From the Defensive to the Offensive – In Higher Education, Across Society

From the Defensive to the Offensive –

In Higher Education, Across Society

By now, just over 6 months into the Trump Regime, it is clear that US fascism will continue to seize power… unless this is stopped. Fascism USA is a powerful mob of the worst tendencies in our history. Trump is just the front man at this point. The fascist forces are destroying everything and increasing their billions in wealth. They demand that the American people submit to their illegal power grab.

Since Charlie Kirk’s funeral on September 14, just 2 weeks ago, the fascist regime has declared that it would seize all the NGOs; Trump declared open war on his “adversaries”, the press and freedom of speech. He has weaponized the Justice Department to prosecute anyone if they criticize him. Then he threatened to invade Portland in October with armored forces, authorizing them to use “all necessary force” to protect ICE.

Following this, Trump’s solution to the coming government shutdown is to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers. This threatens to abolish public access to national parks, to end all federal environmental protections, food inspections, and support of state and local programs. Trump also is threatening to punish the American people for not supporting billionaires over the rest of us.

The capitalist class is conducting open warfare on the US working class by abolishing any form of government support of the public and people.

This is what class warfare looks like. We are seeing in real time the use of naked power, open criminal activity and anti-Constitutional activity, to seize power over all the levers of society. We are seeing the naked take-over of the media, the universities and the military by “patriotic” forces, meanwhile they are taking apart society, one piece at a time.

We Dare Not Submit

In the face of this attack, the leaders of the Democratic Party, the media and the universities – corporations all – tell us to bend the knee, to kowtow and conciliate, to rely on the courts, lengthy law suits and legalities. This doctrine is like bringing a legal writ to a gun fight.

The United States has a long history of resistance that rejects submission:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglas, 1857

But the American people are well aware that “If you give them an inch, and they will take a mile.” It is time to cast off illusions.

New leaders recognize this. Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, most of whom are now contingent workers, indicates the path ahead:

“We’re going to need to politicize this fight. It’s not an economic strike around our job conditions – it’s a political strike around the future of the sector.” He also argues the need to go beyond resistance by countering these attacks with a new vision for higher education, including…free college, an end to student debt, and more funding for science, thereby attacking the corporate right to control education for profit.

Two solid years of Zionist genocide in Gaza and Palestine – the horrors we have all seen – presents us with a profound lesson: No matter how vicious their control, how horrifically destructive, you still do not have to submit, you can resist. Submitting is what they want you to do. But only you can give this up.

Fascism always rises in response to a leap in the movement of the people. Since the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020 demanded abolishing the police, all sectors of the ruling class recognize that the era of bourgeois democracy is over.

The ruling class is well aware that fascism is no longer a choice for capitalism. It grows more vicious as it faces increasing crises from all directions. Fascism is a necessity for the ruling class as it struggles to maintain its control of society. Fascism arises to crush a rising social movement that understands that it cannot submit and conciliate with the open seizure of political power that we are seeing today.

So far, the American people have risen to resist illegal and criminal MAGA changes almost everywhere across the country. Even before Trump, for several generations, public opinion has been strongly in favor of more health care, extending rights to all, abortion, rights to the LGBTQ+ community, Indigenous Peoples, the un-housed and displaced and all people equally.

Resistance to the fascist offensive is historically the first response. From abortion rights to Palestine to voting rights to DEI and Climate Crisis, from ICE kidnappings in LA and DC and now Chicago and Memphis, popular responses are producing vast networks of people who are organizing to block the fascist inroads.

While it is not possible to go backwards, we can mobilize the political power to break and abolish fascism. How to do so is a strategic question. This step requires a much broader array of tactics than the narrow legalities that we are presented with. Specifically, it requires a strategy that takes the offensive, not just defensive. Resistance rejects the politics of compromise and collusion that is being imposed from the top. This is key to building real political power.

But how to do this?

Fascism’s Achilles Heel

Fascist rule is bringing Gaza home to roost. But neither the US nor capitalism can legitimately claim that it supports democracy. They have lost control of the narrative.

In the US, Ai is rapidly replacing jobs or converting them into gig work that cannot sustain life. Today over half of our households do not receive a steady income and must rely on such precarious work… whenever corporations decide to offer it. Six in ten report that they do not have enough money to cover a $1,000 emergency. A majority live from paycheck to paycheck. The illusion of the so-called “American Dream”, something that never was true for most people, is vanishing.

That’s why capitalism resorts to naked force. Yet precisely there is their weak point. We are in the Battle of Ideas. This is a fundamental part of every revolution. The Apocalypse literally means “the raising of the veil” to uncloud the truth. This is the political awakening that must come before Armageddon, the final battle.

The entire history of fascism shows that it is impossible to mobilize and defeat it from the political middle. Resistance to fascism must begin with the absolute denial that their authority is in any way legitimate, that it is formally unrecognized and rejected. This requires winning the public over to attacking corporate crimes against humanity that fascism always justifies.

The fight against fascism is a fight for basic human needs for all, for democracy, for the control of government, and for the future of humanity and the planet. By taking the offensive to defeat fascism, the working class can pass over to the offensive against capitalism and private property, the seedbed of fascism. Building and consolidating resistance is fundamental to taking the offensive.

Going on the offensive means attacking fascism at its root, which requires a specific program. There is no way that we can take power away from corporate “rights” with half way measures. Either oil companies own fossil fuels and therefore have the right to destroy the climate… or they don’t. Either corporations are allowed to own Ai, science and technology, or they aren’t. Either corporations have the right to own housing and raise prices, or they don’t.

Things will not get better. We can’t go back. We can’t just stand our ground. The changes that fascism has imposed on government and the State cannot be reversed without reversing how political power is held in the US. The long list of Democratic Party leaders and university administrations bending the knee shows that the capitalist class cannot and will not lead this fight. Only the rise of a new social force can heal this country. This social force is made up of everyone who is being dispossessed by corporate seizures of power.

Trump put Elon Musk in charge of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate all the functions of government that support human beings. Likewise, MAGA has empowered the private for-profit corporation, Palantir, to organize and control all government data. Palantir also provides the digital networking backbone of the Surveillance State.

This seizure of the public’s information, of all kinds, by private corporations is perhaps the greatest theft and privatization of personal and public wealth and property in global history. Worse, we are watching private corporations abolish one critical function of good governance – developing public information, and using it scientifically to benefit everybody.

Never before has replacing private ownership with public ownership been such an immediate practical solution to every problem we face. The battle begins by challenging government to be accountable to human needs, and ends when we the people establish the government we all need.

The National Public Education Committee of LRNA

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