People Over Profit

Context

We continue to be in a period where the US remains both the most dominant and aggressive imperialist power in the world, but also faces a strategic decline and growing challenges to its economic, political, and military dominance amid an increasingly multipolar world. Due to the contradictions in the imperialist system, we have seen the economic crisis grow more severe with the ruling class responding by unleashing more aggressive anti-people economic policies in all areas of life whether attacks on wages, increased cost of living, worsening workplace conditions, and further advancing neoliberal policies in the US and around the world in an effort to maximize the exploitation of the workers. These policies have only accelerated the destruction of productive forces, shrinking the markets of imperialist nations and leading to mass layoffs and bankruptcies, including global economic crises. The illusion of growth and recovery in spite of decline of industrial production is achieved through state intervention to save the largest monopolies, and increasingly by the financialization of the economy.

In 2025, US imperialism is entering into a new phase of financial oligarchy consolidation and domination. With Trump taking Presidency, Republicans controlling all three branches of the government, and the entry of the world’s richest capitalist, Elon Musk, into the new Department of Government Efficiency, we have seen the immediate implementation of Project 2025’s playbook to completely gut the government agencies and policies that have provided some degree of oversight and limitation to corporate power and the attempt to replace all government positions and employees with Trump loyalists.

These openly fascist policies and rhetoric represent a new tactic of the monopoly capitalists to wage class war against the working people of the US and the world. The long-running strategy of neoliberalism is shifting with Trump’s protectionist measures. The largest tech and logistics corporations have aligned with Trump and push for deregulation and rolling back of protections and rights for workers.

While it was US monopoly capitalism itself that caused this severe economic crisis, the Trump regime maximizes its role as top imperialist superpower to pass tariffs on a massive amount of countries under the guise of “saving American industry.” Yet, this masks the reality that the transnational corporations affected by the tariffs will only raise prices and press down on the working class. This will contribute to the already skyrocketing inflation rate in the US and around the world.

Yet, millions take to the streets around the world protesting these vicious attacks on economic livelihood to fill the pockets of the world’s richest capitalists. The workers’ strike movement, despite moves from the top to make it illegal, is operating at full force to show the power of the working people against the inevitable vulnerabilities of the ruling class. Migrant workers in particular, despite facing the fascist warfare of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, are refusing to be silent and are fighting for their rights as some of the most exploited workers in the country. And where the capitalist system fails workers left and right, working class communities are binding together to support one another as they organize for a better future where people are truly valued more than profit.

We can only anticipate that the economic and political crisis will worsen, escalating the people’s dissatisfaction with their stagnant wages and standard of living in the face of high and rising costs and worsening economic crisis, while the corporate plunder and takeover of public and private resources will further intensify amid the suffering and misdirected conflicts among the majority of the people. As the crisis has worsened and the people fight back, the US ruling class has been unleashing increasingly aggressive and repressive measures to attack the people. Especially with the return of Trump and his whipping up of his fascist mass base, we are only seconds away from full-blown fascism domestically, unless the people rally to fight back!

Join us in Fighting for People Over Profit!

The US chapter of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle is inviting all organizations to join us in the People Over Profit (POP) campaign. As the wealthiest elite continue to reap massive profits and consolidate their power, the working people of the world are bearing the cost: stagnating or even lowering wages, massive debt, layoffs, and cuts to basic social services from housing to healthcare. Under Trump, as the economic crisis heightens, so too is the peoples' resistance. There is an urgent need to organize and build a mass movement to fight for a world that puts people over profit!

POP Campaign Toolkit

If you’re just starting off or even if you’re already waging a campaign and want to figure out how to link it to our POP campaign, we suggest the following:

  • Review our Mass Campaigns 101 page to understand ILPS’ framework on what is a campaign - what purpose they serve in building a mass movement that goes beyond single issues. It also goes over building blocks of a campaign and how to conduct them step by step so the communities we work with are engaged and prepare for the larger fights ahead.

  • Read our POP campaign concept paper with your organization to understand the background, context and analysis for the POP campaign and unite on why it’s important to take it up and how you can wage it. To ensure we’re marching in step together on a national level, it also covers goals and objectives, targets, demands, alliance work, and major action dates (like International Workers Day on May 1st) through January 2026.

  • Check out our Linking Campaigns page to understand why it’s important to link our campaigns to other struggles and the DPS campaign as a national movement and to ultimately expose that our struggles are bound by a common enemy of the majority of the people of the world - US imperialism!

  • Visit United Front 101 for more on the strategy and core points of United Front work.

  • Here are some questions to help think through your campaign planning:

    • What are potential targets in your area

    • What’s the manifestation of profit being prioritized over people

    • How does it impact the people in your communities

    • What forces are working on this issue that you can work with or link up with (even if they’re adjacent issues)

    • How to link your existing campaign to the POP campaign

      • What aspects of your campaign do you see reflected in the POP campaign

  • For your activities, use our hashtags #peopleoverprofit, #ILPS-POP. And Tag @ILPS.US on Instagram!

  • Use this branding kit to design flyers or other propaganda materials!

Background

Over the course of the past year, the ILPS-US Country Chapter has been waging the Defend Peoples’ Struggle (DPS) campaign principally targeting counterinsurgency programs of the US and US-led war & military aggression. A core component of the DPS campaign in this period was promoting and highlighting mass struggles around the main issues facing the people and asserting their legitimacy. In the context of the US elections, the Country Chapter took up the People’s Platform as a consolidated expression of the pressing issues facing the masses, calling for our forces, members, and allies to pursue campaigns addressing these issues. We waged actions and mobilizations directed against the two ruling class parties in the US as the class enemy of the people and those principally responsible for continuing to uphold the imperialist system which produces these issues. Through the course of waging the campaigns as a whole in this period some of the pressing issues that have come to the fore are 1) fascism & repression, 2) war & militarism, 3) attacks against migrants, 4) housing, and 5) other aspects of the worsening economic conditions (inflation, wages, etc). In particular, from the engagement around the US elections and the conduct of the People’s Platform, and the work of our forces and allies, and members of the alliance, the other main pressing issues that have become clearer around which we can further develop into mass struggles are the issue of 1) economic crisis, 2) migrants, 3) housing, 4) the environment, and 5) militarism.

While the DPS campaign will continue to serve the role in addressing fascism, repression, and aspects of US-led war provocations by principally targeting the institutions which the capitalist state uses to directly attack the people, including mass deportations of migrants, it is necessary to take up and elevate campaigns to resist and end the current economic crisis. The 2023 No To APEC* campaign waged by ILPS US and the thousands that physically mobilized against the APEC Heads of State meeting serve as an example of what is possible when the broad masses of the people unite forces and militantly declare “People Over Profit!” against a neoliberal institution of imperialism and plunder. There is a strong basis for an anti-fascist united front to oppose the new attacks of the monopoly capitalists on the workers of the US and the world, and fight for the interests of the majority of people over the moves to accumulate capital at their expense.

*Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, a free trade network of states working together to gut corporate regulatory laws and enact profit-driven and anti-people neoliberal schemes in the Asia and Pacific regions.

Resources