An introduction to Going Against the Tide #6

Over a year ago, we published a lengthy editorial with a lengthy title, “The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program and the ongoing tantrums of two reactionary petty-bourgeoisies.” In it, we analyzed the shifting alignment of class forces and the political expiration of the Clintonian Democratic Party that paved the way for Donald Trump to win a second presidential term. Since then, the second Trump administration has used and transformed the levers of state power to enact rapid and decisive transformations in service of revanchism—against their opponents in government, against immigrants, against trans people, etc.—and in service of grift and profit, for administration officials and the sections of the bourgeoisie that back them. They have proved the ineptitude of the liberal bourgeoisie’s chosen political representatives, who talk tough about resisting Trump while doing little to nothing to prevent the Bovino boys from running roughshod over immigrants and protesters in Democrat-run cities. The Trump administration has also shaken up the orderly functioning of state bureaucracies, whether through gutting institutions or forcing out career government employees. For proletarian masses, crucial services and social welfare programs for daily survival, such as the SNAP program many depend on to eat, are being gutted, a far graver concern to us than federal workers losing their jobs.

The rapid pace of events and radical transformations unfolding under the second Trump administration demand incisive analysis and a militant revolutionary response, and GATT #6 aims to provide some of the former and give guidance to the latter. While we don’t have the capacity to address all the key political struggles and transformations unfolding before our eyes, this issue of our journal features three editorials in the spirit of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. In WITBD?, Lenin advocated using communist agitation and propaganda to bring a class-conscious understanding of all major events in society to the masses that steels us in “how to live and how to die.” On the latter, the vicious repression those resisting ICE are confronting, including the recent murder of Renee Good, indicates the stakes. Consequently, our most lengthy editorial in this issue provides a historical materialist analysis of the position of the immigrant proletariat in the US and the changes in bourgeois policy that paved the way for the current wave of kidnappings, detentions, and deportations perpetrated by the Trump administration’s gung-ho footsoldiers, the Bovino boys. “Whistles won’t stop this: The immigrant proletariat and state repression the from Chinese exclusion to the Bovino Boys’ terror” also aims its ire at what we call the Immigrant Rights Class Struggle Containment Apparatus, which preaches “know your rights” in the face of repressive forces that don’t give a shit about those rights, wishing they could whistle their way out of state repression.

Opal Skinnider’s “When do we get angry?” traces the historical arc of abortion rights in the US from contested victory in 1973 to capitulationist defeat with the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. Skinnider calls for an end to lowered sights and the betrayal of women by the pro-choice establishment in favor of unleashing the fury to women to not only win back abortion rights, but to overthrow the system that perpetuates patriarchal oppression.

“The grifter style in American politics” answers what’s driving the current transformations and uses of state power by the Trump administration. In opposition to simplistic comparisons to past fascist regimes, we point to the rise of the grifter wannabe bourgeoisie to the apex of state power on the basis of mobilizing and delivering on reactionary revanchism, in league with and bolstered by tech and venture capital.

We were not able to produce analysis on the wave of attacks on social welfare that many proletarians depend on daily, changes in US imperialism’s foreign policy, repressive impositions on institutions of higher education, attacks on the rights of trans people, and other key developments in time for this issue. We hope to publish editorials and articles on these and other questions on our website (goingagainstthetide.org) soon and in future issues of GATT.

In addition to analysis of the political situation we face, the communist movement requires a keen understanding of the class and social forces that can transform that situation in the direction of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism-imperialism. Mao Zedong’s landmark essay Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party’s successful strategy for seizing power by identifying the revolutionary potential of China’s peasants. Going Against the Tide and its predecessor kites have published social investigation and class analysis of the contemporary US to identify the revolutionary potential of various sections of the proletariat and forge a strategy that can realize that potential. Previously published social investigation reports largely focused on Black proletarians in large and mid-size cities.

GATT #6 features five reports written in response to the call for social investigation we made a year ago, in our post-election editorial, to broaden our understanding of the proletariat in the US. Three of these reports focus on the immigrant proletariat, from farmworkers in California to delivery drivers, street vendors, and other new migrants in New York City. “Uncertain future in Steel City” gives us a deep dive into Lorain, Ohio, where a very multinational proletarian population has faced dispossession and downward mobility over the last several decades as the factories they worked at closed their doors and left them unemployed and preyed on by opioid peddlers, i.e., the Big Pharma bourgeoisie. “We fought the US before, and will need to again, soon” is GATT’s first substantive analysis of the conditions, concerns, and aspirations of Indigenous people in the US, and points to their desire to hold on to collective ways of thinking and living in opposition to the pervasive bourgeois individualism of US culture.

Taken together, the five social investigation reports in this issue of GATT broaden the communist movement’s understanding of the proletariat in the US, with particular focus on one section—the immigrant proletariat—that is currently in the crosshairs of state repression. Moving forward, it’s up to GATT readers to take this understanding and use it to bring forward the class-consciousness, fighting capacity, and revolutionary organization of the masses, and to expand our understanding through further social investigation into other sections of the proletariat. The small but growing communist movement in the US has yet to reach many sections of the proletariat mentioned in our call for social investigation a year ago. If you’re still sitting on the sidelines, now is the time to put what you’re reading in GATT into practice, to immerse yourself among the masses, and to figure out, collectively, how to bring them to the frontlines of the struggles erupting throughout society. Now is the time for daring initiative, among the masses and in the face of a vicious enemy. Seize the time, and prepare the forces that can seize state power.