Workers: BRACE FOR IMPACT!

It’s about to go down. The U.S. has experienced a profound rightward shift. The liberal mask has been thrown in the scrap heap, revealing the gnarled, ugly face of capitalist exploitation and imperialist subjugation underneath. Trump and the capitalist establishment he represents are ushering in a new world order to re-assert their slipping dominance over the planet. As Trump proceeds with breaking up the liberal status quo, there will be tons of debris thrown in every direction, all of which will come crashing down around the working class and oppressed.

All signs point to an impending economic catastrophe. The U.S. stock market, buoyed by speculative bubbles, is way overvalued. Trump’s protectionist trade measures have investors running for the exit. Working people are already drowning in personal debt. The cost of food, housing, healthcare, childcare and education have all skyrocketed in recent years, while real wages have long stagnated. The bosses are making profits hand over fist by working you to the bone, and then they turn around and force you to pay an extortionate price for life’s basic necessities.

In order to save the hides of the wealthy elite, Trump is willing to throw us into a recession—or worse. To get out of that hole, he will climb on the backs of the workers. The more he plays around with tariffs, the more that small businesses will be squeezed out and that grocers and other importers will charge. The White House has already issued warnings to get ready for economic turmoil.

Trump has promised that the richer he and his bevy of billionaires get, the better off we all will be. None of what Trump is doing will improve the situation for the working class. Workers are about to feel the impact of economic shocks, escalating repression and a drive toward war, as the ruling class re-gears the country for conflict with its foreign rivals. Like passengers on an aircraft experiencing extreme turbulence, working people can do one thing now to prevent injury: Brace!

For Working-Class Cohesion

Many defensive struggles will be necessary, and the goal must be to minimize the damage as much as possible. If the working class is unprepared for disaster, it will suffer defeat and demoralization and be thrown way back. This will only open the door for even greater attacks.

Unions are the collective defense organizations of the working class. But at the moment, they are in a weakened state, riddled with divisions and saddled with treacherous leadership, which plays right into the bosses’ “divide and rule” in one industry after another. These divisions are numerous—black vs. white, native-born vs. immigrants, new hires vs. senior workers, cleaners vs. mechanics, men vs. women and so on—and threaten to tear apart workforces, unions and the class as a whole. This won’t do!

As the economic situation deteriorates, these divisions will only magnify and reinforce the impulse to retreat into the “every man for himself” individualistic mentality. This impulse must be resisted. As workers feel the squeeze tighten, the pressure will increase to put what they view as their own personal interest—the interest of their craft, tier, race, nationality and so on—above those of the working class as a whole. This will just make the problem worse. The only road forward for workers is to put the interests of their class first.

The best way for workers to hold on to what they have is to unite and act as a collective force. The odds of surviving in one piece will be substantially higher. As an individual, being able to keep your head above water is a complete crapshoot, like playing the Mega Millions. Imagine that you are out at sea and a perfect storm is fast approaching. Would you rather be on your own life raft or a big vessel? On that vessel, as part of a large crew with a common purpose, everyone can work together to batten down the hatches, in order to ride out the storm in fighting shape. But alone on the life raft, you are at the mercy of the sea and better be praying to water god Poseidon.

Well, we are all now at sea, and hurricane Trump is just beginning to pound us. To have a fighting chance of withstanding its impact, we need to brace, together. The greater our numbers involved, the better organized we are and the stronger our unity of purpose, the more effective the brace will be. To get there, though, requires openly combating the individualistic mentality and fighting to break down the false polarizations that pull us apart. Many black and women workers blame Trump supporters for the current situation, and Trump supporters blame immigrants and workers abroad for declining living standards. These kinds of divisions obscure the fact that the fundamental dividing line in society is between the U.S. imperialist overlords who own everything and the rest of us fighting for scraps.

Isolated, We All Go Down

Both Trump and the Democrats have done a real job in perverting workers’ consciousness. The woke liberals scapegoated white workers for the ills of the capitalist system and drove them into Trump’s arms. And many workers—white, Latino and some black—have been taken in by Trump’s scapegoating of the specially oppressed sectors of society for those same ills.

Immigrants have been forced into the shadows under fear of deportation, black people are watching their backs as Trump guts anything that simply gives off a whiff of addressing racial inequality and trans people have been stripped of their rights. The Trump administration is just getting started. It has many cards up its sleeve to regiment society, force workers in line and repress the most vulnerable layers—not only to terrorize them, but also to stifle dissent in the working class more widely.

Every worker has a vital material interest in defending oppressed groups: the brutal oppression of one section of the class is a battering ram against the conditions of all working people. We are all being divided against one another and oppressed by the same master. Our common class interests far outweigh our differences. Unless the divisions among workers are overcome, the unions and the working class as a whole will be doomed. To allow each oppressed group to face the reactionary offensive in isolation will undermine the fighting capacity of the entire class.

Organize the Unorganized

The bosses push the lie that the advancement of one set of workers must come at the expense of another; and that any fight against racial, ethnic or gender inequality is divisive or an unfounded distraction. All this is criminally echoed by the union bureaucrats. The bosses want workers to believe these lies in order to keep working people from uniting against the capitalist class responsible for the economic chaos and misery.

In the face of Trump’s upheavals, it is clear that the working class needs to do everything it can now to maximize its collective strength. A big step in this direction would be a serious effort to organize the unorganized, especially the immigrant layers of the class. Doing so would increase the fighting capacity of the unions at a time when being able to mount a real defense could make all the difference to what follows next. It would plant the seeds for a stronger collective response to counter workplace raids and improve the wretched conditions of those jobs commonly held by undocumented immigrants. This provides a path to keep the class intact, afloat and poised to fight for more for all workers when the opportunity again presents itself, rather than the current pitting of one section of the class against another to the bosses’ gain.

Beware of Misleaders

Struggles like last year’s ILA longshore and Boeing Machinist strikes were potentially game-changing class battles that were betrayed by their union leadership. In those two major strikes immediately before the elections, some of the most militant workers were Trump supporters. The bureaucratic strike leadership sought to channel the evident militancy of the class into the restraints of the liberal status quo that workers were revolting against. Since then, many of these same bureaucrats, such as the ILA’s Harold and Dennis A. Daggett, switched sides to Trump. Whether working together with Democrats or Republicans, these misleaders are tying the fate of the unions to the very politicians keeping them down.

In a number of industries, workers in the labor aristocracy, like the ILA and ILWU, have been bribed with substantial wage increases to stop fighting for better. These bribes are sold as good coin by the union bureaucrats. It is straight out of the capitalist playbook to tempt a section of the working class with financial incentives in order to get those workers to turn a blind eye to the havoc raining down on the less strategic layers of the class.

But even the best-paid workers will not be able to escape the whirlwind developing around them. If the rest of the class is dragged down, they will inevitably go down too. Even the tallest trees can fall in extreme fires. The best means of protection for the top layers of the working class is the same as the rest—defend those worse off in order to build the collective power for a solid defense of themselves and all the rest of us.