Margarethe Wegner & Eris Rosenburg | Red Phoenix correspondents | Minnesota–

On June 3, the workers of Minneapolis met Trump’s jackbooted thugs on Lake Street in the defense of their neighbors, when the newly expanded Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) arrived armed and ready for war, equipped with armored vehicles and other military equipment.

That force — comprised of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, IRS-CI, DEA, ERO, ATF, USMS, DSS, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and TSA — and the Minneapolis Police Department began to blockade the Lake Street neighborhood in front of the Las Cuatro Milpas restaurant for what was likely an immigration enforcement action. Despite the thugs armed with rifles and their armored vehicle support, the masses stood their ground, demanding the task force leave the area, and even began to fight back as their numbers swelled.

Mayor Jacob Frey, ever the enemy of the Twin Cities’ workers, immediately came to the defense of the aggressors, citing a sealed noncertifiable warrant for “drugs and money laundering” as justification for this open display of terroristic aggression towards those who he is sworn to serve.

In an unsurprising turn of events, Mayor Frey has bent the knee to the Trump administration’s open war on sanctuary cities by allowing the HSTF marauders to attack workers that he should be protecting. The protected status of all sanctuary cities, counties, and states is at risk of evaporating, with Homeland Security’s hit list marking Minneapolis and St. Paul as targets to make an example with this new stage of development for the US’ ruling class to subjugate the workers through even more repressive measures.

The stage has been set for the standoff on Lake Street since the expansion of the DHS’ “law enforcement” wing allowed then-acting DHS secretary Benjamine Huffman to disgustingly exclaim his support for widespread mobilization of agents to increase the number of deportations in the United States.

With the May 29 denouncement of sanctuary cities by current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who demands for sanctuary cities to give up their protected status, the initial promises of Trump’s administration became manifest through direct military action. It is plain for all to see that US capital has escalated its attacks on the working class, by resorting to ever more terroristic methods.

This will not be the end of the escalation.The capitalists pit citizen and immigrant workers against each other to distract both from their exploitation by the employer. Meanwhile, reactionary and fascist demagogues like Trump then run on a platform of increasing the oppression of immigrants to the cheers of receptive, deceived workers.

The expulsion of immigrant labor, which was originally exploited for superprofits, for supposedly taking American jobs is then used as a rallying call for the slogans of class collaborationism of fascism. In practice, fascism’s true character is as a terrorist dictatorship of the financial bourgeoisie, and always gives way to a worsening of conditions for both citizen and immigrant workers, alongside the petty bourgeoisie.

At this very moment, immigrants are being torn from their homes and families. Next it will be transgender people, and then the disabled. Who is to say whom the MAGA fascists will target after that? As the rate of profit continues to decay, and US workers are displaced by automation and increasing fixed capital costs, US capitalism turns more and more towards the openly terroristic methods of fascism as the only means to secure profits. 

When capitalists can no longer make a profit in the “traditional” way, they must resort to extreme levels of oppression to wring profits from workers by minimizing the cost for these workers to produce goods. In the US, just as in Nazi Germany and other capitalist states in crisis, this takes the form of expropriation through slave labor in prisons and ICE camps.

At this moment, immigrants are being targeted to prop up the failing capitalist system no matter the cost. A return to a Democrat administration will not stop the expansion of DHS, nor will it halt the bourgeoisie’s turn to fascism¹.

The masses have made their growing discontent known by the standoff on Lake Street. This lashing out by the workers in defense of their community marks the beginning of an understanding that only by rising together do we stand any chance at all. Over the past decade, the working classes’ awareness of the class war has been growing; the increase in open defiance of the bourgeois dictatorship around the country and in the Twin Cities is testament to this fact.

It is our task as communists to turn these wild swings into solid punches, by connecting this rising discontent to the political struggle against the bourgeoisie. We call for all workers to get organized and continue to show the strength and solidarity that was shown on Lake Street. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. All power to the working people!

[1] “From this point stabilisation ends, and a transformation begins to develop in the whole of capitalist policy and in the consciousness of the proletariat. Social Democracy, which had shared in the boom of capitalist restoration, goes through a series of inner crises, and weakens before Communism. Fascism which had previously developed only in an experimental stage in a secondary capitalist country, now comes to the front as a world factor, dominating directly a major capitalist country, as well as in greater or less degree a whole series of other countries, and revealing itself as the most typical expression of modern capitalist policy.”

R. P. Dutt, “Fascism and the Social Revolution,” 2nd Ed.

Categories: Discrimination, Immigration, U.S. News