Dear Marxist Left: WAKE UP!

The working class and oppressed face crushing blows under the Trump administration. The liberals, who yesterday haughtily promoted “anti-racism” and pro-trans politics, have abandoned all such talk. A glaring example of this is California governor Gavin Newsom, once a standard-bearer of identity politics; he now spends his time making overtures to the right and denouncing the “toxicity” of Democratic cancel culture as he throws trans kids under the bus. Amid this total shift in the paradigm, the Marxist left bellows into the wind by itself as the attacks come raining down. While screaming against “Trump and the billionaires,” they are completely disoriented and deluded as to what is happening and what tasks are posed.

The role of Marxists is to guide the working class forward. Today, the task is for the left to break out of its isolation, implant itself in the class and intervene in its struggles in a way that embodies the interests of the class as a whole. One cannot prepare a fight against Trump without recognizing that much of the working class supports his administration and that the various social movements dependent on support from mainstream liberals are totally isolated now. Denying this reality, the left poses that the time is ripe to go on the offensive. This will do nothing to improve the defensive capabilities of the working class in the face of Trump’s sledgehammer and thus can only end in crushing defeat.

The left has spent the last few decades tailing Democratic Party liberals as they trampled workers and the poor all over the globe while covered in a veil of enlightened “wokeness.” Now, the ruling class can no longer afford the veil, and Trumpism triumphantly seeks to remake the world order to meet U.S. imperialism’s needs. The DSA, which was largely paralyzed before November by its contradiction of claiming to be socialist from inside the Democratic Party, has reacted to this shift by pushing economic populism to bring working people “back into the fold” of the Democrats.

This is the purpose of Bernie and AOC’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which the DSA promotes as having the potential to ignite “a movement capable of actually defeating Musk, then Trump.” Their Democratic candidate for NYC mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is similarly focused on the cost-of-living crisis while having nothing to offer specially oppressed groups. Some in the DSA recognize the wide gulf that has opened between the left and the working class, but its answer is to again shackle the workers to a refurbished version of the hated liberal Democrats.

In contrast, most of the left flatly denies that any such gulf exists and are stuck in yesterday. Take Socialist Alternative (SA), which proposes to “build the broadest possible working-class coalition” so that we can “beat back the Trump agenda.” How, you might ask, can we do this? We’re told: on the model of the 2006 May Day immigrant rights marches, in which millions took to the streets under liberal Democratic leadership. SA is joined by the likes of Left Voice and the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) in citing the 2006 immigrant rights movement as “historic precedent.”

In addition to the fact that this movement was betrayed by the liberals, it is deluded to think the revival of such a movement is on the horizon. The mainstream liberals want to distance themselves from the cause of the specially oppressed. They are not going to build big coalitions to defend immigrants or black people or trans people. The way to build an effective anti-Trump movement is not to beg the liberals to return, but to pour a new foundation based on the interests of the working class. The left needs to wake the hell up: WE ARE NOT IN 2006, WE ARE IN 2025!

Smoking something good, the RCA ludicrously claims that we are closer to revolution than ever: “Numerous factors are pushing a layer of the US working class toward revolutionary conclusions.” On the one hand, they recognize that “the left’s ties to liberals have only served to discredit them in the eyes of working people.” On the other hand, they deny that the class, in rejecting liberalism, moved to the right, instead declaring it “a step forward that the hypocritical mask of the liberals no longer fools a significant segment of the working class.” But Trump’s victory was a reactionary backlash against liberalism. The RCA presents this backlash as a leap forward in consciousness so that they themselves can leap over the present isolation and place revolution on the order of the day. There is only one direction this can lead—to disaster.

For its part, Left Voice tells us that united we can not only “build a movement to beat back all of Trump’s attacks,” but also “fight for more: abolish ICE, open borders, divestment from Israel, a free, public university run by students, faculty, staff and the community and more.” This is a complete misread of the situation. For example, the majority of the working class views open borders for capital and people as the very thing that ruined their livelihoods. Many voted for Trump out of legitimate anger, wrongly believing that protectionism, mass deportations and Trump’s strongman approach will advance their interests. Pretending otherwise will only prevent Left Voice from finding a road to the working class.

Similarly, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) inverts reality and proclaims about a weak, isolated movement for Palestine as genocide rages on: “In the face of increased repression…the movement for a free Palestine was only growing stronger and stronger.” Such insanity might be personally comforting, but it does nothing for the Palestinians and can only lead to desperate acts. The PSL does not stop there. Dressing up small protests as a mass movement against deportations, PSL says: “Immigrants and communities across the U.S. are responding with mass protests and fearlessly fighting back to make a showing of their strength.” The truth is that there is mass fear in immigrant communities, compounded by support to Trump’s deportations among many workers. The goal should not be to portray the immigrant struggle in a false light, but rather to win the working class to the defense of immigrants.

The left’s answer to the attacks on the labor movement isn’t any better. For  decades, the trade-union bureaucracy restrained any militant fightback from going outside the bounds acceptable to the Democrats they allied with. But since the election, many of these same bureaucrats, such as the UAW’s Shawn Fain and Teamsters head Sean O’Brien, picked up on the direction the winds were blowing and have realigned themselves with Trump’s agenda. While the left obviously recognizes this as a betrayal, they cannot square it with the path Fain and O’Brien have been on since the beginning.

But as Fain himself explained, “We haven’t changed our position, our principles or our mission.” This includes the 2023 UAW auto strike, when the left cheered Fain on despite the fact that he refused to engage in the head-on confrontation needed to win the strike demands. The aim was always to get a slightly better deal within the supposedly friendly confines of U.S. imperialism. And if that requires switching hats from Biden to Trump, so be it.

Rational people might draw the conclusion that in order to unite labor and engage in the necessary collective action, these bureaucrats must be replaced by a real class-struggle leadership. But no. Even though Left Voice, which fulsomely promoted O’Brien’s recent Amazon strike stunt, now finally calls for “getting rid of bureaucratic traitors like Fain and O’Brien,” they give no indication of what kind of leadership and strategy is needed to turn the unions around. This simply leaves the ranks saddled with some version of pro-capitalist leadership. Other left groups, like SA, keep on keeping on…screaming “shame,” while pleading for these misleaders to see the light. SA unashamedly begs Fain to “reverse his statement on working with Trump and publicly advocate and organize to build a labor party in the U.S.” But a labor party that actually represents the interests of working people will never be built by these traitors.

Not to be left out, SA’s Workers Strike Back (WSB) split-off also denies that the working class has shifted to the right, and in fact takes things one step further, claiming that today the working class is “more progressive than ever.” This delusion flows from political appetite: having abandoned the striking Boeing Machinists in its Seattle headquarters to go all-out for Jill Stein in the elections, WSB is now building its ranks not by turning back to the working class, but by opening its door to all “progressive” forces, namely the liberal Greens. Of course, the Greens have as much appeal to working people as Teslas.

All this begs the question: why is the left stuck in a parallel universe of their making? Much of it is probably due to the fear that telling the truth could demoralize young activists and further isolate the left. But the first duty of revolutionaries is to say what is, and the greatest crime is to lull activists into a fantasy. Having a wrong understanding of unfolding events and current consciousness can only lead to setting wrong tasks. Not telling the truth is a recipe for demoralization and burnout and, for some, a turn toward ultraleft adventurism, which would bring even more repression. The left must change course if it is to be in a position to prepare the working class for the kind of defensive struggle necessary to minimize the damage from Trump’s attacks (see top front-page article).

Those who consider themselves to be revolutionaries would do well to heed some basic advice from James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, who wrote in 1932, amid the misery of the Great Depression, two years before the great strikes that led to the organization of the industrial unions: