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. ︎

Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers. 

The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.

A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.

Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant. 

This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.

But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit. 

Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.

That’s all it would take, indeed.

For any debate-bro logicheads, this ludicrous argument has a very simple and identifiable error. It’s called begging the question. Certainly, all it would take to bring down the capitalist order is a coordinated assault, the execution of a few key government officials and particularly awful capitalist robber-barons, the expropriation of their land and wealth, the establishment of a socialist legality and decolonial government, etc., etc. A simple matter!

The question is hidden. What would it require for every worker to militantly agree to go on strike, resist police attack, and prevent scabs from working? Why, not much. Only a total revolutionization of the labor movement.

Only the creation of a centrally coordinating body. Only the joining together of the various labor struggles into a militant political party of labor.

The primary weapon of the working class is organization. Each individual capitalist commands an enormous number of resources. Each capitalist firm is itself an organization designed to marshal and control those resources. When we confront these massive accretions of capital, of political power, of physical repressive violence, we confront them alone and singly unless we are organized. A single strike requires local organization; a mass strike requires mass organization across the entire economy. For a strike against one of the capitalist behemoths that now stand behind the U.S.-Canadian governments, that strike must attack all the bases of the capitalist firm at once. That cannot be done without a high degree of organization. But we cannot organize against capital from within the labor unions until the labor unions themselves are won back from their current class-collaborationist leadership.

We can identify, then, the series of steps needed to break the stranglehold of the labor bureaucrats — those who speak revolution yet perform obeisance to capitalist leadership like Sean Fain, and those who don’t speak revolution at all — on the labor unions. These are the very first and necessary steps toward any question of a mass strike.

1. Active revolutionists — those people now calling for a general strike every so often on the internet, as well as those trained Marxists within the unions who are truly revolutionary — in short, the radical union members, must begin the task of propagandizing and agitating to the rank-and-file, bringing them to the understanding that they are being betrayed by their leadership;
2. Radical union members must form internal organizations capable of challenging the stifling rules and the environment of anti-democratic suppression that now surrounds the election of union leaders and determination of union policy;
3. These organizations must engage in the sharpest possible struggle against their internal union enemies — the labor bureaucrats — and force the addition of new rules to their constitutions, namely: i) thorough and democratic discussion on every issue, with the membership being permitted to pass dictates to its officers, ii) recall provisions for treacherous officers and other officials, iii) caps on officer salaries to be no more than three times the average rank-and-file salary, iv) completely clearing out all current elected officials and employees of the union and replacing them with radical members.

Only when this struggle is won in at least a number of major unions can we begin to discuss formation of a mass strike committee and the enactment of a general strike across all industries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

This work can be begun in an uncoordinated fashion. Small cliques and groups of revolutionists within the labor movement can start the undertaking. However, for it to coalesce into a general strike, these cliques and groups must coalesce into the form of a dedicated, militant, revolutionary party of labor; a Communist party.

School is the singular place in American society where all manner of social reproduction is expected and taken for granted. Schools shelter, feed, and sometimes clothe their students. Educators are expected to assume the roles of teacher, mentor, counselor, and even friend and parent. Professionally, there are too many hats for one person to wear, boundaries that are pushed, and generally too many responsibilities for one person to bear. Tragically, it’s at the discretion of each individual educator as to how much they will give of themselves to their job.

Such is the case for nearly all aspects of education. How many school events will you volunteer your already scarce time and energy at? How will you configure your classroom furniture to be open and inviting to all students? How will you implement accommodations to keep vulnerable kids from falling through the cracks? How frequently are you contacting home? How often are you meeting one-on-one with your students? Are you advising a club? How are you conveying to your students that you are a safe person while not alerting the reactionary students and parents? Are you interrupting bigotry and implementing restorative practices?

The list of questions is endless, and all answers are ultimately for each individual teacher to decide. 

As more and more aspects of social life are privatized and made inaccessible to the poor, public schools have become a final bastion of public life that can help many families meet some of their most basic needs. But, of course, public schools are themselves under threat from privatization, with charter schools and traditional private schools in addition to a steady increase in homeschooling — all of which ultimately steal funds away from public schools. We are called to do more with less, and the demands and scarcity of resources are increasing daily.

This is not to mention the societal threats that plague our schools. American fascism in crisis has resulted in the constant barrage of attacks from the far-right against educators, championing a delusional conspiracy theory that educators are “grooming” their children and making them gay or “woke” (anti-racist) — or worse yet, both! These attacks are not only launched online; the threat of violence is all too real: angry mobs instigating fights, such as the incident in Glendale, California, where a teacher was put on leave for speaking out against transphobia at a School Board meeting; or school shooters whose manifestos clearly lay out their bigotry, such as the May 2, 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Educators have lost their jobs, have been severely injured, or even been killed for their conviction to create a more just and equitable world.

Educators are exhausted. For our sacrifice to public service, we are called upon to give even more while the mass media demonizes us and our profession. The problem isn’t that educators care too much or that educators don’t actually believe in the social justice we try to implement in our classrooms — to the contrary! It is precisely because of our dedication to service, social justice, and the youth that so many of us chose this profession in the first place! But, it’s also the reason our deteriorating society can exploit us so. 

This is not to say we should abandon our shared beliefs and morals or our students’ and families’ needs. We would never abandon them. Educators deeply understand the enormous magnitude of the task that stands before us, and we know the necessity of taking on that challenge. So many of our students face struggles that could be easily solved with proper funding, and so, the “solutions” often presented are unsustainable and, regrettably, sometimes the only option available. At our lowest points, when we are overwhelmed by a system designed to work against us, this necessary task seems insurmountable. 

But we will not give in; we will not falter; and we will not cave to fascist reaction. We will win! The future we desire is within our grasp — we need only reach out and seize it. How will we achieve this victory? Only through a stalwart and unified labor movement — through our unions. The cure to the plague of fascist reaction is solidarity. We must unite and work together to achieve our goals!

Traditionally, most will think of the union simply as a negotiating body to get a better contract — an increase in pay. This is true, but a union can also accomplish so much more. We understand just how much work needs to be done inside our schools, but in order to begin that work in earnest, we need to relieve some of the pressure and return most of the social services our schools provide to the broader public sphere. Educators must fight for more than just a better contract for ourselves — solidarity is the key! 

We are not alone in this struggle. In the fight for educator needs and the welfare of the families we serve, we are also fighting for worker rights more broadly, as well as the rights of children. In linking our struggle with our fellow workers, we can win and create a more sustainable and democratic society in the process. For this, we can look at the history of the Chicago Teachers Union. Since the 19th century, educators in Chicago have organized and fought for the needs of the people. In his article, “A People’s History of the Chicago Teachers Union,” Rethinking Schools editor, Jesse Hagopian, illustrates the necessity of courageous and unswerving union organization. It is in this history of those who came before us, and those who carry on their legacy today, we can find not only the lessons of how to tackle the tasks at hand, but the strength to continue the struggle.

Learning from these examples, our immediate goals become more evident. Who stands with us? And who of those that are in opposition could become an ally? What can we do to support our community? To this question, there are infinite answers, but some examples: rallying against an anti-work bill, raising funds for an organization that helps the unhoused, collecting and distributing meals to families during the summer, rallying to support our worker-siblings who are on strike, etc. Our unions must unite the workers it represents and the families and communities we serve. 

Our struggles are all so deeply intertwined, and it is the process of atomization and alienation that created these horrible conditions we yearn to rid ourselves of. Only through solidarity and unity of action can we successfully fight back and win!

Huge sections of the working class have suffered thanks to capitalist mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, but the policy changes have been particularly hard on the railway workers in the U.S. Empire. Freight railroads within the Empire move approximately 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight each year. This accounts for approximately 28% of the total U.S. freight movement. The railroads are understaffed — many workers have died or fallen out of the workforce as a result of COVID. Others have simply burned out. The attendance rules of the freight rail companies are punishing. At the huge BNSF Railway, workers are given a pool of “attendance points” which are docked for taking days off. How do they get points back? Work for 14 days without interruption. What happens when they lose all 30 points? They’re disciplined.

BNSF Railway workers are required to remain on call continuously. If they’re called in, they have just over an hour to report to work. The system is under enormous strain, and all of it has been placed on the shoulders of the workers. For instance, although federal law prohibits railway workers from working more than 12 hours on-shift while operating a train, it usually takes longer than that for relief to come in.

BNSF workers are forbidden from talking to the press by their employment contracts, but several have come forward anonymously to speak out against this punishing system. To quote one anonymous worker:

“You don’t know when they’re calling and they can call you at any time… We’re still going through the pandemic, whether folks like to believe that or not, or abide by what’s going on or not, even though it’s lessened, you’re forcing folks to come to work sick because they’re scared to use points. You literally have them pick between ‘do you go to work sick and ill and not feeling well or do you save that time to be with your kids and your family?’”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the operation of the U.S. freight railways has been fundamentally reorganized by the capitalist investors, using a system called Precision Scheduling Railroading or “PSR.” This is nothing more than Taylorism repackaged, the same craze for “scientific” management, the same drive for the absolute-maximum productivity of labor, that has driven Amazon to monitor every movement made by its packers, and every grocery store to adopt “just in time” inventory management.

PSR is another desperate attempt of the capitalist ruling class to achieve a more effective return-on-investment — to stop the unstoppable: the constant fall of the rate of profit.

What changes have been brought about by PSR? Trains are now 30% longer, some of them three miles from engine to final car. Even as the trains have grown in length, the freight rail industry as a whole has fired 30% of its workforce in the same period. Conductors and rail workers are thus required to walk miles from car to car, working on skeleton crews, responsible for ever-longer trains.

And how are the workers scheduled? Last-minute — or, “just-in-time,” to use the capitalist euphemism — no-warning crews are assembled to work trains that are too long, run too far, and give them no rest. This has changed the profit margins of the freight railroads from $15 of profit from $100 of capital in 2001 to $41 dollars of profit to $100 dollars of capital in 2022. The rate of profit has more than doubled in the freight rail industry over that time.

In 2001, the BNSF was publicly traded. In 2010, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased it outright. It is now operated as a fully-owned subsidiary. BNSF is reaping even bigger rewards these days, because the Biden infrastructure bill gives $5.55 million in over 5 years in grants to private railways to improve their lines and to make other “necessary” capital investments — all while their operators make money hand over fist and suck it out of their companies. While profits continue to rise, over the past decade six of the largest freight rail operators have paid out stock buybacks and dividends of $146 billion, which is $30 billion more than the investors put in.

The growing anger of the workers at the brutal and inhumane treatment at the hands of the railroad bosses finally found its expression in the repeated “nay” votes of the union members at the insulting contracts proposed by the rail industry bosses. Negotiations began in 2019; for three grueling years, the negotiators have proposed contracts that would address overwork, exhaustion, and lack of sick days. For three grueling years, the railroad bosses have laughed at these modest demands.

The two-party federal government has finally found a topic on which it can rally. On Thursday, December 1, a unified front of nearly all Democrats, joined by most Republicans, marched in lock-step to deliver a crushing blow to the railway workers. The Congress has stamped out the hopes of the rail workers for an equitable solution in one fell stroke: the passage of the Congressional bill forbids the rail workers from striking. This plan did not spring out of the ground, or accidentally fall into the laps of the sitting Congresspeople. Two-faced “Union” Joe, the traitor-president, and his union-busting White House begged Congress to step in. Although “Union” Joe campaigned on his union bona fides he, like every U.S. president, only has one master: Capital.

Drawing upon the arcane and anti-democratic Railroad Labor Act of 1926 (itself the result of prior railroad strikes, some of which spread to become general strikes and insurrectionary, anti-government crises), the Congress has forced the rail workers back to work under the contract they rejected. No new sick days, no more negotiations, just more grinding work under impossible conditions. The undead president of the undead Democratic party now tours the country with the withered parchment of the unjust law clutched in his talons and trumpets, “We’ve gotten you what you deserve!” But what do the Democrats think the rail workers deserve? Nothing.

They asked for fourteen sick days. They did not receive fourteen sick days. They did not receive twelve sick days. They did not receive ten sick days. They did not even receive the seven sick days that Democrats hastily tacked on to the contract at the last minute. They did not receive five sick days. They did not receive one sick day. The rail workers have received exactly what they started with: no paid sick leave.

Railroad Workers United have made it clear who they blame: the deed was done in concert by the Democrats and Republicans — a “one-two punch.”

There is no party that represents the needs of the workers. The real politics of the bourgeois republic are done behind the scenes, not out on the Senate floor. The government betrays the workers every day, while it pretends to represent them. It is a show, a game, put on to confuse the masses and blind us to the true machinations of our rulers, the monopoly-capitalists. They make their deals behind closed doors, in their offices, bargaining for this bit of treasure or that bit of blood, and then put on their masks and greasepaint out before the audience, for the cameras.

The workers are no longer fooled, and the most politically active are already dispelling these illusions. In its press release, Railroad Workers United stated as follows:

RWU believes that railroad workers need to explore options other than the existing two political parties since neither appears to have our backs. RWU also believes that railroad workers need to consider doing away with the archaic and divided craft union system that hampers our unity and solidarity, and initiate the process of building a single and powerful railroad workers union that can win in future rounds of contract bargaining. According to RWU Organizer Ron Kaminkow, “We have been played for well over a century by politicians and union officials alike. The fiasco of recent months will show that perhaps the time has come for railroad workers to push for a unified and powerful labor organization of all crafts, together with a political party that will better serve the interest of not just railroad workers but all working-class people.”

We have had enough of the Democrats and Republicans both. The only thing they understand is force, and the time has come to support those ready to give them a taste of that medicine. If the union workers are prepared to launch a wildcat strike, in violation of the law, to protest their unjust contract and to demand better conditions, then we must stand with them! You’ll hear many complain that a wildcat strike is illegal. So, what? Tell them why it’s necessary. You’ll hear neighbors, co-workers, friends, and relatives grumble about how a rail strike is making things more expensive, even more than the inflation that runs rampant through the market.

Explain the truth to them: that the railroad bosses are their bosses, that the fight of the railway workers is their fight, that we are all together now standing before the jackboots of the police (who will force them back to work, if they strike), before the lash of the capitalists. They will listen, because they already know; they know the shout of the boss, the pain of wage theft or losing vacation time; they know the greed of the railroad boss in the greed of their own bosses.

The tide of class consciousness is rising. We must rise with it.