In the United States too, the rot of global capitalism is accelerating

 

Since Trump's return to the White House, the global chaos that was already evident has accelerated even further: everywhere, wars are becoming bogged down and piling up corpses, accompanied by climate disasters, instability and the fragmentation of political systems. Violence and brutality are only increasing, plunging the planet further into a deadly vortex. The growing negligence of the bourgeoisie, whose thuggish and vandalistic behaviour is splashed across our screens,[1] highlights the extent to which the capitalist mode of production is precipitating humanity towards its destruction.

Terror and desolation in the United States

The domestic situation in the world's leading power, the United States, has become emblematic of this macabre dynamic that fuels a veritable human tragedy. In all major American cities, savage raids are being carried out against immigrants. Cold-blooded killings by the police are becoming commonplace, as evidenced by the deaths of Renée Nicole Good, shot at point-blank range in her car, and Alex Pretti, who died in the same manner in Minneapolis. [2] The slightest suspicious accent or skin colour deemed too dark are grounds for brutal arrest. Without a warrant, the doors of the homes of suspected illegal immigrants are forced open. In public parks, such as the one in downtown Los Angeles last summer, which is very popular with Latinos, immigration police,[3] dressed in combat gear, rushed towards picnic tables and swings to carry out violent arrests. The same is true in the streets, hospitals, places of worship... Children are shamelessly rounded up on their way to school, as was the case with little Liam, aged just 5, who was taken with his father to a detention centre 1,500 kilometres from their home. Such a policy of terror, where immigrants no longer dare to leave their homes, inevitably leads to reactions by an outraged population.

The bourgeoisie exploits the anger it generates

Faced with this violence and the tenfold increase in racism, cultivated by actions that are as repugnant as they are disturbing, a large majority of the population is expressing its anger, particularly against the methods of the ICE, whose agents are regularly booed, heckled and called ‘Nazis’ or ‘Gestapo agents’. From June onwards, demonstrations were organised and multiplied across the country, accompanied by scenes of rioting. In Los Angeles, following Trump's provocative statements claiming that the city was being “invaded by foreign enemies,” violent clashes occurred over several nights between protesters and law enforcement. This situation led Trump to deploy 700 Marines based in Southern California, adding to the 2,000 National Guard members already present.

Elsewhere, protests multiplied: in New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Dallas... and most recently in Minneapolis. In this flagship city of Minnesota, thousands of demonstrators braved the cold to denounce such barbarity and the murders of two demonstrators, finally forcing Trump to back down and withdraw his ICE henchmen from the city.

However, despite the massive mobilisation, all these demonstrations did not stop Trump, nor did they put an end to the abuses of the immigration police. Why? Certainly, the anger that has drawn millions of people across America is legitimate, but it is not the working class, with its weapons of struggle, that has mobilised against the barbarism of the bourgeoisie, it is the population of citizens against a faction of the bourgeoisie, that of Trump and his clique. And that is very different! Indeed, the demonstrations were immediately driven by ‘citizens’ associations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn, Greenpeace, and even the trade union movement, demanding a ‘more equitable’ society and advocating the defence of the principles of ‘participatory democracy’ against the ‘authoritarianism’ of Trumpism, without in any way questioning the capitalist system. Trump and his ICE militia may be despicable, but they are a reflection of capitalism as a whole, of the entire bourgeoisie! Need we remind ourselves of the policies of the American Democratic Party, which today cries crocodile tears, when under Biden and Obama it relentlessly deported migrants en masse and separated Hispanic children from their families? Need we recall the despicable concentration camps on the margins of Europe, supposedly a paradise of human rights and progressivism, and the tens of thousands of corpses that litter the bottoms of the Mediterranean and the English Channel? All of them pursue utterly inhumane policies towards migrants!

In fact, left-wing associations and parties are still trying to divert the proletariat from its class struggle, to make it believe that they must fight as citizens, that their salvation lies in defending bourgeois democracy. This multi-formed movement presents a great danger to the working class, already contained in its name: “No kings”. Indeed, its name, which comes from the bourgeois left, originates from the slogan of the insurgents of the American Revolution, a nationalist slogan that rejected the English monarchy at the time.

There's nothing proletarian or truly spontaneous about all these movements, which have been organised and instrumentalised on a bourgeois terrain from the outset. So it's hardly surprising that these movements have been supported by show-business personalities and the Democratic Party, led by Obama.

This is a real ideological trap, as was the case in the past with the Black Lives Matter movement following the despicable murder of George Floyd by the police, which risks drawing the working class into the false terrain of the bourgeoisie, which leads it to support one supposedly more ‘progressive’ bourgeois faction against another, the defense of ‘democracy’ or “good policing”, or the trap of “anti-populism” or “anti-fascism”. In short, to choose one bourgeois faction against another, to delude ourselves about a fairer capitalism. Such a situation represents a further obstacle to the development of class consciousness, and a real danger to the autonomy of the workers’ struggle.

Confrontations within the ruling class

This danger is all the more real as the increasingly chaotic situation in the USA is marked by growing and brutal confrontations within the ruling class, whose various putrefied factions express nothing other than the impasse of a dying capitalist system

This is evident, on the one hand, in imperialist policies, such as Trump's overtures to Russia, which have provoked outrage among important factions, including within the Republican Party and the armed forces, but also in the proliferation of armed interventions around the world, which are unpopular with certain MAGA factions. The same is true of his destabilising economic and climate policy, which was openly challenged at the Davos forum by California Democratic Governor Gary Newsom's speech. Furthermore, Trump has no qualms about shamelessly favouring his clan and the factions that support him, while dismissing and prosecuting his opponents, accentuating divisions between factions, including within his own camp (such as criticism from ‘long-time Trump supporter’ Marjorie Taylor Greene or pro-Trump influencer Joe Rogan, who compares ICE to the Gestapo), thus reinforcing the spiral of unpredictability and chaos.[4]

This situation is creating a particularly toxic atmosphere in a fragmented and increasingly divided country. All this can only have negative repercussions in America itself and suggests even greater divisions with the prospect of more open confrontations, where the previous assault on the Capitol by MAGA hordes could pale in comparison to the contained threats and growing rivalries that risk inflaming the various factions of the American bourgeoisie.

It is towards these endless and increasingly violent deadly clashes that the bourgeoisie is seeking to mobilise the population!

Faced with all this barbarism, what prospects are there for the working class?

Does this mean that there is nothing the working class can do? Of course not! It too is revolted by the fate of migrants. And the working class, whether ‘native’ or ‘immigrant’, is suffering, as everywhere else, from a growing deterioration in its living conditions. In the United States, there is open talk of a ‘cost of living crisis’ (‘affordability’), with 66% of the population struggling to make ends meet. As elsewhere, the global crisis of overproduction, exacerbated by military spending and inflation, is creating misery that is spreading ever more rapidly and affecting both natives and immigrants. All the more so as everywhere the bourgeoisie demands more sacrifices to buy its weapons and spread death across the planet!

In reality, the proletariat is not yet in a position to stop wars or curb the current chaos. It will need to develop its political consciousness to be able to truly reject the traps set for it by the bourgeoisie, to turn its indignation at the cruelties inflicted on migrants against the bourgeoisie itself. But it is the only force capable, in the long term, of giving society an alternative direction, provided that it first resists the crisis through united struggle.

For now, it must not give in or fall into the ideological traps set for it. On the contrary, it must engage in an in-depth reflection on the true meaning of solidarity with migrants and, more broadly, with all its class brothers and sisters. And today, only a response based on the common defence of workers' interests, on the defence of living conditions and wages, can provide the beginnings of an answer.

This beginning of an answer can obviously be found in the struggles that the proletariat has begun to wage internationally since 2022, following the massive strikes and demonstrations in Britain, France and even the United States, when workers proclaimed “enough is enough!”. But equally significant are the recent struggles in the United States, which are taking place under particularly unfavourable conditions and which the ruling class is seeking to conceal and undermine. During the same months that the media inundated us with Trump's boasts on Air Force One, an important struggle was indeed underway among the 15,000 nurses in New York State hospitals. A struggle that lasted more than four weeks.

While movements engaged on bourgeois terrain have no other perspective than the risk of sterile and destructive clashes between bourgeois factions, each as barbaric as the next, the nurses' struggles represent a real step towards the future. This struggle, because it is potentially one in which all proletarians, immigrants and natives alike, can recognise themselves, has a universal dimension. This small flame is just waiting to fuel a much larger fire, that of an international struggle, capable, in the long term, of becoming politicised to the point of affirming the communist perspective. A struggle that will make it possible to establish the necessary conditions for overthrowing capitalism and proposing another world without classes or exploitation.

WH, 16 February 2026

 

[1] Of which the Epstein case is only the tip of the iceberg.

[2] And these are not the only cases: Keith Porter, for example, a father of two, was killed on New Year's Eve by an ICE agent in front of his building in Los Angeles.

[3] The infamous US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).