Debates On Building The Anti-trump Movement

Protest has been a major feature of the first months of 2017. On 21 January, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a five million-strong surge of resistance exploded on to the streets of 673 cities and towns worldwide. And thousands have marched and protested since.

- Sarah Sachs-Eldridge

The marchers are predominantly young. For this generation, hit hardest by student debt, lack of housing and unemployment, austerity has been the status quo their whole lives.

In response to the bigoted billionaire’s divisive policies, the marchers, largely mobilised through their need to act rather than any specific organisation, raise slogans of solidarity, fighting racism and sexism and defending all our rights. Internationalism is a feature of the movement.

The ideas of mass civil disobedience, including strikes, are starting to be debated in the movement and there is enthusiasm for Socialist Students’ call for school, college and university walkouts on ‘Day X’, when Trump dares to visit.

The Socialist Party’s bold socialist slogans found an echo with an important section of this incipient movement. They want an alternative to the capitalist system that Trump, Clinton, May and the Blairites represent and ideas about how to fight them.

Bernie Sanders

In the US the movement to support Bernie Sanders, a self-declared ‘democratic socialist’, showed the enormous enthusiasm that exists for an alternative to big business politicians. That’s why Socialist Alternative (our co-thinkers in the US) called for Bernie to continue his run for president when he failed to win the Democratic nomination.