editor’s note: you can find a pdf copy of this text at the bottom of the page. as always, feel free to download and distribute. enjoy!
Author’s Note
This article was originally conceived in the context of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, but has taken a new meaning in light of recent Anti-ICE demonstrations. With the former the threat of repression was stratified and void of refined purpose, as the primary target was an insubordinate overseas entity. Furthermore, with the secondary target in this scenario-fictitious and abstract capital (American investments and government financing of Israel)-there was still an absence of direct conflict with America itself. Thus, the American State simply sought a lower socially necessary amount of repression. Certainly demonstrators were bloodied, beaten, and arrested, but because their intentions were against governmental transactions and Israeli aggression, the American bourgeoisie was largely comfortable. Its hegemony was comfortable and enforcement lax, picking cat fights with college students as a form of spectacular amusement. The streets sang not with class struggle, but with justice, peace, and inalienable rights, all values the State could absorb and reproduce. There were few large-scale skirmishes with law enforcement, and those that existed were tucked away on the campus. The daily life of capital was able to reproduce itself, the function of the State was merely blotted with minor inconveniences, and so on. These flaws became responsible for the decline of the solidarity movement in general, and even as activists split into more and less radical camps there was little to be done.
Here the anti-ICE demonstrations represent a renewed focus on the immediacy of the American State. With this immediacy comes new territory, mainly the threat of the State and its functionaries, its ability to supervise capitalist reproduction. Now Communists can really represent a challenge to State hegemony and its efficacy in oppressing the working class, now they can fight a battle that can yield a greater outcome. Yet only if they can imagine it. As ICE grows bolder and better equipped, the consequences and fates of lives hang: Whether it be the targets of ICE, their families, demonstrators, or ICE itself. Thus, any marginal inconsistency with the program of the alleged resistance must be taken to even greater extremes. As such, it is in this analysis we have to sharply criticize the weapons of choice for the movement leadership: The Protest, the fetish of nothing, and various other factors featured in recent demonstrations across the United States.
On Opportunism Amidst Anti-ICE Sentiment
As with our previous issue on the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the student movement, we find it important first to elaborate on the specific historical conditions in which our thesis is currently relevant: A resuscitated, burgeoning anti-ICE struggle. Thus, we will briefly critique the forms of opportunism in this struggle specifically, i.e. language, slogans, and tactics, before developing a large-scale critique on protesting and solidarity as action. Given that the anti-ICE struggle has primarily consisted of these two variables, it is a perfect contextual background for what we intend to deconstruct.
Beginning with the current movement, the crux of the contradiction is simple: After initial outbreaks of resistance which could be deemed anti-formist, the question of migration has crawled back into a safe space. That being, a contradiction marked by deprivations on the international working class has been co-opted into a political question. This has long been the case, but with a deepening political crisis and worries regarding ICE, resistance began to take shape that was not altogether liberal. Yet within weeks it backslid to its political content, which judges the existence of the migrant on their economic and pseudo-cultural output to America. Now how could this be, with a movement’s target as markedly clear as the American State and the US-Mexico border? Primarily, it is due to the various sects of the bourgeoisie which contain some opposition to ICE. Immigrant labor, and especially immigrant labor further subsidized by its illegality, is a cornerstone of American industry: For example, in 2022 roughly 45% of all agricultural workers were estimated to be undocumented.[1] Take these figures with an understandable grain of salt, as data for immigrant laborers and especially undocumented laborers are hard to track. But various studies show similar results: In 2021 undocumented migrants were estimated to compose 40% of the farmworker population, and in some states such as California this number rises to 75%.[2] [3]Regardless of which figure you take, it is plausible to understand the necessity of cheap migrant labor for the agricultural industry. Similar studies can be found for other industries, where in 2024 it was estimated that 30% of laborers in major construction trades (plasterers, roofers, painters) and 25% of all housekeeping cleaners are undocumented. [4]
We see this phenomenon of bourgeois fervor then, for example, in the large scale farms which bemoan Trump’s border policy, putting forward alternative measures such as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act in 2023. This bill, which failed to pass, would have allowed over a million undocumented agricultural workers amnesty, yet severely limit their already depraved workplace conditions.[5] As such, even if the “progressive” bourgeoisie propagandize and lobby against the severity of Trump’s migrant policy, they merely understand the precariousness of their business and seek to consolidate in an industry with a fatality rate 5 times higher than the national average.[6]
As this economic language becomes political, alliances are made to consolidate a political opposition and alternative. They still mobilize for the sake of global submission to capital, yet their forces come in the name of peace, justice, equality, and the most ludicrous and yet stereotypical of all bourgeois slogans: Abstract human rights. Human rights are then the language in which we eat and sleep. Human rights are used to tell the time of day, even when less than 25% of undocumented agricultural workers have health insurance (compared to a still paltry 48% for all agricultural workers) and median wages for undocumented laborers are less than half of their minimum-waged, documented counterparts.[7] It is then human rights that we reject, as we reject the right to toil and the conscription of life to such. Yet the bourgeois mobilization has already made strides, given that as of the time of writing, Trump has seemingly gone back on large-scale ICE raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants.[8] This presents a concession for various sects of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie where there has previously been extensive infighting, and thus we can expect they will quietly fall in line with much of Trump’s remaining program.
Where is liberation for the worker derided as a migrant or alien? Surely not in these programs championing the global melting pot of capital, the capitalism with a place for everyone under its dominion. This is the sick and twisted nature of these democratic protests led by all the classes: They only further strangle the migrant into submission, with progressives seeking to implicate American workers in this process. We must remember that as almost all mass movements which are dressed by and for the “people”, these “diverse peoples” essentially boil down to conflicting bourgeois interests. Thus we cannot rely on morality in this movement, but outwardly criticize those who sell us eternal concepts.
Furthermore and as bourgeois interests shift, the resistance to ICE has given a platform to a feverish kind of “anti-fascist” patriotism equally abhorrent to its Republican opposition. In a remarkable shift from the progressivist cries of 2020 where we sacrificed class to look to a future America, the liberal establishment now yearns for the lost days of a law and order America, an America that stuck to tough laws and followed its judicial promises with brute force. An America that beat back fascism in Europe, raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and subsequently enveloped the entire globe. In their eternal morality they pine for an America that is strong and powerful, both ideologically but also as a global empire of accumulation. They miss the days of the 1990s when America represented the only entity in the world, an unconscious arbiter of reason and thought. Thus it is no surprise that these liberals bank their hopes on the last forces that era represented: The elected officials and all their horses and all their men, who toy with the ability to call in city and State police forces. While this dream-or rather, hallucination-has slowly dimmed, it is still incredibly relevant for the millions of Americans impassioned yet unable to justify doing. They want and desire an Empire that acts independent of democracy, a State that can positively deride all alternatives as fascist or totalitarian. The liberals themselves want fascism, if only in the sense that they plead to capital that its interests will entirely unite from above. This is not perversion but the ultimate manifestation of human rights. If previously unclear, now these new black shirts have displayed in their “people’s marches” across the country a central theme: To “Take back our America!”. This trope is true to the inversion of conservatism by playing into the bourgeois culture war of defining and redefining Americana, and largely identical to the supposedly “fascist” opposition who rallies under the same cry!
All we as Communists are left with is a brutal irony that while marching under the banner of migrant rights, we champion the classic safeguard of “the nation”. This movement which usurps even the established Communist infrastructure in scope is not to be sympathized with; It is conservative reaction that will need to be fought as much as any ICE battalion. We do not seek the global bondage nor our own, and we cannot sacrifice our imagination to the nation.
As we will explore with diligence in the next section, the task of Communists is certainly to resist the spectacle of protesting proper. But in order to do such, Communists must resist the allure of aiding one bourgeoisie against another in these reactionary mass movements. This makes it all the more dooming that the ideals of nationalism, of truepatriotism and moral righteousness are the pretext on which even Communist national demonstrations are being held. It is not a matter of making revolution but consolidating a lost American way of life and ethos. But the Communists are late to this pole, as it’s truly where Trump’s support has already been banked. In a sleek fashion bourgeois language has enveloped its own contradictions and made a fashionable mold out of this struggle, one that has been resold back to the revolutionaries for a significant price.
This threat has long permeated the resistance to border patrol, ICE, and the federal government, but now we risk the bloodying of our own in exchange for bourgeois consolidation. We feel the need to remind Communists, then, that this is no longer a protest on the corner of the street, with no target or aims, ambition or imagination! We, in any situation such as the interventions against ICE, can truly define and redefine society as we wish. How life is used, what we do with it, can all be called into question with even a single blockade. Yet if we are to make a gamble, a truly serious one with our blood as the medium of currency, it should not die for a preferred means of super exploitation. Our response to bourgeois cries of peace and justice are not just the abolition of ICE: This gives them a medium under which the nation-state remains and readjusts. No, we must propagate and organize around the abolition of borders, of the nation state, and of global capitalism in all its forms through a working class struggle.
If we are to make a serious gamble, we must first consider a serious imagination outside of our current confines. Reject bourgeois culture, reject bourgeois demands, reject everything but the world. Is that not but all we demand?
Demands alone are not enough, as the current demonstrations could be organized on the pinnacle of Communist sloganeering and still be hapless. Thus, the second point of struggle which delineates the aforementioned idealism is the site of struggle itself. We are witnessing a time when bourgeois idealism and proletarian outrage clash at each demonstration, but it is the site of the protest which envelopes all. It is in this setting where abstract ideology only goes so far, and we are not ideologists.
On Protest As Spectacle
Protesting tugs at the heart of the imagination of all classes, and for the proletarian it is the culmination of unrealized dreams and an alienated subject. Protesting is everything and nothing: It is the promise of action while demanding inaction, an inexorable mold of doing, of seeking and becoming something else other than what one was. In other words, it is an emotional connection that is not materially consequential.
Protesting, as class antagonisms well, occurs when some mass take on vocal action; This is not exceptional by its own measure. Whenever the social relation is picked at like a scab, there is always some action being done by the warring classes. However, when this action is isolated into a single category of examination, is compartmentalized into a right unto itself and into an action unto itself, it serves as the golden birthmark of capitalist democracy. Severed by capitalist spectacle and the transfer of lived experience onto images, protesting itself becomes separate from the action of doing. Rather it is the admittance that nothing is to be done. Therefore, protesting is not a neutral development or excuse, but a wholly reactionary concept with a shoddy foundation for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This foundation leads to dreadful confusion and false truths that fool both classes, but insofar as it is a capitalist product and right, it has largely been weaponized by the capitalists at the proletariat’s expense. Furthermore, while the act of protesting is a general reaction to capitalist contradiction and can be accompanied by a variety of factors outside of itself (strikes, armed insurrection, sabotage, looting), the protest as an event is none of these things. It exists not as the spontaneous uprising of the proletariat or of the students, but as an isolating mediation between the masses and capital. And a spectacular one at that!
We will proceed to examine this mediation through the conditions that give rise to its existence: Namely, the unrest of the masses, the tasks of Communists/organizers/activists during this unrest, and the means of presenting the spectacle to the masses.
First, let us briefly press on the conditions that make protest possible on a mass scale. As Communists, we understand this simply to be the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the corresponding alienation that governs and fractures the workers’ lives. But we must understand these features are natural to capitalist relations and integral to their reproduction; We do not cause them nor do we facilitate their development as organizers or spectacular agitators. These exist outside ourselves, our work, and our respective ideology. Thus it is not a matter of growing and sustaining a mass susceptible to our ideology or our work, as much as it is communicating what is really happening and offering a point for unrest to coalesce. To puncture all ideology thoroughly.
The prospect of the protest appears here, not to sever alienation at the source nor to provide any action of doing. Rather, it is birthed as the thought of struggle by organizers. By thought, we refer to the imposition of a set of ideas and values on the class struggle itself, into an ideology separate from social relationships. This ideology serves as a mediated concept from class struggle in its inception, seeking to bridge the relation between the mass of workers and the organizer, activist, or intellectual. The ideology can be “revolutionary” or “liberal”, this is not especially important when in relation to the protest. Both result in a similar world-building from the purveyor, which denotes this new reality as the only way to remain true to whichever specified cause.
This is not a social relation itself, just an observation, and eventually a thesis developed into a thought. And this thought has a tendency to prioritize itself, through sheer compulsion, in order to justify its own existence. It must reach some sort of consensus, no matter how minute or miniscule, or just as it was conceived it will perish. And for the purveyor, it is unconsciously the death of ideas which is the point of primacy, not the break in the social relation we all despise.
However lofty, inevitably ideology must brush with the ground. When it does-and comes into genesis physically with the bourgeoisie-it is a prison from which only partial truths of the class struggle can form. It seeks to validate class struggle only through its own lens, or most often to do away with it altogether. This idealism causes the separation of the protest from its initial social content. First as thought, but now with a second division as the voyeur of action. When such spectacular events are formed, the ideology-State relationship presents a controlled environment with preset expectations. As such one protests not to act, but to watch as history unfolds before them. While tempting, they cannot construct an action outside of the event; The subject can only view and interpret through the gaze of ideology. As this phenomenon expands to greater subjects and the protest justifies its own existence, it ironically betrays the very action it was constructed to view. The uncontrolled action that is the cause of the protest has been isolated and reduced to spectacle. Robbed of its spontaneity and vibrance, the action is treated as an uncanny outlier from a different society. One that will remain foreign until it is inexplicably sorted out by the delegates of Empire. All action is criticized, all viewership glorified, and the protest is the final form of this fetishization. A new reality is formed, separate from classes, from struggle, and from society as a whole.
When this fetishism grows noticeable, there is very obviously a detachment from the struggle, from the real, in favor of ideology and optical abstraction. But ideological mediation is only ideological, it cannot confound the real completely. A real relation still exists, there is still struggle to be waged in some form, wrestling with ideals as it must. As such the protest requires real mediation, to anchor irregularities and create a moral spectacle outside of present society, outside of reality. What is this real mediation, and what does it look like?
It is the marshals, the liaisons, the organizers, it is the speakers, the leading NGOs and nonprofits, the trade unions and their affiliates as well as elected officials and their coalitions. It is the swathes of these that serve as a protracted arm of the State, ready and capable of dipping all eyes into a political program and optical comfort. For the sake of simplicity we can classify these into several groups: Rhetorical mediators (implementation of programs and slogans to the protest), internal mediators (the marshals, liaisons, and self-policing culture that sprout from organization), and State mediators ( the police, military, media and so on).
Rhetorical devices serve as the agents of ideology, of the vision of class struggle through the eyes of its absence. Their purpose is as the original line of defense, for their images are the images on which mass protest takes form. Slogans are everywhere, reiterated all at once, directing subjects from their subservience to capital to an ideological concept they find agreeable in their present state. The rhetoric further perverts and fetishizes the uncontrolled action which presents the cause of thought. Thus, rhetorical success is practically confirmed with all protests. Should this not be enough, the internal mediators activate themselves abruptly. They coordinate with State thugs on a permissible event program and utilize their own authority to keep the masses’ shape. Through militant self-policing, they identify agitators, Communist or Anarchist, and alienate them from the rest of the protesting mass to ensure obedience to the rhetorical and therefore the optical illusions of moral grandeur. The State, through messages of violence and fear, will of course do the rest. But it is the protest in its own form that takes it to the level of the State, justifying itself by suppressing dissent, suppressing the class struggle itself. When all are present, the protest is a carefully constructed message of immediate democratic aims. As it grows its own consciousness throughout the duration of its lifespan, it dreams of nothing more than respect from the bourgeoisie, sacrificing more and more of its original content to do so. Eating away at itself, the young protest may completely be cannibalized if left to its own devices. But if its origin is so enthralling, so spectacular that it offers masses a remote alternative to illusion, the protest can subsist on its own life force some time longer. Through its very own servants, it will mass build across class lines until class ceases to exist, thoroughly abolished by and replaced by a pan-class morality and framework.
This is a 4th mediation which arguably triumphs all others: Time. Under capitalism everything is a race against time, including leisure time. What the masses do for pleasure wholly matters, and thus the protest itself is a cost to them and the capitalist system (whereas they could be contributing to social product through commodities). They must get some reward out of it, whether it is merely satisfaction or a false flag of revolutionary fervor. The masses are thus excited and anxious, awaiting something to happen to prove their gamble correct. The protest already knows it will never provide this, its ideologists even more so, but it does all it can to present real stakes to show an image of seriousness. Whether the decision to “take” a street or the sporadic random arrests to keep the mobs at bay, illusions of power and vibrancy keep mass energy in line but activated. They are led to feel independent of everything, unwittingly trapped in a falser reality than ever before. The closer they get to the edge of action and viewership, the further into constructed spectacle they plummet.
This real mediation becomes a supreme spectacle of mass energy, where all solutions to the world become obvious and present. Joy and justice are eternal; Ideas are everywhere just as in relation to the class struggle they are nowhere. Everything can be won, not through struggle but due to the mass being stripped of its class agency. After all, this is a mass struggle, and the mass struggle in protest is in favor of the unity of everything as long as resistance remains allegorical. We stress this to the highest degree: With a collection of every class, every idea is pronounced, expounded upon, provided in bits and pieces. But only as a voyeur to history. Should action be taken, should any subject do anything, this is a breach of the empty platitudes provided by the organizers and harnessed by the collection of mass that forms the demonstration. Even a hapless individual action threatens this balance. This is why the protest acts as the solvent to the class struggle, of any accord or variety.
Many Communists mistake these pitfalls as tendencies of liberal protesting alone. But the protests of Communists are just as shameful for they attempt to really peel back the mysticism of capitalist life. Here, they bellow insults at the police, call for a glorious triumph of the working class, and urge its agency in its own liberation. Their rhetorical defense is still just a false flag. Just as Leninists seek to operate the same machinery that facilitates capitalist reproduction in the State, they play with bourgeois tools while they wait for the revolution to be made. Due to the rhetorical confusion, Leninist protest has to overcompensate with an even more rigid internal mediation. The Communists in their lowly standing become more punishing than the liberals, dividing and conquering the masses while offering up agitators to the elements as “traitors from the outside.”
Even the Communist protest is just an experience and a means to process life, to view it in its fullness, still divorced from the act of doing. In the next section, we will consider what it means to protest in the midst of the Communist spectacular.
The Allure of Nothing: Between 2 Movements
As the resistance to ICE has numerically grown but gone both rhetorically and actually stagnant, it reminds us much of the Palestine Solidarity Movement in its epoch. Not just because the same organizations organize mass protests, but because of the allure of nothing. While headlines capture the imaginations of all, these demonstrations exist in a vacuum of space which is hard to call reality. It is mystic, not realistic. We recount the burning death of Palestine solidarity last year through this attitude.
In Spring 2024 amidst the final throes of Palestine solidarity, the President of the United States was set to make a trip to our city. Roughly half a year to that point had been wasted on the spectacular protests, which drew in thousands of masses of all classes. Recurring events would be insulated and largely mystic to a feverish pitch, producing a popular morality for our mass struggle to guide us with. This morality was growing old very quickly however, and its continued imposition by organizers contradicted the severity of the genocide, the images upon which the morality had been imposed. As things churned forward we were growing tired and expectant, praying for something to unfold before us so we would be blessed with new energy. But it would not come. Instead, we continued to stay relegated to viewership, not just of genocide but of the protest spectacle itself. It was feeding on itself, developing products from its imposition, and slowly losing mass turnout as a result.
As the spectacle could no longer subsist on itself, it now relied on outside action or events. In this instance, the physical presence of President Biden provided us with an audience and target in mind, so the protest could safely continue at least for a moment. At once, we set out with our marshals and liaisons and nationalistic human rights appeals. Eagerly we shared news with fellow organizers and agitators; Now was the time to plan something big, now the event would truly be the greatest spectacle of all. But while small groups of activists agitated on vague escalation, our dream itself was still wrapped up in the absence of action. We knew only the protest and its allure of absolutely nothing. So just as we had done for months, we took to the streets, or rather protest organizers partitioned a carefully defined segment of the sidewalk, tucked roughly a half mile away from the President. When the protest spectacle’s image-its very source of life-is so close to the spectacle, things once again get frenetic and the threat of losing control looms. This contradiction began to show itself while Biden rolled in through the entrance, and the protest stuck to location. Our youth was furious to be confined to such a position, and as such we agitated segments of the masses to venture forward with us. Members of the crowd began to agree, if not completely sure of how to act, they knew that they had to. We only agitated on action and proximity, but this was enough to break with the entire fabric of the event. And some of the masses followed, eventually fomenting enough momentum that later a pre-planned march plan went slightly off-course. See, organizers had gotten approval to parade alongside the sidewalk adjacent to the auditorium Biden was speaking at. They dared not get close, but for the sake of satiating that line between action and viewership, we marched with plans to turn around once by the gate entrance. We crawled closer to the gate, and before organizers could divert, it suddenly felt as if our small sect had created something new. Hundreds of protestors seemed bent on marching toward the President’s location, a small university building just inside an entrance way. Scattered police mobilized in this direction, seemingly confused about the show but nonetheless prepared to escalate. As their numbers were relatively small, an offensive of our own seemed on the table.
While we paraded marginally closer to Biden’s rally, we would never get a taste of State confrontation. Instead, Party and NGO organizers stood at an intersection, parting the march in two. With the use of their arms and a megaphone alone they were able to herd like cattle the march back to the limit of protesting capabilities, back to our enclave some 3 or 4 blocks away. Where our little mass attempted to push on, we quickly realized we were outdone by the revolutionaries. On our own we stood no chance of resisting the police and whatever federal detachments awaited within the gates, and so while making a show of our intentions, we made our way back to the receding mass. This was an elementary embarrassment and a failure on our part which can be viciously dissected, but we already understand the nature of all variables at play. Martials serve to police, and organizers serve to glorious mediations of class struggle conceived by viewers. The Parties and NGOs, we all cry, are traitors, equals to mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie as they sell us perversions of our own dreams. For us this is apparent, and for the reader also.
Even so, the true tragedy was the folly of our expectations and the allure of Biden’s appearance relative to its relationship to the social relation. The physical target spoke to us in a way long and abstract marches couldn’t; A suburban march of a few blocks became more enticing than a parade through the central business district of the city. But it did not intensify the class struggle in our favor, nor would it have been if it was successful. In fact it did not question social relationships at all, rather a bourgeois politician’s hold over a supposed liberatory anti-politics. Concessional nationalist rhetoric was sharpened, and workers went home. Biden’s appearance brought a brief question to the spectacle of protesting, but it was swiftly and mechanically dealt with. All thought in preparation was monopolized by the Parties and NGOs, yet due to the “Communist nature” of this event, the rhetorical devices contradicted protest policy. For a brief movement, a Communist Party seemed to be leading a charge toward the President of the United States. It wasn’t until their internal mediation techniques held mass potential to a standstill that it was truly dead. This is a self-cannibalizing nature of the protest spectacle when led by Communists who cannot help but call for struggle, when in actuality they are drawn to nothing.
This is an extremely specific example that we cite not to draw out this conversation, but to serve as a greater entry in this storied allure. For the masses, there is nothing more fragrant than possibility. They will bet again and again on the prospect of something new, of an outcome or action that excites them. But with the hegemony of a controlled organizing body on one hand and the State on the other, this proposition becomes an empty soul. And the masses, even the working class, fall in line dutifully in a fatal balance of attraction: To watch history unfold before our eyes with the luxury of a spectator, whereas even the Communists lambast the poverty of a participant. To capitalism history is not scary, it is a death sentence upon which its own ruins are made. Hence the force at which we are encouraged not to do. The proximity of action to the protest is enough, and Communists are better than any other at taking the face of action. Even if one does not act in a real sense, they may go days, weeks, months, or years without realizing such.
We also must address that between 2 movements of solidarity lies a bloody reminder that no sacrifice goes unpunished. Those protestors who act now are bloodied, beaten, detained and imprisoned. So why do we watch alongside so few actors as if we have less to lose? This question is not a litmus test of morality, it is a condemnation of our employment of life. It is a condemnation of our existence in the face of capital. And it is the organizers, not the working class, who benefit from the allure of nothing.
The hold of nothing has eased and strengthened recently as embryonic actions fall short of genesis. Just in the few weeks at a large Communist march, thousands of protestors in Chicago easily outmaneuvered the Police Department. Going off the script of march plans, demonstrators easily beat CPD back despite brutality, forcing them to let the march take the streets of its spontaneous choosing. Spinning and turning against the State, sufficiently de-arresting, even very meekly testing the supremacy of property, this was the show for a bourgeois democratic rhetoric. CPD was even briefly set up to be kettled by the marchers themselves. Yet when it truly mattered, the absence of action was more enticing than action itself. A chance for something really spectacular was gasping for life, but succumbed under the weight of the environment. The demonstrators could not break with the protest nor the morality it had instilled. Marchers turned away from corned police and marched nonsensically toward no destination at all. The march, after being injected by that which it could not control, was finally set to subsist on itself until it died in the night. This is the protest in its flesh, the culmination of everything and most decidedly, of nothing at all.
Destabilizing the Solidarity Politic
As much as any ideologist may like to claim, the real movement (the struggle between classes) does not consist of empaths. Yet the Palestine and anti-ICE movements are dominated by them! This is precisely the problem. What is thought and instilled by activists has poisoned the remaining supply of resources from which to draw from. We do not need a bourgeois morality, for the working class are not moralists. Thus, along with the protest and the allure of absolutely nothing at all, we relinquish one final measure: The solidarity politic. Let us explain.
It is true that workers do an immense amount of action in solidarity with their fellow workers and oppressed groups around the world. We can refer to these acts as solidarity when they are perceived by the subject as having little impact on their material lives, perhaps a small departure from other definitions. This is not meant to be a positive or negative thing when workers or activists do this. Rather, it’s something we innately grasp and relate to in the sake of mitigating alienation. The problem arises predominantly when a movement is effectively dismembered by its ideological leadership and left to die, we are left with nothing but a corpse of solidarity politics. One then has to ask what has actually occurred, why the images of solidarity failed to such an extent, and to what degree they facilitated this death.
The toothlessness truly sets in when activists perpetuate a moralist conception of an event as a need to be righteous. We had discussed already how they seek to produce a thought and transcribe it onto the masses. What is often produced is just lazy solidarity politic: Palestine, ICE, and so on. They fail to consider that the bourgeoisie does not care, the petit-bourgeoisie does not care, and certainly the workers will not care about their platitude. But because many activists and organizers are tied to organizations who cannot play to the class struggle, they cannot do anything but leave us with vague notions of intersectionality and moralistic platitudes. Both of these items further push down a worker’s throat the ideas of self-responsibility and solidarity, which may encourage them to do more good deeds when they are not grinded to a halt by capital. Yet this is not a reliable platform to pursue our objectives in a real sense, only fit to half-heartedly protest and meander about until our morals wear out.
When the latter occurs, we refer to this as a defined politic. It is a fashionable way of advocacy, of showing one’s support for trending issues in a legitimate fashion. You can take this politic to the streets and polls, your home or workplace and immediately be commended for it. Many may even envy your solidarity politic! This is resembling a strict departure of the intent of the solidarity action. Rather it is a politician’s co-optation waiting to happen, a flag they can wave to garner support among the morally inclined. But a working class struggle is inherently anti-political, for it knows no respect for bourgeois democracy nor for this kind of social voyeurism. It not only represents but entails the destruction of the political realm until it is a remnant of the past.
Just as reformists hijack movements and platform themselves on existing social contradictions, they platform themselves on existing relations between workers. We understand that every object and interaction is a class struggle, nothing more and nothing less. Workers already face alienation and they already respond communally as they are able to in points of crisis. They may even show solidarity. But to hedge a movement on solidarity itself is an activist’s lie, and to bolster one around solidarity politics is a bourgeois’ lie. For a protest’s grip to be broken, it will take the working class living radically in its own self-interest. In this scenario there is no room for platitudes of “the people”, in which no class acts selfishly but simply comes together in harmony. No, it will take the destruction of harmony and peace, and of course as we have already discussed, morality. The solidarity politic of the hour is the culmination of all of these things and the transcription of a popular image into a powerful feeling.
Certainly, in historic times of crisis, we can refer to various heroic acts of moral solidarity on behalf of the workers. We also see some workers who are politically active, and behave with reverence toward the political system. But both of these things are mediations which point to the real movement; The moral worker and the political worker have just embraced a language to activate their own interests. They can express themselves through it, even step outside of an event briefly and take action. But these tools are still just transcribed language in the bourgeois sense, and their appeals can only go so far. Solidarity itself is one of these appeals, typically provided by organizers to rally the masses into one social movement or the other. In the current setting it is the call to show solidarity with migrants. But these appeals become fruitless, because they are always stripped of their original image-the depiction of class-and converted into a moral tone.
The solidarity politic’s greatest sin is here: Taking the raw human weakness of an image and converting it into something purely optical. It uses the struggle of the migrant worker and twists it into a political question and ultimately a question of good and evil. The migrant worker’s liberation is sold for this platitude. But so is the worker when they are confronted with this image: It is a senseless and disturbing image, and they may show moral outrage, but they are called only to spectate history, they cannot find themselves or their struggle in what they see. Thus, migrants themselves become only more foreign and abstract to the worker, totally unrelatable.
The limits of solidarity politics are obvious and intentional. Their striking imposition in both the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the Anti-ICE demonstrations has contributed to the failure of both. The solution is as simple as our demands are wide: Agitate and activate the worker’s consciousness through their own share of life. Not through questions of allocation or public policy, but of the share of life in its totality. That is the motivation that moves all classes, and the ability to imagine is critical to our proposition.
By encouraging the workers to be selfish, they will show more real collective will with other workers than addressing them through the solidarity politic ever could. Everything is an attack on them, and in the absence of everything, nothing still strikes a blow. If they stand on the precipice of action in midst of crisis, there is no need to toss them in through a fashionable politic, let alone one that isn’t the product of their own reality. Their share of life is the spark.
“Don’t change employers, change the employment of life!”
– Read on the walls of Paris, May 1968
Parasitism, a Conclusion
Class enemies exist all around us. They, like us, exist to live. Yet they are certain they can get by in this social relation, and as such, they have already hedged their bets against the working class. They want a continuation of protests, of propagation, of isolated self-sacrifice and of individual torment. They want the movement to burn heavily on the individual, such that one continues to funnel themselves towards a parasite. Yet a parasite needs a host, and seemingly for the NGOs and Communist Parties, they have found it in the international working class. Decidedly they will feed on the class struggle, with the migrant as the perverted image of choice. Then they will continue to carve out a leading role for themselves by mutilating one’s host, through shameless sabotage and power struggle.
We cannot be sure what the conclusion of this movement holds, only expend our life as if its reins are still up for dispute. No matter how tight is the leash of the organizers or the State, there is a bubbling rage, simmering, opportune to spill over into a boil. The workers are without the machinery and institutions of the past, but this does not mean they are weak. What is, is the establishment of organizations serving as controlled opposition to the federal attacks. What is weak is the protest movement itself, feeding off images of resistance in Los Angeles and elsewhere, teetering between a dangerous balance where a single uncontrolled variable could push it over the edge. The organizers have long sought to control a narrative on this movement, and while they’ve gotten their wish, cracks will continue to form. Their own advice runs dry as federal agents swarm our cities, bloodying resisters and abducting working families. Every worker and activist left restless by their actions will be one capable of taking the movement into new heights. But only with the working class, can we rebel against the protest and all its spectacle.
Every struggle is a workers struggle. Every battle is fought over the worker’s destiny. It is our collective will, or capital’s dominating use of our life. The recent mobilizations ask not what you will do for the immigrants, but what we will do for our life.
References
- Rosenbloom, Raquel. “A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States.” The Center for Migration Studies of New York , 30 Aug. 2022, cmsny.org/agricultural-workers-rosenbloom-083022/#:~:text=CMS%20estimates%20characteristics%20of%20populations,are%20female%20(Figure%202).&text=According%20to%20CMS%20estimates%2C%20approximately,Oregon%20(4%20percent).
- “Farm Labor.” Farm Labor | Economic Research Service, USDA, 2021, www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#legalstatus.
- “Farmworker Health Study.” UC Merced Community and Labor Center, 2025, clc.ucmerced.edu/farmworker-health-study.
- “Mass Deportation.” American Immigration Council, 1 Oct. 2024, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/.
- Tremblay, Hannah, and Jessica Kurn. “Immigration and the Food System.” Farm Aid, 9 Jan. 2025, www.farmaid.org/blog/fact-sheet/immigration-and-the-food-system/.
- “Table A-1. Fatal Occupational Injuries By Industry and Event or Exposure, All United States, 2022.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022, www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/fatal-occupational-injuries-table-a-1-2022.htm.
- Bacon, David. “Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage.” Civil Eats, 29 Apr. 2024, civileats.com/2024/04/24/strawberry-farmworkers-fight-for-a-living-wage/#:~:text=Immigration%20status%20also%20plays%20a,and%20tighter%20border%20security%20policies.%E2%80%9D.
- Hesson, Ted, and Marisa Taylor. ICE Ordered to Pause Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Restaurants | Reuters, Reuters, 14 June 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/us-immigration-officials-told-largely-pause-raids-farms-hotels-nyt-reports-2025-06-14/.
[1] Rosenbloom, Raquel. “A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States.” The Center for Migration Studies of New York , 30 Aug. 2022.
[2] “Farm Labor.” Farm Labor | Economic Research Service, USDA, 2021.
[3] “Farmworker Health Study.” UC Merced Community and Labor Center, 2025.
[4] “Mass Deportation.” American Immigration Council, 1 Oct. 2014.
[5] Tremblay, Hannah, and Jessica Kurn. “Immigration and the Food System.” Farm Aid, 9 Jan. 2025.
[6] “Table A-1. Fatal Occupational Injuries By Industry and Event or Exposure, All United States, 2022.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022.
[7] Bacon, David. “Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage.” Civil Eats, 29 Apr. 2024.
[8] Hesson, Ted, and Marisa Taylor. ICE Ordered to Pause Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Restaurants | Reuters, Reuters, 14 June 2025.
