The inauguration of President Donald Trump marks a change from one of the two major parties that serve the U.S. capitalist class to the other. It does nothing to change the class-against-class reality workers face every day.
Trump won support from workers of all nationalities during the election. He pledged to put an end to soaring prices, to Democrats’ deeply hated woke policies, to government censorship and its use of the courts against political opponents. He said he would prevent more devastating wars from breaking out.
Trump has begun issuing executive orders to advance his program for defending U.S. capitalist interests, claiming he’s ushering in a “golden age.” But like every Democratic and Republican administration, he will ensure the capitalist rulers continue to reap massive profits off the exploitation of workers’ labor. He’ll defend the rulers in today’s trade conflicts and wars against their rivals.
No capitalist politician can prevent struggles from breaking out between society’s two main classes, workers and the bosses. None can stop further economic breakdowns, nor the continuing march of the world imperialist system — with the U.S. rulers at its head — toward fascism and a third world war.
Trump’s inauguration did not mark the triumph of “fascism,” as the middle-class left forewarned. Nor is there now an “oligarchy” that “threatens our entire democracy,” as former President Joseph Biden stated in his farewell.
The entirety of Biden’s four years in office was marked by an assault on constitutional rights, which are crucial for protecting workers from government interference. Partisan prosecutors from the Justice Department on down filed charges against Trump and his supporters, seeking to drive him out of politics. In doing so, they trampled on the right to free speech and assembly, and more.
The Socialist Workers Party campaigned against these blows. “Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution is at the center of the class struggle today,” the party said. And that remains true.
The change from one capitalist administration to another only underscores the fact that the central question workers face is which class rules.
All class struggles are political struggles. To strengthen our unions, workers need to organize independently of the rulers and their Democratic and Republican parties.
We need a party of labor that organizes all workers, builds solidarity and acts on our shared interests with fellow workers worldwide. A party that strengthens workers’ self-confidence and class consciousness. A party that acts on workers’ capacities to take state power into our own hands, to end capitalist exploitation and oppression, and to run society in the interests of the toiling majority. The conquest of power by workers here would open another front in the fight for a socialist world.
The Socialist Workers Party is running candidates for office across the country in 2025 to win workers to that course. Join in campaigning for the SWP candidates!