Statement by David North, national chairperson of the Socialist Equality Party (US), opposing the war and calling for an immediate end to the illegal attack on Iran. pic.twitter.com/IeFnx4Vfju
World Socialist Web Site, ‘Third National Congress of the SEP (Sri Lanka): Greetings from the French and German sections of the world Trotskyist movement’ (19 June 2022) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/20/bnmf-j20.html>
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: “The social and political outlook of those at the core of the protests—including anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Street—was fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the ‘99 percent’ slogan itself was an effort to obscure the deep social divide between the working class and the more privileged sections of the upper-middle class, for which these groups spoke.”
We publish here Part 3 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class
The Arab Spring — Historical Precursor and Political Object Lesson
The Arab Spring of 2010–2011 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) constitutes the decisive historical precursor to the successive waves of extra-parliamentary revolt examined here and its political lessons penetrate the entire subsequent history. It was not a single homogeneous movement but a global eruption of mass social unrest driven by the structural crisis of world capitalism—rising inequality, mass unemployment, and collapsing living standards—whose politics were shaped by the collision of profoundly antagonistic class forces: a radicalising working class and poor, large layers of youth and petty-bourgeois activists, sections of the middle class seeking political space and a greater share of the spoils, and competing fractions of the national ruling classes including military cliques and Islamist parties. What began as mass popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes rapidly became a battlefield where different class forces and bourgeois factions contended to shape outcomes in their own interests.
Demonstrators celebrate in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the announcement of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed Tamarod campaign each sought to channel mass anger into their respective bourgeois projects rather than into an independent working-class overthrow of the capitalist state. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) analysis of the Egyptian experience established, the so-called liberal and pseudo-left organisations played a decisive counterrevolutionary role, with Tamarod leaders standing at the side of coup commander General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as he announced the military takeover—an outcome those organisations had materially prepared.[1] The political demands advanced spontaneously in the streets—bread, jobs, dignity, an end to corruption, democratic rights—expressed genuine and profound social need, but social and democratic demands do not automatically constitute a socialist programme. Where organised revolutionary working-class leadership was absent, liberal, Islamist, and petty-bourgeois currents filled the vacuum, offering alternative programmes that in every instance preserved capitalist property relations and imperialist domination.
A central feature of the Arab Spring was its spontaneity: sudden mass mobilisations, general strikes, and occupations that burst through the limits of existing organisations and terrified ruling classes globally. This spontaneity was simultaneously a strength—demonstrating the capacity of the masses to act independently and with enormous force—and a structural limitation that proved fatal to the revolutionary potential of the uprisings. Without a revolutionary working-class party and without organs of working-class power—factory committees, rank-and-file unions, neighbourhood councils—spontaneous movements remain vulnerable to appropriation by better-organised bourgeois factions or to demobilisation through absorption, exhaustion and repression. As Nick Beams argued in his contemporaneous analysis of the Egyptian upheaval in February 2011, the army and bourgeois forces were able to reassert control precisely where the working class lacked a political and organisational leadership capable of transforming mass revolutionary energy into state power.[2] Egypt possessed, in the strike waves that brought down Mubarak, the objective social power to make a socialist revolution; what it lacked was the subjective instrument—the revolutionary party anchored in the masses and fighting for the perspective of international socialism—without which that power could not be directed to its necessary conclusion. The result, confirmed by a decade of subsequent experience, was a military dictatorship under el-Sisi more brutal than the one the revolution had overthrown.
The Arab Spring exerted a direct ideological and tactical influence on Occupy Wall Street (2011), while simultaneously exposing the political pitfalls that Occupy would reproduce in the specific conditions of the imperialist center. The vivid demonstration that mass occupations of public space and horizontal assemblies could galvanise broad popular sympathy gave Occupy its tactical model and its initial political confidence. But the Arab Spring also disclosed, for those with eyes to see, the precise vulnerability that “leaderless” spontaneous movements carry within themselves: without a socialist programme and independent working-class organisation, mass insurgency is systematically channelled back into bourgeois institutions or reformist dead-ends.
The WSWS identified this danger at the outset of Occupy’s emergence, documenting the efforts of ex-left figures and Democratic Party operatives to absorb the movement into the 2012 Obama electoral campaign—precisely the mechanism of bourgeois reabsorption that had disfigured the Arab Spring’s political outcomes in country after country.[3] The strategic question the Arab Spring posed, and which Occupy failed to resolve, was the same question that confronts the Gen-Z movements from 2022: whether mass protests aim at symbolic disruption and awareness-raising within the framework of bourgeois politics, or whether they are directed toward building independent working-class organisation—general strikes, rank-and-file committees, industrial coordination—capable of fighting the economic power of capital and posing the question of state power. From a revolutionary internationalist standpoint, only transforming spontaneous mass energy into a socialist political programme and durable proletarian (industrial) organisation—linking democratic struggles to the working class’s capacity to seize power—can convert the recurring insurgency of the oppressed into a force capable of overthrowing capitalist rule.
Common Roots: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement (Gilets Jaunes, 2018–2020), and the Gen-Z uprisings constitute three successive and qualitatively escalating waves of mass extra-parliamentary revolt. To treat them as unrelated or merely sequential phenomena is to miss the most important truth they disclose in common: all three are expressions of the same underlying and deepening contradiction of world capitalism—the contradiction between social production organized on an ever more integrated and global scale, and its subordination to private ownership and profit that concentrates wealth in ever fewer hands while condemning the vast majority to insecurity, impoverishment, and precarity.
Each wave erupted from a specific conjuncture of that general crisis. Occupy responded to the 2007–2009 financial crash and the naked reassertion of Wall Street power through the Obama administration’s bank bailout program, which transferred trillions in public funds to the architects of financial ruin while working-class families lost their homes, their jobs, and their savings. The WSWS observed at the time that the Occupy movement expressed “the class struggle reemerging as the basic historical force,” and that it “foreshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.”[4]
The Yellow Vests erupted in November 2018 when Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax—a levy deliberately designed to shift the costs of the energy transition (away from fossil fuels) from corporations onto workers and the provincial poor—rendered unmistakable the class character of the “En Marche” (the centrist, liberal party of Macron) project presented to the electorate as post-ideological (that the era of class politics and ideological conflict was over) technocratic modernization.
The Gen-Z wave erupted when the accumulated wreckage of forty years of neoliberal restructuring, the devastation of COVID-19, the economic warfare of the US-NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine, the IMF’s debt-peonage regime across the backward countries, and the accelerating climate crisis made survival itself a political question for tens of millions of young people across multiple continents simultaneously.
Their common political character follows directly from these shared material roots. All three registered a profound mass rupture with parliamentary politics, with the established parties of both nominal “left” and right perceived as equally complicit in exploitation, and with the trade union bureaucracies and institutional mediators that had long managed and dampened class struggle. The “We are the 99 percent” of Occupy, the Yellow Vests’ visceral contempt for the “Parisian elites” in their media chambers, the Gen-Z movements’ blanket dismissal of all established political formations as corrupt beyond reform—these slogans express not political immaturity but a genuine and deepening crisis of bourgeois political legitimacy that no cosmetic reform or change of government personnel can address.
Politics: Anti-Establishmentism, “No Politics,” and the Populist Trap
Despite their common anti-establishment character, the three waves exhibit significant differences in political composition that must be analyzed with precision rather than collapsed into an undifferentiated “new social movements” category.
Occupy Wall Street: The Middle-Class Rehearsal
Occupy was dominated from its inception by a predominantly middle-class social milieu concentrated in metropolitan centers—New York’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Boston, and their counterparts in London and other imperialist cities. The Occupy movement explicitly drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, with organizers from Canadian magazine Adbusters declaring: “Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”[ABC News] The movement’s imagery—the occupation of Zuccotti Park echoing Cairo’s Tahrir Square—and its timing, coming months after the Egyptian Revolution’s triumph, established a direct lineage. As the WSWS observed at the time, “From the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt, to mass demonstrations in Israel and social eruptions in Europe, the class struggle has reemerged as the basic historical force.”[5]
Occupy protests in New York City (Image from wsws.org)
The movement emerged from anarchist organizations, in particular the Adbusters, which explicitly invoked “the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic” as its organizational model while stripping that model of its class content. The “99 percent” slogan, however appealing as an expression of popular anti-oligarchic sentiment, was politically designed to obscure rather than sharpen the fundamental class division between the working class and the affluent upper-middle strata from which Occupy’s leadership was drawn.[6]
The political consequences of this class foundation became visible in the role played by pseudo-left organizations, above all the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Despite its nominally socialist rhetoric, the ISO worked systematically to subordinate Occupy to the AFL-CIO trade union apparatus and channel its energy toward Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. As the WSWS documented in contemporaneous coverage, the ISO “is attempting to stifle the protest movement by helping to bring it under the control of the AFL-CIO and the rest of the trade union apparatus,” praising corrupt union officials—among them AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CWA’s Bob Master, both fresh from betraying the Verizon strike—while concealing their role in imposing concessions on workers.[7]
The ISO’s promotion of “no politics” and “no leadership” served to create precisely the political vacuum the Democratic Party rushed to fill. The WSWS warned with prophetic accuracy: “Many of the groups involved in Wall Street demonstrations have echoed the position of the indignados in Spain and Greece that there should be ‘no politics’ and no leadership. The call for ‘no politics’ amounts to a rejection of a principled and coherent political alternative to bourgeois politics and the capitalist two-party system—that is, to socialist politics. It plays directly into the hands of the Democratic Party, which will move to fill the political vacuum.”[8] This is precisely what occurred. The coordinated federal-local police crackdown that destroyed Occupy’s encampments in November 2011—documented by the WSWS as a nationally organized operation involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces across multiple cities[9]—revealed the ruling class’s settled determination to tolerate no sustained challenge to capitalist order, however embryonic. The ISO’s subsequent dissolution and absorption of its dominant faction into the Democratic Socialists of America merely formalized the political trajectory it had pursued within Occupy from the outset.
The Yellow Vests: Broader Social Base, Sharper Edge, Same Political Ceiling
The Yellow Vest movement expressed a sharper social radicalism and a considerably broader working-class social base than Occupy. Its geographical and social centre of gravity lay in provincial France—among commuters, pensioners, small proprietors, precarious workers, and the rural and peri-urban poor hit by transport costs, the decline of local public services, and the accelerating erosion of wages under neoliberal restructuring. This diffuse, provincial social composition—rooted in layers of the working class and lower middle strata most directly exposed to the costs of the “modernization” celebrated by Macron’s metropolitan enthusiasts—gave the Yellow Vests a broader geographic reach and a more direct material confrontation with capitalist rule than Occupy’s metropolitan concentration had permitted.
Its tactics were correspondingly more disruptive. Weekly nationwide actions, roundabout and toll-road blockades, the occupation of commercial arteries, and confrontations with riot police in Paris and provincial cities created real costs for capitalist circulation and subjected the French ruling class to sustained political pressure of a kind Occupy’s symbolic square occupations had not achieved. At certain moments, the Yellow Vest movement intersected with strike waves—teachers, health workers, transport workers—creating the real possibility, if never the organizational reality, of a fusion between mass street protest and organized industrial action.
FILE PHOTO: A view of the Place de la Republique as protesters wearing yellow vests gather during a national day of protest by the “yellow vests” movement in Paris, France, December 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo
This possibility was systematically blocked. The French trade union confederations worked methodically to prevent any convergence between the Yellow Vests and the organized labor movement.[10] Left-populist tendencies within and around the movement framed demands in the idiom of “the people versus the elites”—calls for referenda, wealth redistribution, and stronger national welfare provisions—that avoided identifying the systemic enemy: the capitalist class and its state, not merely its more visibly corrupt or arrogant individual representatives.[11] Macron’s government survived. The Yellow Vests dissipated. The underlying social crisis intensified.
The Gen-Z Wave: Global Scale, Revolutionary Intensity, Identical Political Deficit
The Gen-Z uprisings represent a qualitative escalation in both geographic scope and revolutionary intensity. Occurring simultaneously across multiple countries of the former colonial world, they combined militant student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian intervention through strikes and industrial action. Sri Lanka’s two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, in which millions participated across ethnic lines, demonstrated the decisive power of the working class when it acts as an independent force.[12] Kenya witnessed successive waves of strikes by teachers, healthcare workers, civil servants, and transport workers erupting in the wake of the initial Gen-Z protests.[13] The scale of political disruption—heads of state driven from office, parliaments stormed, governments collapsed—surpassed anything Occupy or the Yellow Vests had produced.
Nepal Gen-Z protests. Image Courtesy of Kathmandupost.com
Yet the political framework within which these movements operated reproduced in these countries of belated capitalist development the identical dynamics that had contained and betrayed Occupy and the Yellow Vests in the imperialist centers. Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League, justifying the absence of leadership on the grounds that “the government is actively looking for leaders,” created a political vacuum filled by Raila Odinga and the trade union bureaucracy.[14] The Communist Party Marxist-Kenya promoted defense of the 2010 Constitution—drafted by the ruling class with British and US funding—thereby channeling mass anger into bourgeois-democratic illusions. BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines aligned with bourgeois anti-China factions, subordinating working-class politics to the strategic imperatives of US imperialism’s Indo-Pacific confrontation.[15]
The pseudo-left’s international character was not incidental: these organizations participate in the same international political current—representing affluent middle-class layers whose material interests require the preservation of capitalism while managing working-class discontent—that the ISO embodied in the United States. They celebrate spontaneity to avoid building revolutionary parties. They promote “people power” and “anti-corruption” to obscure class divisions. They align with bourgeois opposition forces presented as “progressive” alternatives. As the WSWS has consistently warned, these tendencies serve objectively as a reservoir for capitalist ideology within the “left.”[16]
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: “The social and political outlook of those at the core of the protests—including anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Street—was fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the ‘99 percent’ slogan itself was an effort to obscure the deep social divide between the working class and the more privileged sections of the upper-middle class, for which these groups spoke.”
Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) Secretary General Booker Ngesa Omole in prison [Photo: CPM Marxist (Facebook)]
The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.
In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: “This was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.” Omole was “beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalised to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.” They state that after the assault he was “dumped at Mlolongo Police Station,” a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.
The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, “and the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.”
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omole’s abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.
That Omole was singled out by the “broad-based unity” government of President William Ruto—uniting the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) founded by the late political fixer Raila Odinga—is clear from the repeated and escalating character of the attacks against him and other CPM-K members. A year ago, he was targeted for assassination as part of a broader campaign of intimidation and repression directed at the party’s leadership.
The assassination attempt came days after the attempted abduction of CPM-K National Chairperson Mwaivu Kaluka in Mombasa—Kenya’s second-largest city—along with two other party members, by plain-clothes police officers. While Kaluka was eventually released, the operation came just weeks after a crackdown on the CPM-K following its national congress in November. At that time, Kaluka and former National Chairperson Kinuthia Ndungu—who had been beaten repeatedly and arrested 10 times—were detained at Central Police Station in Nairobi. No reason was given for their arrest.
The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Ruto’s first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.
The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organised by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.
This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meagre daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people.
Meanwhile, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, the cost of food has surged by 50 percent over the same period, and household expenses for transport and energy remain punishingly high. Public services are deteriorating under the impact of IMF-dictated austerity and debt servicing, exposing millions to collapsing health, education and social support systems.
The trade union bureaucracy is backing this assault on the working class and rural masses. Francis Atwoli, Secretary General of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU), recently declared that workers should “support him [Ruto] and ignore the noise,” hailing him as the only leader capable of transforming Kenya into a “first-world” industrialised economy. “The only person who can take us to that level is none other than William Ruto,” Atwoli insisted, presenting the regime’s pro-capitalist agenda as the path to jobs and development.
Atwoli has openly backed Ruto’s violence on protesters after last year’s July 7, 2025 “Saba Saba” protest massacre, when security forces gunned down scores of protesters nationwide commemorating pro-democracy protests in the 1990s against the Western-backed Daniel Arap Moi regime. Speaking days after the bloodshed, Atwoli instructed young people to “forget about demonstrations, remain home, silent, and promote peace,” warning that protests were “scaring investors away.” He called on the government to take “firm measures to curb the unrest.”
By urging youth to stay off the streets while police deployed live ammunition, mass arrests and abductions, the trade union bureaucracy is providing political cover for state repression. It has made clear that it stands not with workers and youth facing austerity and bullets, but with the capitalist state and its demands for “stability” and investor confidence.
The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighbouring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organisation today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.
These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defence of its wealth and power.
The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centres, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custody—the highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranque—following clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)—to whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalise opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next year’s presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponised to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimise far-right forces.
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last year’s elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.
These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalise violence against social opposition.
Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusions. The defence of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the courts, the opposition factions of the bourgeoisie, or the trade union bureaucracy. Mass meetings, demonstrations and workplaces must establish their own defence committees to protect protesters from police violence and state-sanctioned gangs. Those targeted for repression must not be left isolated but defended collectively.
Above all, the working class must build its own independent political movement, rooted in factories, neighbourhoods and schools, and guided by an international socialist perspective. This means breaking from all parties and trade union apparatuses tied to the capitalist ruling class and uniting with workers across Africa and internationally in the struggle against imperialist domination, austerity and state repression. Only through the conscious mobilisation of the working class for socialist transformation can democratic rights be secured and defended.
The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organization’s general secretary, demands Omole’s immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.
This perspective article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 23 February 2026.
President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Washington with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Friday’s Supreme Court ruling invalidating $160 billion in tariffs collected under President Donald Trump over the last year generated sighs of relief among sections of the ruling class. It also provoked an unhinged verbal tantrum at a hastily convened press conference during which Trump labeled the three conservative justices who joined the three liberals against him “fools and lapdogs … of the radical left.”
The decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and its fallout expose deepening divisions within the ruling class that ultimately stem from the decline of US capitalism.
After labeling the three liberals a “disgrace to our nation,” Trump accused the entire majority of being “swayed by foreign interest and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”
Trump called the forces challenging his unbridled assertion of power to set and modify tariffs, “major sleazebags” who are “foreign country-centric,” and the two justices he nominated who voted with the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “an embarrassment to their families.”
Trump ranted, imitating a Mafia don, that “foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic … dancing in the streets, but they won’t be dancing for long, that I can assure you.”
The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology—to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself. Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.”
The legal issues presented are relatively straightforward. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution expressly allocates all taxation power, including the imposition of duties on imported goods and services, to Congress. Following President Richard Nixon’s resort to extraordinary measures in response to the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods financial framework, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows the president to identify an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and declare a “national emergency,” triggering executive power to “investigate, block, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit” transactions involving foreign-held property. The list of executive powers notably does not include tariffs, and for almost 50 years no president invoked IEEPA powers to impose them.
Shortly after resuming office, however, Trump declared a national emergency based on drug trafficking to justify a 25 percent duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports, and another national emergency citing trade deficits to justify an array of tariffs, modifications, reductions and exemptions that sent equity markets careening. The rate on Chinese goods was ratcheted up in rapid succession—from 10 percent to 20, then to an additional 34, then 84, and finally 125 percent—bringing the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent.
Trump’s IEEPA tariffs account for almost three-fourths of US tariffs imposed last year. Without them, the average effective US tariff rate would fall from 17.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
Separate suits were filed by businesses hammered by tariffs, joined by 12 states. Several lower courts ruled the IEEPA tariffs illegal prior to the Supreme Court taking the case, where nine justices splintered into three camps of three, producing seven separate opinions totaling 170 pages.
The decisive opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, contains language that amounts to a remarkable indictment of the White House’s dictatorial aims. Roberts wrote that the Framers, “having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by ‘taxation without representation,’” gave Congress “alone … access to the pockets of the people,” and deliberately excluded the executive branch from any part of the taxing power. This was, Roberts noted, the “birthright power” of Congress—a characterization that underscores how fundamental the majority considered the constitutional question.
Gorsuch went even further in his own concurring opinion, warning that “our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.”
Roberts was blunt in his description of the scope of power Trump claimed, writing, “All it takes to unlock that extraordinary power is a Presidential declaration of emergency, which the Government asserts is unreviewable.” The only check, Roberts observed, would be a veto-proof supermajority in Congress—rendering the legislature virtually powerless. This would “replace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked Presidential policymaking.”
Trump craves the tariff power to bully and extort foreign nations, to promote or harm certain economic sectors, and to steer wealth to favored industries and companies, including those that directly benefit his family. Roberts’s opinion, read in full, describes a president who has arrogated to himself the unilateral power to tax the entire population, even the world, answerable to no one, on the basis of an “emergency” declaration that he asserts cannot be reviewed.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh drafted a 63-page dissent joined by the arch-reactionary Trump toadies Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito that, Roberts noted, “echoed point-for-point” Trump’s arguments. Kavanaugh bemoaned the fact that the US “may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs,” like a bank robber asking to be let off the hook because the stolen money has already been spent.
Kavanaugh then switched from his role as a supposed neutral judge to Trump’s consiglieri, advising him, “Although I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.” Those alternatives were not raised in the briefing, which addressed only IEEPA tariffs, and Kavanaugh’s addressing them in his dissent, which itself has no legal force, deviates from accepted judicial standards.
Media outlets reported that Trump exploded in profane anger when informed of the ruling while in the midst of a breakfast meeting with various governors. A few hours later he appeared before cameras in the White House press room, his face beet-red with rage under layers of orange makeup.
“Those tariffs remain,” Trump said repeatedly. “We’re still getting them and we will after the decision,” adding, “As Justice Kavanaugh—whose stock has gone so up, you have to see, I’m so proud of him—wrote in his dissent … ‘the decision might not substantially constrain a president’s ability to order tariffs going forward.’”
“He’s right,” Trump continued, “In fact, I can charge much more than I was charging. So I’m going to just start.” Following a Kavanaugh suggestion, Trump announced new tariffs under a never used emergency statute that authorizes 150-day tariffs to remedy balance of payment deficits.
The invocations of the American Revolution by the majority justices are not merely rhetorical ornaments. As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches this July, the Revolution and the democratic principles it evoked are intruding into political life—and not only into the sphere of legal opinions. The language of 1776 retains an explosive contemporary relevance.
That a chief justice of the Supreme Court felt compelled to invoke the memory of the Revolution against a sitting president’s assertion of unchecked taxing power is itself a measure of how deep the present constitutional crisis has become. The ideals of the American Revolution, rooted in the Enlightenment and in the struggle against monarchical tyranny, stand in irreconcilable opposition to the regime Trump is attempting to construct.
The Supreme Court has not, however, undergone a democratic awakening. The Court is, and remains, a pillar of the capitalist state. Its function is to uphold the property relations and class interests upon which the existing social order depends. Nothing in Friday’s ruling alters that fundamental character. The same Roberts Court that struck down Trump’s tariffs has gutted voting rights, overturned Roe v. Wade, and granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity. To recognize the political significance of the divisions within the Court on specific issues is not to harbor any illusions in the nature of the institution itself.
Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh—the uncompromising Nazis on the Court—argued that IEEPA gives the president essentially unlimited power to impose tariffs. Thomas, in his separate dissent, suggested a bare and temporary congressional majority can delegate virtually any power to the president.
The conflict between the two factions is not absolute. Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett have provided critical support for large portions of Trump’s fascist agenda. They have backed the brutal assault on immigrants—the mass arrests, the deportation flights, the use of military facilities as detention camps—that constitutes one of the most vicious attacks on democratic rights in modern American history. On the tariff question, however, which impinges directly on the economic interests of powerful sections of the ruling class, a part of Trump’s judicial majority has been compelled to blurt out—though in carefully worded legal language—that the president is seeking to overthrow the Constitution.
The ruling exposes a profound crisis within the American ruling class. One faction, represented by the Wall Street Journal and the internationally oriented sections of finance capital, recognizes that Trump’s tariff war is a catastrophe—raising consumer prices, disrupting supply chains, and provoking retaliatory measures that threaten the global position of American capitalism. The other views the tariff power as an instrument of personal rule and plunder, a means of rewarding allies and punishing enemies entirely outside the framework of democratic accountability.
The ruling class is deeply divided, its democratic institutions are breaking down, and the working class has no voice in official politics. The defense of democratic rights and the struggle against the emerging dictatorship can be carried forward only through the independent social and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program. It is the working class that is the true heir of the revolutionary principles and spirit of 1776, and it is the working class that must fight to defend them.
[1] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
