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

US President Donald Trump has declared his intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump outlined his genocidal vision during a grotesque press conference, standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has overseen the massacre of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, and who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes.
Trump justified his calls for the annihilation of the Palestinian people from their homeland by describing the complete devastation that has been wrought on Gaza—devastation caused by the man grinning next to him, and by the US itself which has supplied Israel with the weaponry to destroy Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools and all other civilian infrastructure.
As if ethnic cleansing wasn’t bad enough, Trump added his own billionaire-parasite twist, declaring that the US would “own” Gaza, and that he would turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put it succinctly: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago”. 
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has kept his knee bent before the hard-right US president by refusing to condemn these open calls for genocide. Albanese said he “would not give a daily commentary on statements by the US President”. Even spineless world leaders who have been lining up to kiss Trump’s arse, like the UK’s Keir Starmer, have at least verbally rebuked his calls for ethnic cleansing. Not so Albanese, who is setting new standards for pathetic capitulation to the far right. 
Trump’s open support for the total removal of Palestinians from Gaza puts much of the political and media establishment in Australia and around the world in a bit of a quandary. They continued to support Israel through sixteen months of its genocide in Gaza, no matter how many children were massacred. They have dehumanised the Palestinian people and engaged in an escalating campaign of slandering, sacking and repressing those who speak up for the Palestinians, from journalists and academics to students and protest organisers. But most of this has happened under the official pretence that Israel was “defending itself”, accompanied by weasel words from former US President Joe Biden and Albanese pretending that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, and a compliant media who presented this fairytale as though it were real. Netanyahu knows this game well; he knows that to get away with genocide it’s best to deny that is what you’re doing.
Trump has shattered that pretence. He has said out loud what has been Israel and the US’s policy all along, obvious to anyone who wanted to see, yet officially denied: wiping out the Palestinian people. That’s what the last sixteen months have been about, and the US and Australia have provided the arms to do it.
The media’s reaction has been mixed, reflecting this quandary of how to deal with a US president who makes it harder to justify the rotten system we live in. Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph ran an opinion piece titled “Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?”. Pondering about whether genocide equals peace was a bridge too far for most, though, who have instead tried to reassure us that Trump’s statements are “outlandish” and unrealisable. 
But the genocide in Gaza is not outlandish. It has been happening. And Trump’s statements have effectively ripped up the ceasefire deal and given Netanyahu the green light to resume the slaughter in coming months. They must be stopped.

Josh Lees

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

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 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. 
--------------------
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

Donald Trump and his far-right coterie have assumed the reins of the US government. 
But, arguably, the returning president’s most significant victory is that his far-right sensibilities seemingly have become an accepted part of the political furniture: hyper-nationalism, mass deportations, dramatic increases in fossil fuel exploitation, a war on women’s autonomy and transfers of wealth from workers to the already wealthy through tax cuts for billionaires and their companies. 
The New York tycoon wrote in his 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal that attention “creates value”. The adage has proven transferable. Politically, Trump generates outrage cycles to his advantage. Whatever the issue, at the end of the day—and often for weeks—Trump manages to get everyone talking about precisely what he wants talked about, thereby setting the tone and shaping the political narrative. 
Through his attention-seeking, and unlike anyone this century, he has shifted political consciousness to the right—at least in terms of redefining what tens of millions of people consider to be “acceptable” in a leader: narcissism, punching down at almost every opportunity, reheating canards previously the property of fringe fascism, finding scapegoats for every failure while claiming credit for other people’s efforts.
Yet the tectonic plates of global politics and economics are moving under the pressure of forces far greater than those generated by one obnoxious New York billionaire carrying out what some consider to be a hostile takeover of the US government.
Well before Trump arrived on the political scene, the capitalist class in the US and around the world had concentrated obscene amounts of wealth in its hands. Traditional “centre-left” and “centre-right” ruling parties’ public support had eroded. And the 21st century’s two great powers, China and the US, were marching towards confrontation. 
So Trump is perhaps better understood not simply as an individual but as the personification of four converging forces: his own vanity and self-absorption, an arrogant and exploitative US capitalist class, the resurgent and ultra-nationalist far right and a wounded yet increasingly paranoid and aggressive US imperialism.
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward”, Trump wrote in 1987. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
This quintessentially capitalist bullishness is one reason that Trump easily slots in at the apex of US power. But his vulgarity, brashness and scepticism of science are the perfect expressions of a world no longer capable of concealing the naked self-interest and a “might makes right” calculus of politics and geopolitics.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t bother with bromides about defending “freedom” or “democracy” abroad, which have been cornerstone talking points in US foreign policy for decades. Anti-China rhetoric had already retreated from philosophical and political “values” to legalistic appeals to “rules” and “order” in international commerce. 
However, with Trump, it’s just about winning or losing; the only rationale for winning being that doing anything else makes one a loser. Here, the “new” nationalism aligns with real imperial anxieties that question whether the US has what it takes to defeat China economically and militarily.
It would be easy to scoff at an incoming president who muses about turning Canada into a US state and refuses to rule out militarily annexing Greenland. Yet, despite their seeming outlandishness, such wild threats signal to Trump’s supporters and foes that “Make America Great Again” nationalism is a project for America’s international supremacy. Like the last, the new administration is attempting an economic reordering to fortify the foundations of a war economy. 
Politically, he and his team are also trying to create a populace that is more accepting of the indecencies and callousness required to prevail in a major conflict.
No-one is scoffing at Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Yet, while the immediate targets are millions of undocumented migrants, the spectacle of it all will matter just as much. The goal, already partly achieved according to opinion polls, is to normalise the idea that some people ought to have fewer rights than others and to win support for persecuting non-citizens. 
Should people learn to live in such an atmosphere and with abuses directed against their neighbours and workmates, the right-wing hope is that they will become inoculated against impulses to oppose the abuses resulting from a struggle for supremacy against a foreign country.
The war against women’s right to abortion and the campaign against trans people no doubt are led as much by “traditional” conservatives as by the new far right. Yet, similar to the deportation agenda, there is another goal. In this case, it’s reinforcing an “unfree” orthodoxy: subordination to a purportedly natural hierarchy and order. 
In fact, pick any agenda item of the new government—be it “drill, baby, drill”, the veneration of wealth accumulation, the war on “woke”, the return of machismo and so on. Whether new or aggressively recycled, each should be understood as part of an integrated agenda: increasing business profitability and prestige, reversing previous social, cultural and political advances, and bolstering US global supremacy.
The more this agenda is established, and the fewer freedoms oppressed people enjoy, the greater the disempowerment of the working class and the more likely it will drift with, or even embrace, the reactionary political winds.
The key question in the US over the next four years is whether enough people march against the storm.

Trump’s new era of reaction

Los Angeles is an icon of global capitalism. Home to 18 million people and some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world, this sprawling city is a mecca of production and exchange. As the seat of the American entertainment industry, it is unsurpassed in its cultural influence. 
Yet for more than a week now, large parts of the City of Dreams have been transformed by out-of-control wildfires into a nightmarish inferno. That predictable and preventable fires have overwhelmed the second largest city in the United States is an indictment of the system that Los Angeles has come to symbolise.
The worst of the many fires burning around the city is the Palisades fire, which has so far consumed nearly 24,000 acres [9,700 ha], including most of the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood with a population of more than 23,000. The Eaton fire has consumed almost 15,000 acres, including much of the neighbourhood of Altadena. In total, fires have burned through approximately 40,000 acres in the Los Angeles area—an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. One Pacific Palisades resident who was forced to evacuate and witness the fires consume her neighbourhood <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ag/podcast/la-fires-it-was-like-watching-the-end-of-the-world/id1715473158?i=1000683863231">told</a>
the BBC, “It was like watching the end of the world”.
More than 170,000 people living near the Palisades and Eaton fires currently remain under evacuation orders or warnings. Many have been forced to make the heartbreaking decision to flee their homes as embers surrounded them, with some becoming trapped in their vehicles. Twenty-seven deaths have been confirmed, but many more victims are likely to be discovered among the smouldering ruins. What’s more, many millions have been exposed to the toxic smoke, which blankets the city, with health consequences that will be felt for years to come.
Images and videos shared widely on social media show whole neighbourhoods and city blocks burned to the ground. Tens of thousands of people are now returning to the burned-out ruins of what was once home to their entire lives. One Altadena <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000009916693/los-angeles-residents-burnt-homes-fires-.html">resident</a>
told the New York Times, “The flames have consumed all our dreams of years here. Everything has turned to ashes”.
This unfolding catastrophe is not merely a “natural” disaster. It has been driven in large part by the irrationalism of an economic and political system that subordinates all social needs to the logic of profits and capital accumulation. The wildfires illustrate the inability of capitalism to plan properly for and deal with the realities of the environment on which it depends: from climate change to urban planning to basic fire and water management.
Climate change—driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels that are integral to the global capitalist system—intensified the inferno. LA already has a uniquely fire-prone geography, with powerful winds that fuel wildfires flowing out of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah toward the southern California coast. These Santa Ana winds push dry desert air over the mountains and accelerate as they blow into canyons and valleys. Los Angeles County and much of southern California have been in climate change-induced drought conditions, having recorded no significant rainfall for eight months. Longer dry seasons in southern California have not only aggravated the fire danger but also reduced available water supplies and complicated efforts to develop countermeasures. One recent study found that human-caused climate change resulted in a 320 percent increase in burned areas in California from 1996 to 2021. 
Capitalist urban development has transformed LA’s unique geography into the wildfire capital of the world. In his seminal essay <a href="https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/">“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”</a>, American Marxist Mike Davis argued that the wealthy, and the political establishment that serves them, are to blame for these increasingly disastrous fires.
In what can only be described as the opposite of rational urban planning, property developers and wealthy homeowners have fought for their “right” to expand into the scenic but fire-prone foothills of Los Angeles, along the coastlines of Malibu, with the expectation that the government will protect their investments. The southern Californian fire policy of “total fire suppression”, intended to protect these houses, in fact means that there is more fuel to burn when fires do start, which they inevitably do. “At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea”, writes Davis. “A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.” The current wildfires are the latest episode in what Davis calls fire “holocausts” that regularly (and, with climate change, more frequently) wipe out whole sections of LA.
In the aftermath of each fire, government resources have been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, while fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements received comparatively little support or attention. “Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills?”, asks Davis. “Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed ... Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’” 
Local firefighting resources have been completely overwhelmed by the current inferno, handicapped by insufficient numbers and a lack of water pressure caused by high demand in fire hydrants. Firefighters have been mobilised from neighbouring states like Nevada, Oregon and Washington, as well as Mexico, to support local resources that have been depleted. An estimated one-third of those deployed to fight the inferno are hyper-exploited prison inmates who are paid as little as 16 to 74 cents per hour. As one inmate told Al Jazeera: “Sending us to fight fires was abusive. We preferred it to staying in prison”.
Adding to the problem are recent budget cuts for firefighting services imposed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Last summer, Bass cut funding for the fire department by US$17.6 million, leaked documents revealing that Bass recently proposed an additional US$49 million in budget cuts. In December, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley prophetically <a href="https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-widlfires-budget-cuts-palisades-fire/3598438/">warned</a>
that “the [budget] reduction ... has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires”. Whether $17.6 million extra would have made a tangible difference to the outcome of these fires is difficult to determine, but it indicates a governmental complacency about the threat that defies science and logic. 
Class inequalities also affected how fire resources were and are used, with the wealthy using scarce resources to protect their assets without regard for the wider firefighting effort. Meanwhile, LA’s poorer communities have been left defenceless against the fires, with many of the dead older and disabled people who were not able to leave their homes.
None but the wealthiest will be able to recover fully from the damages and displacement caused by the fires. Many will be added to the growing number of homeless, who numbered more than 75,000 last year in Los Angeles County. The problem is compounded by insurance companies’ decisions to cancel hundreds of homeowners’ policies in Pacific Palisades last summer. State Farm, one of the biggest in California and the US, cited the area as high-risk and unprofitable due to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires brought on by climate change. 
Toxic smoke from the fires now blankets the entire region, exposing the 18 million people who live in the LA metropolitan area to the effects of inhaling carcinogenic particles. And it will be the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer the worst effects, such as the tens of thousands of homeless people with no protection from the hazardous air as well as the many workers who can’t afford to stay home to avoid the smoke. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable. Carlos Gould, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego, told the New York Times that the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/climate/wildfire-smoke-risks.html">levels of wildfire smoke</a> in LA could be raising daily mortality by 5 to 15 percent. 
Meanwhile, US media coverage of the fires has tended to avoid mentioning climate change as a factor in the disaster, at the same time as it repeats right-wing conspiracy theories peddled by President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters as they seek to capitalise on the crisis. These include the claim that diversity, equity and inclusiveness programs are behind the shortage of firefighters and that environmental protection programs are the root cause of the water shortages. In doing so, they deliberately divert attention from those responsible for this catastrophe: the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, property developers and wealthy homeowners that have transformed LA into a giant tinder box and the entire political establishment, which supports the rich whilst cutting the essential public services needed to manage and prevent such tragedies. Not surprising, given their policy of “drill, baby, drill” to increase domestic fossil fuel production. 
The LA wildfires have global implications. Capitalist-fuelled climate change is driving more intense and frequent extreme weather across the world that will result in increasingly devastating disasters such as the one unfolding in LA. This is particularly true for countries like Australia, with a climate conducive to bushfires and urban centres vastly under-resourced to deal with the threat. As urban development <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fastest-population-growth-in-the-wests-wildland-urban-interface-is-in-areas-most-vulnerable-to-wildfires-173410">expands into </a>wild lands, the probability of fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk. 
It is not enough to say that climate change needs to be reversed. Even with drastic action now, the majority of the planet will still be living with the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. In the absence of planning and rational decision making, crises like the LA wildfires are going to become increasingly worse and more normalised.
Only a democratic and rationally planned society is capable of dealing with the threat posed by climate change and the social catastrophes that it will produce. Decisions should be made by the many millions who produce the wealth of society but don’t control it and therefore can’t use it to protect themselves from the worst effects of climate crisis. They are the same people who could reorganise wealth production to make it sustainable and geared towards meeting need, not simply accumulating wealth for the sake of it. 
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to 53 billionaires, whose combined wealth totals US$222 billion. The US$222 billion held by Los Angeles billionaires could cover the estimated US$150 billion in damage caused by the fires and provide immediate relief to those affected. 
A democratically and rationally planned society run by the working class could immediately abolish the fossil-fuel industry and direct resources toward building renewable energy and reversing the effects of climate change. Urban development could be rationally planned rather than subject to the whims of the wealthy without regard for the realities of the natural world. And rather than cutting and chronically underfunding essential public resources like firefighters, a society run by the working class would allocate the resources needed to prevent and respond to the threat of wildfires and other climate change-induced catastrophes.
Unless we fight for socialism—a democratic and rationally planned society run by the working class based on genuine human needs—the Los Angeles wildfires provide a window into our terrifying future.

Robert Narai

LA wildfires show the future of capitalism

US President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed trade war, his proposals to increase military spending and the stacking of his cabinet with China hawks have made it clear that the US will continue preparing for war with China. Australia’s military alliance with the United States means that Canberra has practically signed up the country for such a war if it breaks out.
For the Australian political establishment, Trump’s election victory was an opportunity to express unwavering commitment to the US alliance. PM Anthony Albanese was one of the first world leaders to phone Trump and congratulate him on his election victory. Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who considers himself an Australian version of Trump, said the relationship with the US “will strengthen, and we will make sure that we work very closely with the incoming administration”.
The US alliance—and new agreements such as the AUKUS military pact between Australia, the US and the United Kingdom—have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/24/us-military-base-australia-china/">transformed</a>
Australia into a central <a href="https://youtu.be/a3HhPU9DGsQ?si=msq1o2NhLzPADK3x">base of operations</a>
for the <a href="https://youtu.be/CW1TYDVBSmI?si=iKjpIQ1cbsoksrgA">US military</a>
in recent years. 
Northern Australia is now routinely used by the US Marines and Air Force. The Tindal air base near Darwin has been expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. The construction of giant fuel storage tanks on Darwin’s RAAF base means that both now act as a stationing and refuelling point for US aircraft, enabling the US to conduct more flights to and from the NT.
Western Australia will soon host <a href="https://www.defence.gov.au/about/locations-property/infrastructure-projects/submarine-rotational-force-west-infrastructure-project#:~:text=Overview,West%20(SRF-West).">rotational deployments</a> of US nuclear submarines and a <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-10-16/new-defence-precinct-henderson-deliver-continuous-naval-shipbuilding-and-nuclear-powered-submarine-maintenance">naval industry</a> that WA Premier Roger Cook claims will rival the state’s massive resources sector.
The joint US-Australian “<a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/is-gweo-on-target/">guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise</a>” aims to transform Australia’s weapons manufacturing industry to produce large enough quantities of precision-guided missiles to support deployed US forces across the Indo-Pacific. Spy and communications bases—such as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/pine-gap-australias-secret-and-deadly">Pine Gap</a> satellite surveillance facility near Alice Springs, which covers the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East—are vital elements of US strategic command, control, communications and satellite systems for launching attacks against China. Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles recently bragged that the US military is now operating in Australia across “all domains ... land, sea, air, cyber and space”.
What explains this slavish support for the US alliance—shared by Australia’s main political parties, the security establishment, business elites and mass media—no matter who occupies the White House?
The answer given by the political establishment is that the alliance protects the Australian population and deters threats from “our enemies”. Chief among these threats, we are told, is China. Yet the Australian government’s own strategic planning documents admit that an invasion of this island continent, by China or anyone else, remains a remote possibility. The risk of a Chinese attack on Australia arises only because Australia serves as a base for US military capabilities and because Australia’s own defence forces have pledged their commitment to joining a US war against China in the Indo-Pacific. 
Most critics of AUKUS and the US alliance answer that Australia is a puppet of the United States: our leaders are nothing but spineless dupes grovelling at the feet of US presidents. Proponents of this view—from the <a href="https://greens.org.au/platform/world">Greens</a> to former Labor PM <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-keating-aukus-australia-us-alliance/">Paul Keating</a>—argue that Australia should pursue a foreign policy that is “more independent” from the United States.
But the Australian state jumps at the opportunity to stir imperialist tensions more often than not. This can be seen in it joining or supporting every US war since World War Two with little to no prompting.
The Australian political establishment backs the US not because it is too weak to resist US bullying but because the alliance enhances the power of the Australian ruling class and increases its capacity to dominate the Pacific region.
Australia is an imperialist power in its own right, with the thirteenth-largest economy in the world and the strongest military in South-East Asia. However, as a middle-ranking power, it has always relied on a “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6557">great and powerful friend</a>” to help safeguard its regional interests, first through an alliance with Britain and since the Second World War with the United States.
Chief among those interests is the security of the sea approaches to the island continent: Australian capitalism is dependent on international shipping to buy and sell commodities in Asian markets, to import oil from the Middle East and to access deliveries of weapons, machinery and equipment from the United States. Only the US Navy can control the wide arc of maritime territory from the Indian Ocean off north-western Australia to the South Pacific. 
In addition, Australian capitalists have long regarded the country’s neighbours—in particular Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Pacific island states—as Australia’s “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7150">backyard</a>”, with Australian companies dominating their economies.
Australia also lacks the industrial base to field a modern military without the support of a larger ally. Without the backing of the US, Australia would need to triple or quadruple its military spending. Instead, through AUKUS and the US alliance, the Australian capitalist class can piggyback on the US military. And this allows Australia to access the latest US military technology—not just nuclear submarines, but advanced jet aircraft, missiles, naval combat systems and more. 
This is why the US alliance remains an article of faith for both ALP and Liberal governments. Any party that is serious about governing Australian capitalism must sign up to the alliance—the alternative is to face destabilisation by the capitalists and the military top brass.
Australia’s dependence on its “great and powerful friend” means that the ruling class goes out of its way to keep its “friend” firmly anchored in the Indo-Pacific. This helps thwart the emergence of a rival imperial power or nationalist forces that might obstruct the country’s sea lanes or disrupt its investments. One example is the Menzies government aggressively lobbying the Johnson administration in 1964 to commit more US troops to the Vietnam War. 
The AUKUS agreement fits within this general orientation: it is an aggressive alliance designed to maintain US imperialist domination of the Indo-Pacific region. But it also strengthens the power of the Australian state as a junior partner of US imperialism. Rory Medcalf, the head of ANU’s National Security College and a leading China hawk, has <a href="https://nsc.anu.edu.au/content-centre/article/opinion/australian-way-war-and-peace">hailed</a>
AUKUS as Australian imperialism’s “coming of age as a truly Indo-Pacific power”.
The price paid for US military protection is that Australia contributes to almost all US wars and occupations. From Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s to staking itself as China’s most aggressive antagonist in the region today, the Australian government embraces these opportunities to remind the US of Australia’s value to its broader imperial project. 
China is indeed challenging US domination of Asia and hence Australia’s own imperialist project, which is closely identified with the US. China’s growing ambitions threaten Australia’s informal empire in PNG, East Timor and the Pacific island states, as well as its trade routes and, potentially, its influence in Indonesia, a critical power to Australia’s north.
China’s state capitalist model of economic development is also viewed as a threat to the US-dominated liberal economic order that Australian capitalists have greatly benefited from.
Trump’s first administration was an <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-trump-presidency-us-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-neoliberal-order/">aggressive</a>
response to the rise of China (although he only generalised what Barack Obama before him acknowledged with his “<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia/index.html">pivot to Asia</a>”). His program to “Make America Great Again” used tariffs and increased military spending to increase US military-industrial might. Nonetheless, by alienating US allies and destabilising American politics, the Trump administration created opportunities for China to expand its influence, thereby undermining America’s ability to contain its new imperialist rival. 
Rather than mark a break with Trump, the <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/bidens-plan-for-the-us-empire/">Biden administration</a> continued and intensified the China pivot, continuing the focus on rebuilding domestic manufacturing capability and infrastructure alongside an <a href="https://pacforum.org/publications/pacnet-85-countering-complaints-about-bidens-china-strategy-lessons-from-the-us-asia-first-policy/">escalation</a>
of military pressure in the South China Sea and Taiwan. 
Where Biden did depart from Trump was in his multilateral approach to building <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">alliances</a>
and his ability to sell war as peace. Indeed, Biden and Albanese (the so-called “progressive” wing of the establishment) have overseen the biggest destabilisation of the Indo-Pacific region and acceleration toward war with China of any recent governments: they have carried out Trump’s program with gusto.
Trump has made it clear that his main priority during his second presidency will be great power <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">confrontation</a>
with China. This includes a proposed 60 percent tariff on imports from China and a promise to raise the military budget from 3 percent to 5 percent of GDP (US$1.5 trillion) annually. His appointment of aggressive <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-nsc-china-hawks">China hawks</a>
to key positions in his new administration fits with this general strategy. <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3286448/what-does-trumps-pick-pentagon-chief-mean-us-china-military-ties">Peter Hegseth</a>, the proposed defence secretary responsible for the Pentagon, recently bemoaned: “China has a full spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination and we have our heads up our arses”.
Contrary to what much of the liberal commentariat says about him, Trump is not an isolationist, nor does he propose a withdrawal of US global power. Trump is an economic nationalist who sets out to make deals with both friends and foes alike; unlike liberals such as Biden, he does not hide the fact that it must be to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. It is this transactional nationalism that leads Trump to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or withdraw from them completely. In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, Trump prefers bilateral deals with US allies. 
While Trump’s strategy is to restore US imperial dominance, it will most likely, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. This means other imperial powers as well as regional ones becoming more assertive, which will intensify conflicts between states over a failing capitalist system.
What this means for AUKUS and the US alliance is unclear. Trump’s demand that US allies “pay their own way” already fits with a general consensus among Australian ruling circles that they must do more to <a href="https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/australias-defence-strategic-review-forging-partnerships-and-self-reliance/">increase</a>
their self-reliance as part of the US alliance. The AUKUS pact is a prime example of a junior partner that “pays its own way”.
What is clear is that the Australian political establishment is frantically preparing to use the second Trump presidency to further enhance the power of Australian imperialism. Their main orientation so far has been to accept Trump’s argument that US allies must do more to foot their own defence bills. For example, John Blaxland, former head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies, recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/the-prospect-of-australias-defence-being-dependent-on-the-whim-of-donald-trump-points-to-a-need-to-muscle-up-on-our-own">argued</a>:
“The prospect of Australia’s defence being dependent on a presidential whim points to the need for Australia to muscle up on its own, including with as much US-sourced technology as can be accessed, without waiting for another white knight or great white fleet to come to the rescue.” 
In other words, Canberra must prepare to further increase military spending (probably funded by cuts to working-class living standards) and pick up the slack among US allies in preparation for the diplomatic dysfunction that is likely to emanate from Washington under a second Trump presidency.
For the Australian ruling class, the lie that the US alliance is about protecting the Australian population helps legitimise increased military spending and the drive to war. AUKUS and the US alliance have been much easier to sell to (and hide from) the Australian public with Biden and not Trump leading in Washington. Under Trump, larger numbers of people might see the alliance for what it really is: boosting Australian imperial power to protect US domination of the region.

Trump, AUKUS and the US alliance

Joe Allen is a Chicago-based socialist, former Teamster and author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. In this piece, <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/">first published at his blog</a>, Joe critically evaluates the Teamsters union’s recent strike at Amazon warehouses in the United States. 
--------------------
The Teamsters’ five-day strike against Amazon ended inconclusively, but the union hinted at future actions with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/26/business/amazon-strike-teamsters-warning/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Stay tuned”</a>. Beginning on 19 December, the Teamsters called strikes in response to the failure of Amazon to meet the union’s demand to come to the bargaining table four days earlier. The Teamsters <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/12/teamsters-launch-largest-strike-against-amazon-in-american-history/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">declared</a> that it was “the largest strike in Amazon’s history”. The union’s General President Sean O’Brien said in an official statement:
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it. These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”
The Teamsters called for strike action at eight locations across four states, including Amazon centres in Queens and Staten Island, New York, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and Skokie, Ill. They claim to represent the drivers or the warehouse workers through elections or card checks.
The Teamsters sent Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) pickets to scores of Amazon locations across the country, mostly made up of local officials and union stewards with little or no connection to Amazon. The union has not publicly stated how many locations were picketed or what the results were. The Teamsters also called upon community supporters to join the picket lines across the country.
On one level, the Teamsters’ actions were a bold move, but their sparse presence, possibly representing one percent of the company’s entire US workforce, has raised some serious questions. Among them are whether there was any tangible goal beyond the Teamsters maintaining their franchise at Amazon, and left hanging what the next steps, if any, were in the organising campaign.
When I spoke to long-time labour lawyer and negotiator Joe Burns, the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Joe-Burns/author/B004B3WZU0?ref=ap_rdr&amp;isDramIntegrated=true&amp;shoppingPortalEnabled=true&amp;ccs_id=faa8abf9-f80c-46e1-8794-2a1bc15bb88f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">author</a> of many important books on strike strategy, about the Teamsters’ actions at Amazon and what his thoughts on it were. He told me:
“While it is hard to tell due to the lack of credible reporting. These ‘strikes’ seem very similar to the approaches in fast food, rideshare and at <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/our-walmart-union-ufcw-black-friday" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Walmart</a> over the last decade or so, where the union would put out press releases claiming a giant corporation had been struck. This would gather publicity and generate some excitement on the left but it did not impact production or even draw out more than a tiny fraction of the workplace.
“The actions are really more informational picketing with a media spin of a strike tacked on to it. The problem is we have over a decade of experience showing such efforts don’t really work. They gather press and at times can help liberal groups or unions pass labour legislation, but have shown little in the way of furthering permanent union organising.”
It’s hard not to agree with Burns’ assessment. But then why are the Teamsters recycling a failed strategy? Or is there something bigger and better coming down the road?
An existential threat
In 2021, at the thirtieth convention of the Teamsters, delegates overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions to combat what then-General President James P. Hoffa called the “existential threat” that Amazon posed to the union. “The Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon”, which is worth quoting at length, declared:
“Amazon is changing the nature of work in our country and touches many core 
Teamster industries and employers such as UPS, parcel delivery, freight, airline, food distribution and motion picture, and presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries;”
Leaning on its own history, it said:
“Whereas, Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before a meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;”
And it concluded:
“Finally, be it resolved, that building worker power at Amazon and helping those workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union and the Union commits to fully fund and support the Amazon Project, to supply all resources necessary and to ultimately create a special Amazon Division to aid Amazon workers and defend and protect the standards in our industries from the existential threat that is Amazon.”
An <a href="https://teamster.org/divisions/amazon-division/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon division</a> of the Teamsters was created and California Teamster leader Randy Korgan was appointed as its first director by Hoffa, and then reappointed by his successor Sean O’Brien. So, it’s remarkable given that Amazon, which was declared an existential threat three and a half years ago—and probably a decade late at that point—how little the Teamsters have actually done.
The biggest initial breakthrough was accomplished by the independent and financially threadbare Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which made international news and made ALU leader Chris Smalls into a celebrity. Despite an initial burst of interest in the ALU from Amazon workers across the country, it couldn’t reproduce its success at JFK8 elsewhere and soon went into crisis.
Meanwhile, small groups of Amazon workers began to form organising committees in other facilities but faced Amazon’s notorious <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/amazon-trader-joes-starbucks-anti-union-measures" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">union-busting operation</a>. However, faced with the prospect of its victory in Staten Island dying through attrition, the ALU negotiated a merger with the Teamsters as an autonomous unit. I took no position on whether they should join the Teamsters, but cautioned that it wasn’t a silver bullet solution to their challenges. I <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/14/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>:
“Some ALU reformers and supporters argue that for the ALU to succeed at Amazon it needs a big gun to back it up. While you can understand the allure of being affiliated to a larger union after a series of defeats, is this a solution to the existential crisis of ALU? Even recent history at Amazon doesn’t suggest this is a silver bullet solution. Way back in April 2021, when the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), affiliated with the mammoth UFCW, lost two to one in a union election at Amazon in <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2021/04/defeat-in-bessemer/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bessemer, Alabama</a>, despite having a successful record of organizing in the South.”
Now that the big gun has been fired, what were the results?
The big strike?
“Understanding these strikes is made difficult because labor left reporting, including outlets like Labor Notes and Jacobin, does not cover key questions such as level of worker participation in these strikes, which should be a key aspect of labor reporting. However, from accounts online, mainstream sources such as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/amazon-warehouse-staten-island-strike.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a>, it appears that participation is very low in these strikes”, Joe Burns wrote to me. 
“For example, at the main Staten Island facility of thousands of workers, the New York Times estimated 100 workers. Other accounts have been a very small percentage of the workplace and mainly outside Teamster officials or supporters picketing. I have not heard of any facility that had a large percentage of Amazon workers on strike. Good independent labor reporting would zero in on such questions and not merely parrot the official union press releases.”
While the Teamsters made an effort in the major media markets to have a larger number of people protesting at some of Amazon’s facilities, outside of those areas, the lack of Amazon workers on the picket lines was more glaring. I asked several rank-and-file Teamsters and union activists who visited the Amazon picket lines for their observations. Most asked to be quoted anonymously or by a pseudonym. Kat from Florida, who is active with <a href="https://teamstersmobilize.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamsters Mobilize</a>, reported:
“It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process. In the three hours I was there, we let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket. Even short of blocking the road, there were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that; they clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in. Except for myself, the few other workers who showed up basically followed this lead.”
Yet, Kat also reported:
“At one point, a woman who worked inside the warehouse we were stationed at pulled over and was very excited to hear what was happening and to learn whether there were any ongoing efforts to organize her building. Me and the other rank-and-file members were the only ones who spoke with her, which seemed like a huge missed opportunity.”
Alyx reported from Salem, Oregon, on Friday 20 December:
“There were two Teamsters retirees from Local 324 holding the line. From what they said, most shifts were being covered by retirees from their local and another. I don’t know how many current Amazon workers participated. From what I saw, this location didn’t seem to have much impact. The facility is fairly remote, so not a lot of public visibility. The picket spot was set closer to the entrance than the main street, so only drivers and warehouse workers saw us. Since turnout was low, picketers weren’t able to impact access.”
Joe from Southern California wrote to me after visiting the City of Industry picket line. His experiences were more positive, though the number of Amazon workers involved was still small. He wrote:
“Where I was at, I’d say around 45–50 Amazon drivers on the picket line. Some of the striking Amazon workers were well versed on how to talk to their Amazon driving coworkers. I did not see any cards getting signed. The local Teamster union played both a primary and secondary role. Primary role in, they were active in moving striking Amazon workers to the other locations of the picket lines. Some talked to leaving Direct Service Providers (DSP) drivers, but most of the talking was striking Amazon drivers to their fellow DSP Amazon driving coworkers. I have seen many of the striking Amazon workers being interviewed by various online publications, pages and social media accounts. These actions made a difference. It brought publicity to the efforts of the Amazon workers. The public is aware of their efforts. Where I’m at. It was a good start. I would say this was a structure test to really gauge where the IBT Amazon Division is at.”
Karl, a longstanding union steward in Oklahoma City, wrote me:
“We picketed 2 Amazon facilities next to each other. Approximately 20–30 workers talked with us over the course of 48 hours. This, out of a workforce of 4–6 thousand. None participated directly, though strongly indicated that they would be interested in organizing and participating in further union campaigns if the local ​union were to follow up. Many of these provided contact info and requested information on the local. The local’s role seemed to be restricted to one of an informational picket. Little effort had been expended towards contacting workers or establishing any prior inside organization with which an informational picket could reinforce. It remains to be seen whether the local ​union will squander or follow up with new contacts. I think that the actions can make a difference provided the local and international makes a concerted effort to consolidate organization in the picketed plants and follow up with escalating actions that invite increasing numbers of workers to participate.”
Despite Amazon’s insistence that there was <a href="https://www.kwtx.com/2024/12/20/amazon-teamsters-strikes-no-impact-operations-by-unions-attempt-push-false-narrative/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">no interference</a> with their operations, the Christmas actions proved to be a public relations black eye for Amazon. The largely favourable media coverage highlighted the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/newsxofficial/reel/DEC_4mnzuAe/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poverty wages</a> of drivers, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-injuries.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dangerous</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IT0Jhqr9kI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">humiliating</a> working conditions. Yet, we have been here before. No amount of public shaming has changed Amazon’s ways. With barely 1 percent, and that’s being generous, of Amazon’s workers participating in the union’s action, there is certainly a long way to go to organise a small fraction of Amazon’s workforce.
Missed opportunity
“I certainly would not want to discount the organizing and the efforts of the workers who did go on strike. Hopefully, it will spur some more activity but the history of publicity strikes is not very good. I do think a serious analysis needs to be done of levels of participation. The tendency however, is to simply declare victory and learn nothing. But I also think we need a sober analysis of what kind of labor movement it would take to organize Amazon. I do not think we can talk about organizing giant employers without talking about the structure and ideology of our labor movement. In order to truly take on these giant employers, we would need a labor movement capable of employing picket line militancy and solidarity tactics capable of mobilizing the entire labor movement against corporate giants”, Joe Burns wrote to me.
I do think the Teamsters missed an opportunity last year. The Teamsters raised expectations about last year’s UPS contract, the largest private sector contract in the country. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51p1rWkvddM" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> was expected and could have been the lever to organise a behemoth like Amazon. Yet, the contract campaign ended on a flat note. As I <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-25ee74ffb645" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> last year:
“[T]he U.S. Left ... repeated continually that we were on the eve of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4e8jI_qzro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biggest strike</a> in modern U.S. history. This, of course, did not occur leading to the frustration and<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> demoralization</a> of the hundreds of young radicals—many identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, <a href="https://www.dsausa.org/strike-ready-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DSA</a>—who went out and got jobs on some of the worst shifts at UPS to be part of this transformative campaign.”
We operate in the wake of failure of a <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> at UPS and its consequences at Amazon. We are also facing a much more difficult political environment with the incoming Trump administration that promises a full-scale assault on trade union rights, including the Teamsters, despite the union being led by Trump-ally Sean O’Brien. The political terrain can shift quickly, but it will require a clear-eyed assessment of the recent events at Amazon and the creation of new left to take advantage of them.

Workers have the power to stop Trump

Trump’s transphobia must be stopped

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

The MAGA tech oligarchy

Trump’s assault on immigrants can be resisted

The salute that was

Trump’s new era of reaction

LA wildfires show the future of capitalism

Trump, AUKUS and the US alliance

The Teamsters’ ‘strikes’ at Amazon: a critical assessment

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us