Socialist Alternative #108 - November 2024

SOCIALIST

ALTERNATIVE ISSUE #108 | NOVEMBER 2024

TAYADORA VILLALOBOS, PHILADELPHIA I am a queer, non-binary Mexican who grew up in central Missouri. Ever since I can remember, my life has been politicized. Getting politically involved is something that has

been important to me for years, but until I moved to Philadelphia for college and joined the Socialist Alternative branch here, I had never really had that opportunity. Sure, I debated with homophobes in the halls of my high school, and was proudly out about my queerness, but I had never had the chance to actually participate in protests or organize with likeminded people.

I was a part of the DSA in my area, but it wasn’t that active, either. SA has given me the opportunity and community that I’ve been looking for all this time. While I have always believed in LGBTQ rights and antiracism and anti-capitalism, that outlet to organize and fight for these ideas has only come to me now. Discussions feel like a conversation and a guide to action, instead of drowning in jargon and theory. I’ve never had the feeling that I’ve been talked down to or condescended because being a member

broad program for reproductive health. Resist all right-wing attempts to criminalize abortions.

• Take to the streets! We need big, organized • No trust in the Democrats, who campaign on abortion during elections but don’t make protests and walkouts for Inauguration Day to meaningful change when in power. fight Trump’s reactionary policies.

• No to both corporate parties. We need to • Fight back against Trump’s anti-trans legislation and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ build a new party that fights unapologetically people. Full legal rights for all queer people. for working-class and oppressed people, in Build a movement to fight for good jobs, affordwhich elected officials only take the median able housing, universal childcare, and genderwage of the workers they represent. affirming Medicare for All. • Solidarity is the most important tool to fight the boss. An effective resistance to Trump and • The labor movement needs to take a clear stand against these divide-and-rule tactics. his billionaire friends like Elon Musk can only Unionized workers like teachers should unite be built by fighting all forms of racism, sexism, with students to organize mass non-compliscapegoating immigrants, and fear-mongering ance, strikes, and walkouts. about trans people. An injury to one is an injury to all!

​​Fight Trump & The Far Right

Stop Xenophobic Attacks & Deportations

No To Imperialist Wars

means genuinely wanting to fight for a better world.

SA has given me more tools to articulate my struggles not only as a queer person, but as a worker who wants to fight for more protections for workers like me, as a college student who wants to fight for affordable college, as the grandchild of an immigrant who wants to make sure her grandparents are protected against far-right rhetoric and threats of deportation.

Trump being elected is very scary, and it’s understandable that people are terrified for a second Trump term. However, I wouldn’t write this if I didn’t believe it, so trust me when I say: SA is something that every working-class person should consider joining. Organizing around the ideas needed to change the world is how we fight back against the right and our oppressors. SA is a way to fight!J

Corporations caused the fentanyl crisis, and untreated mental health is a massive problem.

• Take Big Pharma into public ownership.

• Bring back the COVID-era child tax credit and make it permanent. No cuts to food stamps.

End Climate Catastrophe & Create Green, Union Jobs

Fight for green, union jobs. We reject big business pitting the climate movement against the labor movement—we need a unionized jobs program to rapidly expand green infrastructure including a massive expansion of free, highquality, and fast public transit.

• We need fully-funded emergency systems to protect and evacuate people from everincreasing storms, floods, and fires. Tax the rich to reimburse working people for their destroyed homes and livelihoods.

• Take real steps to address climate change.

Both parties fund the US military, one of the biggest polluters in the world. Addressing climate change means ending war and cutting military budgets.

• Fossil fuels can’t coexist with a sustainable future—ban new oil and gas drilling and take the top 100 polluting companies into demoRebuild Fighting Unions cratic public ownership, while implementing a democratically planned, just transition to • Inflation, unaffordable healthcare, sky-high 100% green energy. rents, and a lack of basic respect on the job are pushing hundreds of thousands of workers to go on strike. We need effective strikes that The Whole System Is Guilty hit the bosses where it hurts most—their wallets—to win lasting victories against inflation • Capitalism produces pandemics, poverty, racism, transphobia, environmental destruclike Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA). tion, and war. We need an international strug• Unionize every worker. Earlier this year, autogle against this failed system. workers launched a massive campaign to organize the South, a huge step toward building • Bring the top 500 companies and banks into democratic public ownership. Working-class a united resistance to corporations and their people know how to manage their schools, political allies in both parties who profit most workplaces, and communities better than outfrom keeping us divided. of-touch executives and Wall Street investors.

• Demand union leaders stop rubbing elbows with corporate politicians and start laying the • For a socialist world. This means a democratic socialist plan for the economy based on the ground for a new independent worker’s party. common interests of working people and youth Union leaders should accept the average wage everywhere. of workers in their industry. These leaders should be accountable to their membership and the broader working class.

• Unions need to fight all manifestations of racism, sexism, queerphobia, and all forms of oppression as part of the struggle to rebuild a fighting labor movement.

• Build a massive anti-war, anti-imperialist movement demanding a permanent ceasefire in the Middle East; an end to US military aid to • No to Trump’s plans for immigrant detentions Israel; and an end to the occupation and siege and deportations! No border wall expansion! of all Palestinian territories.

Immediate citizenship rights for all undocu• No support for reactionary capitalist regimes mented immigrants. like the Israeli state, Hamas, the Iranian state, • Build a movement that unites immigrants and and Hezbollah. For an international, indepen- • Fight inflation with significant wage increases.

US-born workers against the billionaire class to dent, working-class movement to end imperialBillionaires keep getting richer while inflation fight for good union jobs, social housing, and ist war in the Middle East. eats more and more out of every paycheck free high-quality education for all. working people receive.

• Refuse to cooperate with Trump’s agenda—get • End the war in Ukraine. No imperialist military aid to Ukraine, no support for Russian imperi- • Universal healthcare now. Take for-profit organized to fight for real sanctuary cities and alism. Defend the right to self-determination hospital chains out of the hands of greedy build emergency deportation defense commitfor Ukraine and for national minorities in the investors and incompetent managers, and tees in workplaces, unions, and neighborhoods.

Donbas and Crimean peninsula. run them under democratic workers’ control • Unions should begin now to organize emerfor the safety of staff and patients. gency deportation defense networks to shut • No to military build-up between US and Chinese imperialism, which threatens working • Housing is a human right. Pass strong rent condown workplace raids by ICE and urgently people everywhere. Rebuild an international, trol. End economic evictions. Fund high-quality, respond to community raids. anti-war movement opposing all militarism. permanently affordable, socially-owned hous• Build a movement against the destructive poliing where renters are legally protected from cies of US imperialism around the world that discrimination. drive working class people to flee their home End Racist Policing • Fully fund public education. End school privacountries. We need an international struggle tization. Give educators an immediate 25% for socialism to fight for a world that works for • Arrest and convict killer cops. End the militarization of police; ban the use of crowd control raise and increase staffing. Stop right-wing us, not the ruling elite. weapons and disarm police on patrol. attacks on curriculum and ban standardized Defend Abortion & Stop Attacks • Put policing under the control of democrat- tests. Cancel all student debt and make public ically-elected civilian boards with the power college tuition-free.

On Women & Trans People to hire, fire, subpoena, and review budget • Fully fund addiction and mental health services priorities. and job programs. Big Pharma profits off of the • Free, safe, legal abortion now. All contracepsuffering and misery of working-class people. tion should be provided at no cost as part of a

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Tax The Rich & Invest In Our Basic Needs

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US ELECTIONS

SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE STATEMENT ON 2024 ELECTION Trump’s shocking blowout victory is an enormous and upsetting setback for the working class, the poor, and marginalized people, not just in the US but the world over. Trump has not only decisively won the Electoral College, but also won the popular vote—the first time a Republican has done so since 2004.

Republicans swept the House and Senate, and still control the Supreme Court. Trump’s right-wing, dystopian agenda will have few obstacles in the halls of political power.

We are now faced with the threat of mass deportations and the authoritarian aspirations of Project 2025. Trump’s more dangerous regime will efficiently set about carrying out attacks on the most vulnerable people.

He will give full-throated support to the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza, and will continue to escalate imperialist conflict with China, edging us ever closer to wider military conflict.

Trump was aided by an unprecedented number of ads from wealthy donors like Elon Musk. The fact that Musk, the richest man in the world, will likely be part of Trump’s government shows who Trump’s government will represent: not the ordinary Americans, as they claim, but the billionaires.

Musk will eagerly help Trump to slash billions from already meager government programs that poor families rely on, and go after the “trans woke mind virus” as a way of distracting from the real source of our problems: the unequal and exploitative system of capitalism.

Contrary to what the Democrats said at the time, the right wing was not defeated when Trump lost in 2020. In fact, it grew under Biden.

This is exactly what socialists warned would happen. The Democrats can’t stop the right, but mass protests and working-class action can.

NOVEMBER 2024

How Did We Get Here?

Abortion rights were more popular than Kamala Harris in every state that voted on them. Had the Democrats done more than just talk about abortion, they could have won the votes of millions of working-class people, especially women, who want to see real action to defend reproductive rights.

Missouri went to Trump, but voters there also passed a $15 minimum wage increase and codified abortion rights into the state constitution. Florida went for Trump but a majority voted for abortion and to legalize marijuana—something “law and order” Republicans have staunchly opposed for decades.

While both referendums failed because of the anti-democratic law requiring 60% to pass, the ballot question to enshrine abortion rights into Florida’s constitution got 57%—1.4 million more votes than for Harris.

many of whom are financially worse off now than they were four years ago at the end of Trump’s first presidency.

Trump posed—completely falsely— as an anti-establishment figure at a time when the majority of people are understandably and correctly disgusted with the establishment.

Meanwhile, the Democrats and Kamala Harris clung to their establishment reputation as tightly as ever.

In the final month of her campaign, Harris de-emphasized her more popular economic policies under pressure from big business. Harris presented herself as a reliable administrator of US capitalism, which is failing millions of people.

As always, establishment pundits will try to blame uneducated workers who don’t know what’s good for them, but this is misleading and condescending. Workers across industries are going on strike against massive corporations, yet many didn’t see Harris as an avenue to improve their lives.

After decades of voting for Democrats as the “lesser evil” to stop the Republicans, we are now

The Fightback Starts Now We need mass, organized protests to show that Trump’s pro-corporate agenda is in reality deeply unpopular. Tens of thousands of people showed up to protests called by Socialist Alternative right after Trump’s election in 2016.

Mere days later, large parts of the economy were threatened by airport occupations and striking New York City taxi drivers stopped his racist “Muslim Ban.” In 2019, the threat of mass strikes among airport workers ended his anti-immigrant government shutdown. In his first administration, Trump only backed down when the profits of corporations and billionaires were threatened.

Trump is a liar. He must be exposed as a pro-corporate hack, and many of his attacks will be deeply unpopular. Polls showing historic support for unions, including recent strikes, and access to abortion highlight the space that exists for a genuinely workingclass political force that can beat back Trump’s attacks, and Trumpism, once and for all. Building this means once and for all breaking with the Democratic Party, whose billionaire backers will be just as threatened by working-class unity as Trump is.

Trump Is A Symptom, Capitalism Is The Disease

Complete Failure For The Democrats After four disastrous years under Biden and Harris, people didn’t trust the Democrats to fight for their interests. Democrats are bankrolling and politically supporting the massacre in Gaza and endless war in Ukraine, and inflation is eating into workers’ wallets.

Biden blocked a potential rail strike, failed to fight for a $15 minimum wage or the PRO Act on labor rights, didn’t codify Roe v. Wade, walked back pledges for police reform, continued Trump’s border policies, and abandoned promises to take serious action on climate change.

This was while Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first two years of Biden’s term.

Trump took advantage of the very real economic anxieties of millions of Americans,

promising to build “the most lethal military in the world,” and emphatically pledging to support fracking.

seeing signs of the opposite phenomenon: millions of ordinary people “holding their nose” to vote for Trump out of a greater dislike for the corporate, out-of-touch Democrats.

Biden blamed Trump supporters for his unpopularity, calling them “garbage” days before the election, and Harris completely failed to distance herself in any meaningful way from this condescending narrative.

What started with a wave of enthusiasm and unprecedented small-donor fundraising numbers turned into campaigning with imperialists like Dick and Liz Cheney, boasting of being “tougher on immigration” than Trump,

What’s needed is an international, working-class movement that can actually solve the crises caused by the sick capitalist system. As the inter-imperialist rivalry between US and Chinese capitalism increasingly shapes world events, rightwing nationalists are gaining momentum.

Mass protests are the best way to show that Trump has no mandate to move forward with his reactionary agenda. These need to be linked with the threat to shut down business as usual for Trump and the billionaire class. We need to protest, occupy, organize, and strike.

To defeat Trumpism and the far right for good, we need to take on the system as a whole. We need revolutionary change to fight for a socialist society, organized democratically based on the needs of working people and the planet, not the billionaires.J

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US ELECTIONS Republican, it’s between workers and the bosses. When “left wing” implies the (rightfully) reviled Democrats who have just spent four years failing to make our lives better, it’s not hard to see how workers can find appeal in the right.

Who’s To Blame For Trump 2.0?

KELLY BELLIN, MINNEAPOLIS For many of us, horror at the coming Trump administration is only matched with horror that more than 74 million Americans voted for him.

Going into public since November 6th poses the constant question: who around me just voted for an extremely high-profile rapist? How many of my neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family voted for a political agenda that opposes the rights of women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community?

As a preview of just how much Trump’s decisive election victory has given a dangerous boost to the far right, the FBI is investigating a widespread text message that was sent to Black people across the country, including middle schoolers, calling them “slaves” and telling them to report to the plantation to pick cotton. This text is an extreme example of a real feeling of society moving backwards, ranging from “trad wife” gender roles, to rewriting the history of the civil rights movement, to fetishizing the antebellum South.

Dangerous Rightward Shift Trump’s victory is a reflection of the growth of right-wing ideas and a shift to the right among a significant section of the working class. Tens of millions of people were willing to vote for a political agenda centered on xenophobia, resting on a far-right base which promotes violence against women, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and a total lack of solidarity. Those voting for Trump while “holding their nose” to these issues shows that they have become less central, at best.

Trump 2.0 is a setback for women’s rights and the struggle against sexism. It reflects a reassertion of misogyny, which of course was never dead but had been the target of movements through the 2010s such as the Slutwalks and #MeToo. Biden maintained Trump-era deportation policies, but failed to curb a wave of migration caused by wars, climate change and corrupt dictators. This allowed Republican governors and Trump to call for even harsher measures and take the ruling class’s campaign of divideand-rule xenophobia to new heights. With skyrocketing prices, not enough good-paying jobs or affordable housing units, and too-big class sizes in public schools, the right wing

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has successfully created a scapegoat in the undocumented immigrant. This is in order to distract millions of workers from the real culprit: capitalism.

But It’s Complicated And yet, despite a constant campaign from the Christian right, abortion rights remain steadily popular in the US across age, race, and gender. This includes a majority of people who are “Republican leaning.” Voters passed a $15/hr minimum wage—literally more than double the federal minimum wage which neither Obama nor Biden raised—in Missouri, which also went for Trump. This shows that the political mood in society is complicated and the shift to the right also has contradictory features.

Beyond just the ballot initiatives, the last year has seen a significant uptick in major strikes in heavy industry, from auto workers in the UAW striking all three major US manufacturers for the first time last year, to International Longshoremen’s Association workers shutting down the East coast ports, to Boeing machinists shutting down production in the Pacific Northwest in the last couple of months.

The dockworkers won 62% raises and Boeing workers won 38% raises, all by striking hard against some of the most powerful corporations that exist. Striking is very far from a right-wing activity, and certainly not something Trump supports. Just a few months ago, Trump praised billionaire Elon Musk for firing striking workers.

But many workers, even those who were just on strike, voted for Trump anyway. It shows that workers can be part of a militant struggle against the boss and still be susceptible to anti-working class ideas like racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia.

The divide-and-rule tactics of the bosses have to be actively fought, and we need leaders in the labor movement who fight for the understanding that divisions among workers will always weaken our struggles.

The crucial point is that the main divide in society is not between Democrat and

Trump gained support from some of the very groups of people that he and his MAGA base target.

Compared to Biden’s historic turnout in 2020, Harris lost support from women, Latino men, and young voters. Millions from these decisive groups either declined to vote or instead, shockingly, voted Trump this time around. The shift of Latino voters is particularly striking, especially considering Trump’s reliance on whipping up racist xenophobia. In 2020, 36% of Latino men voted for Trump. In this election, 54% cast their vote for him. Exit polls indicate that Trump may have garnered the most support of Latino voters (45%) for a Republican presidential candidate ever.

The economy was decisive for this election. The supposedly amazing state of the US economy was paraded through capitalist media outlets in recent weeks. Yet inflation has brutalized working class people, and it’s the super rich who are doing better than ever.

A CNN poll indicates that 75% of voters have experienced hardship due to inflation in the last year. Those who’ve experienced hardship, by far, voted for Trump—who promised to “end

inflation,” make tips and overtime pay tax-free, and abolish tax on social security payments.

It’s unlikely that Trump will be able to deliver on these promises, and if he does they will be diligently made up for by attacks on working people to appease his billionaire friends. But by pandering to the right and leaving economic conditions unanswered, the Harris campaign

allowed Trump to pose as the “vote for change” candidate again.

So how much of Trump’s victory is a rejection of the Democrats, and how much of it is a growing appeal of right-wing ideas? The two are completely connected.

In the leadup to the election, it was heavily speculated that having reproductive healthcare measures on several state ballots could help boost Harris’ turnout. Yet in every state that it was on the ballot, abortion rights received more votes than Harris, meaning, yes, some people voted for Trump and for abortion access. This shows how unconfident people are that the Democrats will fight for reproductive justice.

The feeling that many have, that Democrats have been playing politics with our lives, is rooted in reality. Trump’s election victory just made the world more dangerous for trans kids.

And yet, some Democrat politicians are openly drawing the lesson that turning on trans rights and embracing the talking points of the far right is the way for the party to now save itself.

Several elected Democrats were interviewed by the New York Times following Trump’s victory who put forward theories of their loss that can be summed up by Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y. who said, “The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left, I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Could it be any clearer that the Democrats are not the answer?

Trump (And Trumpism) Can Be Defeated In the wake of setbacks for social movements and betrayals from Democrats, Trump’s election victory is a dangerous setback for struggles against oppression. It reflects that rightwing ideas have been clawing back into society, and the far right has made gains.

Now Trump takes office after the most successful Republican presidential election since the 1980s, and with conservative control of all three branches of government. His administration, and the life it brings to the far right, will be profoundly dangerous for working people. Even more dangerous if his victory succeeds at putting a blanket of demoralization over those who oppose him.

We know from his last time in office that mass protests and working-class action can stop Trump from implementing parts of his agenda. Delivering defeats to Trump’s agenda and pointing to capitalism as the root of our problems is also the best way to convince working people to throw out right-wing ideology. Mass movements can shape ideas and attitudes among wider sections of society very quickly, especially when they offer a way forward when the establishment has no answers.

The current rightward trend is reversible, but not through the Democratic Party and not without building a fighting mass movement with a bold working class program that can win actual victories to improve the lives of ordinary people. So this is precisely what we need to do.J

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IMMIGRATION

ANNA BARNETT, PHILADELPHIA Divide-and-rule is an age-old tool by the ruling elite to keep those at the bottom from uniting against our common enemies at the top. Trump and the right wing have used undocumented immigrants as a scapegoat for the many real problems facing working class people today, from the lack of affordable housing, to the opioid crisis, to low wages. These problems are real, but the blame should be placed squarely on billionaires like Trump and his new best friend Elon Musk, not immigrants.

61% of voters ranked immigration as a top issue this election and voters in eight states passed ballot measures banning non-citizens from voting, despite the fact that it’s already illegal. In Arizona, a referendum essentially allowing local police to act as immigration enforcement was also adopted. Donald Trump was elected on a viciously anti-immigrant program calling to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

The right-wing shift in attitudes about immigration in US society is glaring when looking at the election results. This is part of a global phenomenon with the ramping up of attacks on immigrants by establishment parties on both “sides” of the political spectrum.

Trump will be entering the White House this January, but the success of his dangerous antiimmigrant, pro-corporate agenda is not a foregone conclusion. Millions in the US and around the world are horrified by the election results and the prospect of an emboldened right-wing.

We can fight back and we need to start getting organized now, even before Inauguration Day.

Democrats Open The Door Working-class communities are deprived of essential resources, struggling to get by in the face of inflation, and staring down a future of dead-end jobs. The reality is undocumented workers face the same, or often worse, conditions as native-born workers. This is not due to scarcity, but rather hoarding of resources by the billionaires and a conscious divide-and-rule strategy to pit poor and working-class communities against each other.

Kamala Harris and the Democrats failed to provide any alternative explanation for, or solution to, the crises of this system, and instead lectured people about “joy” and the supposed health of

NOVEMBER 2024

the economy. This has thrown the door wide open for right-wing, anti-immigrant ideas to proliferate. Rather than putting up a real counter to Trump and his anti-immigrant policies, Harris doubled down on the Democrat’s failed strategy of chasing Trump to the right, promising to be even tougher on immigration than Trump!

Native-born workers can be won over to the struggle for immigrant justice through a real program that includes things all workers need like Medicare for All, affordable housing, and good union jobs, alongside demands against deportations and for full citizenship rights for all. However, the reality is neither corporate party is willing to fight for these things. This is why now more than ever we need a new party for working people, independent of the Democrats and Republicans which are both happy to sell-out all workers (immigrant and not) to the whims of big business.

Reject The Bosses’ Divisions Bosses will exploit any divisions that exist among workers to prevent unity against our common enemy. Driving a wedge between undocumented workers and those with citizenship or other “legal” status can be particularly effective for undermining solidarity in the workplace.

Having a large group of workers with “second-class” status, who are terrorized by the threat of deportation and paid substandard wages, is useful for the bosses. They simultaneously keep undocumented workers in a precarious position, while also keeping workers with legal status in line and complacent with low wages, using the threat that there are others “willing to work for less.”

For this reason exactly, it’s an absolute necessity that the left and the labor movement take a bold and unapologetic stance of defending undocumented workers against intimidation and deportation, fighting for full legal rights for all immigrants. It’s equally as urgent to undertake a campaign to organize the unorganized, native-born and undocumented workers alike.

Seeing the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in society, the instinct of some union leaders is to take a softer stance on fighting for immigrants rights to avoid creating debate among union members. Some labor leaders, like Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, and International Longshoremen’s Association president Harold Dagget, have also embraced protectionist “America First” rhetoric. This is a deadly trap that the labor movement, which has started to reassert itself for the first time in decades, cannot afford to fall into.

The answer to bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics in the workplace should not be to adopt their anti-immigrant, nationalist logic, but to fight to defend and organize every worker.

Any form of second-class status in the workers movement is a barrier to a unified, fighting struggle against the bosses; this is why we fight for full rights to citizenship for all workers. This is not just a moral question about the conditions of immigrant workers, but a key, strategic question facing the workers’ movement.

in and Trump’s plans were delayed and eventually watered down.

In 2018, Trump’s policy of family separations at the border set off the Abolish ICE movement, which involved tens of thousands nationwide. The following year his attempt to repeal DACA, which gives some legal rights to undocumented people who came to the US as children, provoked explosive school walkouts across the country which forced a temporary retreat.

The best defense against Trump’s agenda this time around will be an offensive strategy.

Immigrants rights groups, unions, and left-wing organizations need to start organizing now to oppose Trump and his attacks. Unions should begin now to organize emergency deportation defense networks to shut down workplace raids by ICE and urgently respond to community raids as well. We need mass protests, civil disobedience, workplace action, and largescale refusal to cooperate with Trump’s antiimmigrant policies.

Mass Struggle To Take On Trump

Unite Against Xenophobia, Capitalism & Imperialism

While xenophobic ideas have gained traction in society, this is in no way irreversible. The answer is not to retreat, but to start building a resistance now to the attacks on immigrants and all working people. Throughout history, movements for civil rights and against oppression have been able to have huge impacts on attitudes in broader society, even when these movements faced significant resistance.

An active movement for immigrants’ rights, organized around a clear working-class program, could have massive effects on US society in pushing back against xenophobia and raising the confidence of all working people to fight for what we deserve.

While Trump did carry out some brutal attacks in his first term, including workplace raids, he also encountered significant resistance in the streets that stalled his agenda. In 2017, after Trump instituted a ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries, thousands of people held mass occupations in airports across the US. Faced with mass upheaval, the court stepped

Workers across borders have more in common with each other than we ever will with the bosses or corporate politicians of our own countries. The policies of US imperialism abroad also lead to war, climate disaster and horrible economic prospects in other countries, which creates the conditions for desperate migration. As long as the capitalist system exists, a race to the bottom will continue and workers will be driven across borders searching for a better life.

Capitalism depends on immigration because the ruling class wants a cheap source of labor available when it benefits them. To fight back, working people internationally need to link up in a struggle against exploitation, militarism, and war. We need to fight for a socialist world organized on the basis of our common interests as workers, not the insatiable capitalist drive for profit.J

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YOUTH & STUDENTS

Why The Crackdown?

HAZEL GRINBERG, NYC Last spring, students around the country and the world set up a wave of encampments on their college campuses protesting the brutal war on Gaza and demanding their schools divest from companies profiting off the genocidal offensive. Some were also joined by faculty and graduate student unions.

At the New School in New York, faculty set up their own encampment after the students’ was broken down. UAW local 4811, which organizes graduate workers in the University of California system, held a solidarity strike after protestors at UCLA were attacked by counter-protestors.

Only a month after the outbreak of the war last year, well before the encampment wave began, Columbia University in New York had already suspended and cut off funding for the groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and closed off the typically-open campus to the public indefinitely. In April, things hit a fever pitch, and colleges in NYC cracked down with extreme force against protestors, for example unleashing the NYPD in full riot gear and making mass arrests at schools all over the city.

Repression Spreads College faculty have been punished with suspensions and investigations for standing in solidarity with their students. Some international students face deportation if they’re suspended or expelled, just for exercising their right to peacefully protest. Trump vowed to escalate these deportations.

Alongside these intimidation tactics are new bans against protests in “academic settings.”

Last year at Emerson college in Massachusetts, a campus police sweep of the encampment arrested over 100 students and left dozens injured. Now students must also register protests a week in advance and end them before 8 PM. At some schools, students agreed to shut down their encampments due to administrations’ “willingness” to sit down and talk, but

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the lack of ongoing pressure allowed schools to look like they were listening without making real changes to their practices. The campus occupations showed that only drastic action that cut across business-as-usual would bring administrators to the table. The same kind of action is needed for the movement’s demands to truly be met.

After students packed up their encampment, Brown University rejected their demand that it divest from 10 war-profiteering companies including Boeing, General Electric, and Northrop Grumman. The administration’s excuse? That their connections with the companies were so small that they weren’t “directly responsible for any social harm” they caused.

If the connections are so small, why not cut ties with them in solidarity with students demanding an end to any complicity in the massacre of Palestinians?

ADDI LANGHORST, MILWAUKEE Addi is a junior at UW-Milwaukee.

Last May, I was targeted in the crackdown against student anti-war activists around the country. Socialist Alternative was helping to build the anti-war movement at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, including holding public organizing meetings on campus to democratically discuss the direction of the movement.

While I was trying to prepare for my finals, a UWM police officer showed up at my dorm several times to try and interrogate me about an incident of “vandalism.” They woke me and my roommates up after midnight multiple times, and dragged me into the hallway in my nightclothes for questioning.

The alleged “vandalism” was chalk on

Protests are the most basic and powerful way for ordinary people to exercise their collective power to win real change, something the capitalist class will never concede without a fight. This preemptive repression seeking to cut off struggle shows that the movement last spring did have a huge impact, striking fear into the ruling class, despite the setbacks it faced. Brown University may have been able to get away with not divesting immediately, but school administrations around the country still learned how strong their students’ willingness to fight is, and just how much force it can take to beat them back.

The ruling class has not forgotten the mass student movement that played a key role in forcing the US to withdraw from Vietnam and accept a stunning defeat for US imperialism.

Today it is plain for all to see that the world is barreling toward more and greater military conflict than has been seen since the Second World War. The US and China are locked in an existential conflict for global imperialist domination, and the ruling classes of both countries are in full-on war-preparation mode.

The old Marxist truism that “war is the midwife of revolution” is not lost on the ruling class. They are terrified of the potential for a powerful mass anti-war movement, let alone a revolution, to develop in response to their reckless drive toward global inter-imperialist military conflict. They are especially scared of students and the working class linking up, as has happened in the past in various countries to great success. But we won’t let them stop us.

Fight Back Against Repression!

Spread The Anti-War Movement!

Although there has been a resurgence of protests since the anniversary of October 7th, many who were out demonstrating are starting to feel fatigued and pessimistic. After both street protests and campus encampments failed to win major gains, some students are growing skeptical about the effectiveness of

a university sidewalk and posters taped around campus advertising an anti-war public meeting Socialist Alternative was holding. They asked for the names of other SA members, saying they just wanted to clarify the rules with the other members involved. When I refused to give the police contact information, they implied we would face legal charges and arrests. My roommates and I closed ranks and didn’t give them anything, refusing to answer their questions and didn’t bow to their intimidation.

Shortly after this, the charges were suddenly dropped. This wasn’t surprising to us; the police never had a real case that could stand up in a court, and they knew it! What they were attempting to do was baselessly intimidate young women participating in anti-war activism on campus.

protesting at all (see pages 8-9). Linking up with organized labor in logistics and manufacturing under demands that challenge the whole of US imperialism would not only provide a necessary shot in the arm for young people feeling demoralized, but bring in those who hold a real lever of power to halt the production and shipment of weapons.

The movement needs to expand its demands beyond boycotts and divestment to include protecting the right to protest and organize. These attacks on students open the gates for wider attacks on the working class, especially when the movement doesn’t have a clear escalation plan.

The threat of increased repression will be even greater under a Trump presidency.

Already he has been grandstanding about using the military on protesters and arresting journalists and politicians he doesn’t agree with. Trump also has a far-right base he can whip up, who, given his track record and role in the January 6th riot, have the potential to become violent counter-protestors.

Trump is also planning to form a conservative, public, and tuition-free ‘American Academy’ that would revise US history to erase mentioning of slavery, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and all social studies. Transgender athletes will be banned from participating in sporting events. Trump vowed to shut down the Department of Education and withhold funds from institutions that don’t follow his reactionary policy. All in all, he aims to wrestle power away from, in his words, “insane Marxist control.”

At root, the Palestine solidarity movement needs to take on the whole capitalist, imperialist system. The fight to end the genocidal war in Gaza is linked with the need to end the war in Ukraine—the Democrats have made that perfectly clear by bundling military aid in the billions for Ukraine and Israel—which are linked with the need to fight US and all imperialism.

For lasting peace on every continent, we will need a new mass, independent, anti-war party that can bring together students and working people to take on the whole capitalist system.J

At the start of the fall semester, the university posted new directives on “allowable free speech” aimed at restricting the activity of left-wing groups on campus and scaring other students away from joining the movement. We’ve been approached several times by police officers while tabling on campus in a continued attempt to intimidate us.

Campus repression hasn’t stopped us from continuing to organize on campus against the war on Gaza and now against Trump. The best defense against police repression is a strong, growing movement that won’t be intimidated and can mobilize to defend student activists under attack.

Even now as the crackdowns increase locally and nationally, we are still organizing and bringing new people into the movement.

Join the fight today!J

socialistalternative.org

YOUTH & STUDENTS

by Lena Stehle, LaGuardia High School senior in NYC

Back in May of last school year, some of my peers at Laguardia High School in New York City and I organized a walkout against the war in Gaza. Trump has now won the election, and despite him posing as the anti-war candidate, he will continue to full-throatedly support the Israeli military’s genocidal onslaught. As students, we have a role pushing to renew and strengthen the anti-war movement. We should call for more walkouts and other forms of protest, and link up with workers who can use their power to go on strike. These protests should be coordinated on a national and even international scale to maximize impact. We need to continue to build walkouts, protests, and strikes to fight the far right and Trumpism, for a new party for working people, and ultimately for a socialist world!

Organizing always starts with political conversations and planning. Through conversations with peers, explaining our demands and aims, we found some people who wanted to get involved. Socialist Alternative planned and hosted a meeting open to all students to discuss the antiwar movement and how to build it. Our objective for this was to gauge the popularity of an antiwar walkout and see how students wanted to participate in it. A meeting is always a great first step in planning a walkout. Giving students the chance to get their opinions out and come to a general consensus can clarify the goals and what we’re all fighting for. It can also help you meet people willing to play a role in organizing and building. The people who came to our public meeting were the start of the team that would organize the walkout, hand out flyers, and manage our social media.

Organizing at a school, where administration is often extremely weary of any kind of disruption of the status quo, isn’t always straightforward.

But, students have the right to protest and not be punished for it.

At my school, we started with just trying to put up flyers. However, even after multiple edits, our flyers were rejected by the school administration on the grounds that it was making some students “uncomfortable”. To work around this, we walked around the cafeteria with clipboards during our lunch periods, and handed out flyers individually to try to find people who would be interested in a meeting to discuss organizing a walkout.

Finally, walking out can be the most stressful part of the process. But it’s important that students recognize that we always have strength in numbers, which is something to highlight when trying to convince your peers who might be apprehensive to participate. A security guard can target a student who’s on their own, but it’s more difficult to do that with a large group. Remember that students and community activists usually can’t convene on school property, so be sure to have a meeting place across the street or far enough away. We had dozens of students participate in our walkout, and many more who supported what we were doing! We started chants and handed out signs around our demands for a ceasefire and more. Our walkout culminated in a short march and a rally with prepared speeches about how funding for war was taking away funds for public education.

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To build for a successful walkout we wanted to involve as many people as possible. Along with flyering and clipboarding, another useful tool is social media. With a “Students For Palestine” Instagram account that we made, we were able to promote the walkout, and made more people aware through resharing. Sometimes, depending on the school, you can reach out to teachers who are friendly to the cause and ask them to make an announcement about the walkout in class or otherwise show support. At Laguardia, the administration tried to warn people to not go to the walkout through a mass email. Instead they accidentally spread the word to the whole school that there was even a walkout happening!

Reach out to SA today if you want to organize a walkout at your school!

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ELAN AXELBANK, BOSTON Trump is soon to be back in office, even more dangerous than before. His agenda of mass deportations, attacks on trans people, deregulating the fossil fuel industry, uncritically supporting Israel’s genocidal war machine, and more has tens of millions of people downright terrified.

As we head toward Inauguration Day when Trump will re-assume power, many are asking, can anything be done to stop him from carrying out his agenda? If so, what? Does protesting even work anymore? What do we do now?

We have to be honest about where we’re coming from. In 2020, twenty million people courageously hit the streets against police brutality and systemic racism but no significant victories were won. Since then, while not without exception, we have generally seen fewer protests and smaller protests. Despite mass public opposition in US society, Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Despite over a million in the streets last fall and widespread outrage, both parties continue to fund the genocidal war on Gaza.

These defeats and the current state of the world have left many feeling hopeless about our power as ordinary people to do anything about the problems we face. In particular, there is skepticism about whether protesting and building movements is worthwhile. While the hesitation that exists among millions of people to take to the streets following Trump’s election is in many ways understandable, inaction is the worst thing we can do and absolutely must be overcome.

People Have Always Protested As long as class society has existed, people have protested. In the 12th century BC, tomb builders in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt downed their ancient-era tools and went on

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strike after not receiving their payment of wheat rations for eighteen days. During the strike they marched, staged sit-ins at the office of the vizier (the pharaoh’s right-hand man), and blocked access roads and pathways to the Valley. After thirteen days of striking and protesting, they won, including backpay.

From slave revolts in Ancient Rome and Greece to peasant riots in the Middle Ages, from the demonstrations that kicked off the bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudal monarchies to establish capitalism, to modern-day protests against the massacre in Gaza—it’s always been a natural instinct of the oppressed and exploited to organize and fight back.

But not only is protesting inevitable, it is critically necessary. In his most famous speech, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass declared “If there is no struggle, there is no progress…

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Those words are as true today as when they were spoken in 1857, and in these dark times we would do well to hold them close.

But while Douglass was right that without struggle change can’t be won, that doesn’t mean that every struggle does lead to change, and certainly not that every demand made leads to concessions from those in power—especially when those in power are led by power-hungry right-wing billionaire Donald Trump. It doesn’t take an expert in history to know that.

So the question facing millions of angry and scared people across the country following the election is what kind of struggle leads to progress? Socialist Alternative has a unique take on this question.

What Happened Under Trump’s First Term?

Trump’s first election was met with immediate shock and outrage. Despite losing the popular vote by three million, he won the absurdly undemocratic electoral college. As soon as it became clear Trump had won, Socialist Alternative branches across the country called protests and tens of thousands came out.

On Inauguration Day, again tens of thousands attended demonstrations and students across the country walked out of class in protest against Trump. The next day, the Women’s March went down as the then-largest day of protest in US history, with five million protesting across the country. This brought resisting Trump into the mainstream, rattled Trump and his advisors on

day two, and set the stage for what was to come.

In the months and years that followed, while of course Trump pushed through many terrible attacks (thanks in part to the Democrats’ repeated failure to mount an effective opposition), some of the worst aspects of his agenda did not go forward. How? By the power of mass protests and working class action.

Pushing Back The “Muslim Ban” When in his second week in office Trump announced an executive order known as the “Muslim Ban,” banning entry into the US from nine Muslim-majority countries, he was met with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in opposition. Mass rallies took place in cities across the country, followed by protests outside and occupations inside airports, where ordinary people from the banned countries— simply returning from trips abroad to their homes in the US—were being detained, turned away, and sent back.

Then, the taxi drivers’ union in New York City struck against the ban, refusing to transport passengers to and from JFK airport where a largescale occupation was taking place. Thousands of Comcast workers also walked out in protest.

In response to this outpouring of opposition, the ban got challenged in the courts, significantly delayed, and ultimately watered down from its original form.

Shutting Down The Shutdown In December 2018, Trump began a 35-day government shutdown—the longest in US history—over Congress’s refusal to allocate $6 billion to fund a wall on the US-Mexico border.

800,000 federal employees were either furloughed without pay or forced to work with their pay delayed until the end of the shutdown, all of this right during the winter holidays.

The American Federation of Government Employees union organized rallies outside federal buildings across the country and thousands of TSA workers began a spontaneous sick-out, with approximately 10% of TSA workers calling out sick in early January. Shortly after, air traffic controllers followed, leading to a full shutdown of LaGuardia airport in New York City.

Then Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, called on all flight attendants to occupy Congressional offices until the shutdown ended and invoked the threat of a “general strike.” Within hours, Trump proposed a bill to reopen the government.

Three Key Takeaways What do both of these examples have in common? Protests followed by workers’ action,

and the threat of even wider working class action, forced Trump to back down. Another parallel is that struggle and working-class action played the decisive role, not the Democrats. For all the #Resistance that establishment Democrats spoke of during Trump’s first term, they did nothing meaningful to stop his agenda. Instead they repeatedly took credit for what was actually achieved by the class struggle.

As we head into the uncharted territory of Trump 2.0, it is imperative that we hold close the central lessons from 2016-2020: 1. Trump CAN be forced to back down, but it takes mass action.

2. Protests work, especially when followed up by workplace and coordinated strike action.

3. The Democrats cannot be counted on— we need struggle and a new working class party.

Unions are going to have a particularly important role to play in the coming years, as the most organized section of the working class. Union leaders like Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson should abandon their failed strategy of trying to court the Democratic Party and instead help build a new pro-worker, anti-war party that organizes, protests, and strikes against Trump’s right-wing, anti-worker agenda.

Even with such a party, the fight would not be easy. Not just Trump and his billionaire rightwing friends, but the whole ruling class, including the Democratic establishment, would fiercely oppose us. It’s the whole system that’s rotten.

This is why, ultimately, a working class party would need to adopt a socialist program for revolution, because even if we stop Trump’s attacks, our problems go far beyond the man himself. We will never achieve peace, equality, and the high standard of living we deserve under the profitguzzling, warmongering system of capitalism.

Next Step: All Out For January 20 We have less than two months until Trump steps back into the Oval Office, this time surrounded by a more loyal and hardened rightwing group of advisors and cabinet. The thoroughly Trumpified Republicans will control the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. It won’t be easy, but the increasingly hard-right Republicans can and must be pushed back.

Mass protests on Inauguration Day in every major city and walkouts in colleges and high schools would go a long way to put Trump on notice that we’re going to fight him every step of the way. It would show millions of terrified people that they’re not alone, and that we can, and must, stand up to Trump and the far right.J

socialistalternative.org

The Russian Revolution kicked off with mass protests and strikes on International Women’s Day. Not every protest leads to a revolution, but there’s never been a revolution without protest.

Since the beginning of this year, over four million people in Germany have protested the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Let’s give Trump our own ice-cold welcome this Inauguration Day. During the civil rights movements 75,000 Black Americans participated in lunch counter sit-ins. This nationally coordinated civil disobedience and direct action on a mass scale played a major role in ending segregation.

Hieroglyphics documenting the victorious Deir el-Medina strike in 1156 BC in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, one of the first recorded protests in human history.

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The world’s ten richest people got $64 billion richer the day after Trump’s election. That’s enough to build a one-bedroom apartment for every homeless person in the country. The whole system is rigged.

The Democrats couldn’t defeat Trump in the election, and won’t meaningfully resist his reactionary agenda. In her concession speech, Kamala Harris congratulated Trump on his victory. A day later, Biden urged people to “turn down the heat” in politics.

But backing down to bullies like Trump only encourages them. This is why Socialist Alternative is calling

for protests, walkouts, and strikes for Trump’s Inauguration Day. If labor unions, organizations like Sunrise Movement and Democratic Socialists of America, immigrants rights and anti-racist groups, LGBTQ rights organizations, and students all mobilize, we can immediately put Trump and the far right on notice with mass protest and working-class action!

No, Biden, we won’t “turn down the heat” on Trump.

Hit the streets on Inauguration Day and join Socialist Alternative today!

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WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

of two evils.

Decades of futile attempts by most of the left to reform the Democratic Party followed, leading to the disastrous situation workers face today. The Democrats and Republicans are beholden to big corporations and billionaires.

Their unwavering support for capitalism offers no way out for workers and young people.

Workers’ parties have been formed in other countries, including countries with entrenched two-party systems like ours. These parties played a historic role in winning major gains for workers, but over time their reformist leaderships adapted themselves to capitalism. Without a revolutionary socialist program, these parties drifted to the right.

How Can We Build A Workers Party Today?

TONY WILSDON, SEATTLE

A Party Rooted In Struggle

One major voice was missing from the election: the interests and needs of working people. Instead, we were bombarded by fake promises from the two parties of billionaires vying for our vote, knowing full well they will sell us out to the interests of corporations.

In the end, many voters chose Trump because he promised to change things up while Harris offered them nothing but platitudes. The election cleared away decades of rule by centrist Republicans and Democrats.

Working people had no candidates who represented us. We must never be faced with an election like this again. We need a new political party that represents the overwhelming majority, what we describe as a ‘workers party.’

In the immediate term, even a small workers’ party could coordinate and link struggles of workers against the bosses, discrimination, wars, and climate change. Out of such campaigns a workers’ party would build support in our communities and workplaces.

Historically, workers’ parties in other countries have come from the concentrated efforts of socialists and other radicalized workers who challenge corporate control over their society. Very often a workers’ party sprouts from unions who see the need to extend their fight against the bosses in the workplace to a fight against the boss’s political parties and political rule as well.

Electoral campaigns should be seen as an important tool to challenge the message of the corporate parties and educate and organize workers. Instead of politicians looking to enrich themselves, a workers’ party would have elected officials who are accountable to the movement, and only accept the average wage of those they represent.

A workers’ party would be united around a common program, developed through democratic debate and discussion in every workplace, school, and community. Real solidarity can only be built by linking the fight against all forms of oppression to the wider social struggle against the elites and the capitalist system that uses the politics of division to prevent us uniting together.

A Bosses’ Party Vs. A Workers’ Party A workers’ party would be a fundamental step forward in US politics. It would take no corporate donations, no money from billionaires, and it would fight for the needs of workers, unequivocally.

The party would campaign on a program that addresses the issues of workers: a dramatic increase in the minimum wage, a massive jobs program at a living wage to implement a huge expansion of green energy, taxing the rich to construct affordable housing and quality public transportation, free publicly-owned healthcare, free universal childcare, guaranteed full-time jobs for all, and an end to wars and imperialist interventions.

All of this should be funded by the richest 1%, and by taking the top banks and corporations into public ownership under democratic workers control to run the economy on the basis of human need, not profits.

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Why Don’t We Have A Workers’ Party Yet? In the 1930s, 30% of the public supported building a labor party. However the largest socialist group, the Communist Party, allied with conservative union leaders to oppose building a new party. They instead supported the Democratic Party, which included warmongers and segregationists, as the lesser

A workers’ party won’t be built without powerful social and labor struggles that threaten the political establishment (and their parties), which unite radicalized workers, young people and activists into common struggle.

This will put pressure on larger organizations like unions and social justice groups to stop supporting corporate parties and build a workers party instead.

Socialist Alternative will participate in every step of this process because we see the building of a workers’ party as an essential step to breaking from capitalism and constructing a new socialist society. Only when the dominance of society by big banks and billionaires is replaced by control by the vast majority of society, the working class, can a decent future be guaranteed for people and the planet.J

by Stephen Thompson, Chicago

Elon Musk got $14 billion richer the day after the election. Inflation is down but the cost of food and rent will remain far higher than just a few years ago.

No Democrat or Republican has the answers to this problem facing working people.

The workers who are successfully winning raises are organizing unions and going on strike. Strikes only work if workers are united in solidarity, with clear demands and a plan to escalate.

Strikes are effective because they threaten the bosses where it hurts most: in their pocket books.

Boeing workers just ended a historic seven week strike with 38% wage increases over the next four years. Earlier this month, dockworkers shut down every major East Coast port, costing corporations $5 billion a day, and won 62% raises over the next six years.

In both cases, more could have been won, and it will take rebuilding a fighting, worker-led labor movement to win big. Socialist Alternative members are fighting to unionize Amazon and build a fighting union at the US Postal Service. In both places, we are raising a $30/hr starting wage as a way to win back decades of billionaire attacks on workers.

Ultimately it will take striking to win better pay and to put power back in workers’ hands.J

socialistalternative.org

WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

role, which is why international solidarity against all bosses is the only real way forward for working people.

A New Era of InterImperialist Rivalry Protectionism and policies to reduce trade between countries represent a seachange from the “free trade” era of previous decades. US politicians used to encourage more trade between countries by lowering tariffs and reducing Dockworkers in the International Longshoremen’s Association on strike in October. other barriers.

After the fall of the Soviet But, because US importers still need to make Union, the US was the undisADAM BURCH, MINNEAPOLIS a profit for their executives and shareholders, puted leading economy in the world, and thereIn July, the president of 1.3 million Team- they pass any increased shipping costs onto fore was in a strong position to dictate trade sters, Sean O’Brien, spoke at the Republican workers in the form of higherprices or by finding terms to other economically weaker countries National Convention. In that speech, he said, ways to cut costs through automation or layoffs. through international institutions like the IMF Any foreign rival to the US that has to pay and WTO. This same logic is what led the US “we need trade policies that put America first.” increased tariffs will likely retaliate by raising ruling class and its politicians to make “free He was essentially saying that American worktariffs on US imports or cutting labor costs. This trade” deals like NAFTA that lowered the trade ers and American bosses are on the same side against foreign competitors (namely, China) retaliation will damage sectors of US industry barriers between the US, Canada and Mexico, and that policies protecting the profits of Amer- that depend on selling to the world market. In and contributed to deindustrialization in the ican bosses are good for the American worker. turn, the increased price of goods that result US. With the help of labor leaders like O’Brien, from higher tariffs could reduce the ability of politicians across the political spectrum are US workers to buy other goods, provoking a promising that their new “protectionist” eco- crisis in other sections of the economy. All this nomic policies will help workers. But is that could mean transferring unemployment from one industry to another. true?

Protectionism also allows domestic manuMost of this “economic populism” is what facturers to sell their goods at a higher price, economists call protectionism. Both the potentially making those corporations more Republican and Democratic parties have profitable.

This development and any resulting adopted this new economic policy to fit the changing needs of the US ruling class in this trade war could create inflationary economic new era of imperialist rivalry with China. The conditions in the short term, and depression in parties of the ruling class are advancing these the long term by reducing markets for growth policies now because the dominance of US with workers expected to pay for these costs It was the expansion of capitalist markets corporations is being threatened by the entry with more unemployment and higher prices. across the globe, facilitated mostly by free of Chinese capitalism into advanced manufactrade deals, that drove down wages and living Workers Lose Either Way turing and technology. conditions for workers everywhere. To be clear, Not only is “America First” a dead end for Protectionism doesn’t change the basic the labor movement, it also creates dangerous fact of capitalism: profits are the unpaid labor the “end of neoliberalism” isn’t about stopdivisions among workers. Only international of workers. The bosses are always going to ping attacks on workers. Protectionism is about solidarity against all the bosses and all forms be incentivized to keep more of this unpaid protecting the profits of US corporations from of exploitation offers a real way forward for labor for themselves, unless workers organize rising competition from China.

Chinese capitalism has outgrown its own working-class people. around a fighting approach to take back the national borders and is now in a position that wealth that we create. Slapping some tariffs on competes with US capitalism for new global How Protectionism Works imports does not change how capitalism works. markets. Previous US-dictated “free trade” Instead, economic nationalism only blurs policies were supposed to keep China as a Corporations and national governments use protectionism in an attempt to reduce imported class distinction between workers and bosses junior partner, but now that China is directly trade with foreign countries. Protectionism by promising fake national unity. It creates an competing with the US as a rival in the imperialmostly takes the form of tariffs and duties illusion that workers should find common ist power struggle, the US ruling class wants to charged on trade imports, which are taxes cause with their bosses, when in reality we have change its own decades-old rules.

The very fact that the US ruling class even corporations pay if they want to sell imported more in common with other working people around the world. has to use protectionism today shows how goods in the US. Workers can’t improve their conditions much US imperialism has weakened. And of Other protectionist trade barriers can without class struggle, and class struggle is course with any imperialist rivalry between include quotas that restrict foreign companies from competing in domestic markets by impossible without building solidarity. The countries, it won’t just be limited to a trade capping how much of a good companies or bosses know this, which is why they rely on war with a tit-for-tat tariff increase.

If taken to its logical conclusion, any impecountries can import. Tariffs are designed to keeping workers divided around national origin, make imported goods more expensive to ship. race, and gender. Nationalism plays a similar rialist conflict can escalate to an actual hot

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military war. US and Chinese capitalism’s drive to carve the world into rival economic camps is already defining the war in the Ukraine, shaping the escalating crisis in the Middle East, and pointing towards direct military conflict between the two main powers over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Union Leaders Shouldn’t Be Cheerleaders For Protectionism US workers and workers everywhere can’t afford an economic nationalism that brings about inflation and imperialist war. However, our labor leadership is failing to put forward an alternative and is instead pandering to this same economic nationalism.

When Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the RNC, he ended up adding fuel to the same divide-and-rule strategy that the bosses use in the workplace to drive down wages and working conditions for all workers.

Only when workers are unorganized can the bosses pit workers against each other. Instead, union leaders should put forward an alternative by demanding a program that would include a closed union shop for all workers so that the bosses have to hire all workers at the same higher union wage.

Just last month, dockworkers with the International Longshore Association union went on strike and successfully won an agreement to raise their wages by 62%. During the strike, both Trump and Harris blamed foreign shipping companies for the grievances that striking workers raised. For both politicians, this claim was a clever way to support workers while also advancing a protectionist agenda that boosts the profits of US bosses.

In fact, by stirring up economic nationalism, Trump and Harris could avoid commenting on one of the strikers’ key demands: ending increased automation, which is actually coming from the US companies that run the docks.

International Solidarity Is The Way Forward When politicians say things like “looking out for America first,” they mean “looking out for the profits of American corporations.”

Similarly, in the past, when they talked about free trade, they really meant the freedom for US corporations to ship jobs overseas while paying millions to executives by price-gouging customers. Workers’ strength is in solidarity with one another, not with the boss.

Workers who can struggle together across national divides can better win gains for their respective workplaces by not allowing their bosses to shift the blame to another group of workers somewhere else. Unions need to abandon economic nationalism for real labor solidarity, and any labor leaders who pander to economic nationalism need to be replaced by genuine class fighters who fight the bosses and not other workers.J

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INTERNATIONAL

LEON PINSKY, NYC Millions of people around the world were out on the street this past year to protest the murderous US-backed Israeli war machine as it ravages through the Middle East, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying whole cities. Anger has focused on the Democratic Party’s refusal not only to end this massacre but in fact breaking records funding it.

With a lack of a dynamic and organized mass anti-war alternative on the ballot, Trump stepped in to rebrand himself as the anti-war candidate. Back in power, however, Trump’s plans for the Middle East are far from peace.

The Middle East is one of the main arenas of intensified global struggle between the two imperialist blocs around the US and China, and Trump is planning to turn up the heat.

Allies of the two dominant imperialist powers are already battling over trade routes around the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea. Several rival regional powers are funding opposing armies in the horrendous war in

ZUHAIR AL-ANHAR, PHILADELPHIA In the past year, a heroic worldwide movement led by students and youth has stood up in opposition to the Israeli capitalist state’s criminal, genocidal war upon Gaza and increasingly, the broader Middle East. This mass struggle fought back by state repression has naturally generated a firestorm of ideas, searching for the best path toward peace and liberation. One trend in particular has emerged: an identification with political Islamism.

Are Islamist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah able and willing to point the way forward to freedom and self-determination, or are they a hindrance to freedom? To understand this, we must know their origins, social character, and the role they have played.

Counter-Revolution In the mid-20th century, socialist and communist forces were prevalent in the Middle East. Although they had weaknesses, like allying with nationalist forces and acting in the interest of the Soviet Union, they nonetheless championed workers’ solidarity against the ruling class and the ravages of imperialism.

Islamism entered as a counter-revolutionary force of capitalism, using populist frameworks to seize on the energies of revolutionary and anticolonial movements and siphon them into reactionary regimes opposed to working class interests. They divided workers against each

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Sudan in part to win naval access on its coast.

Trump plans to continue Biden’s “blank check” policy towards the reactionary Netanyahu regime, avoiding even the empty and symbolic warnings that Biden and Harris have raised over the past year. For US imperialism, the massacre of Palestinians is merely a necessary sacrifice to achieve their wider regional interests.

“Maximum Pressure 2.0” The China bloc’s strongest and most important ally in the Middle East is Iran. Trump is planning to restore “maximum pressure,” in his words, on Iran, which would include increased sanctions and bans on oil sales to other countries, risking further conflict. War and poverty is all global capitalism is able to prepare for us. This is shown by Trump’s support for Israel bombing Iranian nuclear and oil facilities.

Following mass popular pressure to lower inflation in the US, Biden was forced to lift some of the sanctions on Iranian oil to allow higher global output. Trump’s intent to strangle

oil production and massively increase tariffs threatens to bring inflation back up. Of course, increased attacks on Iranian energy is primarily felt by the masses in Iran. This shows that working people in both countries have a basic shared interest to oppose imperialist conflict and war.

other on the basis of ethnicity, nationality and religion. This phenomenon both sprang from and contributed to the decline of the Middle Eastern socialist movement along with that of secular nationalist organizations like Fatah, now the steward of the occupation in the West Bank.

Hamas, originally the Gazan wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was literally funded by the Israeli state as early as 1967 in order to serve as a “counterweight” to the Palestine Liberation Organization. This divideand-conquer tactic was also aimed at thwarting the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

The counter-revolutionary potential that the Israeli regime identified is displayed by Hamas’s ultra-right wing, misogynistic, queerphobic, and brutally repressive character. It has taken the actions of summary execution, abduction and torture not just against Israeli civilians but also against Palestinians. Israel also used Hamas’s poisonous nature to suffocate the mass popular uprising known as the First Intifada.

regional imperialist power, expanding its influence over the Iraqi and Syrian economic and political systems and setting its proxy militias all over the region. This is all while repressing mass movements for women’s and workers’ rights. Now the direct attacks between Israel and Iran have opened a new chapter in this continued horror.

The party representing Iranian interests in Southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, has been a key player in the nonstop escalation of the current war and was an accomplice to Bashar Al-Assad’s suppression of the popular uprising in Syria in 2012. Hezbollah was itself an outgrowth of the Amal Movement, a puppet of the now-deposed Iranian Shah aimed at quelling the rising socialist consciousness of Shia workers. It has now formed a major part of the Lebanese parliament that has presided over an economic catastrophe, bringing that country to utter collapse. A majority of Lebanese workers polled this year said they had “no trust at all” in Hezbollah.

Hezbollah then inspired the Houthis, or Ansar Allah Movement, who are fighting for Zaydi Shia minority rule in Yemen. In this pursuit they have carried out bitter persecution against Yemeni Sunnis (despite having Sunni members) as well as Christians, Jews, and Baha’is, aligning themselves with the nowdeposed former dictator Salah. These acts must be unequivocally rejected by all strugglers against oppression and war.

Iran is increasingly binding itself to the

Competing Empires Today, the principal backer of Hamas is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which sprang up from the 1979 revolution after the revolution was betrayed by the Stalinist Iranian Communist Party and other false leaders who formed an unprincipled alliance with the religious leader Khomeini. Iran has recently asserted itself as a

We Need A Mass Anti-War Movement Trump’s reactionary war agenda will intensify the global crisis and further risk a wider war in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East,

and Asia Pacific. We need to rapidly prepare to build a mass anti-war movement that can mount an alternative to both parties of war and environmental destruction.

The labor movement has a special role to play, organizing workers in the weapons, energy, and shipping industries. International solidarity with workers around the world is a fundamental principle for socialists serious about fighting for a world free from the misery promised to us all by the rotten global system of capitalism.J

Chinese-Russian imperialist bloc. Hence the ever-widening war between the Israeli state and its neighbors is another theater for the inter-imperialist power struggle between the US and Chinese camps, a situation that spells disaster for the region and for the world.

Which Way Forward?

Repressive, right-wing tendencies such as nationalist Islamism play directly into the hands of Western imperialism. These tendencies are in themselves thoroughly capitalist and exploitative in service of enriching their own ruling circles.

Socialists believe that in order for oppressed and working people in the Middle East and everywhere to be liberated, we need international working-class solidarity. Capitalism lies at the root of the colonialism, war, dictatorships and economic crises that are razing the Middle East to the ground, and it is the workers alone who hold the unique position within capitalism to bring it to an end.

We call for the working classes throughout the region and world to unite across nations and religions, to become properly organized with revolutionary leadership, to fight for workers’ democracy and the right to self-determination of all nations. Without this, false prophets will continue to bring calamity to these longsuffering people. Gaza and the Middle East cannot afford these lies being propagated in their name across the globe.J

socialistalternative.org

INTERNATIONAL

KEVIN LIU, BOSTON For several years now, the Pacific has been rearming. Taiwan launched its first indigenous submarine this year, with help and components from the US and its allies. South Korea is expecting its new fighter jet by the end of 2026. Japan kicked off its rearmament with a $400 billion defense push. China launched a new aircraft carrier this year.

Both China and Vietnam have built military bases on ocean islands and reefs in the South China Sea. And the US is upgrading its weapons and wholly reorganizing the Marines to fight an islands-holding war across the Pacific “reminiscent of Imperial Japan” as a Navy War College chief strategist described it.

Importance Of The South China Sea The driver for Pacific rearmament is the inter-imperialist rivalry between US and China, for which the most decisive theater will be the South China Sea. The sea stretches between the Malacca Strait, which carries 30% of global trade, and the Taiwan Strait which carries vital shipments of iron ore, petroleum, and other industrial materials to China, Korea, and Japan.

The dominant dispute in the South China Sea, however, is not over its abundant resources but over Taiwan. 100 miles off of China’s coast and over 5,000 miles from Hawaii, Taiwan is at the center of US-China military tensions. The Chinese military last month sent 17 warships and 125 warplanes around Taiwan in a largescale simulation of a blockade.

The Stakes Over Taiwan Both players in the US-China rivalry have bet all their chips on Taiwan. If China can annex Taiwan, it will show the world that US hegemony is over. Many countries in the US camp would consider siding with a rising China. US regional allies like Japan and Korea will lose faith in Washington’s security guarantees and increase their own rearmament, including their own nuclear weapons programs.

On the other hand, if China ends up formally and finally losing Taiwan, whether diplomatically or militarily, it would mark the end of Beijing’s ability to challenge US power in East Asia and deliver a similar shock to Chinese consciousness, which has been sold a

narrative of the CCP returning the country to its deserved position as a world superpower.

This could spark the tinderbox of seething mass anger at China’s current economic and social problems, and possibly collapse the CCP regime.

No Side Benefits The Working Class Missing from the game of great powers is the interests of ordinary workers. The US ruling class doesn’t care one whit about the Taiwanese masses. Chinese workers also stand to gain nothing from annexing Taiwan. The biggest problem facing Chinese workers is China’s “nightmare economy” where the economic promise of past decades has turned into pay cuts and layoffs.

To an increasingly beleaguered CCP, heightened nationalism and ultimately war might appear as a way out of the current crisis.

Even though US capitalism is growing on paper, it suffers strategically from an underinvestment in manufacturing and from high prices. One long-term driver of inflation is that when the US taxes or bans cheap Chinese goods, prices will go up. This puts enormous strain on American workers. Nonetheless, US workers still have much more spending power than Chinese workers, which helps the US ruling class maintain protectionist policies.

Both sides are bleeding in the trade war but

US imperialism has more blood to lose. The US military is still the strongest in the world, but is starting to lose its grip.

The American mode of war—pricey but sophisticated and accurate—is now in question as the top demand from both Russian and Ukrainian militaries turn out to be basic artillery shells. At the same time the Soviet way of war—massed armored columns—has also been called into question by the thousands of tank carcasses littering the Ukrainian landscape. Both the US and Chinese militaries are learning from the bloody stalemate in Ukraine what it takes to win a war in the Pacific.

This hardening of inter-imperialist rivalry can create dangerous escalations, as the leader of each camp seeks to shore up their credibility and turf. This dynamic can turn small wars into big wars against the wishes of the major players involved. The war in Ukraine has lasted longer than what either the US or the Russia-China partnership wants because it is really about showing determination to defend Taiwan.

Will The US & China Go To War? A war between the US and China would be catastrophic. Both sides are assuming it would start over a blockade of Taiwan. North Korea has already sent troops to fight in Ukraine, and during a war its military could force the

TOM CREAN, NYC

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: NOVEMBER 2024

The devastating invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military began in February 2022.

International Socialist Alternative immediately called for Russian troops to leave and defended Ukraine’s right to self determination. But we also consistently defended the right to self determination of national minorities, including in the Donbas and the Crimean peninsula— which Russian forces occupied in 2014—to determine their future without pressure from occupying forces.

Despite Trump’s claim that he opposes the war and strong opposition from a section of

evacuation of millions in Seoul, destroy shipyards and bases, and menace shipping around Japan.

Floating around jingoist circles in Washington is the horrifying idea of bombing the Three Gorges Dam, which would kill countless millions and which warhawks might see as a quick way to victory but would trigger massive retaliation. Nuclear warfare, which neither side wants, would not be out of the question in such a scenario.

It’s a guarantee that in wartime, the seas around Taiwan would be immediately closed to commercial ships. The Strait of Malacca, through which almost a quarter of the world’s oil passes, could also be shut down. Countries in the global south that rely on selling raw materials to China will be heavily impacted, as would developed markets that rely on China for consumer goods.

Imperialism is the logical outcome of capitalism’s need to grow after it has grown all it can domestically and built up enormous monopolies and finance houses to power international expansion. This logic has already sucked both powers into a stalemate in Ukraine that neither side wants. Every small tension in the South China Sea follows this same logic and could escalate into war.

Why The Working Class Needs To Oppose Inter-Imperialist War The preparation for war will eat up a lot of national resources, and if a war occurs it will require massive economic mobilization.

Rearmament will be extremely expensive and means hardship for the working class. A prewar society means our social benefits could be cut to pay for over-cost warships, while statesponsored jingoism unleashes virulent xenophobia and racism. An actual war will create countless dead and maimed on both sides, while living becomes exorbitantly expensive.

That is why we need an internationalist antiwar movement. Workers don’t benefit from either camp and only stand to lose from the war.

This is a task that falls on the working class of the US and China. The march to war depends on the labor of the working class, and it’s only workers who have the power and the political desire to put an end to this march once and for all.J

Republicans, he gave his approval to the massive $80 billion package agreed by Congress last summer. Clearly he was not prepared, push come to shove, to see Ukraine collapse. But the underlying Trump priority and ultimately U.S. imperialism’s priority is the conflict with China.

In reality, while there are differences­— Trump clearly favors trying to break Putin from his alliance with China as opposed to the so-far failed NATO strategy—the different sections of the U.S. ruling class are moving towards a common position of trying to end this phase of the war and pivot to the Indo Pacific. But will Putin agree to negotiations when he appears to have the advantage?

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SOCIALIST

Socialist Alternative is in political solidarity with revolutionary socialists around the world fighting in our workplaces, communities, and schools against the exploitation people face every day under the capitalist system.

We don’t just talk—we organize and fight to change the world. We build protests and walkouts, we organize unions and strikes.

We led struggles that won the country’s first $15/hr minimum wage, landmark renters’

rights and a tax on Amazon to fund affordable social housing.

Now our members are helping to lead fights of Amazon workers and USPS letter carriers to win a $30/hr starting wage.

Every week, we have branch meetings in cities across the country where we analyze events from a Marxist perspective and discuss our work. Trump, poverty, discrimination, war and environmental destruction are symptoms— capitalism is the disease. Join Socialist Alternative today!

president. In fact, the EPA was formed under Nixon, not because he cared about the climate, but because 20 million people—with massive support from the UAW and the labor movement—participated in the 1970 Earth Day Protests. We need to bring this collaboration back. The climate movement, together with the unions, should call for walkouts for Inauguration Day to fight Trump’s climate attacks and for a massive green union jobs program.

The Democratic Party Is A Dead End

SAMMY ALBRIGHT, NEW HAVEN

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Climate change is here, it’s devastating, and it’s the working class that pays the price for the crisis that we didn’t create. While working-class Floridians and North Carolinians waited in hours of traffic to flee two “once a century” hurricanes, billionaires flew to their third homes in their private jets. The billionaires can fly to vacation homes during the hot summer while workers are dying of heat exhaustion on the job. For the billionaires, climate change is currently an inconvenience, for the working class, it’s life or death.

In the new era of inter-imperialist conflict, governments are dropping the pretense of a green transition in favor of fossilfueled “energy independence” and preparation for war. We live in a time of rising militarism, and you wouldn’t power a tank with a wind turbine. Despite his fake “anti-war” stance, Trump will only escalate this trend towards greater militarism, fueling and worsening climate disaster.

With Trump entering the White House, the struggle against his agenda will be an uphill battle, but history shows that corporate politicians can be forced to act by mass movements. The climate movement needs to be clear about who we can depend on as an ally in this fight against Trump and his war on the climate.

The Climate Under Trump Trump is a massive threat for the climate. During his first term, he rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations.

“Drill baby drill” is his motto, and his administration is a lot better organized this time around. Oil and gas production will be ramped up even higher than their current record levels. Trump vows to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and get rid of pollution standards. He wants to kill the Inflation Reduction Act—except for the parts that help American billionaires. A Trump presidency means accelerated climate disasters for us and massive profits for the fossil fuel executives.

We need to fight back against Trump and his climate-killing agenda from day one of his presidency. We know Trump is reactionary; the only way to stop him is an organized, mass movement. The week of the election, Socialist Alternative called rallies in 13 cities across the country and the Sunrise Movement called for national school walkouts. This is a great start, but we need to keep building. We need to involve as many people as possible around a real program that includes demands that can pull in both students and workers.

If we’re organized, we can win—even under a reactionary

The 2019 school strikes led by Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future were a lightning rod for young people around the world who saw climate change as a dire threat to their future. In the US, the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate organization, rose to prominence with their sit-in alongside then newly elected AOC demanding a Green New Deal. Hundreds of thousands of students walked out for climate justice across 1000 events.

Most significantly, many workers, including 1,700 workers in Amazon’s corporate offices, walked off the job to join them.

With the ascendance of AOC and the Squad, the idea that we could use the Democratic Party to win progressive reforms gained traction. During the 2020 election, Biden made a string of ambitious promises to tackle the climate crisis: no more drilling on federal lands and net-zero emissions by 2050. In 2020, the Sunrise Movement basically turned into a GOTV organization for Joe Biden on the basis that by supporting Biden, they could convince him to pass “bold climate legislation.”

Four years later, Biden has approved 9,522 drilling permits on federal land, 50% more than under Trump. With oil and gas production at an all time high, we’re not getting any closer to net-zero. AOC is no longer the anti-establishment politician that packed Nancy Pelosi’s office with climate activists demanding a Green New Deal. She now endorses establishment Democrats like Biden and Harris without hesitation. This year, despite Kamala Harris’s repeated commitment to fracking and brags about historic oil and gas production, the Sunrise Movement poured their energy into getting her elected, explicitly seeing their role as winning over disillusioned young people to voting for Harris.

The failures of AOC and the Squad to build this type of movement while in office shows that you can’t change the Democratic Party from within—the Democratic Party changes you.

The problem is not with the whims of individual politicians but the parties they belong to and are ultimately accountable to.

The Democrats, while recognizing the threat of climate change unlike many Republicans, are inextricably tied to the fossil fuel industry and the capitalist system which is incompatible with solving the climate crisis.

What Way Forward?

• Bring back the climate strikes in schools and colleges across the country!

• The climate movement needs to break from the Democrats and be part of building an independent, working-class party.

• The climate movement must link up with the anti-war movement! Climate catastrophe cannot be ended without ending imperialist war, and both pose dire threats to working people everywhere.

• The labor movement needs to urgently take up the fight to organize green industry, and fight for the retooling of the fossil fuel industry and re-training of workers while at minimum maintaining existing union representation, pay, and benefits.

• The climate movement must call to nationalize the top 100 polluting companies and bring them into democratic public ownership.

• We need an internationally planned, socialist economy to effectively combat climate change. For a socialist world!J

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SA IN ACTION

GET INVOLVED! Socialist Alternative is an active organization with members across the country. Joining means basic agreement with our ideas and a commitment to putting them into action. Apply to join and a member in your area will reach out to you shortly! If you don’t see an area near you listed below, contact our national office.

(646) 371-9016 info@socialistalternative.org @Socialist_Alternative @SocialistAlt /SocialistAlternative.USA @socialistus

We need to fight Trump and his reactionary agenda in our workplaces, schools, and in the streets. That’s what Socialist Alternative members were doing in cities across the country in the days following Trump’s election: we hit the streets with protests and organizing meetings in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Houston, Los Angeles, Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Haven, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, and Seattle!

During his first administration, the only thing that forced Trump to back down was shutting down business as usual for corporations and his billionaire friends. Socialist Alternative is calling for protests, walkouts, and strikes on Inauguration Day, but we can’t stop there. If you want to take on Trump, but also the whole rotten system of capitalism with its wars, oppression, poverty, and division—then join Socialist Alternative today!

Socialist Alternative is part of International Socialist Alternative (ISA). Learn more about the ISA at internationalsocialist.net.

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Editorial Board: Bia Lacombe, Chris Gray, George Brown, Jesada Jitpraphakhan, Leah Stevens, Leon Pinsky, Rachel Wilder, Tony Wilsdon, Varun Belur Editors@SocialistAlternative.org

NOVEMBER 2024

15

SOCIALIST

ALTERNATIVE

ISSUE #108 | NOVEMBER 2024

by Varun Belur, Philadelphia

In the wake of Trump’s sweeping victory, millions of young and working people are asking, “How did we get here?” To answer this question, we need to understand the root of the right wing’s recent growth—the crisis of capitalism itself.

Trump and the far-right all over the world are a reflection of a fundamentally broken system.

When society is a haunted house of inequality and oppression, a few particularly loathsome ghouls are bound to emerge from time to time. But Trump is more than just a uniquely terrible manifestation of the crisis facing the system. He’s a symptom—and capitalism is the disease.

What Is Capitalism?

Capitalism is a system based on undemocratic private ownership of production for the purpose of maximizing profits on the backs of workers. Like pigs at the trough, capitalists will gorge themselves on human labor and natural resources. But unlike pigs, capitalists can’t and won’t stop their plunder of the world of their own volition.

A small handful at the very top amass obscene levels of wealth created by the working class, the vast majority of society. In short, we do all the work to make society run and capitalists get rich off it. And the wealth that we produce is funneled back into the casino of Wall Street instead of being used for what we actually need: housing, education, healthcare, jobs. A huge portion of our society’s wealth is poured into war and

destruction. Would a sane system produce missiles that cost tens of millions to level hospitals in Gaza when hospitals in the US are indebted and crumbling? Capitalism is clearly incapable of productively developing society, and in fact, is an active block on it.

Racism, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of divide-and-rule oppression are part and parcel of capitalism. Without these backwards ideas, the bosses would have a much harder time dividing and conquering working people to defend their system. As the ruling classes of imperialist countries from the US to China prepare for direct war, they must promote increasingly virulent forms of nationalism, leading to outbreaks of anti-migrant hate and even far-right violence.

Even the concept of the nuclear family and traditional (sexist) gender roles as the basic building block of capitalist society is making a comeback in the guise of “trad” ideology.

This is a right-wing reaction to struggles led by women and LGBTQ people against sexual harassment and abuse, oppressive gender norms, and for bodily autonomy in recent years. Capitalism depends on the subjugation of women and control of their bodies and sexuality. And without the millions of hours of unpaid work women perform in the home to raise, educate, and care for the next generation of exploited workers, the whole system would not be able to function.

Nationalism and the return of “traditional” gender roles were front and center in Trump’s campaign, but they didn’t come out of thin air. These ideologies, and many others promoted by the ruling

class, reflect the needs of capitalism and imperialism today.

Revolutionary Struggle: The Only Way Forward At one time, capitalism was “progressive” in the sense that it was capable of improving living standards and advancing society from the feudalist system that came before it. That time has long since come and gone, and capitalism today is nothing more than a ball and chain.

The overthrow of capitalism in Russia in 1917 punctured the myth of capitalist invincibility and proved once and for all that a socialist economy based on the working class is possible. In 1917, the Russian working class, led by the Marxist Bolshevik Party overthrew the reactionary Tsarist government and took power after sweeping away an attempt to impose capitalist rule. They implemented working-class democracy by putting workers in charge of their own factories and industries. Stalin, however, represented a conservative backlash to the revolution under pressure from reformism and imperialism abroad, and he and his successors undermined its gains until capitalism was finally restored in 1991.

The clear lesson of 1917 is that capitalism creates the conditions for revolution, and it is the working class that must play the decisive role. The backdrop of the revolution was the largest imperialist war the world had ever seen and untold poverty and deprivation. Under these conditions, allout revolution was the only option left for survival.

Today, capitalism faces its most severe crisis in decades. War, climate destruction and untold poverty are escalating. But capitalism won’t overthrow itself or collapse from a final crisis. It will require the working class consciously getting organized for revolution by forging its own revolutionary leadership and rebuilding its organizations of struggle.

But even winning victories short of revolution will require ferocious struggle by the working class in this era of capitalist decline. The biggest victories of the working class in the advanced capitalist world were won through mass struggle organized by forces that posed a threat to the whole system—and weren’t just

looking for a sweetheart deal with the bosses.

Nationalized healthcare was one such victory in advanced capitalist countries across the world, with the US being the sole exception. But as the strength of working-class movements declined during the neoliberal era, the ruling class was given a free hand to undermine those gains of past struggle—as is happening with the defunding of the National Health Service in Britain and elsewhere.

The ruling class and the far right is only as strong as we are weak. In other words, it’s possible to push back the right and force concessions from the billionaires by building powerful movements of working people, youth and the oppressed. To build the most effective struggles against Trump, we need to fight independently of all capitalist parties and take on capitalism itself.

Fight Trump AND Capitalism: Join The Socialists!

Socialist Alternative members have fought Trump and the far right before. Within hours of his victory in 2016, we called protests of thousands in cities around the country. In 2017, we took part in a protest that drew out 40,000 working-class and young people and swept the far right off the streets of Boston. In large part due to these and other actions, including a NYC taxi drivers strike, Trump was unable to carry out some of his most reactionary proposals, including his xenophobic Muslim ban. Protests work, especially when they’re based on the power of the working class and unchained from the Democratic party.

We need to build a new revolutionary movement to sweep away the far right forever.

Socialist Alternative calls for mass protests and school walkouts on Inauguration Day. We will fight to build defense committees against deportations in our schools and workplaces.

And we’ll work to smash any illusion that Trump or the far right has a “mandate” to carry out their destructive agenda.

If you’ve never been to a protest before, but are ready to fight back; if you’re furious at attacks on migrants, women, people of color, trans youth and other oppressed people; if you’re not willing to tolerate a second more of the genocidal Gaza war; if you agree that capitalism is at the root of the crises that we face; if you believe that a socialist world is possible and want to fight for it—now is the time to join us!J