Spark Conference:
Introduction to Discussion

Apr 19, 2025

On July 1, 1971, six people signed the statement, “For a Trotskyist Organization in the Working Class”. In that same month, they put out the first issue of The Spark newspaper. At that point, they had six workplace newsletters between Detroit and Baltimore.

On August 15, 1971, barely a month later, Richard Nixon signed the order indicating that the U.S. government would no longer honor its commitment to exchange gold from the dwindling U.S. stockpile for the dollars held by other countries. Subsequently this date has been used to mark the end of one economic period, and the beginning of a new one, that is, the long-term economic crisis, which has persisted to this day.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the dates are a convenient reminder that our whole existence has been spent in the shadow of economic crisis. At the beginning, the plants where we had work were still roiled by the young men who had been in the streets of Detroit in 1967, and in Baltimore in 1968. But what soon struck us were the recessions that hit one after another, and rapidly: 1970, 73–74, 79–80, 81–82. In Detroit, we were in auto, where plants cut hours, cut shifts, then shut down. In Baltimore, we were in steel, where companies were competing to buy each other up, tearing down the integrated complexes they had built. It didn’t take long for union contracts to be renegotiated or even torn up mid-term. And quickly we were hit by the patriotic crap pushed in the USWA film, “Where’s Joe?,” about Japan’s supposed theft of American jobs; and then by a similar UAW campaign, which went so far as to destroy foreign cars, specifically Japanese ones, and which then led to the racist killing of Vincent Chin by two auto workers, one a foreman. In other cities, details may have been different, but this is what we lived through.

Thus began a steady, for the most part slow and carefully measured attack aimed at a working class that had broken out of the bonds of the McCarthy period.

1974 was the turning point, the high point of strikes, but we didn’t know it then. Up until then, strikes, officially declared and wildcat, seemed on the increase. But after 1974, there began what was to become a steady decline in the number of working-class struggles of any sort.

It wasn’t yet so obvious. And the Blue Cross Strike in 1987, followed by the Workers Against Concessions election campaign, seemed at the time to hold out other possibilities.

In fact, the “victory” won by the women at Blue Cross who stayed out 12 weeks was simply that they did not give in to a single demand the company had made, at a time when other workers were all giving up concessions. Nonetheless, it seemed to open the door. We knew we had done something different in that strike. Our attempt to build on it, that is, WAC, rested on the fact that the strike had attracted the attention of some dozens of unionists who were attempting in their own situation to organize opposition to the concessions drive. We were able to pull together a slate, composed of 26 candidates. We thought that maybe BC/WAC would set off a new movement by the working class. But there was no real echo.

There were strikes after that, mostly led by the existing bureaucracy, or oppositions that grew out of it. But hardly any exceptions, they were rearguard actions, and many led to somewhat spectacular defeats, which weighed on workers’ morale. Overall, strike numbers kept going down, slowly, but from one year to the next, the numbers declined.

When we step back today and compare the living and working situation of the working class to what it was in 1973, for example, almost every measure shows a very big drop. In the numbers working, in wages, in the drive for productivity, or the destruction of schools and of public services in the cities, closing of hospitals in the country, etc.

But as we were going through it, it was such a steady, slow dribble of losses and attacks, that from one month to the next, or even one year to the next, it almost seemed the same. But it wasn’t the same. And when we compare the situation of the working class today with what it was in 1973, the difference is staggering.

So what is the point of all this?

Maybe it lets us remind ourselves that our way of viewing today’s situation is distorted by our having lived through this long period marked by what seemed a cloying sameness.

This is part of what makes the situation today seem so extraordinary. “Everything, everywhere, all at the same time”—that’s exactly the point of the way the Trump/Musk combo has been organizing the attacks on the working class, with such rapidity and complete disorganization that no one can catch a simple breath. The 24 Executive orders Trump issued on Inauguration Day made it clear there wasn’t going to be any more slow, measured pace.

Trump seems to be an extraordinary figure. Maybe. But whatever he is, he simply is reflecting the situation. And even if the situation were extraordinary, the fact is that Big Business and the political class go on as they always have.

The Detroit News just reported that Stellantis has been put “at risk” by tariffs and growing competition from Chinese automakers, that it is caught in an economic situation that threatens not only its immediate profits, but also its future. So Stellantis took action—to increase dividend payouts to stockholders, and to confer a 12-million-dollar separation package on Tavares, the CEO who oversaw the last disastrous year. In other words, it’s business as usual: the sky may be falling, but they still want their money.

The Washington Post just reported on a spectacular fundraising weekend that took place at Trump’s Florida outpost, even while, as the Post put it, “the financial meltdown Plays Out.” Taking central place was a small intimate dinner at Trump’s private club, admission price for which was a million dollars a head. Trump disbursed social media messages: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE.”

It may have been Trump’s usual crude gloss put on the whole thing, but finally it was just politics as usual.

Would Biden have bragged about such a gross fundraiser on the day after his policies sent the stock market and the Treasury-bill market into a nosedive? Of course not, he would have been circumspect. But remember the Democrats raised more money than Trump did in 2024, and undoubtedly from some of the same billionaires who were at Trump’s club.

The problem is not Trump or Biden or Harris, and what they each stand for. Our problem is to follow the process which gets us from Biden to Trump. Unless we recognize how Biden paved the road for Trump, we won’t understand what is going on now. A lot of melodrama is spewing out of social media. Trump knows very well how to play the fiddle all the media dance to.

Trump regularly talks about, for example, deporting a million undocumented immigrants—a million if not three, sometimes it’s eight million people.

Even one million, he can’t do—there is not now a sufficient state apparatus to even begin doing it. That’s not to say that they couldn’t ramp up the state apparatus, if the situation demanded it. But that’s not what we are seeing today.

Yes, six masked men and women can grab a timid young Turkish woman off the street in broad daylight. And the TV news can keep the one video of her capture running over and over again.

Trump can pretend that the first few arrests are just the beginning of a vast roundup.

They can pick up 200 or whatever number it was of Venezuelans with tattoos. They can schedule a video performance of the director of national intelligence airlifted down to the Salvadoran jail, where she issues a warning to all the undocumented immigrants back in the U.S.: if you don’t have papers, this could be you.

They can use administrative measures to sweep the names of 1000 living people off the IRS and Social Security files onto the dead person file.

They can do all that, even while suggesting to immigrants to leave on their own. How many people will calculate it’s better not to be picked up and so take themselves out? Not near a million, but some; it’s maybe enough to scare all those who are left working the jobs U.S. capitalism currently needs filled, so that U.S. capital’s use of vulnerable, low-paid immigrants can go on.

It could change, yes. But what we are seeing today is a scare campaign aimed at getting people to discipline themselves, to fall in line, to shut up.

What is the point, no one exactly knows. It’s all hypothetical. But the fear is real.

To the extent that universities lose some federal funds, or are threatened with the loss, some may discipline their own students. In fact, many started doing that before Trump got in office, cutting their already earned credits, kicking them out of school, even taking back their diplomas. Did that already throw up a barrier to renewed protests this year? Who knows?

To the extent that big law firms cut a deal with Trump to avoid putting out money for a trial, they make the point to every law firm that it’s risky taking on the case of someone accused by the government. The point is made to everyone, that the lawyers who used to represent political activists no longer want to deal with their problem.

To the extent that government workers felt forced to decide one-by-one and very rapidly, whether to take an early retirement with a cash bonus to leave, they confronted the powerlessness of individual resistance. It caused a rapid drain of people working in some departments that the extreme right would like to dump.

What’s real and what’s the creation of social media clumping along after Trump? Don’t be so quick to swallow the headlines.

Think about these demonstrations on April 5, popping up in every city, on the same day—and with exactly the same main slogan, proposing as it’s main demand, everywhere, to get rid of Trump.

Now how did that happen? Who has the nationwide apparatus and staff to be on the streets like that, without a movement first having built up?

Who has the interest to keep the focus on Trump?

Here’s another way to check the situation—who was at the demonstrations? That means who was pulled to come out? If we gauge from Detroit, this large-majority black and working-class city, the demonstrators didn’t reflect it. It appeared 95% or more were white, could have been more. In fact, it was the middle class base that the Democrats have been aiming at—that’s who came out.

The Democratic Party didn’t have to put its name on a single sign—and it didn’t—but the intent of the demonstration was clear. Begin to mobilize now for ... for what? The next elections. In this lesser-evil arrangement, that can only mean prepare to help the Democrats.

April 5 certainly had more people than usual, and a good many younger people, but it was not just a “spontaneous outpouring” of people angry at Trump, as all sorts of social media would have it. It was a centrally organized action, very tightly controlled, with warnings from the beginning, to be “peaceful.”

There are some sloppy ideas being tossed around political milieus today (some of the same old ones). We hear that Trump and Biden are not the same. Well, yes, that is true. They aren’t. But they carry out the same kind of dirty work for the capitalist class, keeping the system limping along, so one more bit of wealth can be accumulated.

As the attacks of capital intensify, Trump is the means to divert workers’ anger into a right-wing agenda. But, more to the point, he seems to be the man the bourgeoisie needs right now to shovel more of society’s wealth into its hands.

But Biden was the man they needed in 2020, when the population seemed in a state of eruption over the killing of George Floyd, breaking out of the Covid handcuffs, which had kept people locked down. In the future if there are eruptions over the attacks on Social Security, Medicare, etc.—and there will be big attacks—we may discover then that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the “man” that capitalism will need. Or, maybe, J.D. Vance.

Do we confront the possibility, even in the near-term, of greater repression? Probably. But the biggest risk in that case is to believe that the Democratic Party, new-style or old-style, can be a protection against it. That is the real, not hypothetical danger we face today. And it’s simply the latest version of the old lesser-evil argument.

No, we can’t just repeat, they are the same. But we can show they defend the same system—if we take the time to unpack the cellophane packaging around each of them.