Liberals Paved the Way for Reaction

The purpose of this document is to show how the SL/U.S.’s political disorientation—beginning in the 1980s and worsening throughout the post-Soviet period—paralyzed our Los Angeles local and why the political lessons are relevant to today. It will address the obstacles to organizing and uniting the city’s multiracial working class at that time and what the tasks of Marxists were as against what the SL argued. It will also consider how these obstacles are posed in the present—and how to overcome them.

Deindustrialization and the Winds of Change

U.S. imperialism went through an extended crisis in the late 1960s and ’70s. Its defeat in Vietnam was a real turning point, opening up a period of economic and political turmoil at home and abroad. L.A. was a hotbed of black radicalism. Much of the Black Panther leadership had roots in L.A., where they organized after the 1965 Watts uprising and also influenced the Chicano militancy of the late ’60s.

However, the revolutionary openings of this period all ended in defeat. In L.A., the destruction of the Black Panthers, in part through murderous government repression, resulted in a vacuum that was filled by lumpen street gangs, whose activity escalated throughout the ’80s. By then, U.S. imperialism was back on the offensive, marking the start of the neoliberal era of privatization, economic liberalization and high immigration.

Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the U.S., was transformed as a result. Deindustrialization happened early on. Starting in the ’70s, a number of industries were hollowed out and replaced with service and tech jobs and an expanding entertainment industry, i.e., Hollywood. The city’s black population was devastated amid a huge demographic shift fueled by immigration of mostly Mexicans, but also Central Americans, as U.S. domination and subjugation of their homelands intensified.

In the 1980s, Reaganism reigned supreme. The U.S. ruling class coupled aggressive anti-communism with a conscious policy of offshoring, both to destroy trade unions and get around the cost of modernizing U.S. industry in favor of buying cheap products from abroad. Over the first half of the decade, employment increased nationwide, but the nature of the available jobs was changing. According to William Lazonick in “The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation” (Seattle U. L. Review, 2013): “Employment of operators, fabricators, and laborers fell from 20 million to 16.8 million, a decline of 15.9%.”

In 1981, early in his presidency, Reagan dealt a decisive defeat to the U.S. working class by crushing the PATCO air traffic controllers strike. This was followed by years of plant closures, which wiped out decent-paying union jobs in L.A. and beyond. A 1991 Los Angeles Times article on the area’s auto manufacturing facilities noted that:

L.A. County had been the second-largest automaking center in the nation, behind Detroit. By 1971, when the Chrysler plant shut down, imported cars already accounted for 41 percent of all sales in the city. Other industrial jobs were also decimated. Many of these jobs went overseas or to cheaper, non-union regions in the South and Southwest.

The Devastation of Black L.A.

It was the presence of industrial jobs that impelled many black people to migrate to L.A. (largely from Louisiana and Texas). The city’s black population surged during WWII and postwar and by 1970 had reached almost half a million, the largest in California. Although segregated, black people made up a key component of the working class.

Because the vast majority of the city was off-limits to black people, as it was to Latinos, black neighborhoods sprang up in proximity to the old barrios. This was both the seed of competition for scarce resources and the start of cultural exchange. In 1964, California passed Proposition 14, which enshrined the ability of homeowners to deny sales based on race. At this point, Latinos were a similarly sized demographic, albeit older than the black population. Some Latino groups organized against Prop 14 on the basis that this was their fight too—like black people, they wanted equality in education and housing. But other Latinos who had progressed toward assimilation viewed anti-black racism as not their problem. While overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, Prop 14 codified the practice in L.A. before and since, whether legally sanctioned or not.

L.A. schools were also segregated. In parts of South L.A. that were then overwhelmingly white and working class, like South Gate, the schools were almost 100 percent white. Black youth who lived near South Gate had to attend schools farther away that were 99 percent black. In 1976, the California Supreme Court ruled that L.A. had to integrate its schools. For three years, busing was implemented. The loudest voices against this were white parents in the San Fernando Valley who did not want their kids bused. But Latinos were also mobilized against busing in the name of defense of bilingual education. While Latinos did not have that much voting weight at the time, they were cynically used to claim that white liberals weren’t racist.

In 1979, the passage of California Prop 1 overturned busing. I grew up in L.A. in the ’80s, at which point the city’s public schools were 18 percent white. (Today, it’s only 10 percent.) Most of those white kids were in better-funded magnet programs that had racial quotas. The high school I went to had two magnet programs, which were integrated but had only a few hundred students. The rest of the school consisted of the “original” school attended by 2,000 students, almost all Latino and black and some Filipinos as well. Today, the L.A. school district is 74 percent Latino, and many kids go to schools with an almost 100 percent Latino student body.

In the 1970s, manufacturing was the top employer of black workers in L.A. Many belonged to unions and earned decent wages. Janitorial and hotel work were mostly black union jobs, as was the postal service. Deindustrialization forced most black workers who stayed in L.A. to take low-wage service jobs. They then had to compete for these jobs with the rapidly increasing Latino immigrant population. All this has ramifications today: Black people are 8 percent of city residents, yet make up 42 percent of the homeless. In California, 28 percent of male prisoners are black, even though only 6 percent of the state’s adult male population is black.

By the 1980s, the historic core of working-class black L.A.—South Central and Compton—was changing. Immigrant groups, mostly from Mexico and Central America, were moving in, mainly because the traditional Latino areas were overflowing and they couldn’t move into the white areas. At the same time, a lot of black people who could do so left the city. The decimation of jobs, together with Reagan’s austerity measures and racist “war on crime,” brought intensified ghettoization and an increase in gangs, drugs and racist police terror and occupation. Police helicopters were called “ghetto birds” because they frequently circled overhead.

This is the golden age of gangster rap like Eazy E and N.W.A., reflecting the worsening state of black L.A. It was also the beginning of mass incarceration, which vastly accelerated under Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. The 1992 L.A. upheaval following the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King was an outpouring against not just rampant police brutality in the ghettos—then half Latino and half black, but also the wretched living conditions and job prospects that went back to deindustrialization.

L.A.’s Latino residents numbered 422,000 in 1970, around 820,000 in 1980 and 1.4 million in 1990. By 2020, almost two million Latinos resided in the city. In comparison, the slightly larger black population of 490,000 in 1970 barely ticked up to 500,000 a decade later. By 2020, that figure had dropped to 335,000. The white population was always the majority in L.A. until the ’90s (2.1 million in 1970, 1.8 million in 1980 and 1.3 million in 2020). Today, there is also a sizable Asian population which is 12 percent of the total. The city’s white working-class areas are long gone, since white workers moved outside the city to find work and more affordable housing.

Denying a Changing Reality

Our party didn’t have any supporters in the L.A. auto plants when the industry was uprooted in the 1980s, but we did fight in Fremont (GM’s Bay Area facility) and Detroit against plant closings. Our propaganda was pretty good, and the UAW Militant Caucus worked tirelessly to stop the layoffs and keep Fremont open. But after the SL-supported caucuses disbanded, we stopped raising a program for the working class and oppressed to fight the devastation.

We couldn’t deal with the major developments of this contradictory period, as Cold War reaction combined with ascendant neoliberalism. We defended the Soviet Union and fought imperialism abroad and at home—which came down hard on black people and immigrants at key points. We obviously knew there was a large increase in immigration. But our reaction was to cling to liberal moralism as opposed to basing ourselves on a Marxist understanding of the objective reality and the tasks flowing from it.

Despite the growth of the Latino population, we denied that a lasting demographic change was underway and projected both mass deportations and the mass assimilation of Latinos along racial lines. It was as if factoring the increasing weight of the Latino working class into our tasks would negate the centrality of the fight for black liberation to the American revolution. In fact, the opposite is true: To liberate Latinos from their exploitation and oppression necessitates fighting against black oppression, the key tool used by the capitalists to weaken and divide the proletariat. The history of working-class struggle in L.A. has made this very clear.

The refusal to take account of a changing reality led to many cannibalistic and moralist internal fights in L.A. and left many comrades unmoored. Spartacist No. 68 (September 2023) states that a party that claims to be Marxist but does not have a correct political and economic appreciation of the period cannot guide the working class in line with its class interests. Lacking a materialist grounding, this party will set tasks for itself, and for the proletariat, that necessarily reflect the interests of other classes. This helps explain why the different fights in L.A. over the black question, Latinos and immigrants have been mired in liberalism.

Liberalism on Immigration and the Black Question

In our seminal article “Hispanics, Refugees Targeted—Labor: Smash Racist Immigration Law!” (WV No. 427, 1 May 1987), we recognize “the growing importance of Hispanics in the United States, and the implications for revolutionaries.” But we then go on to quote our 1983 national conference document:

This is not what happened. Whatever the similarities among the “first waves,” Mexican and Central American immigrants’ overall experiences have differed from those of pre-1920 Italian and Irish immigrants for a reason: their home countries are in the backyard of and oppressed by racist U.S. imperialism. Another key factor is the difference in the period. Prior to 1920, U.S. imperialism was on the rise, and its industrial base was growing. By the 1970s and ’80s, U.S. imperialism was in decline, and there was not much of a ladder to climb.

There have been continuous waves of Latino immigration for decades in an extended period of relative stability. It is common for earlier generations to oppose the next wave, which the bourgeoisie uses as scab labor and to undercut their organizing. Being undocumented in huge numbers—something never faced by European immigrants—also impacts Latino prospects for assimilation. In L.A., while there are a number of Latinos who have “made it,” the vast majority have not. They are segregated in the worst schools and neighborhoods at a time when conditions have been worsening for the working class as a whole. Additionally, Latinos are 80 percent working-class and most don’t get out of the class they are born into, partly due to discrimination.

The answer to the question of how to fight the oppression of Latinos is not so different from that of how to fight black oppression: We must fight for multiracial unity based on shared material interests against the bosses who pit one group against the other in a race to the bottom. It’s not in the interests of white workers to have a layer of black workers below them, bringing down everyone’s wages. This is also true of the relationship between U.S.-born workers and undocumented immigrants. For example, in the 1980s when unionized black janitors were being laid off and replaced by non-union immigrant labor at dramatically reduced pay, there needed to be a citywide janitors strike to defend black workers’ livelihoods and organize immigrants into the union at the same pay. As we would often say, the struggles go forward together or fall back separately. But to my knowledge, no one put forward a program to fight along these lines.

Instead, we approached the divisions between immigrants and black people by arguing that they had to overcome their mutual prejudices—a liberal approach. American Trotskyist Richard Fraser captured the heart of white liberalism:

A liberal argument used to push the “melting pot” American Dream lie is that, unlike black people, Latino immigrants work hard and will do jobs lazy black people won’t do. This is an argument for superexploitation of immigrant labor.

The Neoliberals Feast on the Undocumented

The American bourgeoisie saw superexploitation of immigrants as a linchpin of the neoliberal order that was emerging in the 1970s. The door to the mass influx of immigrants was opened by the 1965 immigration bill, which came out of the civil rights movement and got rid of racist quotas that were in place since the 1920s. Importantly, though, the neoliberals wanted mass undocumented immigration. Milton Friedman—one of the fathers of neoliberalism and a crafter of imperialist “shock therapy” in Latin America—gave the neoliberal argument in a 1978 lecture, “What is America?”:

Today, this is the main argument liberals use against Trump: You can’t deport all the immigrants, who will do these jobs? But such neoliberal notions have fallen out of fashion within the ruling class. Right before the election, JD Vance was asked by a liberal New York Times reporter: “So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?” Vance responded: “You absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market.… People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages, but people will do those jobs…at certain wages.” This is an effective argument that appeals to native-born workers even though it’s a lie that Vance and Trump are going to create high-paying construction jobs. Instilling constant fear in a layer of workers only undermines the ability of the working class as a whole to fight the bosses’ attacks.

In neoliberalism’s heyday, we projected that Reagan was going to carry out mass deportations. In response to his 1986 immigration bill, which contained various nasty provisions, our press declared: “But this is just preparation for the avalanche of up to two million deportations the new law is expected to touch off” (WV No. 427, 1 May 1987). But as far as I could tell, there were no mass deportations that year. Today, the bill is remembered for having granted amnesty to three million Latinos, the last time that has happened in the U.S. To qualify, immigrants had to prove they came in before 1982. At the same time, the militarization of the border began. Previously, immigrants had gone back and forth between Mexico and the U.S., but now many of the undocumented became trapped for fear of not getting back in. Between 1980 and 2000, the Mexican immigrant population increased from about 2.1 million to nearly 9.2 million.

During this time, our articles recognize the huge shift in migration and demographics but saw this as conjunctural: “In every period of economic and political crisis in the United States during this century the rulers have carried out mass deportations.” But in 1987 U.S. imperialism was not on the verge of crisis and instability, but rather was about to gain a new lease on life. Furthermore, our defense of immigrants was problematic:

While it was correct to fight the chauvinist protectionism pushed by the labor bureaucracy, we provided no working-class alternative to nativism and neoliberalism. Instead, we essentially echoed liberal compassion and “enlightened” consciousness-raising. To argue to white and black workers who had lost their jobs that it’s better than being a migrant farm worker was a defense of the new liberal status quo.

The WV No. 427 article on immigration concludes that “Mexican nationalists repeat the lament of conservative dictator Porfirio Díaz: ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.’ Proletarian internationalists greet the fact that massive infusion of Hispanic workers from south of the border can serve as a human bridge for revolutionary class struggle throughout the Americas.” This deeply flawed argument was repeated in our press for the next few decades.

We labeled as “nationalist” the recognition that Mexico is directly under the boot of U.S. imperialism and that this oppression fuels mass migrations. We countered with “internationalism,” putting a gloss on this process and presenting immigrants as somehow inherently advanced. The claim that Mexican and Central American immigrants brought class-struggle traditions to the U.S. and were radicalizing the class here is idealist and, frankly, patronizing. As Marxists we understand that being determines consciousness. Immigrant workers without status are fed anti-black racism to head off multiracial unity and are kept in fear of deportation. Whatever the amount of struggle they waged in their home country, they are not automatically revolutionaries in the U.S.

The Clinton Years and Our Loss of Purpose

Before Clinton was elected president in 1992, Republicans had won the state of California in nearly every presidential election dating back to 1952. Since then, California has been a liberal Democratic Party stronghold. Under Clinton, there was a significant growth in international trade, massive offshoring of production and an explosion of international capital circulation, i.e., globalization. Clinton gave this profound shift a social liberal cover. “Communism is dead” and liberal capitalism is proclaimed the pinnacle of human civilization. The U.S. and its allies ruled the world in the name of liberal principles like “freedom and democracy” and “defense of the defenseless.” California and particularly L.A. were key to this new world order of free trade, open capital markets and high levels of immigration.

By the early 1990s, Latinos had surpassed whites as L.A.’s largest racial/ethnic group. That decade, Latino immigrants in the city increased their organizing against their abysmal pay and conditions. We again attributed to them near-revolutionary consciousness that would revitalize labor. We also claimed to be unique in calling for full citizenship rights for immigrants, which was ludicrous. In our article “Latino Workers: New Force for Labor Struggle” (WV No. 541, 27 December 1991), we also argued:

But economic struggle alone cannot overcome the deep racial and ethnic divisions in the class. To accomplish that requires building a conscious class-struggle union leadership in opposition to trade-union bureaucrats who fuel these divisions.

Our press declared that the struggles of Latino immigrants were driving “the transformation of Los Angeles from a largely open-shop city to Strike City U.S.A.” (WV No. 871, 26 May 2006). But L.A. was not and had not been an open-shop city for decades. While L.A. was an open shop in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building—for which union ironworkers, the McNamara brothers, were convicted—this hadn’t really been true since the 1930s.

The establishment of the CIO unions was a major catalyst for union growth in L.A. For example, following the 1936-37 sitdown strikes in Flint, Michigan, the UAW was recognized at GM assembly plants nationwide, including the South Gate plant in L.A. By 1939, the Teamsters had organized more than 25,000 truck drivers and become the city’s largest union. And, of course, the ILWU longshore union was coastwide.

A useful book detailing the history of L.A. labor from 1880 to 2010 is Sunshine Was Never Enough by John Laslett. As he writes, “If there was any one year in which the open shop in Los Angeles can be said to have entered a period of terminal decline, 1937 was probably that year. No fewer than 113 organizing strikes, many of them successful, took place in the city.… By the time the U.S. entered World War II, the long reign of the open shop in Southern California was effectively over.”

During the L.A. upheaval in 1992, we presented consciousness as having grown by leaps and bounds simply as a result of the outburst of elemental rage. We argued that it was “self-evident” that both capitalist parties are corrupt and, in effect, that no one had illusions in liberalism. In WV No. 551 (15 May 1992), we correctly called for the powerful L.A. unions such as longshore, aerospace and city workers to organize work stoppages and mass mobilizations in defense of the black community, later adding: “This is not ‘pie in the sky’.” But given that we were no longer trying to combat the pre-existing divisions in the class to unite it in such struggle, this was pie in the sky. No longer fighting for class-struggle leadership in the unions, we were just a pressure group calling on the labor bureaucrats to defend the ghetto that was rising up in opposition to the devastation that the bureaucrats had done nothing to fight.

We argued that the fact that the upheaval was multiracial was in itself a refutation of black nationalism as well as liberalism: “The L.A. upheaval and its sympathetic echoes throughout the country give the lie to the preachers of both white liberal and black nationalist despair.” But black nationalist despair was a product of decades of white liberal betrayals. The aftermath of the upheaval only fueled the despair, as the competition for scarce resources increased. This gives context to Farrakhan’s Million Man March a few years later under the call for black self-sufficiency. Instead of putting forward a scientific program to guide the working class along the road to power, we transformed Marxism into an idealistic spirit of rebellion.

We also described the world as defined by right-wing reaction instead of liberal triumphalism. Flowing from this, we set the main task to be beating back this reaction, presenting ourselves as unique in this regard. This was disorienting, to say the least. By painting the world as mired in a dark age with only us defending democratic rights, we could push the most basic liberal demands as inherently revolutionary.

Dems Posture as Pro-Immigrant

The consequences of this logic played out clearly in California. In 1994, the anti-immigrant Prop 187 backed by Republican governor Pete Wilson was headed toward approval. We argued that “a demonstration of some tens of thousands of workers and youth” was “too hot for most of the Democratic politicians to handle” when in fact the demos were led by the liberal Democrats.

In our article “Mobilize California Labor to Smash Anti-Immigrant Racism!” (WV No. 608, 14 October 1994), we cite a TV ad for Prop 187 and continue:

But the liberal leadership of the anti-Prop 187 movement was also breeding division and deadly dangerous to black people and Latinos. It was not possible to make any headway in the fight to improve conditions for the oppressed in alliance with the liberal forces responsible for gutting education and social services in the name of “enlightened” values. The capitalists pit one section of the working class against another to weaken its struggles and obscure that they are the real enemy. Black parents in L.A. had legitimate grievances, even while bilingual education had suddenly become the main need of most students in neighborhood schools. To counter the channeling of this anger in a right-wing direction, socialists should have fought against the divisive liberal schemes and for more resources for quality, integrated and bilingual education, at the bosses’ expense.

Instead, the WV No. 608 article attributed the problem entirely to the march of reaction, declaring: “The current sharp rise in anti-immigrant racism in the U.S. is part of a worldwide phenomenon, which has reached a fever pitch with fascist terror against immigrants in Europe.… With the destruction of the USSR, the imperialist bourgeoisies no longer feel the need to maintain the facade of granting asylum to refugees and are slamming the doors shut.” But from NAFTA and the “end of welfare as we know it” to immigration policy, the Clinton administration was the face of unfettered neoliberalism with a social-liberal veneer. His presidency represented a sharp shift in the Democratic Party away from any association with the New Deal and the left.

Nonetheless, simply declaring the Democrats to be as anti-immigrant as the Republicans reflected a refusal to take on liberalism’s “enlightened” pro-immigrant posture. The opposition to Pete Wilson helped activate California’s rapidly growing Latino population and turn them against the Republicans. Clinton’s motto was “a new covenant with the American People.” His gutting of welfare was couched as “empowering the poor and expanding the middle class.” His 1996 platform said: “We deplore those who use the need to stop illegal immigration as a pretext for discrimination.” It also offered that a Republican effort to bar the children of illegal immigrants from schools was “wrong, and forcing children onto the streets is an invitation for them to join gangs and turn to crime.”

In the mid 1990s, the new AFL-CIO chief and DSA member, John Sweeney, personified the shift in labor toward support for neoliberalism. He endorsed liberal values and appealed to women, black people and immigrants but rejected old-school trade-union struggle as strikes continued to decline and unions shrank. Sweeney worked closely with Clinton and was on the advisory commission that endorsed Clinton’s free-trade initiatives for the World Trade Organization.

Black rights were being thrown back in tandem with the unions, and segregation deepened. But this was uneven. For a layer of black households, income markedly increased throughout the ’90s, while the situation for younger, non-college educated black people became much worse.

In L.A., we needed to fight for black, white and Latino working-class unity in explicit opposition to the liberal Democratic “unity” in support of the new status quo. Instead, we denied that black people’s grievances were just, implicitly attributing those grievances to anti-immigrant backwardness, which could only serve to further drive black people into the arms of black nationalists. We also lectured Latinos that “the color line has always been the central, strategic question” in the U.S. But we failed to address why the fight against black oppression was their fight too. Latinos and black people have been and continue to be pitted against each other for jobs, education and housing. These divisions can only be overcome by motivating their shared material interests in joint class struggle against the capitalists and U.S. imperialism, not by moralistic browbeating.

How “Progressive” Identity Politics Played Out in L.A.

Our article, “Down With Capitalist Rulers’ War Against Blacks, Immigrants!” (WV No. 724, 26 November 1999) acknowledges that the sense of unity between black people and Latinos during the 1992 riots did not long survive the suppression and continues:

But that’s not what black and Latino community leaders in South L.A. were mainly doing. Karen Bass, for example, earned her spurs pushing “black-brown unity” behind Democratic Party liberals. The claim was that such multiclass coalitions linked to the city rulers would “uplift all of us.” Black people and Latinos competed for “representation,” but did so under the veneer of multiracial unity. This liberal model was not new, it just reflected the changed demographics. Tom Bradley, who was L.A.’s first black mayor from 1973 to ’93, initiated a coalition of black Angelenos together with representatives of the liberal Jewish community, the growing Latino and Asian populations and the unions.

The WV No. 724 article notes that “behind the term ‘people of color’ is a political outlook and implicit program” and correctly argues against the false notions that white workers are to blame for racial oppression and that all “people of color” share common interests. But “people of color” ideology denied the hard color line in America and was designed to “unite” black and Latino struggle on the basis of liberalism, which is inherently divisive and a dead end. The article treats liberalism not as the period’s dominant ruling-class ideology, but as the well-intentioned ideas of youth looking to fight racism.

Lastly, based on our years-long wrong assessment that “since the early ’90s the pendulum of bourgeois politics has been swinging ever more strongly toward anti-immigrant nativism,” the article projects “the repatriation of the 5.5 million ‘illegal’ immigrants now in the U.S.” This was all very disorienting for our local in Los Angeles, whose ethnic makeup had already radically changed by late 1999, when the article was written.

Karen Bass and the Community Coalition

In 2006, during the Bush Jr. years and in the lead-up to Obama’s election, L.A. was witness to massive protests for immigrant rights—over a million were in the streets on May Day. At this point, we were forced to deal with the changed demographics, but we never dealt with why our predictions did not happen. The demos were a classic popular-front movement of immigrant rights groups, liberal politicians, labor and the left. We recognized that the Democrats headed the movement, but we never fought to split it along class lines and provide revolutionary leadership to the immigrant rights struggle.

Our polemics against the left were not based on their alliance with the liberals, but on the scope of their demands—they called for amnesty, while we called for full citizenship rights. Similar to BLM, the immigrant rights movement had an underlying contradiction. There was an enormous desire to improve the status of immigrants, many of whom have toiled for over two decades without papers. But to truly achieve that requires confronting the interests of the bourgeoisie, which reaps massive profits from the superexploitation of the undocumented. Hence, the movement’s bourgeois liberal program could only lead to defeat for the Latino working masses. Today, the left looks back to these protests as a model to repeat. Here is a case of first time tragedy, second time farce, as the liberals and union leaders have other ideas.

Only shortly before, L.A. had elected its first Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. He was a UTLA teachers union organizer who placed himself in the tradition of Bradley’s multiracial coalition. The mayor and the head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, Maria Elena Durazo, were prominent in the immigrant rights protests. They both campaigned and worked for Obama, who after the 2008 economic crisis became notorious as the biggest ever Deporter-in-Chief, with over three million deported. The Democrats promised immigration reform, but undocumented Latino immigrants and their children got no real status and no economic ladder to climb, while living and working conditions have deteriorated, like for the rest of the working class. This betrayal led many Latinos to support Trump in 2016 and even more to do so last year, and some others to look to Chicano/Mexican nationalism in despair.

Mayor Karen Bass’s election in 2022 was seen as the culmination of decades of L.A.’s liberal “black-brown coalition” building. Like Brandon Johnson, who was elected Chicago mayor at the same time, she got her support from “progressive” black and Latino activists as well as labor—e.g., the “social justice” liberal-led teachers union, the transit and healthcare unions and the L.A. labor federation.

A month before the mayoral election, a recording was leaked of prominent Latino members of the L.A. City Council and the Latino head of the L.A. labor federation “discussing strategies for using the city’s redistricting process to maximize Latina/o political power and dilute the power of Black voters.” Nury Martinez, then head of the city council, spewed racist crap against the city’s Oaxacan indigenous and black communities. As NPR noted, “What Nury Martinez was heard saying on this leaked tape were just about the worst things you could say as a politician in a city like Los Angeles, where cross-racial coalitions are so important in politics.”

Erika Smith, a black columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the substance of the recording confirms the “worst fears of many Black Angelenos: that Latino politicians treat political power as a zero-sum game. That because of their numbers, they will take over the leadership of the city, and that because of their racist beliefs, they will ignore our needs.” Smith concluded that the incident had shattered the popular narrative of Los Angeles—and California more generally—being a “multicultural mecca, where Black and brown people build alliances to work together…”. The recordings captured that lurking beneath the multiracial veneer is the vicious competition over shrinking resources inherent to decaying U.S. capitalism.

What does L.A.’s black population need? The same things as the Latino and other working masses: reindustrialization and union jobs, decent integrated housing and education near where they work and free, quality healthcare. The only way to get anything for black, brown and working-class L.A. is to wage integrated class struggle against Karen Bass and the capitalist interests she represents. This requires a break with the liberal forces overseeing the devastation.

The liberal multiracial coalition paved the way for the current polarizations and rising reaction, driving black people and Latinos toward Trump. When running for mayor, Bass referred to the decades of progress since the 1990s when things were so bad and how all that was under threat. Her Community Coalition claimed to “unite the voices of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color to bring about social change together. CoCo works on the frontlines of social change to dismantle systemic racism and economic inequity.” But racist oppression and economic inequity have only gotten worse.

A 2016 research paper put out by Duke University, “The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles,” noted that black and Mexican households have 1 percent of the wealth of whites in Los Angeles—or one cent for every dollar. The median value of liquid assets was $0 and $7 for Mexicans and other Latinos, respectively, but was $110,000 for white households. At the same time, there is gentrification of the barrios. Between 2010 and 2016, the median monthly rent in Boyle Heights—a historic and impoverished Mexican area—jumped from around $1,500 to $2,200. Today, it’s $2,400. Actual mariachis were evicted from a building renamed “Mariachi Crossing” for the explicit purpose of making way for wealthy tenants.

A Program for L.A.

The DSA-LA, which currently has four elected Dems (over one-quarter of the seats) on the city council, put out a “Program for LA” for 2022 that correctly notes that in the early 1990s a “multiracial coalition” cohered “to challenge the Republican stronghold on politics and reinvigorate the stagnant Democratic Party establishment that managed the interests of a different faction, primarily business and real estate, within California’s capitalist class.” They also observe that “the dominant power structure within LA County can be described as a status quo coalition which invokes ‘progressive’ language while espousing neoliberal policies and views.”

But they then propose to rebuild the very alliance with liberalism that has screwed L.A.—which is what their electeds do in L.A. now. They essentially argue for a new multiracial coalition, with better liberal forces, to push a bunch of liberal reforms, while conveniently not mentioning Karen Bass. They say, “This coalition is not a single unified power” and that building an alternative to the status quo coalition will “require winning over some elements of the coalition”—i.e., break the liberal “progressives” away from the particularly hated Dems like those on the leaked recording.

The upshot, of course, is that they perniciously give a “socialist” cover to the worsening situation. One of their city council electeds, Eunisses Hernandez, tried to sell out her constituents who organized a tenants union and had been on a rent strike for almost five years, making a deal that favored the landlords at the expense of the tenants. The group of local DSA electeds includes the infamous Nithya Raman, a Zionist supporter of genocide, whom the DSA-LA endorsed based on her fight for “housing.” She voted for Bass’s new racist police chief, despite DSA-LA’s call on Bass to “reject and withdraw the nomination.” Another elected on city council, Hugo Soto-Martinez, puts forward useless legislation in response to mass deportations, such as “requiring businesses report ICE actions in the city.” So, now the bosses who profit from superexploitation are going to protect immigrants.

Both the DSA electeds and the left blame racism and the rise of reaction on Trumpism, but this obscures how liberalism has been at the root of the problem and responsible for many years of attacks and betrayals. Trump’s second election reflected the death of liberalism as U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology. The liberal “multiracial coalition” was given a hammer blow by Trump, who boasts of having won almost half the Latino vote and an increased share of the black vote. Bass, who wrote the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” a few years ago, has since appointed a white racist police chief in the name of “boosting officer morale” prior to the Olympics, when lots of “morale” will be needed to sweep skid row and lock up the black and brown poor. In response to the wildfires, she’s doing all she can to rebuild wealthy enclaves, while the housing crisis worsens for the vast majority of Angelenos.

The social decay inherent in the imperialist epoch can only be overcome by a class-independent fight against both wings of the imperialist bourgeoisie. For the workers movement to continue on the decades-old failed course of political blocs with liberals only ensures that there will be no actual fight to “make LA for the working people,” as the DSA claims to stand for—much less to defend immigrants and fight for black and brown liberation. Our task, in L.A. and nationally, is to bridge the gulf between the left and the black, Latino and immigrant working masses by showing that their struggles are connected to the immediate and historic interests of all workers.

Thousands of young Latinos have been out in the streets in L.A. to protest against Trump’s deportations, but they are isolated and abandoned by the liberals. The left in L.A., which was never very influential to begin with, is seen by workers either as irrelevant or as liberal sellouts. The central task for the left in L.A.—and for our party—is to overcome this divide in order to be able to guide much-needed defensive struggles. Hopefully, in laying out the lessons of past decades, this document will help us to intervene today to maximum effect.