When it comes to ICE deportations, we must ask the question: Cui bono?

Who benefits?

Who benefits from ICE rounding up and deporting US citizens? Into whose pocket do those benefits flow?

Ask any liberal, and they’ll tell you there’s only one person: Donald J. Trump. “This is irrational, destructive ideology at work! It’s Trump setting himself up to become a dictator!” They want you to believe — they need you to believe — that there’s no world in which someone is making a profit off of the ICE deportations. Ask any chauvinist “Marxist” and they’ll tell you the same thing, but about some “faction” of the “industrial bourgeoisie.” They both need you to believe that ICE deportations don’t play a role in maintaining the social and economic order. The reason is that they need you to believe in the existence of some “good” civil society, in this myth of the “good” America counterposed to the “bad” one.

We cannot afford to be confused, we cannot afford to be misled. We must make a sober and scientific analysis that will tell us who our friends are and who our enemies are. Those “Marxists” espousing the liberal platitudes about the good America, the “good” civil society, have put themselves in the camp of the enemy. Unless and until they perform a real analysis, unless and until they examine the question from the point of view, not of what is comfortable for Western dilettante socialists, but what is necessary for the liberation of the entire world, they will remain our enemies.

We cannot espouse return to the status quo ante. That would be fighting on the side of the liberals, for a liberal victory. We fight, not for comfort, but for liberation.

Without the myth of good civil society, these chauvinists and liberals are rightly afraid of mass insurrection. They are selling you this line because they are trying, whether they know it consciously or not, to forestall a social revolution.

But we aren’t afraid of asking.

So, who benefits?

The white settler population benefits from mass deportation.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model study does in fact warn that overall GDP will fall – over 4-years, by 1 percent, and over 10 years by nearly five percent. But the impact on wages varies by skill class. Wages for high-skilled workers (which Penn Wharton says comprise 63% of the working population, placing a huge group in the petty bourgeois or technical specialist class) fall by 0.5% over four years and 2.8% over ten years. Wages for low-skilled US-born workers increase overall; by 1.1% under the 4-year deportation policy and by 5% under the 10-year deportation policy. ICE allows the white declassed labor aristocrat to work their way back into economic positions similar to those of their hated rivals in the liberal professions (who happen to be petty bourgeois).

The prison-industrial complex, which elevates its employees from proletarian to labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois status benefits. Private prisons owned by CoreCivic and the GEOGroup partner with ICE and have received huge investments from expanding ICE contracts ($2.1 billion for GeoGroup, $653.5 million for CoreCivic). CoreCivic employs over 13,000 people across 70 facilities and GEOGroup employs about 20,000 people across 98 facilities. (Because they aren’t obligated to report their total employment numbers, these are estimates). Every single person employed by these corporations benefit from deportations.

The tech companies benefit. Palantir, AT&T, and Deloitte have significant ICE contracts and provide the data systems that underlie the new deportation machine.

The banks benefit. Banks and investment firms such as Citizens Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have all financed ICE contractors and see significant returns on their investment.

If the banks benefit, the imperialist bourgeoisie benefit. Wage theft in the US is highest among industries with high concentrations of undocumented immigrants (restaurants, landscaping and building maintenance, hotels, garment manufacturing, and gas stations). In the initial surges in ICE repression of undocumented immigrants, when sections of the bourgeoisie complained and petitioned that the raids had gone too far and risked hurting their bottom line, the regime relented. At the time, the consensus was towards “immigration policy” under the prior Democrat administrations: just enough repression to terrify the hyper-exploited workers into compliance, but not enough to damage productivity. The calculus has changed.

The imperial extraction machine is not running as it once did. Superprofits (and hence, superwages) are down. The empire’s managers, that section firmly in command of Washington, has made it clear. The empire is striking back. The time of neoliberalization has ended, and the managers are returning to the jodhpur and the pith helm. This year, Marco Rubio told the countries of Europe, “[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Mass deportations – White Terror – breaks unionization efforts, destroys solidarity among workers, and ensures that people paid under the table remain at the razor’s edge of desperation. This lowers their wages. It is the manner by which superwages, those wages paid by the imperialist bourgeoisie out of the suppressed wages of the third world, those wages garnered through the arbitrage in unequal exchange with the colonized periphery, are controlled and distributed in the center. For the white worker, yes. For the undocumented immigrant or for anyone who might look like they’re undocumented, no. Superwages are not for you.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data for February of this year shows that Hispanic workers have higher unemployment (4.4% US-wide average vs. 5.2% for Hispanic workers), and Hispanic women are at the bottom of the US pay scale, earning some 53 cents to the white man’s dollar.¹ “Latinas remain lowest-paid group in U.S. workforce, despite historic gains in education.”² In California, home to the largest Hispanic population in the US, Hispanic women earn 49 cents on the white man’s dollar, according to data collected by UCLA in 2025.³

Will there be a bill to pay for the big imperialist bourgeoisie? Certainly, when the labor markets collapse in the sectors most heavily dominated by undocumented immigrants. But who will be hurt? Who benefits? This strategy will line the pockets of the big imperialist bourgeoisie. The ideology they peddle has enraptured the little bourgeois business owners, and will continue to strike sparks in the flinty hearts of the white US settler population… but only up to a point. Because the bill will come owing first to the petty bourgeoisie, who depend on exploiting undocumented immigrants to manage their bottom lines.

In the end, the big capitalists believe they can manage the terror. They believe they can weather the economic storm.

Amidst these sweeping shifts, these systematic injustices, lie endless individual cruelties. Yes, like Michael Parenti said, there were far more “Good Germans” who simply kept their heads down and followed the law, avoided the trouble that comes with justice; but there were the Patriots too. Those who met the jackboots with a smile and a wave, who industrially sought to use the circumstances to stuff their pockets, they’re everywhere in colonial history — they define it. From the blood-dripping “heroes” who fill the history books, to the businessman who reports his competitor, to the housewives who pick through dresses torn from the bodies of the dead, to the woman that gleefully watches her domestic house-cleaning slaves cower under her gaze. These cannibals, these flesh-eaters are the poster child of mass deportation. But the Good American who believes in a fairer settler-colony and the virtuous “work ethic” of their underclass and the Patriot who will send workers to the concentration camps and man the cells with equal glee, are two sides of the same coin.

Both sides are the face of the enemy.

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The Employment Situation — February 2026.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026. Latino Policy and Politics Institute, UCLA. ︎
2. UCLA, 6 Oct. 2025. ︎
3. Id. ︎

The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
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2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
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4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
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5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
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6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
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8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
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10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
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By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
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2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
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3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
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4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
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5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
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6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
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However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.

The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.

Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.

Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.

The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.

Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave. 

Iraq was bombed into desolation — its electricity grid, water systems, hospitals, roads, bridges, and even sewage systems were reduced to rubble. Their bloodlust still unquenched, the U.S. used depleted uranium rounds, poisoning the land and condemning generations to birth defects and cancer. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether she regretted the slaughter of over half a million Iraqi children, calmly declared on 60 Minutes that it was “worth it”  (Twaij, 2022). A personal memory, I recall once watching a lecture by Arundhati Roy who remarked on the U.S. justification of the bombing of Iraq, “We are expected to believe that the U.S. Marines were sent on a feminist mission.” One truly has to applaud the audacity of the lie. However, this kind of propaganda is hardly uncommon in the history of U.S. imperialism; it is very much par for the course that they hide behind the language of human rights and progressive Western feminism to justify their carte blanche bombing campaigns that eviscerate women, men, and children alike. The hypocrisy cannot be ignored — a woman in a position of senior leadership in the U.S. actively contributed to a campaign that resulted in the catastrophic rollback of women’s rights, safety, and security.

In Syria, America waged a relentless crusade to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, once again cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “democracy and human rights” — not unlike Iraq (and countless other cases throughout the 20th century). As a result, the nation that was once called the cradle of civilization is today a blood-soaked nightmare of unimaginable human tragedy, all because the U.S. demanded a regime change in favor of someone more amenable to their investor and business class interests (Naiman, 2015).

To add to the ensuing horror even further, America continues its crusade of calamity in Yemen, where its bombs continue to shred civilian infrastructure, while American money and weapons fuel Saudi aggression. Meanwhile, Israel, armed to the teeth with U.S. military aid, carries out daily atrocities with impunity, trampling human rights as the world watches in silence (Saleh, 2025). And I have only scratched the surface of American imperialism — and only over the last few decades, in just one part of the world — all while it claims to act under the moral mission of civilization and humanitarianism.

Is it reasonable, then, to expect nations broken and shattered by such wars and foreign intervention to function in any democratic manner? We do not — and cannot — know what these nations might look like today had they been allowed to develop on their own terms, guided by the specific and unique cultural, material, and economic practices democratically determined by their own citizens. The argument is often made that West Asian nations remain undeveloped because Islam is a backward religion that breeds terrorism and oppression — as if religious belief alone determines the course of a nation’s progress. But progress is not born of ideology; it comes from the democratic participation of the masses and the historical and material conditions in which they live and struggle. The idea that faith in a particular god sets the limits of development is not only wrong — it is ahistorical and frankly, absurd. The Western Liberal Democracies, dripping with a colonial arrogance so vast and insatiable it eclipses all of history, lecture such nations on “Progressive Politics.” Yet was it not these same nations that razed to the ground even the tiniest sliver of hope and institutional framework required to achieve such a thing?

Furthermore, if the Western model of development is so superior — if the ideals of the Enlightenment were truly as revolutionary as they are claimed to be – then why did it take centuries for women, Black people, people of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, Queer communities, and immigrants to even begin to be treated with dignity and granted equal rights? And that struggle, I should add, is still far from over. As a glaring example, just four years of Donald Trump was enough to destabilize the American “Democratic” system so thoroughly that the federal right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — was overturned. Just four years of one reactionary leader. Now imagine decades of that, layered with war, foreign occupation, sabotage, and poverty, with not a single institution left standing to hold back the worst instincts of violence and repression. That is — and has been — the reality for much of West Asia, and far beyond.

Not only has Western liberalism failed to deliver on these rights and promises throughout its historical development, but it continues to fail — with equal, if not greater, force — even today. On this, I offer both historical and contemporary evidence. Consider first what the famed liberal hero Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about the workers’ revolt of the June Days Uprising in 1848: “After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favor of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defense’” (Losurdo, 2011, ch. 10).

Now consider Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed champion of the working class, who calls himself the “most pro-union president” and has been hailed by historians as the greatest advocate for workers since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Loomis, 2024). Yet this same president blocked a bill that would have granted sick leave to railroad workers, denying the demands of more than 115,000 workers who had gone on strike in 2022. And this was not some anomaly or failing of character — it is the function of liberalism itself, which gives with one hand and takes with the other, only retreating when popular movements threaten its order. Even on the rare occasions when liberals do offer concessions, they are steadily eroded into nothing by one reformist negation after another. As Losurdo (2011) writes, “At issue was canceling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement.” And as de Tocqueville made clear, when that fails, the gun will do. As the old saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

If we are indeed asked to believe that liberalism is an ideology adorned with glitter and gold, then we must confront an unavoidable question: how can such ideas give rise to some of the most depraved acts of horror ever known to humanity? The contradiction between liberalism’s glittering promises and its reality is precisely the primordial force that necessitates its overwhelming need to oppress.

To further emphasize: as we have already demonstrated, these liberal ideas were never inherently superior; they were not even exclusively European. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment — pillars of so-called “Western thought” — emerged only through a deep engagement with earlier Greek and Roman texts, which in turn drew heavily on the scholarly achievements of Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) (Davidson, 2006). Yet today, many of these regions are dismissed by the West as “uncivilized” or “underdeveloped.” The irony would almost be laughable, were it not so tragically real. As Michael Parenti observed, “The third world is not underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

Moreover, even in their European form, these ideas were never truly progressive; they were always fundamentally Hobbesian and Machiavellian in their outlook on human nature. It was only the emergence of genuinely revolutionary ideas that forced liberals to concede to democratic ideals. The liberal framework, as we have discussed, can only muster reforms that preserve the existing state machinery, whereas revolutionary thought dares to transcend it. Consider the institution of slavery: a liberal might express shock at the slave’s plight and propose marginal improvements — better clothing or food — while the revolutionary would cry out, “Come, comrade, let us shatter the chains of slavery!” That is precisely the kind of transformative progress that followed the Bolshevik Revolution when peasants gained literacy and women secured equal pay, voting rights, and the opportunity to hold office (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 1983). Throughout history, liberals have consistently resisted the sweeping democratic changes championed by revolutionary movements.

Is it any wonder, then, that nations devastated by Western colonial and imperial ambitions remain broken beyond comprehension? Those of us in the West who are not members of racially or economically privileged groups did not receive our rights out of benevolence; rather, we were forced, for the first time in history, to compete with a rival political system that was materially superior and genuinely progressive. It was this competitive drive — fueled by the extraordinary social and human progress of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of development untainted by colonial or imperial interference — that enabled Western societies to evolve into what they are today.

If these same conditions were systematically denied to nations in the Global South through neocolonial exploitation, debt entrapment, illegal coups, and invasions, then it is not only unfair but intellectually dishonest to blame them solely for their own lack of progress.

If we were to allow these nations to develop according to their own histories — if we were to let their people prosper on their own terms, and if the forces of production, labor, and industry were free to drive genuine democratic participation — then, just as in every other society, the rights of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups would naturally flourish over time. Not out of moral charity, but because the conditions of their growth would make progress inevitable. We are told to measure progress by the standards of those who denied it to others. But given the chance — given peace, sovereignty, and the right to chart their own course — these nations would not need lectures from the West. They would show us what real progress looks like.

Citations:

1. Al-Shammari, M. (2023), “Women’s Education: Cultural and Religious Solutions from the Heart of Afghanistan”, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, https://mecouncil.org/publication/womens-education-cultural-and-religious-solutions-from-the-heart-of-afghanistan/
2. Twaij, A (2022), “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was”, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was
3. Naiman, R (2015), “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath”, Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath/
4. Davidson, N (2006), “Islam and the Enlightenment”, Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/islam-and-enlightenment/
5. Saleh, A. (2025), “Yemen dismantles UK-Saudi espionage network and continues to attack strategic US and Israeli targets”, Peoples Dispatch, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/08/yemen-dismantles-uk-saudi-espionage-network-and-continues-to-attack-strategic-us-and-israeli-targets/
6. Loomis, E. (2024), “Biden’s labor report card: Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR” Government Executive, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-report-card-historian-gives-union-joe-higher-grade-any-president-fdr/397002/
7. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1983), United Nations, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25years/content/english/CONCLUDING_COMMENTS/Russian_Federation/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republic-CO-1.pdf

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

Through it all, the Democratic Party and its cowardly leadership has done nothing apart from throwing out a few vacuous platitudes and empty threats on Sunday morning talk shows. And how could they do anything else? The thread of oppression runs throughout the history of the republic, back through the Biden and Obama administrations, back through Reagan and Carter and beyond living memory. Deportations, the “tough on crime” agenda of the Clinton 1990s, concentration camps along the border — all featured heavily in Democratic administrations, despite hypocritical screeching about the supposedly unique evils being visited upon their fair land by the Trump administration. The legacy of the Democratic Party — even among liberals — is far more than tarnished; it is irrecoverably soiled. Whatever shred of decency Democrats could clutch to themselves has vanished. 

Two groups are facilitating this hostile takeover: fascist Christian nationalists and the highest ranking members of the capitalist class. The former hungers for cultural domination and the chance to establish a religious nation based on vaguely representative and specifically theocratic principles, while the latter thirsts, as it always has, for astronomical profits and oligarchy. They have already solidified their control of the state (they were voted in), and now they are moving to install as many party loyalists as they can in government positions until the sheer mass of fascist flunkeys is too great to oppose. Behind the wave of functionaries march the new-generation propagandists, proclaiming Trumpian visions in both official and unofficial outlets, and shouting down any opposing views. The old order is dead and dying; career politicos and CIA station chiefs, newspaper editors and diplomats, graduates of prestigious universities and longtime regulars at the most prestigious parties are all being muscled unceremoniously out the door. The most rightward agents of capital, working side-by-side, are systematically dismantling the last vestiges of the post-WWII white settler coalition.

As numerous U.S. backed coups show, what will follow the fascist takeover is a wholesale pillaging of everything that isn’t nailed down. The hyperrich have their eye set on the biggest plunder imaginable: that of the imperial core itself. The core is the last orange that hasn’t been squeezed — the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy have grown fat and happy off their share of the spoils extracted from the rest of the world, and they’re about to be put in the juicer. Every service, agency, function, apparatus, every conceivable benefit given to everyone from the settler “middle class” on up will be sold at auction to the highest bidder (see former Soviet government enterprises) or simply eliminated (see the post-coup killing of the Guatemalan land reform initiative). Every shred of value that can be appropriated will be appropriated, and the capitalist ruling class, together with its church-and-state allies, will rise to dominate the United States like the United States has dominated the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War. The boot of oppression is coming for all who thought they were comfortable, secure in an idyllic existence, sure the class struggle would never reach them, insulated from all upheaval and tumult.  

The recently-passed Trump administration policies are very unpopular now, and their unpopularity will only grow as the months and years pass. So this new ruling class coalition has ensured that units of force stand by to enforce the will of the state wherever the will of the masses is found lacking. Local police departments have been equipped with military grade weaponry and tactical assault vehicles, massive training complexes have been built to train them in their use, and multiple letter agencies have been deployed with specific instructions to wear insignias and identification on flak jackets at all times during an operation. ICE and Border Patrol are arresting entire families, congregants during a church service, legal residents who were simply overheard in public speaking Spanish, and even Indigenous people. The message being sent is loud and clear: this is the way things will be, and these are the consequences for those who don’t obey. 

Likely not. Objectively speaking, the Trump regime promises to be at least as tyrannical and destructive as it was before. The electoral contest of the past year was undeniably a contest between which faction of the ruling elite was willing to promise the most violence, the most bloodshed, and the most destruction. The fear felt by the vulnerable and marginalized members of our communities is real. The threat to immigrants, ethnic minorities, queer people, the disabled, and so on is more imminent and urgent than ever. Not to mention of course the ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocides in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Myanmar, and Ukraine. Every life lost is a tragedy in its own right. Whether or not the Harris regime would have been any better, any kinder, any less vicious, is irrelevant at this point. The question now on everyone’s minds is “what do I do now?”

The answer we’re seeing many settle on is placing blame. Everyone has a different answer (or answers) as to who is at fault for the election results. Non-voters are to blame for staying home. Stein voters are to blame for taking away votes from Harris. The anti-genocide left is to blame for campaigning against the Biden regime’s genocidal actions. Arab and Muslim voters are to blame for refusing to back Harris. Mexican and Latino voters are to blame for backing Trump. Trump voters are to blame for their selfishness and bigotry. Women are to blame for failing to sufficiently back Harris. Men are to blame for disproportionately backing Trump. And of course the Democrats are to blame for running a terrible campaign, for refusing to waver even slightly on their commitment to genocide, and so on, and so on.

Who then is truly to blame? Seasoned socialists will see clearly what’s really going on here. These “elections,” rollercoasters of drama and intrigue that they are, are full of stories of plots and treason, endless debates, felony charges, assassination attempts, hateful violent rhetoric, and never-ending fearmongering of the “end of democracy” by the corporate news media. The ruling capitalist class has their “electoral” system refined down to a science to sow division, fear, paranoia, and hatred. 24-hour news cycles diligently maintain the frenetic atmosphere with constant updates. Every slight lull in the cycle is immediately disrupted by new coverage of “Project 2025” or breaking news about something Trump said or did, etcetera ad nauseum. 

This is not a democracy of course, and at this point it barely resembles one. It is a vast system of social engineering designed to sort the masses into mutually hostile camps, to keep us at one-another’s throats, to make us fear and hate each other, to blame one-another for the brutalities and crimes committed by the ruling elite. This is the keystone of the empire’s global regime of terror. Terrorism has always been the beating heart of the settler empire. Genocidal terrorism in Palestine tells the oppressed masses of the world what happens to those who dare defy the U.S. empire’s control. Settler-garrison police terrorize the empire’s own citizens, beating down, arresting, and disappearing dissidents, and lynching minorities from “problem” communities in so-called “officer-involved shootings.” Innocent people are executed by the so-called “justice system,” or imprisoned for years, decades, lifetimes, comprising the world’s largest prison population, a system of legal terror where your “right” to a fair trial, or any trial at all, is done away with by 90%+ conviction rates. 

And of course the corporate news media and political system engage in stochastic terrorism directed at the masses at large. They tell us to fall in line and vote for the perpetuation of this grotesque system, vote for empire, vote for destruction, terrorism, bloodshed, death. Sign your name to affirm your loyalty to the regime and your continued support for genocide, or your rights will be stripped from you. Every woman dying of sepsis because she can no longer access abortion is an act of terror by the ruling class, every dead trans child, every homeless person frozen to death on the sidewalk, every Black person lynched by cops, every mother worked to death just to feed her children, every individual who succumbs to the raging COVID pandemic. They want you to live every waking moment in fear that you’ll be next to suffer and die, and to blame and hate your neighbor for it. After all, they voted for the candidate you hate and fear, they voted for your rights to be taken away, they voted for genocide, they voted for more suffering.

Every progressive-minded person in your life is feeling this fear acutely. Do not allow the capitalist ghouls the satisfaction of taking out your fears on your fellow workers and community members. Now more than ever is the time for strategic action and unity. The people in your life are desperate for a way out. Forget the election! Forget who voted for whom! The only people truly at fault for the hellish mire we’re immersed in are the ruling class! The fault lies with the capitalist elites, every vile genocidaire and billionaire oligarch and investment tycoon. We are all in this together, we are all the victims of their petty arrogance and callous disregard for the sanctity of life and disdain for the dignity of their fellow humanity. 

The empire relies most heavily on terror in times of crisis. The crisis is here. The decline and fall of this system is inevitable. A revolutionary moment is fast-approaching us, as the world reaches the brink of global war and financial meltdown looms. It is your task to educate yourself and build consciousness and organization among the members of your community. There is no time to spare, and there is nothing the ruling class would prefer you be doing right now than petty squabbling over the results of their electoral circus. Now more than ever it should be clear how critically important it is to divest all action and energy from the U.S.’s federal political system and direct our efforts to the construction of local organizations and the linking-up of these organizations into a coalescing revolutionary movement.

The historical position of the Democratic Party has been to serve as the brake on the one-way ratchet of U.S. politics. Republicans move the dial to the right, the Democrats stop any backsliding to the left, and little by little the window of the possible lurches into the burning hellscape where we find ourselves today. The Democrats are actually paralyzed by their class position; they cannot take even the most moderate actions in their own self-defense, because to show the capacity to effect change would open the floodgates of demands from their so-called base. In reality, the Democrats don’t represent the interests of the working people of any stripe; they were, are, and remain one wing of the business party. They are the wing that, during the 20th century, sought to consolidate the members of the ruling class with those members of the bourgeoisie subject to any social oppression — all while leaving the economic oppression that underlies those social oppressions in place.

As the party runs down and its supporting coalition collapses, so does the support the Democrats generally garner among the big bourgeoisie. George Clooney, who hosted the single largest fundraiser ever held for a Democrat and raised $28 million for Biden on June 20 of this year, just published an op-ed in the CIA’s paper of choice, the New York Times, calling for Biden to stand down. This level of turmoil at the upper echelons of the party, between donors and the party’s leader, Biden (when a Democrat is in the White House, they control the Democratic National Committee), merely demonstrates a truth that we have all known: the rot of the party is so great, that even its own fiercest exponents smell it.

In practice, this means that Donald Trump is already the victor of the 2024 presidential elections and the entire state apparatus will now pass into the hands of the rabid racists on the far right of the capitalist-imperialist spectrum. This is actually the preferred position of the Democrats and part of the double-game they play while holding the working class hostage with the threat of hostile Republican victories. While the Republicans are ascending, the Democrats can fundraise off of the latest open provocation from the right.

Worst of all, the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the resulting media blitz, the photographs of the bloodied ear and the defiant fists, mean that the party technicians attempting to boot Biden have lost their internal battle. The ruling class has informed the rest of the party and its apparatus that the time has come to “keep your powder dry,” and save the push against the Republicans for after Trump has been elected, for 2028. This means the Democrats will be forced to field a dying octogenarian against the invulnerable anti-politics Trump show and his Nazi support machine. The question of the election has now been made practically unimportant, because it is a foregone conclusion. The ruling class has chosen Trump.

Beyond fundraising, the Democrats generally benefit from being the off-footed party because they are unable to offer anything to the people when they are governing. Thus, while they are out of power, they are free with their promises. They will say anything during their out-of-power hiatus. Cancel medical debt; direct payments to working class people during the pandemic; close Guantanamo Bay and stop the war on terror; codify Roe v. Wade; the list of promises never delivered upon goes on and on. This is a ploy to position themselves as the leaders of a valiant resistance against Republican depredation. They wave the flag of progressivism as soon as their stay in office ends; when it comes time to take up appointments, they fold the flag of progressivism again and put it in a drawer. They then soberly tell their constituents (the dupes they’re trying to pacify) that it wouldn’t be pragmatic to enact any of the reforms they’ve promised. They give grim speeches about sacrifice and the nature of politics in a democracy, and the adult and reasonable thing to do, which is to slaughter the interests of the working class on the altar of Moloch.

For years leading up to this moment — half a century or more — we Communists have been too weak to push the Democrats out of the way and wave the flag that would never be put in the drawer. Now, on the eve of the second triumph of Trump, we are strong enough to stand our ground and lead the resistance to the fascists from the front. The first Trump presidency created the conditions of 2024; the 2020 June Rebellion in the wake of George Floyd sparked more class consciousness. The genocide in Palestine has further fueled the creation of new organizations or galvanized Marxists and spurred them into fresher action. Primary organizations are more solid now than they have been, more prepared to act, and the masses of the working people are at a higher resting state of class consciousness. Dissatisfaction with the state of the empire has never been greater. Now is the time for the red flag to advance.

The Democrats have been doing a marvelous job of discrediting themselves for us, but we must help them into the grave. That is, we must consistently and credibly thoroughly expose them as worse than useless; as hostile to the working classes, as warmongers, as genocidaires, and as racists. Only when their position has been completely debunked among the working people can we raise the red flag and march forward.

Then, we must advocate for the only resistance that can weather the storm of active, crisis fascism: Communism. Communism must become the name of the resistance against Trump and his Nazi cabinet. Resistance must be red.

This doesn’t mean underground terror acts, but rather the establishment of community self-defense networks among the nationally oppressed, copwatch schemes, red aid stations, unemployment councils, tenants councils, and all the other means of the Communist attack on the authority of the enemy state. We must at the same time spark or crystallize primary organizations in the workplaces of the working class that can coordinate actions, disseminate literature, and raise class consciousness. This is our historic task. If we succeed in denouncing the false resistance of the Democrats and in associating the advance of the red flag with the advance of the working class, we will succeed in establishing the preconditions for the emergence of the vanguard party.