Dakota Castro-Jarrett is a member of Socialist Alternative US
It’s been five years since the largest protest movement in US history—the George Floyd uprising. Sparked by the horrific murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, millions of workers and youth marched out onto their streets demanding an end to racist policing and systemic racism. High schoolers organized walkouts, doctors organized teach-ins, and bus drivers refused to transport detained protestors to jail. At the height of the struggle, opinion polls showed higher support for the burning of a Minneapolis police station than Donald Trump—just a glimpse of the impact a mass movement can have.
The demands of the movement went beyond calling for accountability for unjust brutality by the police. It expanded to a wider fight against systemic racism through demands like defunding the police and redistributing that wealth to programs that would elevate some of the damage of racist policies, like redlining, on Black communities.
Now, five years later, Trump is back in office, and once again, brutal state forces like ICE are ripping apart marginalized communities around the country. In response, millions have risen up against ICE and Trump’s many other right-wing policies. Just in June, the US had its single largest protest day in its history.
The ruling class did everything it could to defeat the George Floyd uprising. They used the “carrot”, in the form of Democratic Party politicians making big promises, and then used “the stick”, in the form of violent repression of the protests. As the resistance to Trump’s unpopular, billionaire-backed, bigoted policies grows, these are three of the most critical lessons we think the anti-Trump movement needs to learn from the George Floyd uprising.
We Need Demands & Mass Democratic Involvement
The George Floyd uprising represented a new, exciting height of struggle, especially for younger working people who hadn’t experienced any mass movement of this scale, like those of the ’60s and ’70s. Those movements were able to accomplish what they did in part because they built independent organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that brought workers into the struggle not just as numbers but as active members who participated in debate and discussion on the next steps of the movement they were engaged with. Despite the size of the movement, very few concrete victories were won out of the George Floyd uprising. The few victories that were won came through building democratically organized campaigns with concrete demands, though this was on a much smaller scale than ultimately necessary.
The need for democratically-organized, independent organizations is clear today when the Democrats have continued to shift further right and failed to fight against Trump. Workers need to build up organizations that they actually have a say in—ones that operate by and for working people, not from the funds of billionaires like Bezos or Musk.
Building organizations like these requires the development of sharp, concrete demands that can draw in broad, dynamic layers of the working class who want to fight. For example, during the George Floyd uprising, Socialist Alternative helped build a campaign to tax Amazon in Seattle. Tax Amazon directly connected the gentrification of the city by corporations like Amazon, the disenfranchisement of Black communities, and an alleviation of some of their issues through taxing megacorporations.
Socialist Alternative in Pittsburgh also set an example of what this could look like with our “Stop the Station” (STS) campaign, launched with other community organizers, to halt the construction of a police station in a predominantly Back, working-class neighborhood. STS organized rallies but also, critically, teach-ins and democratic assemblies for working people to get organized to concretely fight racism.
In many places, nonprofits filled the vacuum of organization in the movement, but unfortunately, rarely developed accountability to the movement. For example, the BLM Global Network Foundation faced much controversy for getting millions in donations by capitalizing on name recognition and then using it to buy a $6 million house in Southern California and pay directors extravagant salaries—one of whom stole $10 million. Their strategy for the movement was to push people towards supporting the Biden 2020 campaign instead of building independent working-class organizations.
The seriousness of Trump’s attacks means we can’t afford to get pushed back into billionaire-backed organizations; we must build our own independent organizations right now that can allow workers to take control of our struggles. Today in the anti-Trump movement, organizations like 50501 have organized massive days of action like the June 14 No Kings protests across the country. Mass public meetings, elected leadership, and demands shaped by workers involved in these struggles are essential in building mass organizations that can engage large layers of the working class and push the struggle forward.
The Working Class Can Shut It Down
Despite the enormous step forward the George Floyd uprising represented in the fight against racism, it lacked the decisive presence of the organized labor movement and the widespread use of working-class methods like strikes. The most powerful force in workers’ movements comes from the power the working class has over the economy because our labor is what allows the capitalist class to profit. Weaponizing the power of labor through strike action hits the capitalists where it hurts: in their pockets.
Some important workplace actions did take place and set an example for the rest of the labor movement. For example, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005, representing bus drivers in Minneapolis, refused to follow police demands to transport protesters to jail using their buses. One day later, New York City bus drivers in TWU Local 100 followed suit. On Juneteenth, ILWU dockworkers shut down all 29 West Coast ports in a one-day political strike demanding an end to police terror. These forward-thinking workers recognized what many labor leaders did not: systemic racism is a threat to workers everywhere and fighting back is necessary.
If these actions had been taken up in an organized and widespread way across the labor movement, the threat to the capitalist economy could have been sufficient to extract deeper concessions from the state. It would have been a qualitative step forward for the labor movement.
The current anti-Trump movement needs to harness more of this type of working-class power to push back Trump’s right-wing agenda.
Many unions have spoken out against Trump, but they must go further than words. Real labor leadership means understanding that Trump’s agenda—the deportations, the bathroom bans, the nationalism, the healthcare cuts—is an attack on the working class as a whole and an existential threat to the labor movement. Socialist Alternative launched a petition called Union Members Against ICE which calls on the labor movement to fight against ICE’s disturbing escalation of deportations, including by taking coordinated strike action to shut down Trump.
We Need to Ditch the Dems—Build a New Party of Struggle
During the George Floyd uprising, “resistance” from the Democrats looked like painting Black Lives Matter on the streets and kneeling in the Senate wearing kente cloth. Meanwhile, Democratic mayors and governors across the country, like Tim Walz, called on police forces and the National Guard to brutalize protesters. Small reforms like DEI programs were put forward while ignoring the demands from the movement calling for more serious changes to address the systemic racism Black workers experience.
Since the end of the George Floyd uprising, Democrats have completely backed down on promises they made during the struggle. In many cities, police budgets have gone up, and cases of police brutality have continued to increase. Demands like defunding the police were deemed too radical by the Democratic establishment and were blamed for Democratic electoral losses.
Instead, the Democratic establishment has supported “tough-on-crime” pro-police politicians like Eric Adams and Cherelle Parker. In reaction to right-wing backlash against the BLM movement, Democratic politicians rolled over while Trump stripped away their bare minimum concessions like DEI. In today’s struggle against ICE and Trump’s right-wing attacks, the Democrats, as before, pretend to support political struggle while actively working against it. Gavin Newsom condemned Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard for brutalizing anti-ICE protesters in California while doubling down on his allegiance to ICE in the same breath.
What we need now is a movement leadership that provides more than empty words and does not funnel mass outrage into the dead-end Democratic Party—a party that serves as the graveyard of social struggles. We need a new working-class party of struggle that doesn’t just run in elections. We also need a party that can tie together these struggles, serve as an organizing hub for protest movements, and be a genuine political home for unions and the labor movement.
Fight Racism, Fight Trump, Fight Capitalism!
While there is no doubt that Trump and the right-wing believe much of the racist, sexist, and transphobic rhetoric that they spout, their attacks on oppressed people are connected to the crisis-ridden capitalist system that they are tasked to manage. Trump and his allies have seen the increased willingness of everyday workers to struggle against oppression and exploitation. They’ll do everything in their power to preclude any struggle that stands in the way of their anti-worker measures. To do that, they look to the oldest trick in the book: divide-and-rule. It’s hard for workers to build a united mass movement if layers of them are convinced that their biggest worry is not the cost-of-living crisis, but rather fictionalized ideas of predatory queer people and violent immigrants.
Divide-and-rule must be fought through workers’ solidarity. An attack on one is an attack on all of us, and if more workers are scared to struggle due to intensified oppression, then the entire movement is weakened. Movements need to be bold about rejecting these divide-and-rule tactics.
Ultimately, we can’t live in this unending cat-and-mouse game where workers make some progress and then have it all brutally taken back by the capitalist system. Capitalism relies on racism and ending racism requires overthrowing capitalism. So long as a handful of billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, they must keep people divided. We need a socialist alternative. We need a system that serves our interests, one where we have control over how society functions and where profit is not the priority over well-being. That system is socialism.
