As nation-wide resistance to the racist, genocidal US state has been growing among the working class, Trump and the Republican Party have set out on an anti-communist witch hunt to try and squash any semblance of organised political opposition to the ruling class’s agenda. REAGAN GRAY reports.
On 20 July, the US State Department, headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, issued a 100-page memo entitled Cuba: Capital of 21st century communism which claims that the Cuban state is fundamentally linked to ‘left wing terrorism’ in the US. This sprawling document contains a McCarthy-style web of historical and contemporary references to organisations, individuals, news outlets and ideologies, such as antifa, Third Worldism, Black Power, and of course, Marxism, which it claims Cuban state intelligence has been central in fomenting for over 65 years. The document’s ‘blacklist’ of active groups includes the People’s Forum, Code Pink, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), among many others, citing their historical ties and support for Cuba, as well as their role in recent anti-ICE protests and the Palestine solidarity movement in the US, calling them a fundamental threat to America that must be stopped. This repression has no doubt been spurred by the fierce and organised resistance to racist ICE terror that reached a new height in Minneapolis earlier this year. These sparks of revolutionary struggle, along with enduring internationalist solidarity with Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, have dealt blows to the ruling class. This is an all-out ideological war on organised political opposition.
This anti-communist frenzy is a longstanding tactic of the US ruling class to undermine political opposition and to provide ideological pretext to bring down the heavy hand of the state anywhere it deems necessary. Domestically, this is being carried out via the Department of Justice through criminalisation of protest and political organising – and the most militant and conscious sections of the movement are the first to feel the repercussions. The release of this document came off the back of the Prairieland sentencing (see below), where a Texas judge handed down 450 years of prison time to eight anti-ICE protestors using an unprecedented ‘domestic terror’ connection. Just one day after the document was released, The Party for Socialism and Liberation’s media outlet Breakthrough News received a government subpoena demanding extensive financial and legal records in attempts to muzzle independent, anti-imperialist reporting.
Outside the US, the State Department and the Department of War are aggressively attempting to squash socialism and anti-imperialist resis-tance, with Cuba being the main target. Threats of military operations resembling the assault on Caracas in January still loom as the US continues its genocidal economic strangulation of the island.
With the stakes so high, this demands an uncompromising fightback. Although the White House is casting its net wide and branding anyone to the left of the Republican Party ‘godless communists’ who pose the gravest threat to the United States since its inception, we must be clear about those forces which represent the way forward and those which are a fetter on the struggle for international socialism.
Blue wave?
Following a string of primary election victories for candidates endorsed by the DSA, some on the US left are deeming this a new socialist wave. While these election results signal a broadly positive ideological shift in the US toward a more favourable view of socialism, this ‘blue wave’ does not offer a fundamental departure from capitalism in the US.
Since Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral election in November 2025, beating out a long-standing Democratic incumbent, there has been a surge in energy around running ‘progressive’ candidates, many of whom endorsed by the DSA, on Democratic Party tickets. This rise in support for these candidates has been precipitated by the massive disillusionment in the Democratic Party, which supported the genocide in Palestine, brutally suppressed the solidarity movement in the US and ushered in ever-worsening attacks on the working class’s living standards. These self-styled democratic socialists are tapping into the discontent of voters across the country, campaigning for affordable housing, low-cost transportation, recognition of the statehood of Palestine, and an arms embargo on Israel. This has won them 35 victories so far in Democratic primary elections across the country.
This has also caused a major rift in the Democratic Party. Some in the Party such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, keep the DSA at an arm’s length, benefiting from the popularity as a faux-progressive candidate but careful not to give any firm endorsement of its strategy or politics. Whereas others, such as New Jersey Representative Josh Gottheimer, are vehemently opposed to what they regard as an infiltration of the party, stating, ‘there’s no room for anti-American bomb-throwers who oppose our ideas, values, and leaders’. One thing is certain, no matter who wins its seats, the Democratic Party will not cease to be an imperialist ruling class party and will never be a vehicle of progress, much less for socialism, in the US.
Socialism vs sellouts
The idea that socialism can be voted in via a bourgeois democracy and achieve the liberation of the working class while leaving the imperialist state intact is a dangerous illusion that has long been used to dupe the working class. The US imperialist crisis is clearly pushing more and more people to the conclusion that socialism is the answer, but this growing receptiveness to socialism in the abstract will not spontaneously develop into a conscious, working-class movement that can conquer state power. Rather, the electoral system serves as a safe outlet for a growing frustration among certain sections of the US working class, with the aim of sanitising socialism and emptying it of revolutionary content.
We see this clearly in the midst of the most aggressive wave of political repression in the US in this century. The opposition to this is not coming from the ‘blue wave’ social democrats; rather, they try to ideologically distance themselves from any existing, militant working class or anti-imperialist struggle. They call for peaceful protests against murderous ICE agents while staying silent about violent state repression. They renege on the marginally progressive promises of their election platforms, as we have seen with Mamdani. On 23 June he admitted that, despite his vow to uphold the ICJ arrest warrant for the genocidal Zionist President Benjamin Netanyahu should he enter New York, Mamdani’s hands were tied and he had no power to carry out the arrest. All the while, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores sit in solitary confinement, illegally imprisoned mere blocks away from Mamdani’s office in New York City. Without hesitation, they disparage such socialist governments and leaders, including those in Cuba, as ‘dictators’ and try to qualify their idealistic version of socialism as something completely different from previous, existing socialist struggles. These candidates only represent imperialism with a progressive packaging.
Socialism can only be achieved through the working class seizing state power through an organised, conscious revolutionary struggle. And in the US, the richest, most powerful imperialist country in the world, this struggle must be focused on ending imperialism. As repression grows and working-class resistance emerges, it is the task of socialists to intervene on these fundamental questions and lead the movement away from the stifling grip of social democracy. Crucial to this will be clear opposition to political repression, organised resistance to state violence of ICE, and international solidarity with Cuba and Palestine.
REAGAN GRAY
