John is a former worker at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Plant who provided testimony to the July 27 public hearing on the death of his fellow skilled tradesman Ronald Adams Sr. He spoke recently with the World Socialist Web Site about the hearing, as well as the call by the Socialist Equality Party for workers to build rank-and-file committees to fight Trump’s fascist conspiracy.
“The public hearing into Ronnie’s death was very good. What Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania, talked about really struck me. [Lehman is also a socialist who ran against United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy and replacing it with rank-and-file committees]. Workers need to take control of production and safety, or these deaths are going to continue. Fain and the rest of the UAW leaders are only concerned about their big salaries.
“OSHA is dragging its feet and has not even released the results of its investigation. I heard the family of Antonio Gaston [a Toledo Jeep worker killed eight months before Adams] has filed a wrongful death suit against Stellantis. I read it on the local news and saw what the WSWS wrote. It’s the same thing as Ronnie’s case—the company and the union are keeping everything hush-hush.
“The company said his death was his own fault. That’s BS. Do you think a man would put his life at risk intentionally? There should have been guards on the machine, and there weren’t. That’s why he got killed.”
The discussion then turned to the killing of Charlie Kirk and how Trump and his allies were exploiting it to crack down on all opposition and further their plans to establish a dictatorship.
“I’m going to be totally honest, I never knew anything about this guy until he was killed. But I listened to him and found out what he was doing and saying. I’m against violence, but this guy was spouting hate speech.”
“Trump and his people are saying it’s time to go to war. They sit up there and change the name of the Pentagon to the Department of War, and say that Chicago is going to find out why the name was changed. Then the Republicans are doing all this redistricting so they can keep the House and the Senate. We don’t know if there is going to be another election in 2026 or whatever. They got a war going on against the American people. This is straight out of a dictator’s book.
“We got to get Trump out of there, but it’s going to take the whole world now to make that happen. I was at a family reunion and we were talking about how Trump has all his people on the Supreme Court, in the Justice Department, everywhere, and now he is messing with TV stations and firing Jimmy Kimmel for telling jokes.
“Then he blows up a supposed drug boat [off the coast of Venezuela], but nobody knows who was on that boat. Trump could just be saying they were transporting drugs. It’s like the governor of Ohio who sent National Guard troops to DC and said it was to fight crime. They’re sending these boys for stuff they didn’t sign up for. They get sent to different areas from their homes, walk down the streets, and there is no telling what may happen when they have these weapons.”
“Wait until the next time when an ICE agent shoots and kills somebody,” he warned. “They don’t have a badge, and people can’t see their names. They’re practicing on immigrants, but that’s what they want to do to everybody. They are already stopping American citizens and demanding that they turn over papers to say they were born here. Why do you have the right to do that? Just to humiliate someone.
“I keep wondering, ‘how does he get away with it?’ I’ve never heard or seen anything like what Trump does. It’s not just one thing. It’s one thing after another. I ask myself, ‘where is the Democratic Party?’ They keep saying they don’t control the House and the Senate, and they can’t do anything. But when the Republicans are in the minority they can stop anything.
“I saw the Democrats approved a resolution marking Charlie Kirk’s birthday as a date of remembrance. Then they have the flags at half-mast. When the Democratic legislator and her husband were murdered in their home in Minnesota, Trump didn’t do that for them!
John then discussed the statement issued by the Socialist Equality Party, “Trump’s fascist conspiracy and how to fight it: A socialist strategy,” and, in particular, the section that calls for:
The building of a new form of organization that can unify the working class and mobilize its vast industrial and economic power against the Trump regime. This new form of organization proposed by the Socialist Equality Party consists of rank-and-file committees. They must be established in every factory, workplace, school and neighborhood to organize resistance to Trump’s dictatorship. These committees must become centers of resistance, uniting all sections of the working class (in industry, logistics, transport, restaurants and fast food, social services, legal defense, education, arts and culture, entertainment, medicine, healthcare, sciences, computer technology, programming and other highly specialized professions and student youth) against Trump’s fascist government, the complicity of the Democrats and the broader assault on democratic rights and living standards.
The building of these rank-and-file committees is essential to break the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucracies, which function as the industrial police for the corporations and utilize their power to block every form of resistance by the working class. Power must be transferred from the offices of the bureaucratic parasites to the workers on the shop floor and the job sites, where decisions on all matters of strategy, policy and action can be made democratically by the working class.
John replied: “That’s what we need to see in the plants, with the workers telling them how things are going to go down every day. If we can stop their profits, they’ll run around like angry rats and holler, but they won’t be able to get anything done. There was something like that in Toledo in the 1930s, the Auto-Lite strike.
“Right now, there is a lot of anger with Trump, even among the ones who voted for him are starting to see they were taken in. The economy is going down. You have people from all over the United States saying the same thing: Prices are up and going to the grocery store hurts. The US is becoming the type of country people are running from.
“They are trying to terrorize workers. I heard at the Flat Rock Ford plant, they told the workers coming in for their shift to sit down and look at the robots on the assembly line. When they got there, these things were already doing the work. The workers were saying ‘what the hell is this. Do we start work or are we being replaced with robots?’”
“What is it going to take for things to go in a positive direction? A good start would be to get rid of Shawn Fain. If we do what Will Lehman says, we would have a much better chance because Fain just looks after the status of the top of the union.”
“People need to realize it is either now or never. The simple fact is we got to get the people in the plants and other workplaces to say, ‘We can’t be scared that we’re going to lose our jobs, because they want to roll right over us. We got to speak. We got to make a change.’ This isn’t a big game, it’s for real.”