Since Donald Trump’s presidential election in November 2016, the national situation in the US has been marked by major political crises among the ruling class parties, economic instability, aggressive imperialist escalation, and a rise in attacks on the working-class and oppressed sectors in this country. While the liberal news and commentators have focused for a year on the Russian meddling in the 2016 election and Trump’s real corruption cases, little attention has been given in the media to the many blows that Trump has dealt to working class people.
Written by Florence Oppen
Specifically, the Trump administration’s bailout of the rich is deepening the increasing levels of inequality, attacks on unions are making it even more difficult to wage an effective fightback, the escalating trade wars are increasing geopolitical tensions among the capitalist class, the $716 billion bipartisan defense budget signals an escalation of the imperialist wars and US interventions across the globe, the stagnation of wages are continuing to negatively impact the livelihood of working-class families, and the ICE immigration crisis has resulted in increased deportations and massive incarceration and separation of immigrant families all the while revealing the growing authoritarian and inhumane measures that this administration is ready to take, dividing workers in this country and appealing to the most reactionary and racist members of the Republican base.
The principal strategy of liberals within the Democratic party, which sustained devastating defeats in the presidential and congressional elections, is to ‘Take Back the House’ in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, and we discuss in a separate article why this strategy is doomed to fail for it does not propose real solutions for working class people. Only the working-class have the potential strength to challenge the government’s attacks and provide solutions to the problems we face. Only through organizing a base in our neighborhoods and worksites, building strikes and work stoppages, and engaging in other militant actions will we be able to build the kind of power to defeat the government’s attacks and reverse the devastating effects of the last crisis of American capitalism which include wage depreciation, austerity cuts, and an increase in repression and criminalization of communities of color.
Two Years of Nationalist and Anti-Worker Legislation
The Trump regime is the most anti-worker government in the last half century. Domestically, his administration has directly attacked organized labor and oppressed sectors of the working class, by rolling back healthcare coverage, passing tax cuts for the very rich, and deregulating the banks back to a level before the 2008 global financial crisis. It’s currently implementing some of the strongest union busting laws and rulings in US history, intensifying attacks on federal and public sector unions. On top of this, Trump has issued a series of executive orders worsening the conditions of the oppressed sectors of the working class, such as the so-called Muslim Ban, increased protection for murderously racist police, and most egregiously the maximum criminalization of people migrating across the southern border, with the disappearance of children into private prisons as the most glaring aspect of this policy. Internationally, the regime has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords and rolled back EPA regulations, opening the door to increased fossil fuel extraction and leading to the further destruction of the ecosystem.
The administration has aggressively escalated toward war with North Korea and Iran, and has begun a trade war with Europe and China. Trump’s authoritarian measures have been so extreme that deep divisions have emerged among the ruling class, leaving the Republican and Democratic parties in crisis. To maintain a political base, Trump relies on Islamophobia, racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, and xenophobia, all of which disrupt working class solidarity. With wealth inequality at its highest point in the country’s history, conditions are worsening for the US American working class, especially its most precarious sectors.
The President of the Rich and “Trade Wars”
Since Trump set foot in the White House, he and his administration made it clear that they represent and support the most reactionary sectors of the US bourgeoisie. While there have been consistent changes to his cabinet, reflecting the political crisis his administration has faced, their initial cabinet was the wealthiest in US history.[1] Much like Reagan’s firing of the nearly 13,000 striking PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) workers in 1981, Trump’s executive orders and Republican sponsored legislation attacking immigrants, Muslims, women, workers and the poor signals that the US government is clearly on the side of big business and at war with workers and oppressed sectors in this country.[2] In addition to the outright attacks that the government has waged on the working class, the Trump administration, through Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, has bailed out the bourgeoisie with a $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in 2017 with around ⅔ of the benefits going to the parasitic top 0.1% of US capitalists. Moreover, reports point to the administration’s consideration of an additional $100 billion tax cut through executive action which would further enrich and benefit the top layers of the ruling class.[3] Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump’s actions clearly demonstrate that he is firmly on the side of capital and against the working class.
The Trump administration’s ‘America First’ hubris is exemplified by reckless protectionist policies such as tariffs on aluminum and steel, which are causing increased geopolitical tensions between the US and China as well as with much of Europe, Mexico, and Canada. All of these countries’ governments have responded with tariffs on the US. Trump claims that by imposing tariffs, which are simply taxes on products and goods coming into the US, there will be more jobs and growth of industry in the US. In reality, these so-called ‘Trade Wars’ are an intensification of intra-bourgeois fights around the world for market shares. For working class people in the US and internationally, such measures only cause uncertainty, increased precarity, and further suppression of wages. For example, the US and China are now both implementing 25% tariffs on $50 billion of each others’ goods – with threats from Trump to increase tariffs on China.[4] While Trump claims that his tariffs will allow US businesses to more easily sell and produce their goods in the country, the reality is that the US and China’s tariffs against each other will only increase production costs on both countries’ businesses, leading them to attempt to preserve their profits by making workers and consumers pay theses costs in lower wages, worsened working conditions, and higher costs in goods. There have even been several US businesses and their associations, like the US Chamber of Commerce, Logitech and Daikin Applied that testified to the US Trade Representative against Trump’s tariffs.[5]
Obviously, the bourgeoisie is not homogeneous and there are companies that are winners and losers in Trump’s ‘Trade Wars.’ But the bottom line is that workers are the ones who are most certainly losing out. For example, the tariffs on steel and aluminum, that is, imposing taxes on steel and aluminum produced outside the US, are certainly benefiting domestic steel and aluminum companies like US Steel, because it is now cheaper for them to produce in the US and they can significantly raise the cost of their products. However, companies that use aluminum and steel in production (i.e. auto and beer/soda can manufacturers) are losing as they have to pay whatever these costs are because there is less steel and aluminum coming into the country due to the tariffs. This risks lower wages, job losses, and increased costs to working people. What is certain is that the working class has no say in any of these decisions, and there is no certainty whatsoever that these actions will lead to increased jobs or wages. These ‘Trade Wars’ are simply a fight between the capitalists and their governments.[6]
Attacks on Workers
The Trump government is the most anti-worker government since the Reagan administration. Domestically, there are a series of attacks on organized labor, as well as on the oppressed communities of the working class. In the first year and a half, his administration has advanced some of the strongest anti-union legislation and policies in recent history, through executive orders and support for congressional resolutions, including an executive order which ferociously attacks federal unions, denying them the right to union representation.[7] He has appointed two far-right and anti-union supreme court justices (one of whom, at the time this article goes to press, is yet to be confirmed), resulting in an anti-worker majority supreme court. By ruling in favor of Janus v. AFSCME,this court has launched a massive attack on public sector unions, dispensing with any pretense to be neutral in the bourgeois class war. The Janus case attacks the financial resources of unions by eliminating the so-called ‘Fair-Share fee’ that non-members of unions had paid for receiving representational rights and the benefits of collective-bargaining. With the elimination of the ‘Fair-Share fee,’ unionized workers are now incentivized to stop paying union dues as they will continue to receive the benefits of being part of a union. Here are some examples of additional attacks that Trump’s administration has waged on workers:
- Weakened overtime regulations leaving 12.5 million workers without overtime rights and costing an estimated $1.2 billion in yearly lost wages
- Canceled ‘tip pooling’ protections within the restaurant industry which was designed to prevent bosses from stealing tips from the service-workers
- Through a congressional resolution signed by Trump, discontinued the obligation of employers to keep track and report to OSHA workplace injuries
- Restricted the ‘Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces’ practice which had prevented awarding government contracts to businesses with weak safety and labor standards
- Eliminated rules to protect workers with retirement plans from predatory financial advisers[8]
ICE on Steroids and Immigrant Policing
While Obama was nicknamed ‘Deporter-in-Chief’ by immigrant rights groups for his record of deporting more people than any other previous US president, with more than 2.5 million deportations carried out during his time in office, the Trump administration has significantly escalated this assault on immigrant communities in the US. Trump has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to aggressively ramp up detentions and deportations of immigrants, through an executive order that effectively permits this agency to target any and all undocumented immigrants. Furthermore, ICE has been actively collaborating with police departments across the country, even in so-called sanctuary states like California, to coordinate massive raids in immigrant communities spreading fear and terror among immigrant workers and families. There are seemingly no limits to the viciousness of these attacks on immigrants, exemplified in a recent story that went viral of ICE agents detaining a man in San Bernardino, CA who was driving his pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth. The ICE agents arrested the man, leaving his pregnant wife alone to drive herself to the hospital where she would give birth hours later.[9]
Moreover, Trump has created a massive crisis of separating children from their parents at the border and sending them to privately owned detention facilities, while their parents are transferred to prisons around the country. 2,300 children have been disappeared into these for-profit detention centers sparking outrage across the nation. In direct response to nationwide mass mobilizations (from shutdowns of traffic outside ICE offices to occupations inside them), Trump has signed an executive order to end the separation of immigrant families, and instead imprison them together, indefinitely. This maneuver is a direct result of the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities across the US protesting the practice of family separation. It comes at a time when Republicans and Trump are attempting to use the humanitarian crisis as a bargaining chip to pass anti-immigration legislation that will further militarize the border and expand ICE.
The Way Forward: Let’s Organize like the West Virginia Teachers to Win Our Demands
The Trump administration has firmly positioned itself on the side of the capitalists, and has escalated attacks on the working-class and oppressed sectors in the US leaving workers worse off now than 2 years ago. While we have seen consistent attacks against our class from the Trump administration, we’ve also witnessed in the last decade a restructuring of the labor movement and the development of many independent popular movements in the US, and more significantly, a growth of working class struggles in 2018.
To this we say that, as socialists, we believe we should not only support unquestionably progressive reforms, like single-payer healthcare, free college for all, or new rent control protections, but that we should widely organize through them. Real change in this country, even when expressed in legislative action, like the Civil Rights Act, always came as a result and concession to “pressure from below”, to working class mass and independent mobilization.
This year has seen the emergence of a strong working-class movement in the education sector with massive public teacher-led strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. To resolve the challenges that workers face, we need to follow the example of the teachers by organizing democratically in our unions and building for militant strikes that are independent from the ruling class parties. Furthermore, we need to build an independent working-class party that can strengthen and coordinate these struggles.
The initial success of the mass protests for immigrant rights show us that we should no longer wait for the Democratic or Republican parties to protect our communities. Both parties have been responsible for the establishment and expansion of ICE, deportations, and private prisons in the last thirty years. Some progressive Democrats have taken a rogue stance by calling for the abolition of ICE, to be replaced with another, more “humane” agency that maintains control over the criminalization of immigration. But at the end of the day, these politicians are fully committed to continuing the criminalization of migration to maintain a source of cheap, marginalized labor in their capitalist system. As socialists, we believe in a society where all people are free to live without the threat of imprisonment, and one in which all people have full equality, safe communities, and meaningful lives. Thus, we don’t believe it’s enough to simply abolish ICE and replace it with another police force. We demand the abolition of ICE as well as all police, the prison system, and other armed forces that repress and silence working class people. We demand full citizenship for all people, since we understand that citizenship is only used to strip human rights of non-citizens. As we’ve learned from the Labor Rights movement of the 1920-30s, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950-60s, and the Anti-War Movement of the 1960-70s, the most effective way to make the significant changes we need in our society is through organized mass actions that are independent of the two capitalist parties.
Now Is the Time to Organize For Socialism
With wealth inequality at its highest point in the country’s history, it’s a worsening time for the US American working class, especially its most precarious sectors. Additionally, there are growing sectors among the bases of both of the bourgeois parties that are calling into question the logic of the neoliberal regime, which both parties have been advancing over the past several decades. This has deepened these parties’ political crisis because they are are unable to resolve the profound issues confronting the working class under capitalism. This is not necessarily progress, but it is a sign that the US American working class, even its most conservative sectors, are being drawn towards the idea of alternative solutions to the problems endemic to the capitalist economic system, even if there’s not yet a clear vision in the national dialogue for what those solutions are.
To us, this time represents a great opportunity to organize fightbacks against these attacks in our worksites, neighborhoods, and cities. Now is the time to organize with our coworkers to articulate a vision for our unions which are democratic, fighting, and independent from the bosses and the bureaucrats; unions that respond to the needs of the broader working-class and oppressed sectors, which fight in solidarity with all workers and the oppressed, those organized into unions and those who are not. We need political leadership with a vision that gives confidence to our class to struggle, and to go on strikes regardless of whether these strikes are “legally protected.” The many problems we face cannot be resolved under this capitalist system. We need to continue fighting and organizing. We need to develop democratic unions, councils, and other alternative venues to discuss and decide democratically what is best for our neighborhoods and cities and what strategies and tactics we will use to build a struggle to win victories for our class, and we need to build a political organization of the working class that can unite these struggles and provide visionary leadership.
[1] https://lavozlit.com/es/the-cabinet-that-made-a-fortune-on-workers-backs/#_ftn1
[2] See the so-called Muslim Ban, Zero-Tolerance and Family Separation Immigration policies, “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” the “Global Gag rule,” and the “Ensuring Transparency, Accountability, and Efficiency in Taxpayer Funded Union Time Use.”
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-rich.html
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45294162
[5]https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2156710/business-groups-urge-us-not-impose-more-tariffs
[6] https://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_capitalism_changed_by_its_contradictions
[7] https://www.afge.org/publication/afge-seeks-injunction-to-block-trumps-anti-union-executive-order/
[8] https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-labor-rights-afscme-president-trump-998212
[9] https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/20/ice_arrests_husband_taking_pregnant_wife
Published in: https://lavozlit.com/two-years-into-trumps-nightmare-we-need-a-class-fightback/
