The implications of the immigrant demonstrations for the class struggle in America

Literally millions took to the streets May 1 in cities from Los Angeles to New York, Miami to Seattle and scores of towns in between. This mass protest movement, which has been building since March, is without precedent in both its size and its national scope.

Those who demonstrated and walked off their jobs did so in defiance of warnings by President Bush as well as Democratic politicians. They also took action in the face of naked intimidation posed by recent nationwide factory raids, as well as threats of arrest and deportation by the government and violence by elements of the extreme right.

A layer of workers treated as social pariahs by the US government has suddenly emerged as a militant, potent and vocal social force.

These actions by the most oppressed and exploited section of the American working class have deep social and political roots and a far-reaching objective significance.

At the same time, they urgently pose the problems in the development of political consciousness within the working class as a whole that must be overcome.

The demonstrations have unfolded under increasingly tense and unstable political conditions within the US. Poll after poll shows the Bush administration receiving support from barely a third of the American people. What accounts for this unprecedented political collapse? Neither the mass media nor the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, has posed any consistent or serious challenge to the White House over either the war, the wholesale assault on democratic rights or domestic policies that serve to transfer wealth from the masses of working people to the top 1 percent.

Yet, three years into the illegal war against Iraq, the actions carried out by the Bush administration, combined with an accelerating deterioration of living standards and historically unprecedented social polarization, are beginning to have a profound effect on popular consciousness.

The mass movement among immigrant workers is shaped in no small part by this shift. It has unfolded largely outside of the influence of the Democratic Party or the trade union bureaucracy, which is precisely why it has taken such a mass and explosive form. The sclerotic trade union apparatus, in alliance with the big business Democratic politicians, serves only to smother and abort genuine movements of social protest.

The growth of the immigrant workforce is only part of the radical changes that are taking place in the social composition of the working class as a whole in America. Its ranks have been vastly expanded, under conditions in which substantial layers of what were once considered part of the American “middle class” are being driven down in social status and deprived of stable employment, pensions, company-paid health care and other basic social amenities.

This process has been accompanied by an immense widening of the gap between working people, the great majority of the population, and a financial oligarchy of CEOs, Wall Street financiers and the super-rich who monopolize an ever-greater share of the wealth created by society. While 25 years ago, CEOs were paid $10 for every $1 earned by an average worker, today the ratio is $431 to $1.

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