Workers World Party

10/16/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95354/
Student rebellions reflect no future under capitalism
Workers World salutes the rebellious youth of France whose protests are becoming more revolutionary by the day. They started on Sept. 17 when striking teachers in Créteil, a working-class Paris suburb, were joined by students demanding more staff. By Oct. 6, student protests had shut down 2,000 out of 3,700 high schools across the country, while engaging in daily mass demonstrations over severe teacher shortages, lack of resources in schools and deteriorating learning conditions. The protests have been joined by teachers and other union members.

University students also joined the protest, with 90% of universities mobilized to block 57 campuses. October 8 demonstrations that included both high school and university students put forth 10 common demands. These include the abolition of the racially biased French university admissions platform; an emergency plan for decaying school buildings; massive recruitment of staff; replacement of absent teachers; a reduction in class size; the hiring of nurses, teaching assistants and social workers and lighter class schedules.

Even before high schools were shut down in France, in late August, high school students in Mayotte, Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Réunion — former colonies of France — staged their own walkouts over similar deteriorating conditions impacting their education.

Books or bombs?

These protests are not taking place in a vacuum. Schools in France have grown increasingly undemocratic and more segregated. But it has been cuts in social programs, including education, matched by in..

10/15/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95334/
From 1789 to 2026: A tale of two Bastilles – a poem –
in the streets
of neglected French suburbs
dark-skinned high schoolers
who study under leaking roofs
without desks
wonder that
they are asked
to study famous figures
who made history
because they revolted —
from Arthur Rimbaud
to Olympe de Gouges —
and yet their own revolt
is trashed
feeling like throwaways
the only shields they have
are plastic bins on rollers
while the robocops
test their new expensive
fluorescent toys —
stroboscopic shields
that make even youtube viewers
look away or be sick
refusing to become
cannon fodder
in the billionaires’ profitable wars
they chant:
“our country is rearming
but our future
is being disarmed”
elsewhere
a group of youth
armed with only
one Palestinian flag
dance in front of police
armed to the teeth
the spark
that began in France
has spread to
Belgium
The Netherlands
Germany
Spain
Italy
Greece
Portugal
Ireland
Chile
Brazil
and France’s colonies:
Mayotte
Guyana
Guadeloupe
Martinique
Reunion —
and tomorrow
beyond porous borders
others will join in
and today
on the very square
where the French People tore down
the feudal prison of the Bastille,
legions of children
dismantled it
all over again
ghostly stone
by ghostly stone —
acting out the History
that without teachers
they learned alone

(c) Julia Wright October 8. 2026 All Rights Reserved.

10/15/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95309/
Pakistan’s march to free Imran Khan
Thousands of supporters of jailed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), are determinedly continuing a Long March, or Freedom March, toward Islamabad to demand Khan’s release from prison.

More than 5,000 people, mobilized by the PTI Party, are moving through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, one of the poorest and least developed of Pakistan’s four provinces, toward the totally locked down capital of Islamabad. The march began on Oct. 4 in the city of Lakki Marwat after the breakdown of negotiations with the central government. The government has been controlled by the powerful Pakistani military, the decisive force in Pakistan for decades.

The enormously popular leader, Imran Khan, has been jailed since 2023. He was ousted from the Pakistani Parliament in 2022 based on trumped-up military charges of corruption. Khan’s spouse, Bushra Bibi, was also convicted and jailed.

More compliant political forces took over the civilian government, now headed by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and President Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). These are the two long-established political parties in Pakistan.

In past demonstrations, Khan’s supporters have focused on military installations, since thousands of PTI members and supporters have been arrested, tried and sentenced by military courts...

10/14/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95315/
Boston Indigenous Peoples Day: ‘From Turtle Island to Palestine – Land Back!’
In a powerful demonstration of global Indigenous solidarity, Boston-area Native American and Palestinian-led organizations combined forces with the Boston Coalition for Palestine on Oct. 10 at the Massachusetts Statehouse — an original outpost of European settler colonialism — to demand “Land Back!” and “Free Palestine!”

10/14/2026

10/14/2026

10/13/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95293/
Students in France hold militant protests
“To confront repression, class unity” was written on the banner that some high school students carried in a Paris demonstration the first week of October.

What is happening in France today is developing the class unity that workers in France must build to defeat the harsh austerity measures that the current government of President Emmanuel Macron is imposing. This unity is needed to repel the neofascist regime that the far right intends to install if it wins the presidential elections in 2027.

On Sept. 21, the students at a high school in Créteil, a city in Val-de-Marne southwest of Paris, began a protest over conditions in their school — absence of teachers, particularly reliable substitute teachers; dilapidation of their buildings; windows that couldn’t be opened and overcrowded classes with 35 students in them. They were also protesting Parcoursup (France’s pre-enrollment platform for first-year higher education) and the government’s proposed austerity budget.

According to a French government survey, 70 % of high school classes had 30 students in them; 20% had 35. The average school building is over 60 years old.

Education in France is predominantly directed nationally. But students made it clear that they believe state investments are especially scanty in working-class communities.

Within a few days of the first walkout, high school students in the Paris suburbs, which are mainly working-class and poor, were protesting and demonstrating; there were blockades in many of them, enforcing a student stay away. By the beginning of October, protests had spread throughout France and expanded to universities.

This mobilization of teenagers and youth was totally unexpected and was met with a harsh and violent police response. According to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, 225 students and 70 cops have been injured. Over 6,000 people were arrested. (cnn.com, Oct. 6)

Solidarity with the students

Militant labor unions, including the oldest union in France, the General Union of Labor (CGT), and unions of parent associations came out to student-called demonstrations. They stood between the cops and the students in the hope of keeping their children safe from police violence...

10/13/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95287/
Nolan Wells and a reactionary justice system..
Students organize for justice for Wells

On Oct. 1, students marched through Atlanta University Center (AUC) chanting “No water in his lungs!” in response to the findings of the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s autopsy of Nolan Wells that disputed the grand jury’s conclusion that he had drowned. The rally was organized by A’nija Hughley, president of the Spelman College NAACP chapter, to demand a deeper look into Well’s death.

1955 murder of Emmett Till

Mississippi’s DAs and grand juries, for as long as the state has existed, have always covered up the lynchings of Black people, and they have always met them with dogmatic ignorance.

Take the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Sheriff Clarence Strider of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and the DA at the time, Gerald Chatham, were involved. Bourgeois historians and academics praise Chatham for his noble, heroic effort to bring justice for Emmett Till, but that is factually wrong. Chatham’s office did absolutely nothing to convict Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who kidnapped and killed Till.

Pattern of lack of investigations

Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with Nolan Wells. Every district attorney’s office in Mississippi seems to share a silent agreement: whenever a Black worker is murdered in the state, the protocol is simply not to cooperate, not to investigate, not to do anything. That is why Angel Myers Mccllrath and her office dug in their heels and held to the position that Nolan Wells drowned. They ignored the facts that came out of the autopsy and refused to investigate any further.

This is not only the position of Mississippi but of DAs across the United States, especially when it comes to the murder of Black youth. The policy is open season, not only on Black people but especially Black youth.
..

10/12/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95284/
‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – a war on workers
Over 100 activists rallied outside Philadelphia City Hall on Oct. 2 to oppose the reckless federal cuts – mandated in the “Big Beautiful Bill” (H.R. 1) – to Medicaid, HIV funding, housing and harm reduction that put people living with chronic HIV in the midst of a disaster of genocidal proportions....

10/12/2026

https://www.workers.org/2026/10/95259/
Pa. Supreme Court to consider sentencing relief for Jerome Coffey
In March 2026, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in Commonwealth v. Derek Lee struck down automatic mandatory sentences of life without parole (LWOP) for second-degree murder — a murder committed during another felony, even if the defendant did not kill anyone. While determining that the LWOP sentence was unconstitutional, the court stopped short of reviewing the sentences of over 1,100 individuals currently imprisoned in Pennsylvania for second-degree murder...
However, on Sept. 29, the state Supreme Court agreed to rule in the case of Jerome Coffey, a Philadelphia man currently serving an unjust LWOP sentence stemming from a 1992 killing. Coffey, who has maintained his innocence, is one of five individuals who have appealed to the court to review their sentences based on the March ruling...