Opinion Article by Cliff Smith,
Roofers Local 36, Los Angeles USA
US president Trump’s anti-worker march to fascism will vault forward in October with two developments. Trump’s tax cut bill, giving away trillions of dollars to the capitalist class by cutting health care, food assistance and college student financial aid (while exploding the national debt), will cascade $170 billion into “immigration enforcement.” The annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, will triple. ICE staffing will multiply by 150% from 6,500 agents to 16,500.
With this increased capacity, attacks on immigrant workers, and the rights of all workers, will expand drastically. The erosion of democracy and “due process” has been contrived ostensibly through “halting the foreign invasion” of immigrant workers. Unidentified, masked kidnappers can stop your car, smash your windows, drag you out and “disappear” you, without probable cause, according to the Supreme Court.
Also on October 1, the government is facing a budget shutdown deadline as Democrats refuse to approve continued funding unless Republicans restore some healthcare spending. If the government shuts down, millions of federal workers (including ICE agents!) will be without paychecks and many services will be interrupted. Partisan hostilities will intensify as Trump will blame his opponents. This will be gasoline on the bonfire of his MAGA rule of force through terror.
Neither the Democratic Party nor the AFL-CIO union leadership have any program to defend workers or defeat fascism. Their meek maximum plans of mild protests, filing lawsuits and hoping for the next elections are increasingly rejected by masses of workers as hollow and detached. Workers are looking to fill the void with coherent analysis, organization and strategies to solve their problems. This creates significant opportunities for the expansion of militant workers’ organization for revolutionary peoples’ democracy.
Community self-defense formations are emerging in cities under threat from ICE attacks. Some local unions are taking initiative to oppose fascism and challenge opportunist and sedentary leaders like AFL-CIO president Elizabeth Shuler. In Los Angeles, movement is underway to advance the united front against fascism through labor and community organizations, and calls are being made to build a workers party. We are greatly encouraged by the examples of WFTU affiliated union struggles we see for example in Italy supporting Palestine, and in France opposing austerity.
It is essential that workers grasp the distinction between conventional bourgeois democracy, with its ever-present threats and challenges, and emergent fascism. “The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a *substitution* for one State form of class domination of the bourgeoisie — bourgeois democracy — of another form — open terrorist dictatorship.” Georgi Dimitrov wrote 90 years ago. To blur over this distinction, and to not make use of every contradiction around us, even contradictions among the enemy, is to facilitate the emergence of fascist dictatorship. But by developing concrete analysis of concrete conditions, we will isolate the fascists and illuminate to the working class its position, its interests and its path.
