In Trump’s Address to the Joint Session of Congress, he declared that he created an institution for the ‘Victims of illegal immigration’. In light of the evidence, I must ask: What kind of bullshit xenophobic garbage is this? It’s actually proven that Illegal Immigrants commit less violent crimes than ordinary U.S. citizens.[1] But in a world of ‘alternative facts’, I suppose this isn’t too much of a surprise. They are being scapegoated for our countries problems, but most of us know they are entirely not to blame.

Trump says we can solve poverty by addressing violence. But this is an entirely backward analysis. Anti-social behavior is a result of poverty.[2] Even Aristotle spoke of poverty being the “parent of crime”.  That is why the poor are disproportionately more violent. Violence doesn’t cause poverty, poverty causes violence. Now, if you want to address the root cause of poverty in the world today it’s people like Trump, billionaires and multi-millionaire capitalists who live off the labor of others. Those in poverty entirely make up “that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.”(Engels, 42).  And people like Trump live off their labor alone, amounting ‘their’ billions. His vast wealth is solely due to the poverty of the poor.

Trump makes grand statements of national solidarity, prosperity, liberty and democracy. But these are false slogans, they cannot and will not exist as anything more than an empty slogan in our present society. His use of bringing in the families of the ‘victims of illegal immigrants’ and of fallen soldiers is but a pathetic means to an end. The people will not be free so long as they live under a dictatorship of the rich (or as Marx called a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), under a dictatorship of two capitalist parties who are ideologically identical in nature. The oligarchy of the property owning class is the only institution in our society that actively holds all formal political power, its power is derived from the two-party system that people are ideologically compelled to participate in. In this way, the cycle of oppression can be celebrated as ‘democracy’. Poverty can be celebrated as a ‘free choice’ even if it is practically forced upon its subjects.

People like Trump are the problem, not illegal immigrants and certainly not other countries whose labor people like Trump exploit! I think it’s high time that the workers of America unite to build their own party, to smash the fetters of the false democracy, of the two-party system, and of the capitalist state. To take back what is rightfully theirs and solemnly declare that “labor creates the world, labor is entitled to all it creates!”

Sources:

1 Immigration Study

2 Crime and poverty

3 Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels ☭