Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org
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.
