Democrats Shield ICE – Mobilize Workers for Feds Out Now!

Abort Trump’s Police State!

Break with the Parties of Capital – For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Under the administration of Donald Trump, the United States is building out a police-state regime, in which the arbitrary actions of the executive power are virtually unchecked by courts, laws, Congress or the Constitution they swear by. The U.S. is not there yet, it is only in the early stages, gutting institutions and softening up the population with a barrage of militarized repression. The military is being repurposed for internal war and the various agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) turned into an all-purpose paramilitary police force. Spearheading this is Trump’s campaign of mass deportations of immigrants, who make up a vital section of the U.S. workforce, but the ultimate target is all working people. And it is to the power of the working class that we must look to fight this drive for naked capitalist dictatorship.

After issuing a tsunami of executive orders in the spring, declaring all sorts of “national emergencies,” the Trump regime got down to business unleashing police-state repression in Los Angeles, home to over 1 million immigrants who lack the papers demanded by the bosses’ state. A couple of weeks earlier, the fascistic White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called in top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and bellowed at them that if they didn’t start picking up at least 3,000 immigrants a day, they would be fired. No matter where immigrants came from or what their status is: detain first, ask questions later was the order. “Operation at Large” was launched as a nationwide plan, slated to involve over 5,000 federal agents and up to 21,000 National Guard troops (NBC News, 4 June).

L.A. – D.C. – Chicago: Feds Charge, People Resist, Democrats Bluster

The kickoff came on June 6 with raids on a day laborers site near a Home Depot and at a garment wholesaler in downtown L.A. Soon after federal agents in camouflage arrived at the second stop, community organizers and protesters alerted by rapid response networks gathered, allegedly blocking ICE vehicles. Agents singled out and pushed union leader David Huerta of SEIU-United Service Workers West to the ground, injuring his head. That evening several hundred demonstrators protested outside the federal detention center demanding the immigrants be freed. The next day, President Trump issued an executive order federalizing 2,000 National Guard troops and deploying 700 Marines to Los Angeles. The order was written to apply wherever protests against ICE operations “are occurring, or are likely to occur.”¹ So, anywhere.

In the following days, there were large protests in L.A. against the Guard and federal agents outside the detention center, including activists of the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth. Meanwhile, the feds were rampaging around Latino neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East L.A., and in once predominantly black cities like Compton, which is now two-thirds Latino. June is graduation month. At one local high school, the principal advised families to arrive an hour earlier than the scheduled time and had immigrant rights advocates posted outside as lookouts. Several schools closed out the school year by returning to remote learning so immigrant students would not have to risk being detained on their way to school, and the children of immigrants would not have to fear returning home to find their parents gone.

The raids have been carried out with wanton violence. One L.A. video shows unmarked vehicles ramming a car, with masked agents pulling the driver out and throwing him to the ground. Another shows masked men breaking the windows of a truck in a Home Depot parking lot when the driver refuses to open the door. A third shows la migra (immigration cops) swarming a street vendor. The attackers look like terrorists because they are: the aim of all this harassment and violence is to terrorize immigrants and others. Like the U.S. bombing of Iraq in the 2003 invasion, it is supposed to produce “shock and awe,” but on the domestic terrain. The same on July 7 when a line of agents on horseback trotted around a near-empty Mac­Arthur Park, camera crew in tow: the point was to intimidate, and to assert that the feds can go wherever they want.

Likewise with the July 10-11 raids by 400-500 federal agents on two cannabis farms near L.A., where feds teargassed protesters and detained all the workers, arresting 361, while one died in the chaos. These massive shows of force, random detentions and gratuitous violence are all highly illegal, racist and unconstitutional, violating the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” as well as the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments against depriving anyone of liberty “without due process of law.” But although a California federal judge prohibited these random abductions, on September 8 the U.S. Supreme Court, in an emergency ruling, okayed stops on the basis of looking Latino, speaking Spanish and/or being engaged in manual labor or a low-wage job. It’s blatant racial and class profiling.

Overall in the Los Angeles area, around 5,000 immigrants were rounded up by feds since the militarized June raids. In August, Trump moved on to Washington, D.C., federalizing the entire local National Guard and bringing in hundreds more troops while flooding the streets with federal agents. Supposedly intended to fight crime, this “surge” by the feds sent immigration detentions in D.C. up to 1,400. But while prosecutors were instructed to bring maximum charges against protesters, Washington grand juries rejected at least eight felony indictments, an unheard-of number, and in cases that went to trial on lesser charges, several resulted in acquittals or hung juries. So while the feds are pushing hard to reach the Trump administration quota, the population in targeted cities is pushing back.

This was shown most dramatically in Chicago, where 3,000+ immigrants have been abducted since “Operation Midway” began in early September. In neighborhood after neighborhood, hundreds of residents have come into the streets to protest the marauding ICE and Border Patrol agents, in a number of cases chasing off snatch squads trying to seize their neighbors. The Democratic mayor (Brandon Johnson) and governor (JB Pritzker) have talked tough against Trump, who has threatened to arrest them. They have also taken some steps siding with protesters, such as providing official signs and whistles to alert against la migra. But Illinois state police and Chicago cops have acted as a shield for the feds. The Democrats argue that the National Guard isn’t needed because their cops are doing just fine in protecting the federal immigrant hunters.²

Similarly in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass grabbed headlines over the Mac­Arthur Park provocation, telling Border Patrol regional commander Gregory Bovino that ICE “needs to leave … right now!” But ICE did not leave, and although city officials insist that their “sanctuary” policies haven’t changed, LAPD cops are ever-present when there are protests against the feds, to “ensure public safety,” i.e., to beat up the protesters. California governor Gavin Newsom slammed Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, but had state highway patrol officers keep protesters away from the marijuana farm raid. In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered Metro Police to work alongside the federal agents and National Guard.³ In other words, Democratic elected officials order their cops to ride shotgun for the immigrant snatchers.

While they may mouth off, the Democrats have done nothing to stop the mass deportations of potentially millions of immigrants. They hold flag-waving “No Kings” protests, but have done nothing against Trump’s 217 executive orders (so far) in his second presidency, including patently illegal and unconstitutional measures, beyond having attorneys general of “blue” (Democratic) states file court suits. Once those suits get past the appeals courts, they will be shot down by the Supreme Court, which Trump owns. The dead-end “strategy” of looking to the state apparatus reflects the fact that the Democrats, too, have governed by executive orders, have unleashed racist police repression, have built up the deportation machine, expelling far more immigrants than Trump has, and have helped lay the basis for the police state now coming into being.

In doing so, as a partner party of Wall Street and the Pentagon, waging endless imperialist wars from the Middle East to Ukraine while destroying workers’ jobs “at home” with “free trade” pacts, the Democrats led to the election – twice – of Trump, the would-be strongman who is seeking unlimited, dictatorial powers. This underscores the urgent need to mobilize the power of the working class to stop the deportation of immigrants and to stop the drive toward police-state rule. It drives home the call to break with Democrats, Republicans and all parties and politicians representing capital and to build a revolutionary workers party as a champion of all the oppressed, which is key to defending the fundamental rights of all now under attack.

War on Immigrants, War on the Left

The Democrats may say “stop ICE” or “stop the raids” – and many don’t even say that – but they are not calling to stop the deportations. They are essentially saying, “we can do deportations better,” without federal troops and without so much Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). But for Trump, the troops, the masks, the unmarked cars, the beatings, the violation of laws and longstanding legal precedent, the legal fictions and outright lies, are all integral to his mass deportations program as the vehicle to impose unbridled police rule. Such rule is what Marxists call Bonapartism, a “strong state” regime which, while preserving (some of) the trappings of parliamentary “democracy” is based on asserting unlimited executive power through the military/police apparatus of repression, of which the courts are an integral component.⁴

Many liberal Democrats and reformist leftists call Trump a “fascist.” No, as we have explained, he’s a would-be dictator, but the U.S. president is not the head of a mass fascist movement that serves as a battering ram to smash the workers movement. The bourgeois rulers do not presently need that instrument because their class rule is not now threatened by a radicalized proletariat. Yes, real fascists exist and are a real danger. But what significant capitalist sectors see the need for today is a beefed-up repressive regime to deal with inevitable unrest resulting from the decay of U.S. imperialism. Donald Trump fills the bill. He certainly traffics in fascist rhetoric, and significant parts of his MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement – including several in his administration – have a fascistic, or fascist-like, character. His target is the Democrats and radical leftists, which he ridiculously lumps together.

A good example of how the mass deportation drive fits into this was when Kristi Noem, the sociopathic DHS secretary, went to Los Angeles on June 12, after the initial militarized workplace raids and proclaimed: “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor Newsom and this mayor placed on this country.” Newsom and Bowers are certainly no “socialists.” (Newsom called to roll back Medi-Cal health insurance for undocumented immigrants and had a chummy podcast with Charlie Kirk.) But Noem’s “liberation” army is the hundreds of federal agents, particularly ICE and the Border Patrol, part of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the DHS, acting as a private paramilitary force to “disappear” immigrants and sow terror in the population.

In this context of a federal government itching to unleash heavy-duty repression against what it sees as the left, on September 10, Kirk, the leader of the fascistic Christian- nationalist Turning Point USA national student/youth organization, was assassinated on a Utah campus. This had the impact of a bolt of lightning, delivering a huge electrical jolt to the drive toward a police state. In a message from the White House that night, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.” While little is publicly known about the views of the alleged shooter, who has been kept under wraps by prosecutors, he was certainly no leftist and reportedly was an avid devotee of militaristic video games. Yet the next day, when Trump was asked if he had a message for his followers, he replied that “we have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

Some fascistic MAGA loudmouths such as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones declared that Kirk’s killing means “war,” while Elon Musk declared “The Left is the party of murder.” As the deafening drumbeat of right-wing praise for Kirk kept up, so did calls for reprisals against any criticism of this purveyor of racist, homophobic, transphobic and antisemitic bigotry. This is government-sponsored witch-hunting. Broadcasting the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House, Vice President JD Vance called to report to their employers anyone who made negative remarks about the slain MAGA icon. Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi said that the Department of Justice would “target” Kirk critics for “hate speech.” Suspensions and firings of teachers were reported in at least 24 states, while in Texas some 200 teachers were investigated.

In this orgy of witch-hunting, a web site, Charlie’s Murderers, was set up that gathered the names of “thousands,” publishing many with details about the targeted individuals’ employers, location and social media accounts. And Trump’s words about brutally beating leftists were not just bluster, they were marching orders for the actual fascists. Recall how in the 2020 election campaign he told the Proud Boys to “stand back, and stand by” – which they did. And when Trump called for all to come to Washington on 6 January 2021, where “it will be wild,” the Proud Boys, III Percenters and other fascist action groups responded, bringing an arsenal and leading the racist lynch mob storming of Congress. But this time the calls to avenge the potential future top leader of a mass fascist movement are backed up by the full force of the federal government.

One racist right-wing commentator called the slaying of Kirk “the American Reichstag fire” and called for “a complete crackdown on the left” (New York Times, 11 September). The writer clearly understood, and wanted to emulate, how the 1933 burning of the German parliament was falsely blamed by Nazis on leftists, and then used by the month-old Hitler regime as the pretext for mass arrests of Communists. And at the September 21 memorial for Kirk, Trump deputy Miller eulogized the Turning Point USA leader saying that “we (the MAGA movement) are the storm.” That eerily echoed the words of Nazi leader Josef Goebbels at the funeral of Horst Wessel, a local leader of the paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) goon squads, killed by two Communists in 1930. The Nazi propaganda chief turned the street thug into a martyr and threatened, “get ready for the storm.” The Horst-Wessel-Lied became the Nazi SA Brownshirts’ marching song.

So yes, in the United States today there are strong echoes of Nazism and other mass fascist movements of the past. This underscores that we must use every opportunity to organize mass struggle bringing out the enormous potential power of the multinational working class. And that is, above all, a question of leadership.

Trump’s Big Lie: NSPM-7 Targets the Left as “Terrorists”

Trump understood that Kirk’s killing was an opportunity to step up the drive for a police state. On September 22 he issued an executive order designating “antifa” (for antifascist) a “domestic terrorist organization.” And on September 25, he signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a Stephen Miller special, supposedly for “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” If last year’s go-to technique for witch-hunters was to equate anti-Zionist opposition to the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza with antisemitism, this year’s weaponized label of choice is to brand leftists as “terrorists,” and liberal donors as funders who “aid and abet” “criminal conduct.” Hours before, it was reported that U.S. attorneys around the country were instructed to open investigations into George Soros’ Open Society foundation.

Anyone with the least knowledge of the radical and not-so-radical left in the United States knows that “antifa” is not a single organization but a loose movement to counter fascists with “direct action.” By labeling active opposition to fascist provocations as “terrorist,” the would-be dictator in the White House wants to target the entire left. NSPM-7 lists as “indicia” (signs) of “terrorism” such things as “self-described ‘anti-fascism’” and opposition to “foundational American principles” such as “support for law enforcement and border control.” Other “indicia” are “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

So with those indicators, Trump’s Memorandum calls for “a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations” so that “law enforcement can intervene … before they result in violent political acts,” as well as to investigate “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons.” NSPM-7 is an all-in-one combo of Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) chief J. Edgar Hoover’s 1960s COINTELPRO program of disruption and murderous repression of leftist and black militant groups with Senator Joe McCarthy’s 1950s anti-communist witch-hunting. Equating anti-fascism and anti-capitalism with “terrorism” is blatantly false – but when has that ever bothered Trump, a past master of the Hitlerian Big Lie? It might not suffice to convict any group or person, but it is quite sufficient as an excuse to “investigate,” “disrupt” and worse.

The Memorandum authorizes Joint Terrorism Task Forces (of which there are some 200 across the U.S.) to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” not only groups or individuals labeled “terrorist” but also any engaged in “intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity” (which is what the feds call protests against fascist or fascistic outfits) or to “obstruct the rule of law” (how they label resisting ICE). NSPM-7 refers to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles and Portland as “riots” and “attacks” on ICE and CBP, and defines “rioting,” “looting,” “trespass,” “destruction of property” and “civil disorder” as “terrorist acts.” The Justice Department is tasked with drawing up a watch list of “domestic terrorist organizations” for Trump … via “Homeland Security Advisor” Stephen Miller. 

Again, all this is done by decree – executive orders and presidential memoranda which have the force of law. But in this case, Trump has no need for new legislation. The “legal” basis for much of this was laid under the USA PATRIOT Act rammed through Congress in the wake of the 11 September 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the bipartisan vote of the overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats. Throw in the all-purpose RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) conspiracy laws, COINTELPRO and decades of police spying on leftists, and the feds are good to go.

We’ve seen this before. Our predecessor organization, the Spartacist League (SL) when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism, sued the FBI and U.S. attorney general in 1983 over the Reagan administration’s “Domestic Security/Terrorism Guidelines” and investigations of the SL under those witch-hunting criteria. Like the Trump administration’s new Memorandum, those “guidelines” similarly went after left groups exercising their constitutionally protected rights of speech and advocacy, smearing them with the “terrorism” label. After a year, the government agreed to withdraw its slanderous “definition” of the SL, in a stipulation signed by one Rudy Giuliani as U.S. attorney (see “FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” Workers Vanguard No. 368, 7 December 1984).⁵

Repurposing the Military for Internal War

Shortly after the issuing of the “little-known” NSPM-7, and simultaneous with the military-style deportation raid on a south Chicago apartment building,⁶ the Trump administration summoned all 800+ of the military’s general and flag officers, the entire top brass of the U.S. armed forces, to a command performance on September 30 at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia outside Washington. There they would hear Pete Hegseth, secretary of what Trump has rebaptized the War Department, and the U.S. president on the “warrior ethos.” Such a meeting has not occurred before in living memory and one retired senior officer wondered on social media if it might be a replay of a surprise assembly of German generals in 1935 where they were “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.” Hegseth replied, “Cool story, general.”

What was actually said at the meeting was, first, that the military must become more “lethal,” and second, that the main war is against “the enemy within,” an ominous phrase harking back to the heyday of McCarthyism. Hegseth said he was out to get rid of “woke garbage” that “made us less lethal and less capable.” He would “untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” just “maximum lethality.”

Then came Trump, saying that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now,” because “we’re under invasion from within.” As for which cities, he said:

“The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape ... the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats. What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

Trump went on:

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military – National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid….

“How about Portland? Portland, Oregon where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor, ‘Sir, please don’t come in. We don’t need you.’ I said, well, unless they’re playing false tapes, this look like World War II. Your place is burning down.”

And, of course, Fox media was replaying tapes from the 2020 mass protests against federal forces in Portland. Not that this glaring discrepancy mattered.

Trump highlighted that in August he signed an executive order to set up a “quick reaction force” to “quell civil disturbances.” According to the Washington Post (12 August) those plans call for a force of 600 National Guard troops, stationed at two bases, one in Arizona and the other in Alabama, to be on call at all times and ready to deploy within one hour to any city in the U.S. In addition, according to Trump’s August 25 order, by 1 January 2026, each state will be required to have units of at least 500 troops each to serve as part of a rapid-reaction force. Under the order, those troops would be “deputized” to enforce federal law. Trump is trying to get around the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibitions against using the military for domestic repression by turning federalized Guard units into a de facto standing military force.

Retired Major General Randy Manner, a former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that the order was “100% political”: “The administration is trying to desensitize the American people to get used to American armed soldiers in combat vehicles patrolling the streets of America,” He added that the “purpose is to, quite frankly, dominate and police the American people.” When you add Hegseth’s orders about “maximum lethality” and Trump’s talk of a “war from within” in “Democrat cities,” what the administration is building up to is shooting down protesters in the U.S. This is shades of Operation Garden Plot, the code name of Richard Nixon’s infamous “civil disturbance” plan drafted in the late 1960s, using the Watts, Newark and Detroit upheavals as a pretext, that included locking up thousands of U.S. antiwar protesters on military bases.

In the Oval Office September 25 event when NSPM-7 was signed, the ubiquitous Stephen Miller declared that “This is the first time in American history that there is an ‘all-of-government’ effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism,” which he portrayed as a giant, well-funded enterprise going back to the Black Lives Matter “riots.” Evidently, this Big Lie operation to smear and repress the left also includes the military. Donald Trump is declaring his intent to do what Nixon and Reagan did not achieve. For that he needs the machinery of a Bonapartist “strong state” based on unrestricted military/police power. This is a clear and present danger not only to immigrants and radical leftists (both real and imagined) but to many other sectors of the U.S. populace and to all defenders of democratic rights. The issue is how to fight and defeat it.

“Deep State” or Trump State, It’s the Capitalist State

In response to Trump’s rapid-fire assault on a host of government agencies and the civil service which for years he has labeled the “Deep State,” the Democrats and their various front groups (Moveon.org, 50501, Indivisible, Mobilize.org, etc.) have organized several nationwide marches which have been very large, and very impotent. At the liberals’ “No Kings” marches in mid-June and mid-October, many of the speakers accused Trump of hijacking “our democracy.” But for working people and oppressed social sectors, it is not “our democracy” but their pseudo-democracy, in which both parties represent capital and trample on the interests of the workers, immigrants, black people, women, lesbian, gay and transgender people.

Both parties have ruled by decree (through executive orders) in recent years, in good part because the U.S. is so sharply and narrowly divided. Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote in the 2024 elections, against 48.3% for the Democrats’ Kamala Harris, a 1.5% spread. Yet the MAGA Republicans claim a mandate to ram through their reactionary agenda. The Democrats, for their part, look in vain to the courts and the military – organs of repression of the capitalist state – to rein Trump in. The day that NSPM-7 was passed, the liberal media were focused on the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, who used some of the same conspiracy laws to go after leakers of government secrets like Edward Snowden that Trump would now use against the left. Biden used the courts as a political club against Trump, as Trump is now using them against Democrats.

Meanwhile, Trumpers are going all out to keep their grip on office. As the 2026 midterm elections draw near, in “red” states like Florida and Texas, Republicans are pushing for control of election boards and are gerrymandering like crazy, redrawing the election district lines to maximize their seats. In “blue” states like New York and California, Democrats are doing the same. Trump muses about a third term, which would be unconstitutional. But recall how in 2024 he told a Christian “Believers’ Summit” hosted by Turning Point that if they voted for him in November they “won’t have to vote anymore.” And don’t forget how Trump is seeking to abolish by executive order birthright citizenship, which was established by the 14th Amendment as a direct result of the Civil War.  

At the same time as Trump is readying military forces to wage a war against the “enemy within,” the administration is moving with breakneck speed to integrate numerous government data bases (IRS, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and more) into a population registry far more extensive than what a national ID card would have, including individual residence, financial, medical, biometric and surveillance information. Billions of dollars in multiyear contracts have been awarded to the likes of Palantir and Amazon. Through “public-private partnerships,” so beloved of the Bill and Hillary Clinton Democrats, the Trump administration is cementing a genuine “surveillance state.”

This drive toward police-state rule is not unique to Trump or to the United States, but is an international phenomenon reflecting the rulers’ need for a fortified repressive apparatus to deal with the consequences of capitalist decay. In the United States, masked paramilitary squads are hunting down immigrants on the streets and in their homes while investors are in a wild frenzy, throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into the artificial intelligence (AI) “boom.” Over $350 billion in corporate investment is expected this year in AI companies (cloud computing, chips, data centers) that are burning through cash, many far from profitability. The resulting stock market “bubble” of share prices exceeding earnings is by far the largest in history, by one count 17 times bigger than the “dot.com” bubble of 2000-2001. When the bubble bursts, there could be bank runs and riots.

In Europe, social programs are gutted (Britain’s National Health Service) or dismantled (Italy’s “citizenship income”) as military expenditures soar. Reformists put forward “butter not guns” proposals, as if it is a matter of budget priorities, but it is far more than that. The whole edifice of “welfare state” capitalism, erected after World War II to stave off the threat of red revolution, is shaking. As former Communist and Socialist parties turn to the right or are dissolved and the unions are weakened, reactionary forces are strengthened. As in the U.S., economic discontent is being directed against immigrants, and in the absence of powerful opposition by a revitalized workers movement, fascistic and outright fascist parties may take the reins of power in more European countries. And whether “center-left” or far right are in office, police repression will grow.

The ultimate purpose of erecting a “strong state” is to regiment and discipline the population for war. The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have called to mobilize the power of the workers movement to defeat the imperialists’ war drive, and their militarized repression. This issue is particularly acute in Italy, where the far-right government is led by the fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) of premier Giorgia Meloni, a booster of Trump and Musk. Last May, her government implemented a decree-law that would outlaw blocking railroads and highways, occupying ports and train stations, even picketing by striking workers. The Italian section of the LFI called in its newspaper, L’internazionalista (May 2025), “For a Real General Strike to Stop the ‘Security’ Decree and Arms Build-Up!”

But while Italy has a right-wing, NATO imperialist government, it also has a powerful and militant working class. In September and October, in response to calls for “general strikes” by militant “rank-and-file” unions (sindacati di base), particularly port workers, to shut down the country “for Gaza,” millions of protesters went into the streets and paralyzed the country, twice. On September 22, they were 1 million and on October 3, when they were joined by CGIL, the largest union federation, responding to the Israeli attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla, 2 million came out in 100 cities. Both times, they shut down the ports and rail lines, occupied train stations and highways, picketed arms manufacturers and filled the plazas. The power of the working class was mobilized, and with that they turned the “security law” into a dead letter, for now.⁷

Escalating internal repression is part of the home front of the war drive as the imperialists are careening toward a thermonuclear World War III aimed at counterrevolution in China and dismembering Russia. European rulers are pushing to militarize all of society, from readying railroads and highways, to preparing hospitals for mass casualties, bringing back conscription and introducing “patriotic education” in the schools, as Trump has demanded in the U.S. But they have a problem: the people. In different opinion polls, some 60% of Germans say they would not defend Germany if it is attacked, and among youth upwards of 75% don’t want to die for Deutschland.

Trump uses the Justice Department to wreak vengeance on his personal enemies, treats government coffers as a piggy bank to enrich friends and relatives, raises and lowers tariffs erratically and declares “national emergencies” (nine so far in 2025) to enable his rule by decree. All this makes a mockery of claims that U.S. “democracy” represents the “rule of law,” or what continental European legal theorists, following German philosopher Immanuel Kant, call a Rechtstaat (state of law), as opposed to arbitrary rule. But the drive toward fortifying the state and sidelining or suppressing popular resistance – such as over racist police murder in the U.S. and against genocide in Gaza – is pushed forward by all the capitalist parties. This underscores the basic fact that, whether it is the “Deep State” or a Trump state, it’s the capitalist state.

Increasing institutional Bonapartism has been a fundamental characteristic of imperialist “democracies” since the start of the anti-Soviet Cold War following World War II. Previously liberals referred to it as a “national security state.” But to reverse the speeded-up push for an armor-plated “strong state,” to abort Trump’s police state, no band-aids like calls for court reforms, moves for impeachment (so that the fascistic ideologue Vance could be president?) or appeals to non-existent “international law” will have any effect. It is necessary instead to organize to bring down the capitalist system, which in its death agony inevitably gives rise to police states and imperialist war. The fight for international socialist revolution is the only hope for humanity.

That capitalism is dying is hard to miss. Just look around you. Lots of shiny gadgets, AI chatbots spewing reactionary garbage, public education and public health under attack, food banks running out of food, racist cop terror in the streets … for immigrants and everyone.

What is to be done? The crisis of humanity, as Leon Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program, the founding program of the Fourth International, is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The conditions for revolution are not only ripe but overripe. What’s posed is the struggle to forge a genuinely socialist, revolutionary communist vanguard, rooted in key sectors of the working class. The League for the Fourth International seeks to cohere the nucleus of that vanguard, forging revolutionary workers parties to lead the struggles of the working people and oppressed, to defend embattled democratic rights and to put a stop to the mad rush toward a world war and irradiated barbarism that threatens the survival of humanity. This is the task we must fulfill as millions around the world seek answers and a path forward in the face of capitalism’s stark decay. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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