I teach on Wednesday mornings and on November 6, I was met with students who were in a shocked silence. They were in the 6th grade when Trump won the last election and again, this racist, misogynist authoritarian would take the White House. Some of them cried, thinking of friends and family who might get deported.
For many, it was grief, fear and disbelief. When they hear “mass deportations,” it means their uncle, their mother, themselves.
What to say to these 19 year olds? I wish I could just tell them it would be okay. That they won’t get deported. That they are safe.
I can’t promise they will be safe.
I can’t say to them that in two years voting Democrat will fix it– that would be a lie. I know the Democrats opened the door to the far right by increasingly shifting to the right. I know my students and their families would be in danger under Harris as well. On immigration, Harris essentially accepted the premise that immigrants are a problem and promised to be better at policing the border than Trump.
You have to fight, I tell them. You are not helpless victims. You have to fight; you CAN fight; and you can use some of the most powerful weapons in the world — your weapons as the working class — to fight.
We’re taught in school that politics and civic engagement means voting every four years for our next oppressor. But I try to instill in my students, you are political actors. We are all political actors. And what happens next depends on what we do, beyond the ballot box.
Think of the Muslim ban and how we blocked airports all over the country, forcing the courts to step in. We have to do that again, I say. We have to defend immigrant communities, physically stopping deportations. We could organize defense brigades by community, linking workers, students, and community members. We have to march for immigrants rights, remembering the massive protests against kids in cages under the Trump administration.
This is essential; to think about how we must defend all of our communities, and make connections between trans rights, immigrant rights, the fight for Black lives, and labor rights. We must use the strategic position of labor to organize walkouts, sickouts, and even political strikes.
What happens next depends on what we do, and we have to fight.
But I know the struggle in 2024 will be even harder than before. This isn’t 2016 all over again. Trumpism is much stronger. The Right has control of all branches of government and Trump holds a hegemonic role in the Republican Party. His ability to govern essentially unchecked is much stronger.
We can expect that he will increase neoliberal and austerity measures against the working class. That’s why the stock market is celebrating Trump’s victory. We can expect massive attacks on immigrants, both in policy and harassment and violence by his far-right base. We can expect that Trump will do nothing to stop an escalation in Gaza, which is why Netanyahu congratulated him so quickly, and has been so resistant to a ceasefire: he was waiting for a Trump victory. We can expect attacks on trans youth and the Pro-Palestine movement, including students, teachers, and professors at schools and campuses across the country. We can expect strong authoritarian policing and repressive measures against the Left — the “enemy within.”
If Trump 2024 is stronger, our fight back will need to be stronger too. There is great potential for this to happen.
But the Far Right isn’t the only thing getting stronger. We have grown stronger too. There is a new labor movement, with people organizing unions in their workplace, standing up, and going on strike. More and more people want their unions to fight for more than bread and butter issues and fight for an end of arms to Israel, trans rights, and Black Lives. The UC’s went on strike against repression for the Palestine movement — a political strike of the type we will need a lot more of.
We have seen the resurgence of a bold student movement that has anti-imperialist features, standing for a free Palestine and questioning the Democratic and Republican Parties. We have taken over universities, blocked roads, and crisscrossed cities in marches all over the country. We have seen sectors of the movement for Palestine refuse to vote for a capitalist, imperialist party like the Democrats, as comrades expressed in the Voices from CUNY.
I want my students to know how powerful we are when students and workers unite. I want them to feel the strength of standing side by side, with tens of thousands in the streets. I want them to feel the power, possibility and hope of standing up together, the feeling we got a taste of in the encampments.
We have the potential for a deep unity of students and workers, standing up together for our rights. The radicalism and historical thinking of students, alongside the firepower of an increasingly bold working class has the potential to bring down governments. The French May of 1968, which began with radical students on college campuses taking over the campuses and questioning everything, from capitalism to traditional sexual norms, eventually brought in the labor movement to create a powerful force. Together workers and students fought the police, built barricades, and organized a general strike all across the country which almost toppled the President of France. It is with this spirit that we must organize, to carry forward the unfinished revolutionary task of student and worker organizing.
But for many of us, we have been mobilizing for the past year. It’s undeniable that there is an offensive against our rights at the university, and there is an ebb of the movement. “Our side is tired,” my friend says. We cannot keep doing small actions that preach to the choir.
In this moment when whole sectors of people are politicized, we must mobilize in greater numbers. That means demanding that the leaderships of the masses mobilize: unions and non-profits. They organize millions of people — and have attempted to mobilize those people with the goal of voting for the Democrats. The folly of that strategy is clear, as we have a Trump administration and a de-mobilized base — and if Harris had won, we would be de-mobilized to protest against her policies. But we must demand that unions and non-profits put resources behind organizing against the attacks that are coming. We need unity in action. That means a united struggle in the streets of our unions, the immigrants rights non-profits, the Palestine movement in all it’s wings, from Jewish Voice for Peace to Within Our Lifetime to the Shut it Down Coalition — to the movement for Black Lives.
I don’t mean the unity of apparatuses at the top, without any discussion with the rank and file. That’s already underway in New York City, with an action called by various unions and non-profits, with not only no discussion with the rank and file, but also hardly even telling the rank and file. My own union, the PSC, buried the news of this action at the bottom of an email. Our Left Voice comrades who are nurses were not informed. This is not what we need. We need to actually mobilize and organize ourselves to fight for ourselves.
That’s why we need to organize rank and file debate, discussion and mobilization. That’s why from below, we can decide next steps for the movement against the Right, organize how to turn out more people, talking to all our neighbors and co-workers.
We cannot fall into the popular front logic of mobilizing just to build a popular base for the Democratic Party, as was the case in 2016. In 2016, there were massive movements: The Women’s March, the Immigrants’ Rights Marches, and more. But the shift to the Democratic Party was explicit: in 2018 the Women’s March was entitled “Power to the Polls.”
Our power is not at the polls. And our power isn’t in a Democratic Party that is committing genocide, that also deports and attacks the working class. It is in our self-organization as workers and students. That means organizing with people we don’t necessarily agree with — with people who may have voted for Kamala Harris but have a sincere desire to fight against oppression, exploitation, and repression. By organizing from below, with rank-and-file assemblies in workplaces and universities, we as socialists can use the space to radicalize people, to break them from the illusions of liberalism and towards an understanding of our own power as workers and our need and ability to change this system at the root. From this process, the most left elements should build the foundations for a working class party that fights for socialism.
What happens next in the Trump administration depends on us. Let’s get ready to fight — and win.
