17.04.2025

Breaking with playing dead

How to respond to Trump’s whirlwind of tariffs, chaos and oppression? Democrats have their ‘Hands Off’ protests. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez their ‘Fight Oligarchy’ tour. Matt Strupp and Ben Lenz of the Marxist Unity Group want independent socialist organisation

There are a lot of questions about how these early days of this second Trump administration compare with his first - and where it is going in terms of its ability to keep up the current pace of attacks on free speech and working class standards of living.

The ethos right now appears to be that of the tech industry: a ‘move fast and break things’ attitude, exemplified by Elon Musk as a special government employee in the administration. Is this a temporary phase where they break things and then try to rebuild them in their image? Or do they keep on breaking things, and Musk is slated to be a special government employee only for a short time? Will the courts be able to enforce any decision they make against the Trump administration, because there is a sort of imperial presidency in the United States? After all, federal law enforcement and the military are under the presidency - against which decisions would need to be enforced. Also, will the financial markets continue to react negatively to Trump’s tariffs, and will that slow things down?

What would provide real opposition to a rightwing administration, though, is mass popular resistance, with strikes, etc, providing pressure from below. There are already significant protests at weekends, though decidedly liberal. The Hands Off protests in cities around the country recently included the slogan, ‘Hands off Nato’, but with no mention of Palestine or Gaza. In reality they delivered a pro-Democratic Party political message.

The Trump administration’s treatment of pro-Palestine speech has been to turbocharge the repression of pro-Palestine speech which took place under the Biden administration, especially on college campuses; that has been fused with a deportation crusade.

For example, Mahmoud Khalil, a legal, permanent resident of the USA, was a spokesperson for the pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia University last year. But in March 2025, ICE agents showed up at his New York City apartment and told him his student visa had been revoked (even though he did not have a student visa, but a Green Card). He was arrested and immediately shipped to a Louisiana deep detention facility. ICE claims that under immigration law the secretary of state can deport anyone as a threat to national security, totally circumventing the first amendment to the constitution, and a habeas corpus case is now pending in New Jersey, following Khalil’s “beliefs, statements or associations” that made him deportable.

Persecution now frequently follows pro-Palestine speech, such as in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts University: she was arrested and held in Louisiana like Khalil, after authoring a pro-Palestine article in the local student newspaper. Universities have reported students having their visas revoked without any record of public pro-Palestine speech or activism on their part, seemingly merely based on their country of origin, which could be China and or one of the Middle East countries.

Trump has also reclassified Latin American gangs as ‘foreign terrorist organisations’, rapidly deporting hundreds on creative evidence, thanks to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (last used to intern Japanese Americans in World War II). To top it all, the Trump administration now has a deal with the regime of El Salvador’s self-confessed dictator, Nayib Bukele, allowing the USA to use it as a ‘storage facility’ for deportees.

As to the US workers’ movement, two major unions, the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, have seen their leadership replaced in recent years. Sean O’Brien won the Teamsters’ presidency, despite the fact that during the election campaign he cosied up to Trump, speaking at the Republican National Convention (after the Democratic National Convention refused to invite him). Shawn Fain, UAW president, is treading a line between celebrating the tariffs for supposedly bringing back domestic car manufacturing and protesting against the attacks on pro-Palestine activism and free speech.

While thousands of federal workers have been laid off from government agencies, there is hope of overcoming sectional divisions among them: the recently-formed Federal Unionists Network, which has signs of rank-and-file activism, may be fruitful. It opposes, for instance, the proposed legislation to restrict federal workers’ collective bargaining. The fact that federal workers have no right to strike is oppression and the whole labour movement should respond.

Against the background of all this, there is some tension between the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, currently voting for significant cuts, and Democrat media figures, who see the tactic right now is one of ‘playing dead’: let the Trump administration embarrass itself, make everyone angry at it, and in future years the Democrats can run on a ‘We’re the competent ones’ platform and sweep into office.

Clearly, the Democratic Party is not a ‘normal’ political party: it has no mass membership, though activist NGOs and trade unions are associated with its apparatus. Many who identify with it are dissatisfied with that stance and some Democratic Party politicians, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have publicly denounced ‘playing dead’. They have been on a nationwide Fight Oligarchy tour, including to more conservative or rural places, often drawing in bigger crowds than the Kamala Harris election rallies did.

The message is definitely aimed at the Democratic Party: it should be fighting oligarchy with a social democratic message and accepting the union movement as its base. But there is no mention at Fight Oligarchy events of independent organisation or political expression for the working class - such as in a socialist or working class party. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have previously received endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America, but the pair are not promoting the DSA at these rallies. They are cultivating a separate base within the Democratic Party. The DSA is itself oriented toward the Hands Off protests, having agreed to participate critically, putting forward a pro-Palestine and anti-Democratic Party message. While some DSA chapters are involved organisationally in the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez Fight Oligarchy tour, others have tables outside criticising what Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are saying.

But how to turn anti-oligarchy or anti-Trump sentiment into an independent political expression? This is a major question going forward. At the DSA’s national convention this August there will be proposals around organisational questions, political orientation and the creation of an independent socialist party within the USA’s electoral structure. But there are very fraught questions, such as how to navigate constituencies and electoral laws, when it might be justifiable to use the Democratic Party primary, seek an independent ballot line or maintain control of that. The Democratic Party’s internal selection processes in many US states are run by the establishment. Were an independent workers’ ballot line to be achieved, however, how would the party’s internal democratic processes actually control who is on the ballot?

All these questions and more are currently being explored on the left in terms of how to channel the anti-Trump energy into effective, independent political expression. But the Trump administration continues to move fast and try to break things. Hopefully the response to that will be more and more unrest and resistance. However, the Democrats are not even trying to capture that right now, because, as I have said, they want to ‘play dead’.

So how can we ensure that resistance does not just dissipate? How it gets channelled into an independent political expression is the most relevant question.

Matt Strupp

Factions and tariffs

One DSA current has been responding to the tariffs specifically: that is, the more trade unionist-oriented part of the DSA, associated with Bread and Roses and with Jacobin. This response is that, ‘While Trump’s tariffs are bad, let’s not do something crazy like complain about tariffs in general or have articles about how we dislike them because they push toward reaction. After all, we might want to use tariffs in future to push for stronger labour laws internationally.’

This is connected to the strong support from US industry and the US labour movement for tariffs since World War II. Cross-class responses are associated with the DSA right: formations like Groundwork and the Socialist Majority Caucus oppose tariffs for the same reasons the Democrats do: ‘Why are we breaking trade?’ Obviously, there is an incomplete analysis of imperialism.

The Marxist Unity Group has not as a body talked about this much yet, but generally this is just an extension - a new stage - of the US empire. This is an interesting juncture in US foreign policy, since after the 70s and the end of the Bretton Woods system, there has been a really big shift away from industry. The USA entered the 70s in an increasingly difficult-to-sustain trade balance situation, as it tried to prop up the global gold reserve system - which in turn backs the Keynesian international order - allowing states to run their domestic policies independently.

All that ended with Nixon, who pushed general mercantilist politics originating in the American Revolution. Outside of slavery, probably the most important question in US elections up to the ‘Progressive Era’ has been the question of tariffs. A constant back and forth between the Democrats - generally anti-tariff and associated with northern workers - and southern, including southern slave, capital that wanted free trade with Britain. Northern capital is very pro-tariff and associated with the Republican Party. Historically, there was a major fight, in part because virtually all US taxes came through the tariff system, right up until a constitutional amendment bringing in an income tax system. This shift has allowed radical back-and-forth changes among US tariff policies, and then a shift back to relatively normal tariff rates for the USA - all of which may well have increased the effect of the great depression.

The USA became the guarantor of the world capitalist order through creating the Bretton Woods system. With high US inflation this became untenable from the 1960s and 70s, forcing the Nixon administration to shift towards a more pro-China policy and the creation of free trade that allowed the growth of the Asian tigers through high balance-of-trade debt and big, positive, export-driven economies. The USA has been backstopping that system for a long time - bringing in the emergency greenbacks paper currency system during the Civil War, for example. Trump’s tariff policy right now, while it is really incompetent, is responding to a real set of problems from a US point of view. The USA has been backing the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and the like in the capitalist international order - as was the UK before, which similarly led to a weakening industrial base.

This puts the USA in a position that, while right now it still has dominance vis-à-vis China, that is becoming increasingly untenable, unless the USA makes some fairly serious foreign policy changes. This strategy is not necessarily going to work. But it really explains, from a US point of view, why these tariffs are being used. They need to be understood as a response to China, as a response to a declining US economic advantage, and as a response to its declining unipolar moment.

Ben Lenz

These two pieces are based on openings given to the April 13 Online Communist Forum