A War at Home, Against the Working Class

Mar 30, 2026

The following is taken from talks given at the Spark Dinner in Detroit on March 22. The first part of the talks discussed the U.S. war against Iran, which is covered in other articles in this paper (see pages 3, 9, 10). The part reprinted below connected that war to what is happening to the working class in the United States.

There’s a war taking place abroad, but there is also a war taking place right here in this country, a war against the working class. But the politicians call it an “Affordability Crisis,” which just gives them the opportunity to make all kinds of empty promises for ideas to fix the problems—when they are actually part of the problem!

The reality of the matter is one that we are all way too familiar with. Prices are on the rise for everything—housing, food, transportation, and healthcare. These are the very basics that people need to survive, but they are increasingly becoming out of reach for a large part of the working class.

Housing is one of the most important indicators of the problem. Over the past four decades, rent increases have drastically outpaced worker wages. Currently over 12 million households are spending half, if not more, of their income to pay for rent and utilities, leaving very little for any other costs such as food, let alone recreation. Millions of workers are living in their cars, shelters, or motels, along with their families. School districts across this country report close to 2 million children as homeless.

Reliable transportation is another huge issue for the working class. Lack of affordable housing means that workers live further away from their jobs and schools. Car prices are growing so fast, and we live in a country where there is almost no public transportation. A new car on average costs over $50,000 and a used car about $25,000—and these figures don’t include added interest amounts or insurance.

Another indicator of the attack on the working class is the state of our healthcare system. Healthcare costs are growing at a rate of three times faster than wages. Currently there are approximately 16 million people ages 18–64 without any healthcare coverage. And for those who happen to have healthcare coverage, it doesn’t guarantee them actually getting medical care. There are over 100 million workers that have “inadequate” coverage. This is coverage that often carries high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles, causing many to delay the care they need.

Food prices have skyrocketed over the last five years, at rates that are much higher than inflation. There are almost 50 million people, including 15 million children, that the U.S. government considered “food insecure”, meaning they don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis.

The thing is, the money is there to provide adequate housing, healthcare, transportation and so much more, but it is being stolen by the capitalist class. The wealth of the richest one percent of the population in the U.S. has reached over 55 trillion dollars, which is more than the entire economies of the U.S. and China combined. Not to mention the hoards of money being used to build up the U.S military arsenal.

For the working class, financial cuts and deplorable conditions are only going to get worse as we move into a bigger war. This is the only way the capitalist class knows how to operate. Squeeze every last dime it can from those generating the wealth, us, and use it for what they want and not what we need. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, by the sixth day of the war, the cumulative cost of the war in Iran was 12.7 billion dollars. And this figure is going up by the minute. This is our money. This is tax-payer dollars. Money we pay into a system that should be taking care of our needs, not murdering innocent people or used as a tool for U.S capitalists. We could spend that money on anything other than killing and destroying generations of working-class people in other countries, while lining the pockets of the one percent.

This is not something we need to get down about, this should put fuel in your fire. Most recently we saw in Minneapolis, MN that people are mad as hell and are trying to do something about it.

Minneapolis Fought Back

Because of a determined mobilization by the population in Minneapolis, the Trump administration backed off and de-escalated the situation, at least for the time being.

Trump had sent 3,000 ICE agents into Minneapolis, supposedly to go after criminals who were not U.S. citizens. ICE was nothing but a bunch of masked gangsters, armed with assault rifles. They grabbed people off the street, out of their cars, workplaces, restaurants, schools and homes, citizens and non-citizens alike.

Trump claimed that ICE was arresting and deporting the “worst of the worst”. But when the folks in Minneapolis saw who ICE was arresting, they were not rapists, murderers and criminals, as Trump claimed. People in Minneapolis saw ICE taking away their neighbors and their co-workers; taking away workers from the restaurants and stores; taking away the parents of their children’s classmates. As one woman protester in Minneapolis said, “when you’re here, living it and seeing it, you know people who are being taken. They’re people; they live here; they pay taxes; they have families.” Most of the people taken by ICE were not U.S. citizens, but they were people who were trying to go through the legal process to become U.S. citizens.

People in Minneapolis could see that they had been lied to by Trump. A lot of people were outraged; they said something really wrong was going on here.

So, some people in Minneapolis started to do something about it by protesting against ICE. There have been protests against ICE in other cities, when ICE invaded people’s neighborhoods. But in Minneapolis, people across the whole city started to resist the ICE occupation. It spread fast. Perhaps the protests in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd had given people the experience on how to organize. Ordinary people organized through their community groups, block clubs, churches and schools, in union halls and in workplaces. Over 30,000 people trained to be ICE observers. They had watch groups, recording ICE on their phones, tailing ICE vehicles and warning people when ICE was around. People organized to bring food to immigrants who were afraid to leave their homes. There were marches and mass rallies.

Protesters confronted ICE in the streets. During two of these protests ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But despite these two murders, people were not intimidated, as ICE and the Trump administration thought they would be. When Renee Good was murdered, there was a protest by hundreds of people in zero-degree weather at 7:00 a.m. the next morning.

When people heard about the murder of Alex Pretti, within minutes, hundreds of people came into the streets to confront ICE. People who were unarmed were facing the armed-to-the-teeth ICE agents who had just killed two people in cold blood.

This determination by the protesters in Minneapolis had an impact on people around the country. There were growing protests against ICE in big cities and small towns. The angry reaction from the population pushed the media to criticize the Trump administration and expose the lies the administration had told about the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Facing these growing protests, Trump and his advisers took a step back. Trump pulled Greg Bovino, his top ICE gangster, out of Minneapolis and moved the majority of the ICE agents out of the city. The Trump administration tried to save face by claiming that ICE was leaving because they had achieved what they wanted. They may not admit it, but it looked like the Trump administration was looking for a way to cool the situation down, for now anyway.

The fact that Trump backed off in Minneapolis doesn’t mean the threats from ICE are over. ICE still has agents all over the country, arresting and detaining ordinary working people. Trump is still moving ahead with plans to build more detention jails around the country. ICE is still a repressive military force with more money than the military budgets of all but 15 countries in the world.

The protesters in Minneapolis have not eliminated ICE. But the protesters won something because they did something that can be very important in the future.

A movement like this can mean that people have learned what they can do when they decide to do something. When people have seen what they are capable of, it can open the door for a bigger movement. It can open the door for a movement, not just against ICE, but a movement against all the problems that the population is facing. It has happened before that a small movement like Minneapolis has sparked the flame for a big movement and has ignited a social explosion.

Lessons to Learn

There are a lot of things we can learn from the recent activities in Minneapolis. The one thing that stands out is that people in Minneapolis organized themselves to make a real difference. They figured out what was needed and did it. They found ways to feed people and keep them safe while being actively hunted by ICE. They showed they were willing to fight back.

We thought the same thing after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests under the BLM banner spread across the nation and even the world, but that didn’t stop police brutality, just like the protests and fights didn’t stop the inhumane practices of ICE. The recent protests against ICE in Minneapolis were not organized by workers, but still showed us something bigger is possible. If the working class organizes as a class, that is where our real power comes from.

The working class continues to be pushed back because we have not yet organized ourselves as a class to fight. The capitalist class has organized themselves as on a class basis. They stand shoulder to shoulder to ensure that their profits continue to roll in, regardless of who is hurt or killed, regardless of race or sex. We, as the working class, must do the same—organize as a class. We need a political party that is built by the working class, for the working class.

The working class is not organized for the fight that is necessary right now, but we have been in the past, and we will have the opportunity again. But next time, we must not stop short of our ultimate goal—a working-class revolution. We must stop accepting empty promises and partial victories, given to us by the ruling class. Stop accepting promises from both the Democrats and the Republicans that they are going to make changes to make our lives better. We must stop letting the same capitalist ruling class continue to run the society. Workers can’t let some politicians or union leaders lay out a few crumbs that were won, tell us that’s enough, and then continue on in the same society that caused all the problems in the first place.

The working class is not moving today. But the working class sits in the middle of the whole productive economy. The working class makes everything run, and the working class can make everything stop. Like the song Solidarity Forever says, “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn.” The working class is the only force that has the power to bring down this whole capitalist system and make everything run in a new society. A revolution led by the working class is the only way for all of us, for humanity, to have a better future.

So, it is important for all of us who understand this to talk this and say this all the time, to everyone we know. We have to prepare for when the next movement starts. We need more people who agree that the working class can’t stop short next time. We need more people who agree that next time we can’t stop until we get rid of this system and build a new one.

In order for that to happen, we need to build a revolutionary party in the working class. That is what we are trying to do.