Unión del Barrio Analysis On Trumpista Fascism &
The Struggle For Raza Liberation
The purpose of this four part analysis is to offer a summary of what Unión del Barrio has learned about liberation struggle within the political borders of the United States. We feel it is essential to critically analyze our struggle over time in order to better inform our members and our communities about what needs to be done now in the context of 2017, at the beginning of the Trump administration, and what we should expect going forward. Of course, before we can prepare ourselves for what is coming, we must first be very clear about how we got here. This analysis represents the culmination of ongoing internal discussion within UdB that began in November of 2016, intended to offer clarity on what must be done to resist what we have identified as trumpista fascism. We hope our collective analytical contribution, which is divided into four parts, will help bring about some of this urgently needed political clarity:
– PART ONE: We Owe Nothing To The Democratic Party: Let The Dead Donkey Die
– PART TWO: Republicans Hate Everyone & Everything: Beware The Walking Dead Elephant
– PART THREE: Our Struggles Transcend The Two Party System
– PART FOUR: Touch One, Touch All
Our Struggles Transcend The Two Party System
Part Three of Four
The Republican Party is the organization of trumpista fascism and it is our primary enemy. The Democratic Party is not at this time, nor has it ever been, a progressive organization, and it does not represent any form of “political left.” There are, of course, some marginalized progressive/ leftist Democrats, and there may indeed be some progressive positions supported by Democrats now and in the past. Nonetheless, as an institutional political organization, the Democratic Party has, over time, proven consistently to be a reactionary, culturally elitist, politically unprincipled/opportunistic, economically classist, warmongering association.
We are in a position now to argue that building, expanding, and consolidating Unión del Barrio is the most urgent path to resisting trumpista fascism. Our communities already deal with terrible conditions on a daily basis:
- Our labor is exploited;
- Public schools deny us a quality, relevant education;
- We live under a permanent housing crisis and suffer ethnic cleansing of our neighborhoods by gentrification;
- Hundreds of thousands of our young people are in prison;
- The terrifying acceleration of environmental degradation;
- Tens of thousands of our young people are sent to the front lines of the perpetual global wars of this country;
- Nearly all of our human and civil rights are being stripped away;
- We live under constant government and corporate mass surveillance;
- Ongoing extrajudicial killings (police/ migra);
- Thousands die attempting to find a better life north of the border, while every month thousands more are detained and deported.
Within the U.S. this has been our daily bread. El pan de cada día. And this all unfolded domestically under a Democratic presidency.
The November 8, 2016 election of Donald J. Trump points to a rapid intensification of our misfortunes. The Republican Trump regime in the United States is rabidly anti-Mexican, while its ally, the rancid and murderous narco-government in México, offers nothing more than increased economic crisis, repression, and death. Latino Democrats are confused and demoralized, and have historically proven incapable of providing the leadership or political clarity our communities desperately need – all the more so now in the era of Trump.
This is why, even before the 2015-2016 presidential campaigns, Unión del Barrio has worked tirelessly to expose both the Democratic and Republican Parties as two heads of the same beast. This is why we had the political clarity to reject both the Clinton and Trump candidacies in 2016. This is why at Unión del Barrio rallies you did not hear “I’m with her” but instead “I’m with Berta Cáceres.”
Furthermore, this is how we knew better than to support the Democrat Bernie Sanders. The Sanders campaign had many of the elements of a national progressive movement, minus one essential factor – independence from the logics and political structure of the Democratic Party. For us, alignment with the Democratic Party was a non-starter. If Unión del Barrio has come to understand anything, it is that the only real source of power we have to resist the new trumpista threat is through a coordinated regional and national campaign of local-level struggles, rooted outside electoral politics and the “two-party system,” guided by revolutionary theory, and enacted by revolutionary organizational structures (democratic centralism). At this juncture, nothing matters more than ideological clarity, revolutionary/class consciousness, and organized/disciplined resistance.
Unión del Barrio must collectively resist trumpista fascism, not as sad, dehumanized, objects of a white supremacist Trump presidency, but we must see ourselves as an organized economic, social, cultural, and political force that unites the best qualities of our communities. As we fight trumpista fascism as our primary external enemy, we must simultaneously challenge our internal enemies such as our culturally and religiously rooted misogynistic impulses, homo & trans phobias, and narco-mania. Unión del Barrio members must collectively self-identify first and foremost as descendants of indigenous people, heirs of an indigenous struggle against colonial domination; as defenders of Nuestra América in an anti-imperialist struggle for continental self-determination; and as revolutionary working class militants engaged in a global struggle for socialism. These must be the ideals of every member of Unión del Barrio.
Our daily political work must take shape and be understood within our communities as a force to resist oppression in all its forms, and only then can we, as an organization, achieve principled unity with the struggles of other oppressed communities in Aztlan/ México Ocupado, regardless of citizenship, national origin, or individual identity. Because these basic ideological principles are grounded both in revolutionary theory and historically rooted in the land itself, they do not suffer the current collapse of the Democratic Party, nor do they waver in the face of the current trumpista threat.