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
Apr 6, 2025
“It’s like a Blitzkrieg.... They’re surrendering without a fight. This is extraordinary, and that’s the urgency. When you’re winning, you got to keep pounding, Don’t let them up. Don’t let them have a breath. Don’t let them regroup. Don’t let them organize.” This is Steve Bannon’s description of Trump’s first few months, as told to a Washington Post reporter. Bannon may no longer have a position in the White House, but he is the one who more or less defined the extreme-right-wing populism that Trump flirts with, and he was crucial in pushing Trump to gamble on the presidency as far back as 2012.
“Blitzkrieg”! Other terms have also been used: “shock and awe,” or “slash and burn.” Military terms all of them, and fitting because Trump and his whole administration are carrying out a war against the working class, and first of all on government workers. And they are preparing the war toward which imperialism, with American imperialism in the forefront, is dragging the world.
Elon Musk was tasked with starting the attack on the federal workforce. There is no statutory or constitutional authority for what he has done, nor for his position. Trump, assuming the authority to do what he wants, simply gave Musk a title and set him loose to rip apart government departments. He was Trump’s stalking horse. (Later on, he could become Trump’s fall guy if one is needed.)
With a rapidity that left the political world spinning, Musk gave federal employees “offers they couldn’t refuse”: quit or be fired, with a three day deadline to respond. In the first several weeks, he sent out threatening emails to 200,000 federal workers. Tens of thousands quickly found themselves locked out of their workspace. The whole federal workforce was put on notice: “you can be next.” It was a way to scare people into quitting.
Beyond the job cuts, Musk went looking for information. He sent a small army of Silicon Valley invaders to rush through major federal departments, ransacking digital files for personal and financial information of millions of people. They seem also to have copied financial payment schedules of the big programs and downloaded the digital codes for authorizing payments. We can only imagine what they might do with all this personal and financial information. (Perhaps find addresses for immigrants that ICE hasn’t been able to find?)
Trump followed up Musk’s invasion with executive orders, pretending to give the appearance of legality to all this mayhem. Among his record 107 executive orders issued in the first two months are ones shrinking employment levels or even eliminating departments in really essential public services like the CDC, FDA, NIH, NOAA, FEMA, the post office, land management, the EPA, even the FAA, among others, as well as the major social services like VA hospitals, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Cuts in employment in the social programs and in public services mean cuts in the services provided.
Trump didn’t begin the process of cutting jobs and services. The U.S. Postal Service has long been understaffed, its mail service reduced. Social Security was already missing tens of thousands of workers, people not there to answer questions or rectify mistakes. The Veterans Administration hospitals are so understaffed and lacking in facilities that at times vets wait many months for appointments, including vets who had reported suicidal thoughts. There are so few workplace inspectors that most large factories aren’t inspected more frequently than once every four or five years, if that, and small factories almost never. There aren’t enough referees to hear appeals from workers fired in union campaigns so that even when workers are reinstated, the campaign is often broken. And so on. Those cuts have been part of the attack tearing down the standard of living of American workers over the last four decades.
But Trump’s widespread, mad scramble to cut everything, everywhere, all at once risks cannibalizing the government services any modern society needs. It’s the kind of destruction that finance capital carries out when it takes over productive enterprises, mowing down everything, firing the workforce en masse, selling off what can be turned into money, burying the rest, and minting enormous profits out of the destruction.
The one thing they haven’t cut is the central part of the state, that is, its repressive forces: the Pentagon, the military, Homeland Security, the prisons, the Justice Department, internment camps—all those items that taken together already account for the bulk of regular (so-called “discretionary”) government expenditures.
Trump and Musk pretend to be seeking out “fraud, waste and abuse.” These voracious billionaires, who accumulated their billions from government handouts, dare to pretend they want to make government more “efficient”? No, they don’t want “efficiency”—they want to eliminate whatever they can of government control over business, what business calls “regulation.” In fact, business only agrees to this so-called regulation function of government when it serves the general interests of the capitalist class. But over the last several decades of crisis, as business turned more and more to government for bailouts, money for the rest of government was cut. The federal civilian workforce shrank, and as it did, regulation was stripped away. The cuts Trump envisions will further minimize what was already minimal. But even this attack will have consequences for the population: a further worsening of the environment, of working conditions, of safety, of sanitary conditions, of health, etc.
The Trump administration pretends that it is clawing back unnecessary and even fraudulent expenditures. Trump repeats the lies of right-wing “influencers” on social-media like Laura Loomer, who claim there are tens of thousands of dead people receiving Social Security and millions of immigrants receiving benefits they haven’t contributed to. Yes, there is fraud and waste in government finances. But the terrible waste is in all those subsidies, tax breaks, other gifts that go to reinforce the profits of the capitalist class, symbolized by the enormous 4.3-trillion-dollar tax break Trump pushed through in his first term. Most of the cuts established in the original legislation are set to expire on December 31, 2025, and Trump has promised to resurrect them. This new version of the tax cut, just like the old, will go overwhelmingly to the wealthy and to the corporations from which they derive their wealth. And, like the first one, it will be paid for by the working class. The talk of dead people and immigrants getting government payouts is nothing but a smokescreen hiding the very real wealth-grab around which the U.S. government is organized, that is, the outright theft by Trump’s whole class.
Trump, in his myriad orders, has been setting out the main goals of the extreme-right-wing domestic agenda. The speed with which he laid it out, the vicious criticism he aimed at any who would question it, and particularly any in the judiciary, all this speaks to the extreme right’s desire that nothing get in the way, now that they have a man in the White House to act for them. Whether his party’s control of Congress could give them what they want—that’s not at all sure. The traditional legislative road is too slow, too open to debates and haggling, or even to public pressures, like the ones hitting Republican Congressmen right now from their own voters. Presidential orders are so much simpler, so much faster.
Such orders, alone, may border on being extra-legal. And Trump’s often are—for example, his de facto claim that he can ignore provisions of the Constitution that define who is a citizen. Up until now, the courts may have been slowing down Trump’s juggernaut, but they have been careful to do it only temporarily. Nothing indicates the court system is likely to stop him—not so long, anyway, as he continues to have wide support from the capitalist class. And there is nothing yet that indicates he is losing that—even if there was a bit of unease after the Signal scandal, and outright anger on Wall Street over his April tariff announcement.
Nonetheless, so far, there have been no calls for his impeachment coming from bourgeois sources, in contrast to what happened during his first term. But, of course, all that could change. The bourgeoisie has other means than impeachment to dump a politician. Just as rapidly as Trump moved to wipe out whole government departments, he could be called to heel. Whether or not he always remembers it, he is the dog on the bourgeoisie’s leash.
(In fact, maybe Trump’s a bit worried right now, given the hints that he and the vice-president suddenly started dropping about Musk’s time coming to an end. Better that Musk should fall on his sword than Trump—or so thinks Trump.)
The foreign policy of the Trump administration, despite some obvious changes, is little more than a warmed-over version of policies that preceded him. The main point is, as it has been, to reinforce the dominance of U.S. imperialism over the rest of the world. That dominance has been guaranteed ever since the end of World War II by the enormous difference in the weight of U.S. military “assets,” compared to the military of every other country; the size of the U.S. home market; its control of so many essential primary resources; and, of course, the heavy hand of U.S. finance, demonstrated by the key role played by the U.S. dollar as the international currency.
There is a difference, however. While previous administrations might have used diplomatic back alleys to quietly enforce their dealings with other countries, Trump glories in lording it over the rest of the world.
U.S. moves to weaken Europe, for example, are not new. When the U.S.—under first Obama, then Biden—instigated a conflict that turned into chapters of the war in Ukraine, Europe found itself cut off from much cheaper Russian energy and grain, driving Germany into a real recession. Forced to respect the sanctions imposed on Russian trade, and facing first the blocking of the second pipeline, and then the explosion of the first, Europe was forced to buy its oil and gas from the U.S. at a much higher price, along with the U.S. weapons it was forced to buy to send to the Ukrainian forces.
So the weakening of Europe, vis-a-vis the U.S., is not new. But the attitude publicly expressed about it is new—and striking. Vice-president Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, went on a rant, denouncing Europe’s supposed “freeloading” off the American largess.
The same arrogance can be seen in the way Trump seems to tear up international political alliances. The widely televised discussion, for example, between Trump, Vance and Ukraine’s President Zelensky, turned into a vicious public scolding of Zelensky. That was a statement made not only to Zelensky, but to the rest of the world: Trump’s U.S. will do exactly what it wants to do. Get used to the public humiliation!
Then there is the sudden shift, under Trump, of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia. That shift does not mean, as parts of the U.S. media said, that Putin put one over on Trump. It’s obvious that the U.S. was responsible for the shift, and not Russia, just as it’s obvious that the U.S., under Trump or anyone else, could cut Russia off again. And Trump is already beginning to hint that the friendship is not as tight as he let it seem.
Other parts of the media explained this shift by the supposed affinity between two leaders who both style themselves as “strong men,” Putin and Trump.
But Trump is not the first to seek to use Russia (and before Russia, the Soviet Union), to help maintain stability within U.S. imperialism’s orbit. It might be only a way, for now, to drive a wedge between China and Russia, given the increasing economic weight of China.
In any case, whatever is behind it, these public shifts demonstrate the will of U.S. imperialism to make the rest of the world jump to its tune.
Which is certainly what Trump’s announcements on tariffs show. It’s not clear at this point how serious Trump really is on these tariffs, despite his April 2 TV spectacular, “America’s Liberation Day.” As the business press has already pointed out, there doesn’t seem to be any concrete reality behind the bright-colored numbers entered onto the big chart Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick trotted out for the video cameras.
Trump’s tariff proposal could in part be motivated by his narcissistic desire to always take center stage, as he did for an hour and a half on “Liberation Day,” basking in the adulation of his assembled cabinet and other officials, as well as a dozen auto workers and a few teamsters, brought in for the occasion, along with their hard hats.
The buildup to “Liberation Day” could be essentially a negotiating ploy, a threat to see what concessions he could wring out of other countries. And he even said it: “Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do. We put ourselves in the driver’s seat. If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now, they will do anything for us.” Of course, this boast, coming on the day markets were near collapsing, may have been only a way to say he wasn’t worried, and that markets shouldn’t be either.
Trump’s talk about tariffs could also be aimed at getting deals with other countries on issues other than tariffs—such as Greenland, for example.
Trump may sound like a kid having a tantrum when he yells, “I want Greenland,” But regardless of Trump’s own personal interest in the matter, the U.S. has long worked for ways to guarantee its direct control over the country. Its military has been using it as a forward base since 1941, and the U.S. military has considered it to be one of its most important bases ever since. As the political situation in the world becomes more grave, the U.S. military may well want a more absolute control over its geographic position. All those minerals are just a plus.
The world is beset by conflicts today, both economic and political, that put it on the road to a new global war. Trump didn’t cause them. And he didn’t really challenge U.S. policy in them. Trump basically only brought some of those conflicts out into the open.
Could Trump develop a more isolationist kind of foreign policy? He certainly campaigned on that basis, and it’s the aim of a lot of the extreme right that Trump has gathered around himself. They wish to bail out of what they call “foreign entanglements.” But for every statement Trump, now elected, makes in that direction, there are two more reaffirming the direction in which the U.S. policy has long been going. His aggressive threats toward Greenland, Canada and Panama are hardly the stance of an isolationist withdrawing from the rest of the world. On the contrary, under Trump, the U.S. has stepped up the bombing of Yemen, and has strongly supported the expanding Israeli war in the Middle East. And he’s not cutting military expenditures, he’s increasing them. In reality, Trump is just one more, in a long line of bellicose-sounding mouthpieces for the expansion of U.S. imperialism, who—cloaked under an isolationist brand—is really preparing the way for war.
The tariffs, themselves, didn’t start with Trump. Tariffs have been increasing all over the world at their fastest rate since the Great Depression. It’s an expression of the underlying economic crisis. When the global economic pie stops growing, individual capitalists increasingly rely on their own state apparatuses to fight to defend their own private interests. Workers all over the world will pay the price for it, and in the future will pay a greater price.
But Trump, given his “me-first” style, has at the very least aggravated the situation. The current state of the global economy is not so solid as to be able to absorb the big shock these tariffs might well administer. The rapid fall of stock prices, resulting in a six-trillion-dollar loss in the first two days of trading after Trump’s tariff announcement, of course speaks first of all to the amount of speculation rampant on the trading floors. But it also reflects the capitalists’ awareness of how interlocked and overdrawn their own economy is, and the risks posed by Trump’s decision to try tariffs. He may have thrown them out against the wall just to see what happens, which is often the case with Trump. But the fact that this not-quite-stable egomaniac is leading the state apparatus of the most powerful imperialism the world has ever seen shows to what point of insanity capitalism has brought the world today.
“A tariff,” according to Warren Buffett, one of the richest billionaires in the world, “is an act of war, to some degree. It may not draw blood immediately, but make no mistake—it’s an act of aggression that invites retaliation.”
Some of Trump’s executive orders targeted specific individuals who had been involved in last spring’s protests against U.S. government policies, and specifically against U.S. support for and involvement in Israel’s war on Gaza, or against the U.S. government’s de facto war on migrants who cross a U.S. border without authorization.
A Palestinian graduate student from Columbia University, who had legal residency status, was arrested for the role he played during campus protests last spring. His Green Card was revoked, without any judicial hearing. A graduate student from Turkey at Tufts University was arrested—actually accosted and grabbed by masked ICE agents on the street—based on an article she wrote last spring, criticizing Israel’s policies in Gaza, and calling on the university to divest. Her student visa was revoked, also without any hearing. Seven other graduate students from other countries, some of them Fulbright Scholars, were arrested, their student visas revoked, again without any legal hearing. These were all advanced students with impeccable credentials. The message was clear: if this can happen to them, it can happen to you. Every student from another country was put on notice: don’t so much as open your mouth or put a pen to paper.
When the protests started last year, other students, American citizens who played a role in the protests, found themselves “doxxed.” That is, their personal information—addresses where they live, where their parents and siblings live, email addresses, phone numbers, private information about their lives—all of that has been thrown out into the jungle of social media—with predictable results. They, as well as their siblings and even their parents, were harassed and threatened. This was apparently carried out by extreme right-wing organizations like Canary Mission, but Trump’s bootprints are all over this kind of intimidation. Just as he is behind the discipline Columbia University handed out to its students who demonstrated. The first ones “doxxed,” the first ones who had their degrees revoked or lost credit hours for work completed—they all stand as a warning to every other student who might think about protesting U.S. policies.
Some of the Administration’s actions have no other purpose than to stir up fears in the population about other people, people supposedly unlike themselves. The treatment of the Venezuelan migrants, for example. Some were arrested, accused of being part of a criminal gang. Without any evidence, without any hearing, they were whisked off to a notorious prison in El Salvador, their heads shaved, their bodies stripped of their clothes to show tattoos. They were exhibited in irons, inside a cage. “Dangerous criminal”—it might as well have been stamped on their foreheads.
Adding to their degradation was the visit by Kristi Noem, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security. She rushed to the prison, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, and form-fitting clothes, eager to make a name for herself. The prisoners, crowded 12 into a tiny cell, were props, a backdrop for the warning she spat out to people all over the world: “This vicious prison could be YOUR destination if you attempt illegally to cross a U.S. border.”
One after the other, the more vulnerable parts of the population have been singled out for attack. Treated as pariahs, they are presented as everyone else’s enemy. Transgender women, for example, are supposed to be clamoring to take part in women’s sports, eager to create unfair competition. Black people are supposed to be the beneficiaries of an anti-white racism. “Illegal” immigrants supposedly come with the purpose of taking the jobs of American workers, or to engage in criminal activity.
Trump says he wants to take America back to the “greatness” of McKinley’s time. Well, not only was this the time of the Robber Barons, a time when sweat shops defined work and the greedy chase after wealth defined the new capitalist class. A time when a young U.S. capitalist class joined the rush to divide up the rest of the world. It was also a time when lynch mobs ruled the Southern countryside, when ethnic gangs “cleaned out” neighborhoods in Northern cities, when the American Legion strung up union organizers—or ran them out of town, covered with tar and feathers. It’s an America where different parts of the population were set against each other, put in competition with each other for scarce jobs, for scarce housing, for scarce everything.
Trump would set different parts of the population against each other—obliterating the one division which is the only one that counts, the division into classes, with the working class on one side of the dividing line and the capitalists on the other. It’s an old trick, but pulled out of the hat once again by a capitalist society so rotten that it is engaging in a new trade war that can pave the road to a new global war.
Is this fascism, or in any case, the first steps down the road to fascism? Or is it, even, a new “McCarthy period”?
Certainly, Trump appears more authoritarian than previous presidents. Resting on his hundred and some executive orders, he has dismissed the relevance of Congress for legislating policy. He has called attention to how much he is ignoring orders issued by the courts. He has attacked many of the so-called bastions of democracy: the press, universities, major law firms, unions, the ones who represent freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, or of the right to organize, or of the right of citizens to be represented by legal counsel.
The rapidity with which Trump has thrown out established precedents and moved to assume powers that are not legally bestowed on him—and, up until now, has gotten away with it—shows how quickly the political situation could change, in other words how quickly a renewed McCarthy period—or fascism—might envelop us.
Today, many of Trump’s presidential orders are aimed at disciplining the population, portending worse repression.
But it’s important to recognize the kind of bait-and-switch approach on which his orders rest. A clear example is the way his administration is supposedly removing immigrants, with or without papers. He says, over and over and over that they are going to pick up a million immigrants in widespread sweeps through the population. In fact, the state apparatus to do that doesn’t exist. Not yet today anyway. But six masked men can pick up one Turkish woman off the street in broad daylight, they can repeat showing this one incidence on TV. They can pick up a few dozen Venezuelans, strip them of their clothes to show their tattoos, send them to an El Salvador prison, flood the media with horror stories of this prison, aimed at every immigrant, to say ‘you, too, can end up here.’
They can use administrative measures, declaring for example, that several thousand immigrants—legal or not, no one knows—are dead, messing up their income tax and Social Security records. Yes, they can do all that—it’s a scare campaign to get people to deport themselves. But it’s not a raid. Of course, in the future there could be real, widespread raids through immigrant neighborhoods. But today, what they are doing is a scare campaign, aimed at getting people to discipline themselves.
Just as they are doing with the universities, and the law firms, and the big media.
But that’s far from meaning that Trump is riding a fascist wave today. Trump has vested himself, as it were, with the robes of an “imperial presidency.” Referring to the second article of the Constitution—which says that the executive power is vested in a President—Trump has said, and said it several times, that this means he has the right to do what he wants.
Trump, in reality, is responding to a problem the bourgeoisie has long faced, and that is that the political structure of the country is not well adapted for making decisions quickly. The long-term economic crisis, the growing competition between various countries, the world roiled by more wars—all of this points up the urgency of the problem. Decision-making is spread among various actors, both geographically, and in terms of function. The country is divided into local decision makers (cities and counties), states, and a federal center. As the issue of abortion’s legality shows, this militates against a common approach, common agreement on what should be done, etc.
And the federal government, with its tripartite division—a division usually emulated on the level of the 50 states—can often end up not as a way to get to a decision, but as competing apparatuses which block each other. The modern world is moving at warp speed, but the political structure in the U.S., at least formally, is still back in 1787, when the Constitution was written. As a result, the famous “checks and balances” between three supposedly co-equal branches of government, which every school child has heard about, has given way to one branch—the Executive Branch—accumulating ever more power in its own hands at the expense of the other two.
Take the question of war. Supposedly Congress declares war, after which the Executive Branch carries it out, and the judiciary stands at the side to make sure these clearly defined responsibilities are respected. But how long has it been since Congress actually declared a war? Korea, well no, that was only a “police action.” Viet Nam, well no, the 1964 Tonkin Resolution was not close to a declaration of war, and it came several years after the U.S. had entered the war in force. Iraq, no, not a whiff of it. Afghanistan, no. Syria—was there even a U.S. war in Syria? And how about all those wars funded by the U.S., and carried out by proxies: Israel, Ukraine, Lebanon.
Or take the role of the Supreme Court, which is supposed to keep the president in check. But, it turns out, that when a president appoints the members of the Court, they might be predisposed to see things through his eyes, including by granting the president blanket immunity, as they did with Trump. Or, take the matter of abortion, which one Supreme Court declared to be recognized by the Constitution, only for a later Court to say, no it isn’t.
The structure effectively has been ignored for a long time, whenever a key issue comes up. When the economy nearly collapsed in 2008, Bush, the about-to-leave president, and Obama, the not-yet president, worked with a few bankers and the Federal Reserve to patch up the financial markets. Congress and the Courts were simply irrelevant.
In fact, what Trump has been doing is only taking it all one step further, pushing the envelope, as the saying goes, asserting his right to act as all three: President, Congress and the Judiciary, and doing it all through Executive orders.
To say that Trump is not fascism does not mean that fascism couldn’t develop. But our problem is to know what’s in the hand that’s been dealt to us now. That hand shows an intensifying of economic attacks on the population, and a worsening of the repressive forces of the state, and the attempt to once again offer up the Democrats as the answer to both. Today, this last part still holds the biggest risk for the working class.
How far can this all go—how extreme can the attacks be on the standard of living, how severe can the repression be—that depends not on Trump, but on the pace of the worsening of the economic crisis and in the growing competition which today is playing out between nations.
There will be attacks. And the working class is going to bear their brunt, even just based on the trade war brewing now. The tariffs are another tax, a particularly regressive one, one which will cut the standard of living of those with the least income. To the extent a trade war further develops, the loss of jobs will hit wide parts of the working class.
Whatever repression develops will be directed against the working class because it is the force that potentially can put an end to this system which produces such catastrophes as joblessness and inflation, trade wars and shooting wars.
Today, the capitalist class is more prepared than the working class is.
In fact, what Trump has done, acting like an “imperial president,” is part of that preparation, an indication that the capitalists are ready, if they need to do it, to rest themselves not only on the dictatorship of their whole class over the rest of society, but on the dictatorship of one man if the situation calls for that, if greater repression is needed. That doesn’t mean they are counting on Trump to be that man. He is just pushing the limits today.
Whatever happens, the working class can only depend on itself. And today the working class is not prepared. It has no political party of its own. It has not organized itself to take part independently in political struggles for its own separate interests. It has barely carried out trade union struggles, within the very restrictive formats defined by union contracts and the acceptance of anti-worker labor law, which prevent workers from coalescing as a class.
What makes it worse is that most of the leaders of the unions have worked to tie workers to the Democratic Party. Some of those same leaders fall in behind Trump, pleased with his tariffs, pleased with his moves to criminalize immigrants.
The fact they can support both the Democrats and Trump’s policies is not a contradiction. Because in both cases, they are simply tying the workers, to the extent they have any influence with them, to the capitalist class, which the Democrats and Trump and his party all defend.
Obviously, the Democrats will seek to make Trump the issue, to make getting rid of him the goal. Bernie Sanders, who today is carrying on a national tour, campaigning against “Oligarchy,” is attracting many of those people who want to fight—and pulling them right back into the Democratic Party.
All of that pulls the working class backward. The demonstrations of April 5 show how reactionary that focus can be, how it can divert people who are eager to fight.
That is why it is so important for revolutionaries today to plant a flag that workers and all those who link their fate to the working class can rally around. A flag is needed for all those who are worried and fed up, not just with Trump, but with what the rotting, stinking capitalist system has brought. More than ever, we must say that the working class needs its own independent party, its own independent program. For it is the working class that holds the key to rescuing society from the barbarism that capitalism is bringing to all humanity.
In taking this stand, we will be in the minority. More exactly, we will be a minority of the minority. Sometimes that has been harder to deal with than repression.