By A.A. Ware

The new year on the Gregorian calendar has just begun, and many can feel a building crescendo of new, old and further abuses from the ruling class. Some on the left are approaching 2025 with trepidation due to Project 2025, a manifesto by the Heritage Foundation for the returning Trump administration. Project 2025 is a racist, misogynistic, transphobic and anti-worker agenda that promises mass arrests of immigrant and transgender workers. With intentions of intensifying legal harassment and repression against the entire left, it also promises to increase the militancy of the ruling classes.

It’s not president-elect Donald Trump alone, but rather the ruling class as represented by the entire U.S. political apparatus, which has brought us to this point of reaction to working-class expressions of power.

After the George Floyd uprising in 2020, the bourgeoisie was reminded of its own vulnerability in the face of millions of workers and oppressed people united. This reminder grew more intense as the new wave of powerful labor organizing, from Starbucks Workers United to the Amazon Labor Union, began to win battles against seemingly-untouchable giants of capitalism. 

The U.S. ruling class struck back in many ways. These included further attempts to divide the working class by doubling down on reactionary racist, transphobic and anti-immigrant talking points. Many industries, having already used pandemic quarantines as an excuse to unjustly cut jobs, pay and benefits, further doubled down on these vicious attempts to make workers redundant through the use of AI tools.

Imperialist wars intensify

The Biden administration not only assisted the ruling class in attacks on U.S. workers time and time again, as with the smashing of the rail workers’ strike in 2022, but also supported — and continues to support — the ongoing imperialist genocide in Gaza by shipping exorbitant amounts of arms and material supplies to Israel. 

Again we see the pendulum swing over a wider and wider gap between the capitalist class and the working class, as the last year brought millions upon millions of people across the globe to speak out against the genocide and against every single imperialist government that enables it.

So once again, the ruling classes are scared. Once again, they strike back with further repression. With further laws against protests. With further commands for workers to shut up, know their place, sit down and let thousands of innocents be slaughtered just to deepen the pockets of defense contractors.

What this widening gap tells us is clear. The bourgeoisie is growing more reactionary and dangerous, because it is reacting to our movements. We are making real progress in organizing the working class, and the owning classes want to do everything they can to stop this. We are making real progress in standing up to exploitation and oppression. We are making real progress in waking up, after decades asleep, as a class to our position, to where we have been and where we are going.

And where are we going?

It is up to us. What 2025 means to our class is up to all of us, to every corner of the movement, every workers’ party, every labor union, every organization for the rights of oppressed peoples’ self-determination. Things look so dire because we have made the biggest strides in decades and are facing the biggest pushback in as long. 

When we unite to fight, we win!

The nature of the contradiction that is class society is that our enemy class will counterattack with all its might. Contradiction is inherent in capitalist society. The bourgeoisie owns the levers of power, but the workers are the power.  Nothing in society functions without us. We have the real power in our hands, but we only have it as a class. We only have it together.

Nobody is going to do the work of organizing for us. Nobody is going to save us. We shouldn’t depend on adventurous individuals like Luigi Mangione to save the day. Random individual acts of violence will not change the class character of our society, but will rather provoke a further reaction of repression from the ruling classes without any structural benefit whatsoever. 

The same is true of unguided, unprincipled political action. Without an understanding of political theory of where our movement comes from, we are blindly fumbling in the dark. Again, we will get the reaction of repression without any benefit.

Solidarity is critical

What we need right now, most of all, is solidarity. That’s what our movements are built on, and it’s what we must rely on. Solidarity is what brings the workers of the world together. Solidarity is what brings the oppressed people of the world together. Solidarity is what brings the levers of power and ownership to a halt. 

Determined, disciplined, dedicated solidarity amongst the entirety of our class is the only thing that can build our movement, organize our future and allow us to save ourselves.

If we stand together and collectively wield the power that the ruling classes know we have — what they fear, which we are only just waking up to realize ourselves that we have.  This year can be another tremendous advance in our class struggles. We can defend the most vulnerable among us from the most reactionary attacks.

We can fight for and win workers’ rights to live. We can destroy the violent apparatus responsible for the endless killing in Gaza. We can go one step further in our long march to destroy this unjust class system once and for all. But we can only do it together, with intention.

What type of year will 2025 be? The working class will determine that, one way or another.