Progressive Labor Party salutes the bravery of the Los Angeles-area working class in defending our immigrant sisters and brothers in the face of a vicious attack by State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump and the masked thugs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response to state violence by the kkkops in L.A. and other cities, workers’ resistance—most of it peaceful, some of it violent in turn—pushed Trump to retreat and order a five-day pause on deportation at farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, and hotels. The capitalist bosses are terrified of mass worldwide uprisings that strike at the heart of their rotten, racist system. They’ve been shaken by antiracist fightback after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and by the militant response to Zionist genocide in Gaza. They’re worried that the next wave of protests could light the match for an even broader rebellion.
The U.S. rulers have a dilemma they can’t solve. On the one hand, they absolutely need labor by immigrants, including more than eight million undocumented immigrants, to keep their fragile system afloat. On the other hand, they need racist scapegoating to divide and discipline the working class. As Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and the U.S. threatens to set off an all-out war in the Middle East, global instability is deepening by the day. Confronted by a rising China and their own relative decline, the U.S. bosses are on red alert for World War Three. Trump’s nazi-style immigration raids—like the mass deportations of Joe Biden before him—reflect the endangered state of U.S. imperialism. Regardless of which lying politician gets elected president the next time around, the bosses will be forced to keep moving toward open fascism, the parasites’ last-ditch move to protect their profits in a time of international capitalist crisis.
In the face of this escalating state terror, L.A.’s antiracist rebellion shows the need for organizing by Progressive Labor Party for communism—for a society run by and for the working class. More has been accomplished in a few days on the streets than over decades of useless voting for ruling-class stooges. It is clearer than ever that a system that runs on the racist super-exploitation of immigrants (see bottom section) and Black workers, and the exploitation of all workers, must be smashed for all time.
ICE and LAPD: two faces of fascism
In early June, the Trump regime kicked off a mass deportation campaign by invading the so-called sanctuary city and county of L.A. It started small, with federal agents lying in wait at the downtown courthouse to kidnap immigrant workers as their cases were dismissed. Then, on June 6, ICE descended on a garment factory and two Home Depot parking lots. But they underestimated the power of working-class unity. Neighborhoods quickly mobilized to defend their immigrant siblings. ICE vehicles and gestapo agents were attacked.
This kicked off a wave of anti-ICE demonstrations now into its second week. The phony stance of liberal L.A. politicians was exposed when the militarized Los Angeles Police Department charged in to maintain “public order” with horses, batons, chemical weapons, stun grenades, and “less lethal” bullets. Then Trump mobilized the National Guard and Marines. Each night, the LAPD has ramped up their violent attacks on the protesters.
While ICE has been deployed in several Democratic-run cities, including Chicago and New York, Los Angeles represents the first large-scale kidnapping and deportation operation—and, according to Trump, just the beginning of his mass immigration crackdown. So be on the lookout for more ICE raids in a city near you. Arch-racist Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, is pushing ICE to deport 3,000 workers a day (LA Times 6/6), or more than one million per year. While these numbers are dwarfed by the annual totals of expulsions, returns, and removals under Biden, Trump’s more open fascist terror is a declaration of class war. Workers must stand together to reject it.
Fight fascism in the streets
For now, the multiracial, multigenerational movement in Los Angeles is mostly leaderless. But it has great potential. PLP is out in the streets alongside these militant fighters, bringing our base and communist politics to the movement. We must be clear that no protests for reforms, no matter how militant, can “fix” immigration under the profit system. Capitalism relies on racism, sexism, and nationalism to divide and exploit workers, to drive down wages, and to promote patriotism and war.
The capitalist system is inherently violent. As history shows, fascism can be defeated only by mass violence by a communist-organized working class. Whenever protests threaten the ruling class, whether violent or not, they will always be met with violent repression. The fascist terror in L.A. is just a taste of what’s to come.
It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism
Trump fronts for an “America First,” isolationist wing of the U.S. ruling class, the Small Fascists who promote open gutter racism, white supremacy, and a predominantly white military. But as vile as they are, their competition, the Big Fascists of finance capital, have their own despicable history of scapegoating immigrants. The Obama administration built the border concentration camps now being used by Trump. Biden increased ICE funding to disappear immigrant workers.
The immigration crackdown is just one part of the rulers’ drive to build fascism and prepare the U.S. working class for imperialist war. The bosses need to win masses of workers to support their war efforts. They need workers to accept authority without question and develop hatred for the “other.” The fight by California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines is phony to its core. Bass has no problem with beefing up her cops’ budget and sending them out to maim protesters. Newsom has no problem with denying immigrants healthcare. The real issue is that California’s bosses make huge profits by exploiting immigrant labor in the garment, agriculture, food service, and hospitality industries. It’s the job of Newsom and Bass to protect those profits, no matter how many heads they need to crack to do so.
Mass anger needs communist leadership
We’re seeing a lot of spontaneous, mass anger among the youth and workers of L.A. County against ICE, Trump, the local cops, and—to an extent—the capitalist system. Tens of thousands of workers have put their bodies on the line to try to stop the kidnappings. Some are prepared to fend off ICE with rocks and bottles. But as of now, a void of leadership has enabled liberal racist politicians, union hacks, and fake leftists to push identity politics, nationalism, pacifism, and the Democratic Party’s reformist line. There is little or no class analysis of what the bosses are doing.
Whether this movement will be sustained remains to be seen. Much like Black workers, immigrant workers have a long tradition of fighting back against racism and capitalist super-exploitation. As fascism intensifies, PLP’s challenge is to embed ourselves more deeply with workers, soldiers, and students by leading class struggles on the job and in the schools and colleges and community, and to move masses into the streets and other open battles with the class enemy. To overthrow the bosses and their blood-sucking system, local battles can and must lead to the mass violence of communist revolution.
Anti-migrant racist terror is in the U.S.A’s DNA
No capitalist country has a more violent or shameful history of superexploiting and scapegoating immigrant workers than the U.S. In the 1870s, Chinese workers were brought in to perform the deadly work of completing the transcontinental railroad. When the work was done, they were terrorized and deported. In similar fashion, Eastern European immigrant workers were crucial to early 20th century industrialization and garment bosses’ super-profits. When mainly Jewish women led mass strikes against brutal sweatshop conditions, they were assaulted by police and branded as “inferior” by the racist eugenics movement. In the 1940s, the mass internment of Japanese immigrants, many of them U.S. citizens, helped the U.S. bosses build racist war fever for their bloody, imperialist conflict with Japan.
The most obvious model for Trump’s current terror campaign is “Operation Wetback,” the mass deportations carried out under the “moderate” Eisenhower administration in 1954. The rise of corporate farming in the U.S. Southwest required a huge reserve army of super-exploited migrant laborers to generate maximum profits. Based on a 1942 U.S.-Mexico agreement, large numbers of Mexican immigrants were categorized as temporarily legal field workers under the Bracero Program. But the agriculture bosses’ insatiable profit demands required many more workers, including the undocumented. In response to class struggle against unlivable working conditions for both legal and undocumented workers, they militarized the border and brutally targeted Mexican immigrants. In the horrific spirit of ethnic cleansing, one million workers, including many U.S. citizens, were deported. Hundreds of thousands were sent away in boats that a Congressional committee later compared to “eighteenth-century slave ships” (http://newrepublic.com/article/132988/operation-wetback-revisited).