Socialist Alternative #110 - February 2025

SOCIALIST

Elon Musk’s Far-Right Love Affair pg. 6 Black Liberation & Socialism pg. 8 Unions Must Take On Trump pg. 11

ALTERNATIVE

ISSUE #110 | FEBRUARY 2025

Rebuild Fighting Unions •

MICAELA FOREMAN, CHICAGO My mother was forged by the fire of struggle on the west side of Chicago. Her drive to survive in a world that privileged the college-educated heavily influenced

her values. Together, we dreamed of Ivy Leagues with large green quads. But once I got my chance to attend an elite college, I realized that I was unprepared to be confronted by the deep inequality that permeated my every experience on campus.

At Williams College, I came face to face with the children of the ruling class for the first time. I felt the isolation of being a public school alum amongst a sea of the privately educated, not fluent in their unspoken language and not embedded in their culture. I grew to understand the role the institution expected me to play. As a Black woman, I was mere commodity, show dressing for the halls built with the wealth extracted by the slaves of a colonist.

Education has become a product, cementing divisions to facilitate the exploitation necessary for the machine to run.

My time as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago has laid bare the intent of the university to segment labor and divide the working class, privileging certain people, and off-loading risks onto international workers. Luckily, I was introduced to Socialist Alternative while walking to class at UIC. After several illuminating conversations with members, I joined Socialist Alternative because I trust that this organization believes in the power of labor to transform the world at every level. Since joining, I have felt empowered to be a leader in my graduate student union and to stand against the tide of neoliberalism that continues to organize my university according to profit and austerity. With socialist politics and a desire to change the world , we can fight for education as liberation, not as exploitation.J

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Not another dime of union money to either party of big business – Democrat or Republican. Spend the millions now spent on corporate political campaigns to launch massive drives to organize non-union workers across the US, and run independent, pro-working class candidates.

Union leaders must accept the average wage of the workers they represent.

Reject both capitalist “free trade” policies and “America first” protectionism. US workers have more in common with workers around the globe than we do with the bosses at home.

End anti-union “right to work” and “open-shop” legislation. Implement simple majority card check for all unionization drives.

Unions need to fight all manifestations of racism, xenophobia, sexism, queerphobia, and all forms of discrimination and oppression. The unions should organize mass noncompliance, strikes, and walkouts against right-wing attacks.

End Climate Catastrophe

Fight Trump & The Far Right

where renters are legally protected from discrimination. Pass strong universal rent control • The Democrats can’t stop Trump. Fight Trump and stop the criminalization of homelessness. and his billionaire government’s far-right, • Fully fund public education and end school authoritarian agenda with mass protests, privatization. Stop all right-wing attacks on walkouts, occupations, strikes, and a new curriculum and ban standardized tests. working-class party.

• Cancel all student debt. Tax the elite universi• No scapegoating – it’s the capitalist system ties and the super-wealthy to make all public that creates crises and suffering, not immicollege tuition-free. grants, transgender people, or any marginal- • Eliminate gun violence – massive investment ized group. Build working-class solidarity and in jobs programs, after-school programs, and struggle to fight back against the billionaires’ recreation centers as a starting point, comdivide-and-rule. bined with basic gun control policies.

Work To Live, Not Live To Work

Fight All Oppression

• Raise the federal minimum wage to $25/hr, • Fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophoadjusted annually for cost of living increases, bia, transphobia, ableism, and all forms of as a step toward a living wage for all. oppression with working-class solidarity and • 32 hour work week (maximum work day of 8 struggle. Build a mass, multiracial, multi-genhours) with no loss in pay or benefits. Share der movement against systemic oppression out the work with the unemployed and create and capitalism. new union jobs.

• Equal rights for all, including equal pay for • A minimum guaranteed income of $4,000/ equal work. End all harassment, discrimination, month for the unemployed, disabled, and and violence against women, LGBTQ people, elderly, as well as for stay-at-home parents of Black people, immigrants, disabled people, children up to Pre-K or those unable to work. and all marginalized groups.

• A guaranteed decent pension for all. No cuts • End the institutional racism of the criminal justo Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid – tice system, the racist “war on drugs,” and tax the rich to expand these crucial safety mass incarceration. Invest in rehabilitation, job net programs. training, and living-wage jobs, not prisons. End low-paid prison labor, which is modern-day slavery. Abolish the death penalty.

Tax The Rich To Invest In Our Basic • Arrest and convict killer cops. Immediately fire Needs all police officers with a history of brutality and • Free, universal healthcare, paid sick leave, and racist behavior. End the militarization of police. cancellation of all medical debt.

Put all police departments under the control of • Take the pharmaceutical companies and fordemocratically-elected civilian boards with the profit hospitals into democratic public ownerpower to hire, fire, subpoena, and set budget ship to develop state-of-the-art treatments and priorities. provide high-quality care at no cost to patients. • No more voter registration – automatic voting • Fully fund and drastically expand addiction rights for all. and mental health services.

• Defend the right to choose whether and when • A massive expansion of high-quality, permato have children. Free contraception as part nently affordable, publicly-owned housing of a broad program for reproductive health

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including comprehensive, LGBTQ-inclusive • Ban new oil and gas drilling and take the top sex education.

100 polluting companies into democratic • The right to free, safe, and legal abortion. Stop public ownership. Implement a democratically all right-wing attempts to criminalize abortion. planned, just transition to 100% renewable • Paid parental leave for 18 months, and free, energy as part of an international plan. high-quality childcare and preschool for all.

• A massive, unionized green jobs program. Give • Full legal rights for all queer people, includall workers in polluting industries the option ing the right to self-identify and express one’s of a union job rapidly building and operating gender freely. Free, gender-affirming universal green infrastructure with no loss in pay, benhealthcare. efits, or seniority.

• We need fully-funded emergency systems to protect and evacuate people from the more Defend Immigrants’ Rights frequent and severe storms, floods, and fires • No immigrant detentions or deportations. caused by climate change. Fully reimburse Immediate, unconditional legalization and working people for their destroyed homes and equal rights for all undocumented immigrants, livelihoods. regardless of their job status.

• No to capitalist divide-and-rule. Unions must Build A New Mass Workers’ Party lead the way in uniting immigrants and USborn workers, organizing all workers and form- • No votes or donations to any Democrats or ing deportation defense committees in every Republicans – the labor movement and social workplace. movements must build a new, anti-war, work• Build a movement against the destructive poliing-class party. cies of US imperialism around the world that • Unite this new workers’ party around a drive working class people to flee their home common program, developed through democountries. cratic debate and discussion in every workplace, school, and community. It should take no corporate donations, no money from bilEnd All Imperialist War lionaires, and have a socialist program.

• Fight the rich, not their wars – build a massive, • All elected officials to make no more than the international, anti-war movement. average wage of their constituents.

• End the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

The right to self-determination of all nationaliRevolutionary Socialism & ties, with guaranteed rights for ethnic, religious, and national minorities. End the occupation Internationalism and siege of all Palestinian territories.

• Capitalism produces poverty, oppression, • Abolish NATO and all imperialist alliances. Stop environmental destruction, pandemics, and the military build-up between the two blocs led war. We need an international working-class

by US and Chinese imperialism, and oppose revolution against this failed system. the ramping up of nationalism around the world. • Take the top 500 corporations and banks that • Drastically cut the bloated U.S. military budget dominate the US economy into democratic and redirect that money toward free universal public ownership. Run them under the demohealthcare, public education, and high-quality cratic management of elected representatives affordable housing for all. of workers and the broader public.

• Capitalism breeds imperialism, plunging the • A democratic and socialist plan for the econworld into devastating wars. Only international omy based on the common interests of working socialism can bring about lasting peace. people and youth everywhere—for a socialist

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United States and a socialist world.

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@SocialistUS

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US POLITICS

eyes of his base he’ll maintain his image as a guy who gets stuff done. But if implemented, tariffs would also drive up prices for U.S. workers (not to mention workers globally), who have already seen the price of basic necessities like food and housing skyrocket in the last few years. This could seriously undermine Trump’s current support among a wider layer of people who are much less ideologically committed to his project.

Reasserting The Balance Of Class Forces BIA LACOMBE, SEATTLE Trump’s second term has exploded into action with seemingly unstoppable momentum. Each day has been impossible to predict, and the avalanche of executive orders and other actions impossible to keep up with.

By the time you’re reading this article, there will already be a dozen more shocking things Trump has said or signed into law.

Trump is throwing everything at the wall, both to disorient and show his strength. Not all of it needs to stick in order to help accomplish his and the U.S. ruling class’s bigger goals. Their actions are ultimately an attempt to respond to the deep crises of capitalism, which include looming economic crisis, interimperialist conflict, climate catastrophe which could ultimately make the planet uninhabitable, and a working class that is increasingly angry at the billionaires who control our lives.

Trump serves the U.S. ruling class, which is made up of the richest and most powerful people who control what is still the world’s most powerful imperialist country. But Trump is also self-serving, and at the same time has to balance his support from millions of disenfranchised people who applauded the assassination of a healthcare CEO—that is the devil’s bargain the ruling class accepted when they allowed Trump to come to power.

system has faced before, with fewer ways for capitalists to maneuver to save their system.

That means there will likely be acts of desperation which do not fully fit in logically with their imperialist interests.

In order to prepare for a future war economy and to increase billionaire profits, Trump is dismantling regulations and slashing the federal government to the bone, purging bureaucrats who will get in his way, and replacing them with loyalists. Trump’s tariffs on allies like Mexico and Canada are part of U.S. imperialism’s need to assert dominance on every front at once, even within the U.S. bloc. But this strategy is rife with risk: nearly every mainstream economist is warning of the danger of tipping the entire global economy into recession. And punishing allies could provoke weakening of the bloc, defections, or a degree of disintegration.

Trump doesn’t fear collateral damage with his shock and awe tactics. So long as he can spin a few victories that project strength, in the

Trump is throwing everything at the wall, both to disorient and Inter-Imperialist Conflict In order to understand Trump it is impor- show his strength. tant to know that we have entered a new era of capitalism. The ruling classes of the major Not all of it needs imperialist powers could no longer maintain the neoliberal model of globalization as their to stick in order to interests began to more sharply diverge.

They are now increasingly forced into direct competition (militarily, if necessary) for con- help accomplish trol over markets and production in different parts of the world. As a result, two rival blocs his and the U.S. have emerged, led by the U.S. and China, in a battle for who will dominate the world and ruling class’s its resources.

But the U.S. and China are also both imperialist powers in decline, in an era of capitalist bigger goals. crisis more intense and existential than this

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The ruling classes of the world were scared by the global revolts of 2019 and 2020, including the historic George Floyd protests, and did not want to risk a repeat. This process initiated the ruling class’s hard ideological shift to the right, including their acceptance of right-wing parties which had once been considered too risky for their preferred method of rule, bourgeois democracy.

Trump’s willingness to undermine the resurgent U.S. labor movement is to the delight of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who can now use every means to crush unionization drives at their companies without the interference of the more pro-worker National Labor Relations Board appointed by Biden.

Trump’s scapegoating of marginalized communities aims to ramp up nationalism and social control in the preparation for war, and redirect the blame that actually belongs to capitalism—a system unable to solve the key problems workers and young people face. Trump’s insidious insistence that immigrants constitute an “invasion” at the border, and that transgender people are a danger to women and girls, both instills in his base a siege mentality and justifies the strengthened role of the state.

Under the pressure from social movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and others of the last decade that the ruling class was forced to at least acknowledge that oppression exists, even though their “solutions” were hollow corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that would never be able to address the real roots of oppression.

Still, Trump’s effortless crushing of DEI is an attack on those movements, which were already deep in retreat. Using DEI as a catch-all term, Trump is attacking basic protections against discrimination and gains won over decades.

Triumphant, the capitalist class with Trump at the helm will continue to use sexism, racism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression to keep workers divided and demoralized.

Trump and the U.S. ruling class won’t stop at trans people or DEI—they intend to attack all of the gains made by movements in previous decades, including Medicaid and Social Security, the right to collective bargaining, the right to gay marriage, the right to abortion, antidiscrimination laws, and more.

So What Do We Do? The system of “checks and balances” in the government, the supposed guardrails of U.S. democracy, and especially the Democratic Party have been a pathetic, ineffective resistance to Trump. Trump is not shy about breaking the law, and the courts are struggling to keep up. Some of his measures have been blocked for now, but it remains to be seen if Trump will accept decisions that don’t go his way. He already led the first attempted coup in the U.S. in decades, and given the scale of his illegal, unconstitutional actions, we may be seeing the beginning of something much more dangerous.

The Democrats’ response to Trump’s onslaught of attacks has been, “we have no coherent message.” They will never put up an effective fight against Trump—the Democrats are terrified of mobilizing the mass working-class movements that would be necessary to defeat Trump’s attacks because that movement could be turned against the capitalist system itself, which the Democratic Party exists to protect.

With every passing day, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that no one in the establishment is coming to save us. But the history of this country is one of titanic working-class struggles that have put up serious challenges to right-wing figures like Trump and the entire ruling class. We can’t forget that the federal right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade was won under the reactionary Nixon presidency as a result of the historic mass movements of the 1970s.

Trump’s success or failure depends on whether there is an organized force that can point the way forward to a future actually worth living in and fighting for—a future without war, where we aren’t pawns in imperialist chess games, and we have what we need because it’s no longer being hoarded by the billionaires.

We have no choice but to fight. In early February, tens of thousands of immigrants, alongside U.S.-born workers and youth, took to the streets across the country against Trump’s mass deportations. Educators across the country are refusing to let ICE into their schools and defending their trans students. These actions are an inspiring start, but it will take a lot more to defeat Trump’s dangerous, and ultimately deadly, agenda.

We need to build on these actions and link our struggles together to build organizations with democratic structures, and to organize for a new workers’ party to fight for the things all workers need. We need working-class solidarity in the face of a system that tries at all costs to keep us divided, because right now the ruling class knows our potential strength better than we do.J

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FIGHTING THE RIGHT

JESADA JITPRAPHAKHAN, LOS ANGELES It’s hard to look at today’s war-torn world and come away with any confidence in the system that brought us to this point. Under global capitalism today, poverty abounds, while banks post record profits and the rich get richer. Climate change facilitates the spread of apocalyptic wildfires. Capitalist nations wage bloody wars, and workers and the poor always pay. Trump’s anti-worker, chauvinistic agenda creates a useful smokescreen for capitalism, scapegoating immigrants and trans people for many of our problems that capitalism can’t solve.

The corporate Democrats put up little resistance because they’ve got no solutions either.

In reality, Trump’s second term is the latest symptom of the decay of capitalism, a system claiming that, powered by its engine of competition and profit-seeking, it can provide us the best of possible worlds. It certainly cannot.

To overcome both Trump and the conditions that created him, we need a strategy that roots our struggle today in the ambitious fight for an entirely new system. We need to fight for socialism.

What Is Socialism?

Karl Marx famously summed up the ultimate aim of socialist society with the slogan “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” This condition is clearly incompatible with capitalism, under which billions of people live with basic needs unmet. For a society to even be capable of guaranteeing a high standard of living for all people, it needs an advanced level of productive capacity from which it can supply an abundance of high quality goods and services.

The truth is, capitalism has this potential— especially in the most developed countries. So what’s stopping capitalism from providing “to each according to their needs”? The answer is simple: the reins of production are held firmly by a tiny ruling class of capitalists, and as a general rule, they operate only to maximize their own profits.

Socialism is a system built on completely different foundations. Most critically, the ownership and direction of all the major companies are wrested from the grip of the capitalists and taken into the hands of the working class as a whole—that is, all of us who under capitalism must make a wage to survive. Profit as a motive

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becomes obsolete: when industry is owned by all of society, there is simply no space for a small room of shareholders to make decisions that line their pockets. In place of free market competition, we organize a planned economy, making decisions democratically about how to use our resources to fully address the needs of working people.

In this way, the full potential of humanity will be unleashed to do things it never could because it simply wasn’t profitable: medical research would reach new heights and sustainable energy production and distribution would be accelerated. High-quality healthcare, education, housing, clean water, and healthy food would be available to all. The waste of military production, planned obsolescence, and inefficient supply chains would be eliminated. By sharing out the work in society with

by the ruling capitalist class—this is plainest to see in electoral politics, where racist voter suppression is rampant while corporations and the rich can spend near-unlimited sums on politicians to do their bidding instead of ours.

Socialism would institute genuine democracy in the workplace and in all of society, where elected committees would make decisions about day-to-day operations and how our communities run. To maintain accountability, anyone elected to such a body would make no more than their coworkers, and would be subject to recall by majority vote.

All forms of oppression—racism, sexism, xenophobia, and more—have their root in class society. Each has a different history, but each was introduced by the ruling class to strengthen their control of the unequal system they presided over. All oppressions infuse division within the working class, which the capitalists rely on to hamstring united fightback by the workers. By doing away with class rule, socialism eliminates the basis for oppression to exist. To be clear, prejudice will not vanish instantly upon the dawn of socialism. But as want, inequality, and desperation are eliminated from society, the groundwork is laid for oppression to melt away. In the movement to fight the right today, we must constantly struggle to overcome prejudice among the working class, because without doing so, we’ll fail to forge maximum possible unity. But if capitalism remains intact, so too will oppression.

In reality, Trump’s second term is the latest symptom of the decay of capitalism, a system claiming that, powered by its engine of competition and profit-seeking, it can The Best Fight Against Trump Is provide us the best The Fight For Socialism of possible worlds. It The next several years in the U.S. could prove devastating for working people, unless certainly cannot. we organize and push back against Trump’s the unemployed and implementing automation for the benefit of workers, the work week would be easily reduced for everyone with no loss in pay. Freed up to live better, we’d have more time for creative endeavors, developing more fulfilling relationships, and participating actively in the running of society.

We’re told that our society is a democracy.

But the workplace under capitalism is absolutely a dictatorship, run by bosses and managers whose specialties are cutting corners, keeping workers in line, and making money. The real experts in each workplace are the workers themselves, who know how the job could be improved if money was no object. In the rest of our lives, too, democracy is intentionally limited

agenda. His right populist ideas, however, do undeniably appeal to some layers of workers.

But fundamentally, right populism torpedoes solidarity and keeps workers divided. It decries the billionaires, but ultimately keeps them in the driver’s seat.

The fight against Trump must at the same time undermine the basis for his appeal. While some workers have hope that Trump will deliver the improvements to working-class life that he promised, in the longer run he will not succeed—he is a capitalist after all. While remaining steadfast in our opposition to right-wing ideas, socialists offer an alternative political pathway for the class anger that Trump cynically tapped into, based on the collective power of the working class.

Our struggle for socialism cannot be confined to the borders of this country. Capitalism is desperate and decaying worldwide, and the rise of the far right is a global phenomenon. In France, Germany, and many other countries, support for the status quo political “center” has collapsed, and without a strong socialist movement to draw a class line, layers of workers have rallied to far-right parties. The growth of the right is a threat to the potential for unity and the hard-earned gains of the working class everywhere, and we need an international socialist movement to fight it.

Fighting For Socialism Today As Trump bombards us with a nonstop barrage of attacks, it may appear futile to fight for socialism today. On what timeline can we even conceive of winning socialism? And shouldn’t we focus on defending against the worst of Trump’s attacks? Regardless of how far away socialism seems, socialists have the strategy needed to win working-class victories. In fact, socialists make the best fighters against Trump and the right wing specifically because we hold constant the goal of socialism as our north star.

To win socialism, we’ll need a united, mass working-class movement conscious of its ability to stop production, shut down the system, and force the capitalist class to its knees. Every struggle socialists wage—whether it’s against the deportation of undocumented immigrants or attacks on trans rights—we wage with this in mind. We raise demands that draw the connection between each specific fight and the interests of the working class as a whole, and that trace the inextricable root of the problem to capitalism. We call for methods of struggle, like strikes and walkouts, that imbue the movement with an understanding of its own power and that require it to get organized. We advocate for independent working-class leadership, because history tells us that the capitalist class, often through the Democratic Party, will try to blunt the struggle and run it into the ground.

Liberals don’t think like this, because they don’t want system change. Democrats, when they’re not busy bending the knee to Trump, will pick their battles and confine them to the courts and the Capitol. If they do hold rallies, they’ll largely be for show and will never raise a call to action. Democrats fear an empowered mass movement that they can’t control, and that’s exactly why their methods fall short. It’s up to socialists to stoke the flames of struggle to their full potential.J

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IMMIGRANT JUSTICE

MILWAUKEE SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, teachers, immigrants, and socialists are fighting back against a far-right principal and Trump’s mass deportation agenda. On January 24, a Socialist Alternative member got up on stage at a live music show holding a QR code above her head, appealing for petition signatures. The petition was in support of Alondra Garcia, a public school teacher being targeted by her principal for standing up for her immigrant students, and for being a known activist and leader in her workplace. Her principal, Fritz Blandón, had placed a disciplinary note in her file and given her a one-day unpaid suspension that was set for less than a week away.

Five days later, on the day of her suspension, the petition had over 4,000 signatures. At 8:30 that morning, nearly 100 people gathered outside Allenfield Elementary to hear Ms. Garcia speak about the fight to protect her immigrant students against ICE raids. The goal was to send a message to Principal Blandón that working people, students, teachers, immigrants, and socialists would not back down in the fight against Trump’s rightwing agenda and Blandón’s attempt to implement it in his school.

As the petition created in Ms. Garcia’s defense says: “All Alondra Garcia did was what the school administrators should have done in the first place - providing information about legal services available to families potentially facing deportation. All MPS schools are supposed to be covered by the Safe Haven program to do all possible to protect students and families from ICE raids…

Principal Blandón at Allen-Field School has gone beyond placing an unjustified statement in Ms. Garcia’s file, towards a one day unpaid suspension scheduled for 1/29, charging that she sent a “political” message. The second charge supposedly leading to this escalation is her asking for voluntary donations from parents for our unhoused neighbors!”

In the days after Socialist Alternative, alongside Milwaukee Public School (MPS) teachers and Alondra herself, launched the petition, it was discovered that principal Blandón is not only a rabid Trump-supporter, but a proud and self-proclaimed bigot. His Facebook profile, which has since been scrubbed clean, was plastered with pro-Trump images and memes, including one where he bragged about showing off “all the bigot badges” the left had given him.

Principal Blandón is the principal of a grade school where roughly 80% of the students are

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Latino, operating in one of the most heavily segregated cities in the country. He is one of many who feels emboldened by Trump’s antiimmigrant agenda to attack brave teacheractivists like Ms. Garcia and her union.

determined that since Ms. Garcia’s suspension was set to occur in just 2 days, we needed to rapidly organize a protest outside her school during morning drop-off, with speakers including Alondra herself, talking about what the movement to defend immigrants against the right-wing attacks needed to do next.

“by all legal means available.” The policy is a movement victory won by fighting back against Trump during his first presidency, and it provides something to build on. However, with the severity of the right-wing attacks on immigrants, we need to fight for grassroots safe-haven committees at each school made How Did The Campaign Start? up of teachers, parents, high school students, After Trump’s re-election, many working and community members that could take ownDefend Alondra Garcia— and young people are feeling demoralized at ership of the effort to protect our schools from the growth of the far-right. But we can have no Fight All Deportations!

ICE. faith in the Democratic Party on the national or We’re demanding that MPS not only let This can’t just be a fight to defend one local level, or faith in legal challenges through immigrant students and families know their teacher. We need to take the fight directly to the courts to save us. Many people have a rights, but actually distribute legal resources the right wing, the billionaire class, and the deep desire to fight back, and are just unsure to families targeted by ICE—not punish teach- hundreds of bosses and managers trying to of what they can do. So when working people ers trying to protect immigrant students! Ms. dictatorially terrorize workers across Wisand students saw a campaign to get involved Garcia’s union, Milwaukee Teachers Education consin and beyond. Socialists need to put in, many leapt at the opportunity.

Association (MTEA), needs to take the lead in forward more than just a strategy to take on Members of Voces de la Frontera, one of organizing emergency defense networks that one bad boss. We need to show how to build a broader fight against the slew of attacks coming at workers from the billionaire class and the right wing all across the country— which are being waged in the interest of shoring up nationalism, strengthening US imperialism, and making US billionaires richer. A key part of this fight will be building a more militant and democratic labor movement that can do things like not only advocate for immigrants rights in words, but also boldly take up campaigns of mass direct action and strikes in defense of immigrants and opposing all the forms of oppression inherent to the capitalist system.

Unions and immigrants’ rights organizations across Left: Alondra Garcia, teacher at Milwaukee Public Schools targeted for standing up for her immigrant students. the country need to take Right: Rally of over 100 people to defend Ms. Garcia outside of her school. up similar opportunities to advance the struggle against the largest immigrants’ rights organizations can respond to raids in our schools & commu- Trump’s attacks. In order to be effective this in the country, took real ownership of build- nity with mass direct action to fight against all struggle needs to be waged independent of ing support for the petition, which has been attacks on immigrants. Under pressure from the Democratic Party, which has never been critical to the success of the campaign. Immi- the widespread community solidarity, the on the side of immigrants. Workers, young grants’ rights organizations need to be taking MTEA did send out a statement in support of people, and all those who support the fight of up these types of fights all over the country. Ms. Garcia, but unions need to be at the fore- immigrants and are against the divide-and-rule Socialist Alternative members attended a large front of fighting against these divide-and-rule oppression of the capitalist class need a new assembly called by Voces where we were able tactics. mass left workers’ party. This would also be the to reach hundreds of immigrant workers and The petition has been an excellent organiz- most effective tool to fight to win immediate young people who not only signed, but sent it to ing tool that helped us spread the word about and unconditional full citizenship rights for all their families, friends, neighbors, and cowork- the campaign to defend Ms. Garcia, but it has immigrants, along with a $25 an hour national ers, explaining why they needed to sign. also been critical to broaden the campaign minimum wage, rent control, free healthcare, At the beginning of the second day of beyond attacks against Alondra. Trump 2.0 and free high-quality education from preschool launching the petition we had 400 signatures, will pose a serious threat to immigrants, and through college!J and by the end of that day the number of sig- we can’t just afford to wait and see what hapnatures was in the thousands and growing rap- pens. We need to get organized around a plan idly. The next day, we built the petition at a to defend immigrants from deportations, startleft-wing church and a rally protesting Trump’s ing now. inauguration.

We’re now organizing to strengthen and Socialist Alternative then hosted a public enforce the current Safe Haven policy—under meeting three days after the petition was which Milwaukee Public Schools has vowed launched. At our meeting, we democratically to oppose ICE actions on school grounds

Sign the petition in solidarity!

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US VS. THEM

Billionaires Blast-Off While Climate Change Wrecks the World LEAH STEVENS, CINCINNATI “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great— and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future...”

No, that isn’t a Matthew McConaughey line from the 2014 film Interstellar, where he blasted off into space to find a planet to plant a space colony as the Earth was ravaged by climate change. That is the delusional warm welcome to the SpaceX website, run by right-wing multi-billionaire Elon Musk. When Musk isn’t busy being the world’s biggest internet troll and a vicious transphobe, he’s fantasizing about the future of “space tourism” and bankrolling rocket launches to make it happen. That’s right, for around the low, low price of $55 million, you too can take Musk’s SpaceX ship to enjoy a 10-minute spacewalk!

Down here on Earth, working people are forced to face reality. For us, there is no “planet B”—there are devastating fires, floods, and storms. While Trump gets ready to “drill, baby drill” so the rich can get richer, his new sidekick Musk aspires toward building a Mars space colony.

Musk’s space toys are not only a future escape button to climate disaster, but actively contributing to it.

The EPA fined SpaceX over $150,000 in September for rockets discharging waste into drinking water. That’s only 0.000035% of Musk’s $425.2 billion fortune, and he’s happy to pay it again and again to keep making money. Less than 10% of Musk’s wealth could rebuild the destruction in North Carolina caused by the horrific Hurricane Helene earlier this year.

When the worst of climate change hits, the billionaires will either blast off or burrow in their fortified bunkers. Billionaire space travel, while preposterous-sounding, is not an anomaly. It’s the insanity and savagery of capitalism itself. We urgently need to overthrow the system that gives billionaires the liberty to toy with our lives for their own pleasures and profits.J

VARUN BELUR, PHILADELPHIA Surrounded by billionaires and politicians, the world’s richest man delivered a Nazi salute from the stage at Trump’s second inauguration. Call it a sign of the times. Extreme capitalist crisis and decay have opened the door for cretins like Elon Musk to gain unprecedented political power as the ruling class moves decisively to the right. Musk, a rabidly anti-union billionaire, poses a unique danger to working people as Trump’s right-hand man. First and foremost, his goal is to extend the influence of his corporations and increase his profits. Since the election, his personal wealth has increased by $150 billion—a tidy return on his $277 million donation to the Trump campaign.

Musk sat shoulder-to-shoulder at Trump’s inauguration with some of the most powerful tech bosses. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the CEOs of Google, Apple, TikTok and other corporations had prime seats, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had to watch from an overflow room.

Big Tech CEOs aren’t capitulating to Trump—they see Trump as an opportunity to liquidate regulations, bust unions and crush their rivals, particularly in China, where competitors have been keeping pace with or even exceeding U.S. technology. For example, DeepSeek, the AI chatbot that wiped $1 trillion from the U.S. stock market, is now being restricted by Trump.

The Trump administration, more than any previous government, will intervene nakedly on the side of Big Tech because of its decisive role in carrying out U.S. imperialism’s agenda.

“You Furnish The Pictures, I’ll Furnish The War” Musk’s role in politics echoes that of the Gilded Age tycoons.

The robber barons of the late 19th century bought and sold politicians with impunity. These capitalists manipulated world events directly from

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the halls of power to fill their own pockets.

William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, infamously manufactured the pretext for the Spanish-American War by instructing a photographer stationed in Cuba: “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

The railroads were the most critical industry for American capitalism in Hearst’s day, and as a result, were the center of corruption. Today, that role in the U.S. economy is played by the tech and defense industries— so it’s no surprise that Elon Musk, of all billionaires, is playing the main role in Trump’s administration.

Musk’s SpaceX is one of the most critical links in U.S. imperialism’s arsenal.

Today, SpaceX provides internet access to the Ukrainian military in U.S. imperialism’s ongoing proxy war with Russian imperialism.

The U.S. military also relies on SpaceX to launch nearly all its combat satellites and has awarded the corporation over $2.5 billion in government contracts. Trump has quickly moved to dismantle all regulation over SpaceX since entering office. Now Musk, a man more known for blowing up rockets than his commitment to safety, wields de facto control over the Federal Aviation Administration after forcing out its former head. In an age of deepening imperialist war, Musk and SpaceX stand to make record profits under Trump.

Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, is also a decisive part of U.S. imperialism’s broader agenda. To effectively confront Chinese imperialism, U.S. capitalists must dominate the production and distribution of key commodities that are central to high-tech manufacturing. These include lithium, rare earth metals and semiconductors. Tesla is a key player in all these industries. Tesla’s role in the fight between U.S. and Chinese imperialism for global dominance is complicated, however, by the reality of its dependence on China for manufacturing and a large part of its sales. But at the end of the day, Tesla and Musk will be brought to heel to serve the long-term aims of U.S. imperialism, even at a high price.

Make Germany Great Again?

Ahead of elections in Germany this month, Elon Musk is busy stumping for the neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant AfD party. Musk spoke at the party’s campaign launch, calling on it to “protect the German people” and for Germany

to “move on” from the remembrance of the Holocaust. This was on the very same day that Auschwitz was liberated, 80 years ago.

Beyond his own personal bigotry, there’s a reason Musk flirts with far-right ideas. Germany is a crucial country for Musk. It is home to his $5.5 billion Tesla “gigafactory” that employs 12,000 workers who have fought for union recognition for two years. Musk wants to expand this factory over the fierce opposition of locals. Should an AfD government come to power, Musk hopes to use it to force through the factory expansion and break the back of the union—just as he will use his influence in Trump’s government to threaten the U.S. labor movement.

Europe, and Germany in particular, is a crucial market for electric vehicles, and Musk is determined to grab every inch of it.

In 2024, Tesla sales fell by 13% in the EU, largely because of the end of EV subsidies and tariffs on Tesla vehicles manufactured in China. Musk hopes that an EV-hostile AfD regime will make it easier for him to crush his competition and monopolize the market, just as he hopes to do in the U.S. But above all, he wants to use the AfD to slash taxes, regulations and worker protections.

No More Billionaires!

There is no world where an ideology that serves the needs of Elon Musk can benefit the rest of us. All of Musk’s political projects—whether it’s his union-busting, hatemongering anti-trans attacks or his ruthless calls for mass deportations—serve one aim: growing his own wealth and power. Unlike white supremacists like Steve Bannon, he supports issuing more H1-B visas for highly skilled, but precariously employed, tech worker immigrants who are paid less than native-born workers. But this is based on Musk’s assessment of what is necessary to win the technological war against Chinese imperialism, not out of a rejection of nationalism or xenophobia. By fomenting toxic nationalist ideas and a rigid conception of gender that supports them, Musk accelerates the drive towards war which workers will pay for with our lives.

The working class must stand against divide-and-rule attacks that scapegoat trans people, immigrants and other oppressed groups to make the rich richer. We need to rip the populist cloak off these poisonous right-wing ideas which primarily serve to justify and reinforce the drive to war of the ruling class. Unions and working people internationally have the same enemy. The labor movement needs to join forces with the oppressed to decisively halt Musk’s attacks.

We need a new party of our own that isn’t backed by billionaires and corporations. And, ultimately we need mass struggle against the system that continually brings billionaires to power—capitalism.J

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IMPERIALISM

ELAN AXELBANK, BOSTON “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

“America’s decline is over.”

“Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation.”

If anybody thought that egotistical imperial machinations were only a thing of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, they need look no further than Trump’s inauguration speech. Like a Prussian monarch who believed in the divine right of kings, Trump spoke pompously and unapologetically of an expansionist agenda designed to aggressively assert the interests of US capitalism and imperialism across the world.

Since winning the election, Trump has repeatedly talked about annexing Greenland, retaking control of the Panama canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, making Canada the 51st state, turning the name of the highest peak in North America, Denali, back to Mount McKinley, and pursuing “manifest destiny into the stars” by planting the US flag on Mars.

With talk like this, Trump seeks to send a message to US imperialism’s rivals and allies alike that he means business. To his other target audience, the American people, it is an age-old capitalist tactic: drive nationalist propaganda into the minds of ordinary people in order to construct an ideological justification for imperialist expansion, which serves the ruling class and the ruling class only.

Importantly, Trump’s claims to Greenland and the Panama Canal are no different than Putin’s claim to Ukraine or Xi Jinping’s claim to Taiwan and the South China Sea. Despite Trump’s best efforts to conceal this basic fact, “America First” has never meant that working-class Americans come first. It means

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world are disgusted by the arrogance with which Trump talks about “buying” Greenland, a country whose people should have the same right to self-determination as those of any country. In fact, a recent poll shows that 85% of Greenlanders don’t want to become part of the US. Even worse, Trump recently refused to rule out using military means to seize control of the country Regardless of the exact form that US subjugation of Greenland would take, what’s clear is this: it won’t be native Greenlanders who benefit. US imperialism will drill for every last drop of oil, mine every last critical mineral it can find, and prepare for military confrontaDonald Trump Jr. visits Greenland on the Trump jet. tion, all toward the goal of improving its position in that American capitalism, and by extension the inter-imperialist bloc American imperialism, come first. conflict. Without a mass international antiTrump 2.0 will plunge us even deeper into war movement, culminating in a revolutionary the new era, one dominated by the conflict challenge in the main imperialist countries, it’s between the two imperialist blocs led by the US the planet and the international working class and China. It is a conflict in which the working that will suffer. class of no country has any vested interest, and simultaneously one which only the interPanama Canal national working class is capable of stopping.

For the same essential reasons Trump wants Greenland, he also wants the US to retake conGreenland trol of the Panama Canal: to weaken the ChinaMike Waltz, Trump’s new National Security led imperialist bloc and secure a better deal Advisor, explained very clearly why the new for US capitalism and imperialism. administration wants to take control of Greenland. “This is about the Arctic,” Waltz said. “You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic… This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security.”

21st-century Greenland is a dream for profit-hungry capitalists and imperialism.

As the polar ice caps melt due to capitalism-caused global warming, opportunities for fossil fuel extraction are opening up in completely new parts of the world, like Greenland and the surrounding area.

Beyond the region’s natural resources, the melting ice opens up global shipping routes through the Arctic Ocean, creating new outlets for global trade. Not to mention the fact that the shortest distance from the continental US to Russia is over Every year, 13,000 ships carrying approxithe North Pole, making control over the country mately 500 million tons of goods pass through an important consideration militarily. Hence the Panama Canal—a full 5-6% of all global the early warning radar system that the US mili- maritime trade. Over 70% of containers passtary already has stationed in the northwest of ing through the canal are either heading to or Greenland. leaving a US port, making the US its biggest Millions of ordinary people around the

user, with China a distant second. The 51-mile long canal was built on land seized by US imperialism in 1904 but, since the canal’s return to Panama in 1999, has been controlled by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), a Panamanian government agency.

Control over the canal means charging ships entry fees (revenue from the canal totaled 4% of Panama’s GDP last year), including the ability to adjust fees for political reasons. This could mean favoring countries in one imperialist bloc with lower prices and raising prices on those associated with the other bloc, or using the threat of increasing passage fees as a weapon in negotiations and inter-imperialist conflict like Trump is doing with tariffs.

While an actual US military invasion of Panama is highly unlikely at this stage, Trump’s sharp rhetoric is designed to keep other governments—foes and allies alike—on their toes, giving new proportions to Richard Nixon’s “madman theory.” It’s also possible he is “starting high” in an effort to force the Panamanian government to accept a deal that, while falling short of full US control over the canal, would still secure US imperialism a vastly stronger position and give China a significantly weaker one.

Once Again, Socialist Or Barbarism?

As shocking as Trump’s rhetoric may be, it’s important to understand that the essence of his approach is neither new nor unique to Trump, though of course he adds his own Trumpist spin. Imperialism is an inevitable byproduct of capitalism and it would be a major mistake for the workers’ movement or the left to underestimate just how far the inter-imperialist bloc conflict can go in this new era. Some may think that the time when imperialist nations fought over how the world was divided up is over. But so long as capitalism exists, nations will compete for the division, redivision, and re-division again, of the world according to the needs of their own capitalist classes.

From Ukraine to Taiwan, to Greenland, Panama, the Middle East, and ever-more countries and territories in every corner of the globe, the great power competition over the imperialist plunder of the world is once again reaching gruesome proportions. As International Socialist Alternative has commented: “Today’s conflict is a battle for world domination between two imperialist blocs which can only end in the decisive victory of one side or the ruination of both. The only way to prevent a global war in the long run is socialist revolution within the camps.

Put even more succinctly, as Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg explained over 100 years ago during the First World War, humanity faces a crossroads between “socialism or barbarism.” The re-entry of Trump onto center stage in the inter-imperialist bloc conflict makes this warning even more true today.J

So long as capitalism exists, nations will compete for the division, re-division, and re-division again, of the world according to the needs of their own capitalist classes.

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encouraged the Ku Klux Klan, a reactionary mass movement involving millions of white people, and systematically crushed the limited economic and political gains Black people had made after slavery. Many Black working people fled the South, but were met with the grueling reality that racism and exploitation was present in Northern cities, albeit in a different form.

The Russian Revolution &The Role Of Black Socialists

B

lack History Month is different this year.

Trump’s rants about “diversity hires” and vision of a “color-blind” America are attacks on Black workers, 1 of 5 of whom work in the public sector. Schools are being threatened with defunding if they educate children about the reality of racial oppression of Black people or support transgender students. Social services such as Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing are facing the chopping block by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by a billionaire who salutes like a nazi, Elon Musk.

The Democrats cannot, and will not, defeat the growing far-right danger building up in the U.S. Black people have always faced tremendous odds in this country. It’s crucial that working people, youth, and activists look to the actual history of the Black liberation movement—it’s a history in which a key role was played by Black socialists, Marxists, and union organizers who realized the fight against racism could only be won by a multiracial movement against all capitalist exploitation. By examining this history, we can obtain key lessons about the way forward to defeat Trump and the system which spawns disgusting, racist creatures like him—capitalism.

Marxism & Black Liberation Black people have been in a class struggle ever since the arrival of the first African indentured and enslaved servants in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The enslavement of African Americans was rooted in the expansion of profits of the colonial elite. Black people fought against slavery ever since that moment in various forms—running away, refusing to work, launching slave rebellions, and spreading strategies to defeat the Southern slavocracy. Trailblazing figures such as Federick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth heroically took on slavery and anti-Black oppression by organizing a mass movement of abolitionism.

They fought not only to eliminate slavery, but for the abolishment of all forms of racial discrimination.

Standing alongside these famous Black figures are Karl Marx and Federick Engels. Marx and Engels repeatedly talked about the necessity of the

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emancipation of the Black worker. They were leading activists in England during the U.S. Civil War, when the Southern states tried to bribe the British and French governments to support the Confederacy in exchange for the continuation of cotton trade, which was under a Union naval blockade. Marx and Engels helped organize mass rallies of workers in the clothing industry in England that relied on cotton to stand against any support for the Confederacy.

Marx went beyond simply supporting the struggle of Black people because of injustice. Marx and Engels understood that the enslavement of African Americans was essential to the formation of the capitalist system, meaning not only that Black slaves needed to be emancipated, but that the power to overthrow the international system rested in the hands of workers and the oppressed, including Black people. For Marxists, the struggle for Black liberation inherently means the struggle against the foundations of international capitalism.

After Emancipation, Black activists began to come up against the reality that political rights alone could not win Black liberation—not without economic power. Some, like Booker T. Washington, looked to helping unskilled former slaves join the skilled, industrial working class as the key to liberation. Others like W.E.B Dubois drew more radical conclusions about liberation, but looked to education as the way forward. Hundreds of thousands of former slaves entered political life by building schools, co-ops, and political parties; and in general, drew increasingly radical conclusions about the next steps for the struggle.

The dawn of the 20th century saw massive developments for Black people as a whole. The Civil War had been the culmination of a revolutionary process to abolish slavery, but the exploitation of Black people continued in a different form. Wall Street made an alliance with the former slave owners of the South to ensure that they could exploit Black working people to an absurd degree. Former Black slaves were forced to either work poorly paid jobs or trapped in sharecropping.

The planter class and the Democratic Party

In 1917, the world was stunned by the Russian Revolution. The Russian working class pulled off what was once thought impossible—overthrowing capitalism and imperialism. The leaders of this mass movement were the Bolsheviks, who were led by electrifying leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. They firmly shouted the slogan, “Workers of the world and the oppressed, unite!”

These revolutionary socialists fought against many forms of oppression because Tsarist Russia had subjugated a wide variety of ethnic minorities who faced oppression from the majority Russians, and the Bolsheviks understood the need to unite working people by defending their right to self-determination and equal rights. After the victory of the Russian Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks formed the Communist International (Comintern) to fan the flames of revolution around the world. The Comintern stressed the absolute requirement for American communists to drop any racist prejudice, and to jump into the struggle for Black liberation by organizing alongside them.

Many Black activists were attracted to the Russian Revolution because it immediately followed through on its promise of self-determination of oppressed peoples. This led to the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood, an organization of Black American communists who argued against Black nationalism on the one hand, and liberalism on the other. They put forward the need to organize across racial lines.

Black nationalism puts forward the idea that integration is a pipe dream—Black people need to segregate from all other races, especially white people, and create a Black nation. Black nationalists proclaim pro-capitalist ideas, such as creating a Black capitalist class through Black workers buying exclusively at Black-owned businesses. Others may put forward a “return to Africa” approach in the belief that African capitalism is more culturally compatible with the consciousness of Black Americans.

Liberalism is an ideology that believes capitalism is a natural system that is overall a net positive, and its crises are more due to accidental events as opposed to systemic contradictions. Liberal civil rights organizations believe that capitalism can therefore be adjusted

to allow Black peop and eliminate racism for all social woes.

Both of these ph capitalism require oppressed working and gender. Creatin solve this problem, the character of cap From 1917 to the of Black workers join it actually fought for multiracial, desegre American Federatio against Jim/Jane Cr Mass campaign people from the un the campaign to de were wrongly convic white women. Blac alongside the NAA rights organizations limitations of libera tiquing from the side struggling for farthe that inspired millio including liberal NA

Millions of Black reality they were for new mass organiza Garvey’s Black Nat and liberal civil righ Communist Par building multi-racia determination in fig united struggle by a the United Auto Wo trial Organization (C workers in the mid-1 The CIO raised t Black workers. The ists played a key rol the mass struggles 1960s and early 19 Unfortunately, t trous impact on the

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hilosophies ignore the reality that es the existence of an exploited, class that is divided between race ng a separate Black nation doesn’t nor do reforms ultimately change pitalism as a racist system. e early 1930’s, tens of thousands ned the Communist Party because r Black liberation. They organized egated unions at a time when the on of Labor (AFL) failed to struggle row. ns were launched to defend Black njust U.S. judicial system such as efend the Scottsboro Boys, who cted of the rape of two ck workers organized ACP and liberal civil s. They rejected the al politics, not by crielines, but by actively er-reaching demands ons of Black people, AACP organizers.

k people began to realize the cruel rced to live in, and began to create ations of struggle such as Marcus tionalist organization, the UNIA, hts organizations like the NAACP. rty activists played a key role in al labor unions in the 1930s. Their ghting racism as part of building a all workers was key to the victory of orkers and the Congress of IndusCIO) in organizing manufacturing 1930s, many of whom were Black. the living standards of millions of e CIO and Black trade union activle in determining the character of s for Civil Rights in the late 1950s, 970s. the rise of Stalinism had a disase Communist Party’s direct role in

FEBRUARY 2025

the Black liberation struggle. Rather than focusing on the main demands of the movement, Stalin pointed to Black nationalism and a separate Black nation as the main demand.

The Communist Party began to campaign for Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, since he was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt was silent on the systematic discrimination of Black people in the United States. This confused many Black members and many ultimately left the Communist Party out of disgust and betrayal.

FREEDOM NOW — Socialists & The Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s was a mass movement that was planned and carried out by Black working-class activists who orga-

nized direct actions, popular boycotts and mass protests. Civil Rights leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks are often rightly cited as gigantic figures of justice, and are still seen as legendary Black activists. However, what is often left out is the fact that many of these Black Civil Rights leaders either were socialists, or worked extremely closely with socialists.

The story of Rosa Parks is often told as though one day she got “fed-up” and refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This is actually far from the truth! Rosa Parks was an active NAACP organizer, and the entire famous civil disobedience of that moment was planned as a single action in a larger mass movement. Rosa Parks and other Civil Rights activists learned tactics of mass civil disobedience from union and socialist organizers. For example, not many know that Rosa Parks attended organizing camps with union organizers and communists, such as the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

What’s even less well-known about Rosa Parks was that her husband was involved in the Scottsboro Boys campaign, organized by the Communist Party.

Rosa Parks got involved in politics first by campaigning alongside Communist Party members! This shows that socialists have a key role to play in creating strategies to fight racial oppression, and can radicalize many Black working people to struggle both for democratic

rights and against the system of capitalism. and eventually Barack Obama was elected as the first Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., toward the Black president of the United States. But Obama end of their lives, were both increasingly convinced raised the expectation of millions of Black people that capitalism didn’t have answers for Black working only to oversee the Great Recession’s decimation of people. Malcolm X broke from the Black national- Black communities. The Black Lives Matter moveist Nation of Islam, and began to build international ment, because it was co-opted by the Democratic solidarity among all oppressed people. This clarified Party, failed to win material gains, and Trump’s victory that capitalism is a system of oppression, which uses is in part the result. racism to keep people divided. He began to have meetings with socialist organizations, such as the Socialist Where Do We Go From Here?

Workers Party. He famously proclaimed about the The Black working class has watched countless need for worldwide revolution uniting working people Black people fall into one of three allotments in life: around the world in his later speeches.

Years of fighting for Civil Rights also radicalized poverty, prison, or early death. Ruling elites are frightfigures like Martin Luther King Jr. He stood against ened by the immense anger this has caused in U.S. the complete surrender of the liberal civil rights orga- society—not just among Black people—and they are nizations to the Democrats after the passage of the terrified of the potential for workers of different races Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. He spoke out to fight together in solidarity for Black liberation and against the Vietnam war, and said plainly that “the the liberation of the entire working class. The George greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own Floyd rebellion showed just a fraction of that anger government.” King started to describe himself as a being released, and the movement drew the support “Democratic Socialist.” He founded the Poor People’s of millions of working people across all races and genCampaign to fight for unionized jobs, like sanitation ders and backgrounds. What was lacking were the workers in Memphis, and he fought for quality public working-class methods to take the struggle forward, as well as an organizational structure and democratic housing in Chicago.

MLK Jr. and Malcolm X were becoming clearer leadership to carry out the movement’s demands and threats to the whole system, and their assassinations adjust in key moments of struggle.

Black liberation is a struggle against international represented a serious defeat for the Civil Rights movement. Young Black men were being sent to die by the capitalism. Anti-Black racism is global because capthousands in Vietnam while being treated less than italism is global. Linking up with struggles in Latin human at home. The liberal civil rights organizations America, Africa, Asia, and Europe will be key in order supported the Democratic Party and focused on leg- to learn lessons and to prevent the ruling class from islation that benefited wealthier Black people rather dividing our movements. The only way to truly end than Black workers. The failures of the Civil Rights racial oppression is to defeat capitalism as a whole movement to deliver gains for ordinary Black working and to build the foundations of a socialist society. We encourage all Black workers and youth interested in people was clear.

Black activists learned through this process, and building this struggle to get involved with the Black started creating explicitly revolutionary Black socialist Caucus of Socialist Alternative today.J groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. These were • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS dynamic organizations of young Black people who sought to connect with the explosive movements around the world like in Latin America, China, and Africa. They posed such a threat that the U.S. government orchestrated an allout assault on the Black Panthers.

They were a threat mainly because of their revolutionary socialist politics, and their clear call for a multiracial, multi-gender working class revolution.

The ruling class used the carrot and the stick to snuff out the revolutionary potential of these groups.

They assassinated Fred Hampton when he was 21 years old, and chased others, like Assata Shakur, into exile. At the same time, the ruling class opened up the Democratic Party to a new generation of Black politicians, on the condition that they defended U.S. capitalism. @blackcaucus_socialistalt There were historic gains won as a result of the Civil Rights movement, SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS • SA BLACK CAUCUS

ple to climb the economic ladder m. Integration is seen as a panacea

Join the Black Caucus of Socialist Alternative for a public zoom meeting!

BLACK LIBERATION & THE ROLE OF SOCIALISM

THURS FEB 27

7:30 PM ET

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TRANS RIGHTS

Expressions of competition in sports under capitalism are still a reflection of the dominant ideas and interests of the ruling class, which still views the gender binary and policing women’s bodies as useful to its aims in a deeply patriarchal system. And right now, the U.S. ruling class is reasserting the ideas of the nuclear family, the nation state, and the patriarchy to whip up nationalism in an era of anti-imperialist conflict. Given the vast majority of kids who play sports never become professional athletes, the primary impact is to socially ostracize trans kids so that they go back in the closet.

TONYA ROGERS, MINNEAPOLIS The new Trump administration kicked off its MAGA rule by executive order—LGBTQ+, particularly transgender, people are near the top of their list of targets.

In less than 20 days, the onslaught of attacks against trans people—at work, at school, at the doctor’s office, and in the military—have been relentless. On day one, Trump signed an executive order declaring two binary sexes. On day 10, Trump signed an executive order banning life-saving gender-affirming care for people under age 19. On day 17, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women and girls from competing in girls’ and womens’ sports, from elementary school through college.

The Democrats haven’t fought in a meaningful way to prevent these attacks, including Congress’ first transgender representative Sarah McBride. McBride not only didn’t speak when an anti-trans sports bill was introduced in the House, but she thought it was correct to tell the New York Times that most of her Republican counterparts have been “warm and welcoming.” Eighty-one Democrats did Trump’s dirty work for him by voting to bar transgender children of military service-members from receiving gender-affirming healthcare coverage.

Why Sports?

“Defending” women’s sports is a gateway for the rightwing to make attacks on transgender people and queer people more broadly.

The right prefers that these sports bans ‘out’ young people and forces a gender-binary onto a society where transgender people ages 13-24 years old make up only ~1% of the U.S. population.

The right has used trans sports bans to take aim at dismantling public education, as a tool to cut funding based on “wokeness” and to systematically gut teachers’ unions. Trump is loyal to his billionaire buddies and therefore he will write orders to keep the working class divided and the labor movement weakened, under the guise of “protecting women and girls.”

These orders can be used beyond the scope of sports, especially if “sports” broadly encompass any school extracurriculars and programs.

These orders are really aimed at eliminating transgender people from all areas of society.

Anti-Trans Laws Don’t Protect Women & Girls In 2024, the Department of Education debated changes to Title IX despite hundreds of top women athletes and coaches fighting for gender inclusivity in the NCAA. Of the 510,000 athletes competing at the collegiate level, only about 10 publicly identify as trans.

So what is the actual barrier to accessing athletics for women, despite the “separate but equal” provisions in Title IX? It isn’t transgender people, it’s funding and priorities.

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Take Up The Fight Everywhere

Rebekah Bruesehoff, a transgender student athlete, speaking at a press conference on LGBTQ rights at the U.S. Capitol on March 8, 2023.

“​​ What’s really harming women’s sports is an overall lack of investment, whether in resources for female athletes, opportunities to coach [or] lack of pay,” said Cheryl Reeve of the WNBA. “The notion that the motivation for transgender athletes is to gain scholarships or competitive advantage is a false narrative. Trans inclusion makes our sports, our teams and our communities stronger.”

Women’s sports are fertile ground for solidarity in fights for gender inclusivity because sexism is an integral feature to the divisiveness of the capitalist system. Girls and women have always had to fight discrimination, sexual harassment, and for the basic right to athletics. While it’s not automatic, this has produced a basis of solidarity in the fight against other forms of systemic oppression, including LGBTQ+ and racial equality.

There’s no documented connection between anti-transgender laws and increased safety from abuse amongst cisgendered women and girls. Bathroom bills and anti-trans legislation have been increasing in number since 2015, the year Obergfell vs. Hodges legalized gay marriage. But allegations of sexual harassment and unprofessionalism in the National Women’s Soccer League, documented in the widely covered Yates’ report, exposed rampant misconduct at all levels of competitive women’s/girl’s soccer for at least as long, perpetrated by cisgendered men.

In fact, Terry Schilling, leader of the American Principles Project, admitted that the focus on sports was never the true goal: “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.” This phase of right-wing attacks have the clear goal of bringing legal challenge to Obergfell, to repeal gay marriage, after the right-wing’s success against Roe v. Wade.

The current Trump executive orders could genuinely mean adults looking down children’s pants to determine their teams for a recess game of flag football, a ghoulish future compared to one where trans children are allowed to play sports.

Traditional Family Values Is Capitalism’s Stalking Horse A wing of the establishment will always fight for “traditional family values” and scapegoat oppressed groups to advance their political and social agenda.

Under capitalism, the notion of a “nuclear family” or ideas of “tradition” have served the direct purpose of reproducing the working class to keep the system running in the interests of an upper, ruling class. It took mass movements of the working class to outlaw child labor. Women have been pushed into and then pulled out of the workplaces of industrialized nations based on the needs of war and capitalism. What was once viewed as ‘natural’ changed under massive upheaval of the working class.

Lawmakers frequently struggle to cite cases of transgender athletes creating fairness issues in their districts, and at best point to a few highprofile cases of trans people being successful in sports, like swimmer Lia Thomas. Debate around gender in sports often boils down to whether someone receives a competitive or category advantage; every institution has different metrics and almost all are personally invasive.

Athletes have different builds and play different roles on the field, and not every bodytype excels in every position—that’s sports.

The popularity of cis woman Ilona Meyer and the women’s rugby phenomena at the Summer 2024 Olympics is an example of this. And not every trans person wins every competition after transition.

Teachers unions need to take up a fighting approach to end sports bans, bathroom bills, and join with other unions in every venue where these bills are used to limit workplace protections. We will need to fight taxpayer money going toward persecuting our transgender coworkers and classmates. When the bosses try to enforce bans, we can take action to defend our coworkers. For example, postal workers organized with the National Association of Letter Carriers defended a trans carrier’s right to use the bathroom at work—the boss had originally offered a porta potty outside!

In NYC, thousands protested an end to trans healthcare for minors at NYU-Langone hospital, one of the leading hospitals for genderaffirming care.

We cannot rely on the Democratic Party, as an institution that has demonstrated it will not fight for trans people. We urgently need a new party that fights along class lines, and recognizes that any attacks on trans people are an attack on the working class as a whole.

The USWNT fight with US soccer for equal pay influenced the WNBA, and players in both leagues collaborated in negotiation on their collective bargaining agreement’s language on inclusivity. Players believe there’s more to be done explicitly on trans-athlete inclusion, and Trump’s latest executive orders mean reaching clarity on this is even more urgent.

Transgender people face immediate existential questions in the fight for healthcare and jobs. How many young trans people might have hurt themselves in the time between Trump’s executive order on trans healthcare and its legal blocking? We must fight for a world that allows trans people to have a full life in all facets of society. Young people need connection to thrive. Politics and movements spill into sports because they’re a venue of diversity and entertainment for society, and a platform for acts of solidarity. Socialist Alternative believes the fight for transgender people’s rights is imperative to the fight for a better world.J

Read the full article online! socialistalternative.org

LABOR MOVEMENT

TY NOLAN, PHILADELPHIA There is a trend in the U.S. labor movement today, especially since Trump’s election, to avoid politics or confrontation with the right wing for fear of alienating some union members who support parts or all of Trump’s agenda.

There can be a pressure for unions to only focus on bread-and-butter economic issues because politics is “too divisive.”

Trump wants to scapegoat immigrants and trans people for the issues facing working people today that he has no real solutions for, like inflation and flat living standards. But this is really an attack on the entire working class, meant to distract from the real culprits—the same billionaires Trump gave front-row seats at his inauguration.

Raids on workplaces with high immigrant populations, like Amazon, make it that much harder for all workers there fighting to unionize for $30/hr starting wages, 180 hours paid time off, and more. Trans bathroom bans in federal workplaces are a danger to trans workers and open the door for bosses accessing the private medical information of all workers. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is starting to carry out mass layoffs of public sector workers under the guise of “draining the swamp,” all while he and Trump joke about firing workers who dare to go on strike.

What’s divisive is Trump’s anti-worker administration, and the labor movement needs to stand united against his attacks. Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics against immigrants and trans people, his authoritarian tendencies to repress democratic rights, and the threat of global recession from his nationalist tariffs can all cut across the important gains the labor movement has made over the last few years.

Failure to meet Trump’s attacks with united working-class action will critically undermine the foundation of solidarity that will be

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necessary to win victories in the coming period, much less continue the effort of rebuilding a militant labor movement to reverse decades of retreat.

Without an organized fightback, attacks on workers will only continue and intensify, but they can be pushed back. Strikes at the Big Three auto companies, Boeing, and of longshoremen show that there is a mood to fight against the bosses, but the labor movement and its leaders need to be at the forefront of resisting Trump’s union-busting attacks.

Labor Leaders’ Response (Or Lack Thereof) To The Danger Of Trump Shawn Fain, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW), recently said, “We do not agree with Trump on much of his domestic agenda, but we do hope to find common ground on overhauling our devastating trade policies and rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.”

Just 24 hours before Trump started his second term, Fain authored a Washington Post article on finding “common ground” with the billionaire Republican President.

The statement is a change in tune from Fain, who during the Big Three strike went after big manufacturers’ greed, and now seeks common ground with Ford and GM. Compare this to last year when he labeled Trump a scab and railed against the billionaire class as a whole.

Fain’s article makes no criticisms of Trump other than mentioning vague disagreement with “much of his domestic agenda.” No mention is made of Trump’s Project 2025 plans to attack and privatize the public sector including eliminating many union jobs. International graduate students in the UAW are being threatened with having their visas revoked for participating in anti-war protests, but Fain is silent.

Sean O’Brien, President of the Teamsters, has seriously tacked to the right in recent

months. On a recent episode of his podcast interviewing MAGA Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, O’Brien says “Social issues are all well and good, but protecting illegal immigrants that come into our country to commit crimes and steal jobs, that’s a tough pill to swallow.”

For immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, the toughest pill of all to swallow may be a union leader who pits you against your U.S.-born coworkers. Divide and rule, to pit different sections of workers against each other, is a classic tactic of the bosses. It weakens the labor movement’s ability to fight for higher wages and better working conditions by keeping the workplace fractured rather than united in struggle around a common goal. The super exploitation of immigrant workers only drives down the wages for everyone. Uniting immigrant and native-born workers is essential for rebuilding a fighting labor movement.

For a labor leader like O’Brien to parrot this divisiveness raises the question, “Which side are you on?”

Unions Need To Lead From The Front Unions in many other countries have shown just how crucial it is for the labor movement to take a political stand against anti-workers governments. In Argentina, President Javier Milei’s austerity budget, which would have been devastating for workers, was set back by a 1.5 million-strong general strike. In the UK today, some labor leaders are organizing meetings to discuss launching a new working-class party to oppose the two establishment parties. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions last year launched a campaign to organize the nearly half-a-million undocumented workers in

For workers who are concerned with inflation eating away at their wages, the best path forward is unionizing and struggling against the bosses, not the divide-andrule tactics of the many bosses in the White House.

South Korea and fight for legal status.

There are pockets of militancy against Trump’s agenda within the U.S. labor movement that need to be built on. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), under threat of ICE raids in schools, put out a memo to members to organize “sanctuary teams” of teachers, faculty, parents, and students to resist any attempted raids on schools. They have so far prevented federal agents from entering Chicago schools.

Educators’ and healthcare workers’ unions in particular should be taking the lead in resisting deportations by organizing defense committees against deportations, organizing rallies to build public support, and joining with protestors in the streets. Any actions by unions against deportations need to be connected to a strong economic program to speak to the needs of the entire working class.

Winning workers away from Trump’s rightwing populism requires the labor movement going on the offensive with bold organizing campaigns and taking strike action to deliver strong union contracts. The Teamsters’ efforts to organize Amazon workers and the UAW’s campaign to organize the non-union auto industry, like at Tesla, brings these unions into direct conflict with two of Trump’s biggest allies, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. For workers who are concerned with inflation eating away at their wages, the best path forward is unionizing and struggling against the bosses, not the divide-and-rule tactics of the many bosses in the White House.

We Need A New Party Neither party of big business offers any real solutions for the problems facing working people. The Democrats under Biden oversaw four years of rising inflation, denied the right to strike to railway workers, and just a week before Trump took office, oversaw the deportation of union members of the United Farm Workers.

This Trump administration promises to go even further in its attacks on working people.

Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a reform caucus within the UAW of which Fain is a member, joined the United Electrical Workers Union and passed a resolution in January saying working people need a labor party independent from the Republicans and Democrats “to truly confront the billionaire class, and unite and speak for the working class.” The labor movement cannot survive by “sitting out of politics,” and it cannot continue to line up behind a Democratic Party whose failures have only driven may workers into the arms of Trump. To counter Trump’s phony pro-worker posturing, we need a new working-class party.

Fain, as a representative accountable to the membership of UAWD, should reverse his statement on working with Trump and publicly advocate and organize to build a labor party in the U.S. Fain’s announced General Strike 2028 plans should include calls for a new party along the lines UAWD proposes. Other unions and locals should pass similar resolutions and begin organizing towards a new party that refuses to take corporate and billionaire donations, fights for popular programs such as free, high-quality healthcare for all, and stands unquestionably on the side of fighting for good union jobs for all. Only a united, organized working class has the power to fully resist Trump’s billionaire agenda.J

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HEALTHCARE

LIAM EASTON-CALABRIA, PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT STUDENT

Not a day goes by without doctors, nurses, and patients alike agonizing over the infuriating reality of healthcare in the United States. I work at a primary care clinic that treats many undocumented immigrants and patients on Medicaid. On top of worrying about affording their medications, many of them are now terrified about losing their health insurance entirely or being met by ICE at the hospital doors. For many of us working in medicine, the crisis that the second Trump administration poses to our already broken system is becoming painfully clear.

The right wing has long been eager to cut Medicaid spending to offset the cost of their major tax cuts for the rich, and with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they are on the path to doing so. The projected cuts would mean that more than 600,000 people will lose coverage for medical services like routine doctor’s visits, dental cleanings, or emergency procedures. States recently stripped 25 million people of Medicaid coverage by rolling back the pandemic-era expansions that had provided temporary relief, leaving nearly 8% of Americans uninsured.

But U.S. healthcare was a mess even before Trump 2.0. The dysfunction in healthcare stems from it being run for profit, making it a system riddled with inefficiencies, skyhigh costs, and bureaucratic headaches.

The U.S. spends the most on healthcare worldwide and yet has very little to show for it.

U.S. life expectancy is projected to rank only 66th globally by 2050, dropping from 49th in 2022. High rates of preventable diseases like heart disease, stroke and diabetes are keeping Americans sick and making a few very rich.

For the majority of people who do have some form of health insurance, it is a nightmare to navigate and an enormous financial burden. In 2023, the average worker with employer-sponsored insurance shelled out

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$8,435 in premiums, while families faced a staggering $24,000 price tag for coverage.

And that’s before co-pays, deductibles, and surprise bills. When getting sick can mean financial ruin, it’s clear that the system doesn’t work for us.

Big Pharma, health insurance companies, and hospitals all line their pockets by overcharging us as patients, and by limiting what treatments and procedures we can access—but this is the logic of healthcare under capitalism. The result is a purposefully inefficient system that rewards the rich for keeping people sick, rather than preventing illness in the first place.

Cures Aren’t Profitable Insurance companies are perhaps the most crooked expression of this system.

The widespread celebration of the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO speaks to the anger in society bubbling just under the surface, not only for the ludicrous cost of healthcare, but for the insurance companies’ brazen willingness to deny claims and coverage to people during some of the most vulnerable experiences of their lives.

These companies serve no purpose except as expensive middle-men between patients and healthcare providers. They dictate what types of care patients are allowed to receive, very often against the doctor’s medical opinion, while scrutinizing our bills and playing no role whatsoever in medical treatment. As a result, many patients either incur large amounts of medical debt, go under-treated, or get no care at all. This is not news to working people. There are far too many cases of patients dying as a result of insurance companies denying or delaying coverage of necessary medical treatment.

Hospital CEOs and shareholders also make a killing off of their patients. Hospitals gear much of their services towards medical specialties that perform expensive procedures and surgeries. Putting massive resources into high-yield specialties, like

cardiac surgery, comes at the expense of primary care jobs that prevent you from having a heart attack in the first place.

Even so-called “non-profit” hospitals, which make up nearly half of all hospitals in the U.S., are run like businesses. They get massive tax breaks from the IRS to supposedly invest in “community benefit” and provide cheaper or free services to poorer patients. However, most non-profits operate on a capitalist business model. They pay their CEOs millions and spend massive budgets on shiny new facilities, all while hiring consultant firms to devise ways of making more money off of patients, including schemes to make poor patients pay what they legally shouldn’t have to.

But when it comes to making people pay needless sums of money, Big Pharma takes the cake. A 22-year-old recently died in Wisconsin after being unable to afford asthma meds that had increased by $500! The industry makes enormous profits by keeping medications expensive. Insulin was first patented in 1923 but is continually reformulated and repatented to keep the price controlled by a monopoly of only four companies. This leads to patients rationing their insulin, which can quickly result in medical emergencies or death.

This even affects generic medicines, where monopoly control of medications by only a few Big Pharma companies allows them to fix prices without fear of being undercut. Vyera Pharmaceuticals raised the cost of a generic treatment for toxoplasmosis, an infection that risks miscarriage and stillbirth in pregnancies, from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

While pharmaceutical companies jack up prices for working people, they also openly admit that finding actual cures is “not a sustainable business model” (Goldman Sachs in a report on gene therapy research in 2018).

Fight For Universal Healthcare The dysfunction of the U.S. healthcare system is not an accident—it is the direct

result of a system that prioritizes profit over human lives. This is the logical extreme of healthcare under capitalism: a handful of CEOs and shareholders reap obscene wealth while millions suffer, go without care, or drown in medical debt.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a wave of labor struggles in the healthcare industry. From the historic 301day St. Vincent nurses’ strike—the longest nurses’ strike in the last 15 years—to the 3-day, 75,000-strong Kaiser Permanente strike, healthcare workers have been on the front lines of ongoing fights for safe staffing ratios and higher wages, demanding better conditions for ourselves and our patients.

When hospitals are adequately staffed, when doctors and nurses are not overworked, and when profit-driven cost-cutting measures are beaten back, it’s the patients who benefit. But as Republicans prepare devastating attacks on Medicaid and healthcare access, and the Democrats refuse to fight, unions cannot afford to stop at just workplace demands.

Unions must take up the broader fight for universal healthcare—a fully public healthcare system that guarantees care for everyone, not just those who can pay. The National Nurses United (NNU) has long championed Medicare For All, but these efforts must be scaled up into a serious mass movement.

The reality is that society has more than enough resources to provide free, highquality healthcare to everyone. The only reason it doesn’t is because of capitalism—a system that treats our health as just another commodity, not a human right. The fight for universal healthcare is a fight against that logic, one that working people, led by organized labor, must take up with urgency. But winning real, lasting change requires more than just reform—it means overthrowing the entire rotten system and fighting for a socialist alternative where our health comes before corporate greed.J

socialistalternative.org

CLIMATE

DAVID RHOADES, LOS ANGELES A historic windstorm ignited several wildfires in Los Angeles, encompassing over 40,000 acres—nearly triple the size of Manhattan. At least 25 have died, and thousands lost their homes to unprecedented fires, even in a region that has grown accustomed to wildfires as the effects of climate change intensify.

The Santa Ana winds are a frequent weather event, but this year, a massive wind crashed on LA in a phenomenon known as a “mountain wave.” Santa Ana winds rarely occur in January; these are the strongest winds LA has seen in over 10 years. On top of a severe lack of rainfall, gusts dried up the air and vegetation, creating catastrophic wildfire conditions.

This changing climate led directly to the destruction we’re witnessing now. Firefighters have made heroic efforts to contain the blaze, but the wind made early containment nearly impossible.

Budget Cuts Endangered City Residents One of the fire department’s critical duties is brush clearance for fire prevention, so it enraged Angelenos to learn that LA Mayor Karen Bass recently hamstrung the Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance efforts.

In June, Bass and City Council imposed budget cuts on firefighters and other critical departments to fund limp police recruitment. The $17.6 million LAFD cut eliminated positions and overtime pay for the Fire Prevention Bureau, impacting the inspection of brush clearance around city structures.

Last month, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley reported to City Council that the cuts created an “inability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which are crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.” When Bass

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said last week that LAFD budget cuts didn’t affect the current wildfire response, Crowley broke ranks: “My message is the fire department needs to be properly funded. It’s not.”

Cuts to firefighting make local governments turn to prison labor. Roughly 900 imprisoned firefighters were deployed to LA, receiving essentially $2/hour to clear vegetation, dig firebreaks, and other grueling labor critical for fire containment. In a state government run by ‘progressive’ Democrats, critical infrastructure remains built on legalized slavery, justified by the very party whose mismanagement led to these fires.

Both Republicans and Democrats have a history of cutting social services and endangering the public. The fragile, privatized power grid in Texas failed during a historic winter storm in 2021 and killed dozens. In both cases, capitalism’s needs carved deep cuts to critical infrastructure with disastrous consequences.

Whether a Democrat or a Republican did the cutting will make little difference to the dead or bereaved in future disasters.

Insurers Leave Residents Twisting In The Wind Roughly 12,000 structures have been destroyed, per official estimates. Over half were in the small, historically Black neighborhood of Altadena. Until last week, Altadena was home to many Black and Latino working families with a high rate of homeownership.

For thousands of workers, years of memories, labor, and financial diligence burned away in minutes.

J.P. Morgan analysts estimate total insured losses from the fire will exceed $20 billion.

Actual costs could be much larger. If those estimates are correct, the current fires will be the costliest disaster in state history, though Elon Musk could cover that cost right now if he

donated a nickel for every dollar he has.

But who will actually pay for it?

Insurers refuse to. Only months ago, State Farm canceled fire coverage for 1,600 homeowners in Pacific Palisades while spiking rates elsewhere. Of 2.8 million homeowner policies ended in 2022–2024, most were canceled by insurers. Insurance companies reported losses after paying out claims for the back-to-back historic California wildfire seasons of 2017 and 2018, so they’re taking steps to never be in that position again.

State politicians instituted a privately run state insurance program—the FAIR plan—to bridge the coverage gap by forcing California insurers to pay in and share risk. But policies are expensive. Many working-class homeowners have opted out of insurance altogether, leaving them devastated. State politicians have promised to waive the $3 million cap on homes covered by FAIR, mostly benefiting wealthy owners who can afford high premiums. They’ll recoup their investments, but working people who’ve lived in the Palisades or Altadena for decades likely can’t afford the exorbitant insurance to keep living there.

Moreover, Governor Newsom recently rewrote the rules to force insurers into providing policies in fire-risk areas. But the situation is more fundamentally dire: the insurance profit model is simply not able to account for mass catastrophic losses that occur semifrequently under climate change without an absurd increase in premiums.

Insurers aren’t canceling coverage out of superstition; they utilize bottomless resources for calculating risk. Risk assessments State Farm used to justify canceling coverage could have been used to direct brush clearance efforts in advance or relocate households.

Instead, insurers guard these assessments as lucrative trade secrets.

The Looters In Patagonia Vests When 150,000 people remained displaced as fires spread, the market had already started capitalizing on staggering pain and loss. When residents from Altadena and Pacific Palisades looked for short-term rental housing, rent

prices spiked by 10%–20% or higher.

California law makes rental price gouging illegal under a state of emergency. But to capitalists, this is free market 101. Capitalists routinely raise prices or privatize social services in the face of increased demand—which, in this case, means preying on the desperation of disaster victims.

The market ‘solution’ for underfunded fire departments looks like a billionaire property developer paying for private firefighters to protect a high-end shopping center while homes burn to the ground. As disasters worsen, the super-rich will spend big on emergency responders to protect their assets while demanding deeper cuts to social services. This increases the cost of emergency response for everyone else.

If previous disasters are any indication, property developers will start trying to buy up the smoking ruins of Altadena and elsewhere.

Residents in Altadena have reportedly started getting offers to buy the land where their homes once stood, even though many remain under evacuation orders. To a worker, the loss of a home is a tragedy. To a capitalist, it’s a juicy opportunity.

It’s inevitable that the neighborhoods like Altadena will not be identical to their old selves.

They will need to be rebuilt. But who leads the rebuilding process, and who benefits from the restoration? If workers want to rebuild Altadena into a thriving working class community once again, they’ll need to fight for control from the finance firms, banks, and capitalist politicians who will try to reshape it into a safe haven for capital investment—and little else.

LA Needs Working-Class Disaster Recovery Some businesses voluntarily became temporary social services to meet dire social needs. Planet Fitness and UFC Gym locations offer displaced residents and first responders free showers, power outlets, and WiFi. Airbnb is offering free or discounted housing for one week to displaced residents. Fifty LA restaurants offered free meals to evacuees and first responders until they ran out. GoodRx offers free telehealth appointments for emergency access to prescription medications.

These helpful gestures are limited by the bosses directing them from above. Workers are carrying out these efforts, but they must lead them instead. For disaster aid to solve this crisis, unions must organize critical service workers. Unions in major hotel chains could provide shelter to displaced residents, and unions in grocery stores and restaurants could provide free meals until workers decide the crisis is over. They could direct businesses to offer social services beyond a few owners’ spontaneous and short-lived generosity.

Workers, unions, and social justice movements need a mass organization to ensure disaster relief benefits workers, not property developers. The Democratic Party belongs to billionaires and their interests; for meaningful action that benefits people devastated by this climate change-fueled disaster, we need a working-class party. Such a party needs to end fossil fuel use for good before disasters worsen and fight for an entirely new system that puts our lives and the planet over profit.J

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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’

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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!

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LEON PINSKY, NYC Editors’ note: As we go to print, new reports show Israeli retreat from significant regions of Gaza as part of the second phase of the ceasefire. We will update our analysis online as events become more clear.

A ceasefire was reached between Israel and Hamas after 15 months of barbaric war against the Palestinian people. Conservative estimations say that 47,000 Palestinians were killed. However, the real figures are likely to be much higher. Now hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are making their way on foot to northern Gaza, where the Israeli war machine has destroyed the majority of their houses and infrastructure through relentless air-bombings.

Despite the deal, the Palestinian masses continue to live in conditions of severe humanitarian crisis with no clear way out.

The ceasefire was understandably accompanied by a collective sigh of relief and pride for those who survived the most murderous Israeli attack in history. The release of hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons was celebrated as well. The majority of the Jewish population as well is celebrating the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza during the war. Reports from both Palestinians and Israelis held in captivity talk about severe conditions of starvation and abuse and indeed many did not survive.

The release of further hostages and prisoners, however, remains within the fragile state of the first phase of the deal. The completion of the second and third phases, which include the retreat of the IDF from Gaza and the reconstruction of the enclave, remain unclear.

Changing Power Balance In The Middle East Donald Trump has cynically positioned himself as the main figure to bring about this ceasefire after giving full approval for the IDF’s butchering of Palestinian civilians.

Now he declared the US’s intention to “take over” Gaza and expel the population into Jordan and Egypt.

Considering the mass popular support within these two countries with the Palestinian liberation struggle and the fear of the two dictatorial regimes from mass upheaval, this move was quickly shut down, for now.

Trump’s unhinged remark to redevelop Gaza into a “new Riviera” highlights that the movement for Palestinian nationalliberation needs to escalate.

But Trump’s arm-twisting tactics which may include refusal of military aid or investment in these two US allies mean that the danger is still there. This declaration points towards the bloody and brutal plans of US imperialism to reshape the Middle-East and Trump’s intentions are to continue

supporting Netanyahu’s right-wing government in its murderous oppression of Palestinian national rights. In reality, this fight is very far from over and the struggle against national oppression needs to escalate.

At several anti-Trump protests on January 20 in US cities, some speakers boldly claimed that Israel has lost the war, that the IDF is broken, the economy has been shuttered, and that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have left the country. We need to be very clear that the situation in real life is very different.

Over the past year, Israeli capitalism has strengthened its position in the Middle East through military campaigns and a rapidly changing geopolitical situation. It delivered a blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon, causing mass destruction, and pushed back threats from Iran with the aid of a Western-allied coalition.

The collapse of the dictatorial Assad regime in Syria opened the opportunity for the IDF to destroy Syria’s air and naval force and situate itself on Syrian land.

It is estimated that 92% of Gazan houses were damaged or destroyed entirely. The 50 million tons of rubble is estimated to take 21 years to clear up. Schools, hospitals, electricity, sewage and other basic necessities are completely destroyed. The resources needed to rebuild Gaza are held up by the military-dictatorial regime in Israel and its US imperialist ally.

Meanwhile, the dramatic events in Syria pushed back Russian and Iranian efforts in the region, which now allows Trump to reintroduce the push for the “normalization” process between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

On top of that, the Israeli regime used the ceasefire in Gaza to unleash a brutal military offensive in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. The ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is directly tied to the far-right push to annex the occupied territory and expel millions of Palestinian residents.

Far from coming out of this war defeated, Israeli capitalism has emerged strengthened, especially with a super-friendly Trump now back in power.

Contradictory Outcome That said, the Israeli government finds itself in a contradictory crisis. With the signing of the ceasefire deal, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi resigned from his position, taking responsibility for the military’s failure to defend Israeli civilians during Hamas’s October 7th attack. Many have seen this as a nod for Prime Minister Netanyahu to take the same responsibility.

Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned from the government in opposition to the deal, bringing the coalition government into a thin majority margin.

Significantly, the growing protests and general strike within Israel over the past year, many of which were led by the families of

the hostages, calling for a ceasefire, played an important role pressuring Netanyahu to sign a deal.

The inspiring mass international movement in opposition to the war damaged Israel’s prestige and raised the possibility of its further isolation on the global stage. Without this mass international resistance Trump couldn’t have cynically positioned himself as an anti-war opposition to the Democrats and pressure Netanyahu to reach a deal.

But now the movement needs to take on the reactionary pro-war Trump administration and fight the real danger of this mass ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians.

While Netanyahu initially relied on prolonging the war to save his government from collapse, the opposite became true. Now an end to the war, even a temporary one, is necessary to save him from losing grip over the government.

No Clear Way Forward Israel has not reached any of its stated war goals—primarily destroying Hamas and freeing all hostages, many of them died in captivity, some from Israeli fire. While Hamas suffered a heavy loss—many of its leaders and an estimated 18,000 of its fighters dead - recent reports show that they were able to recruit many out of the resistance to Israeli occupation and still control much of Gaza.

The Israeli far-right is pushing to go back to war once all Israeli hostages are back, with some eyeing a return to long-term military occupation and even to civilian settlements.

The bloodshed is far from over. Trump’s threatening messages towards Gaza and growing militarism and war globally show that we have entered a new era of brutal imperialist war.

The anti-war movement needs to escalate the struggle to bring the war machine to a halt. We need to organize mass meetings, protests, and strikes, halt weapon shipments and shut down businesses profiting from war. Demands must go beyond a ceasefire; for an end to the Israeli occupation and siege over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem; open the border crossing for humanitarian aid, medicine, food, and construction material; tax the rich to fund the rebuilding of Gaza.

Both US corporate parties are thoroughly pro-war and imperialism. We need to begin the process of building a new mass anti-war party of working people to organize the fightback on the streets, workplaces, campuses, and at the polls. Fighting capitalist war, a mass workers’ party will need to fight the roots of this brutality—the capitalist system itself. We need a mass struggle for socialism, for peace and prosperity for all, not profit and war.J

socialistalternative.org

SA IN ACTION

Ready to aggressively take the helm of US imperialism on Martin Luther King Day, Trump declared, “We will make [MLK’s] dream come true.” Obviously, this is not the dream the Civil Rights leader, who near the end of his life vocally criticized the Vietnam War and US capitalism, had in mind. This new, betterorganized Trump regime represents far more serious dangers for marginalized groups and the entire working class than his first administration. Ultimately, there is no force that can push back Trump and the far right except mass, working-class struggle in the streets, in our schools, and in our workplaces.

There is no time to wait. Socialist Alternative is committed to fighting back against Trump, the billionaires, and the whole system—that’s why we hit the streets on day one.

Inauguration Day Protests The weekend leading up to and on Inauguration Day, Socialist Alternative members joined thousands of students and workers in protests across the country. From NYC to LA, Chicago to Houston, we began to fight back against the incoming Trump administration. We spoke at rallies about how we can defeat Trump and the far right. We talked to union nurses and teachers about refusing mandatory reporting to ICE, to trans people about organizing bathroom sit-ins, and to young people attending their very first protest, looking for what to do next. We shouted from the rooftops, and will continue to do so: Trump is the symptom, capitalism is the disease!

We need socialism to stop the far right for good.

To those looking to fight back against the far right, one thing was clear: the

FEBRUARY 2025

Democrats have left us out to dry. Any effective fightback against Trump must be completely independent of the Democratic Party, who spend their time cozying up to the right wing instead of fighting it. They spent the last four years signing off on more oil drilling, attacking immigrants, breaking strikes, and approving tens of billions of our tax dollars to bomb the Palestinian masses. When it came to protecting abortion rights, raising the minimum wage, and ensuring even basic access to healthcare, it was the same old story—“our hands are tied.” The Democrats are bankrolled by many of the same billionaires and corporations as the Republicans, and will always throw us to the wolves before risking their allegiance to the ruling class, which only cares about enriching themselves and maintaining their system while the rest of us suffer.

We rallied against the far right in DC and in cities across the country. Again and again, marchers asked the same thing: where is everyone? The crowds were smaller, a far cry from the tens of thousands who stomped the concrete in 2016 to defeat some of Trump’s attacks, including the “Muslim ban.” Clearly, the crises we face today are severe and dire, and the movement against the far right has been pushed back. Right now, Trump has the backing of most of the billionaire class and the global far right has the initiative. But working and young people have the power to shut down society through protests, occupations, and strikes. Even these small protests show that there are many

people out there looking for a way to fight Trump. It’s time for us to get more organized to prepare for when even bigger struggles break out against the attacks that are coming.

Fight The Right, Fight For Socialism Our protests need to go much further than they did during Trump’s first term. The labor movement needs to play a major role, linking up with movements in the streets under the slogan, “an injury to one, is an injury to all”. We need student walkouts, strike action in workplaces, and movements with accountable, workingclass leadership. Most of all, we urgently need movements that take up socialist ideas to defeat the right. Trump is a mon-

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If Trump getting elected for a second time has made you ask what you can do to be part of the fightback, now’s the time to join the socialists.

Out of Inauguration Day protests, Socialist Alternative is hosting public meetings “A Socialist Strategy to Defeat Trump and the Billionaire Class”.

Already, we have met young and working people at these meetings ready to get organized and to discuss action we can take in the coming months.

The threat of Trump’s attacks should be underestimated. But, a better world free from the rot of capitalism is possible, if we fight for it. If you agree, you should join us today!J

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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

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CHRIS GRAY, MINNEAPOLIS Tens of thousands of people took the streets the first week in February to protest Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants. The protests were courageously initiated by the immigrant right’s groups and individuals who are being targeted by Trump. The next step is to plan out how to stop ICE raids and escalate the struggle.

While Obama still holds the record for the most deportations, Trump’s strategy relies on shock and awe. His administration is bragging about deporting a thousand people a day. Only a handful have ever been convicted of a crime.

Trump wants immigrant workers to be terrorized: either “voluntary deporting” themselves or being discouraged from coming in the first place. He is sending immigrants to the notorious prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba— the same place thousands of mostly innocent detainees were tortured in the name of the unwinnable “War on Terror.”

Trump is also attacking the few legal rights immigrants have. He wants to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the same law used to justify racist internment camps of JapaneseAmericans during World War II, to speed up deportations by removing all legal protections for migrants.

Trump’s administration is ramping up nationalist sentiments in society geared towards the increased imperialist conflict with the China-Russia bloc. To maintain control, he needs a scapegoat; and he’s currently targeting immigrants and trans people.

Trump can be defeated, but only

on the basis of a united, determined, mass movement that is prepared to disrupt business as usual.

Civil Disobedience To Stop Deportation Raids ICE is focusing on finding undocumented immigrants in workplaces and public spaces, but also schools and hospitals, many of which are unionized.

If ICE does show up, don’t help them do their job. Keep the doors locked until ICE produces a warrant for a specific person, and if they do, tell the agents it could take some time to find them.

Immediately notify everyone in the building, the news, and the wider community—encourage them to show up to disrupt the raid. If ICE insists on disrupting a school day, the students should calmly walk out in groups using alternative exits away from danger.

Similar plans should be discussed in every workplace, school, and neighborhood. Unionized workers have the most protections and need to lead the way. Transit workers should refuse to stop at stops where ICE agents are conducting raids, and letter carriers should act as early warning by calling a hotline if they see ICE vans parked in a neighborhood.

Schools, hospitals, and workplaces can form the hubs around which wider community mobilizations can happen. Every neighbor should be signed up for text alerts in the event of confirmed ICE raids. Protestors should use non-violent civil disobedience to disrupt ICE raids like linking arms around ICE vans, blocking surrounding intersections, and picketing entrances and exits.

Mass Protests To Show Support For Immigrant Workers Effective deportation defense needs to be linked to an offensive strategy to mobilize immigrant and U.S.born workers into mass protests to show there isn’t public support for Trump’s expensive, divisive, deportations. Mass protests bring people out of isolation and into the streets, build solidarity among people from different backgrounds by uniting around a common cause, and most importantly build the confidence to fight back.

Mass protests take away Trump’s popular mandate to carry out deportations. Trump points to polls showing a surprising number of both Republicans and Democrats support mass deportations. What they actually show is the effect on consciousness from the leaderships of both corporate parties and the corporate media constantly blaming society’s ills on immigrants. The same polls showed that the overwhelming majority in swing states prefer a path to citizenship over mass deportations.

Mass movements can reverse the growth of anti-immigrant ideas among working-class people, and put forward real answers to society’s problems.

the airports. As the protests spread across the country, Trump backed down for a period. In 2019, Trump shut down the government over funding for a racist border wall. TSA agents, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers threatened to go on strike over unpaid wages and beat Trump back.

Class Politics To Cut Across Divide & Rule The only people benefitting from Trump are billionaires and corporations. The same thing was true under Biden, Trump 1.0, Obama, and every other capitalist politician. People hate the obscene wealth of billionaires and corporations, expressed by popular support for Luigi Magnione’s assassination of a healthcare CEO. The only way billionaires, corporations and their two parties maintain control is by keeping working-class people divided.

The only way to unite the working class into a coherent force that can fight for its own interests is to link the fight against deportations (and every other form of oppression), to a wider program that actually improves life for working class people. Immigrants being afraid to go to the hospital or trans people being denied gender-affirming care won’t make healthcare cheaper for everyone else. An injury to one is an injury to all. The only way forward is a struggle for affordable healthcare as a human right for everyone, including immigrants.

Build A Socialist Alternative

Hit Billionaires Where It Hurts Trump is not the first politician to blame immigrants for capitalism’s crises. In 2006, George W. Bush tried to pass vicious antiimmigrant legislation. On May 1st, immigrant workers organized a general strike called “A Day Without An Immigrant,” shutting down businesses across the country. Millions took the streets, including non-immigrant workers.

Under the threat of mass protests and strikes, and facing growing opposition among the formations who profit off immigrant labor, Bush backed down.

It was the retreat of the movement which allowed Obama to break new records of mass deportations.

A similar thing happened twice during Trump’s first term. In 2017, when he signed the infamous “Muslim Ban,” bodega owners and taxi drivers went on strike and occupied

Corporations rely on immigrant exploitation and outsourcing jobs to keep wages low and workers divided. Imperialist countries undermine the development of poorer countries and former colonies. War and climate change have displaced millions of people. These factors have driven global migration to record heights, and anti-immigrant politicians are making gains around the world.

Workers of all countries have more in common with each other than with their bosses. Regardless of what language they speak, they worry about being able to earn a decent wage, stay healthy, raise a family, afford good housing, live in a safe environment, and be able to retire comfortably. This is impossible to attain in a world where a few billionaires have as much money as entire nations. Real solidarity is only possible on the basis of a socialist society, where the global economy is mobilized for the betterment of workers everywhere and the planet. Join Socialist Alternative today!J