The September 30 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood marks a decisive moment in the capitalist rulers’ ongoing war against the working class. The pre-dawn fascist assault on an apartment building was executed with helicopters circling above and troops in full military gear. Children and adults were zip-tied in cruel display, with at least 37 arrested (ABC7, 10/1).
The militarized repression was clearly meant to terrorize Black and Brown workers and families already under siege from the poverty and displacement rooted in the profit system. The message was clear: As the international crisis of capitalism deepens, the bosses have less incentive to offer the carrot of reform to our class. Instead, they are leaning heavily on the stick of state terror.
Four days later, workers and youth across the city bravely answered this assault. They rammed ICE vehicles to block raids on the Southwest Side. For days they battled tear gas, arrests, and rubber bullets outside a detention center in the nearby suburb of Broadview (Block Club Chicago, 9/28). These acts of worker defiance show a growing understanding that the struggle against rising fascism will require far greater commitment from the international working class.
Workers’ boldness in this moment—facing off against tanks, helicopters, and masked ICE marauders—reveals the potential of our class. Each confrontation builds collective consciousness, sharpening our understanding that capitalism itself is at the root of exploitation, racism, and war. What’s needed now is organization: the unity of militant workers under a revolutionary banner. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands as the disciplined force to transform spontaneous fightback into a conscious movement for liberation: communism. Only by destroying the old capitalist world—its police and prisons and brutal law of maximum profit—can we build a new society based on equality, working-class power, and working-class rule.
U.S. bosses scrap and scramble to save their empire
The intensifying violence against immigrant workers and antiracists can best be understood in the context of the split within the U.S. ruling class on how to manage their fading empire. The dominant industrial power for much of the 20th century, the U.S. is now faltering in the face of increased competition and production from China (CEPR, 1/17/24). The U.S. capitalist bosses are relying on speculative financial schemes as they attack unions and freeze workers’ wages.
As their profits are squeezed, the capitalists have sharp disagreements over how many crumbs should go to an increasingly impoverished working class. The current federal government shutdown is a case in point. The rulers’ faction fronted by President Donald Trump has broken with the liberal bosses, who want to preserve a minimal level of health coverage and other social benefits to stave off unrest and rebellion. What’s more, MAGA’s anti-DEI crusade is undermining the liberals’ long-range plan to recruit the larger multiracial military they need to fight in the next global inter-imperialist war (CNN, 3/27).
The chaos in Washington reflects the broader instability of the capitalist system. Sooner than later, as they’re forced to move toward open fascism and world war, the U.S. ruling class will need to discipline itself through jailings and political violence. The coming show trials of James Comey and Letitia James are just a taste of what’s in store. In their desperate efforts to save their empire, one faction or the other will need to consolidate control as it prepares to confront their imperialist rivals.
While we can’t predict how the U.S. bosses’ infighting will play out, we know that the growing volatility of their system presents great dangers—and great opportunities—for a unified, multiracial, communist-led working class.
Expose the liberal fascists
For capitalists everywhere, a steady supply of vulnerable, super-exploitable immigrant labor provides untold billions in profits. The Trump-led faction’s racist hate speech notwithstanding, their businesses—from hotels and construction sites to the picking fields—would be devastated if this flow of cheap labor were shut off. Trump acknowledged as much when he temporarily backed off from attacking agricultural workers this summer (NPR, 6/16).
But for workers to count on the liberal bosses for protection from the ICE Gestapo would be a deadly error. Liberal fascists Barack Obama and Joe Biden exposed their loyalty to U.S. imperialism by arresting and deporting millions of workers (Yahoo, 5/8). Their feeble efforts at immigration reform, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), were conceived to build patriotism and funnel young workers into dead-end jobs and the military.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire Democrat with designs on the White House, is posing as the worker-friendly opposition to Trump’s threats to deploy the National Guard against anti-ICE protestors in Chicago. Meanwhile, state troopers under Pritzker’s command provide cover for ICE vehicles and arrest workers outside the Broadview detention center (Chicago Sun-Times, 10/8).
As the class struggle sharpens, the liberals will be exposed as the class enemies they are. But it’s not enough to reject the liberal racists’ misleadership. Progressive Labor Party must advance working-class consciousness and militant fightback on the road to communist revolution.
Fascism means: we got to fight back!
For all the dangers of full-blown fascism, it’s important to understand that it stems from the capitalists’ weakness. The bosses abandon liberal democracy—and the democratic “freedoms” designed to pacify the working class—only when it can no longer keep them afloat. That’s when they’re compelled to turn to open, ruthless terror. Our task is to study the essence of fascism, past and present, to better equip ourselves to destroy the capitalist system that spawns it.
The lessons of history are clear. Fascism can be smashed by the organized power of the international working class under communist leadership. From the heroic anti-fascist fighters who crushed Mussolini’s forces in Italy to the Soviet workers and soldiers who broke the back of the Nazi war machine at Stalingrad, communists have been at the forefront of humanity’s struggle against capitalist terror.
Today’s international mass uprisings against racism and genocide offer the potential for millions of workers to unite our struggles into a revolutionary communist movement that strikes at the very heart of the capitalist system. PLP is the multiracial force that can achieve the monumental task of building an egalitarian society out of the ashes of the old. We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains!
