By CARLOS SAPIR
Reading the capitalist press today, it’s easy to get the impression that the Trump-Musk government is unstoppable. Raining down a torrent of policies, attacks, and provocations against oppressed communities and government infrastructure alike, the current government acts with a blatant disregard for the existing written laws of the U.S., and gives self-contradictory half-excuses when its actions are challenged by judges or the press. It is true that the largely symbolic norms supposedly balancing the powers of the liberal state are currently dead letters.
So what can keep the government in check? Two recent examples from last year chart a path forward.
One-day strikes stopped the chainsaw in Argentina
Elon Musk, who has never heard an idea he didn’t want to steal, got his phallic chainsaw circus act from Javier Milei, Argentina’s own slash-and-burn tyrant. While the government learns theatrics from Argentina, Argentina’s labor movement has demonstrated concretely that the government can’t push through policy against the massed forces of organized workers. When the Milei government tried to advance its reactionary cuts to social spending, the unions called one-day general strikes that sent those policies back to the drawing board. The rubber stamps of Argentina’s legislature in favor of the policy didn’t matter: Argentina’s workers demonstrated that they are vehemently opposed to these changes and that they would not accept them, so the government was forced to retreat.
They have done this repeatedly, in January, May, and October 2024, and they’re preparing to do it again against austerity measures in April 2025. Notably, when the largest union, the CGT, neglected to muster its forces in July of 2024, an amended version of the cuts was passed. It is not enough for workers to be organized, we need to be mobilized every time that we are under attack. While the Argentine labor movement can’t yet claim total victory over the Milei government, the battles they have won are an example of the power that unions can wield against tyrannical governments. Whereas in the U.S. we are seeing new attacks landing day after day, it took months for Milei to implement even a fraction of his program.
South Korea stops martial law overnight
Beyond the fights against austerity policies, 2024 also saw an even more astounding mobilization of popular forces against capitalist military dictatorship. At 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 3, President Yoon Suk Yeol abruptly declared the imposition of martial law, accusing the opposition DPK party of engaging in “anti-state activities” and working with “North Korean communists.” He moved to ban all political activity, end freedom of the press, and outlaw strikes, ordering striking medical workers to return to work. South Korean civil society and trade unions erupted in response. While police and military forces were carrying out orders to lock down state institutions, mass protests erupted in the darkness of midnight. The Korean Central Federation of Trade Unions (KCFTU) called for a general strike. Within a stunning six short hours, the martial law order was reversed and President Yoon was indicted.
The political crisis created by the attempt to impose martial law has yet to be resolved. Yoon Suk Yeol resisted arrest, and continues to defend his actions while facing charges. Although Yoon and his collaborators in principle face a possibility of the death penalty for treason in the current proceedings, the bourgeois courts that control this ongoing process have a motive to let Yoon and others off lightly, out of ruling-class solidarity. We should not trust that they will reach a just verdict. But, despite this and other daily injustices of capitalism in South Korea, the victory won against the attempt to reimpose martial law was a crucial demonstration of the power of working-class mobilization.
This is not the final battle
Even when we lack the forces to decisively end capitalism once and for all, masses of workers are a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, Trump, perhaps even more so than his overseas counterparts, enjoys only the begrudging, half-hearted approval of significant layers of the bourgeoisie. They are willing to give him a chance to enact his vision, in part because his policies give them more legal grounds to repress their own workers, but also because rocking the boat is usually bad for capitalist profits. If workers up the ante, and make it clear that we are going to put up a fight, layers of the capitalist class will also get cold feet about supporting Trump. But make no mistake: it is only the independent mobilization of working-class forces that can provide the leadership for this change by demonstrating its direct power to mobilize and bring life-as-usual to a standstill.
The immediate militancy of unions in Argentina and Korea in the face of threats to their basic rights is in part due to the recent memory of struggles to defeat entrenched military dictatorships in both countries during the 1970s-80s. In contrast, the U.S. labor movement has languished under decades of business-unionism strategies that tried to play nice with the bosses instead of confronting them head on. No major trade union in the U.S. is currently prepared to call a credible general strike. But that doesn’t mean that mass politics are indefinitely postponed until we reach a desired level of union concentration and militancy.
We can build mass mobilizations today by winning the support of union locals and regionals to throw their weight behind the grassroots civil liberties, education funding, Queer rights, Palestine solidarity and anti-war protests that are already sprouting all around the country and publicizing them widely to invite the public to join in. In doing so, we will be drawing more and more previously politically inactive people into these movements, making them a force to be reckoned with that can stop government plans in their tracks (and building union membership and militancy in the process). It will also create the conditions for articulating and achieving political demands that go beyond simply stopping the latest new attack that the capitalists have concocted. This is how we tip the scales of class struggle to our favor.
Winning new demands will require even greater levels of organization. It will require a political party to organize and coordinate militant rank-and-file trade unionists and community organizers who want to fight for a better future, and not just a better-negotiated present, in order to push the labor movement and broader working class to consistently and aggressively take up the fight against oppression and for greater democratic rights, for workers’ economic and political control over their living conditions. This is the party that we are hoping to build today, striding forward to both build the best defense of the rights we are still allotted and prepare the fight for their further expansion, while ultimately organizing the struggle for the working class to take full political power.
