The recent wave of racist attacks on immigrant and homeless workers is exposing the U.S. bosses’ drive toward liberal fascism. As the world economy shrinks (imf.org, 7/22), the international crisis of capitalism is nearing a breaking point. As the U.S. loses ground to imperialist arch-rival China, and the war in Ukraine brings tensions with Russia to a boil, U.S. rulers will be forced to ditch their mask of liberal democracy and its charade of “human rights.” They will have no choice. To protect their profits and prepare for World War III, the liberal finance capital bosses must crush their capitalist competition—the openly racist, “America First” isolationists fronted by the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. At the same time, these liberal fascists know they need to build a mass patriotic movement, even as tens of millions are denied the most basic human needs: healthcare, housing, adequate nutrition. To stop workers from rebelling as capitalist society falls down around our ears, the liberal bosses are taking a page from the Nazi playbook. They are working to divide the working class by scapegoating groups they deem expendable.
On the Texas border, liberal President Joe Biden is breaking the bosses’ own rules for asylum and leaving migrating workers and children in the cold. In New York City, liberal Mayor Eric Adams has declared that homeless people can be detained and forced into hospitals that lack enough beds or staffing, even if they pose no threat to themselves or others (npr.org, 11/30/22). Trusting the Democratic Party liberal fascists as “lesser evils” will continue to devastate the international working class. We must see these murderous misleaders for what they are, an even greater danger than Trump and the Republicans. The liberals are more deceiving and, at least for now, more powerful in wielding state terror.
Our class is in a life-and-death struggle, and we cannot be fooled: There are no good capitalists! Our only future lies in communist revolution, in a society run to meet workers’ needs.
Homeless workers: a scapegoat for a system in crisis
The most liberal city in the U.S. is also a world leader for inequality. In New York, out-of-control housing prices combined with starvation wages and a gutted public health system have driven the number of homeless people to the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s (npr.org, 5/13/22). There are 65,000 people in the city’s overcrowded, chaotic shelter system, and thousands more living on the streets (NYC Coalition for the Homeless). Racism is a core component of the homeless crisis; 89 percent of this population is Black or Latin.
Meanwhile, thousands of offices in New York sit empty. Instead of converting these spaces into homes for those without them, the bosses provoke fear of the homeless by screaming about crime and erratic behavior by people with mental illness (nyclu.org, 12/30/22). Adams is siccing his mad dog kkkops to sweep people off the streets and forcibly take them into custody. This is a “solution” driven by the needs of the real estate and tourism bosses.
There is no homeless crime wave in New York — no crime wave at all, in fact. The city’s murder rate is roughly the same as it was in 2009, a small fraction of the numbers in the 1980s (Bloomberg.com, 7/29/22). But you would never know that from listening to ex-cop Adams, or to the bosses’ media.
Migrant workers punished for capitalism’s crimes
Liberal darling Joe Biden entered the White House vowing a “fair and humane” approach to immigration that would “reassert America’s commitment to asylum seekers and refugees.” Two years later, Biden’s “decision to continue–and even expand–some of Trump’s harshest policies has left many migration and human rights advocates disappointed” (The New Humanitarian, 1/22/22). Atrocities on the U.S.-Mexican border mount by the day. In 2021, Biden’s horse-mounted Border Patrol Gestapo beat back Haitian migrants by whipping them with their reins. More recently, in border cities in Texas and Mexico, thousands of migrants have no option but to live on the streets (npr.org, 12/23/22). Biden administration officials have privately pushed to keep enforcing Title 42, an old public health law that Trump cynically used to expel workers seeking asylum without granting them a hearing (New York Times, 12/20/22).
Fascism is the liberals’ final solution
The Nazi death camps, the German fascists’ “final solution,” followed the brutal logic of capitalism in crisis. When the bosses’ profit system starts breaking down, they become desperate to keep it afloat — at any and all costs. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s driving the rise in homelessness and the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s forcing millions around the world to flee their homes in the face of war and deadly poverty. The liberal rulers can’t reform their way out of these disasters; it’s the necessities of their system that create them in the first place.
Biden and Adams are reformist stooges on the payroll of the finance capitalists, the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class. These liberal politicians use the fear of Trump to scare the working class into looking the other way as migrant workers and the homeless are terrorized. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fake-left Squad railed against Trump for ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages in Texas. Now these great progressives sit on their hands as their liberal fascist masters do the same as Trump and worse. If we let them get away with these outrages today, tomorrow they’ll be targeting the rest of our class.
Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses
The revolutions led by communists in Russia and China proved that society can be led by and for the working class. The capitalist bosses can stay in power only if the working class allows it. Of late we’ve seen promising sparks of rebellion. Tens of millions marched after the murder of George Floyd. Black and white miners in Alabama broke through the bosses’ racism to go on strike together. In Colombia, thousands rose up in a general strike against a tax reform to impoverish the working class and prop up the rulers’ failing system.
These inspirational battles and many more show the power of our class. They also reveal our main weakness. In each case, workers stopped fighting and retreated into lesser evilism. When workers stay wedded to the bosses’ rotten ideas, when they lack confidence that our clas s can run society, they are sunk by their own defeatism. When workers swallow the liberal bosses’ soft words and crocodile tears, they become complicit in genocide.
Some say that capitalism is always bad. They say that people are always being bombed or jailed or put on the streets to die, and that the world is essentially no different than it was twenty or fifty years ago. But that is a defeatist position. It’s built upon the lie that nothing ever really changes—and that, by extension, nothing can ever change. By contrast, a communist analysis of history points to moments when capitalism falls into periods of extreme crisis. When our class faces greater dangers from rising fascism. When we have a greater opportunity to advance the historic struggle for communism. Progressive Labor Party believes we have entered such a moment of reckoning. Will we drift along with the liberal fascist tide, or will we break our chains and fight for communist revolution? There is no in between. Join us!
