By DANIEL ADAM
If the present wave of repression led by Donald Trump today appears to resemble the mid-twentieth century campaign of fear spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy, it is not exactly coincidental. Trump was, after all, mentored by the rabid anti-commmunist Roy Cohn, who was in turn mentored by McCarthy. In Trump, the ruling class has a figure who comes from a tradition of attack dogs. The broad tolerance for his unprecedented offensive suggests that the ultra-wealthy very much want what they are getting from him.
In McCarthy’s moment, the American capitalist class enjoyed unrivaled economic and military power. But they faced revolutionary movements around the world that threatened the political and social foundations of that power, and which even had a significant base in the U.S.
Today, the American ruling class is not confronted by an immediate global threat to capitalism itself, so much as rivalry from other rising imperialist powers. Its economic development is not on the rise, but in decline. This class, on the whole, appears to be betting on Trump’s ability to bludgeon the working class and its allies into submission and clear away all barriers to raising profitability and pursuing its interests across the globe. It is a desperate gamble.
Like McCarthy (whose crusade was ended years before the flood of anti-communism was stemmed), Trump could very well be discarded as a political instrument while the American ruling class continues to pursue a policy of unbridled repression. Certainly, much of the measures Trump uses (targeting Palestine solidarity activists, mass deportation of immigrants) were prepared legally and politically by his predecessors in both parties.
Likewise, the so-called “McCarthy Era” did not just pass naturally out of existence. It was blunted only by the emergence of mass social movements that consciously fought it and qualitatively undermined its effectiveness (most notably, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s liberation movement, the Black power movement and the Queer liberation movement)
Trump’s repressive measures today can be beaten. The task is a test for all social movements and leaders today. To meet this challenge it is essential that our movements learn what we can from past struggles, and discard unfounded myths that undermine our defense.
First and foremost is the myth that there is no value in protest today because Trump is in office and doesn’t care or listen. This myth is derived from another misunderstanding that other politicians make concessions because they care, or because their base of power is somehow dependent upon those protesting. In reality, all politicians who manage the bosses’ state base themselves on the power of the capitalist class and are tasked with serving it. They make concessions when they believe that doing so serves capital.
Repression, for example, is employed to break movements up, to make people feel vulnerable and alone where once they felt confident and part of something larger and more powerful. When a movement responds to repression by growing, by increasing connections and bonds of solidarity, by bringing more people together, and by growing in confidence and independence from ruling institutions, the repression fails. If this response continues, the bosses usually decide at some point to pull back from the strategy of crackdown, and attempt one of cooptation and domestication. Otherwise, a movement can eventually become strong enough to physically halt the repression itself or even remove the organs of bourgeois power altogether. (And so, the question of defense is not a side-issue: A class sufficiently capable of defending itself can take power. One that cannot, will not.)
As much as Trump may try to make it look like he has limitless power at his command, he does not. The extremity of his offensive on basic rights is, in fact, spurred on by weakness, not strength.
Other evidence of his class’s limitations may be seen in an episode from Trump’s first term, when in the midst of the 2020 uprising over George Floyd’s murder, a day of actions to defend Black trans lives emerged on June 14, bringing tens of thousands into the streets in New York and other cities. The next day, a highly conservative Supreme Court voted in favor of protections against job discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity by a vote of 6-3.
The vote was hardly accidental, and in a body that never faces having to run for reelection. In the face of a historic uprising with no end in sight, and the prospect of a new movement for trans rights taking the world stage simultaneously with an anti-racist movement against police brutality, these most far-seeing agents of the ruling class decided to grant a significant concession to calm things down.
And so yes, it is essential that we respond to every act of repression by organizing ever larger numbers to defend our movements. Sometimes this means organizing a meeting, or a mass forum if people are not ready to take the streets. At other stages people will be ready to call work stoppages. It is not possible to go beyond what people are ready to do at any given moment. But at every moment, the next stage of the fightback must be organized. Mass explosions against repression do not materialize out of nowhere.
The organization of our defense is impeded by the dependence which so many organizations of working and oppressed people have upon one of the parties of big capital and its institutions. Unions, whose natural power lies in workers’ ability to refuse to work, have spent decades orienting towards the power of their bosses’ parties and their bosses’ state. This has produced unions with little experience in organizing a struggle, and where members rarely even have the expectation that they should get to have a say in what their union does.
This means that a central question for today is reintroducing a culture and tradition of a self-acting membership that is capable of working through political questions and organizing defense. This may mean organizing defense meetings through union locals. It may also mean organizing defense through united front efforts that draw a wide variety of organizations into common action through meetings where participants argue out differences and make decisions democratically.
The Palestine solidarity movement can play a critical role in creating these organizational spaces. To do so, participants will need to overcome certain misunderstandings such as the idea that there is something wrong with defending members of the movement or with free speech itself. Or the idea that marches for Palestine have already reached their limits in participation and cannot include new and broader sectors of the U.S. population.
The last idea may come in part from the optical illusions created by social media, where political echo-chambers feel like platforms that face the world. In reality, there are few activist accounts that reach more than .03% of a given community on a good day. And even then, social media is designed to distract and entertain, not to politically engage. The reliance on these platforms for the last year’s actions meant that a very small percentage of people ever even knew about a single demonstration in advance, let alone were engaged in ways that are often necessary to not only get someone to take a side, but to participate in a specific form of action.
Polls show to the contrary (as does anecdotal evidence of efforts where actual in-person organizing took place) that the vast majority of people in the United States could be won over to the struggle to defend Palestine. This means that defense campaigns of people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk will not be organized in vain. Not only can they become focal points for building a mass fightback capable of breaking Trump’s offensive, but they can become a means for engaging millions of people more deeply on the question of Palestine’s struggle for liberation. Such defense is not a distraction, it is central.
This also means that our movement must once again learn how to explain the struggle for Palestinian self-determination to working and oppressed people who are still new to it. Our language must be oriented toward politicizing them, not toward pleasing our social network echo-chambers. We have millions of friends and allies we have never known. Now is the time to meet them.
