USA: Large Demonstrations Will Never Be Able to Stop Anti-proletarian Attacks

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 23; December 2025)

Back Sumary

 

 

The ‘No Kings’ demonstrations on 18 October were perhaps the largest day of protest in US history: 2,700 rallies across the country with 5 to 7 million participants, despite statements by the pro-Trump press and officials who sought to scare off potential participants by labelling the organisers ‘terrorists’, predicting unrest and announcing the mobilisation of the FBI to oppose the ‘chaos’.  This day followed similar demonstrations, such as the No Kings protests in June, which were also massive, and others before that.

The scale of these protests is a sign of the hostility of a large section of the American population towards the reactionary policies of the Trump administration: cuts in social spending, the dismissal of thousands of state employees, widespread attacks on undocumented workers, etc. The shutdown meant that tens of thousands of civil servants were furloughed, food stamps that enable more than 40 million proletarians and their families to feed themselves were suspended, etc. This anti-proletarian policy is accompanied by unbridled authoritarianism, as illustrated by the practices of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency: masked and heavily armed ICE agents organise raids in neighbourhoods where immigrant workers live, arresting and kidnapping those who do not have the proper papers.

 

THE FIGHT AGAINST UNDOCUMENTED PROLETARIANS

 

ICE’s official role is to protect the country from terrorists and transnational criminal networks, but its remit has since been extended to include the prosecution of foreigners accused of crimes of varying severity. The Trump administration has made ICE the tool for combating ‘illegal’ immigration, which is one of its stated priorities; Its budget has been tripled, notably to recruit 10,000 additional agents by 2029 (which would bring its total number of employees to 30,000, compared to 38,000 for the FBI), build new detention centres for foreigners awaiting deportation, etc. – And, of course, ICE funding was not interrupted during the shutdown...

The real goal of this campaign is not to deport the approximately 12 million undocumented workers – they are indispensable to the functioning of American capitalism – but to terrorise them and foreign workers in general, in order to make them even more submissive to employers’ demands. It is also about widening the gap between undocumented foreign workers and American workers, with government policy supposedly aimed at ‘protecting’ jobs from competition from the former. But the bourgeois state only protects the profits of the capitalists! Undocumented workers are the most vulnerable workers; other proletarians must not leave this section of the proletariat at the mercy of the bosses and their state, as this amounts to strengthening the class enemy. Solidarity with undocumented migrants is not a humanitarian or democratic imperative, it is an immediate requirement of the struggle against capitalism, which requires the broadest possible unity of the proletariat.

 

CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE ‘ENEMY WITHIN’

 

Alongside the spectacular abuses of ICE, a real immigration police force targeting undocumented workers, the Trump administration has mobilised the National Guard under the pretext of maintaining order, either in response to protests against ICE (Los Angeles) or in response to crime (Chicago, Portland, Washington). Although this mobilisation has so far served only as a political weapon to try to show the inability of Democratic governors (in theory, only governors are authorised to deploy the National Guard), it is nevertheless indicative of the growing climate of repression in the United States.

Thus, the assassination on 11 September of Charlie Kirk, an ultra-reactionary ‘influencer’ who played a major role in mobilising young people in favour of Trump, was immediately blamed on the ‘radical left’ by the latter. A vast campaign against the ‘enemy within’ was launched: from calls to denounce those who had disparaged Kirk, to the official designation on 17 September of the ‘Antifa’ ‘ (anti-fascist) movement as a ’terrorist organisation” on 17 September – even though no such organisation exists – to an official directive to the police and judicial forces classifying as terrorists those who profess anti-capitalism, hostility towards traditional American positions on family, religion and morality (!), etc. (1), to the creation of a ‘rapid reaction force’ of more than 20,000 soldiers for maintaining order, to the institution, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, of an ‘anti-communism week’!

The already high levels of social tension will inevitably intensify further in the country as economic difficulties lead capitalists to increase their attacks on the proletariat; the Trump government is in fact merely accompanying this situation with increased repression and a generalised reactionary offensive – including by overturning certain formalities and traditional practices of the bourgeois system of domination.

However, repression alone cannot maintain social peace, as demonstrated by the proletarian explosions of anger that regularly shake the United States: there are a whole host of ‘citizen’, ‘community’ and religious associations, organisations and institutions, etc., whose function is to sterilise the thrust of the struggle by diverting it towards dead ends and harmless, even entirely bourgeois, objectives.

This is the case with the huge demonstrations organised by their organisers in defence of democracy and the Constitution. But democracy and its Constitution are only one form of bourgeois domination: it is the latter that must be fought, whatever form it takes.

It cannot be fought through peaceful and festive marches, however numerous they may be, nor through the election of democratic politicians, however ‘left-wing’ they claim to be.

The victory of the ‘Democratic Socialist’ Zohran Mandani in the New York municipal elections undoubtedly reflects the discredit of the corrupt leaders of the Democratic Party (such as Democrat Cuomo, who ran as an independent candidate, supported by Trump!). But it also testifies to the illusions among the masses of proletarians (2) about the possibility of obtaining real improvements in their situation through the electoral process. Even the timid reforms promised will not be easily achieved by Mamdani, who, the day after his election, did not hesitate to reach out to New York’s big financiers and to Trump himself to reassure them about his supposed ‘socialism’.

To respond to the attacks, the US proletariat must free itself from the influence of all political, trade union and other forces that chain it to capitalism and stifle its desire for revolt, and return to the path of class struggle and organisation: this is the sine qua non for confronting the most powerful and brutal bourgeoisie in the world.

 

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(1) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/

(2) Mamdani achieved his highest scores in the working-class neighbourhoods of New York.