by Roger Silverman
The return to power of Donald Trump in the USA marks the beginning of a new era in world history.
In its former strongholds of North America, western Europe and Japan, capitalism is decaying, prone to periods of stagnation punctuated by slumps and weak recoveries, and dominated by a shrinking elite of super-billionaires indulging in largely parasitic, corrupt and speculative profiteering. Its political profile has degenerated accordingly into sleaze and demagogy. And under its stewardship the environment is rotting, posing an existential threat to human civilisation.
The supremacy of the old dominant powers is challenged by the BRICS bloc, satellites revolving around the rising giant superpower China – a hybrid society which, thanks to inexhaustible supplies of labour and a regime of state planning, has surged ahead economically and is now pioneering futuristic leaps forward, for instance in electric cars and information technology.
Only rarely has a dying empire gracefully ceded supremacy once its time has come. The USA is preparing for war with China. Faced with the threat of China’s current ally Russia with its huge nuclear stockpile, the traditional faction of the US ruling class had been seeking, at colossal cost and with diminishing returns, to exhaust Russia’s resources with economic sanctions and a proxy war. The old order is now displaced, triumphally supplanted by a new faction operating an alternative strategy: to appease and neutralise Russia. This explains Trump’s determination to end a war which it was already losing in Ukraine by conceding its neutrality and ceding Crimea and Donbas.
Trump’s brutal rupture with the eighty-year old NATO alliance and his rapprochement with Russia are therefore by no means perverse. They represent a perfectly rational recognition of the new world balance of forces. His Vice-President Vance calls for a “focus on East Asia, which is where our most significant competitor is for the next 20 or 30 years”. Even more clearly, Secretary of State Rubio says: “We’re in a situation now where the Russians have become increasingly dependent on the Chinese… If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States… It’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.”
The far right and fascism
This fundamental regime change is not confined to the USA. The ruling classes have torn off their liberal masks. The collapse of social democracy and the failure of any alternative left groups have opened a vacuum into which have stepped radical far-right parties. In Europe, one government after another has fallen into their hands, with Germany, Spain, France and Britain likely soon to follow. Trump, Musk and Vance are openly promoting the AfD in Germany, and in Britain not just Reform but even Tommy Robinson.
In the heyday of capitalism, business entrepreneurs entrusted the running of their state to the experts. The classic bourgeois state served as an executive committee of the entire capitalist class, acting to manage their affairs, protect their common interests, resolve disputes between them, collect taxes to administer their needs, provide essential services, subdue the working class, etc. Political leaders in their day were connoisseurs with a range of diplomatic skills, strategic expertise, an insight into the lessons of history. Trotsky commented that at its height the British ruling class was able to plan for decades and even centuries ahead. By contrast, Trump has the strategic foresight of a flea; he switches policy several times a day.
The shutdown of entire government agencies, mass deportations, political victimisations, forcible annexations, defiance of climate treaties, a global trade war, a new concentration camp in Guantanamo, even preparations for world war with China… These are not mere tactical shifts of policy; this is a coup. How long before we see a new “Reichstag fire”: a theatrical pretext enabling him to assume emergency powers?
It is true that both Mussolini and Hitler also came to power initially by constitutional means; but there is a big difference. Both came to power after years of class struggle: strikes, uprisings, revolutions which were confronted on the streets by counter-revolutionary thugs. The impasse in the class struggle having sapped the ability of the ruling class to wield power by traditional means, it made a decision to incorporate these private street gangs into the state machine and relinquish control to lawless and unaccountable dictators.
Yet it is a mistake to call the Trump regime fascist; it is the exact opposite. Fascism means the voluntary surrender by the ruling class of direct political power to an agency of brute force in conditions of crisis and deadlock in the class struggle, once traditional means of control have failed. Far from submission to an unaccountable dictatorship, Trumpism is the personal takeover of the functions of the state by a handful of capitalist oligarchs. They have amassed into their hands such a vast accumulation of wealth and power that they have dismissed the services of a professional elite to administer their affairs. They have dispensed with the finesse, diplomacy and strategic planning of a classic bourgeois state.
Trump & Co. represent a declining empire thrashing around to maintain its supremacy by whatever means available: dismantling constitutional balances, curbing free speech, driving down wages, imposing tariffs, threatening annexations, launching mass deportations of minority ethnic groups. They have fascist ambitions; however, we should be cautious about using that term. We shouldn’t discard Trotsky’s very specific definition. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet came to power in the wake of years of bitter class struggle; they had a mass base in the form of very real private street armies. They terrorised, jailed, tortured and physically exterminated a generation of working-class militants, and as a consequence their regimes lingered on for many years. Trump and Musk personally are aspiring fascists, but their rule has yet to be put to the test. They do have at their disposal small fascist gangs which could later be deployed, but at this stage these are held in reserve. At some stage we can expect widespread working-class resistance. Only once Trump succeeds in decisively crushing it can something like a classical fascist regime materialise.
Society today has become so grotesquely polarised, wealth so monstrously concentrated, capitalism so grossly monopolised that it feels it can dispense with the need to assign its collective interests to a specialised political agency: it now rules directly in its own name. Naked personal power is concentrated directly in the hands of brash billionaires: the crooked property tycoon Trump and the venture capitalist Elon Musk (soon to become the world’s first trillionaire). They have dismissed their traditional caste of political administrators and seized direct power for themselves.
The iron heel
Trump is running the state as “the art of the deal”, dispensing with the old political arts. He is a speculator who creates no value but simply buys and sells. He treats the presidency as a sequel to his former TV “reality show”. His foreign policy largely entails the acquisition of property; he remains fundamentally a property speculator with his eye on lucrative plunder: Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, the minerals of Ukraine, the “riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza. Musk too is essentially just another investor. He may or may not know much about cybernetics or cosmology or space rockets; he simply has a nose for profit.
But a state ruled directly by the oligarchy and lacking the strategic skills of a professional political caste can only end up all the sooner in an almighty crash. And that can only bring confrontation. What is the future for the American working class? The imposition of tariffs will raise prices and precipitate a recession; the purge of state payrolls will push up unemployment; the expulsion of migrant workers and the forced relocation of US companies from abroad will squeeze workers’ wages and conditions closer to third-world levels. Whatever illusions in the American dream still linger on will evaporate.
The new era of Trump and Musk was already foreshadowed in Jack London’s prophetic novel The Iron Heel, written 117 years ago, in which the oligarch tells the revolutionary hero: “We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.” The hero replies: “There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers.“
Never in history has there been such universal unrest. Even the revolutions that followed the first world war were confined to Europe and parts of Asia, whereas today they are shaking every continent. Above all, the youth are mobilising worldwide in Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Palestine solidarity and climate protests. A succession of overthrown dictators have fled their palaces.
While in its former strongholds the working class has lost its industrial base and its traditional reformist parties are in terminal decline, a new working class is emerging. It constitutes today a majority of the world population, based now on every continent, with women in the forefront of militant struggle. It comprises massive pent-up power, East and West. Once it rises to its feet, it will open up a new chapter of history.
The voice of the working class is yet to be heard; crucial struggles lie ahead. The mass of the working population have not yet stirred. It is inconceivable that they will remain silent. Big battles lie ahead. The last word is yet to be spoken.