The US Ruling Class is a Little Overconfident. And That's Going to Cost Them

They Are Not Going Backwards

Richard Mellor

Watch Gary Chambers speak and understand something: this is what defiance looks like. Standing against the deliberate redrawing of electoral maps designed to dilute Black voting power in Louisiana, he is not intimidated and he will not be silenced. And he is not alone.

A few days ago I posted a TikTok video making a simple point that the corporate media works hard to obscure — the American working class is not the monolithic conservative bloc they want you to believe it is. When Black Lives Matter took to the streets, the cameras and the commentators worked to frame it as a Black movement, full stop. That was a lie of omission. It was a multiracial movement. BLM had many allies particularly among the youth mired in student debt and other members of the community confronting the state in the streets. That truth matters because it points toward something they fear more than any single protest — the possibility of a united working class that knows its own power.

We cannot manufacture that movement from the top down. It will be built from below, as it always has been, and it will come. What is happening right now in Minneapolis, where communities are organizing direct resistance to ICE operations, is not an isolated incident. It is a glimpse of what is coming. Real political education happens in struggle, not in lecture halls.

Gary Chambers comes from a community that has fought one of the longest and most brutal battles in American history, against a system of racial oppression that stretches back centuries. That community is not going backwards. Not now. Not ever.

There are times when those in power get a little too cocky, when confidence becomes arrogance and they underestimate the anger their policies generate in society.  We are living in such times. The American working class currently lacks the organized leadership and political party it needs and the movement against the capitalist offensive has not yet raised its head above the parapet. And as I was reminded more than once in my political education, consciousness tends to lag behind events and this is more so when it has been decades since a major mass movement has taken to the streets.

But what we are seeing with Gary Chambers, what we saw in Minneapolis, will multiply a hundredfold. A ruling class that is losing its grip on the global stage, that failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, and is flailing across the Middle East, is forced to turns its aggression inward, against its own workers.

Trump's rise was not inevitable. It was made possible by the dismal failures of the Democratic Party to offer a serious alternative  but in in large part, by the absence of an organized, united working class movement and a party of our own. That vacuum was filled by the ugliest currents in American life — white supremacists, Christian nationalists, the settler mentality dressed up in electoral politics, fascist mobs given permission to come out into the open. That is the honest account of how we got here.

But here is what is equally true. American history is a history of resistance. The Native peoples were never fully defeated. Enslaved Africans broke their chains and remade this country in the process. The millions of Europe's poor, shipped here to work the mines and textile mills, built a labor movement from nothing. Racism has been the ruling class's most effective weapon in its long war against working class unity — but it has never been a permanent solution, only a postponement.

It will not be easy for them up ahead. They have reason to be worried. We have reason to keep going.