Trump and the Liberal Response

A Reflection on the U.S. Scene

By Mark Andresen

More than anything, the public response to the result of the US Presidential Election has exposed how the Democrat-supporting wing of its media has learnt nothing from Trump’s first term. Many among their blue-collar audience, however, have finally begun to realise how they were being played; and, this time, they aren’t MAGA.

  Kamala Harris’s godawful campaign highlighted her middle-class roots, thus overlooking that very audience. Too often she reverted to it as if, somehow, it might be a vote winner, assuming her party already had all of it on-side. Consequently, the justifiable contempt of the majority of the electorate – of both main parties – was assured; appointed by her party as sole candidate with no challenger; actually boasting about gaining the support of fellow warmonger (and Bush Republican) Dick Cheney; talking down to the black male community, (horribly doubled-down on by Obama, on camera, visiting a white collar office); the horrific Imperialist / anti-Gaza speech by Bill Clinton, again, speaking only to their middle-class; the parade of Hollywood elite supporters; Harris’s endless word salad answers to interviewers; the refusal to discuss policy; still live memories of Harris as a State Prosecutor who had no problem jailing working-class mothers, whatever the consequences to the children; the inappropriate, humourless cackling; all left the field open for Trump. In fact, all this would’ve left the field open for any political challenger. Meanwhile, television pundits made claims on inflated voting projection, which markedly contrasted with the results of the more (comparatively) independent pollsters. With no subtlety whatsoever, the electorate were being told what to think; only this time around, a much larger number realised it.

  Last month, post-result, Brianna-Joy Gray of the Bad Faith podcast, pointed out that the Democratic Party ‘never call out Donald Trump’s inconsistencies that would actually matter to his base. Liberals consistently criticise Trump for things that Liberals care about. (e.g.) “Oh, he’s so orange . . . oh, he’s a racist . . . oh, he’s impolitic.” Guest Katie Halper added; “the way he treats the working-class, is the way they should be going.”  Correct, but that would entail saying the quiet part out loud, so exposing the true aligned interests of both main parties. Something liberals, here in the UK, also conveniently avoid. Anya Parampil of The Grayzone neatly summed-up why the Dems lost: “They crafted a lie that no-one else believed. They mistook the reality they’d created for the actual reality Americans are living in.”

Why should this matter to Communists? Because unless this cross-party voter disenfranchisement with the status quo can be encouraged and somehow harnessed, a crucial opportunity for class politics and consequent radical change will have been missed. For it is the case that sections of the working-class American public have finally been waking-up. Identity Politics has become widely discredited (thanks, most recently, to the Kamala Harris campaign relying upon it), while, inevitably, the right has taken advantage; however, the disenchanted non-party aligned who weren’t already in Trump’s MAGA fan club, prior to 2020, will, I suspect, ultimately be reminded, during his second term, why he was never the antidote.

 Independent US journalists have pointed out that, aside from the activists, Socialism – let alone Communism – is dead in America. As here in the UK, capitulating unions have ensured that. The state brainwashing has certainly done its job when Republicans can call fellow corporate imperialist Harris “Far” and “Hard Left” and have their voters parroting this. Reactionary authoritarianism is the new go-to as opposition. This might be funny if the implications weren’t so sinister. Yet, the conditions in which Communism can thrive is now revealed before their eyes, even if – so far – it daren’t be articulated. With a discredited, gloves-off Imperialism, so goes fake centrism and liberalism, once citizens start to make the connections; ones that may, finally, discredit the MSM and so enable a strong third-party, bottom-up movement to thrive.

 In mid-November, Jon Stewart sat down with Biden’s Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco. It may be a surprise to Ms. Monaco that it shed light, to everyone else who watched the interview, on her department’s $850 billion budget and how Government funds are so casually mismanaged. In response to Stewart’s question on accountability, she asked for clarity. He added; “there’s a lot of waste, fraud and abuse within a system . . .

MONACO: “Audits and waste, fraud and abuse are not the same things. So let’s decompose (sic) these pieces.”

STEWART: “So, please educate me on what the differences are.”

MONACO: “Sure, so an audit is exactly what you just described, which is, ‘do I know what was delivered to each place?’ The fact that the GOP has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud and abuse. That is completely false.”

STEWART: “So, what is it suggestive of?”

MONACO: “It’s suggestive that we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where. That’s not the same as saying that we cannot do that because waste, fraud and abuse has occurred.”

STEWART: (Ironically). “So,…in my world, that’s waste.”

MONACO: “How is that waste?”

STEWART: “If I give you a billion dollars, and you can’t tell me what happened to it, that to me is wasteful and that means that you are not responsible . . . If you can’t tell me where it went, then what am I supposed to think?”

Stewart then contrasted her the dismissive view to those being given so little for basic services, when the State Department seems so lax with such a large military budget. Remember Monaco’s admission. “It’s suggestive we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where.” I re-quote the above not because the content will be any surprise, but, the casual Governmental attitude accompanying it.

Subsequently, Max Blumenthal, during a debate with fiscal conservative Republican and former Trump speech-writer Darren Beattie of Revolver News, commented: “The Pentagon has failed its seventh audit in a row. One-trillion dollars is missing. Everything else pails in comparison to that. So, if you’re not going to go in there and force an audit of the Pentagon and then cut all of the waste, and all of the money going to the ‘beltway bandits’ – that are just corporate welfare for the upper-class in Northern Virginia – all of these corrupt programmes that do nothing (then what’s the point?) It’s all there. If Pete Hegseth (Trump’s proposed pick for United States Secretary of Defence) is actually willing to take that on, then I will cheer. Everybody supports that – except for Congress.”

I’d like to believe that the funding of the Gaza genocide had a major bearing on the anti-Harris vote, but, there was so much else out-of-touch in the Democratic Party’s re-election campaign, the extent of its effect is somewhat buried. The Democratic Party’s silence on it, however, only emphasised the working-class’s correct perception of their irrelevance.

Many of us have, like myself, been ‘friend requested’ by US Trump supporters simply because of our critiques of Biden and the Dems. Where once I may have mocked such requesters, today, I realise it is also a symptom of something far wider than racism alone, since an additional number of posters encompass all shades of US ethnicity, equally powerless from decades of neoliberalism and the lack of leverage to replace it.  The next step must be to remorselessly discredit the demonising of the solution – in public – by articulating it in a way that links to those problems they recognise and experience on a daily basis.

Communist Fight Series 2 Issue 8 out now!

This issue focuses on the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the Middle East/West Asia region, which has become much more evident since the journal went to print, with the US-Israel-Turkiye- backed offensive of jihadist terrorists in North-West Syria, against Russian and Hezbollah opposition alongside Syria. However, the lead article is about the crisis precipitated by the lame-duck Biden administration after Harris was defeated by Trump in the US presidential election in October. The ‘permission’ given by the Biden administration to the Ukrainian regime to fire British Storm Shadow and US ATTACMS mid-range cruise missiles into Russia is a major escalation towards WWIII. Because these missiles cannot be fired and programmed by Ukrainians – they do not have the satellites and technical infrastructure to do this. These are Western missiles programmed and aimed by the West. Meaning that Russia is now being bombed directly by NATO imperialism.

The response by Russia in unveiling the mid-range hypersonic Oreshnik missile is analysed, which appears for now to have stymied the Biden administration. Along with Trump’s victory, which appears to be two-pronged – a degree of popular support due to his rhetorical isolationism over Ukraine, combined with the collapse of the Democratic Party vote being driven by the inflation and hardship to the working class inflicted by anti-Russian sanctions over Ukraine. The statement notes the danger of WWIII, and the difference between this confrontation and previous world cataclysms. Such a war would not be inter-imperialist, but rather a war of the imperialist US hegemon and its client imperialists against an alliance centrally of the Global South, encompassing two remaining smaller deformed workers states (Cuba and North Korea)  and centrally led by two giant ex-workers states, Russia and China, whose form of restored capitalism has a massive proletarian deformation derived from their previous many decades of post-capitalist economic and military development.

The issue contains a fine article by Mark Andresen that expands on the reasons for Trump’s victory in the disillusionment of the working class, not only with liberalism, but also palpably with its right-wing opponents, and the opportunities that this gives to communists. And there is a signed article by Ian Donovan which contains a preliminary analysis of the dangers from the Assisted Dying Bill, which in our view involves a serious threat to the sick and the disabled – an even more sinister dimension to the austerity attack since 2010.

But also in this issue is part two of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on another facet of their problematic legacy from the politics of their founder James Robertson – their support for Brexit – that is, the exit of British imperialism from the European Union, and their belief that the working class has some kind of interest in this. We note that there are some positive elements to the political shift that they underwent a few years ago, before the death of Robertson. A grouping of ICL comrades centred in Quebec rose rapidly in the declining ICL though a project to address the national question regarding French-speaking Quebec in mainly English-speaking Canada, and then extending their approach to some of the smaller, multinational states in Europe – such as Spain and France regarding Catalonia and the Basque Country, Corsica, Belgium regarding the Flemish and Walloons, and also Scotland. These are all situations where there is either clear national oppression, or in Belgium a kind of forced unity of two language groups in the same imperialist state. Scotland was also a major part of imperial Britain, not a colony as was Ireland, but there is still a historically evolved national question with elements of oppression which must be addressed. But the New Spartacists mix this up with Robertson’s belief that British separatism from the EU was progressive. We cite Trotsky’s 1923 Essay on The United States of Europe and also Joseph Seymour’s 1977 article On Bourgeois Class Consciousness which both point to the reactionary and nationalist fundamental nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and its division of Europe in particularly, as something that Marxists are bound to oppose.

The letter deals with the New Sparts’ errors over Covid, which led to them somewhat amazingly arguing against lockdowns virtually as a principle, including in China (which they consider to be a workers’ state), even when no vaccines were available, and then for compulsory vaccinations. A strange combination, which seems to have been a by-product of severe disorientation of the tendency after the death of their historic leader and then faced with the Covid pandemic. The organisation collapsed during that period, though the Quebecois trend that shifted the ICL on the national question, took up this strange approach to Covid and became the core of the new leadership. It does appear to have been a confused bridge to a better, orthodox Marxist understanding on some other key questions though, such as the Anti-Imperialist United Front and Permanent Revolution.

We also address their failures in the Corbyn period, to fully engage and do entry work in the Labour Party during that crucial period of leftward shift in Labour. We counterpose our record of principled and somewhat high profile entry work in Socialist Fight, to the Sparts abstentionism. We are sharply critical of some of the discussions that went on and still go on today among their people, where they confuse the leftward movement represented by Corbynism in its first few years, at least up to the 2017 General Election, with their schemes about how Brexit was supposedly something that the workers movement was obliged to support. This is how, when the class struggle was being waged at a surprisingly high political level in the Labour Party during this period, the Sparts were embroiled in sterile internal debates about how it was unprincipled to support Corbyn because he didn’t support Brexit, and even ended up themselves publishing material about Brexit that they, not we, condemned as amounting to ‘political support’ to Boris Johnson’s Tories. A terrible muddle of political errors, which our letter attempts to bring some clarity to.

The next issue of Communist Fight will include the final part of this letter, which addresses the ‘Russian Question’ today – the nature of Russia and China after the 1989-91 Counterrevolutions – the reason for the continuing conflicts between these giant former workers states and world imperialism, and the contradictions and shortcomings of the New Spartacists over Ukraine today.

This issue therefore contains much of considerable importance to socialists and all class-conscious working-class people.

Trump cannot “Make America Great Again” – the ship has sailed!

Here is an interesting commentary on the election of the fascist demagogue Donald Trump from the Facebook page of Mike Gimbel, a lifelong Communist from the United States.

Many good people are, for good reasons, horrified by the election, yesterday, in the US, of Donald Trump as President.

Donald Trump is just as arrogant, racist and Misogynist today, as when he was elected US President, in 2016.

However, there is a huge difference economically, politically and militarily for US imperialism, in 2024, from 2016.

The world has changed!

That is why we need to be confident that our working class and oppressed comrades should be optimistic!

In 2016 the US was able to intimidate and threaten every nation on the globe, with economic sanctions and military threats.

In 2016, every nation on the globe, even including China and Russia, had to measure very carefully, their actions and their words, in terms of how US-led imperialism would react.

US-led imperialism acted with confidence and arrogance, as WORLD HEGEMON, in 2016.

Today, in 2024, US-led imperialism is in the process of seeing its hegemony evaporate before the eyes of the people of the entire world and has become the object of hatred over its leading role in the genocide in Gaza.

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office, as US President, on January 20, 2025, he will face the world with his usual arrogance limited greatly, because he will be the leader of a hugely weakened world power.

Donald Trump’s arrogance and anger, therefore, can logically only be utilized WITHIN the USA, not externally against Russia and China, no matter how much he may wish to.

However, Logic is not Donald Trump’s greatest asset! We will have to wait and see whether the neocons around him will lead Trump into a stupid military misadventure, which will only ACCELERATE US-led imperialism’s collapse!

For now, it appears that Trump is determined to avoid such a war and, instead, to try to fight an economic trade war, not only with China, but with much of the nations of the globe! Not a wise move!

This economic trade war will further destroy the economic well-being of the US population, as an inflationary spiral would result from that trade war.

The Tariffs imposed on foreign goods, by Trump’s proposed economic policies, would have to be paid for by the working class at the checkout counters in the retail establishments, because most of the goods purchased in the US, will be of foreign production.

How will that strengthen US imperialism? It cannot and will not! It will just further weaken the economy as the purchasing power of the US population will decline drastically, forcing thousands of US businesses into bankruptcy, for lack of customers!

Trump’s election triumph will, at first, make his fascist followers ‘heady’ with hopes that CANNOT BE FULFILLED!

Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again” cannot be made a reality. That ‘ship’ has sailed!

US imperialism faces a hard reality:

IT IS $36 TRILLION IN DEBT!

US imperialism’s economy is being strangled by those 850 foreign military bases, which serve only TODAY, as ‘easy targets’, no longer as a projection of actual military power!

The monstrous cost to the US budget and the US economy, for maintenance of those foreign bases, will quickly become a dividing issue withing the capitalist ruling classes, within the USA, once the realization of the loss of effectiveness of those military bases, for demonstrating US imperialism’s military power, becomes apparent.

The US military Industrial Complex (MIC) is not the center of control of US capitalist rule, no matter how much some on the left may believe it.

What is a MIC used for?

It is the “WORLD POLICE FORCE” to protect US imperialist profits and the US capitalist ruling classes!

The MIC is just like your local police force, which is designed to intimidate the internal class enemy, whereas the MIC is the US POLICE FORCE for intimidating the EXTERNAL class enemy.

The Middle East Oil and Gas is the greatest source of profit for US-led imperialism and its capitalist ruling classes.

In the Middle East, the MIC is the imperialist protection force for that oil and gas predation of the Middle East.

The Zionist entity was set up as an imperialist MILITARY OUTPOST, for the MIC, to protect US-led imperialism’s predatory profits, against any attempt by nations in the region’s attempts to nationalize their oil and gas production facilities.

Donald Trump, in other words, is taking control of the leadership of US imperialism, with few, if any, ‘cards’ to play because the MIC, after losing wars in the Ukraine and in Palestine, is now draining the power of US imperialism, not the other way around!

In other words, Donald Trump cannot “Make America Great Again”!

His followers will be quickly disappointed!

Yes, the maniacal fascist ‘core’ of Trump’s supporters will ignore reality and are likely to try to smash everything and everyone to their left, when Trump is unable to fulfill their furtive dreams, but the mass of the population will move strongly to the left, in order to defend their standard of living, under the coming harsh economic austerity that Trump will be forced to implement.

AGAIN, I REPEAT:

DONALD TRUMP HAS NO ANSWERS FOR WHAT IS COMING!

THIS IS NOT THE GERMANY OF WWI AND WWII.

In WWI and WWII, Germany was a rising imperialist power, with a huge industrial base. In both wars, Germany could hope to challenge US imperialism for world dominance, if it was able to place the entire European industrial base under its military control. (see my linked video, below, for historical background)

The US is not the Germany of those two wars!

Germany was an industrial power! The US de-industrialized!

The New York Stock Exchange cannot fight a war! It produces nothing!

Donald Trump’s confusion also comes from the fact that his wealth comes from completely outside of the industrial and manufacturing and mining sectors.

Trump is a ‘Real Estate Baron’.

Trump is just a BIG LANDLORD, the very epitome of a ‘rentier’ capitalist!

Capitalism is based upon production of goods, whereas a LANDLORD is a relic of FEUDALISM.

LANDLORD’s serve no purpose in capitalist production! They are the ultimate ‘bloodsuckers’.

In every revolution, the first target of the outraged masses, is the LANDLORD!

Donald Trump knows how to ‘Buy and Sell’, which is a relic of a long bygone era, but has little knowledge of CAPITALIST PRODUCTION! That is why Trump focuses on TRADE, not PRODUCTION, as the solution to the US imperialist economic problems!

Putting tariffs on goods entering the country, trying to force foreign capitalist to relocate their factories to the USA, in order to sell into the massive US market, is folly.

The massive rise in inflation, due to the cost created by those very tariffs, will be a huge disincentive to that investment, as it will cause the US market to shrink, simply because the US masses will not have the money to buy those goods!

As such, Donald Trump can be, and likely will remain, the ‘bull in the China shop’, breaking all the dishes. He can’t help himself. He doesn’t understand the economic system that he is the leader of. He has no vital connection, in his experience, to its CAPITALIST economic base.

The Democratic Party, representing the core of the US capitalist ruling classes, has decades of experience leading US CAPITALISM.

Donald Trump, however, is likely to make US-led imperialism go even quicker into decline simply because he has far less experience and far less necessary connections to experienced ruling class leaders needed to do the job. US imperialism has hired a veritable “Mob Boss” as its leader! A “Mob Boss” only knows how to run a ‘protection racket’, not an economy!

Yes, the near future, for the US working classes and oppressed peoples, may likely be made difficult, perhaps even in bloody confrontations, but that difficulty comes with an optimistic outcome a little farther ‘down the road’.

JUST BE PATIENT AND READY TO STRUGGLE, COMRADES!

GET READY!

ORGANIZE!

COMMUNISM WILL WIN!

Communist Fight series 2, issue 6 is out now!

This issue centres on the racist riots that convulsed Britain in early August, and the creditable response by the left in Britain. Both lead articles analyse the events from different angles, with the back-page lead focusing in more detail on the events themselves and the government’s attitude. It notes the racism and anti-migrant chauvinism which successive British governments, Labour and Tory, have promoted for many years, which provided the background to the eruption of violent racism, and the economic decline and decay which provides its economic basis. It touches upon the question of who funds the far right in Britain today, noting the Zionist interest and influence in promoting Islamophobia and targeting the Muslim population.

The other lead article goes into this more, noting the lack of any real political distance between the government and the far-right rioters, that both support the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, though in the case of the government they are now trying to cover their tracks with fake ‘peace’ gestures.  It notes that both the government and the far right have a common interest in punishing the Muslim population for their role in the mass movement against the genocide, which is now spreading to the West Bank. Starmer may may punish rioters and jail the most ardent and violent, but at the same time they agree in targeting and persecuting the left and oppressed minorities. It was not the Labour government and the cops that defeated the planned and announced mass pogrom on August 9th – it was the left and anti-racist activists acting completely independently who out-mobilised the fascists by a ratio of sometimes hundreds to one and stopped this horror from materialising. This inflicted a serious tactical defeat on the fascists, for now at least.

Though the left, the trade unions and the labour movement need to create our own military organisations – we cannot trust the police and the racist Starmer government to deal with far-right thugs.

Other articles in this issue include a detailed programmatic analysis of the political roots of right-wing populism in the current state of decline of US hegemony and the inability of the imperialist bourgeoisie to break with the nation-state, an institution that is palpably obsolete. However, the bourgeoisie is bound to it, and when capitalist logic appears to point beyond it, we see the eruption of major factional wars within the ruling class between right-wing populists, on the one hand, and supposed ‘globalists’ on the other.

We also have a statement that was earlier agreed by our international organisation, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and the ClassConscious trend in the US and Australia, on the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July. This deals with the palpable threat of Civil War in the US. It is accompanied by an introduction by the Consistent Democrats noting what has happened since – the enforced retirement of Joe Biden from the Presidential election and the seeming rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to a stronger position in the contest with Trump.

It notes that even a Harris victory would not necessarily remove the threat of civil war, for what is driving much of it is the fear and hatred of ruling class white supremacists of the prospect of whites no longer being the majority population in the US, a change that is approaching. Egged on by Zionists who see Trump as their most fervent supporter. An entirely legitimate victory of the non-white Harris could easy precipitate an attempted overthrow.  And though we abhor the Democratic Party and would not consider voting for this arch-imperialist party or especially this administration with its support for genocide in Gaza, we would advocate that the labour movement mobilise form a united front mobilisation, and in fact a military united front, to defeat any such attempt to impose Trump by such a coup.

Finally, we have a short piece noting the need for a new working-class party, addressing some of the problems involved in seeing George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain as qualified to take on that role. It is nowhere near as clear cut as that, as the article argues.

The Trump Attack and “Civil War”

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

Trump’s ‘assassination’ photo-opportunity

The seeming assassination attempt on former President and almost dead-cert Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania is one more bizarre episode as the US appears to be staggering towards the possibility of civil war. Trump gives the appearance of having been grazed on the left ear by a bullet. If that were true, he would have survived by pure luck – a couple of inches away from a likely fatal or at least incapacitating head shot. A 20-year-old shooter was killed by security.  

There are other interpretations. Serious questions remain about this so-called “security lapse”.  It is possible that this was an elaborate false flag stunt to help Trump’s election campaign, perhaps with a patsy who was sacrificed. False flags are frequently used by all wings of US imperialism. It will be recalled that Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right ex-president of Brazil, used a dubious stabbing incident in 2014 for dramatic effect to boost his drive to power. Regardless of the truth of this incident, the scenes of Trump’s bloodied face with fist in the air will be powerful material to promote his fascistic presidential bid.

Meanwhile the Democrats are in deep crisis, as the fact that Joe Biden is dementia-ridden, and incapable of functioning is now centre-stage. Behind the scenes, there are considerable efforts underway in the Democratic Party to replace him, to pressure him to stand down from the Democratic presidential nomination in favour of an alternative. In the frame is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but she is an unpopular figure – a right-wing prosecutor in California who was vehemently hostile to campaigns against murderous police shootings of minority youth, which are endemic in the US. Other possibilities include the Governor of California, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, or even former first lady Michelle Obama. 

Trump, on the other hand, is a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 charges associated with his payoff to a porn star to hide his sexual adventures. These would be of little legitimate interest were he not a on a crusade to destroy women’s right to abortion, and the rights of trans people, in the name of Christian ‘morality’. He was evidently guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and many more besides. He attempted a ‘beer-hall putsch’ on 6th January 2021 to stop the transfer of power to his successor Biden when he lost the 2020 Presidential election.

But the Democrats never dared to go after him for that until it was too late. And when they belatedly did so, the Supreme Court far-right majority which he put in place declared that he, and presidents generally, have virtual immunity from prosecution for acts committed in office. Which as many pointed out, in effect makes a president akin to a king or establishes a US version of the “Fuhrer principle”. Richard Nixon would certainly have made good use of that ruling.  It would be interesting, perhaps, to speculate that if Biden were to ‘officially’ order the summary killing of Trump and his cohort judges, in the name of defending the US constitution against subversion from the far right, he could plausibly declare that he was immune from prosecution according to the ruling of those very same judges. He could then appoint new judges and force congress to endorse them at gunpoint, to overturn the previous ruling going forward, but not retrospectively.

But Biden is evidently mentally unfit to do that. And even if he were not, the bourgeoisie is politically incapable of such resolute action in defence of the democratic rights that the Democratic Party sometimes claims to stand for. Biden is more interested in sending hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Nazi Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia and defend US world hegemony, than in defending democratic rights at home. Likewise, Biden sends many billions in military aid to the Zionist state to carry on with its genocide of the Palestinian people. Trump today as in the past is funded by Likudniks like Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow. She plans to spend $100 million dollars to elect Trump; her late husband, the Likudnik gambling billionaire, bankrolled his presidential campaign in 2016.

The payoff for that was the US moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, US recognition of the Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, seized in 1967, and the annexation of the Jordan Valley area on the West Bank. As well as the end of Obama’s JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran.  It was Trump’s brazen support for this intensification of the oppression of the Palestinians, and his attempt through the ‘Abraham Accords’ with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to liquidate the Palestinian question entirely, that created the conditions where the breakout of October 7th from Gaza became inevitable, and the genocidal response from Israel also.

Trump promises to openly and brazen support Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ of exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza. The Democrats say nothing about this, as for all Biden’s occasional double talk about a ceasefire, everyone knows that his administration has backed the genocide to the hilt with arms and for months raised its bloody arm in the UN Security Council to defend Israel against overwhelming condemnation from the majority of humanity. Both parties are brazenly up to their necks in the Zionist holocaust.

That is the position of the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie in general. The ruling class, with all its terrible contradictions, unites as a class to limit and destroy the democratic rights of the masses. That is the ABC of Marxism, though charting what could and ought to be done about the kind of fascistic threat that Trump represents has agitational usefulness for Marxists.

But what is important is understanding the class-based reasons that are driving the United States towards a potential armed conflict between its two main parties. It does appear that the potential geographic lines of a civil conflict are not dissimilar to the fault lines of the secessionist civil war of the slavocracy in the middle of the 19th Century. With less developed and ethnically diverse states such as Texas and Florida at the centre of the Trump-led GOP block. The opposite, Democratic Party trend being centred in California, the Great Lakes area (Illinois in particular) and New England/New York with their ethnically mixed population, stronger trade unions and minority organisations, and comparatively liberal politics. 

There appears to be no solid class basis for such a Civil War. It was clear in the 19th Century that that conflict was between two mutually antagonistic ruling class layers that had their material roots in different forms of labour exploitation. The Northern bourgeoisie was solidly based on wage labour and classical bourgeois extraction of surplus value for its material basis. The Southern slavocracy gained its considerable wealth from the production of commodities, such as cotton, tobacco and sugar, by means of slave labour, where the worker himself was the property of the slave owner. This was obviously a clear class difference, and the US civil war had the character of a social revolution – the destruction of one archaic form of labour and hence mode of production (slavery, albeit slavery that had an early-capitalist origin as a tool of so-called primitive accumulation) by a social formation based on the capitalist mode of production in a classic sense.

The Civil War that is brewing now appears not to have any such class basis. It would be based on two camps both fully rooted in the capitalist mode of production, and to be thus incomprehensible in class terms. But there is an explanation. An important clue as to why this is happening is the disputes in Europe involving far right trends such as Nigel Farage and his Reform Party in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) in France, the Alternative fűr Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) in Germany, the followers of the far-right politician Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the bourgeois mainstream. These right-wing populist trends, which overlap considerably with fascism even if they are not all actually fascist, are strongly at odds with their respective bourgeois mainstreams over the proxy war in Ukraine. They regard it as a provocation that threatens ‘their’ nation-states with severe damage or destruction for no good reason. Trump’s followers in the US have similar views.

The basis for this antagonism is capitalist globalisation. In the period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, the US achieved unparalleled global dominance, far beyond even that which it exercised in the three ‘golden decades’ after WWII, when the USSR was a potent barrier to its domination. With the USSR dissolved, for the entire decade of the 1990s US domination was far more grandiose and all-encompassing, despite such defeats as Vietnam which it suffered in the 1970s. But this has been accompanied by the deindustrialisation of the major imperialist countries, including Britain and the United States, the relocation of much industrial production to places like China and India, and the increasing financialisation of capitalism in the imperialist countries of North America and Western Europe. In contrast to the hollowed out West, China’s economy, trade links and productive capacities continue to increase apace. ClassConscious attribute China’s success to the CCP’s as a workers’ state with continued control over the “commanding heights of the economy” whilst the LCFI think China is more similar to ex-Soviet Russia. a powerful bourgeois state where capitalism is still restricted by its inability to overcome deformations and restrictions to capital bequeathed by several decades of productive growth where a higher, socialist mode of production was in preparation. Regardless, the economic and military rise of China is fuelling the sense of crisis in the US ruling class.

This has created a situation where the obsolesce of the capitalist-imperialist nation state, which revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky remarked upon in connection with the two world wars in the 20th Century, has become a live issue causing divisions in the bourgeoisie. Financialisation and the migration of production out of the imperialist countries appears to threaten the imperialist nation-state itself and has produced a backlash among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself.

In the 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness” (see page 4) the leading Marxist intellectual of the Spartacists, Joseph Seymour noted that:

“While capable of certain acts and attitudes of internationalist solidarity, the bourgeoisie is a nationally limited class. It is capable neither of abolishing national states nor, often, even of subordinating immediate national interests to the historic defence of the bourgeois order.” (Spartacist 24, 1977, at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/on-bourgeois-class-consciousness/)

Today, in the context of the aftermath of the ‘New American Century’ that was fleetingly born in the aftermath of the end of Stalinist rule in the East, there is a backlash underway among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie against this financialisation and ‘globalisation’. This is what led to Brexit in Britain. It is why Trumpism is a potent movement in the US, which threatens the US with civil war. It is also highly threatening to the coherence of the European Union itself; just how threatening remains to be seen. These wings of the various imperialist bourgeoisies are quite prepared to make use of fascists and quasi-fascists as a weapon against their bourgeois opponents.

They are not, for the most part, today confronting mobilised workers movements that are a threat to capitalist rule and aiming to crush such movements. Thanks to the decline of social democracy and the collapse of Stalinism, such movements are generally far weaker. However, under conditions of crisis, even the possibility of workers organising in the most limited or even spontaneous ways is deeply threatening and is also driving all factions of the ruling class towards authoritarianism. There is a fear that even mild social democratic reforms, let alone a revolutionary movement may develop. That is why the ruling class for example of the US and UK responded so viciously to the possibility of reformists like Sanders or Corbyn taking power. It also explains their hostility to social media and the bipartisan support to ban Tik Tok in the US.

But a key element of globalisation is the presence of migrant workers, and these fascists are a potent threat to them, which is why the workers movement must steadfastly stand against these movements. Of course, targeting migrants is also a key way to channel working class discontent into reactionary ends.

A turn towards fascism by a section of the ruling class is therefore seen as the answer to domestic and international problems but these bourgeois movements are ultimately doomed to defeat; they will not be able to reverse the deindustrialisation and financialisation of the imperialist countries. Trump’s sponsorship by the Israel lobby gives that away. Even the Zionists, who have a major bourgeois international dimension, are divided about this. The United States particularly is vulnerable to a collapse and a division that could conceivably bury it as a world power. Because, after its 19th Century Civil War, the knitting back together of the US as a nation was shaky and incomplete. As part of this contradictory process, it’s major parties even appeared to change places with regard to the continuity of the Civil War – the Republicans are now the party of the reactionary South, the Democrats the party of the liberal North. It is therefore entirely feasible that the US could be torn apart by this antagonism, and come to an end as a world power, with a whimper more than a bang. The other dangerous possibility is that the self-destructive path the US ruling class is embarked upon will drag the world into a Third World War. It is the job of Communists to intervene wherever possible to build a movement that can end the threat of fascism and world war by removing its source – the decayed capitalist system. Regardless, the apparent attempted assassination of Trump demonstrates that the pace of events towards one conclusion or another are accelerating at the heart of world imperialism.