Eric London is a writer for the WSWS and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. He is the author of numerous essays on the Security and the Fourth International investigation by the ICFI into the assassination of Leon Trotsky, including the book, Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement.
This report was delivered to a meeting of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at Wayne State University in Detroit on March 6, 2025.
The Fourteenth Amendment was the product of a democratic revolutionary change that sought to put the Constitution on a genuine egalitarian footing.
Late Wednesday, the Trump administration announced an executive order aimed at transforming American universities into a surveillance and enforcement arm of the military-intelligence-immigration enforcement apparatus.
The first wave of immigration-related executive orders issued by Donald Trump have now been published. With a few scribbles on paper and no involvement from Congress, Trump has undertaken a substantial transformation of the legal landscape in the United States, eviscerated the basic rights of a significant portion of the population and upended the lives of millions of people.
The president lacks the power to issue executive orders that contravene constitutional provisions like the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, but that did not stop Trump.
Abolishing birthright citizenship would mark a qualitative new step in a legal counterrevolution and would fundamentally undermine a democratic principle conquered in the American Revolution and Civil War.
In a series of recent interviews, Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan has brought the incoming administration’s nightmarish mass deportation plans into focus. Despite the muted response among the Democratic Party and its allies in the corporate media, Homan’s statements make clear that the administration is planning a social crime of historic proportions.
On Monday, federal judge David Lawson of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ordered the UAW to produce records and documents the union had been withholding in an effort to block an investigation into ongoing corruption within the UAW bureaucracy presently led by UAW President Shawn Fain.
The proposal by Donald Trump to eliminate birthright citizenship by executive fiat on “day one” of his second administration would mean the formal repudiation of the bedrock democratic principle underlying the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments: that citizenship and the panoply of democratic rights attendant to it are available to all persons born in the United States, and that no branch of government can strip them away.
Donald Trump’s threat to force through his slate of far-right cabinet nominees as “recess appointments” without Senate confirmation votes marks a significant step in the de jure breakdown of constitutional forms of government.
While the votes are still being counted and no official results have been announced, it is all but certain that Donald Trump has won the US presidential election. This not so much a victory for Trump as it is a debacle for the Democratic Party.
Having fertilized the soil with the Big Lie, Trump, his network of lawyers and his allies in Congress and state legislatures are preparing to delay and block the certification of votes at the local, state and federal levels. The plan is based on violence.
Fearing that the potential power of the emerging movement will disrupt profits or undermine its ability to wage imperialist war abroad, the Democratic Party is incapable of making any genuine appeal to the “aspirations of working people” which Obama mentioned.
The campaign of political terror initiated by Donald Trump and the Republican Party against thousands of Haitian workers in Springfield, Ohio, marks a turning point in the crisis of the American political system.
The degraded spectacle of Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris held a mirror to a political system in extraordinary crisis. Between the mad ravings of the fascist Trump and the empty-headed platitudes of the warmonger Harris, the debate presented the vicious face of American capitalism.
Of all the stage acts in the Democratic Party’s 200-year-old playbill of political deception, perhaps the most hackneyed is the sleight of hand the party conducts at election time to paint its candidates as progressives, even as they move ever farther to the right.
Erik Larson’s new book The Demon of Unrest, published this year by Penguin Random House, contains critical lessons for the fight against Trump and the threat of dictatorship today.
We are publishing here the report to the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) given by Eric London. The congress was held from August 4 to August 9, 2024.
One need not idealize the American party conventions of decades past to acknowledge that this year’s Republican National Convention was an unprecedented spectacle of reaction and backwardness.
The UAW has refused to send the monitor documents that refer to open threats or acts of criminal violence, including “cut throat,” “slit throat,” “punch,” “smack,” “knock out,” and, ominously, “kill.”
