EDITORIAL
Workers Can Prepare a Defense Against Capitalist Disaster

Mar 31, 2025

Trump and company are making big noise about the government deficit—Elon Musk has even promised to cut a trillion dollars a year from federal spending. This is their excuse to slash department after department, program after program, making it harder for retirees to get their Social Security, threatening Medicaid.

But while they are cutting everything else, they are planning to increase spending for the military, already over 900 billion dollars. They’re planning for a new F-47 fighter jet named after the 47^th president, Trump himself, when the last fighter jet program, the F-35, cost about two trillion dollars.

And while they cut the small amounts the U.S. donated in food and health aid to other countries, they are not cutting the billions the U.S. gives to other countries’ militaries. On top of Israel and Ukraine, the U.S. props up the militaries of Egypt, Jordan, Colombia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Ethiopia….

Actions speak louder than words, and their actions show that their goal is not fundamentally financial. Of course, the wealthy would like another big tax break, military contractors like Boeing want more juicy contracts, and this money has to come from somewhere. But the increase in military spending and the money going to other countries’ militaries is preparation for war.

The U.S. capitalist class is determined to keep increasing the amount of wealth it wrings out of workers all around the world, even as the capitalist system falls deeper into crisis. To do that, they have shown they are willing to use the most extreme violence, up to and including war. That’s what all the military aid to other countries is about: lining them up as allies, and helping their militaries control their own populations.

The U.S. is already involved in wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen. And bigger wars loom in the future. The sides are not yet clear, and alliances may be reshuffling as the U.S. changes its stance toward Europe and Russia. Those alliances may be reshuffled again before the U.S. pulls the world’s peoples into the next major war.

War is not fought only against people in other countries. It is also fought against the population of this country. We are already being pushed to live worse, and we can already see growing repression. Trump and his cronies have arrested people for demonstrating. They have attacked lawyers who stood up to them in the slightest way. They have deported people to a notorious prison in El Salvador, and released video after video of shackled immigrants. These are threats, aimed directly at the people who live in this country.

Trump is the president carrying out these attacks and preparations for war today, but he is not the cause of the crisis of capitalism, or of its drive toward war. Behind Trump, the whole capitalist system has long been pushing workers toward disaster—his policies accelerate our descent, but they don’t point us in a new direction.

But Trump is very useful for the capitalist class because he is a master at pitting one section of the working class against another.

Look at the propaganda against immigrants. Blaming workers from other countries for taking jobs distracts from the speedup and overtime that destroy jobs, and points blame away from the bosses. But also, immigrants with tattoos who don’t speak English are a useful target to get the population used to seeing people marched off in handcuffs to be shipped to a brutal prison.

Or, look at the attacks on transgender people. Politicians like Trump are normalizing the dehumanization of those who aren’t normal according to their standards.

Attacks that start off against immigrants and transgender people will not stop there. We can see this in the way they blame DEI programs for the lack of decent jobs for white men. This distracts from the reality that this system has destroyed the few good jobs that used to exist at all. It also reinforces the racist ideas that have long been central to American capitalism.

The working class is not prepared for what is coming at us. We are going to be pushed into blaming other workers. It’s been so long since workers united in any major way to defend themselves as a class that the traditions of class consciousness, of the idea that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” are almost lost.

But workers can begin to prepare today to stand up to these attacks.

We can prepare morally by refusing to blame other workers.

And we can prepare practically by bringing together those of us who see the need for the working class to organize to defend itself in our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our schools.

Organized together, we can prepare to fight for a different future—not to be used as cannon fodder or chained to the oars on a sinking ship—but a future in which the wealth we have produced will be used to provide everyone with a better life.