the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 3, 2024
Donald Trump may put himself forward as the workers’ champion. He decries the lack of jobs: “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken.” He bemoans declining real wages: “We have an inflation crisis that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families....” He rants about the lack of services.
But he does not talk about the root of these problems: the diversion of an increasingly enormous share of the wealth workers create into the hands of the capitalist class over the last 50 years. According to one study by the Rand corporation, the increase in the amount captured by the richest 1% of the population meant they took an extra 50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% between 1974 and 2020. That doesn’t include the money drained from schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. This is the obvious cause of worsening unemployment, lower wages, and crumbling services.
Far from blaming the real culprits, the class he himself represents, Trump blames a supposed “invasion” of immigrants. In the name of helping the U.S. population, he promises to carry out the “largest deportation effort” in U.S. history, targeting 15 to 20 million people. It is not only absurd in a country whose labor force has long included people from other countries. It is an invitation to violence, directed to all those right-wing fanatics, who are eager to carry out attacks.
The Democrats claim that the only defense from the violence Trump represents is to put them back in office in this year’s election. But the Democratic Party is itself responsible for enormous violence against the working class. As the current crisis of jobs was growing, the Democrats’ answer was Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. Instead of providing jobs, Clinton’s “sentencing bill” set up millions of people—black, white and Latino—to be locked up. Cities almost entirely run by Democrats deployed the police even more aggressively against the poor population, setting the stage for the wave of police killings, the numbers of which have only grown since the murder of George Floyd in 2020. So no, depending on Democrats does not protect workers from violence.
Nor do the Democrats point out the responsibility of the capitalist class for workers’ problems any more than does Trump. The Democrats even have the nerve to pretend that things are getting better. By denying the disaster capitalism has created, the Democrats themselves opened the door for Trump to pose as the candidate of working people.
While the Democrats say that Trump represents a real danger for the population, they don’t act like it. In the face of such a threat, it is obvious that the population needs to be organized and mobilized to defend itself. But rather than mobilizing anyone, the Democrats simply call for people to vote—as if a vote, even if the Democrats win, could stop the growing threat of violence. It didn’t in 2020, and it won’t in 2024.
As for the unions, the only mass class organizations the workers have, the union leaders have for decades blamed competition from “foreigners” for workers’ problems, laying the groundwork for Trump’s anti-immigrant demagoguery. Most continue to support the Democratic Party—even while repeating many of Trump’s slanders on immigrant workers.
Within the framework of the policies proposed by this country’s major parties and unions, there is no answer to the crisis that is leading toward violence directed at part of the working class—and, ultimately, at the whole working class. To stand up to the real danger that Trump and those like him represent, the working class desperately needs an organization that opposes the workers’ real enemies, that is the capitalist class and its political servants in both parties. It needs an organization whose aim is for the workers to bring their own forces together to defend themselves, which can only fully happen when the working class wrests control of the entire society from the capitalist class, reorganizing it to meet the population’s needs.
It is true as Trump says that workers are experiencing a disaster. But this disaster has been caused by the basic functioning of this capitalist society that has for 50 years been dramatically increasing the wealth of the capitalist class at the expense of the working class.
Labor productivity today is almost two and half times what it was 50 years ago, meaning that each worker produces more than twice as much wealth per hour of work. This could mean that every worker could work many fewer hours and still get higher pay. Instead, the capitalist class has taken the entire benefit of increasing productivity, and then some.
Workers have been pushed to work faster and to cover for staffing shortages. Technology has been used to squeeze everyone, like the person taking orders, working the register, and handing over food at the drive-through. This increased level of exploitation has destroyed jobs: the share of the adult population working or looking for work has been declining for more than twenty years and is now under 63%. It has also increased the wealth flowing to the capitalist class.
Instead of raising pay as the workers put out more production, the corporations have imposed lower-tier wages and benefits on new hires, contracted out work to low-wage suppliers, moved production around the country to find the cheapest workforce, and given paltry raises that don’t nearly keep up with inflation. Today, average real wages for non-supervisory production workers are more than $2 an hour lower than they were in 1973, using the government’s headline measure of inflation that excludes housing, food, and transportation. And a larger share of workers’ paychecks is deducted for health and retirement benefits that provide a smaller share of what workers need for health or retirement. Lowering wages again means more wealth for the capitalist class, at workers’ expense.
Even as their share of national income increases, corporations and the rich pay a smaller share of taxes: corporate taxes accounted for about 15% of government revenues in the 1970s, but only about 6% today. Even as the corporations pay a smaller share, they take a larger share of the money the government spends. On top of the multiple massive bailouts the corporations have gotten, military contractors suck money from the “defense” budget; interest on the debt is paid directly to the banks; insurance companies run “Medicare Advantage” plans for profit; contractors have taken over janitorial services in schools and trash collection in cities.
This is one reason money is lacking for the services and infrastructure workers count on. One 2020 study found that underfunded schools would need 150 billion dollars to bring their students up to the national average—these are the schools that serve working class and poor children. In recent years, water has been unsafe to drink in Flint, Baltimore, Detroit, parts of New York City, Hawaii, and Jackson, Mississippi—something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Crumbling roads destroy cars; basements flood. More than 200 rural hospitals have closed, with more on the chopping block.
Increasing exploitation and looting of government money have made the rich much richer: from 44 U.S. billionaires on Forbes’ original 1987 list, there are now 756. Collectively, they own more than 5.5 trillion dollars, 1.5 times as much as the poorest 50% of the population.
These 756 individuals, and people of their same class, have pushed the working class into crisis, much worse even than Trump says. According to the government’s own statistics, more than 600,000 people are homeless, an increasing share of whom are working. One in eight people in this rich country are food insecure. And workers’ lives are increasingly shortened: one 2020 study found that life expectancy for people without a college degree—roughly, the working class—had been falling since 2010 and was eight and a half years less than for those with a degree.
The lack of a working class response to this disaster lays the groundwork for the increasing move to the right and the growing threat of violence.
Even as they experience this crisis, workers in this country see increasing numbers of immigrants trying to get to the U.S., from all over the world. In 2023, the border patrol reported 2.5 million “irregular encounters” at the southern border. In addition to Mexico, tens of thousands each came from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, from the South American countries of Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, from the Caribbean, Africa, India, China, and from the Middle East.
But people are not coming only to the U.S. Today, the U.N. estimates there are about 300 million international migrants, the most in history. At the most basic level, what’s pushed so many people out of their home countries is that imperialism, and first of all U.S. imperialism, has made their countries unliveable.
The U.S. government has carried out wars all over the world in the interests of its corporations. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq spread throughout the region: by 2016, the U.S. military was also carrying out bombing campaigns in Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya. Today, the U.S. is involved in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and is preparing for Israel to directly confront Iran. It is reinforcing its military cordon around China. Ongoing wars in Sudan, Myanmar, and Congo are all driven by the imperialist domination of the world.
The U.S. government has also supported countless repressive regimes and military overthrows in the interests of its corporations. Two recent examples are the 2009 coup in Honduras and the 2022 overthrow of the government of Peru, each of which led to massive repression.
And the U.S. government has undermined countries that try to take even a small slice of independence from U.S. corporate domination of their economies, like the two U.S.-backed coup attempts in Venezuela and the harsh U.S.-imposed sanctions that have made it almost impossible for that country to sell its own oil and buy food, medicine, and other goods.
Even when its state doesn’t impose outright war, the U.S. capitalist class has increased its exploitation of people everywhere. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, the U.S. forced Mexico to completely open itself to U.S. business. Millions of Mexican farms failed as the country was flooded with cheap U.S. food. Small stores were driven out of business by companies like Walmart, the largest retailer in Mexico. Even as U.S. companies set up thousands of low-wage factories in the country, there are not nearly enough jobs, and these jobs pay extremely low wages compared to those in the U.S.
It’s not just Mexico: suppliers of clothing in Central America and Asia have been set against each other to provide ever cheaper goods to U.S. retailers, which can only be done by increasing the level of exploitation—that is, by eliminating jobs and lowering wages. Plantation and mining corporations have grabbed land from small farmers all over the world. Unemployed workers and landless farmers crowd the miserable slums surrounding the cities of the poor countries.
In these slums, gangs feed on poverty. In countries like Haiti, El Salvador, or Mexico, the proportion of impoverished young people who can be recruited into gangs dwarfs that in the U.S. The gangs are also remnants of imperialist policy. The U.S. worked with the drug cartels to fund wars in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. For decades, Haitian politicians and the very rich, backed by the U.S., used gangs as their own private armies to impose control over the population. Now in many countries, those gangs have gotten out of control. In Haiti, they have essentially taken over the country, with workers paying the biggest price in kidnappings and murders.
U.S. corporations are effectively looting public services in other countries. According to the U.N., 3.3 billion people in the world suffer because their countries have been cutting funding for the most basic services to pay debt—the lion’s share of which goes to U.S. banks and investors. While schools and medical services are crumbling here, for workers in many countries, they are becoming non-existent.
Given the unliveable situations so many people face, can it be any wonder that they have been trying to escape if they can, whether to the U.S. or to some other, safer country?
So no, immigrants are not coming from prisons, jails, mental institutions or “insane asylums” as Donald Trump says. Nor are those who are crossing jungles on foot with small children, or braving the sea in leaky boats, doing so because the U.S. is “the freest nation in the world,” or to seek “the American Dream,” as the Democrats say. They are fleeing the ravages U.S. imperialism has inflicted on a huge portion of the world.
The Democratic Party has been the main party of U.S. imperialism. Democratic administrations carried out World War I, World War II, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. They expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and carried out countless smaller invasions and gave military means for plotters of coups—in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama.... Not to mention, the U.S. has imposed sanctions and embargoes to undermine the economies of any country that tried to chart an independent course. Today, a Democratic administration is facilitating Israel’s murderous war in Gaza that threatens to spread into a wider conflagration. The same Democratic administration is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which also contains the danger of setting the world on fire. In other words, the Democrats are at least as responsible as the Republicans for making huge parts of the world unliveable, thereby driving migration. Today, they are seeking by military and diplomatic means to choke the Chinese economy.
Far from defending immigrants, the Democrats are now falling all over themselves to prove they can be tough too, with Biden issuing an executive order in June closing the border to asylum applicants almost identical to an order Trump issued in 2018.
It’s not different than the policies they have carried out in this country. Over the last 50 years, the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, has overseen the transfer of wealth from the vast majority of the population to a tiny class of billionaires.
Democratic proposals have given enormous sums directly to the corporations: one estimate put corporate subsidies just in Biden’s so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” and “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” at 1.8 trillion dollars. They have cooperated with Republicans to bail out the banks again and again, from the 130-billion-dollar Savings and Loan bailouts of the 1980s and 1990s, to the multi-trillion-dollar bailouts of 2008 and 2020. While they complained about tax cuts for the rich passed by Reagan, Bush, and Trump, the Democrats never seriously tried to roll them back when they were in power.
Even when they implemented policies that were supposed to help the population, they put corporations first. Look at the Affordable Care Act, which was designed top to bottom to benefit the insurance companies. In 1979 and again in 2009, Democrats bailed out auto companies, supposedly saving jobs—but only if workers would accept concessions. Workers gave concessions, jobs weren’t saved, but profit was beefed up.
It’s true that the Democratic Party is not openly calling for the violence that Trump encourages. But by helping to create the disasters workers face in this country and elsewhere and by insisting today that things are going very well, the Democrats have paved the road for Trump and the violence he represents. Whether they win the 2024 election or not, they are no protection from that violence.
The working class has no political party of its own. Its only organizations, the unions, organize only a small share of the working class. But the problem is not size, it’s that the unions do not defend a working class policy in the face of the growing right-wing danger Trump represents.
Some union leaders such as UAW president Shawn Fain even accurately point out how anti-immigrant rhetoric covers for the capitalist class and divides the working class: “Right now, we have millions of people being told that the biggest threat to their livelihood is migrants coming over the border. The threat we face at the border isn’t from the migrants. It’s from the billionaires and the politicians getting working people to point the finger at one another, when in reality, we’re all on the same side of the war against the working class.”
But Fain’s answer to this threat—just as the answer given by most other union leaders—is to call on workers to line up behind the Democrats. Fain has gone so far as to say: “Joe Biden has a history of serving others, and serving the working class, and fighting for the working class, standing with the working class.” Fain repeats the Democrats’ basic lie that under Biden, things for workers have been getting better, which only opens the door for Trump to pose as the one candidate speaking the truth about the disaster workers are experiencing today.
Just as they cover for the attacks on the whole working class that have taken place under the Democrats, so have the main unions covered for the attacks on immigrants carried out by the Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO made no official statement on Biden’s recent order to close the border to asylum applicants. Of course not. For 40 years, the unions have been putting out propaganda that “foreign imports” or “cheap foreign labor” are taking “American jobs.” Maybe until recently most high ranking union leaders were careful not to use this kind of language directly against immigrants, but the implication remained: people from outside the country are responsible for the decline in workers’ standard of living. This has served as a convenient excuse for not organizing workers to defend themselves.
Can it be any surprise that some union leaders are now parroting Trump’s rhetoric, such as Robert Bartels, Jr., Business Manager for the New York City Steamfitters, who said at the Republican convention that: “we have an open border inviting illegal immigrants to take our American jobs and lower our wages.” This rhetoric is just the logical conclusion of what the unions have been saying for decades.
The unions don’t offer any kind of policy that might provide a way out for the working class. For that, they would have to call on workers, irrespective of whether or not in a union, whether immigrant or native born, to join in a wide social movement aimed at challenging the hold of the capitalist class. Instead, they reinforce Trump’s attacks that right now are targeted against immigrants, but those attacks will eventually fall on the whole working class.
Too many times in its past, the U.S. working class has failed to confront anti-immigrant propaganda and been violently divided against itself. In the 1840s and 1850s, as the first workers’ movement was developing in cities on the East Coast, politicians raised mobs of native-born workers to attack Irish immigrants. In the 1870s and 1880s, anti-immigrant politicians in California led riots again Chinese immigrants that culminated in a law that cut off immigration from China—though employers found plenty of immigrant workers from other countries. In 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans. From the 1840s to the 1930s, historians estimate about 5,000 Mexicans and U.S.-born Mexican Americans were lynched.
Each time, these violent attacks served not just to terrorize their immediate targets, but to divide the working population. And violence against one disadvantaged group has not stayed focused only on that group. It was not an accident that the Ku Klux Klan, which grew up as a way to throw the newly freed black population back into a de facto form of slavery, eventually spread by the 1920s to target immigrants, Jews, Catholics, communists and unionists.
Today, the politics of the country seem to be moving in an increasingly right-wing direction, with violence threatened, openly and implicitly.
But it is not inevitable that anti-immigrant sentiment will result in mass violence. The working class has overcome these types of divisions before, as during the massive workers’ movement of the 1930s. The black mobilization of the 1960s, which led to urban revolts widespread in the country, pulled after it younger white workers eager to follow the path black people had laid down. Different groups of people have found the way to organize to defend themselves against the threats of mob violence.
But to address the crisis workers face in this country will take more than simply a working class fight. It will take an organization that tells the truth about what is causing workers’ problems, and that organizes them to take on their real enemies, the capitalist class and its political servants. And it will take an organization which advocates to the workers that they take their fights to their only conclusion—the conquest of power, taking it away from this capitalist class that is driving the population of the U.S. and the entire world toward increasing violence and war.