In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have unleashed a reign of terror on the US working class. Musk’s DOGE team, who are entirely unelected and apparently accountable to no-one, are defunding or shutting down swathes of the public sector that operate or fund services providing health care, education, housing, social welfare and environmental protection. Tens of thousands of federal public sector workers are being intimidated into resigning from their jobs.
Trump and Musk are gutting workplace health and safety and consumer protection. They have dismembered the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal body tasked with protecting workers’ rights to unionise. Any provisions to promote the interests of oppressed groups, many of which were fought for and won in the 1960s, are being stripped away. 
This is accompanied by a racist offensive to divide and demoralise workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been let loose, with thousands arrested in raids across major US cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. 
Trump’s objective is to slash the public sector (aside from the military and security agencies), reduce oversight of private corporations, deliver fewer services to those in need and bend the state apparatus to his will. That will then free up federal funds that can be funnelled to the military and to subsidise corporations and the rich.
The vigour with which Trump, Musk and their cronies in the cabinet are prosecuting this agenda is matched only by the feebleness of the opposition. 
As compared to 2017, when a number of Democrat-aligned media owners, university administrators, Hollywood studio chiefs and Silicon Valley CEOs, along with judges, senior Republicans and departmental heads and left-sounding Democrats opposed Trump and his hard right agenda, opposition from such quarters is barely visible today. Most of yesterday’s opponents have been purged, converted to Trump’s agenda or stand silent out of fear or political opportunism. 
The right wing of the Democrats support his anti-immigrant measures, while liberal Democrats are in disarray and demoralised. The same holds for the hundreds of NGOs that operate in the orbit of the party. 
So much for the liberal “resistance”.
But what of those organisations that are meant to fight for workers’ rights, the trade unions? Little has been heard from them. The federal public sector union chiefs went to the federal court to prevent Musk sacking tens of thousands of public servants and won a brief reprieve. That lasted one week before the same judge waved the cuts through. The union leaders have made no call for broad resistance by workers and those who depend on government services. In some cases, union leaders are even praising Trump for his supposed support for “working Americans” or imposition of tariffs which, they argue, will save jobs.
The forces of official politics—all of which embody different wings of capitalist politics—are giving Trump a free run. What then can stop him? The US working class must move. 
The working class constitutes by far the majority of the US population. It ranges from farm workers and IT workers in California and Las Vegas hotel cleaners to flight attendants and baggage handlers at Dallas Fort Worth airport, oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico, warehouse workers in the logistics hubs of Atlanta and Chicago, New York City bus drivers and teachers in Boston. Whichever way you measure it, at least 100 million Americans are in working-class jobs. Then there are their dependants, the unemployed and working-class pensioners. All up, the working class is two-thirds of the entire population, a mighty force if mobilised to fight.
Workers’ numerical strength is not the only thing that gives them power. More important is their strategic position in American life: nothing moves—not a container, not a crane, package, bus or aeroplane—unless the working class moves it. Nothing gets built and nobody is treated, taught or fed unless workers do the work. And nothing is dug from the ground unless workers do it. 
In a just world, it would be the working class, the direct producers, who would benefit from their labour. Under capitalism, however, because the bosses own all the factories, mines, warehouses, ports and hotels and workers own nothing, workers must sell their ability to labour to the capitalists, allowing the bosses to cream off the profits. 
It is this theft of workers’ labour that is the source of the capitalists’ profits but also their vulnerability: they depend on workers for everything. This is obvious in any strike: when the workers fold their arms, nothing moves and the flow of profits to the bosses dries up. No matter how high and mighty the bosses think they are, they need us; we don’t need them.
And unlike every other oppressed group, workers have a common interest and a common enemy. Each individual worker can improve their life only in cooperation with other workers, and only insofar as they can collectively wrest control of the wealth of society from their bosses. 
The working class needs to leverage this power to halt Trump and his billionaire buddies. Just think about it. If bank workers refused to process financial transactions handing public money over to billionaires, we could stop them looting the Treasury. If truck drivers refused to deliver the cement and construction workers refused to build the detention centres, Trump’s plans to grab, process and deport millions of migrants could be stopped in its tracks. 
There is something else special about the working class. Karl Marx described the working class as the universal class, in that when it fights it does so in the interests of all humanity. This is clear when it comes to the fight against racism. The working class needs unity if it is to win against its class enemy, the capitalists. Racism divides workers and weakens their collective strength. This is why Amazon bosses, currently confronted by a union organising drive at the company’s big warehouse in North Carolina, are trying to stoke divisions between African-American and Latino workers. It is why Trump and Musk are attacking DEI initiatives, which, although they are mostly tokenistic, are at least recognition that the effects of racism should be countered. Wiping out DEI serves only to intimidate racial minorities, embolden racists and undercut workers’ unity.
Because workers need unity in their ranks, they are often at the forefront in the fight against racism, and that benefits not just workers but every oppressed group. In 2019, the Chicago Teachers Union won a clause in their contract declaring that their employer could not ask about or keep track of the immigration status of students or their families. The contract barred ICE agents from entering school grounds unless they provided their credentials, a reason for their request and a signed warrant. In 2017, two unions, the Teamsters in New York City and the National Union of Healthcare Workers, both pledged to refuse cooperation with federal agents in prosecuting or deporting members.
Going back further, on 1 May 2006, labour unions and Latino Catholic organisations and community groups organised a nationwide Day Without Immigrants. Millions of migrant workers and their supporters boycotted work and shops on the day in protest at an anti-migrant bill then being considered in the US Senate. One to 2 million marched in Los Angeles, half a million in Chicago, and 200,000 in New York, along with tens of thousands in other cities. These protests killed the bill. 
Such acts are only the most dramatic way workers can stop Trump in his tracks. But in most cases, getting to this point will require workers to build their confidence by organising to defend their own jobs, wages and conditions. Right now, this means a determined fight to prevent mass lay-offs in the federal public service. That means service-wide strikes. Musk may want to slash public-sector jobs, but government machinery must still turn if the capitalists are to enjoy the services they require. 
If workers defend their jobs successfully, they are more likely to develop the confidence to act in solidarity with other oppressed groups. This is why, in practice, it is those workers with a record of fighting for their own rights who are likely to lead the way in a broader fight against Trump’s right-wing offensive.
That the workers’ movement in the US is at a low ebb should not make us despair. Unions still represent nearly 15 million workers in the US, and every year tens of thousands of workers—last year these ranged from school employees in Virginia and nurses in Michigan to VW auto workers in Tennessee—joined a trade union. 
Unions can still fight and win. After a seven-week strike at Boeing in Seattle last year, metal workers won a 38 percent pay rise over four years, while a three-day strike of east coast longshore workers (wharfies), the first since the 1970s, yielded a 61percent pay rise over six years. Simply a threat to strike by American Airlines flight attendants secured an immediate 20 percent pay rise.
Trump only has to recall his first term in office, when an illegal teachers’ strike wave swept the country in 2018, disrupting parents’ attendance at work for the duration, to remind himself of the power of workers when they withdraw their labour. Particularly impressive was the fact that these were strikes in conservative, Trump-supporting states, such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, where Republican governors had a battery of anti-strike laws at their disposal. The teachers pressed on regardless and won most of their claims. 
Then there are the actions workers took early in the COVID-19 pandemic. US socialist Lance Selfa noted recently: “Workers in the Alameda County, Calif., public health system conducted a strike that succeeded not only in winning their own demands on pay and working conditions but also stopped the county’s plans for privatizing the public hospital. Autoworkers in Ford and GM plants came off the unemployment line to produce ventilators. Workers in the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania occupied their workplace in March 2020 for a month while they produced tons of materials for use in producing facemasks. Hundreds of smaller, and largely unheralded, actions of working-class self-defense took place, especially in the first year of the pandemic.”
As these examples show, workers have power and an interest in wielding it for the whole of society. Trump and Musk may now seem unstoppable, but that’s because no organisation of any social weight is doing anything to stop them. 
Public opposition may begin to emerge from liberal or union bureaucratic quarters in coming months, especially if Trump’s right-wing coalition splinters or the economy or financial markets tank. But we can’t wait that long. The attacks are coming thick and fast now. 
Even if resistance to the whirlwind of attacks is currently extremely weak, there are glimmers of hope: demonstrations outside federal offices to protest against the gutting of government services; rallies of one or two hundred in big cities to oppose attacks on migrants and ICE raids. These actions, although small, are steps in the right direction. Everyone shocked by the brutality of the right-wing attacks must try to build on them. But to be most effective, the working class must be at the centre of such mobilisations. Unlike the liberal institutions currently lying low, the working class has not just an interest in defeating Trump’s right wing offensive but the power to do so.
Most likely mass working-class resistance won’t suddenly erupt in the next month or two, but all it would take is for a few groups of workers to start to move and the situation could shift quickly. It’s not like Trump and Musk have a solid mandate to carry out their drastic attacks on workers’ rights—Trump did not even win a majority of votes at November’s election.
And to move from token actions to a mobilisation with real weight, workers must prevent their resistance being coopted by the Democrats, the fate of so much of the resistance last time around.
That means socialist politics and socialist organisation, and rebuilding a movement that looks to the strategic power of the working class, and mass grassroots action, to confront Trump’s right-wing agenda.

Tom Bramble

Workers have the power to stop Trump

Transgender rights are firmly in the crosshairs of US President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the 26 executive actions signed on Trump’s first day back in office was a sweeping order aimed at eliminating the idea of a “gender identity” separate from sex in the federal government. Among other measures, “gender” will be changed to “sex” on all government forms, and funding for anything pertaining to “gender ideology” will be cut.
Three subsequent executive orders encourage the US military to disqualify “individuals with gender dysphoria”, direct the Department of Health to de-fund “chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and compel athletic and educational institutions to “keep men out of women’s sports”. Trump’s language is deliberately brutish. His aim is to vilify and intimidate an already highly stigmatised community, and to send a message to all those who dare not conform to society’s institutions and expectations: be afraid. 
The initial order claims that so-called gender ideologues have used “socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces”. The not-so-veiled implication is that transgender women pose an insidious and potentially violent threat to the rest of the female population. The order on gender-affirming care singles out “impressionable children” as especially vulnerable to “radical and false ... gender ideology”.
Fearmongering around the safety of women and children is a longstanding tactic of the American political right. Jim Crow-era panics about “race mixing” have morphed into modern narratives that link migrant communities to child-trafficking and violent crime. Trump’s anti-trans crusade fits squarely into this playbook, reinforcing and reinforced by simultaneous racist uproars around border control and law enforcement.
Such frenzies create a sense of escalating crisis and imminent danger. The far right presents these as problems that only harsher policing and authoritarianism can resolve. Other executive orders signed upon Trump’s inauguration include, predictably, “Securing Our Borders”, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety”.
Republicans have also incorporated transphobia into economic appeals to voters. The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/us/politics/trump-republican-transgender-ads.html">estimates</a>
the party spent $37 million on election adverts condemning federal funding for gender-affirming care in 2024. The broadcasts focused on trans prison inmates in particular as undeserving of medical support. In a country where 15 million people are saddled with medical debt <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-15-million-americans-have-medical-bills-on-their-credit-reports/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Consumer%20Financial,medical%20bills%20on%20credit%20reports.">according</a>
to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Republicans see an opportunity to tap into existing anger about government spending priorities and direct it against the marginalised and oppressed.
In their recent book Who’s Afraid of Gender?, gender theorist Judith Butler outlines how the global far right have incorporated transphobic hysteria into their broader political framework over the past decade. “Intimate fears and anxieties” about personal identity, safety and the traditional nuclear family “become socially organized to incite political passions”, Butler writes. 
US legislative records bear this out. In 2015, according to researchers at <a href="https://translegislation.com/">Trans Legislation Tracker</a>, 21 bills targeting trans rights were brought before US state legislatures. Those proposals mostly sought to restrict trans women’s access to public bathrooms. The number of bills snowballed over subsequent years as a coalition of Christian fundamentalists, conservative think tanks and Republican lawmakers worked together to extend their scope into health and education. 
In 2024, some 674 anti-trans bills were considered in 43 states. This avalanche of persecution now targets trans people and their supporters in almost every sphere of life, from inclusive schooling to workplace rights and gender-affirming medical care.
Anti-trans agitation in public schools is particularly important for Republican politicians because it connects them to a reactionary “parental rights movement”. According to the New York Times, that movement <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/us/parental-rights-school-board-elections.html">gained momentum </a>in 2022 by opposing coronavirus health measures, but it also opposes teachers’ unions, LGBTI-related literature, history curricula relating to slavery and evolutionary theory. US social conservatism weaves together racism and gender oppression with anti-abortion religious sensibilities in reaction against progress on multiple fronts.
Trump clearly places transgender rights under the shadow of a broader “woke” agenda. A White House memo from 27 January directs federal agencies to cease spending on any social programs that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering”. In a Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-president-trump-calls-enemy-within-more-dangerous-any-foreign-entity">interview</a>
last October, Trump warned, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics”. He then suggested that the National Guard or military should be deployed against this “enemy from within”. In a campaign speech last October, he declared “I will take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female”. 
Transgender people are being targeted not only as a specific minority group, but as part of a multifaceted “enemy” that’s been constructed to advance Trump’s reactionary agenda. The notion that “gender ideology” permeates institutions at various levels helps to justify and fuel the new administration’s broader agenda of reorganising government and its priorities. Trump has repeatedly promised to dismantle the Department of Education specifically, which <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-save-american-education-and-give-power-back-to-parents">he says</a> is infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”.
Any organisation receiving federal funding can become a target for conservative campaigns if it does not follow strict norms around gender identification and segregation. Any federal employee who supports trans people as part of their job now risks being fired. This is not only a direct attack on trans people, but a way of normalising an atmosphere of heightened repression and surveillance in an increasingly authoritarian United States.
Around the world, the far right are looking to the US as a model for the sort of society they want to create. A fight back is urgently needed both to defend trans people from Trump’s vicious attacks and to take on the reactionary agenda that motivates them and threatens us all.

Ruby Healer

Trump’s transphobia must be stopped

The hard right is making serious ground globally. But, while increasingly powerful, their ideas are not hegemonic. Now is not the time to despair, but to fight for a better world.
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There’s an undeniable sense that a right-wing vibe shift has taken place over the last eighteen months. Bashing migrants, trans people and women’s rights is “in”, as is climate denialism and the unfettered right of billionaires to accumulate as much money as possible. The hard right have become normalised; they are the mainstream in politics.
Donald Trump’s re-election and his rapid-fire assault on the oppressed and regulatory departments are the pinnacle of this new political era. He campaigned on assertions that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of US society and eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio. He celebrated his success in appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned national abortion protections. He vowed to abolish the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Authority. And now that he’s taken office, he’s holding good on many promises, while threatening US territorial expansion.
But it’s not just the US. The far right is on the march across Europe, surging in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, on the verge of taking power in Austria, and ruling Italy and several Central European countries. Many trace historical links to 1930s fascist parties. In Australia, Liberal leader Peter Dutton has borrowed elements of the MAGA playbook, lashing out at the “woke agenda”, lamenting that young men are “disenfranchised and ostracised” by diversity initiatives and setting up his own DOGE-inspired shadow minister for government efficiency. 
Unsurprisingly, corporate America is also going MAGA. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has inserted himself into the heart of the Trump administration, while using his control of X to promote far-right parties internationally. In a speech to the fascist Alternative for Germany party, Musk encouraged Germans to move beyond “a focus on past guilt” less than a week after performing a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration. 
The titans of Silicon Valley—where many of the richest men in the world made their billions—have embraced Trump. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sports a gold chain, encourages companies to embrace “masculine energy” and recently dropped diversity initiatives. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is spending $40 million for the right to make a documentary about first lady Melania Trump, live streamed Trump’s inauguration and, along with many other tech billionaires, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. There was a revolving door of corporate leaders bending the knee at Mar-a-Lago in the months before Trump took office.
It’s unsurprising, because these are the people set to benefit the most from an administration that is gutting regulations seen as impediments to the rich making money. In a world that feels more unstable (economies are stuttering, climate change is wreaking havoc and the threat of global war is looming), Trump promises a more ruthless administration focused only on “making America win”. Be under no illusion: it’s corporate America he is referring to. 
Diversity, equity and inclusion programs fitted the vibe of the 2010s and early 2020s, when millions of people mobilised to demand racial justice and the #MeToo movement excoriated misogynistic corporate culture. Companies adapted to try to maintain relevance amongst their consumer base. But that moment has passed, and the naked pursuit of profit and power, the preferred state of affairs for the billionaires, is making a comeback. “I feel liberated”, a top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... It’s a new dawn.”
Right-wing politics also feels ascendant in broader society and popular culture. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have infected a growing section of young men with their noxious brand of hyper-misogyny and hustle culture. Trump received loud cheers during the Super Bowl live stream. Joe Rogan rules the airwaves. #YourBodyMyChoice trended immediately after Trump’s election. UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell received barely a slap on the wrist for a pro-Hitler rant that called the Nazi leader “a good guy”.
This all amounts to a dangerous new normal in world politics. For anyone who cares about the plight of the oppressed, this is serious cause for concern. It also raises a few important questions: How did we get here? And what can we do about it?
The first thing to note is that it’s not the case that everyone is now a bigot. Trump did not win by a large margin—at 1.8 percent, it’s the smallest since 1968—and nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home. Only one newly elected president has had a lower approval rating than Trump since the end of World War II: himself, in 2017. Across Western Europe and the UK, a majority of voters still reject the far right. If Dutton wins the upcoming federal election, it will be because of the ALP’s failure to help ordinary people during the cost-of-living crisis: every Australian poll conducted in the last twelve months shows more than two-thirds of respondents do not support Trump.
Polling also indicates that many of the key right-wing talking points are not very popular. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal access to abortion in most or all cases (which has increased since the Dobbs decision), according to the Pew Research Center. In June last year, Gallop found that more than six in ten Americans opposed banning access to gender-affirming care for minors. Only 37 percent of US adults support Trump’s call to deport all undocumented migrants, according to a survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In the cultural sphere, Chappell Roan, who loudly promotes LGBTI rights and supports Palestine, is the pop star of the moment. And apparently Trump’s cheers at the Super Bowl were challenged by loud jeers—Fox sport just edited those bits out.
The next thing to understand is that the right has not risen to power because the masses turned fascist. The story of electoral politics in 2024 was the crisis of incumbency: parties that have overseen the rising cost of living of recent years were booted out of office. For instance, in the United Kingdom the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, but now that they’re just dishing out more of the same, the far-right Reform UK party has surged in the polls. Politicians of all stripes are being punished for rising inequality.
In addition to that, official politics has for years been shifting to a harsher, more racist edge. For the last fifteen years, everyone from the traditional conservatives to the social democratic parties has tried to deflect anger away from themselves and on to migrants—it’s a classic case of divide and rule. Fortress Europe—the decade-long effort to keep migrants out of Europe by building barbed wire fences and letting at least 25,000 refugees drown in the Mediterranean—was not constructed by the fascists, but the political “centre”. Last year, deportations under Biden surpassed Trump’s record. When all we are hearing from politicians and the mainstream media is that we can’t afford a house because migrants are flooding the borders, is it any wonder that people start to believe this?
Popular consciousness is not only hardening to the right, but polarising to the left as well. There are countless examples of this: from young people demanding action on climate change, growing acceptance of trans people and outrage over attacks on abortion rights, not to mention the popular response to Luigi Mangione assassinating a health insurance CEO in New York last year. As the world becomes a nastier place, many are looking for a progressive alternative. 
So how do you square this circle with the rise of the right? For one thing, it’s easier for the right. Despite their anti-establishment rhetoric, they fit much more neatly into the system, venerating hierarchies, national divisions, racist scapegoating and profit making. They’re not trying to overthrow capitalism and create a society of genuine equality—quite the opposite. When it comes to electoral politics, the right has the advantage: for instance, the left doesn’t have the support of the richest person on the planet (and nor would we want it).
But mistakes have also been made by the left. Many have tried to transform the centre left parties into a weapon for economic and social justice. This means that organising efforts are wasted on hopeless projects like the Democrats or Labor-type parties. When these parties continue to betray their hopeful supporters, people become demoralised and withdraw from politics entirely. We saw this with Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and even more left-wing, but limited, electoral projects in Europe. 
The other mistake is thinking that the bosses can be compelled to right society’s wrongs. “Woke capitalism” and diversity programs still gave us soaring inequality, accelerating climate change and the genocide in Gaza. 
Left-wing people feel defeated while the right is ascendant, which has a broader impact on society. The right-wing trolls who were hiding in subreddits five years ago are now brimming with confidence.
Instead, we need to look towards forms of organising that history has shown can push back against the right and the ills of capitalism more broadly. Protests are an essential part of that strategy. At the start of last year, support for the German far right fell after mass protests swept the country. The Black Lives Matter uprising—the largest protests in US history—helped put the final nail in the coffin of the first Trump administration. They’re also a way to gather those who share a common outrage and vision for society, cutting against the atomisation and demoralisation that the system relies on. 
Working-class power is the other necessary element. Imagine if every teacher in the US stopped work to stop Trump from gutting the Education Department. Or if every doctor and nurse went on strike against cuts to public health or the health insurance vultures. Without the labour of ordinary people, their system would come to a standstill.
But we also need a political alternative: socialist parties that fight this shitty system, instead of capitulating to or compromising with it. Politics that fights for workers, for migrants, for trans people and women’s rights, against war and genocide and greenhouse-gas-emitting corporate criminals. 
We’re living in an increasingly dangerous world. The rich want to stamp down harder on workers, the oppressed are having hard-fought rights stripped away, and the threats of war and climate catastrophe loom large. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for anyone with a shred of decency. It’s time to join the fight.

Eleanor Morley

Resisting the right-wing vibe shift

The Women, Life, Freedom uprising has profoundly shaken the foundations of Iran’s Islamic Republic. Regional defeats, including the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of the dictator Assad, have further weakened the regime in Tehran. With the social and economic crisis into which the country is sinking, the very survival of the Islamic Republic is at stake.
With galloping hyperinflation, the collapse of the national currency, gas and electricity shortages, regular production stoppages and untimely closures of factories and administrations, the entire economy has been hit by an unprecedented crisis. Although Iran has the world’s second-largest gas reserves and third-largest oil reserves, the population lacks everything: more than 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Unpaid wages are on the increase.
In 2024, 2,396 demonstrations and 169 strikes were recorded. Due to censorship, these figures are undoubtedly lower than the reality. These protests by workers of all categories (teachers, nurses, manual workers, municipal employees, pensioners, etc.) and from all sectors, including the strategic petrochemicals industry, took place in all 31 regions of the country. The demands concerned wages, social protection, pensions, employment contracts and the abolition of daily working hours.
The Islamic Republic, a capitalist and theocratic dictatorship, responded with systematic brutality. The regime’s first weapon is to continue to ban the right to organise and form trade unions. The authorities are seeking to prevent any structuring or coordination of social protest. Worker activists are constantly being arrested and sentenced. Often dismissed from their jobs, they are subjected to intimidation and various forms of pressure regularly during their detention and when they are released.
Faced with regional defeats, the social crisis and the struggles, the Islamic Republic has tried in recent weeks to flex its muscles by conducting military manoeuvres designed to dissuade the colonialist state of Israel and US imperialism from attacking Iran. At the same time, it has deployed Basij militias in the streets to create a climate of fear—a clear message to those who constantly challenge the authorities.
But these gesticulations do not put an end to mobilisations, acts of civil disobedience, or collective or individual resistance. The assassination in broad daylight of two Supreme Court judges on 18 January testifies to the fragility of the government. Known for their summary trials of opponents and directly responsible for the execution of many political prisoners, no-one will mourn the deaths of Judges Razini and Moghisseh.
Every time the regime fears for its survival, its violence against its opponents becomes more ferocious. In 2024, the Islamic Republic murdered more than 900 prisoners. And since the northern autumn, the authorities have even stepped up the pace, executing more than three prisoners a day. 
Kurds and Baluchis are the first victims, demonstrating the systemic racism of the regime. Fifty-one prisoners of conscience are on death row. Campaigns against the death penalty are organised from inside the prisons themselves, before spreading outside the country. This is particularly the case for Varisheh Moradi and Pakhshan Azizi, two Kurdish activists for whom various appeals and petitions are circulating. A well-attended one-day general strike was called in Kurdistan on 22 January to protest against their sentencing.
Against the capitalist and obscurantist regime of the mullahs, which is showing many signs of weakness, it is important to develop support here and now for those who are fighting for social justice, democracy, gender equality and the defence of national and religious minorities. 
It is high time to put an end to the Islamic Republic. To achieve this, the youth, women, workers and peoples of Iran need international solidarity. The fall of the regime through a popular victory and without imperialist interference would be a tremendous encouragement for all the peoples of the region and the world.
Reprinted from InternationalViewpoint.org

Babak Kia

Iran: Storm warning for the Islamic Republic

Serbia’s students have brought to life a mass movement and grassroots democracy rarely seen in the country. In the morning, they block roads; throughout the day, they occupy their faculties, march across the city and the country and shut down highways and ministry buildings. 
The movement aims to win justice for fifteen people killed in a train station collapse in Novi Sad on 1 November, and hundreds of thousands identify that goal with the daily mass protests of the students. Pushed into action by the tragedy, the students have questioned Serbia’s whole system of greed and autocratic governance.
The current president, Aleksandar Vučić, has spent years curbing democracy and allegedly lining his and his colleagues’ pockets at the expense of the mass of the Serbian people.
Vučić, who has held positions of power since the Milošević era, has usually seen off opposition protests. But this student movement has been different. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in disgrace after a mass 24-hour highway blockade, and several ministers have faced the chopping block. Unable to convince the population that the students are foreign agents, Ustaše fascists or separatists, the Serbian government has never appeared as powerless as it is at this moment.
The student movement is a dazzling display of the power of activism and democracy rooted in the people. While change is usually said to come from the best ideas and the ballot box, the masses in Serbia are showing that real change, change that can undermine an entire system of authoritarianism, comes from mass struggle.
What started as daily vigils was transformed by right-wing violence into a militant challenge to the entire system. Defending themselves against a physical attack, students in the Dramatic Arts Faculty of Belgrade took over their campus building and declared it under their control.
Soon, nearly all of the 80 major faculties in Serbia were taken over by students demanding the publication of documents regarding the station collapse, the release of their arrested comrades, justice for the attacks on students and a 20 percent funding increase for education.
The blockades are places in which a form of radical democracy has begun to grow. As described in a letter addressed to students of the world, the dramatic arts student group Svi U Blokade (SUB) describe:
“We have suspended classes, dissolved all student representative groups, self-organised plenums ... and begun to apply pressure ... We have begun to set up kitchens, dormitories, pharmacies, workshops, cinemas and classrooms for self-education ... We organise blockades through work groups ... open to everyone who wants to participate ... [They] present their ideas to the plenum ... an open forum for all students of the faculty ... [and] direct democracy is put in practice.”
The blockades have shifted power away from the government, but also from the more moderate opposition forces that have led many of the recent protest movements in Serbia. Centring resistance on the active participants of the struggle in the blockades makes those who refuse to take part have no influence, like the student union president who, on television station TV PINK, called the protests “the greatest destruction of higher education”.
The blockades have also used pressure from below and grassroots democracy in the plenums to keep leadership away from opposition politicians and in the hands of the masses themselves. After calling only a couple of symbolic demonstrations and a fist fight in parliament, those politicians have gained no leadership as the mass of students have voted for militant actions and systemic change, not just the election of the other political team.
Rather than scaring people off, the student occupations have drawn wide layers of the population into street politics. Students called one of the largest protests in Serbian history, have inspired teachers and workers into strikes and protest action, have led hundreds in days-long marches from city to city. Three months later, they continue to hold the vast majority of university faculties under student control.
With the occupations as focal points for organisation and protest, workers, unionists, parents and pensioners have all made their way into the blockades. Students have keenly adopted the concerns of various groups, supporting farmer and media protests, and travelling to the energy ministry to join rallying power plant workers. As one postal worker said in an article in the socialist newspaper Kontranapad, “If the students could respond and come to our protest, let’s stop our work too!”
Farmers have played a key role in maintaining the blockades and protests, providing tractors for barricades, soup kitchens and spit roasts, and food for weary marchers halfway between Belgrade and Novi Sad. Teachers have also shown solidarity and drawn in workers across Serbia, first in the universities as faculty members rushed to the blockades to support their students, conduct classes on the streets and participate in plenums.
The teachers have been an icebreaker for workers in Serbia. Every time they have joined a blockade, defied government threats, gone on strike or rallied in the city, they have inspired other workers to join them. 
Lawyers and actors joined the teachers on strike, while bus drivers refused to run services transporting strikebreakers. In the main news stations of RTS, workers demanded that the chief editor allow students to join their program or resign. Power plant workers, who had promised to strike further after a one-day suspension of work, overcame an order not to protest and began hour-long stoppages.
This was not guaranteed. “One part of the trade union is in connection with the regime and participates in the local government”, according to a coal miner in Kolubara speaking to N1 News. Across the country, various repressive and demobilising tactics have been attempted, workers being threatened with the sack or hauled into ministry and management buildings for lengthy interviews about their political support for the students. 
Trade union leaders have played no better a role than student union leaders. They have signed wage rise deals in exchange for calling off strikes and have taken to the media and to parliament to denounce the idea that they might strike against the government. However, they have also been dismissed in individual workplaces—one union meeting of electricity distribution workers ended with the union officials being booed out of the room by their own members.
By reaching out to workers on strike, pensioners, lawyers, high schoolers and more, the students have given ordinary people a chance to feel their own power. By creating opportunities for mass struggle, students have accomplished what a thousand speeches and essays couldn’t: they have convinced hundreds of thousands of people they have the power to change society.
Whether or not their movement wins, the students have started a radical process in Serbia. Instead of elections and bills, politics is now plenum democracies and protests. The idea that university faculties could be run by mass meetings rather than board meetings has gripped Serbia. 
During the 20 January teachers’ strike, Dušan Kokot—a leader of the Nezavisnost (Independence) trade union faction, a more militant faction of the unions—declared the strike gathering a plenum and turned to the crowd for a decision on, “Who is in favour of a general strike?” 
Of course, this is not the same as a student plenum, which Kokot noted in an interview with Vreme, but it gives workers a taste of their power. If this level of democracy were exercised not just in a protest or on a campus, but in every workplace, town and city, Vučić’s corruption and greed wouldn’t stand a chance. This could also be pushed by organising all sympathetic workers into a network of activists who could transform Serbia from the ground up.
Regardless of what building is occupied next, who protests next, who resigns next, the university students at the centre of the movement aren’t letting up. On 15 February, tens of thousands from across the country converged on the city of Kragujevac to protest together, following other inter-city marches to try to join the various city-based protests into one. 
While the government insists it is meeting the protesters’ demands, one student who had marched from Belgrade to Novi Sad explained to Radio Free Europe, “The system needs to change; if the system hasn’t changed, our demands have not been met”.

Johnny Gerdes

Serbian students lead mass movement against autocracy

Everyone used to know which capitalists were the bad guys and which ones were the good guys. Bad: oil, banks, military contractors. They don’t care about climate change, they profit from wars, and they crash the economy. They live in bad places like Florida and Texas and Wall Street. They promote weird right-wing Christian ideas to bamboozle people. They are Republicans. They deserve derision and hostility. 
Good: tech. They make clever websites where you can stay in touch with your friends and see pleasant images of beaches and fancy breakfasts. They solve climate change. They live in California. They run Barack Obama’s campaign. They deserve low taxes, deregulation and invitations to special White House parties.
Yet here we are. Many of those enlightened Silicon Valley capitalists now look like a propaganda cartoon from a Communist Party magazine of the 1930s. They embody all that is awful about contemporary life and use all their power to make it worse. They fund, promote, and grovel before the most reactionary and authoritarian US president in living memory. They run media platforms promoting the most twisted and dehumanising racist propaganda. They celebrate the power of “masculine energy” with Joe Rogan. What happened? What do these people actually want? What do they truly believe?
Democrats are searching for answers. There are probably some contingent explanations. The development of AI depends on energy-hungry data centres. That makes immediate access to electricity more important and climate change less of a concern. The economic stagnation of the “second tech boom”, as well as fuelling the crypto and AI crazes, may have made key tech players more interested in direct corruption and state patronage. 
Some right-wing Democrats, like commentator Matt Yglesias, have suggested that the Biden administration’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/18/joe-biden-has-just-dealt-a-big-defeat-to-big-tech">meek pushback</a> against tech industry power, or his largely meaningless pro-union rhetoric, are to blame for “systematically trying to alienate stakeholders in the technology industry”. But that all came pretty late in the piece, once it was obvious that the big tech players were shifting towards Trump.
Contingent, temporary factors play a role. But so do permanent ones. To quote <a href="https://lbo-news.com/2012/05/22/explaining-what-exists-in-memory-of-bob-fitch/">Robert Fitch</a>: “Vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world”. 
These people are tech capitalists. But what is a tech capitalist? In a way, nearly all capitalists are “tech” capitalists. Most of the important products in the modern economy require complex technology to produce. That privately owned technology is the capital that makes someone a capitalist. Whether they make steel or spaceships, they have the same basic interests. They want to hold back the progress of competitors, protect their position and win special grants and favours from the state. They need to keep costs down: adopt new production techniques, keep taxes low, remove or disregard irritating regulations and keep their employees cheap.
Moment by moment, they may favour different tactics, and accept different compromises. They might be Democrats one day, Republicans the next, and some unknown horror in the future. In the realm of politics, they follow the principle of Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.
Seen in that light, the Trumpist tech capitalists are rather traditional. They are defence contractors, car manufacturers, finance capitalists and media barons. Who would be surprised that this crew would swing towards a far-right, ultra-racist, highly corrupt political movement once it looked like it could win?
Thiel and Musk began their “tech” careers with an online finance platform. Now they’re both tightly linked to the US defence and espionage industries. Thiel’s main outfit, Palantir, sells a data analysis tool used throughout the US intelligence and military. It purports to be able to reveal important trends concealed in mountains of data, and it received billions of dollars of military and intelligence contracts to do so. 
As David Runciman writes: “[Palantir’s] business is dispelling the fog of war—define war any way you like, and personal privacy be damned”. Likewise, Musk’s SpaceX has received US$3.6 billion in Defense Department contracts in the last decade—along with $11.8 billion from NASA. So what’s good for business? Civil liberties and global disarmament? Or a militarised, paranoid world in which the population is tricked or forced to accept spying, violence, ultra-nationalism, and the economic prioritisation of war and its associated machinery?
Musk makes cars. It’s big manufacturing. Production schedules are tight. Wages and conditions need to be constrained. Regulations and unions are a danger for him—as they are for logistics titan Jeff Bezos. So, unsurprisingly, he follows in the tradition of the industry’s modern founder, Henry Ford. For Musk, as for Ford, unions, “communists” (like Kamala Harris), and other forms of subversion need to be undermined; extreme racist propaganda is part of the cure. Musk’s anti-migrant tirades and flirtations with fascism on X are exactly in the tradition of Ford, the Hitler supporter who published his antisemitic conspiracy theories in his own personal media outlet, the Dearborn Independent.
It seems likely that Musk’s manufacturing interest first set him on the path to his current interest in fascist politics. In 2020, his Tesla plants were affected by pandemic lockdown protocols. Musk’s profits were temporarily threatened by government regulations aiming to save lives. 
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies”, he complained on a Tesla earnings call. He began furiously promoting medical conspiracy theories, tweeting against “fascist” lockdowns, campaigning against “unelected and ignorant” public health officials, and tweeting the “FREE AMERICA NOW” slogans of the conspiracy-addled far right. He ultimately reopened his factory in defiance of a lockdown order. Trump offered him public support. 
Thatis seems to have been the year of Musk’s political awakening, as it was for so many pandemic-era capitalists frustrated by public obsession with health affecting their profits. Musk learned that he could undermine and destroy inconvenient regulations if he promoted demagogic conspiracy-theory politics in an alliance with Donald Trump. Now, unelected and ignorant, he is the president’s “first buddy” and a guest speaker at European far-right party conferences.
Among the capitalist class, the owners of media outlets act as a kind of political vanguard. They try to shape the ideas and set the terms of debate for their co-thinkers. They have their own party-like rivalries and disagreements. Trump’s first rise to power was dependent on an alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which had spent decades promoting anti-migrant politics to its TV audience of millions in the US. 
Now, in a way, the torch has been passed. By purchasing Twitter, Musk became a media baron. He quickly converted X into a decisively important outlet for racist conspiracy theories: taking advantage of his rigged algorithm, Musk himself became the platform’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories”, according to an <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-musk-x-election-influence-immigration/">analysis</a>
by Bloomberg Technology. Mark Zuckerberg, always trying to mimic his bolder rivals, would soon adjust Facebook and Instagram to resemble Musk’s outlet more closely.
Old-school “legacy media” could present right-wing propaganda with an air of spurious authority based on traditional signifiers: a suit and tie, hair and make-up, a trained voice with a posh accent or a folksy one, depending on the audience. 
The social media outlets controlled by Musk and Zuckerberg play a similar trick with different methods. They are full of some of the most extreme racist, misogynist and anti-democratic right-wing propaganda you could imagine. But it’s presented as an organic representation of mass opinion. You forget the enormous data centres shaping your feed under the oversight of utterly secret algorithms shaped and guided by Musk, Zuckerberg, and their co-thinkers. The gusher of propaganda is delivered to you as a direct and authentic act of self-expression from people just like yourself.
So a set of ultra-powerful, quasi-monopolistic military contractors and manufacturers are using their influence over media outlets to promote far-right politics. Should anyone be surprised?
Maybe the Democrats. They spent years incubating this group of monsters. Their decades-long alliance with the tech industry, just like their alliance with Wall Street, would make a joke of Biden’s later attempts at populist, pro-union posturing. It’s part of what made people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vulnerable to the (basically accurate) attack from Trump that they represented an oligarchy of wealthy elites. But Trump has now made those elites a better offer. 
The offer has not been universally accepted. Subtracting the donations of Musk, who spent $246 million in the 2024 elections, the biggest donors still broadly favoured the Democrats in 2024. As a group, the major tech industry donors gave Harris $121 million compared to $31 for Trump; overall, the Democrats out-raised the Republicans by more than a billion dollars during the 2024 campaign. This may be some comfort to Democrats., Bbut it is no good to the rest of us. After Trump proved he could defeat Harris, many more capitalists switched sides. And the fact that so many remain willing to finance the Democrats simply proves that the Democrats continue to act as loyal and trusted servants of the US oligarchy—not some anti-corporate opposition that can confront the power of Musk and the rest.
The MAGA tech capitalists have evolved in tandem with Trump, as he has proven his ability over time to capture and defuse anti-corporate sentiment more effectively than the Democrats. In 2016, Trump and his supporters raged demagogically against entrenched corporate interests that controlled their rivals. “Across the country, wages are flat”, Peter Thiel said at the 2016 Republican convention. “But health care and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.”
Little remains of this anti-corporate posturing. Through years of propaganda, Trump captured this energy and converted it into pure, miserable bigotry. But Trump was never more anti-corporate than the Democrats are pro-worker. And the tech industry was never interested in social progress—only profits and power. It would be foolish to expect any better of these forces: the Democrats, the Republicans or the big business interests whose support they crave.

D. Taylor

The MAGA tech oligarchy

The promise of mass deportations. Pardons for fascist militia leaders. Nazi salutes. Turning Guantánamo Bay torture camp into a migrant prison. A war on federal anti-discrimination provisions. On and on it goes, in US President Donald Trump’s shock and awe campaign to remould US politics decisively.
His right-hand man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is charged with making swingeing cuts to government expenditure. But he is just as focused on building support for jailed British fascist Tommy Robinson and for the Alternative for Germany, a fascist party that, with Musk’s backing, is now polling second in the lead-up to a federal election later this month. 
Far-right parties are in government in seven EU member states—Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia—and are surging in France and Britain, among other places. Austria’s Freedom Party, founded by an SS-Brigadeführer and former member of the Nazi Reichstag, is on the cusp of forming a government. 
None of this is coincidental. The new right is building a global movement. A victory for one is viewed as a victory for all. And no victory has been celebrated as much as Trump’s return. There could have been no greater boost to the forces of global fascism than having a far-right figure running the world’s most powerful country. At fascist and far-right rallies everywhere, people wear the distinctive Make America Great Again caps and hold pictures of the bigoted billionaire while cheering their local equivalents.
Capitalists and establishment politicians are not only doing little to impede the growth of this toxic new far right; in many cases, they are cosying up to and encouraging it. 
During his first term, Trump faced significant resistance from many quarters and mass protests from the public. Indeed, his administration turned out to be weak and somewhat ineffective, embroiled in turmoil from one week to the next and with a revolving door of staff, one day praised by the president, the next derided as dumb as rocks. 
This time around, so far, it has been different. Since 5 November, establishment arse kissers have lined up to visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to ingratiate themselves with a man who has basically promised to carry out mass human rights violations across the country. The financial pages have been a sea of articles about “the Trump trade” as all attention turns to money making, to hell with humanity.
After Trump entered office in 2017, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, changed its masthead motto to “Democracy dies in darkness”. This time, Bezos forbade any election editorial against Trump (a “hypocritical, chicken shit move”, according to one former US diplomat) and was a guest at the presidential inauguration, along with a who’s who of America’s most influential and wealthy people.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong also attended, personifying Australia’s imperial cringe: a hack basking in the glow of power. More than that, Wong exemplified the useful idiocy of the political centre left. While the far right coordinates globally, all the ALP can offer is smiles and photo ops that help normalise the brewing reaction. 
Not a peep of opposition can be heard from this so-called party of labour, just the sound of it sucking up to the rich and powerful here and abroad. Indeed, if Trump had strolled over and taken a crap at Wong’s feet, we’d probably have gotten a bumbling DFAT media release about the president’s attention to Australia’s representative being yet another indication of the two countries’ “enduring mateship”. 
So what’s left? And what can we do?
“No-one saves us but ourselves.” That saying is attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Buddha. A few years ago, the global climate movement adopted it. Hundreds of thousands of young people started to recognise that lobbying was a dead end. Clearly, those in power—politicians and capitalists—have zero intention of doing what’s required to avert environmental catastrophe. In fact, pursuing profits, they continue to green-light destructive coal and oil extraction projects worldwide. 
It’s also clear that the established political forces will not save us from the far right. If gaining office means adopting parts of the far-right program or capitulating to far-right leaders, they will do it. If being close to power means being close to and friendly with fascists, then they will dress for the occasion. 
They are scum.
No-one will save us but ourselves. We have to build a socialist alternative to this global horror show and a socialist alternative to the useless ALP. We need a party willing to fight, not capitulate—a party that fights for workers, not billionaires; a party that fights against bigotry and racism; a party that fights against war and imperialism; a party that fights against the whole rotten system of capitalism, and for a society run according to Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
If you want to resist the far right, and build a better, socialist society, join Socialist Alternative. We have a world to win.

‘No-one saves us but ourselves’: we have to resist the far right

The new US administration of Donald Trump is moving fast to unleash hell on millions of undocumented migrants. Brendan Stanton, now based in Australia, was active in the Student Farmworker Alliance, United We Dream and the broader immigrants’ rights movements in Texas from 2007 to 2019. Here, he outlines what is at stake in the latest attacks. 
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US President Donald Trump has signed at least a dozen executive orders to further criminalise undocumented immigrants and militarise the country’s southern border. The<a href="https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025_IJN-Trump-EOs.pdf"> slew of directives</a> includes a massive push for more criminal prosecutions and granting deportation powers to officers from other federal agencies. 
On top of immigrants, the orders target anyone who “facilitates [a person’s] unlawful presence in the United States”. They are so far-reaching that jurisdictions and agencies that advocate protecting immigrants could be defunded. There are even suggestions that the Department of Justice could prosecute state and local officials who don’t comply with the anti-immigrant policies. 
Tiny pockets of sanctuary are also being destroyed. Already, immigration authorities were <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/trump-mass-deportations-ice-raids-executive-immigration-rcna188620">arresting around 300 immigrants</a> per day; Trump’s first wave of raids appears to be <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/24/immigration-raids-deportations-trump-ice/">doubling that figure</a>. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency, is now publishing daily <a href="https://x.com/ICEgov/status/1882955710612291627">arrest totals</a>
and demonising <a href="https://x.com/ICEgov/status/1883220876914487756">individuals</a>
as part of the propaganda work of this campaign. 
Meagre protections from raids in schools, hospitals, churches, domestic violence shelters and funeral homes <a href="https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/ice-removes-protections-sensitive-locations-immigration/3749256/#:~:text=Some%20areas%20that%20have%20been,emergency%20response%20and%20relief%20centers.">have now been rescinded</a>. There has already been one <a href="https://abc7chicago.com/post/us-immigration-customs-enforcement-agents-denied-entry-hamline-elementary-school-back-yards-cps-officials/15833738/">scare</a>
at a primary school and workplace raids in New Jersey. Everyone is awaiting the administration’s promised mass operations in big cities.
Declarations of an “invasion” feature in at least six of the executive orders, and Trump directed the military’s<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/clarifying-the-militarys-role-in-protecting-the-territorial-integrity-of-the-united-states/"> Northern Command</a> to prioritise border enforcement. Since a national emergency was declared, he has added 1,500 active troops to the 2,200 already stationed at the border. These soldiers join the whopping 88,000 personnel working in various border agencies.
The US-Mexico border is the world’s<a href="https://www.iom.int/news/us-mexico-border-worlds-deadliest-migration-land-route"> deadliest land migration route</a>; up to 80,000 people have died crossing it in the last 30 years. Countless others have been traumatised by the increasingly militarised area, which features buoys and razor wire designed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/04/like-traps-meant-for-animals-death-no-deterrent-at-the-rio-grande-river-barrier">to drown people</a> crossing by river. And each year, <a href="https://www.southernborder.org/deaths_by_border_patrol">dozens are killed</a> by border patrol and the police. 
Trump’s orders direct immigration authorities to expand migrant prisons. He’s giving enforcement agencies and the military the green light to use force more freely. In a related law, which many Democrats support, tens of billions of dollars are being allocated to<a href="https://apnews.com/article/immigration-detention-trump-costs-5c6c59afdb8fa79a7ca74848bd3b7cc8"> more than triple</a> the capacity of immigrant prisons in the world’s largest immigrant detention system. 
The outcomes of the threatened offensive are yet to be determined, but it is a massive attack on some of the most vulnerable and oppressed people in US society. It’s a blaring announcement that the new regime aims to use its momentum to push further into the abyss of a labour system that relies on apartheid and an even bigger repressive apparatus to maintain it. That’s particularly true in agriculture, where <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#:~:text=In%202020%E2%80%9322%2C%2032%20percent,percent%20held%20no%20work%20authorization.">more than 40 percent</a> of workers are estimated to be “unauthorised”.
The immediate targets are obvious: the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/17/us/immigrants-trump-deportations.html">14 million people</a> either lacking documentation or holding some form of precarious temporary visa. Most have fled places dominated by US capital or that US imperialism has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/19/central-america-migrants-us-foreign-policy">ravaged for decades</a>, such as Mexico, Central America and Haiti. Allegations of immigrant criminality have been used to create a narrative that the new administration is fighting dangerous enemies at home. This is despite evidence that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at <a href="https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate">far lower rates</a> than native-born citizens.
What is less obvious is that this is an attack on the entire working class of the region.
When there’s a permanent underclass denied rights and in perpetual fear of deportation and family separation, wages and conditions are broken down at all levels. Immigrant oppression only serves the bosses, as already underpaid workers in underserved communities are terrorised and sections of US workers turn their attention to “illegals” and away from their own exploiters. 
The political project of the right is to create a meaner and more brutal society of nationalistic chauvinism.
The primary response of undocumented people has been to <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/21/immigrants-skip-work-amid-ice-fears/">keep their heads down</a> to avoid the waves of promised raids. There have been small actions for immigrants’ rights and against the new administration. But so far, these have not been big enough to challenge the onslaught coming from the right.
Some Democrats are speaking out—but they were largely silent under Joe Biden’s administration. The reality is that there is an existing colossal border apparatus that the past three Democratic administrations expanded. Indeed, Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar", previously worked for the Obama administration. “A lot of the same tactics are being dusted off”, John Sandweg, the acting ICE director from August 2013 to February 2014, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/18/politics/tom-homan-donald-trump-barack-obama-deportation/index.html">told CNN in December</a>. “What Tom is talking about are Obama-esque things.”
The border has been increasingly militarised since the early 1990s, and the state has invested more than <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/research/cost_of_immigration_enforcement_factsheet_2024.pdf">US$4 billion</a>
since 2003. Previous administrations justified this militarisation using the War on Terror; the new talk of combating an “invasion” is serving a similar function. The ruling class in the US wants to create a more militaristic society on all fronts.
Before Trump’s election, the immigrant detention system held 35-40,000 migrants <a href="https://www.southernborder.org/deaths_by_border_patrol">on any given day</a>. While using less belligerent language, Biden deported <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o">more people</a> than Trump’s previous administration. Obama earned the moniker “deporter-in-chief” by overseeing the<a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/2016/09/01/president-obama-deported-record-number-of-undocumented-immigrants-despite-what-donald-trump-says/"> highest rate of forced removals</a> of any president in history. Kamala Harris used her first diplomatic trip as vice president to tell Guatemalans: “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57387350">Do not come to the United States</a>”. She responded to the rampant racism of Trump’s campaign promises by pledging to add thousands of border patrol agents and by <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57387350">raising the bar for asylum claims</a>. 
There was a consistent level of immigrant rights activism from the 1980s through the first Trump administration. But there was a severe decline under Biden, and the movement seems to be at one of its lowest ebbs as these new attacks are rolled out.
However, there are recent precedents for a fightback.
Growing up in Texas, I was exposed to a flood of stories about immigrant oppression. Migrant farmworker classmates drifted in and out of school between harvests. Friends struggled as their families were divided by an increasingly militarised border. Workmates were forced to brave the desert borderlands and evade ICE helicopters, only to be rewarded with demanding jobs paying $3 per hour for 70-hour weeks. 
Shortly after starting university in Houston, my friends and I joined campaigns to shut down a notoriously abusive family detention centre and to end the collaboration between our local police agencies and ICE. These were long and arduous campaigns, but, for a time, we <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/politics/06detain.html">won an end to family detention</a> at the nearby T. Don Hutto prison in 2009, and local collaboration with ICE was <a href="https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2017/02/22/189009/sheriff-gonzalez-ends-program-that-transfers-undocumented-immigrants-to-government/">officially ended</a> in 2017. 
Our activism came in the shadow of the most significant wave of pro-immigrant protests the US had ever seen. The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005—also called the Sensenbrenner Bill, after its sponsor, Wisconsin Republican Sensenbrenner—carried similar threats to what we see now. It was introduced in December 2005, and by March 2006, thousands of high schoolers had walked out across the country. Countless workers refused to work as waves of protests crashed through the Southwest and all major urban centres with significant Latino populations. 
During “The Day without an Immigrant”, as it was called, <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/moves/2006_immigrant_rights.shtml">millions of people</a> marched in hundreds of cities, including the largest-ever rallies in a host of places. Big cities like Los Angeles had <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/immigrant-protests-peak/">several rallies</a> with over half a million people; in relative backwaters like Dallas, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/us/huge-crowd-marches-in-dallas-in-support-of-immigrants.html">300,000 marched</a>. From February to May 2006, the movement exploded; Sensenbrenner’s bill was voted down during this wave of revolt. The movement kept generating massive rallies, organising deportation defence networks and countering armed anti-immigrant militias. It revitalised May Day, turning it into an immigrant worker protest for years. 
Even under the Obama administration, my brave comrades <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/undocumented-youth-infiltrates-another-immigrant-detention-center/">infiltrated immigrant prisons</a> to report on the abuses, and we organised solidarity protests for incarcerated undocumented families who were engaged in <a href="https://statesofincarceration.org/story/hunger-strike-t-don-hutto-detention-center">hunger strikes</a> for freedom in T. Don Hutto prison. I remember the unflinching defiance of young undocumented fighters hounding the Harris County sheriff in Houston—screaming at the racist monster as we gate-crashed his fundraiser in the pouring rain. 
When Trump was first elected, we protested on election day, organised an immigrant rights contingent at the Women’s March and built networks to defend against deportations. When the new president’s so-called Muslim ban was instituted, we <a href="https://www.chron.com/houston/article/Protests-planned-against-Muslim-ban-across-10892379.php">converged on Houston’s airport</a>, shutting down its regular operations. During the height of child separation, authorities had the gall to turn a Houston homeless shelter <a href="https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-officials-dispute-claim-that-13123113.php">into a child prison</a>, so we defiantly flooded the streets to shut it down, too. 
Tragically, many activists became entrenched in the broader world of immigrant NGOs or the Democratic Party apparatus. We didn’t have the class consciousness or political understanding to predict the consequences. Many of my fellow activists retreated from politics altogether, resulting in a decline in activism. It’s essential to learn from those mistakes. 
The working class on both sides of the border has immense power. But charity work and advocacy alone can't harness it. Turning the tide against the Trump administration requires reinvigorating the fighting spirit that animated the last wave of victories.

Brendan Stanton

Trump’s assault on immigrants can be resisted

Capitalism’s new era of brutality found no greater expression this week than in the world’s richest man, Elon Musk—a supporter of European fascist organisations—openly and emphatically invoking the most reactionary of political doctrines. 
At an event celebrating Donald Trump’s swearing-in as the 47th president of the United States, the multi-billionaire unmistakably performed Nazi salutes. Yet this provoked little consternation among the mouthpieces of capitalism—the media that relentlessly smear anti-war protesters as antisemites. 
“Standing ovation for Elon Musk”, observed news anchor Erin Burnett during CNN’s live coverage. “You saw him come out with that odd-looking salute.” The New York Times
adopted the posture of a media establishment utterly unperturbed, with a headline that conjured a shrug: “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture”. 
For many years, the global ruling classes’ only defence against Trump’s right-wing electoral populism took the form of repeated warnings about the danger of fascism. Now, presented with the most culturally recognisable symbol of fascist politics from a member of Trump’s administration, they feign ignorance. 
This is no mistake. It is the wilful legitimisation of far-right filth by a system built on exploitation, oppression and militarism.
Big bank CEOs, industrialists, politicians and diplomats have brushed off Musk’s obscenity as they flock to embrace Trump. Salivating over the promise of tax cuts, deregulation and renewed imperial might, the profit-seekers are kneeling before their new master like so many Pavlovian dogs. 
On ABC News, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong congratulated the president and described the “honour” of attending his inauguration as “such an important event, the peaceful transfer of power in our democracy”. The Hitler salutes that featured in the celebrations—not to mention the reactionary programme of the incoming administration—weren’t worth mentioning, let alone condemning. 
Defenders of the status quo might try to deny reality. But the far right fully grasps the facts. Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell posted a video of Musk’s salute, declaring it a “Donald Trump White Power Moment”. Right-wing US political commentator Evan Kilgore <a href="https://x.com/EvanAKilgore/status/1881431216181985720">wrote on X</a>: “Did @elonmusk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally ... We are so back”. 
Among the global leaders of the parliamentary far right, Argentina’s President Javier Milei was first in line to stand with Musk. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Milei claimed that the Tesla CEO “has been unjustly vilified by wokeism ideology of recent days for an innocent gesture that simply reflects his enthusiasm and gratitude for people”. On X, Milei was <a href="https://x.com/JMilei/status/1881887233516482610">more forthright</a>: “Tremble, leftist motherfuckers”.
One of the most disgraceful defences of Musk came from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a US-based nonprofit that presents itself as an antisemitism watchdog. As footage of the rally circulated, the organisation offered <a href="https://x.com/ADL/status/1881474892022919403">an instant apology for it</a>:
“It seems that [Musk] made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute ... In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt ... Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”
The ADL, of course, has been unwilling to extend the same level of understanding to activists opposing genocide. Even Jewish opponents of Israeli war crimes have been labelled antisemites by the group. Mondoweiss, a US news website, reported last June that ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt had stated at a corporate panel event: “Saying ‘free Palestine’ to a Jewish person out of context is antisemitism, plain and simple”. In a previous address to an ADL leadership summit, Greenblatt insisted: “When campus organisations like SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] interrupt speeches, disrupt events ... that is extremism”. 
If there’s one thing that should be simple to identify as extremism, it’s a Hitler salute by a man who recently wrote on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany”. (The AfD­—Alternative for Germany—is a fascist party led by a man <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-69012813">convicted for knowingly using a Nazi slogan</a> at a public rally.)
Musk himself clarified the situation by <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882406209187409976">posting a sequence of puns</a> containing the names of high-ranking Nazi officials, capped off with, “Bet you did nazi that coming”. This is from a man who thinks UK far-right leader Nigel Farage ought to be <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/6/musk-turns-on-uk-politician-farage-over-jailed-far-right-activist">replaced by fascist street agitator Tommy Robinson</a>.
Yet Musk escapes official rebuke because of the power bestowed on him by wealth and his proximity to the incoming US president. Almost every institution of Western capitalism has declared its eagerness to work with Trump’s team. 
Nazi sympathies were no barrier to lucrative partnerships earlier in the twentieth century, as the <a href="https://www.thehistoryreader.com/historical-figures/hitlers-american-friends-henry-ford-and-nazism/">compatriots of Henry Ford knew well</a>. The US ruling class seems to be returning to the sensibilities of those times. Reservations are being voiced in some establishment circles—but the desire to make money is trumping the idea of putting up any serious resistance to the reactionary political tide. 
This episode is a grave forewarning about what our current rulers will tolerate. Our only hope in pushing back the far-right surge is to build radical opposition against the system that created this monstrosity in the first place.

The salute that was

On 11 January, 15,000 people travelled from across Germany in at least 200 buses and more sold-out trains to protest the conference of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is polling second in the run-up to national elections next month. 
After its conference in Essen last year was met with 70,000 anti-fascist demonstrators, the AfD this year moved its meeting to the regional town of Riesa, in Saxony, where the party received 38 percent of the vote in the 2024 state elections.
Fascists lead the AfD. Its unofficial “führer”, Björn Höcke, who has been convicted for using Nazi slogans at rallies, has long won the fight for control over the party. Research last year by Bavarian Broadcasting, a media company, <a href="https://www.br.de/presse/inhalt/pressemitteilungen/afd-recherche-bundestag-mitarbeitende-rechtsextrem-100.html">found</a>
that the AfD employs more than 100 hardcore Nazis in the German parliament, including activists and organisers of street fighting groups.
The AfD dreams of a German ethnostate, to be realised through mass deportations of non-ethnic Germans. This plan to “return millions of foreigners to their homeland is no secret”, admitted AfD Brandenburg chair René Springer last year. “It is a promise.” 
Indeed, Höcke boasts of projecting a “politics of well-tempered cruelty”.
Two anti-fascist campaigns organised the blockades in Riesa under the slogan “Prevent the AfD conference!” Stand Up to Racism is a historic campaign formally supported by the Social Democrats, Greens and trade unions; Resist was formed last year to organise the blockades of the AfD conference in Essen.
An important development this year was the formation of Students Against the Right, which recently called mass student general meetings to oppose the AfD and mobilise for Riesa. Waiting for one of the dozens of buses from Berlin organised by the students, Phil Butland, a member of Socialism from Below and a contributor to the Left Berlin, told Red Flag:
“There were meetings at three Berlin universities where there were 4,000 at them [in total]. They were just student union meetings, but they were the biggest student union meetings in years.” 
Similar meetings across the country attracted thousands more.
“Most, if not all, also passed a motion on Palestine at the same meeting”, Butland said. “I think people were mainly there for the AfD thing, but it shows how much things have shifted at German universities that people who weren’t there for Palestine voted for a pro-Palestine motion.”
Once its fleet of buses arrived, the Berlin “finger” was stopped by the police for over an hour. As dawn broke, it finally began its march toward Riesa. A young, first-time protester told Red Flag that he knew he had to go when he saw the blockades advertised: “[The AfD] stand against everything that I stand for ... I’m scared of fascists, and even more scared of fascists that are successful with what they do”.
Amid economic stagnation, politics in Germany—and across Europe—has shifted sharply to the right. Racism has been used to paint refugees and immigrants, rather than bosses and landlords, as responsible for rising unemployment and rents.
It is not just the far right that is fuelling this shift. In 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz argued for Germany to “finally deport on a mass scale”, and since his ruling coalition collapsed, all major parties apart from the crisis-ridden left-wing Die Linke (The Left) have begun a racist election campaign of which the AfD could be the primary beneficiaries. Prioritising campaigning for February’s snap election, however, Die Linke had a notably small presence in Riesa.
On the other hand, the trade unions were very visible. Germany’s second-largest union, ver.di, refunded half the cost of its members’ bus tickets and publicly promoted the blockades. There was even a small group called Tesla Auto Workers Against Fascism. 
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promoting the AfD, but while he shared a livestream from inside the conference hall to his X account, outside, the Tesla workers who generate his wealth staffed the barricades.
After a couple of hours, sub-zero temperatures began to wear down the blockaders, but photos of a near-completely empty conference hall generated a triumphant mood. Unfortunately, this did not last long. Blockaders were cleared by police, who attacked with truncheons, pepper spray and dogs, Berlin’s Daily Newspaper <a href="https://taz.de/Protest-gegen-AfD-Parteitag/!6058447/">reported</a>. Nam Duy Nguyen, a Die Linke parliamentary observer, was beaten unconscious.
Protesters then marched through the town, carrying signs that read, “Björn Höcke is a Nazi” and “Stop the AfD-Nazis!” Red Flag spoke to Ahmed Shah, a member of Socialism from Below and a longstanding anti-fascist campaigner. “If Nazis march, and you don’t do anything, they grow”, he said. “So you have to act.”
With the fascist Freedom Party forming a government in neighbouring Austria and Donald Trump stepping into the White House, the far right is on the march. Days after its conference, the emboldened AfD distributed election flyers in the form of deportation tickets. 
The blockades in Riesa were important, but more actions will be needed.

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