U.S. Donald Trump’s military assault on Washington, D.C., marks a massive escalation of state terror against Black workers and a clear sign of rapidly rising fascism on the road to world war. U.S. capitalism is in crisis. The capitalist rulers need to terrorize workers who could revolt—and especially Black workers, the revolutionary vanguard of the international working class.
The smaller domestic capitalists, those fronted by Trump, plan to use the D.C. occupation as a model for targeting Black, immigrant, and antiracist workers nationwide. For the moment, Trump’s power grabs have given his gutter racist faction the upper hand over the liberal racist Democrats, who represent the big multinational capitalists of finance capital. But make no mistake: The emerging U.S. federal police force—a hallmark of fascism, as evidenced by the Nazi regime in Germany—is a bipartisan creation, decades in the making.
No matter which brand of fascism wins out, the only force on Earth that can smash it is the organized power of a communist-led, multiracial working class. As the illusions of liberal democracy and the brute reality of capitalism get more exposed by the day, smoldering embers of resistance will flare all the more brightly. It is the task of the international Progressive Labor Party to fan those flames into worldwide revolution.
Fascism: capitalism in crisis
Behind Trump’s racist theatrics about rescuing D.C. from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” his latest move toward full-blown fascism is rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalism itself. As U.S. imperialism declines and lashes out like a wounded animal, it faces growing political isolation, most notably over the Zionist genocide in Gaza. In Ukraine, yet another defeat for the U.S. bosses seems written on the wall.
As unemployment and inflation rise, and divisions within the U.S. ruling class sharpen, rival imperialists in Russia and China are emboldened. For the U.S. capitalists, fascism is their desperate, last-ditch attempt to resolve their crisis and stave off their fall.
D.C. occupation: trial run for fascism
The thousands of National Guard troops now patrolling Washington are an advance guard to prepare the ruling class and condition the working class for fascism. The howls about “crime” in the capitalist media are so many racist dog whistles, as old as slavery. In fact, D.C. crime is at a 30-year low (U.S. Department of Justice, 1/3). Trump declared a state of emergency in the city after a former staffer with DOGE, Elon Musk’s digital shock troops, was allegedly assaulted by two unarmed 15-year-olds on August 3. From there, events moved fast.
After federalizing D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and deploying National Guard soldiers from six states, the Trump administration dropped any pretense of fighting crime and launched an indiscriminate dragnet. Black workers and youth were subjected to a wave of racist stop-and-frisks, already standard practice for DC’s kkkops (dcnewsnow.com, 9/16/24). Black workers were targeted as they sat on their stoops (The Independent, 8/13), while immigrant delivery workers were singled out for arrest by the ICE Gestapo (NBC News, 8/19).
The D.C. cops’ racist terror campaign has focused on the city’s southeastern, Black-majority wards, where stops occur on average every ten minutes (ACLU DC, 2/4). In a city where Black and white workers are roughly equal in population, police stop white workers just 13 percent of the time. It’s no coincidence that the recent invasion followed the mass firing of Black federal workers (see box). Racist policing and racist unemployment are two big parts of the bosses’ plan to marginalize, dehumanize, and scapegoat Black workers for the failings of the profit system.
Trump’s trial run for fascism isn’t limited to the U.S. capital. In June, he mobilized 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to back up ICE’s immigration raids and squash mass fightback. Now he’s planning to go national. Last week, he ordered the Pentagon to form a military “rapid reaction force” to counter protests while threatening Chicago and New York with federal occupations of their own (ABC News, 8/25).
The fascist state the liberals built
Not long after Trump unleashed his occupation, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Black Democrat, praised the president for deploying the National Guard (Washington Post, 8/28). More than Trump, it’s the liberal misleaders who deserve credit for racist police terror nationwide.
Liberal Democrats laid the foundation for the state terror apparatus that Trump’s faction has built upon. Under Jim Crow Joe Biden, the number of racist police murders broke records each year. Before becoming president, Biden spent decades in the U.S. Senate building racist hysteria over “predators on our streets.” He also led the charge to pass President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. Coming on the heels of Clinton’s slashing of 250,000 federal jobs and closing record amounts of federal housing, the law pumped out billions of dollars to hire 100,000 new local cops. It established mandatory minimum sentencing that mainly targeted Black workers. It decimated a generation of Black families with mass incarceration.
Two decades later, Barack Obama did more than anyone else to militarize the cops. In 2011 alone, $500 million in military weapons and assault gear were funneled to local police departments (wired.com, 6/26/12). Obama exploited a 9/11-era law for the indefinite military detention of suspected “terrorists” without charge (ACLU, 12/31/11). In short, much of the fascist infrastructure that Trump’s using today was built in plain sight by the Democrats.
Don’t vote, revolt!
While the capitalist class counts on its mad dog cops and fascist terror apparatus, the most powerful force in the world is the international working class. Capitalist crises created the conditions for the two greatest revolutions in history, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the 1949 Chinese Revolution. History shows us that the contradictions of capitalism can be resolved in only one of two ways. One is fascism. The other is communism, a world run by and for the working class.
The bosses live in mortal fear of an organized, united, international, multiracial working class ready to fight for revolution. It’s why they’re sparing no effort or expense to sow racist terror and division. In turn, our resistance cannot be spontaneous or identity-based. Fighting for the liberation of an isolated group of workers here or there will never smash capitalism. Neither will short-term reforms or the latest popular, lying stooge who wants your vote. If ever there was a time to link local struggles with the international movement for communist revolution, that time is now. Join PLP to make the communist world we deserve a reality!
[JC1], “Black Workers: Key to Revolution.” to read visit www.plp.org and find it in our literature section
Racist unemployment
Over the past four months, the shocking racist termination of over 300,000 Black women from federal jobs, mainly in D.C., has driven Black women’s real unemployment to over ten percent and pushed overall Black real unemployment into double digits (MSNBC, 7/17).
From the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War to the civil rights era and beyond, the federal government became the largest single source of Black employment. Until recently, it employed more than twenty percent of Black workers, most of them women. Black workers are disproportionately represented in essential federal jobs, including the U.S. postal service, as well as in the military, basic industries and transportation, transit, healthcare, and education.
Progressive Labor Party holds that Black workers, and especially Black women, are the key to revolution. The workers subjected to the sharpest racist and sexist oppression have the greatest material basis for communist class consciousness. Workers have always fought back against capitalism; Black workers have fought back hardest, with Black women at the forefront. [JC1] Only a united, multiracial working class can smash this genocidal imperialist system and build communism upon its ashes. When we do so, Black workers’ leadership will be instrumental to our victory.