Last Friday, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) held a public meeting in New York City to oppose the state kidnapping of pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil on March 8, which was carried out by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the orders of the Trump administration.

The meeting, titled “Free Mahmoud Khalil! Mobilize the Working Class Against Trump’s Dictatorship,” was attended by workers from various industries and students and staff from schools across the city. Attendees were broadly opposed to the illegal detention of Khalil, Trump’s moves to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States and the collaboration of the Democratic Party with Trump.

Friday’s meeting was chaired and introduced by a leading member of the IYSSE in New York, Karsten Schneider, who explained that the IYSSE takes the COVID-19 pandemic seriously and thanked attendees who chose to wear masks. Masks were distributed at the meeting’s check-in table and all but two or three attendees wore them.

Tim Avery, another leading member of the IYSSE and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the meeting’s main political report. Avery reviewed the details of Khalil’s detention and placed it within the broader context of the escalating drive by the Trump administration to establish a dictatorship in the US.

The report explained that Khalil’s detention is entirely illegal. Khalil “has not been charged with any crime,” Avery noted. “Instead, according to a court document issued by the Department of Homeland Security, Republican Secretary of State Marco Rubio ‘has determined that [Khalil’s] presence in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.’”

He continued, “Khalil’s presence is only a threat to the ‘foreign policy’ of the United States insofar as he has exercised, as I’m sure many of you in this room have, his First Amendment right to protest the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, which studies estimate has killed upwards of 186,000 people, mostly women and children.”

The report placed Khalil’s detention in the broader context of the Trump administration’s moves toward presidential dictatorship, emphasizing that Trump has not “come out of nothing.” As the WSWS wrote, Trump's presidency represents the violent realignment of the American state to correspond to the oligarchic character of American capitalism.

Avery called on attendees to turn to the working class to free Khalil and halt Trump’s plans for dictatorship. He explained that the working class, which is being driven into struggle against the attacks on its living standards, jobs and social rights, is the revolutionary social force in capitalist society, but it needs independent organizations, rank and file committees, to realize its revolutionary potential.

The report sharply exposed the treacherous role of the Democratic Party. Avery explained that the Democratic Party is incapable of opposing Trump because it is as much a party of Wall Street and the financial oligarchy as the fascist Republicans. He added that this is no less true of all the pseudo-left champions of the Democratic Party, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Following the report, which received warm applause from the audience, the majority of attendees remained for the hour-long question and answer period.

One attendee asked about the IYSSE’s position on building coalitions of the “left” with organizations like the DSA.

Avery and Schneider responded that the IYSSE is open to collaboration with all those who agree with the fundamental political principle of the necessity of independently mobilizing the international working class against capitalism and for socialism, but that the DSA is the pseudo-left arm of the Democratic Party, specifically representing privileged sections of the middle class and working to corral workers and youth opposed to present conditions behind the Democratic Party and its policies of war. Avery stressed that, fundamentally, the Trotskyist movement is not concerned with the size of the movement, but with how to prepare the revolutionary political vanguard of the working class for the mass movement that is coming.

Schneider explained that the IYSSE and Socialist Equality Party (SEP) fight for the unity of the working class across all attempts to divide it based on nationality, skin color, gender, religion and other artificial factors of “identity.” He further explained that all political tendencies and organizations have specific class origins and orientations, which emerge through an understanding of an organization’s history and political program.

Rank-and-file members of pseudo-left organizations turning to the IYSSE on the basis of fundamental political programmatic agreement is entirely different from mixing political banners with the organizations of the middle class, Schneider explained.

Emma Arceneaux, a leading member of the IYSSE in the US, briefly explained that one of the main tasks of the IYSSE is to help youth and students to politically evaluate the class orientation of various organizations and tendencies. She continued, “Individual politicians and political organizations can say about themselves whatever they want to say, but we have to look at their actual record and history and development in order to evaluate them. Youth and students require a clear Trotskyist political program and perspective. As Lenin said, there is bourgeois ideology and socialist ideology, there is no middle ground.”

Several speakers emphasized that in regard to political program, there can be no compromise with the pseudo-left organizations. The lessons of the past 17 months of protests against the genocide in Gaza were discussed in detail, specifically the middle-class protest politics of the organizations presently leading the protests versus the Trotskyist call for this movement to be based on the developing opposition in the working class.

Bill Van Auken, the Latin American editor of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party in the US, raised that the meeting took place on the fiftieth anniversary of the US withdrawal from Vietnam. He explained that a whole generation had been radicalized by that war and within the anti-war movement there were various political tendencies. On the one hand, the most prominent, radical tendencies advocated for mass protests to appeal to Congress and the Democratic Party. Others, the Maoists in particular, sought paramilitary options, including bombings and bank robberies. Both sides of the middle-class “left” ended up bankrupt and solidly in the corner of the bourgeoisie. 

Van Auken stressed that the Trotskyist movement alone advocated for a turn to the working class in opposing the war and that this political perspective and program remains the only option in opposing the developing third world war and fascist dictatorship.

A construction worker noted the low level of political consciousness among many of his colleagues who do not understand the connection between the assault on living standards and working conditions and the escalation of imperialist war, genocide and fascist dictatorship. He asked how the consciousness of workers can be raised to meet the demands of the present situation and recommendation for resources to aid in this task. 

Avery and Schneider stressed that the task of educating workers, raising the political consciousness of the working class, is the central task of the socialist, Trotskyist movement. Speakers pointed to the WSWS as the most important resource of the working class in the development of socialist consciousness. The WSWS does not simply publish news on global events, but provides a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people and youth around the world thrown into struggle. 

The speakers emphasized the necessity of taking up a serious study of the history and political heritage of the Trotskyist movement in order to understand the great historical and political tasks confronting the working class as the international revolutionary social force today.

Several attendees asked about “next steps” and how to move forward following the meeting. Avery and others spoke to the need to form rank-and-file committees, part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), in factories, workplaces and schools to free Khalil, stop the assault on democratic rights, mass deportations, inequality, genocide and war. Above all, workers and young people should join the IYSSE and SEP and study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky as part of an active struggle for socialism in the working class.