No. 75, January-May 2025  Table of Contents Selected articles linked Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

Not the Democrats, But Workers Action Against Mass Deportations and Layoffs! Trumpland USA: Lurching Toward Authoritarian Rule Against Police-State Repression: Fight for Workers Revolution! The second presidency of wannabe autocrat Donald J. Trump started with a tsunami of executive orders, 26 on Inauguration Day (January 20), now up to 141 by Day 100, an all-time record. As the barrage of decrees targeting one group or institution after another has kept up, with a new abomination every day, fear has spread among vulnerable populations across the U.S. First on Trump’s hit list are immigrants, now facing mass deportations. Next came witch hunts in academia, deporting pro-Palestinian international students and slashing budgets of institutions that failed to fall into line. Then Trump declared a trade war against just about every country on earth, setting off panic. The talk is of chaos, but the avalanche of actions shows a well-prepared plan: Trump is systematically preparing a counterrevolutionary war on China. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International say you can’t fight Trump with the Democrats and fight for workers action in the struggle to stop deportations. Defending China and Russia against the imperialist war drive, we warn that there is no reformist alternative to the drive by all wings of the imperialist bourgeoisie for a “strong state” based on a militarized police apparatus. The answer is to fight for international socialist revolution, and to forge a workers party on the program of Lenin and Trotsky to lead it. Trumpland USA: Lurching Toward Authoritarian Rule (29 April 2025) Elon Musk Goes After Federal Workers, and He’s Coming for Your Social Security (29 April 2025) White Supremacists Push State-Enforced Pregnancy (29 April 2025) Fascism, Bonapartism and Donald Trump There is a lot of talk, especially from Democratic “progressives,” about Trump supposedly being a fascist, which we have said is not accurate. Trump traffics in fascistic rhetoric. He is ultra-reactionary, aiming at a regime that would rule with semi-dictatorial powers, but that is not identical with fascism. Fascism is based on a mass movement of “declassed” elements, filled with rage at having lost status, notably due to economic crisis, particularly from the petty bourgeoisie, that is mobilized in the interests of the big bourgeoisie as a battering ram to destroy the workers movement. The bourgeoisie does not need that in this country at the present time. What they are pushing for is a beefed-up “strong state,” or “Bonapartism.” Fascism, Bonapartism and Donald Trump (29 April 2025)

For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations In neighborhoods across the U.S., immigrants are being targeted and seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police and other federal agents as the government ramps up its operations to implement President Donald Trump’s campaign threat of the biggest mass deportations in U.S. history. It is a war on the working people of this country. The Internationalist Group and fraternally allied groups are organizing in the labor movement to form committees to defend immigrants in schools and workplaces. In the Pacific Northwest, Class Struggle Workers – Portland put forward a “Resolution to Defend Immigrants Against Mass Deportations and Racist Violence” which was passed by six area unions. In New York City, a Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants (LCDI) was established at a conference on January 9 attended by more than 70 members, organizers and officers from unions, worker-organizing and immigrant-rights groups, including six Teamsters locals. The Committee has established working groups including construction and building workers, education, healthcare, hospitality, transport and warehouse workers, students, and outreach. Class-conscious workers and immigrants’ rights defenders around the U.S. are encouraged to undertake similar initiatives. For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations (May 2025)

Mobilize Workers Power to Defend Democratic Rights! For a Black-Centered Workers Government! Trump Embraces Afrikaner Racist Trope Among the more than three dozen executive orders and actions by President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day was one banning all refugee admissions to the United States for 90 days. But before that deadline was up, even as immigration police abduct immigrants across the country, on May 12, a plane landed in Washington, D.C., bringing 59 so-called refugees from Africa to the United States. This was no act of benevolence by the imperialists toward people desperately fleeing armed conflicts in, say, Sudan or Congo. Rather, it was a sinister and racist PR stunt headlined by the white-supremacist in chief. The “refugees” were Afrikaners, mostly farmers, ditching South Africa for greener, or should we say whiter, pastures in the United States. Trump Embraces Afrikaner Racist Trope (May 2025) South Africa: Drop the Charges Against Xolani Khoza! (8 May 2025)

Smash Imperialism with International Socialist Revolution! Defend and Extend the Vietnamese Revolution! On April 30, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lined the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to participate in the official celebration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of South Vietnam and national reunification. The decades-long struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants put an end to colonial and capitalist rule in Vietnam, and 1975 marked the ignominious end of the U.S. imperialist war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese. At the time, the revolutionary Trotskyists declared: “We hail this stunning defeat of U.S. imperialism, the first in a major war during this century and greet the victory of our class brothers and sisters in Indochina with internationalist proletarian solidarity.” At the same time, they cautioned that the Stalinist leaders of Vietnam still sought “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. That remains true today, even as Donald Trump slapped 46% tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the United States. Against the threats of imperialism and counterrevolution, the League for the Fourth International calls  to expropriate the dangerous capitalist sector and replace the Stalinist bureaucracy that promotes it by genuine xô viết rule of workers councils with an internationalist communist leadership. Defend and Extend the Vietnamese Revolution! (May 2025)

Not Democratic “Faux Friends” But a Revolutionary Workers Party! Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights Starting on the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump unleashed a series of attacks on one of the most vulnerable social groups in the United States: transgender people. In his inaugural address on January 20, he proclaimed that “there are only two genders, male and female.” With a stroke of the pen, Trump & Co. seek to erase transgender people. Trump’s executive order had many immediate effects, among them assaulting transgender health services. For us as revolutionary Marxists – whose outlook is based on science and reason, not obscurantist prejudice – decisions on such intimate and consequential questions, and on medical issues in general, are a matter for the person and their doctor. We say: Hands off trans kids! While Democratic liberals started posturing as trans people’s “allies” in the recent past (only to abandon this when they decided it was electorally expedient), revolutionary Marxists’ support for gay and trans people’s democratic rights goes back well over a century. Remembering that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” labor must use its power against the deadly dangerous offensive targeting the rights and very existence of transgender people. Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights (May 2025)

Trump, White House Witch-Hunters Besiege Academia The Gleichschaltung of American Universities U.S. universities are under attack like never before. It began on March 8 with the seizure of Mahmoud Khalil, a politically moderate Palestinian graduate of Columbia University. In the following weeks, while pushing to deport international students, the federal government launched an assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus intended to be much more deep-going than even the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Washington is seeking control over hiring, enrollment, governance and course content, while demanding the expulsion of liberal “activist” faculty and students. The basic outlook of the administration can be summed up by the title of a 2021 speech delivered by now vice president J.D. Vance: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As Vance put it in a July 2024 interview, the Trump regime seeks to “replace the existing ruling class with another ruling class.” As the U.S. lurches toward authoritarian rule, we are facing a drive to control all education, whipping educators into line to march in lockstep with the MAGA agenda, imitating the German Nazis’ Gleichschaltung (synchronization) of the schools. The Gleichschaltung of American Universities (May 2025)

Heading Toward a Bonapartist Police State Italy: For a Real General Strike to Stop the “Security” Decree and Arms Build-Up! Build a Leninist-Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party! For Workers Action to Stop Arms to Israel and Ukraine! On April 4, the right-wing Italian government of premier Giorgia Meloni approved a decree putting into effect the repressive measures of a draconian “security” law DDL This police-state law would outlaw such things as street blockades or even picket lines. On April 10, the government pushed a motion through parliament to participate in the ReArm Europe plan to spend hundreds of billions of euros to build up European Union military forces. And on April 17, Meloni will travel to Washington to plead for lower tariffs on goods made in Italy in the trade war unleashed by U.S. president Donald Trump. Under the regime of Meloni and her fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Fd’I), Italy supplies arms to the Zionist butchers in the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza, and to the fascist-infested Ukrainian puppet government in the imperialist proxy war against Russia, while waging class war against working people in Italy. The Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia urges class-conscious workers to fight for a united, unlimited general strike to STOP the security decree and arms build-up! Italy: For a Real General Strike to Stop the “Security” Decree and Arms Build-Up! (April 2025) Meloni, Trump and Musk (April 2025)

May Day 2025 On May 1, more than a quarter million people took to the streets across the United States on the international workers day. They were driven by opposition to the assault on working people by the administration of President Donald Trump, attacking immigrants, transgender people, universities and everyone on the Republicans’ hit list. Democratic Party front groups, meanwhile, held large parades in early April with slogans such as “Hands off NATO.” The Internationalist Group organized contingents in the May Day marches in New York City, Portland, Oakland and Los Angeles focusing on calls for workers action to stop the mass deportations, marching with Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants contingents in NYC and Portland, alongside ILWU Local 10 (longshore workers) in Oakland, and with Transport Workers Against Deportations in Los Angeles. May Day 2025 (May 2025)

Student/Labor Protests Stop Immigration Cops’ Provocation at CUNY Campus On February 27, a campaign of protest and exposure caused the Customs and Border Protection agency to cancel a special recruitment session it scheduled at one of the main campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY). The planned session at the John Jay College career fair was a dangerous provocation, seeking to make the largest urban public university in the U.S. a recruiting ground for the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” drive. It was stopped as the result of two protests, initiated by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, demanding “DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: Out of CUNY Now!” in front of the campus building where the job fair was held. The first, on February 25, on the opening day of the “CareerCon” fair, drew some 150 students and faculty/staff union members. Many students came from Hunter College, under the banner of the Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants. Linking up with the power of NYC’s labor movement was a key theme of the protests. More than a dozen members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) faculty/staff union from different campuses participated, and several spoke, as did a Teamster warehouse worker, an NYC teacher, a restaurant worker and students from several campuses. Another important theme was that the deportation machine Trump relies on was beefed up by Democratic “Deporter-in-Chief” Obama and his successors in the Biden/Harris administration, point to the need for a revolutionary workers party. Student/Labor Protests Stop Immigration Cops’ Provocation at CUNY Campus (March 2025)

Giorgia Meloni and Her Fascist Fratelli d’Italia When Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Fd’I, Brothers of Italy), took office as prime minister in late October 2022, there was a wave of concern internationally about a first-ever Italian government headed by a party descended from the fascist movement of Benito Mussolini. In Italy not so much. While leftist anti-fascists protested against the new right-wing coalition government, the “mainstream” bourgeois parties and media have long since “normalized” the Fd’I. Even much of the left routinely refers to Meloni’s party as just another party of the bosses. Many circumlocutions are used: in the press. Fratelli d’Italia is often referred to as “populist,” “right-wing populist” or at most “radical right-wing populist.” The Fd’I defines itself (in its 2017 Trieste Theses) as a “patriots movement” and “national conservatives.” Another frequent label is “post-fascist.” For our part, the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia and League for the Fourth International hold that there is nothing “post” about it: while the Fd’I may adapt its electoral pitch, it is the latest iteration of the post-WWII fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). And the aim of the right-wing coalition government that it leads is to erect a bonapartist “strong state.” Giorgia Meloni and Her Fascist Fratelli d’Italia (April 2025) The Fraud of Italy's “Anti-Fascist” Constitution One factor behind much of the blindness as to the fascist nature of Fratelli d’Italia is confusion about the so-called “anti-fascist Constitution” of 1947. This was not a great “democratic conquest” in “the direction of socialism,” as Communist Party leader Togliatti claimed. It was a cover for the betrayal of the workers revolution of 1943-45 by the Stalinist leaders, who ordered the disarming of the partisans. It also served to mask the general amnesty of almost all fascist officials, which Togliatti proposed and carried out. The Fraud of Italy's “Anti-Fascist” Constitution (April 2025) Italian Fascists Spearheaded Cold War Anti-Communist Terrorism Giorgia Meloni never renounced the fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), defending it as “a party of the democratic right.” But while the MSI was electorally marginalized, behind the scenes it was well-connected with top levels of the Italian military and intelligence services, as well as coup plotters and fascist terrorists. Italian Fascists Spearheaded Cold War Anti-Communist Terrorism (April 2025) Fascists and Hobbits In the late 1970s, the Italian fascists latched onto the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Starting in 1977, the fascist youth organized annual “Hobbit Camps.” In the U.S. and elsewhere, Tolkien’s works were associated with hippie counterculture, but in Italy they served as a fantasy version of the anti-Soviet Cold War. Also in Ukraine, the fascist-infested military adopted the allegorical figures of Tolkien's works in the imperialist proxy war against Russia. And in the U.S., Lord of the Rings is an icon of the libertarian and “technofascist” power brokers of Silicon Valley, including vice-president JD Vance and Peter Thiel. Fascists and Hobbits (April 2025) The “Little Black Shirts” of the Fratelli Youth The Fratelli d’Italia youth of Gioventù Nazionale has an estimated 50,000  members, while its high school group, Azione Studentesca, claims of 50 groups across Italy. They hold yearly “training camps” they call agoge, after the camps in ancient Greece that trained warriors for the armies of Sparta. These junior-league squadristi not only train for street combat, they have attacked leftist youth in high schools and universities. This is not some tiny Nazi sect but the youth organizations of the fascist leading party of the right-wing coalition government of an imperialist power. The “Little Black Shirts” of the Fratelli Youth (April 2025)

Our Answer to RCI Rally in Rome: Program Is Decisive Proclaiming Yourself a Communist Doesn’t Make You One This past June [2024], several hundred delegates from a number of different countries met in central Italy and bombastically proclaimed themselves the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). As Marxist materialists do not believe in a virgin birth, one would have to ask, where does this new international, with groups and supporters in several dozen countries, come from? The answer is that the RCI, which today postures as super-revolutionaries, is the transmogrification of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), heirs of the Militant Tendency that for over three-quarters of a century was buried in the arch-reformist British Labour Party. The is a product of this social-democratic milieu, specializing in "deep entrism," including in bourgeois parties. It has long sidled up to police and prison guard "unions." The RCI/IMIT has nothing to do with authentic Trotskyism, and has systematically capitulated to imperialism. Proclaiming Yourself a Communist Doesn’t Make You One (November 2024)

Chris Knox (1944-2025) Chris Knox died on 14 April 2025. We honor him in particular for his invaluable contribution in formulating the guidelines for revolutionary working in the trade unions which have guided our intervention ever since, first in the Spartacist League and the international Spartacist tendency (from 1989 on the International Communist League), and then in the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International. Chris Knox (1944-2025) (May 2025)

¡Acciones obreras para poner alto a las deportaciones en masa! En barrios de todo Estados Unidos, los inmigrantes están siendo perseguidos y detenidos por la policía del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE) y otros agentes federales a medida que el gobierno intensifica sus operaciones para implementar la amenaza de campaña del presidente Donald Trump de las mayores deportaciones masivas en la historia de Estados Unidos. Es una guerra contra el pueblo trabajador de este país. El Grupo Internacionalista y grupos fraternalmente aliados se están organizando en el movimiento obrero para formar comités que defiendan a los inmigrantes en las escuelas y lugares de trabajo.  En la ciudad de Nueva York, el 9 de enero se creó un Comité de Trabajadores para la Defensa de los Inmigrantes que ha iniciado grupos de trabajo entre los trabajadores de la construcción, la educación, la sanidad, la hostelería, trabajadores del transporte y los almacenes, los estudiantes y otros. Se insta a los trabajadores con conciencia de clase y a los defensores de los derechos de los inmigrantes de todo EE.UU. a emprender iniciativas similares. ¡Acciones obreras para poner alto a las deportaciones en masa! (mayo de 2025)