Each year, News and Letters Committees publishes our Draft Perspectives Thesis for our coming national gathering. We ask you to join in the discussion. Here is a table of contents:

Part I: The sound of bootheels
* Repression of immigrants and free speech
* Demonizing Transgender people
* Remaking the state for power, profit, and ideology
* New human relations to nature and to each other
* Resistance swells
* Thought control

Part II: What new world order?
* What kind of new world order do trade wars and shooting wars anticipate?
* Gaza as touchstone of war and genocide
* Congo as touchstone of imperialism

Part III: Trumpism and the present moment of capitalism
* What is it about this moment?
* Robber barons’ billions come from the labor of others
* Beyond economic measures
* Inadequacy of defending the institutions

Part IV: Where is the Left?
* Growing resistance, growing questioning, and the reach for ideas
* The ‘Left’ that has turned right
* Needed: unity of theory and practice

Part V: Our tasks
* Resisting false alternatives
* Marx’s Humanism and Marxist-Humanism
* Philosophy of revolution demands an organizational expression

 

Part I: The sound of bootheels

“If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.” — Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S., married to a U.S. citizen who gave birth after he was detained. He was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in New York City and sent to a notorious immigrant detention facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away. They told him his green card was revoked, which neither they nor their bosses had the authority to do. While the administration smeared Khalil with lies, they made it clear he was being punished for political speech. Donald Trump threatened, “This is the first arrest of many to come,” singling out college students.

The effort to deport Khalil is at the crossroads of the administration’s attacks on free speech and on immigrants. There we also find:

• Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, was abducted in Massachusetts by six masked, unidentified people and forced into an unmarked car, while an onlooker asked, “Is this a kidnapping?” She too is being abused in Louisiana, all for co-authoring an editorial in the student newspaper calling on the university to take action against the genocide in Gaza.
• Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen teaching on a student visa, is slated for deportation just because of who his Palestinian wife is.
• Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor who had a valid visa, was deported in violation of a court order.
• Mohsen Mahdawi went to an interview to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, but instead ICE forced him into an unmarked car and detained him because of his Palestine solidarity activities.
• Kseniia Petrova, a 32-year-old Russian medical researcher at Harvard Medical School, was detained and threatened with deportation to Russia, where she faces imprisonment for her opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
• Kilmar Ábrego García was deported by mistake, in violation of a court order. He was sent to the hellish CECOT mega-prison run by fellow dictator President Bukele in El Salvador. Defying court orders, the administration claimed it could do nothing to bring him back, as did Bukele. As they did so, both dictators made a show of enjoying their cruelty. Trump, who never admits a mistake, posted a photoshopped image of Abrego’s hands with “MS13” written onto his fingers as if tattooed there, because he claims the man is a member of the MS13 gang. To punish his wife for speaking out, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted her home address on social media, forcing her to move with her children to a safe house.
• Amir Makled, a U.S. citizen who is an attorney representing a student charged in connection with Palestine solidarity protests, was detained at Detroit International Airport by the “Tactical Terrorism Response Team,” who demanded to search his phone.
• U.S. citizens are being arrested, including two in Florida and Arizona, and threatened with deportation only because they have brown skin or Spanish names or speak Spanish.

From detention, Khalil reported on the inhuman treatment of other detainees. The administration, using transparently false declarations of an emergency and “invasion,” is on a rampage extending those inhuman conditions to a sizable portion of the people living in the U.S. Once again violating a court order, the administration deported more than 250 people—labeling them Venezuelan gang members with no evidence or due process—to CECOT.

ICE agents are known for breaking the law in their zeal to torment immigrants, but under Trump they have taken it to a new, blatant level. The administration says it deported around 30,000 people in eight weeks, labeling them criminals although the vast majority are not. Another 48,000 are being held in overcrowded detention facilities. ICE illegally arrested many people without warrants, including some U.S. citizens. It is impossible to know how many have been disappeared into a black hole. After making a reality TV show of sweeps in Chicago in January, with Dr. Phil as special guest, “ICE officials won’t disclose exactly who their agents arrested in the city, what they were arrested for or what’s happened to them since.”

The racist citizens who cheer this repression should think twice. A massive apparatus of propaganda, surveillance, detention, and abuse is a handy tool for Trump, who has made clear his cruelty, hatred, and thirst for revenge. Who will fill his proposed $45 billion in “a massive expansion of ICE detention capacity—including at facilities notorious for misconduct and abuse”? No one is safe. Attacks on many fronts have already begun, and they are part and parcel of what is widely recognized as a Trump/Musk coup, but is usually portrayed as normal politics in the media.

Community groups have sprung up, or reignited, across the country to protect immigrants. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan complained about such groups educating migrants: “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘how to escape arrest.’”

Know Your Rights events and literature are spreading around the country.[1] So are protests demanding release of specific detainees, as well as student and faculty organizing, and the whole matter is one of many demands taken up in the huge number of Hands Off rallies, April 19 actions, May Day marches, and other protests.

DEMONIZING TRANSGENDER PEOPLE

Another group Trumpism demonizes is Transgender people. Both Trump decrees and state laws that have been passed or proposed aim to erase their existence, declaring that there are only two sexes, and gender is fixed from the moment of conception—a use of words also meant to codify that life begins at conception, which is a not-so-hidden threat to the right to an abortion. Toward this end, they are trying to stop people from choosing their own pronouns or names, to ban mention of Transgender in schools, and to ban certain types of healthcare. Trump sent Trans women to men’s prisons, knowing the danger to their lives, and banned Trans people from the military because they supposedly detract from the “warrior ethos” he says it needs. The paragon is apparently Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who champions war criminals and torture.

The Feb. 14 protest at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City caught the spirit of these hateful and discriminatory actions. Protesters objected to the erasure of any recognition of Transgender people, as well as the word “Queer,” from the monument’s website. “The first people that threw the brick at Stonewall, that led the charge at Stonewall, were women of color, trans women of color.

Are we seriously trying to erase entire history?” asked Eli Shirk, a Transgender student. Beyond erasing history, it betrays a will to erase the living people themselves. This must be stopped before it escalates to concentration camps.

The attack on what Trump calls “gender ideology” is also an attack on women’s self-determination, as many of the same fanatics openly call for women to stay in the home and for the repeal of women’s right to vote. At the same time, this administration is a hotbed of rapists, it offers a platform for rapists like Conor McGregor, and it amplifies sex traffickers and misogynists. One way their hatred of women is expressed is in sacrificing women’s lives on the altar of fetuses, even doomed ones. The administration dropped a lawsuit to stop Idaho from letting pregnant women die or be maimed from being refused emergency services. (See “Women Fighting Fascist Rulers–from Iran to the USA.”)

Trump’s purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is transparently an attack on Blacks and other people of color, and on women. One of his top appointees put it plainly: “white men must be in charge.” The official racism and sexism plays out in a myriad ways, from cancelling the 1965 order forbidding federal contractors from discriminating, to the Department of Justice ripping up the settlement that required Alabama to minimize raw sewage pollution in Lowndes County.[2] In the administration’s Orwellian doublespeak, anything that fights racism is called racism, anything that fights sexism is called discrimination, and white supremacy is called colorblind meritocracy, even though it rewards incompetents like Pete Hegseth. Above all, this is about trying to bury the vision of a new, human future that all freedom movements inexorably reach for in thought and in life.

REMAKING THE STATE FOR POWER, PROFIT, AND IDEOLOGY

Top Trump aides brag about their campaign to demoralize and destroy the government workforce. The most visible part is the billionaire oligarch Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). It is paving a path of destruction through the federal government, destroying, defunding, depopulating, and disrupting one agency after another and seizing control of what remains—often in violation of court orders. Policing bodies are exempt. While Musk’s deputies are incompetent and arrogant, destroying efficiency is not an accident but is part of the plot to justify privatizing as much of the state as possible, putting its functions in the hands of oligarchs. It has several aims:

• Eliminating labor, safety, anti-discrimination, and environmental regulations in the service of profit
• Siphoning money from the state to Trump and his cronies—Musk alone is lined up for billions in new government contracts
• Establishing complete loyalist control over all wings of the state
• Imposing a police state

This cannot be separated from the war to subdue the legislative and judicial branches and civil society under a dictatorship. Judges ruling against the administration are facing numerous threats, both threats of impeachment from Republican politicians and threats of violence from the MAGA base. Republican members of Congress fear crossing Trump, both because Musk may fund primary challengers and because Trump could incite violence.

This rampage’s human toll combines deliberate cruelty and uncaring collateral damage to countless lives. Prominently, many women are suffering greatly from the denial of healthcare, centered on but not limited to the outlawing of abortion. There was a movement to lower maternal mortality that had some progress, which is already being reversed in abortion ban states. The same is happening worldwide because of the annihilation of the USAID international aid programs. Those cuts are also taking a mounting death toll from South African babies no longer protected from HIV to Sudanese refugees dying of starvation.

Trump-Musk are driving a quantum leap in the dismantling of the public health system that began with the ideological reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, with some states banning mask mandates and handcuffing public health authorities. Due to abortion bans and Medicaid cuts, many rural hospitals and clinics have closed down and OB/GYN doctors have left some abortion-ban states.

Anti-vaccine propaganda and quack medicine have flourished for several years because they made big profits for liars like Alex Jones; Mehmet Oz, the new head of Medicare and Medicaid; and Trump’s Lysenko, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Now quackery is official government dogma. We are already seeing the results in a deadly resurgence of measles in the U.S. and potentially drug-resistant tuberculosis internationally. And when climate change, capitalist factory farming, and environmental destruction make the emergence of new pandemics ever more likely, with bird flu already rampant among livestock, pandemic preparedness has been decimated.

NEW HUMAN RELATIONS TO NATURE AND TO EACH OTHER

When it comes to the climate crisis, this administration is carrying on an all-out assault on science, programs to mitigate and adapt to global warming, and regulations to protect human health and the environment.

That includes illegally cutting regulations that could have saved 200,000 lives, and declaring a nonexistent “energy emergency” to justify skirting (again illegally) the regulatory process to approve oil, gas, and mining permits. It includes hiding scientific data, defunding climate research with the excuse that it causes “climate anxiety” in young people—as if it is not the reality of rapidly intensifying extreme weather and disruption of agriculture that causes anxiety—and allowing companies to stop reporting greenhouse gas emissions. Even the ability of the National Weather Service to track and warn people about tornadoes, hurricanes, and extreme storms has been undermined.

No wonder that defending science, climate action, and climate justice are major points in the many protests cropping up, including the Earth Day protests across the U.S.

While the climate deniers and obstructionists dominate the administration and the right-wing media, an in-depth survey found that 89% of people worldwide, and 74% in the U.S., want more climate action from their governments. And when people come together to fight climate injustice and environmental harms to their communities, they start reaching for new relations not only between humanity and nature but between human and human.

Climate is a labor issue, as shown not only by the wave of state laws banning local governments from requiring heat breaks for workers, but the fact that the people hurt most by heat waves and other climate disasters are working-class, Black, Indigenous and Latinx people, people with disabilities or without housing, and people who are poor.

MAGA dangled a false promise of dignity and reindustrialization to appeal to workers, but the reality is an attack on workers. Trump hamstrung the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Along with firing tens of thousands of federal employees, he threw out union contracts and rescinded the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers. All this emboldened private companies to ramp up their unionbusting with the expectation of impunity if they break laws. Musk and fellow tech robber baron Jeff Bezos of amazon.com sued to demand the NLRB be declared unconstitutional. In addition, DOGE’s use of AI to try to replace workers and intensify surveillance of those who remain is a road map for corporations to do the same.

The response from labor is just beginning. Along with multiple protests by federal workers, as well as larger protests like Hands Off including the workers, they set up the secret #AltGov network of resisting DOGE from the inside. Twelve national unions and close to 100 locals representing more than three million members issued a joint statement listing several union members taken by ICE and demanding their release. It is important to bring out the fact that solidarity with immigrants is a defense of the whole working class. There is talk among the rank and file of starting a general strike.

Just beginning is the disruption of the economy from tariffs, immigrant repression and expulsion, and government cuts in jobs, budgets, and regulations.

RESISTANCE SWELLS

Also building are anti-Trump protests, both planned and spontaneous. Republican politicians faced such anger at town hall meetings that the party told them all to avoid public events. But Democrats have also faced anger from constituents for not standing up to Trump strongly enough. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in particular had to cancel a book tour because of the backlash against his helping the reactionary Republican budget to pass.

The tamed media may give the impression that resistance is slight, but in truth a group of researchers “tallied [in February alone] over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally.”

That is not counting the sabotage and boycotts of Tesla dealerships, Target, and other complicit businesses, which are now widespread. Their impact is why Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi are branding the Tesla sabotage “domestic terrorism,” whereas they have always opposed any crackdown or even investigation of the real domestic terrorists, the violent white supremacists and anti-abortion fanatics.

Some of the recent protests include the veterans’ protests (see “Veterans protest attacks by Trump/Musk”), the “Stand Up for Science” protests, International Women’s Day protests, and federal workers’ rallies opposing their illegal firing. They took up an incredibly broad range of issues.

This resistance is vital not only to puncture Trump’s lies that he has a mandate, but to puncture his attempt to convince us that he has achieved total power and no one can stop him. His repeated backing down on tariffs underscores his vulnerability.

Just as Vladimir Putin subdued civil society in Russia by bankrupting, imprisoning, or killing his enemies, Trump’s threats have cowed corporations, law firms, universities, and media and social media companies. In this Great Capitulation, anti-discrimination policies are dropped, voices in solidarity with Palestinians are silenced, multicultural and women’s centers are closed, fact-checking is discarded, college courses in women’s/Black/Hispanic/Asian/Native history have been tanked, and censorship targets only the Left, not the Right, not even Nazis and Holocaust deniers.

THOUGHT CONTROL

Connected to it is the rush to totalitarian thought control. In the drive to erase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the Pentagon purged web pages about Jackie Robinson’s military service, Navajo code talkers, sexual assault, the Holocaust, breast cancer, prostate cancer, suicide prevention, Sept. 11 remembrance. One phrase the thought police banned is “diversity is a strength.” With 24,000 pages rapidly marked for deletion, this has all the hallmarks of a crude computer program singling out pages based on searching for a list of phrases (part of that long list has been publicly reported). The Naval Academy library was purged of books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf is still available.

Other agencies, private businesses, and universities are under pressure to do the same. Some caved cringingly, like Columbia University, which only emboldened Trump to keep coming back for more. The kind of backlash this sparked can be seen in a letter from 218 alumni (with graduation years from 1959 to 2024) of Northwestern University—which had deleted DEI web pages and policies and observed Women’s History Month by removing the Women’s Center website. The alumni called out their alma mater for refusing

“to take a strong stance against the mind control that is spewing forth from the Trump administration like effluent….What, precisely, justifies the need to censor the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion? Please explain.

“And if the intent is ‘merely’ to appease or avoid antagonizing a bully, please let us know where you WILL draw the line. Whose identity or what values won’t you sacrifice?…After all, as George Orwell noted, ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’

“With an endowment of $14.3 billion, one might think that an institution dedicated to contemplating things that are true, honest, just, pure or lovely might have some freedom to think for itself, stand up for its own values and lead the way. Imagine if all the leading universities just said ‘NO!’ and used their considerable endowments to cover funding lost while pushing back on this mind control.”

Institutions cannot be trusted to save us, from the Democratic Party to courts to universities. They are all under pressure from the administration and they need to feel the pressure from the resistance, including economic boycotts, protests, strikes, and other measures. Especially the pillars of the regime’s support, like Tesla, need to feel the pressure.

Continues with Part II: What new world order?

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[1] For example: Tucson, Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston.

[2] See Waste: One Woman’s Fight against America’s Dirty Secret by Catherine Coleman Flowers (The New Press, 2020) for a participant’s account of the struggle there.