No More Kings, No More Lords

We are living in historic times. Since his inauguration, the Trump administration has unleashed a storm of violent repression and austerity against the working class, both immigrant and native born. On one hand, national debt is used to justify cuts in spending on social programs, codified in Trump’s “one big beautiful bill”. At the same time, ICE funding has been increased dramatically to support a militarized mass deportation campaign. Immigrants have been snatched from their workplaces and neighborhoods and disappeared into concentration camps. Partnering with Palantir, the US government has made a particular point to target immigrants who have expressed opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Customs and border control have been mobilized as an occupying army in blue cities, equally concerned with enacting revenge against urban citizens who oppose Trump and carrying out raids against immigrant communities. The murders of Renee Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti represented some of the worst manifestations of this repressive wave. All of this is occurring alongside a general economic crisis of high unemployment and an increase in the cost of living. In barely over a year, the American working class has already grown tired of the frontal assault by the Trump administration’s attempts to manage capitalism.

This has led to popular unrest and resistance across the country, including in Oneonta. Democratic party groups have channeled this rage into a series of ‘no kings’ protests with one basic demand: to remove Trump and his lackeys from office. Their apparent militancy in the fight against Trump conceals their lack of a message for working class people. The democrats are a party without a program, torn between a base who increasingly demands change and their actual masters who demand stability. A base who despises the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and masters who have economic and political ties to the Israeli government. A base who wants universal healthcare and masters who sit on the executive boards of health insurance companies. A base who needs affordable housing for themselves and their loved ones, and masters who are landlords. These two sets of demands are the reflection of distinct class interests in capitalist society. Those are the interests of the capitalists and the working class, those who exploit and those who are exploited. These two classes have fundamentally different aspirations and interests. The job of the democratic party is to make you forget that. Trump, as the face of all America’s evil, is their tool of choice.

Donald Trump allows the democratic party to get away with having no program. To manage their own base without threatening the interests of the capitalist class, they run on a return to a pre-Trump status quo, instead of any actual substantive change. Busy “fighting” the “king” in Washington, democratic party groups are apparently too high minded to challenge bosses and landlords. The frontal assault on the working class is not just being carried out by ICE officers under the command of Trump. The capitalist class itself has been carrying out an offensive against the workers every single day on every front. Rents continue to increase. The prices of basic goods and essentials are still too high. Wages remain essentially stagnant. Underemployment and unemployment for recent graduates are at historically unprecedented levels. All this while wall street continues to take in record profits. In every way imaginable, the capitalist class is wringing more and more out of the working class, and they don’t even care to hide it anymore. The democratic party is complicit in this war.

Oneonta itself gives a solid picture of a city overwhelmed by a capitalist offensive. Even more than most, Oneonta is a city dominated by the interests of landlords. Working class tenants face attacks from all sides. On the one hand, there are exploitative corporate real estate groups coming into Oneonta to build “affordable housing” for the tax benefits before rapidly raising the rent on their tenants, squeezing them out of their housing. On the other hand, there are local landlords who want to hoard and freeze the housing market, blocking attempts to build new housing units to maintain their solid grip on Oneonta’s tenants. In the face of decreased college enrollment, these same landlords are engaged in a long term project to displace working class tenants by turning more and more apartment units into summer vacation housing for baseball families. These landlords see that they can extract more money in less time from vacationers than they can from the working class tenants who merely work in the schools, restaurants, hospitals, and other lines of employment that are of no concern for this class of rent-seekers. 

Six of the eight common council members for Oneonta are democrats. Both the new mayor, Dan Butterman, and the former mayor, Mark Drnek, are democrats. The Oneonta-Cooperstown indivisible group (a democratic party grassroots organization) managed to mobilize well over 1000 people to protest the Trump administration in Oneonta in July and October 2025, a significant accomplishment in a city of 15,000. With all this power and influence, what has the democratic party done to oppose the landlord-driven offensive against Oneonta’s workers? So far, basically nothing. In all the speeches and rallies calling Oneonta residents to vote against the republicans, where was the meaningful housing agenda to relieve the conditions of Oneonta’s working class? It was completely absent. The politicians of Oneonta have much more fire for the Trump administration than the mini-Trump’s in Otsego County. This selective timidity is no accident. Both parties are subservient to the same capitalist ruling class. The electoral arena exists to confine the demands of the working class to two choices that will never challenge capitalist exploitation. The crown changes heads, but the lords remain untouched. The working class has to go beyond calling for the deposing of a king. We must go for the lords as well.

No More Dead-Ends

This requires abandoning old paths. Time and time again, the working class is duped into seeing the electoral circus as its path. In the face of Trump’s brand of repression the democrats are asking the working class to forget past mistakes and blindly fall in line behind whatever democratic politician we see. We are expected to forget that it was their actions that gave us Trump in the first place. This ‘voter’s amnesia’ is exactly how the tyranny of the capitalist government sustains itself without challenge. As things get continuously worse under a republican president, people assume that lasting change will be given to us by a democrat. No more falling for the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine of the democratic and republican party. The truth is, both parties represent the capitalist class against the workers, protecting the lords of our society. Neither party has the interests of the working class at heart. The democrats simply represent the need for capitalists to govern more gently sometimes. In everything from ICE repression and austerity at home to warmongering abroad, the democrats have been partners in crime to the republicans. 

Many well meaning people will agree to this, but argue that the problem is the lack of courage among democratic party leadership. They will claim that so long as we elect progressives, then we can make real change through the electoral arena. The election of Zohran Mamdani and candidates like him are pointed to as a real way to begin developing a political alternative. This has caused young progressives attempting to take over the party by defeating more conservative democrats in primaries. Many in the working class stake their hope in these firebrand politicians due to the promise of change they claim to represent. In reality, they rarely live up to expectations. The basic power in capitalist society lies in the hands of unelected state bureaucrats and in the economic monopolies of the ruling class. The capitalist class is not afraid to use its ownership of society’s resources to impose their will on politicians. They frequently use their economic leverage to punish politicians who step out of line. The constant threat of capital flight, when capitalists divest from communities, disciplines rowdy local politicians especially. Progressives who end up in office will quickly find they can do little more than push minor tweaks at the margins of society, completely unable to block capitalism’s attacks on the working class.

But you already know that, don’t you? You already know that neither party serves the people. You know that in the closed door meetings between corporate representatives, landlords, bureaucrats, and politicians, they’re not coming up with plans to serve the interests of the working class. You know that no matter who is in office, you’re still exploited by landlords and bosses. There is no way forward for the workers within the rigged game of the state, where capital always wins. The political arena does not work for us. So vote for the candidate you like if you want to, but do it knowing that they will change nothing for us. Elections are a dead end. We have to find another path.

The Path: Independent Working Class Power

We must carve our way out through independent action. Genuine change has to come from wielding our own strength against our exploiters. This means organizing in our neighborhoods and workplaces to directly defend ourselves against landlords, bosses, and corporations. When we come together as a class and use direct action, we cease to be powerless. We have many ways to impose our will on our exploiters depending on how we organize. For example, when we organize in our workplaces, we can deny the bosses our labor until they give into our demands. Even just the threat of strikes or other forms of workplace action can extract concessions from the exploiters. When tenants organize in our buildings and neighborhoods, we can deny the landlords our rent until they give in to our demands as well. Beyond these most basic forms of passive resistance, communities can directly reclaim their own land to block corporate projects. The possibilities for class power are endless. What unites all these actions is the need for working class people to organize independently and impose ourselves directly, using our numbers and their dependence on us to our advantage. We can act on our own initiative to TAKE what we want, rather than begging for it. This is the power of the workers directly united around common interests and prepared to use our most immediate weapon: the mass, general STRIKE.

This power can be wielded against more than individual exploiters. Through strikes and other militant forms of direct action, the exploited class can force the state to pass reforms it otherwise would never concede. This is the real source of most of the privileges we enjoy today. In New York city from 1918 to 1920, tens of thousands of tenants went on rent strike across the city through the Socialist Party of America and the Greater New York Tenants League to resist rent increases, housing shortages, and poor housing conditions. Alongside the strikes, New York tenants blocked attempts to evict striking tenants. As a result, New York State passed the first rent control laws in the US, the city health commissioner made it a requirement for landlords to maintain heat during fall and winter, and much more, providing significant relief for New York tenants that we still benefit from to this day. During the great depression, from 1931 to 1933, New York City tenants launched another mass rent strike wave. This time, the rent strikes were paired with tenants and unemployed workers occupying government buildings to demand relief. This forced the government to fund housing relief and reduced rents.

Let’s take a look at Oneonta just as a counterexample. In this majority tenant town, when was the last time major pro-tenant legislation was passed and enforced? So far, Oneonta tenants have been content either accepting that nothing will get better or hoping that local democratic party politicians will decide to do the right thing. Many passively accept that Oneonta will always be a landlord dominated town. When we see our neighbors displaced for air-bnb, see our rents increase faster than our wages year over year, see landlords block housing projects with no input from the people most affected, or see rental units kept empty and off the market while the homeless population continues to grow, what do we do? We keep our heads down and act like there is nothing we can do. But what if you were organized with other tenants around Oneonta? What if when landlords tried to increase your rent or turn you out for vacation housing they were faced with rent strikes, marches, and pickets from other tenants? What if tenants went en masse to occupy government buildings and demanded more strict limitations on vacation rentals? What if when the common council went to approve construction projects for housing they didn’t just have to deal with the demands of the landlord lobby, but were also faced with thousands of tenants united to act for ourselves? I think this town would look very different. That’s the kind of power working class people can have when we unite.

From the fight for the eight hour workday to the abolition of child labor, the working class has always been able to count on our own strength more than the goodwill of capitalists or state officials. Only that strength can open a new path for us. But even that road can only take us as far as we are willing to go. As we expand the struggle and unity of the working class, as we demand more, the capitalist class will not just sit and watch. There will come a time when they are no longer able or willing to concede to our demands under the current system. If we want our wins to last, we have to turn the fight for relief into a fight for revolution.

The Destination: Social Revolution

As long as humanity is divided into classes, it will always be dominated by kings. We can fight for reforms today, but those wins are always temporary. With each battle we win, the ruling class prepares its counterattacks. Capitalism and the state are willing to give the workers some concessions after a hard fought battle to give themselves the breathing room to mount offensives of their own. They will have the advantage for as long as the workers tolerate our own enslavement by the wage system and state. No amount of reforms will change the basic relationship of exploitation that exists between the working class and the capitalist class. We cannot be content with this dismal social arrangement.

We must push beyond immediate struggles for better conditions. The world ruling class has revealed its depravity. There is no reforming a system that produces Epsteins and puts them into high office. The working class must go after the heart of this system. The reason we can be exploited so ruthlessly is primarily because we do not own the things we need to live and maintain society. The fact that the capitalist class owns the land and everything on it means they can always subordinate us. We can resist the worst of that subordination in temporary revolts, but when the strikes end, we return back into de facto slavery.

The other factor in this equation is that the government owns the right to use violence against us. We must fight to abolish the state and expropriate the property of the capitalists, taking all power into the hands of the workers. This can only occur through an insurrectionary general strike which establishes working class self government. After expropriating the capitalist class and abolishing their oppressive government through our organizations of struggle, we can create a new society based on cooperation rather than exploitation. This new society would be a true democracy, where sovereignty lies directly in the hands of working people rather than money. This is the social revolution, a world without lords or kings. That must be our destination.

The only way to get there is through the long and difficult path of class struggle. Right now, we are wandering through the desertous wasteland of elections. The path is clear, but in every direction there is no hope. Every few years, an oasis seems to appear on the horizon. Maybe the oasis appears as a progressive firebrand with national renown like Bernie Sanders, or a new democratic party caucus. Invariably, each of those oases turn out to be a mirage. We continue to wander, slowly marching to our demise. 

Class struggle takes us through a dark forest. In that forest, we cannot always see the path clearly. Each step forward seems more frightening than the last. Going through it means confronting all the beasts your parents told you to be afraid of. Your boss, your landlord, and the might of the state all seem too dangerous. In that forest, we also find hope. In the forest there is life and the potential for change. Above all, in the forest, we are not alone. We can find one another and confront those beasts. On the other side of that forest there is the possibility of genuine freedom. It is time for the working class to decide which path we will take. Will we continue to aimlessly wander through the desert, following our ruling class into another catastrophe for their enrichment? Or will we strike out on our own, seeking out each other in the unknown but hopeful forest of class independence? The path we take will likely determine whether capitalism collapses in the fire of nuclear bombs or in the hand of a united working class.

Join Reclaim Oneonta

Reclaim Oneonta is one of a growing number of organizations around the world today that recognize the need for working class power and a social revolution. If you recognize the need for such a change, you should join.