In a scene from Andor that has been widely quoted on the left, a Rebel theorist describes the nature of the Empire’s ideological stranglehold on the Galaxy: “So much going wrong, so much to say. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.”
This only seems more true of the empire we are confronted with in real life, as 2026 has brought us horrors we could have barely imagined just a few months ago.
Let’s start in Minneapolis. The horrifying street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration agents early this year — in broad daylight, caught on video from multiple angles, and seen by millions — have proven to be a threshold moment for the broad left in the United States. These acts of barbarity come after a nightmarish ramping-up of state violence against immigrants last year, when record numbers were detained and deported, and 32 people killed in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agency’s horrific year was capped off by the murder of Keith Porter, Jr., a Black man, by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. All this has provoked unprecedented outrage and mass action against the Trump regime and the MAGA right.
After Trump poured thousands of ICE thugs into the Twin Cities in January in what seemed an attempt to foment a civil war, a grassroots network of tens of thousands, predominantly ordinary people protesting and organizing for the first time, have taken to the subzero streets to defend their immigrant and racialized neighbors.
Minneapolis’s resistance to ICE, however demanding, dangerous, and ultimately deadly for Good and Pretti, has proven at least partially successful. ICE’s activities have been thwarted again and again, and the morale of the organization has been severely diminished. The last week of January saw the first municipal general strike in the US in decades, as millions shut down Minneapolis for one day to demand “ICE out!” Solidarity actions erupted across the country. Days later, the public faces of the offensive against immigrants were offered up as sacrificial lambs: Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino was demoted, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was sidelined.
Ordinary people who have never protested before are taking to the streets in great numbers, with high levels of organization and increasing militancy. In a recent poll, 60 per cent of liberals under 30 said that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest and even break the law in response to ICE raids.
These events have shattered illusions in US democracy and the rule of law on a mass scale. We see the highest offices of the land brazenly lying about and aggressively defending state violence against innocent civilians. Scenes associated with imperialist war overseas, from Afghanistan to Palestine, are now witnessed on the streets of the US. Occupying forces strut around with automatic and chemical weapons harassing, beating, and abducting immigrants and citizens alike with impunity, while adding activists’ faces to a high-tech database of “domestic terrorists.”
As a result, mass radicalization is happening at a rapid pace. The question of whether the US has descended into fascism is now mainstream discourse. Hollywood actors and other celebrities have called for a nationwide general strike. Ordinary people who have never protested before are taking to the streets in great numbers, with high levels of organization and increasing militancy. In a recent poll, 60 per cent of liberals under 30 said that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest and even break the law in response to ICE raids. People are making connections between what is happening now and the institutions of policing and borders in general, as well as the entire blood-soaked history of the US.
The new world disorder
There is so much more happening besides. The vicious misogynist and homophobic state murder of Good came less than one week after Trump’s brazen, illegal assault on Venezuela and abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro. This terrorist action effectively signalled the Trump regime’s dispensing with the pretense of the “international rules-based order.” The Trump administration is seemingly enacting a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine— the 19th-century US foreign policy that opposed any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere so that the US alone could exploit it. Meanwhile, Trump’s unhinged pursuit of Greenland accelerates this aggressive, erratic strategy on another front. Trump has not only been content to endanger the US’s relationship with NATO, but has explicitly threatened longtime NATO allies if they interfere.
With the US empire in a long decline, the sections of the ruling class represented by Trump have settled on a return to a world order based on “spheres of influence,” an approach that guided US imperialism from its emergence as a world power in the late 1800s until the end of the Cold War. No longer the unchallenged unipolar power of the world capitalist system that it was in the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US now finds itself competing with China and the European Union for dominance.
Seven years ago, Trump infamously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” This year, more than ever, he has acted on that hideous sentiment.
The US also enforces a belligerent, contradictory “America First” economic policy that alienates even neighbors and close allies like Canada. In his address at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney bemoaned this new reality, where “great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests.” Carney’s unusually candid appraisal is an insight into the frustration felt by many in the world’s ruling classes over the chaos and instability brought on by Trump. His speech has been hailed by liberals as a bold challenge to Trump, when in reality, far from any kind of “resistance,” it represents the pragmatic concerns of a lesser imperial power angling to find its way in the new disorder.
Meanwhile, the genocide in Gaza continues, albeit in a different form, exposing the lie of the October “ceasefire.” Hundreds of Gazans have been slaughtered by Israeli occupation forces since the ceasefire began, while many more freeze and starve. Trump’s “Board of Peace” includes key MAGA figures like Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner; former UK prime minister and butcher of Baghdad Tony Blair; and two indicted war criminals who did not attend the founding ceremony for fear of being arrested on warrants from the International Criminal Court: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
This Board of Billionaires and War Criminals, as it should be called, is a blatant maneuver to impose further colonial control on the open-air concentration camp of Gaza. It will consolidate US power in the region, rubber-stamp Israel’s genocide, and make way for a future “Trump Riviera,” a proposed glittering coastal resort modeled on Dubai and built on the bones of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Seven years ago, Trump infamously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” This year, more than ever, he has acted on that hideous sentiment.
The mask comes off
All of this happening at once can be bewildering and disorienting, even for experienced Marxists, especially due to the tremendous human suffering we see every day. Still, it’s important that we do not allow the pace of repression to outstrip our ability to understand it. We must analyze this new political landscape, not only so we can most effectively participate in the fightback, but also so we can collectively develop a strategy to overthrow the whole miserable, bloody, crumbling system.
The common theme of all these disasters is that the capitalist class worldwide is now operating with masks off. The rules-based order has been revealed to be a sham. As genocide, street executions, and concentration camps have been normalized on the political center, more people now understand that it has always been one set of rules for the dominant powers and another for everyone else. Democratic rights are being actively eroded in the Global North where the ruling class sees fit to do so. In the United Kingdom, activists are proscribed as terrorists and jailed indefinitely. In Australia, free speech and the right to protest have been severely curtailed amid the racist, Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian backlash to the Bondi Beach massacre. In both cases this repression is happening under nominally liberal governments.
To the ruling class, the degradation of democracy and human life is necessary because capitalism is in a permanent state of crisis, with a climate apocalypse unfolding and billionaires rapaciously hoarding our dwindling resources.
This mask-off brutality has been developing for some time. The US bipartisan consensus that the lives of a million people were worth the cost of reopening the economy in the middle of the COVID pandemic was an early indicator, before the Gaza genocide further entrenched it. To the ruling class, the degradation of democracy and human life is necessary because capitalism is in a permanent state of crisis, with a climate apocalypse unfolding and billionaires rapaciously hoarding our dwindling resources.
The only possible answer is social revolution, and they know it. The capitalist classes will do anything to defend their power and profits. So the mask has to come off, the old norms can’t apply anymore, and we are all increasingly subject to the terror and violence that was previously reserved for the most marginalized. This is one reason for the right’s “war on empathy,” which was popularized by their dead icon, Charlie Kirk.
The question of fascism
As Marxists, we must stick to a clear analysis of social forces, even as circumstances become more desperate. Despite the terror of recent events, despite understanding why so many people compare ICE to the Gestapo, we still do not label the Trump administration a fascist regime. Fascism is not merely a synonym for violent authoritarianism. It is a specific turn of the capitalist state during a time of crisis in which the ruling class suspends democracy and violently smashes the working class. In this, the ruling class depends on the activation of the declassed, ruined petty bourgeoisie (roughly, the middle classes) to be their foot soldiers against a working-class threat to their rule. A fascist regime would attack the entire working class, including direct physical attacks on unions; whereas Trump is, for now, focusing on immigrants and political activists — both of whom are also traditional targets of fascism, to be fair. He does not have a large mobilized base in the petty bourgeoisie ready to take part in violence against workers.
Certainly there have been fascists at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media is practically a tutorial in fascist art and ideology. An ICE prosecutor in Texas runs a white supremacist social media account that has praised Hitler, and a former White House liaison to the DHS admitted he has “a Nazi streak” in him. In all likelihood the majority of violent racists who make up the ranks of ICE, many recruited from actual fascist organizations like the Proud Boys, are unambiguously ready for fascism themselves.
But the composition of ICE itself is a point of departure. ICE is not a fascist paramilitary street army, but a government agency cosplaying as one. It’s worth noting that ICE is nowhere near the size of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers) in Germany nor the Squadristi in Italy, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands each. After their obnoxious recruitment campaign last year, ICE claims to have 22,000 agents in a country of 340 million people, although they are likely to be exaggerating these numbers. For comparison, the New York City Police Department has 33,000 uniformed officers in a city of 8.5 million.
This is not a picture of a successful fascist takeover. It’s fairer to say that some in the Trump administration are trying to impose a quasi-fascist order from the top down, without the social conditions nor the broad support of the capitalist classes needed to do so.
If ICE thought they could function as the Stormtroopers of Minnesota, it has not gone according to plan. Without downplaying the horror and the suffering of their victims, they have been significantly impeded by the heroic grassroots resistance. After the murder of two civilians, Trump has been forced to partially back down or at least pivot, and a nationwide day of action on January 30, including massive protests and walkouts by workers and students, has further galvanized the movement.
This is not a picture of a successful fascist takeover. It’s fairer to say that some in the Trump administration are wrestling with the machinery of the state and trying to impose a quasi-fascist order from the top down, without the social conditions nor the broad support of the capitalist classes needed to do so.
We are dealing with an intensification and expansion of state repression in the context of a rapidly changing world capitalist system, administered by a regime that contains more fascist elements than ever in living memory. But these elements have not succeeded in bringing about a fascist restructuring of US society, and the unevenness of their attempts — as well as the staunchness of the mass resistance — suggests they are not close. The more people realize this, the less likely they will be to feel despair in this moment.
This does not minimize the reality of the threat to working and oppressed people, but rather puts the blame where it belongs: on the existing political structures of the US, which have been facilitated by both capitalist parties.
The bipartisan ratchet effect
Whether we call it an early stage of fascism or simply an authoritarian turn of neoliberal capitalism, our response would be the same. We must organize and protest out in the open, and not panic or go underground prematurely. We must resist the analysis and solutions proposed by liberals and ultraleftists alike. We must continue to build revolutionary cadre. We must avoid the traps of lesser-evilism and electoral fetishism, as well as adventurism and substitutionism (mistaking radical action by a few for the action of the masses). Most of all, we must not water down our revolutionary ideas out of fear of repression, even as that repression ramps up.
In this period of domestic instability, we should never consider the Democrats nor officials such as judges and attorney generals our allies, even when they oppose Trump’s terror. We may applaud some of their actions, such as the mayor of Chicago directing police to document misconduct and pursue prosecution of federal agents, or the Colorado attorney general setting up a website to track ICE misconduct. But instead of seeing these as the actions of allies, we should understand them as signs of just how deep the rifts have become among the various managers of the bourgeois state. Certainly we must extend solidarity to Democratic politicians when they, like Rep. Ilhan Omar, face threats and violence from the right.
But it is much more often the case that a Democratic leader will say the right thing and then do the opposite. After the murder of Good, Mayor Jacob Frey was celebrated for telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Two weeks later he spoke with Trump and said he “appreciated the conversation” and that he would “continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement.” Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has raised “Abolish ICE” as a slogan in recent days — but also oversaw the mass arrest of dozens of activists who were occupying a Hilton hotel in Manhattan in protest of ICE staying there.
Everything we say about ICE, we mean about the police. Everything we say about the police, we mean about the state.
None of this should be a surprise; Frey and Mamdani are just doing what Democrats and executive officials do, enforcing the will of the capitalist class. Their job is not to fight for the people, but to convince the people why they can’t fight for them. Or, more to the point, to fight the people themselves — as when Governor Tim Walz called in the National Guard to repress protests in Minneapolis after the murder of Pretti.
On those rare occasions when Democrats act like real opposition, or when they purport to be socialists, it only serves to confuse people about their role as co-managers for the enemy class alongside Republicans. When the police or the courts occasionally make efforts to keep ICE in check, it confuses people about the nature of policing and the “justice” system under capitalism. The Democrats are not on our side. The cops and the National Guard are not on our side. They never will be.
Everything we say about ICE, we mean about the police. Everything we say about the police, we mean about the state — and its cruel, inherently violent borders. None of these can be separated from the others. ICE is not an aberration of policing and border “protection,” as liberals would have you believe; it is the logical end result of those things. You cannot train ICE agents, or unmask them, and expect them to be more humane. Their very function is inhumane. The ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents who killed Good and Pretti were both veterans with years of experience and training. Cops don’t wear masks, and yet they kill over a thousand people a year in the US. Cops operate with impunity too — and so they must in order to fulfill their role of keeping the exploited and oppressed in check.
ICE must be abolished. This simple, clear demand has gone from a contentious slogan confined to the left during the first Trump administration, and even abandoned by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other high-profile progressives during the Biden years, to one currently supported by 80 per cent of Democratic voters. “Fuck ICE” is an overwhelmingly mainstream position now. With the right political will, abolishing ICE could be accomplished very quickly; the agency has only been in existence for some 22 years and serves no useful social function.
But we can’t stop there. ICE is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The police and prisons must be abolished too. Borders must be abolished. The capitalist state must be abolished. We maintain that fundamental truth: the whole damn system is guilty as hell.
Remember that the Democrats increased ICE’s funding during the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations; and that Kamala Harris campaigned on increasing it further. Harris went so far as to portray Trump as soft on border protection in her campaign against him, angling to appeal to right-wing voters while assuming she’d get votes from liberals either way. It was Obama and his appointee at ICE, Tom Homan (now Trump’s new border czar), who innovated the practice of separating families in order to discourage asylum seekers, and who expanded the border facilities that have correctly been called concentration camps. For decades, the Democrats have eagerly built up and brutally enforced the US’s border regime and deported millions. Unlike Trump they do it quietly and thus minimize protest. This might explain why Democrats joined in voting to praise ICE in Congress last year after the mass uprising in Los Angeles against the agency; or why they just voted to increase ICE’s funding by billions, supposedly to pay for more training.
The Democrats turn the ratchet a little by increasing ICE funding and building concentration camps; the Republicans turn it a lot by occupying sanctuary cities, disregarding the Constitution, and kidnapping activists and other citizens. Then the Democrats make sure the ratchet never turns back.
Yes, Trump has introduced new and greater terrors; that can’t be denied. Under the Democrats, ICE was not using kindergarteners as bait, abducting citizens from their cars, or shooting people in the street. But the trap of the two-party system is that it works like a ratchet. The Democrats turn the ratchet a little by increasing ICE funding and building concentration camps; the Republicans turn it a lot by occupying sanctuary cities, disregarding judicial orders and the Constitution, and kidnapping activists and other citizens. Then the Democrats make sure the ratchet never turns back.
Looming in the background is the reality that the Democrats are responsible for enabling the worst genocide of the century. As author Ta-Nahesi Coates said about the Democrats, “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
The Trump administration has exposed the brutality at the core of the capitalist system. Now that the mask has come off, we must never be fooled again.
How to respond to the moment
Minneapolis shows us the way. The organic, spontaneous, decentralized, yet highly organized nature of the resistance there has been a significant factor in its success.There have been no leaders as such to be harassed, bargained with, or tamed by the Democrats. The skills needed to monitor and resist ICE agents can be taught quickly to anyone willing to learn, and tens of thousands have stepped up to take on and share this work.
The people of Minneapolis have moved beyond merely symbolic protest. First they built a citywide network to oppose ICE’s activities and provide mutual aid on a scale hardly seen before. Stories of citizen activists smuggling food and medicine to immigrants and citizens of color in hiding, and of Somali aunties bringing sambusas to the front lines, depict true multicultural solidarity and a beautiful rejection of racist terror. Activists have set up neighborhood defense committees and have even constructed street barricades to function as “filter blockades” to identify and delay ICE vehicles — exciting developments that provide a glimpse of the dual power needed in a revolutionary situation. The breadth and depth of this organizing is what made the general strike of January 23 possible, as unions and religious organizations followed the lead of the people in calling for a shutdown of the city.
The rapid growth and development of this movement can be compared to what we saw during the Arab Spring of 2011, with millions experiencing a political awakening all at once, and organically getting themselves organized against the government forces of repression. No wannabe Gestapo could subdue such a movement once it got properly under way. The forces of oppression are vastly outnumbered by the people. This is why the capitalist class fears the general strike above all else. Such a movement can only be derailed by its own limitations.
When they criminalize dissent, we need to respond with more dissent. The most important time to join ICE watch is when they are murdering ICE watchers.
This is where Marxism is needed. A mass movement needs political education. It needs to learn from history, both the successes and failures — why the Russian Revolution succeeded, why the Egyptian Revolution failed. It needs to reject the leadership of liberals and reformists. It needs to understand that workers are the true power of society and when they move, nothing can stop them.
The revolutionary left needs to do everything we can to support the anti-ICE movement, in Minneapolis and nationwide. We need to encourage and deepen the radical conclusions people are coming to, and further direct them toward revolutionary socialist horizons. We need to build the militance of the movement — to amplify the voices of those young liberals who are rejecting peaceful protest and legalism. We need to connect the struggles at home with those around the world, and explain why all these terrible things are happening at once.
We also need to demonstrate our solidarity and take part in the movement to the best of our abilities, by joining ICE watches and protests. We need to do everything we can to help stop the reign of terror, while politically intervening in the movement. We need to do this out in the open and not succumb to fear and despair. Rather than becoming so security-minded that we are paralyzed, we should heed the lessons of Egyptian activists, as recounted by journalist Hossam El-Hamalawy:
Our choice was to become more public, not more hidden. More visible, not more clandestine. This did expose our members to repression. There is no denying that. But we sought to counter that risk through scale, visibility, and broad public participation.
When the police state comes for the left, it will do us no good to say “we’re not the left.”When they characterize anti-fascism, “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as domestic terrorism, we cannot make a U-turn and disavow our politics. When they criminalize dissent, we need to respond with more dissent. The most important time to join ICE watch is when they are murdering ICE watchers.
In the face of ICE’s assault on their city, the people of Minneapolis have gone on the offensive and inspired the world with their courage. They saw the shocking murders of Good and Pretti and went right back out into the streets to confront the thugs, armed with not much more than whistles. In the same spirit, rather than beating a tactical retreat from the authoritarian turn, revolutionaries must rush to the front lines in the fight against it.
The Trump regime is rapidly creating its own gravediggers. It is our task to help them dig, to sharpen our tools together, and to keep digging until capitalism itself is buried.
