Protests Against Deportations in Los Angeles : A Warning About the Future the Bourgeoisie Is Preparing for the Entire Working Class

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A Warning About the Future, the Bourgeoisie Is Preparing for the Entire Working Class

For several days now, massive protests have been taking place in the American city of Los Angeles – often violent and accompanied by fierce clashes with the police – against the raids and deportations carried out by the U.S. government through ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), an agency normally responsible for implementing immigration policy and partly for border control. According to press reports, the demonstrations have in the past two or three days also spread to other cities, such as San Diego (also in California) and Seattle (in the state of Washington, in the north of the country). In Los Angeles, the protests have reportedly escalated after the White House deployed the National Guard and the Marine Corps with authorization to intervene against the demonstrators and even assist ICE in anti-immigration raids.

Although the press focuses exclusively on the most spectacular aspects of the protests and tries to make them even more sensational with photos and videos of burning police cars or hooded demonstrators, the reality is that these protests are not taking place only in the streets and in the form of demonstrations. CNN itself reported strikes and picket lines at several factories in Los Angeles, where ICE agents attempted to arrest undocumented workers inside the facilities – but these workers joined forces with their fellow workers in a show of solidarity and even blocked the trucks that were supposed to transport them to detention centers (1).

The measures adopted by the U.S. government – mass deportations, internment in detention centers, repression against immigrants attempting to cross the border, the separation of children from those arriving with their families, etc. – are instruments of pressure that the American bourgeoisie has been using for years against the immigrant working class. The European press, which defends the interests of the local ruling classes now in conflict with an aggressive America defending its national interests against its European “partners,” seeks to place responsibility for this situation on the administration of Donald Trump. However, the truth is that repressive policies and attacks against undocumented immigrants began long before Trump’s first term: it was Obama who – amid an escalation of anti-proletarian measures aimed at pulling American capital out of the 2008–2013 crisis – turned his attention to immigrants, both those living illegally in the country and those trying to enter without a visa. It was his administration that strengthened border detention centers, granted the Border Patrol unprecedented repressive powers, and so on. Trump merely continued this policy, made it more visible, and reinforced it in accordance with the particular style of governance demanded by the bourgeoisie – a policy that the American bourgeoisie considers essential for maintaining social control in the country.

Of course, the issue of immigration cannot generally be understood solely as a matter of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, especially in a country like the United States, where most of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie themselves come from immigrant backgrounds (albeit under different circumstances), and only a few generations back. There is, of course, also an immigrant petty bourgeoisie living illegally, involved in more or less illicit activities, and likewise targeted by anti-immigration policies – not least because local ICE units are incentivized to meet a minimum daily quota of arrests. But that is not the essential point: it is clear that repression, arrests, deportations, etc., are aimed at intimidating the masses of immigrants who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages – labor power that, through its extreme exploitation, sustains both the informal and formal economies (a hypocritical distinction which the bourgeoisie maintains solely for propaganda purposes). Immigration is, fundamentally, the importation of labor power by the host country.

Precisely because the labor market in the country of origin is not large enough to absorb a portion of its proletarian population – which thus becomes “surplus” – this labor force, once in the destination country, is forced to work for a lower price (wage) than what is paid on the legal and official labor market. The import of labor thus corresponds to the needs of the productive system of the host country, and its classification into “legal” and “illegal” labor serves the bourgeoisie to divide the proletariat – into native workers and accepted, legalized immigrants – and to sharpen competition among immigrant proletarians themselves: between those granted access to the official labor market under existing laws, and those who are exploited even more severely, though covertly, through undeclared and precarious work. In this way, competition among proletarians intensifies more and more, allowing small and medium employers as well as large capitalists to systematically increase the pressure on the entire labor force – including that which is legal and formally recognized.

In capitalism, no social phenomenon is balanced or peaceful – wherever the law of value and the appropriation of surplus value prevail, various social distortions arise, all based on the exploitation of wage labor, whether legal or illegal. The American bourgeoisie, whose police forces are little more than an expanded version of the Irish gangs of the early twentieth century, is well aware of this and relies on these intermediate social strata to keep the immigrant proletariat under control – for both the bourgeoisie and these strata live off its super-exploitation. The American bourgeoisie needs illegal immigration because it needs the cheap labor force that this immigration provides. It certainly has no interest in being left without workers, but at the same time it must maintain control over them. In a period of social crisis such as the one currently affecting North America – caused by a fragile international situation and internal conditions that have further deteriorated since 2008 – the attacks on the immigrant proletariat serve a dual function: on the one hand, they intimidate, discipline, and isolate proletarians who live in constant fear of deportation, separation from their families, or even the legal abduction of their underage children; on the other hand, they provide society as a whole – especially the middle classes, but also the so-called labor aristocracy, i.e. the better-off layers among whom nationalist rhetoric resonates – with a scapegoat for social misery, a sort of common enemy onto whom hatred can be redirected, hatred that should instead be aimed at the ruling class.

The bourgeoisie – the class that promised individual freedom above all else, and that (in its revolutionary era) proclaimed it would oppose all forms of oppression in the name of equality and universal brotherhood – has survived for centuries by fueling racial and national hatred and through racist repression. While in periods of economic expansion it imports labor without restraint, it is unable to offer any legal protection in return for the daily exploitation of that labor. In times of economic recession, however, it turns its entire political and police arsenal against undocumented workers – targeting them selectively to spread fear and submission among their ranks, while at the same time attempting to forge a national front against them. This is also the case in the United States, where the government is fully aware that both the agricultural and industrial sectors of the country depend on proletarians subjected to extreme exploitation – namely undocumented workers – in order to remain competitive, and yet it launches “anti-immigration” campaigns, creating fertile ground for imposing even harsher working and social conditions on this group of workers.

The main goal of this policy of mass deportations – which we see today in the United States, but which will strike Europe again tomorrow with the same brutality – is to convince “legal” proletarians, those who did not have to climb over walls or risk their lives on a boat just to become exploited, that exceptional laws, repression, and extreme exploitation are things that only affect immigrants. Today, the immigrant proletariat is experiencing the future fate of the entire working class. The bourgeoisie, in order to exist as a class, has always depended on the exploitation of labor power. For the capitalist system of wage-labor exploitation to function and endure, it depends – and has always depended – on workers being pitted against one another, entering into increasingly fierce competition among themselves, accepting ever-lower wages and worsening working conditions, instead of uniting and confronting the bourgeoisie itself. In times of crisis, when wage-labor exploitation must be especially intense, the bourgeoisie seeks to impose these conditions first on the most vulnerable layers of the working class – but its ultimate goal is to impose them on all proletarians. By degrading the living and working conditions of the most exploited, while at the same time suppressing any immediate reaction from those workers who still enjoy better treatment, the bourgeoisie prepares all the social and legal mechanisms through which it will extend to the rest of the proletariat a future of even worse conditions than those of today – made possible precisely by competition among workers.

In the not-so-distant future, the great capitalist nations will once again be engulfed in the fires of war. Then the proletarian class – whether native or immigrant – will have to face, in all its rawness, the reality of a world in which its fate is to be canon fodder: bestially exploited in times of peace, and mass-murdered in times of war. The bourgeoisie will then demand unimaginable sacrifices – and to enforce them, it will make use of this competition, this rivalry among proletarians, this ingrained habit of those workers in better social positions to collaborate with the bourgeoisie.

To prevent this, the proletarian class has only one path: class struggle – the uncompromising defense of its own interests, against every form of “national unity,” against any united front with its own bourgeoisie in the name of shared origin, ethnicity, or religion…

This class struggle means a break with the politics of collaboration with the ruling classes, a break with solidarity with their nationalist policies based on the repression of the most vulnerable layers of the proletariat. Undoubtedly the events in Los Angeles will not, by themselves, put an end to decades of acceptance of cross-class collaboration, but they show that the only real alternative for the proletariat of all countries is to enter the struggle in defense of exclusively proletarian interests – and to break radically with the habit of begging the petty or grand bourgeoisie for starvation wages.

(1) https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2025/06/12/eeuu/video/ice-redadas-coches-sector-carnico-ush-trax

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