By East Bay Syndicalists Group
Since Trump was inaugurated and brought in billionaire oligarch Elon Musk and his hacker team to do a wrecking operation on many programs and agencies of the federal government, Trump and his team have moved in a rapid-fire way to disorient the opposition with a continuous stream of outrageous statements, illegal executive orders, firings of thousands of federal government workers and slashing of funding for services. The regime is pursuing a “flood the zone” strategy — shock-and-awe to distract, disorient and overwhelm the media and the opposition. Threats and intimidation tactics aim to paralyze with fear. This makes it ever more important to emphasize that organizing and collective action give us the power to fight back.
In the US constitutional structure, Congress has the power to allocate funds, pass laws and set up agencies and independent administrative boards. Once these actions are approved, a president — or members of his cabinet — cannot simply shut down these agencies or funding streams on their own. Doing so is illegal. For one thing, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the president to spend every cent Congress has appropriated for the purpose Congress has designated. In a recent warning to Trump, Republican Senator Susan Collins writes: “Just as the president does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate.” This is true for all spending that Congress allocates for a particular purpose.
But Trump rejects this feature of the constitution. He’s said “I am the law.” The Trump administration now faces huge numbers of lawsuits. Just the wrongful termination lawsuits are likely to cost the taxpayers many millions of dollars. As one labor attorney put it: “These firings they’re conducting without following the law will result in thousands of former federal employees being owed back pay, plus interest, plus benefits, plus attorney fees. When the bill comes it will be monumental.”
The violations of the law are an intentional feature of the MAGA regime — it’s an attempt to blow up the guardrails of the US constitution — to establish a unitary, autocratic presidential power. Because the US constitution is not very democratic and the president has the most powerful role, this was always a potential danger. Trump no doubt anticipated the legal challenges now filtering through the courts. A federal judge has ordered re-instatement of thousands of federal employees in case brought by the federal employee union, American Federation of Government Employees. And another court has ordered re-instatement in further agencies, in a case brought by state governments. Trump appealed the ruling but has now agreed to rehire 25,000 people who were fired. The MAGA administration hopes it can blow away longstanding constitutional guardrails with the assistance of the right-wing political hacks on the Supreme Court and a gutless Republican majority in Congress.
Another MAGA tactic is intimidation. Reuters reported that several federal judges in the Washington, DC area had received pizzas sent anonymously to their homes. Police interpreted this gesture as “a form of intimidation meant to convey that a target’s address is known.” The Trump regime is also likely to ask the supine Republican congress to ratify its actions.
Elon and his muskrats claim they are finding “corruption, fraud and waste.” Meanwhile, Trump illegally fired the independent watchdogs whose actual job is to carefully ferret out “corruption, fraud and waste.” Congress set up various administrative boards over the years whose terms of office continue across the four-year presidential terms. This was designed to protect their independence. An example is the National Labor Relations Board, which can provide some protection for workers — such as reinstatement if they are fired for “talking union.” But Trump illegally fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board and appointed a replacement who is an anti-union hack. Trump has also issued an illegal executive order banning union rights or collective bargaining for many federal employees. According to Labor Notes, “Early estimates have the move affecting 700,000 to 1 million federal workers, including at the Veterans Administration and the Departments of Defense, Energy, State, Interior, Justice, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and even Agriculture.” This attack has echoes of Reagan smashing the air traffic controller’s union in 1981. At this point Trump has not moved to attack the postal unions. The half million postal workers are the largest unionized federal government workforce.
The Trump-Musk wrecking operation also took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Board which has returned millions to people who have been charged illegal bank fees or other corporate scams. Although this was blocked by a judge, Trump is appealing these judicial rulings. Trump has also illegally seized the post office — firing the US Postal Service board of governors.
The firings are already having bad effects. Trump’s new boss for the Veterans Administration, Doug Collins, plans on cutting 80,000 jobs from the VA. Among the first thousand VA employees fired were “staffers working on treatments for vets with cancer, respiratory problems, missing limbs, and opioid addiction.” The Agriculture Department was forced to rehire 6,000 fired employees, mainly forest maintenance workers at the Forest Service, after the Merit Systems Protection Board has ordered their reinstatement. Meanwhile, Leland Dudek — Trump’s new boss for Social Security — plans to fire half the agency’s 60,000 employees and close many Social Security offices. This will make it very difficult for people to get setup for payouts if they’ve just retired. Wait times at Social Security offices will become unbearable. Underfunding services is used by right wing administrations to diminish public support and set the stage for privatization. Privatizing Social Security has been a Wall Street aim for decades.
Another illegal move is Trump’s order that would require a photo ID that meets so-called “Real ID” standards in order to vote. Obtaining such IDs requires documents which some may not have as well as a trip to a DMV office which might be expensive for some poor people. This would violate the constitutional amendment banning a poll tax. The order is illegal because it’s the states who determine qualifications for voting. Like other vote suppression measures, it’s an attempt to entrench Republican rule. The Republicans have also introduced the SAVE Act in Congress which could disenfranchise millions.
“Deep State” Talk Is Cover for Attacking Public Services
As anarcho-syndicalists, we are opposed to the top-down bureaucratic state. For one thing, the state is a vehicle of worker oppression — through the subordination of workers to the top-down managerial hierarchy of the state. But we are not opposed to the public services. On the contrary, we want them expanded — such as education free to students at all levels, free-to-user universal health care, and free abortion on demand. In our vision, the country’s hospitals, health clinics and drug factories would be self-managed by a democratic, worker-controlled staff organization, not a top down managerial bureaucracy. We would envision the postal service also run by a similar worker-controlled, democratic staff organization. In general, we favor re-organizing the whole economy on the basis of workers self-management — with distributed decision-making united into a social federation to replace the corporations and the top-down bureaucratic state.
Despite the MAGA talk about some secretive “deep state,” their attack is a direct assault on public services provided through the federal government — from the “people’s pension” (Social Security) to medical services provided via the Veterans Administration or Medicaid, to student financial supports. The people being laid off are not some secretive managerial power center but the workers who do the work — providing the public services Americans have come to expect.
For more than a century the politicians running the federal government have been mediators between mass middle class and working class protest, on the one hand, and the capitalist oligarchy who are the dominant power in this country. The people who run the state must be able to govern. Reducing the level of social unrest and mass struggle makes their job easier. Thus, Social Security, the legal minimum wage, and the minimal legal protections offered for worker on-the-job action and unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act were concessions won through the mass working class rebellion — mass strike wave and fights against evictions and so on — during the 1930s. A mass wave of eight-hour strikes during World War I gained government support for reducing the working day to eight hours. Social protest, wildcat strikes and urban rebellions in the 1960s-1970s added additional federal programs as concessions to the social movements of that era — such as the civil rights acts, Medicare, the clean air and water acts, and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The various radical left “militant minorities” on the scene played an important role in popular education and organizing.
But in recent years the labor movement has been weak. Despite the promising do-it-yourself grassroots efforts of workers to build unions recently, only six percent of workers in the private sector belong to unions. When we add public sector union members, this rises to 10 percent of all wage-earners.
The radical left in the USA is also in a very weak state. The authoritarianism and failures of state socialism in the 20th century tended to undermine support for socialism, yet some tendencies on the left cling to obsolete ideas from that era.
A faction of American capitalists and their think-tanks and social media supporters see the current weakness of the left and the labor movement as an opportunity — an opportunity for a major political assault on all the federal government programs that represent the accumulated concessions to previous eras of mass protest and struggle.
A Convergence of Extreme Right-wing Tendencies
Over the past few decades a faction of the American oligarchy have gradually helped to finance a mass far-right extremist movement, which has coalesced into MAGA. Although this movement differs from the classical fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, it has some stark similarities.
In the decades before World War 2, fascism was a mass movement to smash the rapidly growing socialist and radicalizing labor movements of that era, which were perceived as a dire threat to the capitalist system. The present MAGA neo-fascist threat differs from that earlier form of fascism in that there is not now a strong socialist movement or powerful labor militancy posing a current threat to capitalism.
But there are similarities: For example, the use of intimidation and threats of prosecution for perceived “enemies” and reliance on the potential of violent vigilante action. According to recent polls, 11 percent of adults in the USA say violent extra-constitutional attacks on perceived political enemies is legitimate. That same poll found that 14 percent support extra-constitutional armed violence and thus favored the pardons of even the people convicted of violence in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Moreover, 14 percent also support Trump’s smashing through the existing US constitution by refusing to recognize the authority of the courts or the rule of law — defining the presidency as an autocratic power. These views are explicitly fascist.
Just as MAGA has been financed by sectors of private capital in various ways, the earlier fascist movements often had initial funding or backing from elements of the capitalist elite. Just as the small business class is the core mass constituency for MAGA, this was true also of those classical fascist movements.
The MAGA movement often makes absurd allegations that the moderate Democratic Party-enforced regulatory regime is “socialist” or “communist.” Why? To explain this, we need to look at the ideological tendencies that have converged in the MAGA movement. The extremist opposition to use of government as a means to protect society through regulation of the destructive activities of capital or provide social benefit systems has a long history in the USA. The word “liberal” first emerged as a political term in the USA to refer to a new faction in the Republican party in the 1870s. The liberals criticized the black-led Republican governments in the south that were attempting to provide land and services (such as schools) for the recently freed black population. The liberals opposed any government action to provide public benefits or any laws to protect labor, such as eight-hour laws or child labor laws. A well-known proponent of this view was Yale professor William Graham Sumner who gained a wide audience through his popular essays. Sumner opposed any social supports for people he deemed “weak” or “inferior” — the poor, the working class, black people, women. For Sumner, the dog-eat-dog competition of laissez faire capitalism was “the natural order” in which “the struggle for existence” would work itself out.
This extreme form of laissez faire liberalism had been a minority faction in the Republican party in the post-World War 2 years. In the 1960s Murray Rothbard and others decided to rebrand this earlier form of liberalism as “libertarian.” Here we see the origin of the MAGA claim that government benefit systems and regulation of capitalism are “socialist” or “communist.” Only the laissez faire “struggle of all against all” is “real” capitalism for some Republicans. This extremist opposition to all government regulation appeals to much of the small business class who fear the burden of government regulations and hate unions. But elements of the capitalist oligarchy also viewed the expanded benefit systems and environmental regulations of the 1960s and 1970s as “an attack on the free enterprise system” — as in the famous 1971 memo of Lewis Powell whcn he was a leader of the Chamber of Commerce.
In the extreme form of “libertarianism,” such as Rothbard’s “anarcho-capitalism,” the proposal was to do away with democracy and privatize the state functions —such as direct ownership of the police and courts by the capitalist oligarchy. This fusion of private and public power makes this ideology neo-feudal. Separating out a public realm run through “democratic” government and civil liberties was a key feature differentiating 19th century capitalism from the previous feudal society.
Curtis Yarvin’s neo-fascist “dark enlightenment” philosophy, worked out in the early 2000s, is an evolution from that “anarcho-capitalist” milieu — especially present in the California techbro capitalist environment. Yarvin sees the liberal evolution into the regulatory state as the “failure” of enlightenment humanism and liberalism. Yarvin is a software engineer and house philosopher for billionaire Palantir CEO Peter Thiel. Yarvin proposes doing away with democracy and re-organizing the world into a neo-feudal, multi-polar world of autocracies controlled directly by the oligarchy, and run by CEO style autocrats. In his advocacy of “race science” he is also explicitly racist.
Peter Thiel’s financial support was important for the political career of JD Vance. Both Vance and Musk are fans of Yarvin’s ideology. Musk’s wrecking operation at the federal government can be seen as an attempt to carry out Yarvin’s RAGE plan — Retire All Government Employees. In more statements, Musk admitted DOGE isn’t about saving money but “destroying a power base for liberalism.”
Pete Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist tattoos burn his ideological commitment into his skin. Christian Nationalists support the Project 2025 plan which also calls for firing vast numbers of government employees. And here we see convergence of diverse extreme right ideologies. As a recent essay notes, Christian Nationalism is “the anti-democratic notion that America is a nation by and for Christians alone. …Christian nationalism is…a contributing ideology in the religious right’s” practice of “circumventing laws and regulations aimed at protecting a pluralistic democracy, such as nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQI+ people, women, and religious minorities.” The religious right’s patriarchist ideology is the basis for the war on abortion.
The MAGA movement differs from the fascism of the pre-World War 2 years in its drive for direct control of state power by elements of the capitalist oligarchy. Not only is the regime deploying the world’s richest man in “blowing up the administrative state,” the Trump cabinet has 13 billionaires. This is more in keeping with the “anarcho-capitalist” ideology, rooted in the era of robber baron capitalism in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.
Nonetheless, the use of scapegoating (such as the obsessive attacks on trans people), attacks on immigrants, and the (thinly veiled) racism and misogyny of the MAGA movement are similar to classic fascism — as are the methods of intimidation and threats of state prosecution of political “enemies.” The scrubbing of climate justice and “DEI” language from federal websites is a form of Orwellian Newspeak.
The USA was founded on an ideology of white supremacy to justify enslavement of people from Africa and land-grabbing against indigenous communities. This became deeply entrenched within the white population of the USA. From the 19th century abolitionist movement to the black freedom movement of the 1960s, systemic racist practices have been subject to a long fightback.
But the gains made in improving opportunities for non-white groups in the USA — in hiring, bank loans or schooling — have been resented by a sizeable fraction of the white population, and MAGA appeals to these people. Many MAGA fans describe these efforts as “racism against white people.” Hiring any woman or black person can be delegitimized as a “DEI hire.” Racism is implicit also in the hatred of public benefit systems that might benefit “Those People” (the groups despised by MAGA hard core). White supremacist ideology was explicit in Trump’s recent executive order attacking the Smithsonian Institution. He pointed to an exhibit titled “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” Trump complained that the exhibit uses the phrase: “Race is a human invention.” He added that the exhibit “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” Pointing to the reality of racism, sexism or other forms oppression is mistaken “historical revisionism,” as Trump calls it. But of course race is an invention. The colonial elite in North American created the idea of a division between “white race” and “black race” at the end of the 17th century to justify their creation of a system of life-time slavery limited specifically to people of African ancestry. Professional organizations in biology and anthropology have stated that race is pseudo-science as the biological race concept has no empirical foundation. It was a myth created to serve the interests of colonizers and slave plantation owners.
The Defense Department under Pete Hegseth initially removed thousands of pages and images of women, Navajo, Japanese-American and black military figures from the government websites as part of their attack on “DEI”. (Some of these pages have been restored due to popular outrage.) Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot told NBC News that “DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.” “Cultural Marxism” is an anti-semitic neo-fascist conspiracy theory that sees a small group of Marxist intellectuals (the Frankfurt School) as somehow responsible for the urban uprisings, civil rights struggles and social movements of the 1960s. As far as “dividing the force,” that’s what racism and misogyny do.
Although the MAGA movement that coalesced around Trump has neo-fascist features, the Trump regime is still operating, more or less, within the inherited American governmental structure and has not completely implemented a fascist governmental autocracy. Thus we see some resistance from judges and from state and local governments. And anti-MAGA street protests are occurring all over the country.
MAGA Attack on the Green Transition
The fight against global warming is essential to ensure a livable planet for future generations. Global warming is driven by the burning of fossil fuels. As fossil fuel pollution cooks the planet, there will be increasing frequency of deadly heat waves and more powerful storms and rising sea levels. A common goal of the climate justice movement has been to achieve Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. But Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris White calls “Net Zero 2050” a “sinister goal.” Trump has called global warming a “hoax.”
The fossil fuel industry and its well-funded think tanks are another thread in contemporary neo-fascist ideology. The far right thus attacks the scientific consensus that provides information about the global warming emergency and backs the fossil fuel industry’s goal of continuing to profit from generating emissions that are cooking the planet. This is not unique to the MAGA movement. It’s also a feature of the neo-fascist Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany.
The Trump administration has engaged in a wide-ranging and vicious attack on the movement to stop fossil fuel pollution and build the green transition. The MAGA regime is firing thousands of employees who monitor pollution, collect data at the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies. According to a recent report, the planned cut at the EPA will eliminate the scientific research office and possibly “fire more than 1,000 scientists and other employees who help provide the scientific foundation for rules safeguarding human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.” This would include more than a thousand chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists — 75% of the research program’s staff.
The Inflation Reduction Act was an imperfect start at moving to a green transition — the transition to reliance on renewable energy as a substitute for fossil fuels. Now the Trump regime is trying to illegally stop the distribution of funds allocated under the IRA — such as subsidies for low-income solar installations, heat pumps to replace gas heating. Projects from Maine to Alaska to lower carbon dioxide emissions of fishing fleets through more efficient refrigeration systems are now being denied the funding they had been promised. The MAGA regime has also pulled the USA out of an international fund to compensate poorer countries for damages due to global warming.
The regime has also moved to eliminate electric vehicle chargers at government buildings. In a particularly crazy move, the FBI got a freeze on the bank account of Habitat for Humanity — accusing them and several other institutions such as the DC Green Bank — of a “conspiracy to defraud the government” by obtaining grants under the IRA. Thus if Habitat for Humanity wants to use the funds for increased home efficiency or installation of solar panels or heat pumps, that’s “fraud” on the assumption global warming is a “hoax.” These FBI prosecutions will probably be rejected by the courts. Federal judge Tanya Chutkan has already demanded evidence of fraud or illegality. But in the meantime these organizations will have to spend money on legal fees. Thus it’s a form of intimidation.
Blowing Up the Pax Americana
The era since World War 2 has been the era of the USA as global hegemon — dominant imperialist power. In previous history, empires were built through military conquest, colonialism and mercantilist “beggar thy neighbor” trade barriers to keep the imperial loot for the home country.
But the USA created a new kind of imperialism. For decades after World War 2, the American capitalist elite and its political cadre put a lot of effort into building trade pacts and military alliances to bring other capitalist elites within a system overseen by the USA. The USA also built a very powerful navy and a vast array of military bases around the world. The NATO alliance was used to reassure western European capitalism through American military protection. This has allowed the European capitalist countries to spend less money on military buildups. As European powers and other countries bought military gear built in the USA, this spread the costs of new weapons systems over a number of countries and was very lucrative for the USA — building up a huge American arms industry. It would have been much more costly to the USA if it had to do this on its own.
A strange feature of the MAGA regime is the way they are blowing up the Pax Americana. A faction of the American oligarchy seems to have come to the conclusion this is “too expensive.” They fail to appreciate the way the wealth and power of the American capitalist regime since World War 2 has been built on that intricate network of military alliances and trade relationships. They envision a return to an earlier era of go-it-alone imperialist powers. This MAGA push for USA to go it alone seems to reflect both the crisis of American globalist capitalism and the insular mentality of “America First” as well as Curtis Yarvin’s vision of a multi-polar world of autocracies controlled directly by the local oligarchy.
The MAGA regime’s attack on the Pax Americana takes various forms — from Trump’s mafia-like use of threats of tariffs as a form of intimidation, to his use of tariffs to blow up the relationships with the USA’s main trading partners (Canada, Mexico, and Europe), threats of imperialist conquests of Greenland and the Panama canal, the destruction of USAID’s humanitarian aid programs, talk of withdrawal from NATO’s defense of Europe, and Trump’s willingness to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s imperialist conquest.
As anarcho-syndicalists, we are opponents of American imperialism but we propose an internationalism of cross-border working class solidarity. This is why we join with the Ukrainian unions, socialists and anarchists in supporting Ukraine’s military resistance to Putin’s imperialist quest to conquer Ukraine. In this we are following the example of anarchist activist Errico Malatesta who supported the Arab resistance to Italy’s conquest of Libya in 1911.
USAID has been a relatively inexpensive form of US “soft power,” buying support of organizations and countries through its medical and food assistance programs. The radical left has long been critical of the way USAID has been used to support anti-socialist groups and right-wing labor unions. But the destruction of USAID’s medical and food assistance programs by Musk’s wrecker gang is having destructive consequences on the poor in refugee camps and elsewhere. Cancelling 5,000 contracts with nonprofits fighting AIDS in Africa means cutting off retroviral medicine for people who are HIV positive — drugs to prevent full-on AIDS. People are going to die as a result of the sudden cutoffs of medical and food aid.
Blowing up the system of alliances and established trade relationships will be very destructive for the USA. The American arms industry will lose many lucrative contracts. Portugal recently cancelled its F-35 fighter jet purchases for example. This will lead to layoffs. Retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts in Canada or Europe will cause a loss of trade and Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. Tariffs are paid by importers in USA and they will pass on the costs. The high tariffs on auto industry imports from Mexico and Canada will lead to much higher prices for cars.
Republicans will argue that raising prices on imports will spur American manufacture. The idea is that a higher price for the imported product makes them less competitive with American-made competition. But manufacturing facilities are an expensive investment that only pays off over a long period. Tariffs can be easily removed in the future and don’t provide investors enough assurance for massive investments.
Laying off thousands of federal employees will reduce consumer demand. When we combine this with loss of military contracts and inflation from tariffs, this makes a recession very likely.
Building an Effective Fightback
Trump and his team have pursued a shock-and-awe strategy with a constant stream of attacks targeting many different groups — from illegally rounding up legal immigrants with green cards, illegally banning union rights for federal workers and firing thousands of them, to narratives attacking “DEI” to rebuild white supremacy, to attacks on trans people, to attacks on health care for veterans, to bans on abortion and sowing fear among millions of Americans about their access to Social Security or health care funding. This “flood the zone” strategy is designed to exploit social divisions and disorient potential opposition.
But this strategy has a major risk for the MAGA regime. With so many different groups under attack, this means that there is an incentive for these groups to come together, build coalitions, and use solidarity to mobilize a wider fight back that could assume a vast scale. With vast firings of federal workers and smashing their legal union rights, this assertion of power by this billionaire-controlled authoritarian regime is also a threat to the entire working class in various ways.
A strategy for building an effective counterattack requires both organizing and popular education efforts to win “the battle of ideas” — countering the right-wing media machine. The MAGA propaganda says they are fighting for “freedom.” We can point out that their goal is maximizing the “freedom” of the capitalists to treat their workers in whatever way they like, freedom to pollute with impunity, and freedom to loot the federal treasury for their own enrichment. But this means an attack on our freedom — freedom in the workplace, freedom to organize, freedom of dissent.
A useful element of strategy from the experience of labor organizers is the idea of escalation. This means we don’t expect the maximum power of resistance initially but work to encourage increasing levels of action and disruption over time. Already we are seeing signs of rising opposition. Indivisible groups — and other groups of various kinds — have been forming and protesting all around the country. Groups are protesting at Tesla dealerships and calling for a boycott of Tesla. There have also been student walkouts and community resistance to raids by the ICE immigration cops.
A next step is building coalitions where more groups come together and build a common agenda that addresses their various concerns. LGBT people, federal government workers, environmental activists concerned about global warming, immigrant communities and other groups have a stake in the fight back.
Once people start participating in protests or meetings, they have a motivation to find more effective action. Their initial steps can help them to get past the fear that the MAGA regime is trying to instill, to keep people quiet.
In an escalating strategy, the idea is to use easier or less scary tactics to get people initially involved and overcome passivity or fear. A next step is moving to forms of disruption, such as occupying offices to shut own “business as usual”, occupying a Tesla dealership, or a short one-day walkout.
Disruption is where the working class begins to exert its potential power. The ultimate power of the working class lies in the ability to shut down workplaces — shutting government agencies or shutting off the flow of profits to companies. The maximum power of the strike occurs in a general strike where workers have built cross-union and cross-sector networks they can draw on for a society-wide assertion of working-class power. With a highly repressive regime in office, top paid officials are likely to fear any disruptive action that violates contract language or threatens the state directly. The solution here lies in rank-and-file organizing and building committees and networks independent of the union officials. With federal union leaders already terrorized by the Trump regime, federal workers are already building cross-union networks, as with the Federal Unionist Network. Another example of this type of organizing is Railroad Workers United, which came into being due to sellouts by top paid officials of the railway craft unions. A national general strike would exert a tremendous level of counter-power against the MAGA regime. It’s likely that a movement of that sort would have to come from the organizing and motivation of the rank and file.
Another essential element of strategy is the vision or goal — to provide motivation and a direction. The Trump regime is unprecedented in American history in many ways, but it builds on weaknesses of the inherited ancient US constitution which the Republicans have exploited for years. Since the MAGA movement wants to “blow up the administrative state,” trample the constitution and destroy a century of concessions to working class struggle, it won’t be easy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The emergence of a faction of the oligarchy backing the MAGA regime’s “blow it all up” agenda and looting of the state is itself a symptom of a capitalism in crisis. The vision going forward needs to push beyond the inherited limits of the American capitalist framework. As green syndicalists, our program calls for rapidly ramping up the green transition program — shutting down fossil fuel extraction, phasing out the oil refineries, replacing petro-plastic with alternatives, and ramping up a de-carbonized green economy built around renewable energy. And doing all this with “just transition” supports to sustain incomes, health care, and retirement guarantees for the displaced workers.
We also envision worker self-management — direct control of the labor process — by workers in factories making electric stoves, heat pumps, solar panels, battery-powered buses and delivery trucks for the green economy. Our goal is a fundamental shift to a society built around democratic self-management — people controlling the decisions that affect them.
Rather than the top-down bureaucratic state as the basis of a green economy, we propose workers self-management of the industries. Thus we envision the drug industry and health care run by a society-wide, democratic staff organization — run by the people who do the work. With universal free-to-user health care funded by the society, health outcomes can be greatly improved.
We propose that the communication sectors — such as the postal service and telecom — be run by a worker-controlled industry organization without either capitalist ownership or top-down managerial bureaucracy over workers. To put long-distance freight transportation on an ecologically sound foundation, we agree with the Public Rail Now campaign — for public ownership of the railway network. But we propose control of the railways by regional industry organizations democratically self-managed by the railway workers. With railway electrification and an industrial policy favoring rail (including trucks on flat cars) for longer-distance freight transportation, the freight industry can operate with a vast reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
These are just some elements of the vision that is needed for social transformation.
For a list of resources for the resistance, check out the sources listed here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G-K23W9Jl23-ixJRCWrNvWjI7-VNOXCT/view?usp=drive_link