Justin Akers Chacón is a revolutionary socialist, author and professor of Chicanx Studies in San Diego. We interviewed him recently during a visit to discuss the process of regroupment and convergence of his organization Socialist Horizon and the ISL.

Interview by Vince Gaynor

What is your analysis of the political situation since Trump’s second term began?

The election of 2024 that brought Trump and a far right composition of the Republican Party into power was not so much a reflection of a significant shift to the right within the working class, but really a significant shift at the top of US society in the ruling class. We went through four years of the Biden-Harris administration, in which we saw a massive bailout of failing capitalist firms. We saw the expansion of war and genocide, through Israel, in Palestine. We saw the US building up an army, directly and through NATO, in Ukraine. And of course, we saw the buildup of the war apparatus in Southeast Asia. This is why I would characterize the Democrats as really the A-Team of US imperialism. They have been trying to reassert US imperial hegemony at a time when there are great challenges for the US centric imperialist system.

 In large part, Biden was elected on the basis of undoing what Trump had done in the previous four years, putting a moratorium on deportation, passing a legalization that would affect all undocumented people, and generally mouthing the rhetoric of being a pro immigration president. But we saw that quickly collapse; by the last year of the Biden-Harris administration, they were leading the effort to argue for closing the border, enabling ICE to act more aggressively in rounding up and deporting or detaining people, and trying to push through a very right wing anti immigration bill that had actually been crafted by the Republicans. In fact, the Republicans were timing the passing of that bill with the election but, since Biden and Harris championed it, Trump ended up saying “don’t vote for it, because we don’t want to give them any kind of win right before the election”.

 So I would characterize the political situation as a crisis, because in the United States, there is a significant social polarization, we have the elevation of the upper echelons of the capitalist class into what’s been characterized as a new oligarchy. We have the new sections of the far right wing of the capitalist class now moving into government. And the Democrats basically have nothing to offer.

 Trump leads an extreme imperialist attempt to use US military power to force its will on the rest of the world. There is an attempt to radically restructure economic relations through a tariff regime. We see Trump openly stating his intentions to recolonize or colonize different parts of the world. But this trajectory reflects the US empire in decline and its aggressive attempts to arrest that decline.

 In relation to the polarization we see, the class divides are widening significantly in this country. Not only in the attempts by Trump and the Republicans to criminalize migrants and pit them against other groups of workers. But also in the attack on women’s reproductive health and reproductive rights, the attacks on people with disabilities, the attacks on trans people and the LGBTQ+ community in general. We see this is a direct offensive, in the form of naked class war, against the different sections of the working class, at a time when there’s also rapidly declining, in some cases collapsing, standards of living, stagnant wages and economic precarity for more than half of the whole population in the United States.

 So to have all these things happening at once represents a significant crisis. The bipartisan project of reasserting US imperialist preeminence reflects unity. But then they have nothing to offer; there’s not even the pretense of speaking to or addressing the interests of the working class. Instead, there’s just attacks. This greatly explains the political climate in this country and how it’s very quickly politicizing and further radicalizing sections of the working class and students and oppressed groups.

The rise of the far right is much better known around the world than the radicalization you describe. What does that process look like

 People are being politicized and radicalized very quickly because the glue that has held a lot of people in a state in which they believed that things could be reformed, is quickly coming apart. “A” because there does not appear to be an electoral solution to this crisis, in part because the Democrats are providing no alternative. And “b” because the very rapid deterioration of the basic standard of living is compelling more people to have to figure out how to fight for their basic rights and needs. Of course, this is not how the two party political system and the capitalist media represent what’s happening in society, but there is a profound crisis afflicting the large majority of the working class.

 So, that glue is coming undone because each sector of the working class is now facing its own crisis. Students are graduating from college and having zero economic opportunities. And are now having to fight for the right to even have access to education.. There’s a crisis in housing. Inflation has been undermining and erasing any kind of capacity for working class people to save or to afford the basic necessities.

 The Democratic Party has moved so far to the political right that it has abandoned even its rhetoric for reform. This last 2024 election, we saw the Democratic Party offering the working class absolutely nothing, offering more war and neoliberal dismantling, offering nothing on the question of migration.

 This is one way of understanding why there’s a crisis on the left. Because the largest section of the left of the Democratic Party has entertained reformist solutions, starting with some of the larger reformist group groupings like the Democratic Socialists of America, essentially entering into the Democratic Party and believing that they could move it left, towards more of a socialist reformist or some kind of party that did not answer to the capitalist class, but rather to the working class.

 This is not a new strategy on the US left. It’s been an ongoing one for over a century. But I think there’s been a spectacular collapse of this project, because we’ve seen the illusions in the Democratic Party quickly collapse. But we also see that a lot of the revolutionary left over the last several years has also gone into decline over the question of reformism, aligning in some capacity with the left wing of the Democratic Party, the “squad” or Bernie Sanders. And this has created another type of crisis in the revolutionary left.

 There’s been a significant decline in the revolutionary left organization and a decline in the confidence in revolutionary socialist ideas. But we’re at a point where there’s significant flux and there’s a process taking place in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of working class people, students and others are now shifting consciousness towards an understanding that the system cannot be reformed from the inside. The level of threat to their life, their livelihood, their employment, their basic rights is now compelling people to be open to and look towards more radical solutions.

 So that raises the question of then what do we need to do in order to connect people with ideas that can explain how to analyze the crisis of capitalism and imperialism, but also how we have invested in ourselves and the working class the power to organize, to fight to defend what we have, to fight against the authoritarian and fascist aspects of how the state is operating, and to challenge the very capitalist system itself.

 So, while the objective conditions are rapidly presenting themselves as ones in which the working class will need to engage in larger scale class struggle, the subjective conditions, the ideas of how we do that, are in urgent need to be developed and amplified through a movement to build a revolutionary socialist party in this period. This is the task of Socialist Horizon.

Tell us about Socialist Horizon

Socialist Horizon is a new revolutionary socialist organization that’s being developed, that has an analysis and an understanding of the depth of the crisis that we’re facing. And also an understanding of the possibilities for building mass movements of working-class people in struggle against this system. That is a gigantic task for a small group of revolutionaries, but we also see the need to regroup with other groups of revolutionaries who share a similar understanding and similar views. So we have taken it upon ourselves as an immediate and urgent task to bring as many revolutionary socialists together into a common organization.

Because the tasks must be understood in relation to the scale of the crisis, and the moment that we’re in indicates that we need to fight for this now. We see that this crisis is not a superficial or temporary one, but one that reflects these larger crises that don’t have solutions without there being more attacks, without there being more war, without there being more of the most grotesque byproducts of capitalism and imperialism. Because capitalism has to respond to its own crises, when there’s no way out, there has to be more attacks on the working class, there has to be more war, there has to be more barbarism that we already see manifested in so many ways.

 We also believe that, in the great traditions of revolutionary socialist organizing and parties that have been able to understand and respond to the challenges that they face, especially in critical junctures, that it’s possible—with confident, militant, revolutionary socialist organizing in the workplaces, in the communities, on the campuses—to connect with much larger numbers of people and build a much larger revolutionary socialist movement, a much larger revolutionary socialist organization in the struggles of today and tomorrow.

But the crisis of capitalism and imperialism is global. Therefore, the revolutionary movement against capitalism and imperialism must also be global in our efforts to rebuild and regroup revolutionary organization in the belly of the beast, in the heart of empire, in the United States. We understand that we can’t build our movement independently of also building connections and relationships with revolutionaries around the world.

 In our process of coming to that understanding, we were fortunate to come into contact with the comrades of the International Socialist League and to learn more about their project and see where we converge. We share a high level of agreement on the importance and urgency of linking revolutionaries across the globe—especially from our position here in the United States—on the need to connect, to learn from dialogue and collaboration, and also to see ourselves as part of a movement that crosses borders, working together toward common objectives and goals, even if we are fighting in different conditions and contexts.

 So, working with and being part of the International Socialist League’s global project gives us confidence—it gives us the sense that there are comrades around the world doing the same work, and that what we are building is much larger than ourselves, with an impact that strengthens and benefits all the different struggles we’re engaged in within our own countries. We see the ISL project as a key element alongside the work we’re doing nationally. We see what the ISL is doing internationally as deeply interconnected, and we want to be part of building that.

 We also understand that being located at the center of the global counterrevolution gives us a particular responsibility: to oppose the efforts of the U.S. government to impose imperialist and neocolonial domination on countries across the world. To do everything in our power to oppose the U.S. government and capitalist class’s capacity to attack other nations for their own profit, and to sabotage revolutionary movements that emerge in different parts of the world. That’s why we see building international solidarity and defending workers’ movements and future revolutions—as part of the ISL—as an urgent and necessary task.

San Diego Socialists is one of the local groups that make up Socialist Horizon. Tell us about its activities.

San Diego Socialists is a project to build a revolutionary socialist organization based on the methods of class struggle, while also adapting to the specific conditions we face here in San Diego. One of those conditions is being a border city, directly across from Tijuana, where hundreds of massive factories—maquiladoras—are located. These factories house a significant portion of U.S. production that has been relocated to Mexico, reinforced by the border, in order to impose low wages and brutal working conditions on hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers in the greater Tijuana region alone.

 We have built a cross-border solidarity network with Mexican socialists in Tijuana who are actively organizing independent, bottom-up socialist labor unions in the maquiladoras. We support them in different ways, including attending workers’ gatherings, participating in political discussions, and protesting at the U.S. headquarters in San Diego of corporations operating across the border in Tijuana. Cross-border and international solidarity is a founding principle of San Diego Socialists.

 We also organize among the transnational working class on this side of the border, as many workers in San Diego are migrants. We oppose the border and reject both border enforcement and immigration restrictions as part of our labor organizing and migrant defense work, grounded in transnational solidarity.

 Another core aspect of our work in San Diego Socialists is organizing tenant unions. San Diego is a county of 3.7 million people and a coastal city where a dominant sector of the capitalist class consists of private equity firms, real estate developers, and landlords. Their goal is to eliminate any restriction on rent increases and to use homeownership and the rental system as mechanisms for extracting maximum profit from the working class. As a result, over half the population of San Diego are renters.

 We use the class struggle union model to develop a tenant union movement that organizes tenants as workers are organized—into unions—and builds these unions to collectively demand concessions from landlords and property owners. Through this process, we not only educate workers on their rights as tenants, but more importantly, we teach the necessity of class struggle as the method for halting rent hikes, forcing landlords and managers to make repairs, and engaging in other forms of collective action to win their demands.

 In many cases, these struggles culminate in rent strikes. This is one of the main tactics we use because, like workers withholding labor, tenants withholding rent shifts the balance of power and compels landlords to negotiate. We have helped form several dozen of these unions across San Diego. A significant portion of the tenants we organize with are migrants, including undocumented workers—but not exclusively. We work with a broad cross-section of the working class.

 Our rank-and-file organizing has also led to a project of socialist education and orientation across various unions, uniting workers to do two things. First, to push union leadership from the left to be more active in supporting working-class struggles broadly, such as those involving migrant workers. And more significantly, to build labor solidarity and a rank-and-file network of unionists who can serve as a radical wing of the labor movement, fighting around demands that represent the working class as a whole. This Labor Solidarity Action Network, which we recently formed, is an important step toward building a socialist movement within and through the unions.

 We also have a project of socialist political education for workers. It’s a labor school that some of our members have been developing over time, aimed at creating spaces within unions to study the history of class struggle and revolution—because these traditions and this historical memory have been driven out of much of the working class in this country. So, locally, through our connections with multiple unions and rank-and-file members, we seek to help workers reconnect with their own radical and revolutionary history, as part of building a broader revolutionary socialist movement.

 We are also active in campus-based Palestine solidarity work. Our members have helped establish two chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine here in San Diego, and we also organize a Faculty for Palestine group. Both are active across multiple campuses, organizing boycotts and divestment campaigns targeting Israeli products, protesting on campus against the repression of students involved in Palestine solidarity actions, and participating in the broader pro-Palestinian movement citywide.

 These are just some of the projects we’re building through San Diego Socialists, and we are optimistic about our ability to keep growing this work—locally, nationally, and internationally—as part of the revolutionary socialist movement in the years to come.