Working people face no shortage of hardship amidst the crises of capitalism: runaway health care costs, rising inflation and unemployment, the compounding climate catastrophe, ICE invading cities, and the US military invading countries, to name a few. This is the grim reality for the working class, yet a reality increasingly met with the willingness to fight. Ordinary people want to fight Trump’s agenda, and they are looking for the best strategy to do so.

The Democrats are doing everything they can to try to hijack this fighting mood. From their speeches at anti-Trump rallies to toothless press conferences, the Democrats bray empty words, then point toward the midterm elections as the only way to fight Trump. However, ICE brutality and Trump’s imperialist aggression will not wait for the midterms. Imagine your house is on fire, and the fire department pulls up and says, “Hey, if you want to put out that fire, you can vote for a new fire chief in six months.” And then they pull away. Working people cannot afford to wait until the midterms, while the fire consumes us. 

Democrats Year In Review

Before Trump’s term, the Democrats bankrolled the bombing of Gaza and failed to meet the economic needs of working-class people. Now, the Democrats pose as the only option to oppose Trump, but in the last year, they’ve produced little more than hot air. It only takes a quick look at their track record to see that this is the case:

• After the Democratic defeat in the 2024 presidential election, much of the party concluded that they had lost because they were too “woke.” Rather than defend our trans neighbors and coworkers, the first expression of the Democrats’ new approach was to throw them under the bus and to adopt similarly vicious rhetoric to the right wing.
• When ICE invaded Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom posed as a challenger to Trump by calling for the National Guard to get out. At the same time, in an interview on “The Daily” podcast, Newsom said it was  the “privilege of a lifetime” to be head of the California National Guard, and he bragged about working with ICE over 10,500 times.
• The Democrats correctly voted down Trump’s draconian budget last December. But when this led to the longest-ever government shutdown that left millions of Americans without pay and much-needed SNAP benefits, the Democrats did nothing meaningful to fight back and in the end, they won nothing. Just as Trump’s favorability numbers were plummeting due to this crisis, the Democrats gave up the fight for extending healthcare subsidies.
• Jacob Frey, the Democratic Minneapolis mayor, who also oversaw the repression of George Floyd protestors in 2020, was recently quoted as saying “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis”. But not only has he failed to kick ICE out, he’s admitted that he does not favor abolishing ICE. For Frey, ICE is too violent. Like Democratic Goldilocks, he prefers the police, whose violence is juuusst right.

At the time of writing, Senate Democrats are, at least temporarily, giving up the threat of government shutdown over a spending bill, by separating DHS funding (which includes $10 billion for ICE) from the larger package, while taking no issue with the $839 billion defense bill. To pull this off, they’ve supported two-week stopgap funding for DHS, buying time for negotiations to “rein in” ICE. None of the conditions they’ve proposed to reform this barbaric gang are near enough. ICE needs to be abolished full stop, though even then, more must be done to end the deportation machine. They should absolutely vote against more DHS funding, but that should be the first step not the last.

The Democrats, along with the Republicans, are the managers of US capitalism—they have different managerial styles, but at the end of the day, they are looking out for the billionaires’ bottom line. No manager will ever truly call for a strike. Managers prevent strikes. And when that does not work, they break strikes. Furthermore, the Democrats are not just the “lesser evil” of the two capitalist parties—their failures have actively fueled the growth of the far right, and as a result, the Democrats have been yanked rightward year after year.

A Party Of Our Own

Working people must collectively take matters into their own hands, as we have seen most dramatically in the anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis. This movement shows the power of combining neighborhood defense with collective working-class offense, culminating in the city-wide general strike of January 23rd. The Democrats did not lead this development—ordinary working people did. 

The strike of January 23rd can serve as a launchpad for further organization, for collaboration between rapid response groups, immigrant rights organizations, socialist parties, and unions. Not only should this collaboration and organization be politically independent from the Democrats, Republicans, and the whole capitalist class, but such a growing mass movement can lay the basis for a new party that fights for working-class interests using working-class methods.

The working class needs a party of its own that can organize the movement further with fighting tactics like walkouts, occupations and strikes. A party that has complete political independence from big business and the billionaires. A party that can be used as an organized force to build and support social movements and unions.

The Democratic Party is a dead end. The working class must pave our own way forward in the fight against Trump, ICE, and the whole rotten system!