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
Nov 10, 2025
The federal government shutdown is now stretching into its second month, the longest in history. The Republican and Democratic politicians blame the other party for the shutdown. What liars! Each in their own way engineered the shutdown. These are the same politicians who have waged class war against the working population all along.
Close to 1.5 million government workers and employees are not getting paid. About half are being forced to work without a paycheck. The other half are out on furlough and face the very real possibility that they may not have a job, when the government is reopened.
Vital SNAP benefits, previously known as food stamps, have been interrupted, a gigantic attack against the 42 million people who depend on them. SNAP benefits are not handouts. They go to working families with low-paying jobs, the elderly, and people with disabilities living on extremely low fixed incomes.
Over 18 million of those on SNAP work full time and make up an important part of the workforce, both in the private and public sectors, including Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s. The wealth these workers produce is stolen from them in order to make billionaires like the Waltons and Bezos even richer. In fact, SNAP is a taxpayer-funded subsidy to employers that pay such low wages their workforce would starve without them.
These families’ refrigerators and cupboards were already bare when SNAP benefits ran out on November 1. As the shelves of the charities and food banks emptied, desperate parents climbed into dumpsters, searching for unspoiled food to feed their children.
The politicians claim there’s no money, supposedly because of the shutdown that they themselves engineered. Yet, the government still collects all the taxes from the working population. It still pays out hundreds of billions to all the big companies and capitalists through fat, profit-heavy contracts. It still pays for all the salaries and perks of the politicians, the cabinet secretaries, the judges and the generals. The government just bought brand new jets for Kristi Noem so she can carry out Trump’s witchhunts against immigrants in luxury, and it paid for Trump’s fancy new gold-plated bathroom in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom. All the other crooks and scammers, starting with the Trump family, continue to feast at the government trough.
The government finds plenty of money when it wants to, especially to fund the priorities of the capitalists, the super-rich and the billionaires. Right in the middle of the shutdown, the Treasury found a “spare” 40 billion dollars to bail out all the U.S. speculators and billionaires who own Argentina’s national debt and to help out Trump’s extreme-right-wing buddy, Argentine President Javier Milei. It continues to bankroll the rapid expansion of ICE and the Border Patrol, along with their growing network of internment camps and prisons, meant for immigrants … and anyone who dares oppose these policies. And it continues to fund the gigantic military build-ups aimed at Venezuela and China, as well as the myriad other wars on all the continents, wars that threaten to give way to a much bigger conflagration.
No, for the politicians, the wealthy and the privileged, there is no shutdown. Government is still very much open for business. Not for a second has their government stopped doing what it always does, defending the interests of the capitalist class, the wealthy and the elite, as they plunder and rob the working class here and abroad, reaping poverty and destruction, running the entire society worldwide into the ground.
The government shutdown, and the toll that it is taking, is only these latest chapter in the capitalists’ ongoing war against the working class.
Today, the working class is stunned and disoriented and has yet to respond to these attacks except in a few protests. But the history of capitalism is not just the history of exploitation and oppression, but the history of the human beings who stood up against this oppression and organized enormous struggles.
Capitalism is not the be-all and the end-all. Another future is possible. The forces of the working class and its potential for struggle are under the surface, just waiting to erupt.