- Every action has a reaction. Repression and class violence by the imperialists and their State naturally breeds resistance, whether it be in the United States or abroad. In neighborhoods and communities around the country spontaneous mass resistance to the Trump Administration’s offensive on the immigrant masses, in particular its reactionary deportation campaign, increases with each passing day. From large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, to smaller “second cities” like Worcester, Massachusetts, the masses are spontaneously mobilizing en masse in an attempt to blockade ICE and prevent local police and federal agents from carrying out their campaign of terror and extrajudicial deportations. As the process of fascistization develops, and the Trump Administration turns to more severe repressive measures to implement its offensive on the immigrant masses (such as his calling out of the National Guard on June 7th to pacify the LA rebellion), mass resistance and rebellion will reciprocally intensify for the foreseeable future. While currently just a set of nascent and scattered uprisings, anyone can see that the potential is clearly there for this fury to be organized into a powerful and complete mass movement against ICE, the State and US imperialism. Therefore, it is essential that revolutionaries-in-formation and all class-conscious mass organizations unify on a correct understanding of and orientation towards this developing situation, so that the current mass community resistance to ICE can be transformed from short-term spontaneous rebellion into long-term revolutionary momentum.
- This is not the first wave of mass resistance against ICE, nor is it even the first one in recent memory. Comrades who were active during the first Trump Administration will remember the rise and fall of the anti-deportation campaign eight years ago. What began similarly as spontaneous mass resistance against ICE was very rapidly co-opted and institutionalized by the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party and the NGO-complex, specifically by organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and Movimiento Cosecha. These activists and organizations, which trafficked in the righteous anger of the masses and slogans like “fight ICE with fire” and “abolish ICE,” channeled this energy back into the system first via the 2018 midterm campaign, and then eventually into the 2020 Biden presidential campaign. Once Biden was elected, the ICE “rapid response networks” and anti-deportation campaigns were demobilized and calls to “abolish ICE” suddenly fell out of favor among the pacifists and reformists. This is why we are forced to rebuild anti-ICE infrastructure as if we were starting from scratch: it was destroyed from within the first time around by opportunist reformists who ride on the energy of the masses to further their careers and blunt the possibility of real resistance to the broader imperialist system. Already this pattern is beginning to repeat itself. In the face of growing direct and militant confrontations between the masses and the State, the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO rush to capitalize on this mass energy and co-opt for their class-collaborationist and electoral schemes. Allowing the Democratic Party and its affiliated NGOs/state unions to lead the fight against deportations once was a tragedy, allowing it to do so a second time in less than a decade would be the ultimate error, a true farce.
- In the place of reformism, pacificism, and electoralism, we must raise up and impose a correct path within the mass movement against ICE. An essential component in achieving this is maintaining a correct proletarian line in leadership within the revolutionary movement itself. During the 2016-2020 period of anti-deportation resistance, incorrect lines, weak politics, and opportunist leaders condemned the revolutionary movement to defeat from the start. Although early attempts at revolutionary anti-deportation work were initiated, particularly in Los Angeles, the bigger-picture errors of the revolutionary groups launching them meant that in a rather short period of time almost all such work had fallen apart. It is a matter of life and death that we fight to keep revolutionary politics in command throughout this effort, and all other efforts at work within the mass movement. Ed Dalton’s The Worker, Christopher Winston’s DSA Liberation Caucus, the Maoist Communist Union, etc., all these vanity projects of the ghoulish opportunists of the past are houses of cards that will inevitably collapse just as their older iterations did as long as the same opportunist lines and incorrect politics remain in command. To avoid a similar fate we must do three things: 1) we must take up the road that leads to Socialist Revolution in the United States, taking into account the special importance of the National and Labor questions on this revolutionary road, 2) in the mass movement we must apply this revolutionary road through sectoral organizations of the masses based on class lines, and 3) by leveraging our mass organizations and their class lines we must simultaneously broaden and elevate the spontaneous mass struggles against ICE, the local police, and the anti-immigrant offensive.
- To broaden the mass resistance against ICE means to work to forge links between our efforts in this trench of struggle and our ongoing work in the other sectors (e.g., the workers movement, student movement, or police brutality movement). To elevate this struggle means waging this particular struggle in service of the more general burning questions of our class, in particular the question of the conquest of political Power for the multinational proletariat. Take the mass resistance against ICE deportation activity in Los Angeles or in Worcester, Massachusetts. In the case of the current LA rebellion, there is the constant rising to the surface of the Chicano question (the national question of the Spanish-speaking population of Mexican origin in the US Southwest), and in the case of Worcester the resistance occurred in a community with national minority groups of a largely Latin American origin, in particular from the US colony of Puerto Rico. Both cities have heavily exploited working-class and poor populations and a history of labor and neighborhood conflict. We can easily see then how in order to broaden and elevate the current spontaneous struggle against ICE, the police, and the anti-immigrant offensive, we can use revolutionary theory to educate the masses on the relationship between their own struggles and conditions and the broader struggle of the in international proletariat against US imperialism. We must use revolutionary organization to apply our revolutionary politics in practice in a way that allows the fury of the masses to overflow in rebellion against the State and connects with the work of national mass organizations like the New Labor Organizing Committee, the People’s Defense Committees, and the Revolutionary Student Union. Keep in mind always that the slogan of the US imperialists in all this is “divide and conquer”. Just as has occurred throughout the history of our country time and time again, the US capitalist class and their State use race, language and legal status to organize national oppression and prevent the multinational working class from uniting to overthrow their rule. To defeat the mass work of the counter-revolutionaries, in the workplaces, neighborhoods, and campuses we must raise up the powerful principle of proletarian unity in our political-organizational work and propaganda work. We must mobilize the broad non-immigrant masses to join in this fight, and at the same time we must more completely integrate the immigrant masses and their demands into our other sectoral work. We must expose the counter-revolutionary work of the State, American national chauvinism, and organized opportunism before the masses for what they are, and use practice to test and prove our revolutionary leadership in this struggle, just as we do elsewhere.
- We cannot allow ourselves to get theoretically confused by the intensity and spontaneity of this current wave of rebellion, and similarly we cannot allow ourselves to abdicate our task to provide practical revolutionary leadership for the masses. We aren’t naive anymore: we have been through this rodeo once and have had ample to time to study its lessons, synthesize them, and begin to apply them. We must intervene in the mass movement of ICE while at the same time not losing track of our broader tasks and needs as revolutionaries, things like keeping a correct politics in command, developing a powerful united front based on correct principles, program and practice, and organizing the masses around our road to Socialist Revolution in the United States. The masses clamor for rebellion, and march in the streets against the State. Historically, however, we know that without conscious revolutionary leadership such spontaneous waves of rebellion are condemned to slowly fade away under the twin blows of co-optation and repression. Let us study the successes and failures of the forms of struggle of the movement, such as the anti-ICE street blockade or information network, and apply their lessons in our work! Let us elevate and broaden their struggle and defeat the opportunist vultures who would seek to co-opt and destroy their movement once again!
