Now you can view the content of this issue of Socialist Viewpoint in electronic format on your Kindle, iPad or any other Reader that supports the PDF format.
Click Here to Download a copy of this month's contentWorkers vs. Capitalism
By Bonnie Weinstein
Trump’s Tariffs: It’s the Working Class Who Will Pay
By Daniel Alfonso
Legacy from the Vietnam Anti-War Movement
Interview with Cliff Conner
Which Way Forward for Palestinian Liberation?
By Joseph Daher
Workers Will Rule When They Work to Rule
By Gregg Shotwell
Workers vs. Capitalism
Some ideas on how to change the balance of power
|
Fightback!: |
“There are decades where nothing happens; and then weeks where decades happen.” —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
On April 5, 2025, millions of people took to the streets in major cities and small towns across the country and in other countries around the world in opposition to the Trump/Musk assault on democracy. Many of the demonstrators also expressed opposition to the U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
Everyday Trump and Musk bombard us with ever-more racist, bigoted, anti-worker, anti-free speech, pro-genocide edicts.
It is now against the law, according to Trump, to speak or organize actions critical of Israel. Any criticism of Israel, he says, is antisemitic, unlawful, terrorist and pro-Hamas—especially on college campuses.1
The truly horrifying thing is that many universities, newspapers, news programs and employers are caving in to Trumps dismantling of civil and human rights including the democratic rights to free speech, assembly and protest.
Even worse, on April 3, 2023, the Trump administration, in an amazing, jaw-dropping edict—threatened to withhold funds from public schools that have not eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. 2
At the same time, the Trump administration has granted refugee status to pro-apartheid Afrikaners in South Africa even though, according to the New York Times, “…white people make up seven percent of the country’s population, [but] they own at least half of South Africa’s land.”3
Cold is hot and hot is cold
The American people are opposed to these attacks against people of color, immigrants, women, the LBGTQ community, unions, all working people and the poor, and the environment.
They are also opposed to the ever-increasing prices on all basic necessities—food, housing, healthcare, utilities, and education. And now, Trump’s punishing tariffs will drive even higher price-increases for the foreseeable future.
It’s clear to everyone that every time Trump or Musk speaks, they turn everything on its head in astonishing ways, like speaking fiercely about the need to fight racism against white people. And declaring that any student—or person—who criticizes Israel is a terrorist and will be deported or jailed. It’s like claiming that the whistling tea kettle is cold as ice.
Meanwhile, the members of the American ruling class are vying for his favors. He is not being challenged. He is being obeyed. Columbia University has caved in to Trump’s demands. 4
Fighting the Trump/Musk
new world order
Trump, the primary representative of the American capitalist class, is conducting a grand experiment devised by billionaires to see how far he can go carrying his fascist banner.
Trump sent J.D. Vance to Germany in February to encourage the German government to embrace the far-right, pro-Nazi party, Alternative for Germany. 5
All over the world the right wing of the capitalist class is advancing into power while the so-called more liberal governments are moving further and further to the right in competition with them.
Working class youth are leading the way against capitalism’s right-turn toward fascism
While there have been massive protests against the Trump/Musk agenda of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the all-out assault on human rights and free speech and assembly at home, the youth have begun to discuss forming their own, independent organizations to fight against the U.S./Israeli war on Gaza, the ICE raids and the assault on free speech and assembly.
The TV news here in the Bay Area have been reporting about local student walkouts protesting ICE from coming into their schools and to their parents’ places of work.
Many of these kids are immigrants or children of immigrants.
Their fear is real—they fear they will come home to an empty house because their parents have been taken by ICE, or that ICE will come and take them from their school.
But they are very bravely fighting back and not backing down. They have been extremely articulate critics of the Trump/Musk ultra-right agenda.
One day in mid-February in the Bay Area, as reported on TV news, children from multiple schools walked out spontaneously in protest of ICE raids. In the midst of the walkout, the students from the different schools found out about each other over social media and began texting each other. They arranged to meet up and join together for an impromptu rally.
These students were protesting against much more than ICE raids. To them, the whole system is against them!
Some of the kids who met up from the different schools spoke to reporters on the scene. They spoke about trying to encourage everyone to join together to build a united movement for immigrant rights and free speech at all their schools.
One cluster of kids interviewed said they wanted to organize their own political organizations independent of both major parties in time for the next presidential elections.
Even those far too young to vote had strong opinions in opposition to both the Democratic and Republican parties.
In fact, one young woman said she would not make the same mistake as her mom and would not support either party in the next presidential election. She said she’s hoping that a new, independent party will be formed that represents her and her friends.
The kids have the right idea!
An attack against one is an attack against all
Millions have been protesting the Trump/Musk swift move toward fascist rule because it is impacting and causing hardships, in every way, for the overwhelming majority of workers and the poor—not just here in the U.S.—but everywhere. Leaders of nations across the world are modeling themselves after Trump and Musk—moving further and further to the right and against the working class.
Organizing workers’ power
The intent of the Trump/Musk bold assaults against the working class—deportations, arrests, firings, raising prices on everything, imposing tariffs on imported goods, cutting aid to the neediest—serve the dual purpose of scaring us into submission while increasing profits for themselves.
Workers are told that what’s good for American businesses is good for us—that when the stock market goes up—it’s good for American workers—because many of us own stocks through pension and retirement plans. What they don’t tell us is that ten percent of Americans—the wealthy elite—own 93 percent of those stocks.6
The only way to combat their fascist agenda is to refuse to submit en masse to their bullying campaign. And that will take working-class unity, solidarity and independence from capitalist parties and politicians.
It requires the formation of independent, mass-based united front coalitions against the Trump/Musk anti-worker, anti-humanity, anti-environment agenda—the agenda of the American capitalist class.
Some people still seem to be waiting around for the Democratic Party to do something—but they are doing less than nothing—they are voting Trump’s way.
Organized labor must break with the Democratic and Republican parties and start organizing independently of all capitalist parties and boldly take up the banner of all who are under attack by the U.S. government.
The labor aristocracy is silent
Clearly, the organized labor aristocracy is not taking any leadership role in opposition to Trump at the present time. They are still wallowing in the morass of the Democratic Party that is, in fact, moving further and further to the right.
They have not yet come to terms with the rug being pulled out from under them by the Democratic and Republican competing parties for capitalist rule.
Some union leaders are even groveling for the good graces of Trump instead of organizing defiance of the Trump/Musk agenda!
Begging for crumbs from the Trump administration or any capitalist administration, in the name of labor, is a vast betrayal of all workers.
The current partnership that the labor aristocracy has with capitalism—when the union leaders sit down with the bosses at the bargaining table and try to come up with some agreement as to how much of a cut the boss can get away with—is a partnership with the devil.
You can’t bargain with someone who’s out to get you. As long as labor continues to partner with the bosses, we are freely turning our power over to them.
A new leadership has to emerge who will break this corrupt partnership, take the power into our hands and organize our own defense for the benefit of all workers—the capitalists don’t need our help.
There’s real power when workers stop being silent and take the lead
Workers, organizing together, have the power to end deportations, the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, and the administration’s overall attack on the poor and working class.
Ultimately, taking the means of production into our own hands—controlling our own destiny—is the only way to end the atrocities of capitalism.
Anti-labor laws
We can strike. We can walk off the job or occupy the worksite until our demands are met industry-by-industry or job-by-job—but it’s illegal under U.S, capitalist law for one union to go out on strike in sympathy of another union’s demands—even though those demands could benefit them as well.
We must find a way around this and other anti-labor laws because these laws can get us arrested, fired from our jobs or even killed for standing in solidarity with our fellow workers.
The labor laws fortify capitalism’s control over workers by outlawing labor solidarity—the general strike—the ultimate power the working-class majority has over the capitalist minority.
Organizing against anti-union,
anti-worker laws
Say, you’re a union painter and you show up one morning to the job and you see a plumber’s picket line around the building. The plumbers, your fellow workers, are on strike—and for good reason—but you have to cross the picket line or be fired.
The law, drawn up by capitalist lawyers and on their behalf, says the boss has the right to fire you if you refuse to cross a picket-line in support of a strike by workers from another union.
This means that the whole working class has to put our heads together to form democratically functioning organizations that can consolidate our power into a force strong enough to defend worker’s rights and defeat capitalism’s descent into fascist rule and, ultimately, back to barbarism.
The general strike
The general strike—workers everywhere walking off the job together nationally and internationally—may be against the law, but it’s the ultimate and unbeatable challenge to capitalist rule.
With the full participation of the masses of the workers, the general strike can overturn the balance of power from rule in the interests of the minority to rule in the interests of the majority.
As it stands now, if one person refuses to cross a picket-line, they are powerless against getting fired. If everyone refuses to cross the picket-line, no one works, and no profits are created for the capitalists to steal.
Mass, general strikes are a direct challenge to capitalist rule. By organizing, carrying out, and winning a general strike, the working class displays the power we have to control our own destiny.
Strategizing our road to victory
I had been pondering what steps could be taken to build steppingstones to the general strike—what kind of organization would be needed to build toward such a challenge to capitalist rule—and I was reminded of an article we printed in 2006, by a UAW autoworker, Gregg Shotwell. Gregg was a member of a group within the union called Soldiers of Solidarity that carried out a very unique tactic during negotiations for a new contract. They slowed down production at their jobsite by following each and every safety rule on the books. They called it, “work to rule.7” And they won a good contract.
I began to contemplate how that tactic could be used to organize resistance to Trump and Musk’s creeping fascist agenda at the workplace—actually slowing down production in protest of their agenda—without endangering the livelihoods of the workers on the job.
While it’s against the law for one union to go out on strike in support of another union, it is not against the law to encourage all workers to abide by all the safety rules on their job. Safety rules are there to protect workers and the public from harm.
In the real world, workers are routinely forced to ignore safety rules to keep up with the bosse’s constant pressure to speed up production. The boss doesn’t care if there’s an accident, they can simply blame it on the worker for not obeying some rule or another. The boss is off the hook and the worker pays—sometimes with their life.
Now, let’s say that the theoretical painter, referred to above, who didn’t want to cross the plumber’s picket line was the Painters Union representative on the job. What, if he spoke to his crew and instructed them to take extra care to follow all safety rules on the job until the plumber’s strike was satisfactorily settled? Then what if they encouraged all the other workers on the job to do the same?
There’s nothing illegal about it. Workers can’t be fired or punished for following the rules. And it has the potential to add much more weight and encouragement to the plumber’s strike—ultimately leading them to victory—and reinforcing solidarity and pride and power among all the other workers involved.
Slowing down production as a prequel to the general strike
The boss knows that strictly abiding by all the safety rules certainly does slow down production.
But not only is it totally legal to insist that workers abide by all the safety rules—it’s required! And it’s required on virtually all jobs—union and non-union, in service, office or industry, in every state and in most countries across the world.
Shotwell reminds us that “work to rule,” has been used as a form of resistance by workers and slaves throughout history.
It is empowering. It encourages unity and solidarity and empathy with each other. It builds confidence in the working class. It builds workers up and diminishes the power of the bosses. It fills workers with the realization that actions taken on behalf of workers, in unity and solidarity, gives us real power over the bosses.
Today’s labor unions could use this as a powerful tool to organize the unorganized while at the same time defending workers who are under attack from the fascist agenda of the capitalist class on the job, in our communities and in our schools.
Working to the rules is another way of hitting the capitalist class where it hurts the most—in their profit margins.
It fortifies our power and diminishes the power the capitalist class has over us.
It could be a prequel to a national and international general strike of the entire working class—one that can actually challenge the power of capitalist minority rule everywhere and win!
Actions such as strikes, work to rule, and cutting all ties to the Democratic and Republican parties—and all capitalist parties—are what the labor movement must begin to organize on a mass scale.
It is a fact that the masses of humanity—workers, employed and unemployed and their class allies—outnumber the capitalist class by more than billions-to-one.
We have much more in common among ourselves than we have with members of the capitalist class.
They comprise less than .01 percent of humanity yet claim ownership to all the wealth produced by the working people of the world. They own the corporations, businesses, military manufacturers—they own all the means of production in virtually every country—and every penny of that profit is stolen from labor.
Trump is running the country like it’s a business. And businesses are the oxymoron of democracy—they are rule from the top.
Every worker knows this. The boss is the boss! They will pay you as little as they can get away with.
The American capitalist class controls and dominates the wealth of the world. It has the most massive military power. They carry out, and financially support, bombings and genocide while at the same time, taking advantage of the strife they have created in order to bargain for the ownership of natural resources—or, as a last resort—forcefully take them from countries around the world.
The capitalists employ fascist repression when their system is in danger of collapse. They employ any and all means necessary to destroy resistance to their rule including paramilitary forces and the threat of death.
But every worker must learn, too, that it is we who have power to do away with capitalism and take the ownership and control of production into our own hands and for the good of all.
Leave it to the youth
And here’s where the kids were so prescient. They have learned that united together in unity and solidarity for freedom, justice and equality they have the power to create a new world. That conclusion is logical to them. What they have witnessed in their short lives has not frightened them, it has empowered them into action on their own behalf and on behalf of all of us.
These are the weeks where decades happen
Workers, young and old, planning production democratically can free humanity from the tyranny of capitalism’s for-profit production methods that wastes precious resources and pollutes the environment—all in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
We are living in a critical time—time to take the weapons of death out of the hands of the capitalist class and dismantle them so they can never be used again. And we must use every means available to us in order to win.
If workers become the boss—the collective owners of the means of production—we can produce to satisfy the needs and wants of all and bring an end to war forever.
Our collective profit will be the well-being of all and the health of the planet we share.
1 “California international students on alert as Trump ramps up arrests of pro-Palestinian activists”
2 “Trump Administration Threatens to Withhold Funds From Public Schools”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/politics/public-school-funding-trump-dei.html
3 “Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/world/africa/south-africa-whites-trump.html
4 “Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped”
5 “German Chancellor Rebukes Vance for Supporting Party That Downplays Nazis”
6 “Stock Ownership Is What Really Divides Americans”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/opinion/stock-market-tariffs.html
7 “Workers Will Rule When They Work to Rule” elsewhere in this magazine.
8 “Stock Ownership Is What Really Divides Americans”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/opinion/stock-market-tariffs.html
