The killing of Charlie Kirk represents a dangerous moment in U.S. history.
The Trump administration and right-wing organizations are going all out to capitalize on Kirk’s assassination to attack working-class movements and the left. Already, we are seeing firings and political targeting of individuals just for voicing their views, including over a dozen teachers and professors who have been suspended or fired. The Trump administration is also gearing up to use Kirk’s killing as a pretext to double down on attacks against trans people.
Working people urgently need to fight back.
We also must unambiguously reject the methods of terror on display in the killing of Kirk. Such methods are a dead end for working-class movements.
Throughout history, the way working people have won change has been through powerful mass movements against the capitalist class and their representatives, mass strike action to shut down the profit machine of the bosses, fighting to take the major corporations into democratic public ownership, and through building our own political parties that will fight for our needs.
The most fundamental change comes through revolution. Karl Marx was right. A revolution is an act of the millions, not of frustrated individuals or small groups. It is the product of mass struggles, organized around concrete demands and a fighting strategy, that can successfully take the reins of society away from the billionaires and into the hands of the working class, to create a society that is democratically run in the common interest. Capitalism is a system that cannot be reformed. Neither the billionaires and multimillionaires who currently own the vast resources and wealth, nor their political spokespeople such as the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States, will ever willingly agree to transforming society in the way that’s urgently needed. Only a socialist world, built on international working-class solidarity, where the economy is under democratic workers’ control and planned rationally and sustainably, can ensure a real future for humanity. To win such a world, the violent, bankrupt system of capitalism must be eliminated.
My organization, Revolutionary Workers, and I reject the methods of terror used against Kirk, because OUR methods are mass movements and revolution.
We also completely reject and condemn the waves of hypocrisy coming from the halls of power.
Both Republican and Democratic politicians, including my opponent Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, have loudly spoken against “political violence” in response to Kirk’s killing, yet they are themselves fully complicit in mass political violence, state terrorism, and the holocaust being carried out in Gaza.
Democrats and Republicans, including Adam Smith, have repeatedly voted for tens of billions in military aid for the genocide in Gaza, to block United Nations food aid for Palestinians, for the ongoing brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, for war after bloody war on multiple continents, and for savage attacks on the living standards of American working people. The Gaza genocide has, by some scientific estimates including by the medical journal The Lancet, already taken well over half a million Palestinian lives. Both Democrats and Republicans are still unconditionally backing this genocide, even in the face of decisive evidence of the mass starvation taking place and the Israeli state’s openly proclaimed ethnic cleansing objective.
Now, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, these same genocidal politicians would have us think that they believe every life is precious. Some Democratic politicians say we must “honor” Charlie Kirk’s legacy. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom tells us “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.” Working people must completely reject this shameful attempt to whitewash Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Kirk, and the right-wing movement he helped lead, have caused immense human damage. Far from honoring Kirk’s work, we need to build powerful working-class movements against the attempts to use Kirk’s death to escalate those horrors.
Kirk was a longtime supporter of the brutal occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli apartheid and state terrorism, and the genocide in Gaza. He was a leader in the anti-trans assault, a misogynist and antagonist toward women’s rights, and a cheerleader for mass deportations and other vicious attacks on the working class. He was a dedicated fighter for Donald Trump and his trillion-dollar assault on Medicaid and Medicare, which will claim many thousands of lives.
Calling for the continuation of Kirk’s work only reveals once again that Newsom and the Democratic Party have infinitely more in common with the Kirks of the world than they do with working-class and oppressed people.
When was the last time Democratic politicians showed any such concern for the Palestinian people, whose killings they continue to back and whose blood they have on their hands? Where is the honoring of the many millions of ordinary working and poor people killed by U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and countless other countries, with the full support of both warmongering parties?
When leaders like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, and Martin Luther King Jr. were brutally murdered, capitalist politicians didn’t mourn. Some of them celebrated. Some of these killings are known to have been carried out by capitalist states.
Even more egregious than Newsom’s statements was the recent vote by Congressional Democrats for the so-called Charlie Kirk remembrance day resolution. The resolution praises Kirk as a “champion of free speech” and lauds him for supposedly “promoting principles of liberty and democracy across the United States”. Every single Democratic Senator, and 95 House Democrats including Adam Smith, voted in favor of this resolution.
At the same time, this same Democratic Party is also trying to pose as standard bearer for free speech, putting forward a free speech bill that is mostly devoid of any substantive provisions in defense of free speech and also a purely performative gesture in a Republican-controlled Congress. The first 15 of the nearly 24 months of the Gaza genocide happened under Democratic President Biden and the leadership of Congressional Democrats. Any “free speech” bill from the Democratic Party is especially hypocritical in the wake of the ferocious attacks on peaceful antiwar activists last year. In April of last year, Adam Smith called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists”and demanded they be arrested. Both Biden and the Congressional Democrats, and Democratic administrations in cities and states including Newsom, oversaw the worst police crackdown on protest movements in the half century since the Vietnam War era. By the summer of last year, over 3,500 antiwar protesters had been arrested.
Some on the left underestimate the dangers of a crackdown on our movements in the wake of Kirk’s killing because they say we’re already facing one and it can’t get worse. This is woefully mistaken. The current level of repression, as horrific as it is, is far from the level of the Red Scare of the 1920s, in which countless socialists and labor organizers were murdered, or the assassinations of Black Panthers and Civil Rights leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, or the many horrific examples internationally like the mass killings in Chile following the U.S.-led coup.
But while recognizing the real danger, the solution is not to go on the defensive any more than it is to “honor” the legacy of Charlie Kirk. We need to do the opposite: go on the offensive to build militant mass movements to politically fight for the interests of working people and the oppressed. To fight for an end to the genocide in Gaza and all U.S. military aid to Israel. To fight for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich. And for an end to the deportations and to shut down ICE and the detention centers. To be successful, working people need to get far better organized.
We need to become the real left POLITICAL threat that Trump and the right wing say we are.
To do so we need to build broad working-class unity — unity across race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. Unity which includes working people who agree with what we are fighting for, regardless of whether they have previously voted Republican, Democratic or independent, or whether they are native-born or immigrant. We need to build this unity by fighting for our common interests as working people AGAINST the billionaires and their bankrupt system of capitalism, which is based on theft, brutal violence, and the exploitation of all of us.
To defeat the right wing and the billionaires, and to achieve anything at all, working people and unions need to sever all ties with both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Trump and the Republicans are deeply anti-worker and anti-poor, and so is the Democratic Party. Wars and attacks on working people have always been a bipartisan project. The rank and file of the labor movement need to organize for a different course than the labor leadership, who have long been tied at the hip to the anti-worker Democratic Party and are now shamefully making overtures to Trump and the Republicans as well. Teamster President Sean O’Brien in particular has been cozying up to Trump. Teamster leaders in Ohio recently endorsed right-wing political figure Vivek Ramaswamy. United Auto Workers President Sean Fain declared himself ready to work with Trump on his disastrous tariffs project, after having uncritically cheered Kamala Harris in last year’s election. All of this stands in stark contrast to mass consciousness, with the majority of American working people disgusted at both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Working people cannot afford false ideas of unity with either of these anti-worker, warmongering parties. Most importantly, it’s illusions in the possibility of reforming the Democratic Party that are holding back the growth of left movements and have enabled the right wing to grow and become increasingly dangerous. Working people need to build independent movements and independent campaigns and prepare the ground for a new party. There is mass support for almost every demand we are fighting for, and both the Democratic Party or Republican Party are irreconcilably opposed to all of them. Working people are desperate for an independent fight. I urge working people to join Workers Strike Back to help build a movement against both parties of genocide and capitalism.