child poverty. The Labour Party lost the 2023 election in a landslide as living costs soared and it campaigned on cutting jobs in the public sector, to make workers pay for the developing economic crisis.

Labour also agrees with the government’s decision to raise spending on the military from 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product. This will divert an extra $12 billion to the armed forces over the next four years, which will be paid for by further eviscerating public services. By comparison, the cost of the pay equity settlements reached thus far is just $1.78 billion a year.

Fleur Fitzsimons, national secretary of the Public Service Association, wrote in the Post: “The PSA will not be taking this outrageous attack on the rights of women workers lying down. We will be fighting this in the streets and in the courts.”

The PSA, however, has not announced any strike action. It has done nothing to oppose the thousands of job cuts across multiple government agencies over the past year-and-a-half. The union vocally supports the vast military spending increase, which is at the direct expense of workers.

The statements by the union bureaucracy blaming low wages for teachers, healthcare workers, caregivers and others entirely on gender discrimination serves to disorient and divide the working class. 

There is a gender pay gap: Women’s median hourly earnings are 8.2 percent less than men’s. But the fundamental division in society is the gulf between the working class and the financial and business elite, whose wealth is based on the exploitation of workers of every nationality, gender and ethnicity.

Feminist identity politics, which blames low pay on “sexism” and “patriarchy,” obscures the reality that male-dominated sections of the workforce have experienced major attacks on wages and conditions in recent decades. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in meat processing, agriculture, construction, transport, forestry and other sectors of the economy have become casualised and insecure, with low wages and often dangerous working conditions.

The richest 5 percent of the population owns 45.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest half of the population owns just 2 percent. According to figures released in 2023, New Zealand’s richest 311 families collectively owned $85 billion in assets. All the capitalist parties, including Labour and its allies, are dedicated to the enrichment of this parasitic layer.

The politics behind the selection of the American-Peruvian Pope

Andrea Lobo

Newly-elected Pope Leo XIV waves to the crowd in St. Peter's Square in his first public appearance. [Photo by Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar / CC BY 4.0]

The selection of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV is a calculated political decision by the Catholic Church, not a theological one. He has been chosen as the figure deemed most capable of giving capitalism a facelift amid an unprecedented global crisis.

As Trump’s second term is defined by threats of neo-colonial conquest and global war abroad, and mass deportations and fascist reaction at home, the Catholic Church is positioning itself as a “moral” counterweight to the naked oligarchic rule now dominating the center of global capitalism.

With 1.4 billion adherents worldwide—nearly half concentrated in the Americas and 20 percent in rapidly growing African nations—the Catholic Church remains a critical bulwark of the capitalist status quo, playing a central role in containing class struggle and suppressing working-class radicalization in much of the world. 

Despite deep divisions within the Church, Prevost reportedly won broad support from cardinals across Latin America, the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. His multilingual fluency—Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and English—along with dual US-Peruvian citizenship and leadership roles in both countries, were seen as ideal qualities to aid the Church’s efforts to intervene in global politics by channeling popular grievances in both advanced and oppressed countries.

Trump’s social media praise for Prevost—a “great honor for our country”—masks underlying tensions. Prevost has publicly criticized Trump’s mass deportations, climate change denial and Vice President JD Vance’s perversion of medieval Catholic doctrine to justify the persecution of immigrants. He previously denounced Trump’s “bad hombres” rhetoric as racist. Prevost’s defense of immigrant rights—which resonates with most workers internationally—risks upstaging Washington’s would-be Führer.

Prevost’s election also reflects the Church’s concern over rising nationalist divisions and conflicts within the US-led imperialist bloc. As theologian Miguel Perez told the Huffington Post, he “has always talked about bridges and dialogue, about overcoming confrontations, in a context in which multilateralism is damaged, especially by leaders like Trump.”

Among the leaders of European powers, who would have been consulted in the process of selecting Prevost, there is no doubt a hope that the pope will be an ally in its conflict with the Trump administration.

Expressing the generally favorable view of the new pope prevailing within sections of the American ruling class, CNN Vatican analyst Elise Ellen described him as a “calm and balanced” centrist, who is “even-handed” and an “exceptional leader.” On the other hand, Trump’s former chief advisor, the fascist Steven Bannon, called his selection “jaw-dropping” due to his previous statements criticizing Trump officials.

Another political consideration behind Prevost’s selection is an effort somehow to contain growing social anger among broad masses of the population throughout the world.

In his inaugural prayer, speaking in Spanish and Italian, Prevost warned of “a third world war in pieces,” citing Ukraine and India-Pakistan tensions, and called for a “ceasefire” in Gaza and “authentic peace.” He directly addressed AI-driven inequality and climate disasters in an appeal to workers and the poor facing job losses from automation and ecological collapse. 

Prevost’s chosen name invokes the legacy of Pope Leo XIII. The latter’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum sought to counter the influence of Marxism during industrialization at the turn of the last century. The document endorsed unions and fair wages while condemning socialism and revolution, declaring: “Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.”

By framing class conflict as a moral issue resolvable through Church-mediated “dialogue,” the Rerum Novarum sought to divert workers from the class struggle and Marxism, which identifies scientifically the intrinsic contradictions of world capitalism that lead to extreme inequality and other social ills. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx explained in Capital.

Prevost’s papacy is a conscious revival of his namesake’s strategy. He has praised Rerum Novarum’s “commitment to social justice,” while upholding the sanctity of private property, a stance engraved in the explicit rejection of socialism by the Cathechism, or the official doctrine of the Church. 

While posturing as a reformer, Prevost was selected to better maintain and nurture the Church’s alliance with capital and to protect its own major landowning and financial interests. Consequently, so-called “progressive” elements such as Prevost are always reduced to empty platitudes and impotent moral appeals to an insatiable capitalist class, such as his longwinded calls for AI ethics to focus on “human dignity” and for “inclusion” and “listening” to youth and marginalized groups.

The elevation of figures such as Prevost and his late mentor Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) are only the latest examples of the Church’s historic role of “loyal opposition”: criticizing war and social degradation, while upholding the capitalist order from which they inevitably flow. 

For instance, in 19th-century Europe, the Church promoted “Christian labor associations” to rival socialist unions, emphasizing the supposed harmony between workers and bosses. Germany’s Kolping Society and Italy’s ACLI used this model to fragment working-class unity.

While 1960s Latin American liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez advocated class struggle, the Vatican suppressed radical elements. The “Dirty War Pope,” Bergoglio himself denounced the “ideological colonization” of the Church and collaborated with the Argentine dictatorship’s “disappearance” of radical elements within the Church.

Post-Rerum Novarum encyclicals, including Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Centesimus Annus (1991), refined the Church’s “third way” or reformist rhetoric denouncing both socialism and unfettered capitalism while upholding private property.

Despite his extensive curriculum vitae, which includes criticizing the “injustices” under the late Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, Prevost’s image as a “progressive” quickly came under fire after reports emerged that he refused to address clerical sexual abuse cover-ups in Peru and Chicago.

Most recently, in Peru, in 2022, three women reported to Prevost that two priests from his diocese had sexually abused them as minors in 2004. The women claimed Prevost failed to conduct a thorough investigation, did not inform civil authorities adequately and did not impose restrictions on the accused priests.

AI-driven job losses, climate disasters, genocide and imperialist war are inherent to a system prioritizing profit over human need. Prevost’s pacifist appeals and moral denunciations of inequality and fascist reaction are aimed at covering up the deep roots of these social issues in capitalism.

However, even the meager reforms mediated through religious or bourgeois institutions in an earlier epoch to counter revolutionary consciousness are today rejected outright by ruling elites confronting a much more advanced stage of the crisis of global capitalism. 

The Church itself, an institution steeped in medieval obscurantism, can only respond to the wildfire of AI technology reaching the palms of workers in every corner of the globe by clinging desperately to the tailcoats of the capitalist oligarchy and offering all its reactionary services.

Political warfare deepens as Philippines holds midterm elections

John Malvar

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte arrives to cast her vote at a polling center in Davao City, southern Philippines, Monday, May 12, 2025. [AP Photo/Manman Dejeto]

On Monday, Filipinos voted in record high numbers in the country’s midterm election. Lines began forming outside of precincts at five in the morning and voters endured hours of sweltering heat to cast their ballots. It was universally understood that the stakes in this election were extraordinarily high, as the outcome could prove the tipping point in the fierce political standoff between the camps of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and former President Rodrigo Duterte.

At the time of writing this article, 80 percent of precincts had finished tallying their results. While many races remain uncertain, a majority are now clearly decided. The results leave the bitter political war unresolved, which in itself is a striking setback for Marcos.

The election was, for the ruling elite, a referendum on Philippine ties with its former colonial ruler, the United States. Marcos, son of the former dictator, took office in 2022 in an alliance with the powerful Duterte faction; his vice president and running mate was Sara Duterte, daughter of the former president. Rodrigo Duterte, president from 2016 to 2022, had during his term in office sought to stabilize economic relations with China by distancing Manila from Washington. He rescinded US military basing deals and downplayed Philippine claims to the South China Sea. Shortly after taking office, under intense pressure from the Biden administration, Marcos Jr reversed course, placing the Philippines at the forefront of Washington’s war drive against China and in the process breaking with Duterte.

The rival factions of Marcos and Duterte represent different layers of the Philippine ruling class. Marcos is shored up by older political clans with historic, colonial ties to the United States. They are the Manila elite. Duterte expresses the growing power of the elites of the provincial hinterlands, long resentful of the inadequate and Manila-centric infrastructure of the country. The forces behind Duterte see in Chinese infrastructure investment an opportunity to shore up their economic interests and political power. Securing such investment requires a break with the aggressive anti-China policies of US imperialism.

These tensions have deep roots. They were expressed to an extent in the presidency and ouster of Joseph Estrada around 2000. The possibility of Chinese investment as a solution to the problem of the hinterland elite, and an orientation to China as the economic future of the country, found initial expression in the second term of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from 2004–2010.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr [AP Photo/Aaron Favila]

But while these tensions have been long boiling, it is the deeply destabilizing second term of Trump that has brought them to a fever pitch. How to deal with Washington has become the one great unavoidable question for the political establishment in capitals around the world.

An entirely different set of concerns brought the majority of the record number voters to the ballot box.

Rice prices, long the most fundamental bellwether of social anger, remain at more than double the price, 20 pesos a kilo, that the Marcos government pledged to achieve in 2022. Over a quarter of all Filipino families reported experiencing involuntary hunger in the past three months according a survey published in December 2024. More than 10 percent of the country’s population is compelled to seek employment as an overseas migrant worker in order to provide for their families. There is an immense popular resentment and hostility that found confused and distorted expression in the midterm vote.

Rodrigo Duterte, heading up the opposition slate to Marcos, repeatedly attacked the president for his inability to control rice prices. More than any other factor, this plank won votes.

However, the rival factions of the ruling elite agree on one thing: they are prepared to use any means to suppress this growing social opposition. While they are torn apart by geopolitics, both factions—the far-right populism of Duterte and the dictatorial pedigree of Marcos—represent the imminent danger of authoritarian rule.

Marcos aggressively prosecuted the midterm election as political warfare. He arranged the arrest and extradition of Rodrigo Duterte to stand trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He pushed through the last-minute impeachment of his Vice President Sara Duterte. He whipped up a war-fever against China, denouncing his rivals as stooges of China and made baseless claims of Chinese meddling and espionage in the election.

While half of Philippine governance, town councils, mayors, governors, congressional representatives are all up for grabs in the election, it is on the Senate race that all eyes are fixed. Senators are elected by the entire nation, the top 12 vote-winners take office. The composition of the incoming Senate will determine the political fate of Sara Duterte. Marcos needs a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate, where Duterte’s trial will be held, to secure a conviction, removing Duterte from office and banning her from running in the future.

The preliminary results show that Marcos has not secured sufficient votes to confidently carry out the removal of the vice president from office.

From his prison cell in The Hague, Rodrigo Duterte ran to be mayor of Davao, the southern city that has for decades been his base of power. He was elected in a landslide. His son, Sebastian, won the vice mayoral race and will likely rule in his father’s stead.

Bong Go and Ronald dela Rosa, the foremost allies of Duterte, currently stand at first and third in the Senate race. Go has received nearly five million votes more than the second candidate. Go is a political cipher, a man with no particular personality or platform. His entire identity is as the right-hand man of Rodrigo Duterte. Dela Rosa was the head of the police under Duterte and more than any other figure was directly responsible for the conduct of the murderous war on drugs that landed the former president in The Hague.

The overseas absentee ballots, overwhelmingly the vote of migrant workers, showed an even stronger backing for the Duterte slate. Not a single Marcos candidate made it into the top twelve of the overseas vote.

The intimate allies of Marcos—Benhur Abalos and Francis Tolentino—have not placed. It is plausible, although unlikely, that Abalos will still make it into the top 12, but the current Senate majority leader Tolentino, who made his political career out of attacking China, fell millions of votes short.

Beyond Abalos and Tolentino, the rest of the Marcos slate was a conjunctural and opportunist alliance. This alliance will hold if Marcos holds power. But the majority of the Marcos slate will defect to the Duterte camp if they sense a change in the winds of power. This process was already underway during the election. Camille Villar, daughter of real estate billionaires, part of the Marcos slate, shifted into the camp of Duterte during the election and campaigned with Sara Duterte.

The Liberal Party, which has been in decline for nearly a decade, experienced something of a resurrection. Its candidates, Bam Aquino and Francisco Pangilinan, both secured seats in the Senate. Its pseudo-left political ally, Akbayan, received a record number of votes, 2.2 million at current count, placing higher than any other party-list organization. In the 2022, Akbayan received a mere 236,000 votes.

The unexpected victory of the Liberal Party-Akbayan tandem expressed a broad sentiment among voters to break free of the Marcos-Duterte rivalry. Throughout the election these two dominant factions were popularly referred to as Team Kadiliman (Darkness) and Team Kasamaan (Evil). The Liberal Party ran a campaign focused on food prices and promised good governance to remedy the country’s economic woes. Pangilinan had been food security secretary under the Benigno Aquino III administration.

While the vote for the Liberal Party is, in terms of mass sentiment, a sharp repudiation of both the Marcos and Duterte camps, its gains will likely be a consolidation in the Marcos wing. The allegiance of the Liberal Party has always been with Washington. The Liberal Party administration of Benigno Aquino III (2010–16), of which Akbayan was an integral component, aggressively prosecuted US interests against China.

Support for the Makabayan organizations, the various party-list groups that follow the political line of the Stalinist National Democratic Front, collapsed. Bayan Muna is poised to win less than 200,000 votes. It is likely to the first election in which these organizations fail to win a single seat.

The political crisis in Manila will only deepen in the wake of the election. The Trump administration poses major threats to the Philippine economy with the possible mass deportation of Filipinos, resulting in a huge decline in remittances, and the unresolved issue of US tariffs on imports from the Philippines. An economic slowdown will only fuel infighting in ruling circles as well as political unrest as the social crisis facing millions of working people worsens.

Kurdish Workers Party dissolves itself amid deepening war in the Middle East

Ulaş Ateşçi & Barış Demir

At its 12th Congress, convened between May 5 and 7, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced its decision to dissolve and end its armed struggle.

Founded in 1978, the PKK launched an armed struggle in 1984 with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdish state, but long ago abandoned this demand. Since 1984, the conflict with the Turkish state has left tens of thousands of people, mostly Kurds, dead and millions displaced.

PKK supporters in London, 2003. [Photo by Juan Pablo Arancibia Medina / CC BY-SA 3.0]

The decision follows a process that began with a call on October 22 by Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), an ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Bahçeli said that Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, could be released and permitted to address parliament if he announced that the PKK had been dismantled.

Following negotiations with a delegation from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), Öcalan called on the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve itself on February 27. Proposing “integration with the state”, he effectively declared his party’s historical and political bankruptcy.

In the congress’s final declaration, the PKK Congress Board stated:

“The Extraordinary 12th Congress evaluated that the PKK’s struggle has dismantled the policies of denial and annihilation imposed on our people, bringing the Kurdish issue to a point where it can be resolved through democratic politics. It concluded that the PKK has fulfilled its historical mission. Based on this, the 12th Congress resolved to dissolve the PKK’s organizational structure and end the armed struggle, with the implementation process to be managed and led by Leader Apo [Abdullah Öcalan]. All activities conducted under the PKK name have therefore been concluded.

The final declaration also stated:

Leader Apo, by referring to the period before the Treaty of Lausanne and the 1924 Constitution, where Kurdish-Turkish relations became problematic, proposed a framework for resolving the Kurdish issue based on the Democratic Republic of Turkey and the concept of a Democratic Nation, founded on the idea of a Common Homeland and co-founding peoples. The Kurdish uprisings throughout the history of the Republic, the 1000-year Kurdish-Turkish dialectic, and 52 years of leadership struggle have shown that the Kurdish issue can only be resolved based on a Common Homeland and Equal Citizenship.

This nationalist perspective neither explains anything, nor offers a way forward. The so-called “Common Homeland” and “Equal Citizenship” are merely reiterations of the failed notion of reforming or democratising the existing bourgeois nation-state. In reality, the Turkish bourgeoisie is no less incapable of and opposed to the establishing of a genuinely democratic regime than it was in 1923, when the Turkish Republic was founded. The same structural impotence and counter-revolutionary class position applies to the Kurdish bourgeoisie.

As Leon Trotsky, who led the 1917 October Revolution together with Vladimir Lenin, explained in his Theory of Permanent Revolution, the bourgeoisie in the backward capitalist countries is incapable of solving the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, such as securing independence from imperialism and establishing a democratic regime, in the face of the growing threat from the working class. These tasks fall to the international working class, which is the only social force capable of abolishing the national borders and capitalist system that reproduce all relations of oppression and persecution in the direction of the bourgeoisie’s domination.

Today the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisies are tied to imperialism by a thousand threads and its hostility to the threat of socialist revolution by the working class eclipses that of a century ago. Moreover, the Turkish bourgeoisie, which a century ago was incapable of a democratic solution to the Kurdish question, will always tend to see the large Kurdish population inside the country as a “separatist threat” under conditions of an imperialist war of redistribution aimed at redrawing the maps in the Middle East, no matter what kind of agreement is reached with the Kurdish bourgeoisie.

Workers and youth will welcome the end of a bloody war that has cost thousands of lives, served to divide the working class on ethnic grounds and been used by the state as a pretext to suppress democratic rights. However, it is essential to expose the underlying process that led the PKK to dissolve itself and the falsity of its claims of “democracy and peace”.

Ankara’s and the PKK’s claims of democracy and peace come against the backdrop of the consolidation of a presidential dictatorship in Turkey that has eliminated basic democratic rights and the escalation of the Gaza genocide in the Middle East. Accelerated by Trump’s return to power in the US, these trends are global phenomena stemming from the growing crisis of the capitalist system. Thousands of political prisoners are currently in jail; in recent months elected mayors of the DEM Party and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) have been dismissed and arrested, and millions of people denied the right to vote and be elected.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor and presidential candidate for the CHP, is the most significant example of a political arrest in the midst of “peace and democracy” negotiations between Ankara and the PKK. Erdoğan himself had hinted that Imamoğlu would be targeted, despite the allegations of corruption levelled against him not requiring arrest. The main reason for his arrest was that Imamoğlu was ahead of Erdoğan in the latest presidential polls.

Claiming that a regime which violates basic democratic rights, such as fair trials, the right to vote and be elected, freedom of expression and the press, and freedom of assembly, can lead a great democratisation is a deception.

Moreover, the same regime, in line with the reactionary interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie, is deeply involved in the US-led imperialist wars in the Middle East. And therein lies the key to the attempt to reach an agreement between the Erdoğan government and the Öcalan-led PKK. As stated in the final declaration of the PKK congress: “Current developments in the Middle East within the scope of World War III also make the restructuring of Kurdish-Turkish relations inevitable.”

PKK's imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan (middle) and DEM Party delegation on İmralı Island, Thursday, February 27, 2025. [Photo: DEMGenelMerkezi on X/Twitter]

The PKK’s decision to dissolve itself came at a time when all imperialist powers and capitalist states are waging wars for the redivision of the world that could surpass the two world wars of the twentieth century.

The US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine has brought the whole world to the brink of nuclear conflict. The Trump administration has declared a program of global conquest and hegemony targeting both China and its own allies. The US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza is deepening with the implementation of Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan to expel more than two million Palestinians. Regime change in Syria has the potential for a new conflict pitting the occupying allies, Turkey and Israel, against each other and various other forces in the country.

A comment in the Middle East Eye on Öcalan’s call in February stated, “Many insiders in Ankara believe the government’s motivation for engaging in talks with Öcalan is linked to escalating regional tensions between Israel and Iran.”

The US is using Israel as a spearhead in its imperialist plans for domination in the Middle East, particularly targeting Iran and its allies. As Israel has expanded its occupation of Syria and launched air strikes on the military infrastructure of the new Damascus regime, its rivalry with its ally Turkey, which occupies northwest Syria and has close ties with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) regime, has sharpened.

The declaration by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar that the Kurds in Syria are “natural allies” has raised concerns in Ankara. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish nationalist group allied with US forces in Syria, is affiliated with the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a sister organisation of the PKK. Ankara is trying to bring the YPG forces, which lead a de facto autonomous administration in Syria, to an agreement with HTS, thus making them part of the Syrian army and putting an end to their autonomous structure.

This geopolitical situation is the main shaper of the agreement between Ankara and the PKK. At the beginning of the process, last October, Erdoğan said: “While the maps are being redrawn in blood, while the war that Israel has waged from Gaza to Lebanon is approaching our borders, we are trying to strengthen our internal front.”

An agreement between the Turkish and Kurdish elites, both US allies, facilitates Washington’s imperialist domination plans. The Trump administration’s main focus now will be on aligning Israel and Turkey in the Middle East under the leadership of US imperialism, especially against Iran and its allies.

Republicans move forward with plan to cut an estimated $715 billion in Medicaid funding

Jacob Crosse

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) speaking as President Trump listens. [AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee]

In a massive attack on the working class, on Sunday, House Republicans confirmed that their main proposal for offsetting some of their planned $4.5 trillion in tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations will come in the form of at least $880 billion in cuts to social programs, centered on Medicaid.

Medicaid is a vital social program and the principal insurer for the elderly and youth in the US, providing healthcare coverage for nearly 60 percent of all nursing home residents. The US government spent $618 billion on the Medicaid program in 2024—less than Social Security, Medicare or the US war budget.

As of 2024, roughly 37 percent of Medicaid enrollees were children under the age of 19. Medicaid coverage is even higher among the poor, with over 8 in 10 children in poverty covered by the program, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid also provides coverage for millions of non-elderly adults, who are paid poverty wages, as well as those with and without disabilities.

The 160-page proposal released Sunday night by the House Energy and Commerce Committee mandates cutting $715 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, resulting in an estimated 8.7 million people losing coverage this year and an additional 7.6 million more uninsured people over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Currently, some 71.3 million people—roughly one in five Americans—are enrolled in Medicaid.

The proposal is part of an ongoing effort by Republicans to push through the annual budget without support from the Democratic Party, in a process known as reconciliation. President Donald Trump has called for “one big beautiful bill” that will include making his 2017 tax cuts permanent and cuts to Medicaid.

Medicaid was created in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” agenda, which included the Medicare Act—together known as the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Medicare provided health insurance for persons aged 65 and older, while Medicaid provided health insurance for the poor.

These programs were created in response to upheavals from workers in the 1930s and the strike waves in the 1940s and 1950s. Terrified of social upheaval at home and the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution, the US ruling class gave up a portion of its unearned wealth to temporarily save its historically bankrupt system.

Prior to 1965, healthcare coverage for the elderly and poor workers in capitalist America was extremely limited; the 1950 census showed that two-thirds of older Americans—8 million people—had incomes of less than $1,000 annually, and only 8 percent of seniors had hospital insurance in 1950.

After Medicaid was signed into law, healthcare coverage was extended to millions of low-income children, their parents, the elderly and the disabled. By 1968, nearly 20 million people were enrolled in the program. In addition to providing access to hospitals and physicians for the poor, the program hastened desegregation in the South—in order to receive funding from the federal government, hospital facilities were required to comply with civil rights laws.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress increased federal funding to the program, allowing people to remain continuously enrolled, leading to around 94 million people receiving some coverage as of 2023.

As part of the ruling class’s normalization of mass death and infection from COVID-19, that year the federal emergency for COVID-19 was ended, and the federal government began disenrolling millions of eligible people, including children. In roughly a year, 20 million people were kicked off the program as part of the “great unwinding” of Medicaid under the Biden administration.

As of 2025, over a decade after its passage, 40 states and the District of Columbia had implemented Medicaid expansion, while 10 states had not. The cuts proposed in the Republican plan would not only halt any expansion but result in some 8.7 million more uninsured Americans over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The proposed cuts are not in the form of actual reductions in benefits but in mandating work requirements and updating renewal periods, both of which will lead to kicking people off the program, leaving them with no coverage.

In a section titled “Increasing Personal Accountability,” the bill requires able-bodied recipients to participate in “community engagement compliance” to receive insurance. This requires individuals to engage in “80 hours” of “work,” a “work program,” “community service” or be enrolled in an educational program “at least half-time.”

Work requirement rules have already been instituted by some states. In 2018, Arkansas implemented work requirement rules for Medicaid beneficiaries in their 30s and 40s. Despite 95 percent of the population meeting the work requirements, over 17,000 people have lost their benefits since the program was implemented. This is due in large part to the Byzantine system the government requires people to use to properly report their work. Medicaid enrollees without access to the internet are especially vulnerable to removal.

Another aspect of the bill aimed at denying people insurance is a new requirement that recipients must go through “eligibility redeterminations” every six months, as opposed to once a year. Like the “work requirements” benefit, eligible people will be removed from the program due to bureaucratic hurdles purposely placed in their path.

Keeping in line with Trump’s fascist attacks on immigrants, the bill would reduce federal funding to states that provide Medicaid coverage to immigrants and their beneficiaries without verified citizenship or immigration status.

The bill also prohibits using Medicaid funding to provide “coverage of gender transition procedures as an essential health benefit.”

In addition to Medicaid, the bill proposes amending the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 to block immigrants from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In 2023, over 42 million people participated in SNAP monthly, although it is unclear how many were non-citizens, refugees and green card holders.

At this point, it is unclear if the exact proposal revealed will become law. Several House Republicans and Senate Republicans have already voiced their opposition to the bill, with fascist Senator Josh Hawley warning in a New York Times opinion piece that backing the current iteration of the bill is “politically suicidal.”

In his own op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (Republican) proposed going back to a two-bill reconciliation process, with the first bill centered on funding Trump’s border police expansion, military expenditures and social cuts, with the follow-up bill focused on extending “current tax law to prevent the automatic 2026 increase.”

As Republicans prepare to enact one of the largest transfers of wealth in recent memory, Democrats are predictably doing nothing to stop the onslaught. In a post on her X account Tuesday, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on her 13 million followers to “Hit the phones to save Medicaid.”

She wrote that Republicans “on the committee are in tight districts. Call + pressure ARE effective here.”

Trump and the increasingly fascist Republican Party will not be swayed by calls or postcards. Decades of billions spent on imperialist war and bank bailouts for the oligarchy must be paid for one way or another. Seeking to extricate itself from $36 trillion in debt, the US ruling class is cutting social programs and pumping up the military budget in preparation for a “strategic conflict” against its rivals, chiefly China.

The origins of wealth inequality as reflected in the archaeological record

Philip Guelpa

A newly published study (“Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record,” PNAS, April 14, 2025) provides insight into the initial rise of class societies across the world. Using data from 1,100 archaeological sites from Europe, Asia and the Americas, the researchers trace the beginnings of wealth inequality back to over 10,000 years ago, millennia before the first major civilizations (e.g., Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Maya). The study elucidates some of the primary factors in the transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer social groups to early farming societies in which indications of wealth and status differentiation can be discerned. 

The initial processes that eventually led to the emergence of class societies (although the word “class” does not appear anywhere in the PNAS article) began to appear during the last stages of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene (the post-glacial period in which we have lived for approximately the last 10,000 years). Since there are no written records from those times, the researchers employ a proxy data set—dwelling sizes—specifically the in-ground footprint of structures which are the usual housing remnants, if any, found in archaeological sites. No standing buildings survive from the time period in question. The study gathered data from over 47,000 residential structure remains, documented at 1,100 archaeological sites from around the world. The large sample size alone gives a degree of confidence in the study’s results. 

The study identifies several commonalities in the initial emergence of economic inequality: 

Growth of wealth differences among households has been a long-term though not universal trend in the Holocene. Marked increases typically lagged plant domestication by 1,000 y[ears] or more and were tightly linked to development of hierarchies of settlement size and land-limited production. We infer that the social upscaling (growth of polities in population and area) that typically began one to two millennia after agriculture became locally common, and continued in some areas throughout the Holocene, interfered with traditional leveling mechanisms including enforcement of egalitarian norms.

In general, in egalitarian societies the dwelling sizes of constituent family groups tend to be similar at any given settlement, reflecting a general equality in economic and social status. As wealth and social stratification developed, the study found that differences in dwelling sizes begin to appear. As societies become more complex, the number of levels of dwelling sizes increases, reflecting the different levels of social stratification. 

A significant observation resulting from this study is that the process of differentiation becomes noticeable roughly one to two millennia after the advent of agriculture, the pace of which varies in different parts of the world. The inference is that the factors driving social stratification were not an immediate consequence of the initial forms of agriculture, which were likely little more than plant tending, weeding and other such practices to favor the growth of targeted plant resources.

Indeed, other archaeologists have hypothesized that agriculture originated in societies with what is labeled “harvesting economies.” These are characterized by the presence of multiple naturally occurring food resources which happened to be located in close proximity to each other, together providing a complete diet. Such settings allowed more or less permanent settlement at a single location, or perhaps two seasonally alternating locations, as opposed to the more typical hunter-gatherer pattern of migration between multiple, temporary settlements to exploit spatially dispersed resources. The latter pattern necessitated light, easily transportable and flexible material culture. 

In egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, the relatively simple technology and more or less equal access to wild food resources means that each family group is on relatively equal footing with every other in a given community. Therefore, no individual or small group can control access to necessary resources for other members of the community. Social distinctions are primarily based on age and sex. Leadership positions, to the extent they exist, are based on the assent of other members of the social group. As a result, dwelling sizes of the members of a given group tend to be similar. 

By contrast, the more sedentary occupation pattern of harvesting economies made the investment of labor to improve the conditions of favored plant species economically rewarding, as well as the development of specialized technology for the efficient exploitation of such resources. Among the latter was the advantage gained through the use of food processing and storage technologies which allowed for the long-term availability of larger amounts of food resources beyond the immediate time of harvest. 

In addition, the more stable settlement locations of groups with harvesting economies and the increased reliability of stored food resources encouraged population growth. This set up a positive feedback (i.e., self-reenforcing) loop. The growing population necessitated an increase in the food supplies, promoting expansion and intensification of agriculture, leading to the development of domesticated plants, improvements in technology, and over time the development of a division of labor. 

As the authors of the study point out, a key limiting factor for such emerging agricultural groups was the availability of arable land. Competition over rights to this limited resource both promoted innovations to increase productivity, such as irrigation, drainage, and terracing, but also inevitably led to conflicts and social tensions which necessitated adjudication by a “higher authority.” The increasing complexity of these technologies and the need to organize large labor forces for their construction, including individuals with specialized knowledge, required the development of administrative roles. 

Another administrative need was the control over and allocation of stored food and other resources. The combination of these factors tended, in areas where such intensification was possible, to a greater need for administrative roles, usually based on the leaders of kinship groups. Since not all land is equally productive, differences in prosperity and wealth would eventually emerge. This tended to lead to the development of hierarchical relationships within and between kin groups. In other words, class differences.

Tikal – An ancient Mayan city in Central America. Mayan society is thought to have collapsed from a combination of environmental stress and class conflict.

Another significant factor in the relative pace of developing economic inequality within regions suggested by the study’s authors, although difficult to verify archaeologically, is resistance by some members of a social group to their loss of independence and to the assertion of control by those in the upper levels of the emerging hierarchy. In some societies, even in the recent past, behaviors known as “leveling mechanisms,” such as redistribution and ostracism, functioned to put restraint on incipient social stratification.

In egalitarian societies, a method of social control was the expulsion of members of a community who fell afoul of social norms (i.e., ostracism). As wealth differentiation grew in agricultural societies, attempts to remove offending individuals would have become more difficult. In some societies, social pressure growing from kinship relations imposed requirements for those in leadership roles to distribute some of the food and other resources over which they exercised control to the lower levels of the group in order to validate their qualifications to hold the leadership position. As levels of inequality increased, the enforcement of such practices would have become more difficult. 

The article goes on to provide a great deal of fine-grained statistical analysis of some of the factors relevant to explaining regional variations in the pace and specific characteristics of the development of social hierarchies. 

Overall, the study concludes that, “Worldwide there is pervasive though not universal evidence for increasing economic inequality some 1,500 y[ears] after plant domestication became locally common (somewhat later in Europe, somewhat earlier in Asia).” Furthermore, “We present strong evidence that a pervasive reworking of settlement structure, partly preceded by, but also accompanying, shifts to more land-intensive strategies of subsistence, together contributed to increasing wealth inequality worldwide. These processes began and had their most important effects on inequality well before writing.”