The following is a shortened edit of an article by S.J. Dickie, published by the Independent Socialist Group, the Socialist Party’s co-thinkers in the US, before events erupted in LA.
Four months into the second Donald Trump presidency, larger protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are developing. Trump’s rapid-fire executive actions are meant to intimidate and spread fear. People across the US are angry, exhausted, overwhelmed, and struggling to keep up with the news cycle.
Still, resistance is stirring. Millions came out for the ‘Hands Off!’ rallies that were organised in hundreds of cities nationwide on 5 April and 19 April. These protests were called in response to a myriad of issues, including Trump’s flagrantly racist crackdowns by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on migrants and revocation of student visas, his destructive mass federal layoffs, his attacks on transgender rights, and his annihilation of healthcare accessibility and social services.
The ‘Hands Off!’ protests include many working people looking for an alternative to Trumpism. These protests are a positive development, but to successfully fight back against Trump’s attacks and the system he represents, these protests need to be the start of a new mass movement.
The attacks coming from the Trump White House and his clique of billionaire backers are the latest escalation of capitalism’s long-standing tactics to sow division among the working class. He uses fearmongering against trans people, for example, to draw attention away from his cuts to social services and failure to address the cost-of-living crisis, pitting workers against each other to prevent united working-class organising.
The Trump administration is now defining one’s sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and removing recognition of gender identity. The executive order is dubiously titled ‘Defending Women’.
Trump does not care about protecting women. Among other misogynistic moves, Trump has committed to enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion. The Biden administration left this open for attack by refusing to codify abortion rights into federal law while the Democrats were in charge of both Congress and the White House.
To further stoke fear and sow division, the Trump administration has accelerated the repression of Palestinian rights activists, initiated by the Biden administration. US immigration authorities have cracked down on several international students who have taken part in anti-genocide protests or spoken out in defence of Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump has issued an executive order to limit “wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities in government and by government contractors and grant recipients. This will allegedly restore “merit-based opportunity,” the implication being that good, hard-working white men have lost opportunities to women, people of colour, gay and trans people, and people with disabilities – people who did not “deserve” them. This is an attempt to stoke distrust and resentment among different sections of the working class.
Cost of living
The cost of living – housing, healthcare, debt, education – keeps rising as wages stagnate. Climate disasters continue to ravage communities around the world. Attacks on DEI and mass layoffs cause chaos in working people’s lives. While these issues predate Trump, he and the other capitalists he represents will continue to watch the world burn if they stand to make a profit. As such, fighting against Trump needs to be a step toward fighting against the capitalist system as a whole.
In 2020, millions of Americans voted for the Democratic Party as a vote against Trumpism and the far right. But instead of following through on popular campaign promises to close border camps and end the funding of Trump’s border wall, implement the Equality Act to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, to cancel student debt, codify Roe, and implement a Green New Deal, the Democrats continued many of Trump’s policies. The Democratic Party urged a peaceful transfer of power and confined itself to performative ‘fights’ against Trump in the courts, refusing to build mass protests in the streets.
If anything, the Democrats consistently seize opportunities to channel energy from social movements away from independent politics and toward voting blue.
The Women’s March in Washington, DC was one of the largest single-day protests in US history, with over 470,000 people in attendance – yet nothing really changed. When they left the march, protesters had no programme to follow but to fall in line with the Democrats. ‘Progressive’ Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have tried to capture the anger against Trump but are not using this energy to build a political organisation by and for working people.
Working-class mass movements of the past have made significant gains, and those tactics and strategies need to be taken up once again if workers want material solutions to the attacks on LGBTQ and women’s rights. The key is to use mass demonstrations and strikes in a sustained, coordinated mass movement that’s tied to an independent working-class political party.
The United Auto Workers union led a six week-long strike in 2023 against all three major car manufacturers in the US, winning pay rises. Its members have been some of those on the frontlines of the pro-Palestine protests. It could be mobilising its members – not only those on college campuses but in other workplaces as well – in defence against ICE raids, harassment by management, discrimination, restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, and the gutting of many federal programmes and services which LGBTQ+, women, and immigrants especially benefit from.
At Columbia University and the University of California system, unions have coordinated rallies and even strikes in defence of pro-Palestinian protestors. It’ll take not just one or a few unions but the larger labor movement and wider working class to beat back Trump’s policies. A workers’ party is a key piece to solving the puzzle of how to unite us as working people across social movements and the labour movement.
Capitalism stokes the ‘us versus them’ sentiment that is weaponised against our most vulnerable groups while Trump and his gang of billionaires profit. Our struggles as workers – gay and trans workers, racialized workers, immigrant workers, disabled workers – are linked by the economic structure of capitalism.
Laws against job discrimination mean nothing when the standard is ‘at-will’ hiring and firing. Women and the LGBTQ+ community see lower wages than their straight, cis-gendered male counterparts. 40% are employed in the lowest-paying sectors, such as hospitality, education, and retail – jobs that often don’t receive medical benefits or paid leave. Trans women, in particular, make $0.60 for every $1.00 that the average worker in the US makes. Medical discrimination runs rampant in our for-profit healthcare system, in which insurance is tied to employment, and out-of-pocket costs further hinder access to care, whether one is insured or not.
This oppression is built into the capitalist system: discrepancies in wages and benefits are explicitly used to create a race to the bottom. Capitalism spins the lie that good jobs are finite resources that workers must compete to earn. The right aims to divide and conquer the working class by picking off vulnerable sections, turning others against them with hateful rhetoric, and blaming these sections for the suffering of others.
The United States lacks an independent workers’ party. We must connect our struggles and unite against the ruling class. We need a socialist programme to end oppression. We need a workers’ party to take housing, energy, healthcare, and transportation under democratic public ownership, and ensure that all people have what they need. A workers’ party would have to ensure that its leaders were accountable to its membership. When enough workers choose independent, left working-class politics over the corporate duopoly, Trump and the far-right won’t stand a chance.
