DEFEAT TRUMPISM WITH CLASS POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE!
Socialist workers, trade unionists and activists are wrestling with how to stop the fascist Trumpian MAGA steamroller. Across the country committees are coming together to form labor parties and action committees. Many are calling for class wide strike actions and popular assembly preparations. The following has been drafted to bring the historic consciousness, class struggle methods and demands into today’s emergent classwide response. To make this response concrete we need to agree to convene national conventions of the workers and oppressed to discuss and adopt a fighting workers party program and launch the national party.
DEFEAT TRUMPISM WITH CLASS POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE!
Trump has been chosen by the capitalist class to administer its offensive against the working class internationally and to navigate the decline of US hegemony in competition with the China/Russia bloc. His plans are for austerities and union busting at home, attacks on the human rights of specially oppressed people, immigrants, and women. His foreign policy is for tariffs, bullying trading partners, wars of annexation and military escalations against Palestine, Iran, and China. To defeat these assaults and the threat of WWIII the workers movement must go beyond protest in the streets and develop a plan for taking power away from the imperialists by establishing a worker’s government. To achieve a worker’s government a workers party is required.
The ruling capitalist class under both the Republicans and Democrats have a political program which serves imperialist capital by administering austerities, stagnating wages as productivity and prices rise, hoarding housing in the hands of capitalist landlords and speculators: they limit access to education, healthcare, childcare, and eldercare; they maintain a reserve army of labor by refusing to grant citizenship rights to immigrant workers and ensure the minimum wage never becomes a living wage. They maintain and enforce anti-labor laws to block union organizing, solidarity and general strikes. They employ and empower academics, media pundits, clergy, politicians and union bureaucrats to tell workers they can never take power and to be pessimistic and “realistic” in our demands. Henry Ford said “history is bunk,” but we know that from the Levellers to the Diggers to the Jacobins, Communards and Bolsheviks the historic program of the workers and the oppressed has been developed in class struggles and written in blood!
The working class needs a united front movement to build our own fighting worker’s labor party with its historic program which builds class power through self organization and historic class struggle methods. The workers movement and its fighting workers-labor party must be the tribune of all oppressed peoples.
To win, workers must build our class struggle movement in every workplace, school and community. We must replace entrenched leaders who tie our movements to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties. We need independent organizations which unite our class and our allies in a fighting workers labor party that democratically drafts its program. The program must address the immediate needs of the masses, building a bridge of struggle to raise the consciousness of the masses from every minimum demand towards working class ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, and democratic planning and running of the economy based on social needs, not shareholders profits.
To stop the imperialists drive towards war and to stop the ongoing wars the workers movement needs to convene a New Zimmerwald to unite the international working class forces to build a new worker’s international that turns the guns around and turns imperialist wars into class wars at home against our own ruling classes.
Doing the academics’ service for the capitalist class, Postmodernism and identity politics siloed the struggles of the oppressed into sectoralism reducing the working class and the labor movement to an intersectional stratum of the specially oppressed. This not-so-modern ideology both ignores and negates the fact that the primary contradiction of capitalism is class struggle between capital and labor. Long before labor was relegated by postmodernist (intersectionalists) to the status of allies of the oppressed, militant workers organized strategically to abolish oppression and exploitation under the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. Only the united working class taking political power can end the root causes of economic exploitation and social oppression.
The capitalist class and their dying system has brought living things to the brink of extinction by climate catastrophe and World War. The workers movement can only win if it offers an alternative program and builds a mass party of labor that mobilizes the masses around its program.
The workers movement and its party must:
Build class struggle caucuses in our unions and community organizations of struggle which displace leaderships which accommodate the bosses and promote class peace.
We must organize and mobilize to defend immigrant labor from deportation with mass mobilization of the labor movement with actions to stop the deportations while organizing immigrant labor into existing and new unions.
We must defend Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous and immigrant communities with union led self defense guards built up in workplace and factory committees, united and mobilized in district and regional workers assemblies. The workers’ organizations must welcome, defend and advance the equal rights of women and all specially oppressed people.
We Demand; Jobs for all with living wages and automatic COLA’s to counter inflation. To close the widening gap between productivity and stagnant wages, to share necessary work among all capable hands we demand to shorten the workweek with no reduction in pay! The automation coming to industry via technology must be made to benefit the working class. 24 hours work for 40 hours pay is long overdue!
We Demand: Trillions of dollars in public works programs to build and provide housing, educational and medical facilities for all, upgrade public transit, re-forest the wilderness, eliminate toxic infrastructure and make a transition to clean energy.
When the bosses say this is not possible we demand: Open the books of the finance and monopoly capitalists to identify where the money is. Such will show that the billionaires and big shareholders hoard, speculate and build armaments for destruction rather than investing to produce for public need.
When the capitalist class and bosses say profit is their right and wars are in the national interest, we demand an end to speculation, hoarding and military profiteering. Stop funding the Military Industrial Complex and the workers party will show what the savings are. Not one person, not one penny for imperialist war!
We Demand NO IMPERIALIST WARS! CLOSE THE 900 overseas bases! Troops! Build a “Come Home Now Movement” and an enlisted persons international union. When the bosses try to stop our strikes with Police, National Guard and their private armies the workers movement must appeal to the soldiers to organize soldiers unions which support the workers movement and arm the workers militia to defend the Mass Strikes, factory and workplace occupations and the seizure of the capitalists’ hoarded and stolen social wealth.
The workers movement and workers party will mobilize with class struggle methods of the Mass Strike (general and political) to implement a Workers Government which will nationalize the commanding heights of industry, finance and monopoly capital without indemnification, run under worker’s self management and democratic workers central planning.
The Democrats call Trump a fascist and congratulate him on his election! At every step since 2016 we were told Democrats had legal remedies to Trumpism. The same flimflam gang of esquires promise more judicial nothingness and tell us to prepare for Congressional elections in 2026. This is a treadmill leading us nowhere. The empire in decline cannot dangle reforms before us; prize reforms their collapsed rate of profit already excludes! They will try to shear our Social Security from us, yet they will not give us bullet trains or safe airlines, but they will try to swipe our Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care. They have told us this much!
Let’s build every strike and mass movement by convening popular assemblies that unite all our struggles, build our class struggle organizations and run class struggle labor candidates!
To ensure the Popular Assemblies do not squander the masses’ anger and energy they must be utilized to launch mass actions that popularize a system of demands and build transitional organizations of struggle that lead logically to the seizure and maintenance of all political power by the workers, exploited and oppressed. Species survival demands nothing less.
