Upstream - Unlocked Immigration Ice And Working Class Rebellion W Cecilia Guerrero

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Note: We have unlocked this Patreon episode which originally aired on Jun 23, 2025 It's easy to get lost in the narratives that are fed to us by the very same institutions that oppress us. Whether liberal institutions or far right ones, there's always something crucial missing—some component of analysis that's left unaddressed, some root cause that remains misidentified or distorted. And the reason is because when it comes to the class war that we are all engaged in—whether we like it or not—the issues of class, of imperialism, and of monopoly capitalism are never, ever part of the mainstream discussion.  So, what are the root causes of immigration? What do the ICE terror campaigns look like on the ground in cities like LA or Nashville? What happens when we apply a materialist lens to the conversation about mass deportations and conversation about the scapegoating of the more vulnerable groups in society? And what happens when we shift the frame from the more liberal, rights-based approach to activism to one based on unified, solidaristic class struggle? Well, we've brought back on the perfect guest to help us unpack some of these pressing questions.  Cecilia Guerrero is Chair and Founding Member of A Luta Sigue, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. In this episode, we talk about the terror campaign being waged on immigrants throughout the country and the responses coming from working class communities who are standing up for themselves and standing in solidarity with the oppressed and exploited classes across the globe. We talk about ICE, the role that immigration plays in the imperialist global system, the attempts by liberal institutions to co-opt and neutralize our radical movements, and what the MAGA right gets wrong about the root cause of their immiseration.  Further resources: A Luta Sigue Poder Popular Tennessee Drivers Union Southern Youth Solidarity Network Capitalism and Workers' Immigration, V.I. Lenin Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt In New York, Karl Marx Related episodes: From the Frontlines: Class Struggle and Class War in the US Southeast w/ Cecilia Guerrero The Imperial Boomerang w/ Julian Go Artwork: CPSU propaganda poster Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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Hope you enjoy this conversation. These deportations do tend to happen often during times of economic crisis. And so some describe these mass deportations as mass layoffs as well. So what these do is that they make the status of immigrants even more precarious. They want to make people docile, complacent, too afraid to strike, too afraid to organize. And so as a result, it will drive down wages for all workers, regardless of immigration status. and it's going to lead to the further consolidation of monopoly capital. Because, you know, all of this behavior by the ruling class, by the monopoly capitalists,

you know, they're only doing what is convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital, you know, in the words of Marx. Trump doesn't just represent himself, even though Democrats might want to say that, oh, he's just an egotomaniac, he's just this, he is representing collective interests. and those collective interests are from a section of the monopoly capitalist class. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It's easy to get lost in the narratives that are fed to us by the very same institutions that oppress us. Whether liberal institutions or far-right ones, there's always something crucial missing, some component of analysis that's left unaddressed, some root cause that remains misidentified or distorted. And the reason is, because when it comes to the class war that we're all engaged in, whether we like it or not, the issues of class, of imperialism, and of monopoly capitalism, are never,

ever part of the mainstream discussion. So what are the root causes of immigration? What do the ICE terror campaigns look like on the ground in cities like L.A. or Nashville? What happens when we apply a materialist lens to the conversation about mass deportations and to the conversation about the scapegoating of the more vulnerable groups in society? And what happens when we shift the frame from the more liberal, rights-based approach to activism, to one based on unified, solidaristic class struggle. Well, we've brought back on the perfect guest to help us unpack some of these pressing questions.

Cecilia Guerrero is chair and founding member of Aluta Segui, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. In this episode, we talk about the terror campaign being waged on immigrants throughout the country and the responses coming from working class communities who are standing up for themselves and standing in solidarity

with the oppressed and exploited classes across the globe. We talk about ICE, the role that immigration plays in the imperialist global system, the attempts by liberal institutions, to co-opt and neutralize our radical movements and what the MAGA right gets wrong about the root cause of their immiseration. And as Della is still enjoying her first few weeks as a mother and some much-deserved time off, I'll be presenting my own interview again today. So here's my conversation with Cecilia Quiro. All right, Cecilia, it's great to have you back on the show.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on and on, you know, a little bit of short notice too. And so we've had you on in the past, actually not too long ago. We had an episode where we discussed class struggle and class war in the American Southeast, which is where you're based. And so yeah, if anybody missed that or just needs a refresher, though, I'd love it if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just share a little bit about the work that you do. Yeah, it's great to be here. I am Cecilia. I'm an organizer from Tennessee. I work with an organization called Aluta Sige. What we do, we try to find working class leaders and progressive youth and support them in building organizations. So in the last two and a half years, which supported the development of three projects, the Tennessee Drivers Union, which is a union of Uber and Lift Drivers, representing. drivers from over a dozen nationalities, primarily in Nashville. Poder Popular, which is an organization of Latino workers in construction, manufacturing, and hospitality. Right now, they have two large tenant unions in Middle Tennessee and, you know, have also supported tenant unions in Memphis.

Then we also have the Southern Youth Solidary Network, which is an organization of progressive young people in Nashville and Memphis, that are working to integrate the working class and align with working class troubles. So you can find those on Instagram or on our website. You know, we're always looking for volunteers and also just support all around. And so I myself was, you know, born and raised in Mexico and a family of steel workers. I have a background in the labor movement, in also some in the immigrant rights movement. And, you know, currently in the work we do, we focus a lot on conducting social investigation, like just integrating with working class communities and, you know, getting an understanding of what are the conditions that the people on their ground are facing.

And then how do they think? How do they think about themselves, about other classes? How do they relate to each other? And so trying to get a real sense of that. And using our social investigation alongside our study to build a. class analysis, right? An understanding of like what classes are there in our region, what are the different classes relationship to each other, to politics, culture, the economy, nature. So there we can really understand like who are the friends, who are the enemies and just like fully

informed like the work that we do down the line. So that's that's what we do. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much and you're doing such important work. And so as usual, I'm going to link to all of those organizations that you're involved with in the show notes. And highly encourage everyone listening to check those out, check out Cecilia's work more deeply. And also go back to listen to our first episode with Cecilia, where we really dive deep into this concept of social investigation and class analysis and exploring a lot of the topics that you just briefly touched upon in a lot of So if anybody has any questions or curiosities there, go back and listen to that episode, check out the show notes and click on those links to get more information on that.

But we're also going to be embedding a lot of the work that you do and the analysis that you do into the conversation today as well. And on that note, so I wanted to invite you back onto the show specifically to talk about the current events that are sort of hitting our headlines, maybe a little bit less since the war in the Middle East and the war on Iran is sort of dominating headlines right now, but I think it's really important to keep this conversation going as well. And of course, those are the ice raids, which have been impacting workers all over the United States and also have been impacting you and the work that you do in Tennessee, I'm sure,

and we'll talk about that now. And, you know, the uprisings in L.A. will get to that as well. and just this whole sort of fascist, Gestapo style of assault and attack on working immigrants throughout the country. So, yeah, I mean, just I guess to start, you know, this feels a little bit like an escalation, right? But also, you know, you and I and most of our listeners know very well that this kind of assault on working people and working immigrants didn't start. with Trump. So maybe just give us a sense of what's happening on the ground and give it some context, if you think that might be helpful. For sure. I mean, and what we're experiencing right now is like

this more reactionary liberalism. So just wanted to say that. It does feel like it's fascism, but in reality, like liberalism can be just as reactionary and can inflict so much terror. But I wouldn't say that we are fascist just yet. There's some steps that. need to be in place in order for me to be able to confidently say that. But, you know, just to be able to share a little bit on the ground what we have been experiencing. Since the beginning of May, ICE has abducted hundreds of working class people from Nashville and Middle Tennessee, right, which is, you know, where many of us are based in. This was one of the largest ICE operations in the region.

About a month ago, the count was over 200 people that had been kidnapped. and we know that they have continued to kidnap people, but we just stop counting. The rates have primarily affected working class Latinos, but they have also targeted, like, other communities. One of the first acts of terror that, you know, we can link to this operation with an ambush outside a very popular nightclub in South Nashville called Bucanas on Saturday, May 3rd.

And so on a Saturday night, Bucanas is, just packed. Like there's hundreds of people in this club, right? And it's one of the only spaces like nightclubs in the area that you can go and listen to band music, Corridos, like other kinds of regional Mexican music plus like reggaeton. So like it's just the music that like working class Latinos listen to, right? So on any given night, like on a weekend, you see hundreds of Latinos working class Latinos in there. So at like 3 a.m. people are leaving the club, right?

And this is when they got folks. You know, they were waiting for them outside. And it took primarily men, but took a lot of people there. Throughout that weekend, I was collaborating with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and conducted around like 150 traffic stops and kidnapped like 94 people, right? Just that weekend. and then they put everybody into a bus which transported them to detention centers in places like Louisiana by Mayport. So then, like, that marked the beginning of the operation. And it's considered the largest in our region.

They're so notable for the amount of cooperation between, like, state and local agencies. So, you know, in Nashville, we don't really see that local cooperation between the cops and ice. but outside of Nashville, like there's just a very clear cooperation that we're seeing. And so they have been terrorizing our streets, like raiding the day laborers corner, waiting for people outside immigration law offices. You know, I saw people get taken at the fast food line, just chaotic. And it's just a campaign of terror. They've also been like driving and ICE has been making an appearance at certain places,

without taking anyone, right? Which stresses the whole community out, and that's the point. They have been driving around complexes where there's one of the tenant unions that we work with without taking anybody. They have been driving around manufacturing plans where workers are making the servers

for the cloud systems used by Tesla, by Dell, making servers for Elon Musk, not taking anyone, but also, you know, just with the system. the purpose of scaring the workplace. So we're seeing that a lot as well. You know, one worker at one of our organizing meetings was saying, well, you know,

the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats are fake. They tell you what you want to hear and then they deport you, then they deport more people than anyone. And Trump is different. He's a businessman. He likes to make a big fuss and like,

be selective about he goes about it, so he causes the most panic. And they're like, you know, his tactics, are psychological. So people leave on their own or stop coming. And I think that's spot on. You know, I think that assessment was spot on. But one thing that I want to touch on is that, you know, while it's true that Biden deported more people than Trump and that Obama earned his nickname, the deporter in chief, there's one key aspect that I find that is different from previous

administrations that does constitute an escalation. And that's the fact that workplace rates have increased exponentially. So Trump is targeting the so-called sanctuary cities. And, you know, he's in that process. He's showing how the term doesn't mean much. And like, what is a sanctuary city? Exactly. And, you know, so Trump is targeting the home depots, the construction site, elementary school graduation. And that's a campaign of terror. explicit against the working class, right? And I'm not saying that deportation has not always been an attack against the working class. Like deportations are always an attack on the working class. But this time, the mask is just fully off. They are blatant about it right now. More blatantly than ever targeting

working class people, working class spaces, and working class leaders, labor organizers, activists, anti-imperialists, right? And, and, and, the imperialists, right? And, and, all of those people are at the top of Trump's deportation list, right? And, you know, while I do see that this is a type of escalation, I also see that this is a type of weakness, right? It's a major contradiction because that is also a force that is currently galvanizing the working class and opening people's eyes and like building deeper, more class conscious and more internationally type of solidarity than ever before. because how can undocumented workers not see themselves in Palestine when they're seeing Palestinians get thrown in the same ICE detention centers as their loved ones for standing up against the genocide of their own people, right? And not just that the United States doesn't just deny them any kind of action to stop the genocide of Palestinians, but they lock them up in the same detention centers, right?

How can black workers not see themselves in undocumented people when they're seeing the violence inflicted on them by the police and eyes? Right. And ultimately, how can you not lose your shit seeing the government terrorize our people at the same place where we get exploited at our most sacred spaces, right? You know, that's just going to continue to, you know, as we say, buy him and that. And yeah, I mean, you're talking a little bit about how these. assaults and disappearings and kidnappings are the potential for building solidarity between different groups of people that are often pitted against each other under capitalism. What has the community response been? Like you're seeing some potential for solidarity, but also just like on the ground too. What has that response been like? Do you see more like predominant

spontaneous organic reactions, are there foundations for more organized responses that have been utilized to respond and protect immigrant workers from the kinds of assaults and kidnappings that are taking place across the country? Like, what does it look like on the ground where you're at? So in Tennessee, it's a little bit different than in LA, given the fact that, you know, there's just so many organizations that are, you know, principal in LA that have. been working with the people, integrated with the people for a long time. And even though the rebellion that we have seen in LA is spontaneous, the anger is spontaneous, the class consciousness is not. The class consciousness is there. And so I do think that there is some work to be done in

Tennessee still, although we do see some level of organization in the communities that have already being organized. So for example, in our tenant unions, we are seeing that they have the infrastructure that allows people to actually engage in a more proactive community defense. For example, just a few days before the mass rate of May 3rd, one of our tenant unions had a meeting with a landlord from North Carolina. And so the members had organized for months, right, to stop. The landlord was implementing this predatory parking policies. They were scamming people, overcharging them for everything. So the members had organized and applied pressure on the landlord and, you know, finally got the landlord to agree to meet them and take a flight from North Carolina to

Middle Tennessee and actually meet with the residence in person in a town hall, right? However, the requirements, the conditions that the landlord plays for the residents in the town hall were like very concerning, right? So, you know, he, they require IDs. They did not allow any electronic devices. And they did not allow press or anybody else in there. So, you know, it was going to be in a close space, a town over Nashville. So like a one hour away in an area where I spoke. presence is more dominant where local agencies are cooperating with ICE and it was going to be in a

space fully controlled by the landlord. It was going to require people to give their IDs and it was going to require people to not have their cell phones, right? So if there was an emergency, they couldn't be able to call anybody. So the residents are like, you know what, if this is a setup, if this is whatever we don't care, we're not afraid, right? We do not want to be portrayed as victims and defenseless victims and we want to show people that we are unafraid, we are brave and we're organized. So over 100 and so residents showed up to the meeting when they show up to the meeting like the meeting had over 40 cops which counted several undercover and they wanted the residents to come inside

this room and come inside a circle of cops right but when the landlord sees that the the residents are not afraid of it, the landlord freaks out and cancels the meeting right on the spot. Right. And so they, you know, the residents called press, which was outside, the residents organized and they push. And so, you know, this is a glimpse of what we're seeing in LA, not to that greater degree, but we're seeing that immigrant people are no longer afraid as they used to be. They are brave and they are fed up with all of the attacks that they have been experiencing. people are saying, well, like the people in LA, they are mostly Chicano, they are mostly people with documents. And that's not really the case. The whole community is behind. And so we're seeing glimpses of that in Nashville, but for the type of scale of what we're seeing in LA to happen,

then there needs to be more organization that is similar to what we're doing happening as well. And so because of that lack of infrastructure, we're only seeing pockets of that kind of of bravery and pockets of that kind of consciousness in some parts of the city but not all across. So let's continue to broaden out a little bit from Tennessee and talk more generally about the assault on immigrant workers all across the country. So I want to ask you kind of a larger question. Like how can we make sense of what's going on through a lens of like materialist analysis, which you're so disciplined at and you're so good.

at applying to different conditions. So like what role ultimately does immigration play, both for, you know, U.S. capital and more broadly for imperialism, and how can we understand the Trump regime's focus on immigration and mass deportations right now in this context? Yeah, yeah. I mean, first we should be clear that the displacement of workers and peasants from oppressed countries to capitalist imperialist countries is inevitable.

Immigration is inevitable under a capitalist imperialist system. And also competition among workers is a feature of capitalism. And so as long as capitalism exists, someone out there is always going to be coming for your job, right? Like blame capitalism, not your fellow workers. And so now that that's out of the way, we can dive into it a little bit more. So capitalism always needs to expand. It needs to find more markets, more things to commodify, more resources to extract, more labor to exploit.

Monopoly capitalists from imperialist countries are displacing people from their land. So like in Guatemala, for example, Mayan communities right now are being displaced at alarming rates due to mega projects by corporations from imperialist countries that, you know, these mega projects are involved, things like mining operations, hydroelectric plants, cash crop monocultics, right, like palm oil. And so oppressed countries are not able to develop their economies like other countries, right? Their economies are subjugated to finance capital and external debt, right, which gets exacerbated by like predatory trade agreements, for example. In these conditions, capitalism is unable to fully develop domestically and feudal relations persist in the countryside. And so we call these conditions semi-colonial

and semi-futal because they still have, it's not that this is a new type of colonialism or a feudalism, is just the fact that those questions are still unanswered or on-resolved, those problems that are still there. even though the countries are independent in name. And so to protect their investments and power, imperialist governments representing these monopoly capitalists intervene with the domestic affairs of other countries they oppressed, inflicting brutal violence on the people and the stabilizing their societies. So then people leave their countries because of the violence inflicted upon them by imperialists

with the help of their governments and move to imperialist countries to find work and safety, right? And so then they are considered like immigrants or foreign workers, and then they become part of a pool of super exploited labor. Right? And so, you know, immigrants from oppressed countries,

right? So working class immigrants from oppressed countries, they compose the majority of what we call, quote unquote, unskilled labor, right? And so that has always been the case. Lenin has a piece called capitalism and workers immigration, where he points out that the term unskilled worker, like it's basically another way to say foreign worker, right? So he's like, you know, the more oppressed the country, the larger is the number of unskilled agricultural laborers is supplies, right? And the advanced nations are taking all the best paid occupations

for themselves and leave the people from the semi-feudal countries, the worst paid conditions. Right. And so, you know, that has always been the case. And at this point, immigrant, foreign workers, right, are paid less than other workers. Capitalist benefit from paying these workers less, but also by making other workers compete with these workers. And by instigating tensions in the workplace that are rooted in national origin or national chauvinism, you know, also known as race, right? That is also a similar, the same phenomenon. What we know as white supremacy is national oppression at the core. You know, go to any construction site, factory, warehouse, meat processing plant, or even like any restaurant in the United States, you're going to see how the boss has divided the workplace by national identity or race, right? And during union busting campaigns, the differences between the workers across national, language, racial lines is one of the first things that the boss exploits. And who went

the boss? Who loses the workers? Right. And so now, you know, that's a more general analysis, right? But when we're looking at the United States, let's think about the fact the United States is the sole hegemonic superpower. And, you know, it has nearly 800 military bases around the world. People are being displaced from their home countries to condition they, US created primarily, right, in collaboration with the comparators and bureaucrats, he bought up. So displaced people then migrate to the United States to be super exploited, right? All foreign workers from oppressed countries, but especially the undocumented experience, Blanton wage theft, you know, by wage theft, like especially undocumented people.

I'm talking about they're completing whole ass jobs and getting ghosted by their boss when it's time to pay. Like, this is just something that is happening every day predominantly, like in, industries like construction, like hospitality, right? Like, the amount of wage theft and the form that it takes is so blatant, right? They are also experiencing physical, emotional, sexual violence in the workplace, human trafficking, unverbal working conditions. It's been horrific to have been able to see the conditions in which undocumented people are working on in the United States. When I tell people some of the concrete stories, people do not believe me, but that's really the case. And so then, you know, your immigration status is used by the boss as a tool

of extortion, right? So your boss tells you like, well, if you get out of a line, I will call immigration and get you deported. And so then this fear of deportation acts like a type of bondage, right? It's like a union embustic tactic is a chain that workers are going to have to overcome and break. You know, in addition to the super exploitation that they endure at the workplace, undocumented workers just also have to deal with the fact that they are not able to access healthcare, driver's licenses, other necessities, right, living in this type of apartheid. And so finally, the U.S. monopoly capitalist class uses every tool at its disposal to humanized foreign workers from oppressed countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia,

through the press, through popular culture, through institutions, right? And as a result, like working class citizens end up having prejudices against foreign workers from these countries, which can show up as chauvinism, as indifference, or even as patronizing savior mentality, right? And all of this ends up serving the capitalist and reinforcing oppression against all workers, citizens or not. It ends up serving imperialism because it makes the U.S. citizen workers indifferent to the oppression of these workers, countries of origin, right, which is what caused the immigration to begin with, the exploitation of the global south. And right now, the country is entering a recession. And so, in terms of the country, and so, in

with Monizai, immigrant workers are often scapegoated. And so we have seen in previous waves of mass deportations, right? Because we're not, this isn't anything new, right? After the Great Depression began, for example, the U.S. forcibly deported two million Mexicans who got scapegoated for the Great Depression, deported by the Department of Labor, by the way, which was the agency that predated ICE. Fun fact, used to be the Department of Labor, and then it became a different agency, I think, forgot the words for this INS and then just eventually one thing led to another became ICE became USCIS or DHS. Then also we see that Obama deported three million people after the 2008 financial crisis, right? So, you know, I can go on, but you get the pattern, right? Like these deportations

do tend to happen often during times of economic crisis. And so some described is that mass deportations as mass layoffs as well. So what these are these deportations as mass layoffs as well. So what these are, do is that they make the status of immigrants even more precarious and you know they have an objective they want to make people docile complacent too afraid to strike to afraid to organize and so as a result it will drive down wages for all workers regardless of immigration status and it's going to lead to the consolidation of monopoly capital the further consolidation of monopoly capital because you know all of this behavior by the ruling class by the monopoly capitalists you know they're only doing doing what is convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital,

you know, in the words of Marx. Trump doesn't just represent himself, right? Like, you know, even though Democrats might want to say that, oh, he's just an egomaniac, he's just this, he is representing collective interests. And those collective interests are from a section of the monopoly capitalist class, right? And the fact that the rates are so violent and so militarized is actually a sign of desperation and weakness, right? It speaks to an increased economic crisis that they cannot avoid. And so that's what Trump is doing right now. He's figuring out a way to maintain profit and

hegemony. And that's what the Democrats are doing too. They just have a different strategy to go about it, right? And of course, he's going to start with immigrants who perhaps are less ideologically aligned, immigrants that he considers to be a liability, right? In 1987, like Reagan, with his amnesty. He gave amnesty to many immigrants across the country, but he wasn't just doing that because he loved Latinos and other immigrants, right? His foreign policy, if you look at it,

was literally anti-communist, explicitly anti-communist. He was funding anti-communist death squads all over Latin America, for example, and he gave preference to anti-communist refugees from places like Cuba, Nicaragua. He will call them like freedom-seeking refugees, right? And he was like, this is something that is going to do. It's going to be good for us to absorb all of these anti-communists, right?

And so we need to be looking at what is happening through a lens of class analysis and to an understanding of history and how these contradictions have developed throughout time. And just hearing you talk about the role that scape, scapegoating plays in terms of creating an other that all of the blame and immiseration that we're all experiencing can be sort of transferred onto in this really sort of neat and tidy way in their minds like it's insane to me that people still fall for that stuff you know like I don't know if how many people are actually watching this and buying into it but like the scapegoating of trans people of

immigrants, like, it's just so blatantly stupid and obvious what's going on. And what they're stirring up, too, like what the ruling class is stirring up right now leads to another aspect, which you touched upon a little bit in terms of the extreme difficulties that immigrants, you know, of all backgrounds face in the U.S. and also just generally in Western core countries, is hatred, right? Like, we recently had a conversation with, you know, Julian Goh, who he wrote a book called Policing Empires and it's about the Imperial Boomerang and one of the points that he was stressing is this pattern that has been, you know, a foundation of US and global capitalism pretty much from its inception, which is

the system's reliance on cheap labor performed by vulnerable immigrant groups. And then this, so this, you have this reliance, but then this simultaneous disdain, and this drive to repress and disproportionately police these groups. And I'm just wondering, you know, I don't have like a specific question on that. But like if you have any reflections on that analysis and if you can comment on it in the context of what's happening right now. Yeah. I mean, I touch a little bit on these, but, you know, just going back on this team because I do think there's just a lot to say. Yeah, I mean, capitalism necessitates a competition amongst workers.

It necessitates an army of unemployed and underemployed to keep workers in check. Have workers docile. Hey, you don't want to do this job. I have 10 more people that will take it. Right. And, you know, as capitalism develops into imperialism, we see the mass displacement of workers from oppressed countries into oppressor countries. And we see the competition, right, manifests between foreign workers. and citizen workers.

And so I have been doing some research on these because I'm like, okay, this is definitely a feature of imperialism. So our friends must have written about this before. And so, you know, I found this letter from Marx who explained this phenomenon to Siegfried Mayer describing the relationship between Irish and British workers, right? And I found this part of the letter very interesting, right?

He says, every industrial and commercial center in England right now now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently, he becomes a tool of the English aristocratism. and capitalists against Ireland,

thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the poor whites to the black workers in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman faced him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker,

both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, religious institutions, comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power, right? That's basically a lot of the analysis that I have provided on the US. it just completely applies to this day to what is happening in the United States.

We are seeing that like in any, for example, amid processing plans is often divided around this national line, who the bosses put to be the manager of a construction site, who are usually deformed, who are the workers that are building, whatever building and doing a lot of the labor. There's often these divisions alongside national line, who is at the first, front of the house at a restaurant and at the back of the house, right? And these divisions are often why it's difficult. If you go to a restaurant organizer, like somebody that organizes restaurant workers, for example, ask them what the most difficult part about organizing restaurants is.

Nine times out of ten, they're going to tell you that it is difficult to build unity between front and back of the house, right? Between the servers and between the cooks. Why is that? Because they're putting people that are usually college graduates, usually, you know, white or, you know, more Americanized English speakers at the front of the house. And they're often putting the immigrants and like black workers at the back of the house, right? And so these divisions are creating these distance between citizen workers and immigrant workers. But at the end of the day, these two workers are still being exploited by the same boss. Right? And so, you know, just by going alongside what the capitalist wants us to do, which is to divide the working class, to make us all fight, they are able to use citizens and workers who believe in these as their useful idiots, basically. You know, like in maintaining the oppression of all workers, regardless of immigration status. And so there is a very strong connection, too, between immigration and imperialism, right?

He mentions like, you know, with the prejudices that the English worker built against the Irish worker, it justifies the domination of Ireland. It justifies the oppression against Ireland, which ultimately, too, is what is causing the mass migration and mass displacement of workers from Ireland into England. And then causing the competition for the worker, right? So we are just by us not building that kind of internationalism. Like we are either complacent, indifferent, or even supportive of U.S. policies that are generating these mass migrations from people from the global south. People don't want to come here, right?

And, you know, when we're thinking about this also makes me think of the example of, for example, criminal organizations, right? you know, just thinking about how much people from Central America are being scapegoated for being members of criminal organizations like the MS-13. You know, criminal organizations like these, like MS-13, like the cartels, that are all over Latin America, they're often the result of counterinsurgeon operations, right, inflicted in these countries by the United States. So, you know, just looking at the example of MS-13, right?

MS-13 is a criminal organization that was formed and expanded on their conditions created by both imperialist parties in the United States, by Democrats and Republicans. And so in the 1980s, the U.S. was financing anti-communist counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador to fight the Farabundo-Marti National Liberation Front. or FMLN. So there were communist guerrillas that were trying to fight for socialism in El Salvador. So the U.S. starts funding dead squads, starts funding the military to cause an immense amount of violence on the people, like countless of massacres and war crimes committed against the Salvadorian people by U.S. funded military in their squads. And so many Salvadorians left their country as a result of the violence generated by these U.S. back military and dead squads. So the display Salvadorian, you know, now are, you know, they go to LA, to Los Angeles.

They are experiencing massive social isolation, discrimination, lack of safety because of their vulnerable status. And in order to protect each other, they form MS-13. And MS-13 at the very, very beginning, it was composed by both people that left, that were just caught in the crossfire, but then also former military, former dead squads as well. So they formed MS-13, and eventually in 1992, after the fall of the USSR, the FMLN in El Salvador was forced to liquidate and demilitarized. So they give up all their weapons. What happens is that the areas, the geographic areas that were formerly controlled by the FMLN,

now become vulnerable, because immediately after, Clinton, a Democrat, began deporting MS-13 members in mass, right? And then these MS-13 members quickly gained control of the territories previously controlled by the FMLN and then just exacerbating the problem of the gangs in El Salvador, right? And in many, many recent years, in recent years, many former police that have been trained by the U.S. have joined the ranks of MS-13 in El Salvador and Honduras. So, like, even up to recent years, the U.S. has continued to exacerbate this problem, right? And then now they're scapegoated, people from El Salvador that are fleeing violence from it

are being scapegoated because, you know, the MS-13 at the end of the day is just a small portion of Salvadorian. And so, like, this is just one of those cycles, right, because it's complex. It is complex. It's part of the foreign policy of imperialism, it's part of the cycles of capital, it's part of many different processes that ultimately just serve the continued expansion of capital, the consolidation of monopoly capital, is just serving that. At the same time, though, Lenin also saw a great opportunity in this contradiction. He was basically saying that all of these workers from semi-fuelal countries

are coming to industrialized countries and becoming part of the industry. industrial proletariat. And there's an opportunity that we have here. You know, because he was saying, like, okay, so this is going to be inevitable. People are just going to be displaced because of imperialism. It's just going to continue to happen. And so we should also see the positive side of this contradiction, you know, which, you know, we're going to be bringing workers from all parts of the world are going to now be in the same factories, in the same workplaces. And so he saw the opportunity to break down national barriers, right? He was saying, you know, class-conscious workers realizing that the breakdown of all national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive are trying to help enlighten and organize

their fellow workers, right, from other countries. And so, you know, he saw this as an opportunity to build deeper solidarity and internationalism. And that also makes me think of the fact that, like, no wonder why in every workplace, that's what they're trying to divide us. So it should be even more of an incentive for us to actually focus on building those kinds of solidarity in American workplaces. Absolutely. And I want to talk to you definitely more about this idea of immigrant workers as a revolutionary class in the United States. I'm going to ask you about that in just a second. But before I do, I just want to go back a little bit because earlier in the conversation you had mentioned that you don't think that we are in a situation right now that could be

accurately described as fascism. And I don't want to get into like a semantic conversation necessarily about, you know, what exactly constitutes fascism or not. But I also am very curious, like, why you said that and what your conception of fascism is, because it's something that I would say at the very least resembles fascism, and it's a conversation that a lot of people are having. We had it recently, like I mentioned, with Julian Goh and policing empires of this idea of fascism, just really being empire, coming back to the core in many ways,

which, of course, doesn't discount the fact that it's not just, you know, it's not just empire returning back home in the United States, for example, has been terrorizing indigenous and black communities since it's very, very beginning since the very inception of this country. But yeah, I don't know if you want to just say a few words about that and what your idea of what fascism constitutes it, why you don't see what is taking place right now is fascism. Well, I mean, I think that a lot of people tend to equate terror with fascism. and, you know, we need to be also conscious of the fact that liberalism inflicts terror on a specific sector of the population. So the United States, a liberal democracy has always been a dictatorship of capital, right?

And so we have been living under a dictatorship of capital. And so the conditions in a dictatorship of capital are always going to include terror for a sector of the population. because as I mentioned, capital does need to have an army of super exploited and underemployed and unemployed workers in order to suppress wages and conditions for all of the working class. And so what we're seeing is a more reactionary type of liberalism. But there are some other features that a fascist government usually has, which is one of them being the merger of, the state and monopoly capital, right?

And we're seeing the nationalization of industry and using that machinery in order to inflict terror on adulter terror in the population without any kind of liberal democratic principles, like bourgeois democratic principles, right? We are not seeing that kind of concentration of monopoly capital into the state. We still see it,

concentrated in private hands, which does kind of yield to a more just reactionary type of liberalism. We're also seeing that Trump is still not able to fully do what he wants as well. So there are some tensions that we're noticing between the judicial branch, for example, and Trump, which, you know, we don't see like a full consolidation like that or a corporative state. this is still a liberal democracy, just a more reactionary type. And we are seeing that, for example, like, if, you know, he had full control about what to do, like, why is he having to have a trial for Kilmarabrego-Garcia just to, like, basically cover their ass for doing a massive mistake by deporting him?

You know, why do they have to even go through this whole thing? So we are seeing that, you know, there's still some. contention, there's still some level of, you know, democratic, bourgeois democratic principles, right? The thing that the Democrats have been saying, oh, this due process, the idea of due process, right? So, you know, at the end of the day, what we're not seeing is this merger of state and monopoly capital, just yet. I see. Yeah, that's really helpful. It sounds like maybe there's a strong fascistic headwind blowing the ship, which is the United States in that direction, and that there are, you know, a lot of elements that could be, there's like a tension between

what would be more outright fascist political system versus this sort of liberal democratic system that is just kind of barely holding on by the skin of its teeth, so to speak. Yeah, totally, Totally. So there's kind of multiple things going on right now. But I appreciate that answer. I think that's really helpful. And yeah, so thanks for that little detour. Let's hop back into this question of revolutionary classes, because I think this is really

interesting and you were kind of building up to it earlier. So if anybody listened to our first episode with you, this is something that they'll probably be familiar with in terms of your perspective. But you've talked about, you know, how crucial it is for the the Western left to recognize immigrant workers as a revolutionary class in the United States. So I'm wondering if you can just sort of talk about that again here and tie it into what we've been talking about, like the assaults we're seeing on immigrant communities right now and how we can begin to really view and center immigrant workers as a revolutionary class.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So, you know, to go back to the letter from Marx that I read just a few minutes ago. Let's go back to this one part of the quote, right? When he's talking about the antagonism between English workers and Irish workers, he's like, this antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class despite its organization. So, you know, the English working class was getting organized at the time that Mark was writing this letter. But by not overcoming this antagonism, this national chauvinism that is coming all the way from the top to the population, it makes the left impotent in any given country. And that's what happens too in the United States by not focusing on building this type of solidarity across the revolutionary class. because there's, you know, the workers are going to be who emancipate the United States.

So the workers must be united. Just a basic formula. Unite with your friends to fight your enemies. And the ruling class fully understand this. They are united. They know who their friends are and they know who their enemies are. And, you know, they know that they have antagonistic interest to all the working class, no matter if they are citizens, no matter if they are, you know,

immigrants, right? And so what they do is divide us in order to make a left that is impotent, to make workers that are impotent. You know, I have been going through a lot of old documents from the CP USA. And one of the patterns, right, specifically looking at the Western worker by the CPUSA, because we know that the CPUSA did do maybe not the most sustainable work, But we know that they did do work with the black workers because Stalin told them too, which was an amazing thing that Stalin did that he doesn't get quite enough credit for. And just to pop in real quick, just for anybody who might be confused, CP USA is the Communist Party of the USA. I thought I would just clarify that real quick.

Yes. But sorry, yeah, you were talking about Stalin. Yeah, no, I mean, Stalin just gave orders to the U.S. working class and was like, what are y'all doing? You need to be organizing black workers. you need to go to the U.S. out. And so, you know, the Communist Party of the USA did do that. And that's some of the best work that they ever did. And so I was familiar with that history.

And so I was trying to also look at what was happening, you know, in the southwest of the United States. What did the communist organizing look like in the southwest of the United States? And, you know, by looking a lot of the editions from the Western worker, you know, one pattern that keeps coming up is that they just talk about, like, hey, the Mexican workers, the Latino workers are some of the most radical. Like they always are coming to our rallies. They're coming to our demonstrations.

They always show up. But they are not able to join our membership. They're not able to join our ranks for real because they are unable to understand the meetings in English. And so they turn over of Mexican workers at the CPUSA was about 85% they described it, right? at the same time of being some of the most receptive workers in the southwest of the United States. And so some of the organizers are writing, hey, we need a department that help us organize the Mexican workers. We need to have content in Spanish. We need to be able to have sessions in Spanish until folks are able to learn English.

Because there was this contention within the CPUSA of, well, you know, the Mexican workers just need to learn English. Right. And so, you know, they're communists, right? They're saying like, well, you know, they're communists. But at the same time, you know, they are not perfect, right? There are people that are existing in a given time and given conditions. And at that point, you know, we're absorbing some of the national chauvinisms against Mexican workers. And that made them impotent at the end of the day. Not being able to organize this section of the working class made them impotent.

They made them less powerful, right? it made the CPU as a less powerful by not being able to organize some of the most receptive workers in the region that they were organizing, right? And so, you know, why do I think that immigrant workers are a revolutionary class? They're super exploited. Exploitation breeds resistance. They're also, you know, coming from other countries where they have been maybe more in contact with collective struggles, like the United States. United States has a highly individualistic culture. And so while many people think it's harder to organize immigrant workers because of the fear,

I think the biggest barrier here is the fear of deportation, but once you overcome that, they're actually easier to organize because they are very collective people that are willing to take on the discipline of an organization that are very much acquainted with how the nastiest types of exploits that can be experienced in the United States, they have lived it. You know, they are familiar with the worst sides of the ruling class. They are cleaning the houses of the richest people in our country. They are building our infrastructure.

They are building, you know, even in industries like manufacturing, you know, the people who are building the hard drives, the hardware for, you know, data server, you know, data servers for cloud systems, do you think it's primarily citizens? No. I mean, at least not in the United, in the southeast of the United States, we're seeing that a lot of these workplaces that are building critical infrastructure are primarily like people that are not from the United States.

There are people from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and of countries that are oppressed by the United States. And so they are a lot of contracts. addictions in there that people can see. And, you know, oftentimes, like what is separating them from other workers is the ability of the organizers of all the organizations to appeal to them, to really be able to bring them into the organization. And so, you know, I think after L.A., I don't even have to say, I don't even have to, like,

make the case of why they are a revolutionary class. Like we are seeing how they're showing up, and we're seeing how, you know, how they're showing up when they are all empowered in mass and when they're all fed up. And we're seeing the strength in which they are showing up. We're seeing the class consciousness that they're displaying in their acts, right? Like we're seeing a lot of people wearing like Mexican flags alongside, you know, Kaffirs, like connecting anti-imperialism to the struggle that they're facing. So there's just a lot there. And on that note, too, like you mentioned to me in our correspondences that what's happening in L.A. is really refreshing because of, like, yeah, you mentioned the power on display, the solidarity on display. And in certain ways, the organization, even though a lot of it is organic and spontaneous that is on display on the streets of L.A. in response to everything that's, you know,

happening with, you know, ice agents, LAPD, Marines, the National Guard, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe just expand a little bit about why you see what is happening on the streets of L.A. as something that you described as refreshing, right, because of significant fissures that it might be revealing in the, quote, immigrant rights movement. So a lot of that is your wording from our correspondence. So I just want to ask you to maybe unpack that a little bit and talk about what you meant by that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I am saying this is somebody who has a background from the immigrant rights movement

and have just built up so much frustration about it. I mean, it's nothing different than, you know, the general left of the United States, right? Like it's, you know, we are, we've been plagued with postmodernism and liberalism. And so, yeah, I mean, what I'm seeing in LA is the first thing I thought we were, actually, I was, I was in a study group with a bunch of comrades. And we were literally just talking about what are some of the examples that we can think of in our country of working class rebellion, right? of like working class people just getting fed up en masse and doing something together and showing that willingness to engage in perhaps violence but righteous violence that shows that combative spirit of the working class.

We were thinking about, for example, the burning of the 12 precinct in Minneapolis. And I'm looking at this from a theoretical perspective, right? Like I'm not saying like, yeah, let's go. Like, y'all should definitely go. Burndy your nearest police office. But, you know, it is an example of working class rebellion, right?

Like that is something that happened, even though the movement as a whole did get co-opted by non-profits and the Democratic Party all across the country, but we do see some spurs of working-class anger manifested at that time. And so then when we look at our phones and this is happening in L.A.,

right off the bat, we're seeing just an amount of strength that is qualitatively different than even like the UCLA encampments or the Columbia encampments, right? That's the most recent uprising that took place in the United States. Like this is, it felt qualitatively different. Like people were like burning Waymos. Like who hates waymos, right? Like who understands that contradiction that Waymos poses more than workers themselves, right? Just how strong the reaction was within such a, short amount of time that, you know, make some of the most recent uprisings that took over national media look like a peaceful rally, right? Like, you know, like, that's workers. Like,

that's how workers show up when they're angry. And so, like, right off the bat, we saw, like, the character of this rebellion is working class, is very much proletarian. These are angry proletarians that are fed up in trying to give a lesson to the people in power and to say back off from our people. And that is also just a refreshing thing to see because since the first Trump administration where, like, you know, the immigrant rights movement like exploded at that point. Like it had been going since like, you know, the DREAM Act and whatnot. But at this point, it really just explodes. You know, the immigrant rights movement has been very much. much focused around very peaceful tactics, you know, this know your rights framework. Like if you only know your rights, you'll be safe, right?

And that is a type of passive defense, right? Just waiting for you to, for something bad to happen to you so you can like, you know, maybe minimize the damage that is done to you. But, you know, one of the things that these kinds of frameworks do not do is that they do not explain the root of that oppression, right? And at the end of the day, a lot of the people that are being targeted by Trump, a lot of the people that are being sent to labor camps in El Salvador to Secold, they had rights on paper. But that doesn't matter. Immigrants have always gotten their rights violated in the workplace, in their community. That never stopped a boss from not paying a worker.

that never stopped an ICE agent from breaking their own protocols to cause terror among the people. And so the framework of rights, which, you know, has its background in, you know, the United Nations and whatnot, it is not helpful for the people to really understand who the enemy is, who their friends are. And how do we unite with our friends and fight our enemies? How do we build a plan for us, for ICE to be weaker by the day, not just for us. us to be able to respond once eyes is attacking us and to respond in the most passive way. And so this is refreshing too because the same immigrant rights movement has been portraying our people as these defenseless victims that we just need to protect.

And we need to protect them by voting for the Democratic Party or by, you know, just giving money to this rapid response networks that like, you know, composed of also more people that serve the Democratic Party. but rather like just seeing the people say like you know what we're actually brave as hell we're actually the strongest motherfuckers in this game like we're actually like gonna make like any recent uprising like the most like radical uprising that y'all have put together we can make that look like a peaceful rally that's what like this is showing you know and also so many there's some analysis out there that are saying like well you know from

just let this rebellion happen because he wanted to send the military to repress more. He wanted a justification to send the military. But, you know, we know that he didn't really need that. And maybe that's true. Maybe he did want to send a military. Maybe he did want to instigate. Of course, he wanted to instigate Los Angeles. I totally believe that because he went for Los Angeles. He went for a highly, like, densely populated area with, you know, a lot of Latino immigrants. and went for working class bases, of course. But I doubt that he expected the response that he got. 5,000 troops or so on the ground,

and they couldn't even handle the people. They're trying to pay people like $50,000 to give some of the participants away to the police, and I'm not sure that that has worked. They're also showing just the weakness of the United States right now, of this imperialist power. Like, they have a military that is obviously not able to conduct ground operations against its own people. One, because they recruit from the military as well. So, like, all of these military, like, Marines and stuff are named Hernandez.

And they are being asked to, like, basically going inflict violence against their own people. And so that's leading to a lot of demoralization of soldiers. But then at the same time, you know, if we're looking at the type of warfare that the U.S. is engaged in, they're not really ready to conduct ground operations. That's one of the main reasons that a lot of weapon manufacturers are using Ukraine as an opportunity to test new weapons, right? Because they actually do not have a lot of other opportunities to test these weapons in a scenario of more traditional combat, right?

Like they're just using drones nowadays and other types of technologies. So, like, you know, they're not really, they're showing how they're not ready for their ground operations. So they're showing the weakness of the state rejecting all of the narratives from the previous immigrant rights movement that was at the service of the Democratic Party. They are like very much delineating the lines between friend and enemy. And they're also like making connections between fights, right? Like what I was mentioning before, we're seeing these young people like, you know, not just carry around the Mexican flag in defiance, right? to U.S. imperialism, but they're also like wearing kaffir and making those connections and seeing

themselves also in the Palestinian struggle. So all of those things combined, I think I just find like really, really interesting. And I understand that also finally on this point, a lot of people are bringing up the fact that, well, but they're not organized. This is spontaneous. We shouldn't support things that are spontaneous. We should just focus on building the infrastructure that we need. But the thing is, is that in order to build any kind of infrastructure, we also need to understand what is the historical access of our country. Like, you know, even from the angle of class struggle. Where are the places where proletarians have riced up and have engaged, have taken matters up upon themselves and being willing to engage in this kind of righteous action? Right.

And so that is informing us where the anger is, right? Like where the kind of fuel is for the type of organization that we need. So to us, like, this is actually a good thing. We do not want to pacify it, right? You know, even we know that it's spontaneous and happening spontaneously, but we're not going to get in the middle of it. We are going to pick our side based on class analysis. And we're going to use this as information as well.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for all of that. And I just want to say, like, when when I think about the liberal rights movement or, you know, various rights movements versus what you're encouraging and underscoring, which is more communist movements, like, it's the difference between trying to learn how to play the game of liberalism, like the game of bourgeois democracy really well, so that you can put up a good defense against. those who control the game, right? Versus the alternative, which is simply opting out of the game, breaking the rules of the game and fighting on your own terms, right? So then you're going from defense to offense, and you're stepping away from the oppressor's rules.

And, I mean, you're always going to lose when you're fighting on the terms of your enemy, especially when your enemy is more than happy to throw the rules out the same. second it begins to benefit them to do such, right? Like laws are tools of the capitalist class and they will only adhere to laws when it benefits them as we're seeing very, very clearly right now. Like laws are pretty meaningless when those in power simply choose to ignore them. And so you talked a little bit about how we should not step in the way of spontaneous organic rebellions.

I completely agree. But you've also talked about the importance of organizational infrastructure And so as we saw with like the George Floyd protest, I'm going to ask you more about this and you've brought it up as well already. But like the energy that came out of the George Floyd uprising was largely co-opted by the Democratic Party. And I don't feel like it led to a sharp increase in the organization of the working class. You might disagree with me on that. But I'm wondering what do you see? that needs to be done in order to take that spontaneous energy coming out of LA, coming out of different cities across the United States right now in response to the assault on immigrant workers.

How do you take that energy, organize it, discipline it, and make it effective at exerting sustained pressure, right? Like something long term. Yeah, if you could just talk about that a little bit. Yeah. And I say this as an individual as well, so not in my organization. I mean, it all comes on to this, right? So the working class needs its own party.

And it has to be built correctly. You know, a party is not a mass organization. And so the proletariat as a class has existed for now, you know, several hundred years. And in that time, it has been engaging in class struggle and has been accumulating lessons, right, and know which. We're seeing, you know, from engaging in class struggle all across the world. You know, the Russian Revolution gave a lot of lessons for all of humanity, the Chinese Revolution, all of the different struggles for national liberation and for socialism across the world. And so through that, we were able to identify, like, what are some of the universal truths that are,

are here. What is the ideology of the proletariat? Right? And ideology is important at the very end because any kind of plan, any kind of strategy that we implement is a reflection of our ideology because it's going to require a thorough assessment of the enemy and assessment of the forces of the current situation. And, you know, if we have different ideology, we are going to have different assessments or conclusions to those things. And so we need to understand that importance of ideology and the importance of the working class having representation in the political terrain, which it currently doesn't. we have not had an ideological center in the United States for nearly a hundred years, right? So think about what that does to the subjective of the people, right? So many words even have been erased from the common vocabulary in English.

Like even the word proletariat. If I go to Mexico, for example, the word proletariat is a common word. Like people even call it like, oh, prole, they make jokes about it. It's just a common word. But if I come to the United States and I use the word proletariat, that I'm suddenly an intellectual, that it's elities for using these big words in front of people. And, you know, you just have to think about the fact that the people have been robbed. The proletariat in the United States has been robbed from its vocabulary, even, from its consciousness.

And it has made us believe that, you know, we don't need the ideology of the proletariat, that we can get to liberation just by a spontaneity and spontaneous movement and, like, decentralized stuff. And, you know, our academia has been dominated, right, in, like, even the most, quote, unquote, progressive institutions. It all dominated by this, quote, unquote, Marxism that is fully critical of all the Marxist principles, or criticism of capitalism devoid of the actual ideology of the proletariat. And so people are here thinking that they can achieve liberation without looking at what the history of the proletariat in struggle tells us, looking at the lessons, what has been tried

before. So we're trying all these things that had already been proven wrong by history, and we continue to do them thinking that maybe this time is going to work. or, you know, socialism has failed in other countries, and therefore we should be trying something new, and that's just wrong. So, you know, by us concentrating only in this spontaneous struggle, we're leaving the political struggle up to the Democrats.

That's really who is co-opting everything, right? We're leaving it all up to the Democrats, we're helping them by even engaging in some of this work, if we're not actually thinking about the fact that what actually needs to happen is that the proletarian needs to have its own party. And this party needs to be composed of the most competent leaders that our class has to offer, who are fully subjugated to the ideology of the working class, right, who are integrated with the working class, who have the trust of the working class,

and who can accurately assess this moment, right? And that's at this moment, all I can say is that our organizations, without an ideological center, our organizations do not matter. Our projects don't really matter because we are kind of shooting in the dark right now. We're doing as best as we can. Like even in Tennessee, right? Like we're doing as best as we can, but we don't fully know, right? Like we cannot tell you what is the national political economy of the United States. we cannot answer everything, every political question about the national character of the United States

of the route that the United States needs to take the strategies that would work all across the country. But I can tell you about Tennessee and I can tell you about what are the classes in Tennessee. I can tell you what are some of the contradictions that we're seeing in Tennessee and what the working class of Tennessee is dealing with. But by ourselves, just operating in these regional bases, we're not going to be. able to solve everything. We need to come together, you know, and we need to align and we need to adhere to correct ideology and, you know, we need to stay away from the ideology of other classes, right? Because the proletariat is going to be the only revolutionary class. The proletariat is the last

class in history. It is the only class that does not need to justify a exploitation and it is the class that is going to emancipate the United States. So we need to be in full alignment with that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And just to go back a second, when you were talking about the word proletariat, you made me think of an experience. I actually hadn't remembered this for a really long time, maybe since it happened. But years and years ago, I was in an organizing meeting and somebody was talking about how one of the big problems is that we're using outdated ideas and that like nobody identifies as a proletariat anymore. So why are we talking about that? And it was just really interesting to observe that because it's like that's the problem. The problem is that nobody identifies as a proletariat anymore. Like the problem that needs to be addressed is why. right? The problem that needs to be addressed is not that we need to like abandon that whole structure, that whole idea of a proletariat and stop using that language. But the problem is like

exactly what you just said that nobody identifies as a proletariat anymore. Anyways, I was just thinking about that. I thought it was relevant. But so sort of on that note, I've been thinking a lot about like how counterinsurgency is always victorious. It feels like it's always so victorious here in the United States, right? Like in terms of like especially co-opting radical militant uprisings by institutional actors, like for example, the Democratic Party, or even, you know, these mass protests organized by liberal organizations and organized by like, you know, the heirs of Walmart and whatnot, which tend to miss the mark when it comes to what is being protested exactly, right?

they tend to misidentify root causes and they attempt to denigrate more radical acts of rebellion and sort of isolate and remove those elements from what's a legitimate movement. I can't help but think about you actually had a really, really funny story that you posted a few days ago about Democrats abroad and how they had like an update

where they wanted Democrats that were doing the No King's protest in countries that actually had monarchies to change it from no kings to no clowns or something like that which I just feel like couldn't be like a better example of this.

So on that like going off of what I was saying about the George Floyd uprisings and other spontaneous movements that were largely co-opted and neutralized in the past. Like do you see this happening right now? And if so like

how do we make sure that we don't fall into that trap while also trying to remember that like we're not trying to alienate progressive liberals like I started as probably maybe not so much a progressive liberal but definitely something like that and now I'm like a revolutionary Marxist Leninist, right? So like how do we navigate that tension and yeah just all of that. I'll just throw that all at you. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean, Democrats, are bad even at being liberals, right? But, you know, and Walmart needs welfare.

So I understand what they are following this protest. They don't want any attacks against welfare. They're the biggest beneficiaries of welfare. And so, you know, I was thinking about the No King's protest, right? I just, it was really interesting just how quickly they co-opted this response against, you know, the Trump's military parade, you know, all over the country just because obviously they're well-funded and they are able to. Here in Nashville, the No Kings folks were also leading the,

just the small little protest outside of the federal court where Kilmar-Abrego's pretrial was taking place, right? And I'm just seeing, you know, outside the court, like all these Democrats in, like, Uncle Sam's outfits that were holding, like, U.S. flags and signs that, say due process for Kilmer-Abrego, respect the constitution, right? And almost no signs that talked about the terror that ICE was costing and inflicting upon immigrants, right? Like, very little bit of that. And, you know, I was reflecting a lot on that. And, you know, the concept of due process,

right? It's a core value of liberalism, which is the ideology of a reactionary state, right? And, behind this weak chance for due process, these liberals decide to continue with the exploitation and the deportation of immigrants. Like, they're going to be friendlier to you. They're going to be fake. But at the end of the day, they're not arguing for no more deportations.

In fact, you know, they would often brag, like, hey, Obama deported three million people, like more than anybody else and he did it politely. Like, you know, and they're not going to do that. they're not going to go and fight against deportations. They're going to fight for their liberal values, their liberal concepts, their liberal rights, because, you know, both liberals and Democrats, at the end of the day, represent monopoly capital, right? And so they represent monopoly capital.

And monopoly capital necessitates imperialism. I mean, necessitates the oppression of other nations, other countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and it necessitates the cheap labor of undocumented people. It necessitates the continued super exploitation of immigrants, immigrant workers, and also necessitates these deportations as well. So they want the deportations to continue. They want the exploitation to continue. They just wanted to be done nicely with due process.

And it just represents a difference in the form that this exploitation is taking place. is not really a difference in the essence of the problem, right, in the essence of the issue, right? And so, you know, we need to be thinking about these things. And, you know, just looking at the imagery that I felt really interesting. And, like, that's what, like, you know, my story was kind of centered on that. You know, they're using these outfits of, like, Uncle Sam of, like, defunding fathers, right? like because they're nostalgic about the liberal revolutions right they're nostalgic about the war of

independence they are nostalgic about this part because that's something that liberals always do right you know liberalism is the ideology that took over feudalism just you know capitalism replace feudalism one system of exploitation replacing another system of exploitation and when we look at that a lot of liberals love to be nostalgic about that and be like, hey, you know, we know that our system is decaying, but remember feudalism? Weren't kings awful? Isn't it great that we have a capitalist system where you are kind of free instead of like a system that is ruled by kings? And, you know, at the same time, though, the system that they're defending is decaying. And they are unable to escape the crisis of capitalist imperialism. And no matter,

their facade, like no matter what facade they're putting together, no matter what they're saying. At the end of the day, both of these parties represent monopoly capital. They're for the same things. They're for the exploitation. They're for dividing the working class. And, you know, it's just that they're going to have different styles to go about it. You know, we're seeing the co-optation happen, but I think that they are just also so impotent at this point because the working class is ever more and more and more away.

You know, for example, in Tennessee, as soon as the deportations were taking place and like the state was deporting and kidnapping people, kidnapping workers, you know, with no discrimination. Still, we saw liberal organizations mobilizing quickly to pacify the people and misled the people. But it wasn't working very well. Because some of the same kind of tactics that they're using are, you know, tactics that the people are already very familiar with and are very tired of. For example, one of the organizations that I can think of, like this organization that was basically completely inactive during the Biden administration,

which, you know, Biden also deported a lot of people. And this organization was like taking vanity portraits to raise money, vanity portraits in front of the bosses that were full of kidnap, abducted immigrant workers. Like the bosses were full of abducted immigrant workers. And these folks from, you know, associated obviously with the Democratic Party

or in support of the Democratic Party, like they're taking vanity portraits in front of these bosses saying like, oh, like we stopped the boss. But, you know, they didn't stop the bus. They moved right away after they took the photo. And so the people like in our tenant unions, in our communities are saying like, did you see what this is going on? Did you see what is happening? That is so offensive.

You know, we're not going to believe these things anymore. We're not going to believe this theater. Like where were they in the last four years? We haven't heard anything from them in the last four years. So, you know, people are understanding that they're being used as a talking point between the electoral parties. between the electoral parties that also represent the exploitation and the imperialism that is causing people suffering to begin with. And so we're also seeing a lot of some of the same groups, right,

pushing for anti-communism and conflating Trump with communism, which is outrageous, right? Like, you know, the same group, right? The same group had a rally. They staged a rally here in Nashville, and they were basically, like it was an immigrant rights rally. and they had a big banner. And like you would be thinking like, okay, you can put something like immigrant rights now

or citizenship now or any kind of lame slogan that you could have think of. But what they choose is like Trump, enemy of the people. And the way that they wrote Trump has a hammer and sickle. So like just making the illusion that Trump is a communist and that's just playing into that anti-communism of the right. But one, that's not really working. and two, that just puts them out there as enemies of the people to begin with because who is out there in the detention centers,

who is out there in the jails, in any dungeon of this state, right? It is going to be workers and it's going to be anti-imperialists. It's going to be workers and threats who fills the prisons and the detention centers all over the country, right? And we're seeing that. And so we combat that to people by really spelling out those connections. Because at the end of the day, like there's going to be a lot of normies that are going to gravitate towards like the No Kings rally. They're going to gravitate to other more mainstream rallies.

And so we're not going to be taken seriously by these normies unless we're able to really spell out. Why are the liberals wrong and why are we right? Why do we represent their interests? And we're only going to be able to make an argument around that if we're clear, if they can understand us, and that if we also have their trust and are integrated and show that we actually care about them. The way that I often see it is that liberals, and I'm talking a little bit more about like conscious, like either establishment liberals or people who are consciously liberal, not people who just sort of fall into that category because they don't really think about things too much and they just kind of

go with the flow. But these people are looking back at the decay of their, system with just all you can describe it as is like pure cope you know like they can't imagine a different future all they can do is fight against like the only certainty in life which is change and they're they're just as afraid of fascism taking root as they are of socialism taking root right like they just want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening and if they're like really really pushed all they can do is please with us, like just stop trying to fuck with this system. You know, we just need to return to the rule of law and respect the institutions whose legitimacy

they're so desperate to maintain and whose rotten foundations they've always refused to accept or acknowledge, really. But the reality that like their beloved system is going to collapse. It is inevitable. And the only question is what will replace it. And yeah, that's a. question worth fighting for, I think, and not a question that we should take lightly, because it's not guaranteed one way or the other. And so just to kind of close out our conversation,

it's very unlikely, I think, that anybody from the MAGA right is going to be listening to this episode, even more, especially because it's a Patreon episode and it's behind a paywall. But I just want you to maybe articulate it for us in case there's anybody listening who is maybe in contact with anybody who holds these beliefs and would maybe like some help with like dispelling nativist propaganda and a lot of the propaganda that is flowing into our ears from, you know, all of the different ruling class sources. Like how would you respond to the position that the Trump administration and people like Stephen Miller, for example, are trying to advocate for this claim that immigration is the cause of all of your problems, right? Like you're emiserated

because of immigrants. You've already talked. touched on this a little bit at the top of the conversation, but again, if you could just spell that out for us and present why that claim is so wrong and misguided. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is one of the, this is what I'm talking about often with the fact that we have to be clear and we have to fully spell it out for people. But for us to be able to be heard, right? We also need to be able to listen to the person that is right across from us. So the way that I personally handle these conversations and I know others do, it's by, you know, first getting to know the person. What makes them stress about society? What do they think of society?

What do they think about how society has changed? What do they think about the work that they do? So, like, you know, we do talk to a lot of Trump supporters, but then also a lot of these Trump supporters are in, you know, highly exploitative jobs, right? So they're getting exploited in the work. So, you know, assuming that that's who you're talking to, because if you're talking to somebody like more upper class, and, you know, it's going to be a lot different because the interests will be different.

But if you're talking to somebody who's getting exploited and who is pro-Trump, just try to learn a little bit more about them and try to learn, you know, how was your pay? Five years ago. What's your pay now? What do you think is going to be in five or ten years? How much worse do you think it's going to get? and just trying to understand, like, what is the root of this person's anxiety? And then just breaking it down for them, you know, breaking it down for them that, you know, competition, you're never going to be able to escape competition, right?

You're never going to be able to escape competition because this is just a feature of the capitalist system. Like, it's a system that we live in. You know, this is exactly what the bosses want you to think. You know, they want to smash like one sector of our class with the help of other sectors, right? Or with the passive agreement of other sectors, right? You are doing the dirty work for the people who are exploiting you. And, you know, I make the connections. Like you think that you're unique on your exploitation.

Like you think like Uber is unique. You think the Amazon is unique? Like, look around you. Look at other workers in other sectors. Everybody is struggling. the economy is not doing great because the country is losing its grip over the global market, right? So everybody is doing badly. And, you know, in this system, like, we need to understand who our friends are and who our enemies are.

You know, your boss, the capitalist, Uber, Amazon, like, they understand who the enemy is, right? That is why they treat you the way it is. That's why they repress unions the way they do. that's why they take wages from you. That is why they treat you like you're nothing, right? And that's not unique. They're part of a class. And this class is organized.

And our class is fighting each other constantly and picking fights at each other. So it's not together. And so, you know, you have here this phrase like divide and conquer. And that's what they are doing to us. Because that's the rules of the game. The game is you unite with your friends and you fight your enemies together. And so they are united with their friends and they're fighting us by dividing us.

And so what we need to be doing is organizing and uniting and dividing them, not dividing us, right? Really be thinking about why this is that it's happening. Why have you asked one of the co-workers why they're here? Have you asked a lot of these like Latino folks, Sudanese folks, Haitian folks, Have you asked them why they're here? Like, why are they here? Do you know why they are here to begin with, right? Do you know what has happened in those countries, right?

And so, you know, it is impossible, right? Like, it's impossible that one section of the working class can enjoy high standards of living, right? While the other part is enslaved, right? Like, we, as a class, right, like the left fucked up back in the 40s, right, when he completely compromised and compromised the organizing that it had done independently, he had built a force

that actually threatened the ruling class. And he made the ruling class afraid that the working class was going to come for them. So what did they do? They divided workers by national origin and started giving some benefits to white workers, to citizen workers, and throwing black and immigrant workers

under the bus. and now flashback to 2025, where are all those benefits? Most of them have been stripped away. There's like a very impotent national labor relations war right now, like a department of, like all of those systems of mediation, all of those little treats and little crumbs that we took in exchange for throwing some of our siblings under the bus.

Now we're paying for it, right? And now we're going to experience more and more precarious conditions. There's going to be less comfy jobs for people. You know, it's going to be harder and harder to find a good job. And this is all because we fell into this trap before. And so if we're going to continue to fall into this trap, then we're just going to be giving consent for our own subjugation, right? And, you know, we're giving consent for this capitalist class to continue to step all over us, right? And so what is happening to immigrants right now is an attack against the working class. And so because we're being attacked as a class, we need to fight as a class, right? You know, I just try to connect to

whatever experience that workers are having because, you know, people will listen to you if you are actually concerned with what they're doing. So I think that for any conversation with somebody who is MAGA, that is also a worker, you know, if they're being exploited, then we need to really get to know them, really get to know why they believe Trump is going to improve things for people, why they think that Trump is going to be good for the economy, why they think what they think, right? What makes them anxious about society? Like, are they unable to afford retirement? Like, what is it? Right? And then connect that, connect that anxiety to the real narrative and like really break it down why it actually is that way. What are some of the lies that they're consuming and agreeing?

And they might not listen to you the first time, but, you know, eventually if you keep bothering them and you keep earning that trust, like, you might be able to change their mind. Like, we have changed some minds before, even recently. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Cecilia Guerrero, chair and founding member of Aluta Sigwe, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class

to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. The cover art for today's episode is a CPSU propaganda poster. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political

education podcasts to the public and build our movement. For more from us, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on social media at Upstream podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. This really helps to get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you.