The basic problem is that a lack of demand is not the constraining factor in American manufacturing; it’s the workforce. The number of workers who are able and willing to work on a factory floor is shrinking. Almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the U.S.’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire U.S. ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
It’s clear that the left and the labor and social movements are in a very precarious state today, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us…
It is not just the number of immigration detentions and deportations that is alarming migrant communities across the country; it is also the gestapo tactics used by the badge-less thugs who refuse to identify themselves as they beat and kidnap their targets.
Job openings are down, and employment growth is confined to a small number of sectors. The average of about 130,000 jobs added per month in the first half of a year is the weakest since 2010, when the U.S. was beginning its long ascent from the depths of the Great Recession.
There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics that don’t require the type of political commitment or mobilization that a true social movement entails.
Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since… Who knows?
Much of it hidden behind opaque appropriations and congressional loopholes!
In a very short time—and due largely to the grassroots “Tesla takedown” protests that started in February—Musk became a major political liability to Trump. Musk’s “chainsawing” of the federal workforce and essential services, along with his embrace of far-right politics, transformed him into one of the most hated figures in global politics. Even Trump knew it was time to cut him loose.
Millions of people joined in the protests on June 14th in defiance of Trump’s latest authoritarian power grab, with the largest drawing up to 100,000 demonstrators. A sea of people—most carrying handmade signs—swarmed downtowns in major cities. Many described their opposition to mass deportations as a key motivation to take part.
From a Marxist perspective CECOT is a behemoth of state power used by the ruling class to protect ruling class interests. Migrants, often fleeing persecution or poverty caused or exasperated by global capitalism, are considered surplus labor. Rather than being integrated into the U.S. economy or granted basic rights, they are criminalized and cast as a threat to national security and economic stability.
At the end of the day, the bill represents the entirety of the Trump/Republican domestic policy agenda. And even though the senate may tinker around on the edges of it, it will pass the Congress largely intact. In the senate, where the GOP holds a 53-47 majority, three Republicans can vote against it and it will still pass with Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote.
Any genuine resistance to the Trump agenda is to be welcomed and built on. But we also must “tell no lies” and “claim no easy victories,” as the Bissau Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral put it in the 1960s. The state of the opposition to Trump is weak now.
Trump, and Biden before him, have used charges of “antisemitism” against all pro-Palestinian protesters to justify violently cracking down and expelling students who had taken part in opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Trump has ratcheted up punishment to detention and deportation, using the Cold War era “Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952″—which allows the State Department to deport non-citizens who it deems pose a threat to “U.S. foreign policy.” This was a key tool used in the persecution and deportation of communists during the McCarthy era, which for good reason has been likened to the witch hunt against pro-Palestine activists today.
In the early days of the Trump administration when most establishment Democrats were treating Trump as a political colossus and telling their supporters that they couldn’t do much to stop him, the Sanders/AOC road show helped rank-and-file members of the liberal side of U.S. politics to break from feelings of isolation and despair. But Sanders and AOC are engaged in a project that the Rev. Jesse Jackson used to call “keeping hope alive” in the Democratic Party…
