Here we present the Revolutionary Communists of America’s draft document, “US Perspectives 2026: The Coming American Revolution.” It was unanimously adopted by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communists of America, to be debated at the upcoming Third Congress of the Party on May 30–31.

The aim of this process is to facilitate a Party-wide discussion on our political perspectives and organizational tasks, and to determine the direction of the Party over the next period. If you are a member of the RCA but you are not yet registered for the Congress, there is no time to wait. And, if you agree with these perspectives but you are not yet a member of our organization, join us!

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

—Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

This year marks 250 years since the first American Revolution. Yet the American ruling class has no grounds for celebrating the occasion. The country they have ruled for a quarter millennium is teetering on a catastrophe.

As they survey the state of the nation from the bird’s-eye view of their skyscraper penthouses and corporate boardrooms, from their gilded halls of power, and their remote luxury islands, they see a picture of decline. As they look at this country’s position in the world, the mood of its population, perception of its institutions, quality of its political leadership, and its economic trajectory, they have no reason for optimism in the years ahead.

We are living through a historical pivot. On the global stage, US imperialism has lost the hegemonic grip it once held. In the space of 25 decades it has matured from colonial infancy, to unrivaled colossus, to the irreversible frailty of senile decay. Its strength has waned for decades, but in the 2020s, the gradual downward slope has started to tip into free fall. When future historians look back on the country’s curve of rise and decline, they’ll identify this decade as the tipping point.

Capitalism’s historical mission has come and gone. The next American revolution is approaching.

A glimpse into the future

In 2009, the left-liberal academic Mark Fisher wrote a book titled Capitalist Realism. For all the postmodern jargon in its pages, its premise was simple and pessimistic: it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. His book summarized the ideological blindness, empiricism, and despairing resignation that defined the outlook of the “left” of the early 21st century.

Partly, his views reflected the malaise of the time. The financial heart of world capitalism had just stopped beating, only to be revived with taxpayer dollars. Wall Street was bailed out, while millions of workers lost their jobs, homes, and life’s savings. Where was the righteous fury of the working class? Where were the pitchforks and riots? The year 2009 saw just five major work stoppages—the lowest strike figure in US history. From all of this, Fisher concluded that the class struggle was over. Apparently, the capitalists had won.

He was wrong.

At the time, the genuine Marxists in the US were a miniscule force. But we took the long view of the process and examined what was unfolding beneath the surface. We understood that the 2008 crisis would have a profound impact on the consciousness of the American working class, even if it wasn’t expressed immediately and overtly.  The illusions in the system would deteriorate, and the pent-up class anger would find an expression. Eventually, as we predicted in our 2008 US Perspectives document, there would be a “colossal and perhaps surprisingly rapid shift to the left.”

We were right.

The world has changed drastically since then. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, tens of millions of Americans are wide open to communist ideas. A 2025 Cato/YouGov survey is just the latest in a stream of recent polls announcing similar findings: 62% of young people in the US say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, while 34% say the same of communism. Among residents of large US cities, 28% of people of all ages hold a favorable view of communism.

The shift in public opinion has also been expressed on the streets. Three mass movements have erupted across the US in the last six years. The 2020 George Floyd uprising brought 26 million people to their feet against racism and police terror. The Gaza solidarity movement against Israel’s genocidal slaughter mobilized over 2,100 protests across 500 cities, according to a Harvard study. And the spontaneous mass resistance against ICE and other masked federal agents in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis culminated in the first de facto general strike in an American city in 80 years.

The political sea change of the past decade has coincided with the Donald Trump era. As an individual, he encapsulates the distorted contradictions of American politics and the dilemma facing the bourgeoisie. At one and the same time, he’s a billionaire specimen par excellence of the “Epstein class,” and an outsider to the ruling institutions he now dominates. He’s a New York City real-estate gangster, a reality-TV personality, vindictive narcissist, and political misfit in the Washington establishment. He cynically rode a wave of “populist” anger to the White House only to spend hundreds of millions remodeling it with gilded adornments and an opulent ballroom.

Trump is both a symptom of the decline of the US-led postwar liberal world order and its accelerant. He’s both a critic of the foreign policy pursued by US imperialism for decades and a reckless imperialist warmonger. He has fatally undermined the legitimacy of institutions like the news media and destroyed trust in the integrity of elections. He has gleefully dispensed with the decorum and propriety of high office, indulging in crude insults, trolling memes, and brazen lying.

In short, he’s not the man the ruling class wants in the control room. They see him as impulsive, unreliable, unpredictable, and irresponsible. But the ruling class has the leadership it deserves. The fact that he made it to the Oval Office—twice—speaks volumes about the abhorrent alternative offered by the Democratic Party. A vast swathe of the American electorate has decided that whatever else is on the ballot, the Washington status quo is the greater evil.

Decades of accumulated discontent make a return to the pre-2016 political landscape impossible. The chaotic turbulence of the Trump era is part of the price the capitalists must pay for 2008, and for the half-century of misery to which they have subjected significant layers of the working class since the end of the postwar boom. They have no way out, no way to lower tensions, no way to ease the discontent or recover the stability of the past.

Given the innumerable ways the world has changed over the past two decades, would Mark Fisher stand by his 2009 outlook today? We’ll never know. After a long battle with depression, he took his own life three days before Trump was inaugurated for his first term. He didn’t live to see the “brave new world” of the 2020s. He didn’t get to cheer as BLM spread from coast to coast in 2020. He never heard the names Aaron Bushnell, Luigi Mangione, or Renee Good. He thought the capitalists had gotten away scot-free with 2008, as with so many other crimes. He didn’t understand the forces working quietly beneath the surface of events, preparing the minds of millions to turn against this system. He didn’t meet the generation of workers who grew up in a post-2008 economy, or hear the way they talk about the billionaires. He didn’t see the path the US was traveling.

But Marxists are armed with the tools to understand the direction of history. And we can see what’s yet to come. Anyone who watched the barricades go up in the streets of Minneapolis in January 2026 will have caught a glimpse of the future. Anyone who watched the general strike procession, who marveled at the sight of tens of thousands of workers marching triumphantly through the city in -20°F weather to show their defiance of the federal government, got a preview of the scenes that will play out across the country in the years to come. Anyone who woke up to the news of Alex Pretti’s murder the very next morning, anyone whose heart sank while watching the footage of his execution, who felt the horror inside them turn into a throbbing rage, got a preview of the coming revolution, coursing through their veins.

This year marks a quarter millennium since Thomas Jefferson declared the unalienable right of the people to make a revolution. The same revolutionary document that brought our rulers to power proclaims the right to unseat them. It stated that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations” on the part of the government threatens to reduce the people under the weight of despotism, then “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

It is fitting that this was also the year that the working class began to fully see the Epstein class for what it is. Some of the darkest suspicions of the most cynical conspiracy theorists as to the depravity of the elites turned out to be spot on. As if the anti-elite resentment and class hatred that has been accumulating for decades needed another source of fuel. A Financial Times columnist anxiously warned of the danger that “public moral outrage will further corrode faith in US democracy,” adding that a budding Lenin “might see the files as kindling awaiting a revolutionary spark … How can you throw the bums out when they span the system?” The natural answer to his rhetorical question is clear: then you must overthrow the whole system.

A historically exhausted mode of production

The United States is on an inexorable path toward revolution. This is not due to Donald Trump’s provocations or the actions or decisions of any particular politician or billionaire. It won’t be avoided by electing a more competent or skillful bourgeois administration. Every social system in history has its limitations and constraints. Every mode of production has a rise and fall, ultimately determined by its ability to develop the productive forces. It is in this sense that the capitalist mode of production has run its course, and long ago exhausted its potential to move humanity forward. At the deepest level, this is the root cause of the pervasive sense of social decline that  expresses itself in countless metrics, from economic data measuring our falling living standards, to the subtler forms of social and national disintegration expressed in the crises of mental health and deaths of despair.

When the bourgeois revolutions toppled the feudal order and unleashed the productive forces that had been constrained under its domination, their revolutionary historical role was twofold. On the one hand, they created national markets corresponding to nation-states with borders, central governments, and national infrastructure for developing industrial economies. On the other hand, their laws enshrined private ownership of the means of production—profit-driven market competition that induced capitalists to continually invest a portion of their capital into improving productive technique through scientific research and technological innovation.

Marx vividly expressed this astonishing transformation in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

However, these once-progressive features—the nation-state and private ownership of the means of production—have since turned into their opposite. From great advantages, they have become the greatest obstacles to further progress. The task of the coming revolution is to remove these obstacles and bring humanity’s productive  potential to the next level.

Competition between nations and blocs of nations over labor, resources, markets, territories, trade routes, supply chains, and finance capital will be replaced by global coordination and rationalization of the key economic levers of every nation. These will be treated as the collective patrimony of the workers of the world whose labor built this mighty productive capacity to begin with. Democratic planning and workers’ management in every industry will be combined with the highest achievements of technology and the combined scientific research of the entire planet. Virtually overnight, this will unleash material abundance and a breathtaking improvement in living conditions. This is the true power of the rousing finale of the Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!”

A materialist view of today’s tectonic shifts

These are the conclusions that flow from historical materialism—the only scientific approach humanity has yet produced for understanding the real movement of history. The materialist method shines a light on the historical juncture we’re passing through with dizzying speed in the 21st century. Processes that were unfolding gradually for decades are now coming out into the open.

The most fundamental tectonic shift in the global balance of power is the relative decline of US imperialism and the rise of Russia, and above all, China as new superpowers. The magnitude of this change is difficult to overstate. Ever since World War II, US imperialism’s domination of the world market—and its supremacy in  industry, finance, trade, research, engineering, manufacturing, energy, international diplomacy, and military strength—has been the linchpin of world relations. After the collapse of the USSR, the American ruling class enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented dominance—and the corrupting hubris that inevitably accompanies such power.

What is unfolding before our eyes is not merely the unraveling of the post-Cold War unipolarity of the last 30 years, or even the post-WWII world order of the last 80 years. It is bigger than that.

For four centuries, the world market developed under the domination of Western European powers—the Spanish, Dutch, and British Empires—before being overtaken by their American offshoot. Now the clout of Western Europe is in free fall, and the US is not far behind on the slippery slope.

China has overtaken the US in many key industrial, trade, research, engineering, manufacturing, and energy sectors. The world’s four largest banks are Chinese. It controls global supply chains and critical minerals with vital military and commercial applications. And it is vigorously campaigning to unseat America in terms of international diplomacy and multilateral institutions, not to mention the US dollar’s reserve-currency status. The China-led BRICS bloc is emerging as a potential alternative to the “collective West.” Given its own internal contradictions, however, the extent to which it will succeed remains to be seen.

A century ago, Trotsky described the changing balance of power between declining British imperialism and rising American imperialism:

During the war the gigantic economic domination of the United States had demonstrated itself wholly and completely. The United States’ emergence from overseas provincialism at once shifted Britain into a secondary position … the fundamental antagonism in the world is that between Britain and America, and all the other antagonisms which seem more acute and more immediately threatening at a given moment can be understood and assessed only on the basis of this conflict of Britain with America.

Though historical analogies have their limits, these words aptly describe the fundamental antagonism in world relations today. The two imperialist world wars of the last century laid bare the new relationship of global power that had been gradually taking shape. Over the last four years, the wars in Ukraine and now Iran have served a similar function. The entire planet can now see that US military might—and by extension, that of NATO—is no longer superior to its rivals. The difference between projecting overwhelming power and applying it worldwide has been exposed.

Under Biden, US imperialism provoked the Ukraine proxy war against Russia in a desperate gamble. Their aim was to exhaust Russia militarily, strangle it economically through sanctions, and if possible, achieve regime change in Moscow. The installation of a pro-Washington regime in Moscow would facilitate their efforts to do the same against China. But the wager backfired and achieved the opposite result, draining Western equipment and munitions, exposing NATO’s weakness, and contributing to “regime change” in Washington in the form of Trump 2.0.

After blaming his predecessor for starting a war that “never would have happened” on his watch, Trump doubled down on Biden’s disastrous mistake. Trump’s Iran War is merely Act II of the same worldwide drama. The former casino magnate spun the roulette wheel, hoping to secure Venezuela-style regime change in Tehran. His aim was to quickly and painlessly remove a key piece from the chess board. But his gamble backfired badly and could lead to the ejection of US bases from the Middle East altogether. Far from counteracting the decline of US imperialism, these wars of choice have only sped up the process.

What is the underlying reason for this dramatic shift? The Western imperialists treat China’s rise like something that snuck up on them due to tactical errors by US foreign policy. “We let them get too powerful … We shouldn’t have moved our manufacturing base overseas … We shouldn’t have let China join the World Trade Organization.” These impotent laments express the arrogance of a decaying empire, but they explain nothing. The waning position of US imperialism—along with the other advanced economies of the “Western world” roughly coinciding with the OECD countries—is ultimately a result of the impasse of global capitalism.

American finance capital is now far more concentrated than anything Lenin described in his masterpiece, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. With every major industry dominated by colossal monopolies, the market competition that funneled investment toward innovation at an earlier stage of the system has given way to parasitic stock buybacks and shareholder payouts. Since 1980, US corporate spending on factories, property, and equipment has declined by nearly 80% as a share of total revenue. Around 60% of profits now go straight to shareholder payouts, while corporate cash stockpiles approach $8 trillion.

Overproduction looms in every sector of the economy. Why lay out huge sums of capital to build factories and hire more labor when most industries already have more capacity than they can profitably utilize? In the 1960s, US capacity utilization stood at 87%; today, it is 76%.

During the postwar decades, when the world market was rapidly expanding, the capitalists could generally assume that there would be more effective demand tomorrow than there is today. This assumption no longer holds true. For several decades, GDP growth rates in all Western economies have slowed to a crawl. From annual growth of over 5% in the 1960s, the OECD average has plunged to 1.7% in the 2020s. As a result, the smartest investment from a capitalist perspective is not to innovate, expand production, and hire more staff, but to gamble on the stock market. It is this feverish speculation that has inflated the AI bubble to dizzying heights.

For the West, globalization has gone into reverse. The growth rates of the postwar boom will not be restored within the limits of capitalism. This trend cannot be reversed any more than a decrepit old man can become young again.

If the problems plaguing Western capitalist economies boil down to the basic exhaustion of capitalism—the breakdown of the market’s ability to incentivize productive investment—then what explains the apparent dynamism of the core BRICS countries? After all, China and Russia are both capitalist countries, as are Iran, India, and Brazil.

It’s no accident that the two rising superpowers spent a large part of the last century as workers’ states with centrally planned economies. Despite the bureaucratic deformations and the lack of workers’ democracy and control, the advances in the Soviet Union and China nevertheless proved the superiority of economic planning over the anarchy of the market, surpassing the rate of industrialization of any capitalist country. And although both countries underwent a capitalist counterrevolution towards the end of the 20th century—a catastrophic collapse in Russia, a bureaucratically managed transition in China—they inherited certain advantages from the previous system.

Both countries exhibit a significant degree of state intervention and public ownership of certain key sectors, and especially in China’s case, even a degree of economic planning. In a limited sense, this has allowed significant long-term investment in strategic industries to an extent that Western capitalist markets have failed to achieve. On top of this, US-led sanctions designed to isolate and weaken these countries have had the opposite effect, pushing them together into a wide-ranging series of strategic agreements for collaboration on multiple fronts.

In short, the relative dynamism of the large powers within the BRICS is a result of historical conditions that have allowed them to partially and temporarily mitigate the two fundamental barriers holding back world capitalism: private property of the means of production and the nation-state.

Overproduction: the basic capitalist contradiction

By no means does this indicate that China and Russia have overcome the underlying contradictions of capitalism, or that they will make endless strides forward in all the fields in which they have overtaken the West. Nor does it mean that China will replace the US as the world’s hegemon and become the “world policeman” of the 21st century.

For one, the BRICS are not a single nation-state, but a trading bloc that has banded together in response to US bullying. Aside from the advantage it provides in the face of an erratic and aggressive declining Western world order, there is no inherent mutual interest binding these capitalist countries into a permanent union. Each BRICS member still has its own ruling class, national industries and markets, regional ambitions, and particular spheres of influence. They also have their own working classes to pacify. In the game of capitalism, not everyone can be a winner. At a certain point, these fault lines will inevitably assert themselves, just as the European Union is now at risk of breaking apart and pulling in different directions.

Furthermore, the world market has finite limits. The restoration of capitalism in the former planned economies brought hundreds of millions of consumers and low-wage workers into the global market. This expansion of the world economy provided a temporary respite that has run its course. Today, the limits of the world market have been truly maxed out—and there are no more “leases on life” on the horizon, i.e., no large populations holding out on the margins of the world market. Capital has finally nestled everywhere, saturating the entire planet to an unparalleled degree. With nowhere else to turn, the world market is cannibalizing itself as the capitalists seek to export crisis and social unrest to their rivals.

China’s success provides history’s most vivid example of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction: overproduction. The purchasing power of the world market is now too narrow to absorb the full volume of products that China is capable of producing. China exported a record $3.7 trillion worth of goods last year—a figure roughly equivalent to the GDP of the entire world in 1972. And the only way to get those commodities into consumers’ hands is by expanding debt, which merely postpones the day of reckoning.

A third of the world’s physical products are now made in China. The output of some Chinese industrial regions now satisfies global demand for a variety of goods. For example, China produces over half the world’s steel, 70% of lithium-ion batteries, 90% of solar panels, and 90% of global rare-earth refining. Chinese capitalists can sell these and other commodities more cheaply than their competitors. This risks ruining the manufacturing base of every country that trades with China.

As Marx and Engels explained, “The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls.” Trump’s tariff war is nothing but the US ruling class’s frenzied drive to defend and revive their uncompetitive national industries by trying to rebuild a battered Chinese wall of their own. But it’s too little, too late.

This highlights the absurd predicament at the heart of the global economy. In effect, Chinese capitalism has become too advanced for the limits of the world market. Its manufacturing sector is “too strong,” “too efficient,” “too sophisticated.” Its industrial infrastructure and global supply chains are “too integrated and precise.” These extraordinary advances in the productive forces are colliding with the narrow limits of capitalist profit-making. What happens when, inevitably, the glut of commodities no longer finds a market? Sooner or later, as Marx and Engels pointed out, recurring crises of overproduction are unavoidable.

In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

At humanity’s fingertips is an immense technical capacity that could be harnessed to feed, house, and educate billions, shorten working hours, eradicate diseases, and produce the needs of life in abundance. Under capitalism, all of this progress is instead expressed in a vicious global trade war, and, increasingly, open wars.

Trump is a slave of history

“What is Trump trying to do?” “What does he want?” “What’s his plan?” “Does America First mean America everywhere?” “Is he retrenching to the Western Hemisphere? Or starting a new forever war in the Middle East?”

Without a doubt, the world has struggled to make sense of Trump’s policies. This is partly a deliberate attempt on his part to keep the public—including foreign rivals—guessing what he’ll do next. Mostly though, it’s because he’s making it up as he goes, rather than following a coherent strategy based on any kind of consistent ideological outlook. Trump shows all the zigzagging hallmarks of an eclectic, impressionistic, and erratic decision-maker. He is surrounded by “yes” men and women, and is rarely challenged by mediocrities like Vance, Gabbard, Hegseth, Bessent, and Miller. They stumble from one risky misadventure to another, with mixed messages blasting from the White House, and U-turns on one issue after another.

In the early days of his second term, amid the flurry of executive orders, the outrageous press conferences in the Oval Office, and the efforts to “flood the zone” with daily memos and directives, a significant layer of his base took this “shock and awe” as a sign of energetic action and real change. They were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and many assumed that he was operating on the basis of a mysterious and sophisticated “4D chess” strategy.

A year later, only a rump of the most diehard MAGA loyalists still believe this. His every move has blown up in his face. The poorly choreographed circus of gags and gimmicks seen at February’s State of the Union can’t alter the underlying truth. Eventually, reality catches up with the “narrative.”

His historic “Liberation Day” tariffs only caused supply-chain chaos and paralyzing uncertainty for US manufacturers—a far cry from the industrial renaissance he promised. US importers and consumers have paid 96% of the tariffs, and 70% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, say the tariffs have made them pay more for their purchases.

For all his bluster in the tariff showdown with China, Trump blinked first. It was revealed that China was positioned to forgo access to the US consumer market for longer than the US was prepared to forgo Chinese imports and industrial components. Trump justified his retreat by pointing out that the bond market got “a little yippy.” In other words, his game of chicken nearly crashed the US dollar when holders of Treasury bonds deemed his government to be a risky lender and began pulling their money out. For the first time in history, all three credit rating agencies downgraded America’s credit score.

Although the Supreme Court found his tirade of tariffs to be unlawful, he is trying to continue them via different avenues. Stymied on the trade-war front, Trump turned to domestic police terror. He calculated that deploying masked federal agents to conduct high-profile immigration raids in some of the country’s largest cities would shift attention away from the “worst consumer confidence since 2009” headlines. For a while, it did. But when “Border Patrol Commander At Large” Gregory Bovino’s cross-country tour of brutality and teargas went too far and provoked a furious class-war response in Minneapolis, Trump had to back down from that project, too.

Many on the left equate Trumpism to fascism. In reality, this is merely a faithful expression of bourgeois democracy which has always meant the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the exploited majority, ultimately enforced through state repression and violence. Whatever his personal inclinations may be, Trump is not in a position to construct a fascist regime. The movement in Minnesota exposed the state’s weakness, showing that the balance of forces in the US overwhelmingly favors the working class. Trump is an expert at distracting and  diverting attention, and prefers to double down and go on the offensive whenever possible—but there are clear limits to how far he can go.

Bovino and Kristi Noem were removed, ICE’s thugs were drawn down, and operations scaled back. By March 2026, the White House was advising Congressional Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations” in the runup to the midterms. Indiscriminate brutality and the murder of civilians wasn’t polling well.

Steve Bannon, the MAGA ideologue and disgraced Epstein confidant, attributed Trump’s 2024 victory to three pillars: “Stop the forever wars, seal the border and deport the illegal aliens, and redo the commercial relationships in the world around trade deals.”

To this, we could add the number one issue of the last few years: the cost of living crisis. Exit polls on election day showed that seven-in-ten voters felt “dissatisfied or angry” about the direction of the country. The same number rated the condition of the economy as “poor,” while 75% reported that inflation had caused hardship for their families. In the end, nearly 80% of voters who said the economy was their top concern voted for Trump.

In other words, Trump has betrayed every promise he made to his voters. On the campaign trail, he made bombastic speeches about a new “golden age” that would usher in “the best jobs, the biggest paychecks, and the brightest economic future the world has ever seen.” There is a stark contrast between the expectations he whipped up and the reality of his second term.

In 2025, there was a net loss of 113,000 manufacturing jobs. Energy bills increased 13%, despite Trump’s pledges to slash electricity bills in half. In January 2026, a poll by Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos revealed that six in ten respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 46% said the cost of living was the worst they can ever remember. This view was held by 37% of Trump voters. And this was before the war on Iran and the global spike in fuel prices.

In our 2008 US Perspectives document, drafted before Obama had even won the Democratic primaries, we wrote the following:

The next President of the United States of America will not get to pick and choose his or her agenda. The agenda will be set by the crisis facing the capitalist system both at home and abroad. Bush ran on an “America First” domestic agenda, but was forced by events to become the most aggressive imperialist in US history. The next occupant of the White House will inherit an increasingly unstable world and an economic downturn of unknown depth or duration … [As] the “American Dream” is transformed into an “American Nightmare,” more and more people will begin to question the very system that leads to such instability.

This was true about the Bush and Obama years, and it applies even more to Trump. George W. Bush was forced to abandon his own “America First” domestic agenda in favor of launching forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with an $8 trillion price tag. On the campaign trail, Obama opposed these extended quagmires, then bought into them once in office, surging tens of thousands of troops into both countries. As Obama was taking office, US  personnel in Iraq moved into a new embassy the size of the Vatican City—the largest in the world. Despite declaring a withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, thousands of troops remain there to this day.

Likewise, Trump criticized Biden’s war in Ukraine, and cast the Democrats as the party of warmongers and neocons, only to follow in their footsteps. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker,” he declared in his victory speech. Opposition to the disastrous and costly forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been a key component of Trump’s anti-establishment appeal. Now it’s one more MAGA faultline where he’s bleeding support.

The desires, plans, and preferences of individual presidents are no match for the objective requirements of the capitalist system they defend. Amid the luxuries of wealth and high office, Trump is tossed to and fro by historical forces outside his control. “A king is the slave of history,” Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. The same is true of American presidents.

Was Trump just another neocon all along?

When it comes to mixed messages from the Trump White House, his “America First” foreign policy has been the most contradictory. In the “alternative media” circles of geopolitical commentators who champion “multipolarity”—many of them disillusioned former military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials—Trump’s victory was initially greeted with naive optimism. They hoped he would take on the neocon establishment and pursue “peaceful coexistence.”

To some extent, their misreading of Trump’s plans was understandable. After all, his administration initially appeared to signal a change of course from Biden’s policy. His criticism of the Ukraine War and NATO seemed to indicate his intention to abandon the postwar alliance with Western Europe—which he more or less did—and to end the Ukraine fiasco by conceding to Russia its territorial gains—which he didn’t.

Marco Rubio’s interview with Megyn Kelly in January 2025 appeared to frankly acknowledge the end of America’s unipolar dominance, and the need for the US to stop policing the world. JD Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference the following month echoed the same themes and even cast Europe as a greater liability than BRICS: “The threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s the threat from within.”

Around the same time, Washington, DC was in the throes of an internal purge, with Elon Musk’s “DOGE kids” conducting audits and laying off federal workers. Entire agencies like USAID were stripped down or shuttered altogether. It seemed as though Trump, having learned his lesson from being hemmed in by the entrenched bureaucracy of the federal government during his first turn, was determined to remake it in his own image. Long gone were figures like Iran-hawk John Bolton, who Trump fired in 2018 and later criticized: “I think he’s incompetent, all he wants to do is go to war with everybody.”

In December, 2025, the White House released its National Security Strategy (NSS) document, further emphasizing the intention to retrench to the Americas. With remarkably explicit language, it laid out the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: the US would assert control of “our Hemisphere” and would not tolerate  Russian or Chinese footholds of any kind.

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American  preeminence in the Western Hemisphere … We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.

A month after its release, as if to prove his intention by turning words into deeds, Trump attacked Venezuela. He mobilized 20% of the US Navy in the largest buildup of military force in the region since 1989 to kidnap two people: Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Trump was pleased with the quick “decapitation” operation, which was facilitated by insiders from the Venezuelan state apparatus.

The brazen abduction of the head of state of a sovereign nation was the culmination of months spent bombing unidentified civilians in speedboats. The Pentagon ordered “double tap” strikes to kill all survivors, though none of them had been charged with a crime. In addition to these war crimes, the US seized oil tankers outright in acts that can only be described as piracy. When the operation was complete, Trump declared his intention to “run the country,” effectively turning Venezuela into a US colony. Drunk on his victory and brimming with hubris, Trump wasted no time in threatening Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico with a similar fate, and proceeded to order a ruthless blockade to strangle Cuba.

All of this aligns with the plans laid out in the National Security Strategy, showing the bloody methods by which US imperialism intends to assert control over “its” hemisphere. Far from signaling a more peaceful order,  multipolarity means increased “law of the jungle” brutality and instability in the scramble to carve up the “neighborhoods” of the world.

Then came Iran. If Trump’s strategy was to refocus on the Western Hemisphere, what explains his unprovoked war of imperialist aggression on the opposite side of the globe? He intervened in the Twelve-Day War and declared a hasty victory in June 2025, claiming to have “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities. His justifications for launching a new war against Iran just months later have been notoriously contradictory.

Some of MAGA’s erstwhile champions, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly, have broken with the president on this and other issues, describing the war as a betrayal of “America First” principles. To one degree or another, they place the blame on Israel’s influence—in the person of Netanyahu or through the AIPAC lobby—for leading US policy astray. However, this inverts the relationship between US and Israel, confusing the attack dog for its master. The US’s nominal GDP is 50 times greater than Israel’s, which depends heavily on US subsidies for its survival. Israel would not last a month without this material support—totaling $3.8 billion annually. Minus this backing, Israel would cease to exist as a viable state.

To be sure, the reactionary Israeli regime has its own priorities. Given its size, population, industrial base, and history, Iran is a threat to Israel’s bid for territorial expansion and regional dominance. As an individual, Netanyahu has his own reasons for escalating the war, even if these make life more complicated for the US. If the war ends too soon, he faces removal from office, prosecution, and imprisonment. The Israeli political,  intelligence, and lobbying apparatus has undoubtedly campaigned feverishly for this war—as have the home-grown Zionist neocons within the US state apparatus itself.

The fact that so many people assume the tail is wagging the dog reflects US imperialism’s decline and inability to establish its preferred order in the region. History shows that when a great power weakens, its vassals gain greater room to maneuver.

The bigger problem with calling this primarily Israel’s war is that it lets Trump and US imperialism as a whole off the hook, as if they were well-intentioned victims duped by a malicious external actor. Though they may disagree on this or that detail, they are in lockstep on the fundamentals. Since the end of World War II, US imperialism has been the world’s “greatest sponsor of terror,” with Israel as its regional extension. As Joe Biden famously said, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” And they did, as the first order of business of the United Nations formed by the US after WWII. When the Iranian Revolution deposed the US-puppet regime of the Shah, it left US imperialism with one pillar to rest on. Israel has been its “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the region ever since.

Despite his cynical “peace candidate” rhetoric, Trump was never a principled opponent of the neocon predilection for foreign interventions. To the limited degree that there’s a consistent thread in Trump’s thinking, a recurring theme in his statements going back to the 1980s was the complaint that America was “a sucker” being taken advantage of by its thankless allies, who should be made to pay up for military defense and access to the US market. He accused the leaders of US imperialism of being poor negotiators. His solution? Turn America’s “allies” into subordinate vassal states, starting with Europe. Relegate them to the position of a pain sponge for absorbing military costs, debt, and unemployment, and weaponize tariffs as to bully the world market into submission.

Trump is an “economic nationalist,” who combines anti-immigrant baiting at home with American chauvinism and protectionism abroad. He was never truly an isolationist looking to relinquish US imperialism’s grip on the world. He simply thought he had better ideas about how to hold onto unipolarity, which are now being put to the test.

That being said, Trump has few ideas of his own and a low political level, even for an American head of state. He differs from other elements of the US capitalist class in method and style, but not in terms of his objectives. He told war-weary voters what they wanted to hear when “Genocide Joe” was associated with Ukraine and the bloodbath in Gaza. But as the flag-draped coffins pile up, Trump—congenitally incapable of taking responsibility or accepting blame for anything—merely doubles down on his crude imperialist bluster.

Imperialist calculations

His impossible challenge is to slow down US imperialism’s decline on the world stage while preparing for a decisive showdown against China. The playbook for this strategy comes not from his “genius” mind but from earlier generations of imperialist strategists. This includes the ideas of Halford Mackinder, George Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and a host of other architects of the dark arts of imperialist domination.

Taken together, their views have coalesced into a Washingtonian orthodoxy for keeping US imperialism dominant: keep the Eurasian landmass from uniting; prevent a hostile coalition from rising to challenge the US; and keep a grip on the Middle East as a strategic energy and trade corridor and to weaken Russia and China. This is one reason the US-Israeli relationship has been treated as untouchable: letting go of it would mean ceding a key region to the rival bloc, which has the decided advantage of operating on its own continent.

The influence of these strategists is transmitted through intelligence agencies and think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, RAND corporation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Anyone with the time to comb through decades of thick policy papers published by these outfits will find that every modern war—including the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran—was first theorized and recommended in these behind-the-scenes blueprints.

Regardless of the intentions or campaign promises of this or that Democratic or Republican president, the real thread of continuity from one administration to the next is determined by the “Great Game” of the 21st century. Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, it is very likely that the same war would be playing out in more or less the same way. After all, Trump’s bellicose ravings against Iran are usually the only thing to receive bipartisan ovations from Congress.

To be sure, Netanyahu’s influence may have played a role in the timing of the war. Some within US and Israeli intelligence sources believed that Iran had been critically weakened by the Twelve-Day War, that the recent uprisings had put the regime on the back foot, and that 80% of the Iranian population would support a US-backed regime change effort. All that was needed to topple it was a little push. The mainstream media dutifully repeated all of this propaganda.

Trump appears to have been convinced that the odds were the best he’d ever get, and that it was now or never. Aided by heavy state investment and planning, America’s rivals are ramping up their military-industrial might at a pace the US’s profit-driven complex cannot match. The clock is ticking, and time is not on the side of US imperialism.

The recent wars have exposed the sorry state of US and NATO arms manufacturing, compared to the unanticipated industrial might of Russia and China. In particular, US air defense systems such as Patriot missiles and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor stockpiles have been rapidly depleted, while Russia and Iran have piled up deep arsenals.

How did the world’s largest arms spender end up with such a deficient military industrial base? This, again, is explained by the senile nature of the capitalist market. In an effort to wring maximum short-term profits from a lucrative sector, they eroded it and squeezed its workforce, rather than investing in it for the long-term. In a word, Wall Street looted the Pentagon—and a steady stream of former-general lobbyists greased the wheels. Lockheed Martin, which produces THAAD missiles, once offered high salaries and benefits to its workers. Not anymore. In 2006 pensions were ended for new hires, who make $15 an hour. Employee turnover was 13% in 2023, compared to the national average of 3.8%. Meanwhile, Lockheed gave $6.8 billion to their shareholders in stock dividends in 2024—the same year the company had a backlog of unfulfilled contracts amounting to $176 billion. As Lenin explained in Imperialism, parasitism is characteristic of decaying monopoly capitalism.

Energy dominance and “de-dollarization”

The struggle for control of the global energy market is another theater of the conflict. It’s no coincidence that three recent targets of US aggression have been BRICS-aligned petrostates—Russia, Venezuela, and Iran—which provided China with a third of its oil. US imperialism’s longstanding desire for regime change in Tehran is not just about toppling a hostile actor that obstructs US-Israeli regional hegemony in the Middle East. It’s also about removing a threat to US dominance over the global oil market, while cutting off China’s access. This is the world’s second largest oil-producing region, accounting for 29% of global output.

But the opportunity to inflict pain on China by cutting off this resource would not last long: the country is fast-tracking its energy self-sufficiency. As part of its recently completed 14th Five-Year Plan ending in 2025, China invested more in renewable energy than the rest of the world combined, reaching 85% energy independence. Here again, the “now or never” factor may have motivated Trump to act. Another year or two of postponement would only increase China’s leverage.

The fate of the petrodollar is also at stake in the fight for global energy dominance. After the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, and with the onset of the oil crisis in 1973, the US needed a new mechanism to keep the dollar at the heart of world trade. This was achieved when Nixon negotiated for Saudi Arabia—and by extension, the rest of the oil producers in the region—to sell oil exclusively in US dollars. This forced every country that needed to buy oil to stockpile large reserves of US dollars. It also incentivized the Gulf states to invest the dollars they earned from the sale of oil in US treasuries and other major American assets like infrastructure.

The growth of alternative financing mechanisms and trade among BRICS nations in currencies like the Chinese renminbi threatens to accelerate the trend of “de-dollarization.” Xi Jinping has made no secret of his desire for the renminbi to become a global reserve currency capable of challenging dollar dominance. While this will not be easily achieved, the dollar’s grip on global trade is not what it once was. Iran’s decision to allow oil through the Strait of Hormuz, as long as it is sold in yuan, is significant. On March 22, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament announced that entities that invest in US treasury bonds will be considered legitimate military targets.

US national debt has now surpassed $39 trillion, and is growing by about $1 trillion every 100 days. This has only been exacerbated by the expensive military adventure in Iran. The only reason they had been able to get away with this level of borrowing for so long is precisely because, as the world’s undisputed imperialist power, US currency was considered a safe haven for global finance. But the dollar is no longer “as good as gold.” At the start of 2026, the world’s central banks held more gold than US Treasuries in their reserves for the first time in 30 years. In the year 2000, the US dollar represented 70% of global foreign currency reserves; it’s now down to 56%.

As a result, interest on the debt has tripled since 2020. The US government spends more money on debt repayment than on healthcare, education, or even the military. A further undermining of US bonds would shoot up interest rates, making it harder to continue borrowing in order to pay off already existing debt. It’s a vicious spiral that could lead to a full-blown financial crisis or even a default—unless the government embarks on massive  austerity. In other words, the ruling class faces no choice but to make workers pay in the form of deep cuts to healthcare, social security, education, and beyond.

Where is MAGA going?

2016 sounded the death knell of the kind of conservatism that had dominated the GOP for decades. Trump’s MAGA takeover of the Republican Party effectively led to the extinction of the pre-2016 brand of conservatism—or its conversion into a current within the Democratic Party.

Before 2016, the now-defunct Weekly Standard was an important mouthpiece of American conservatism. It championed free market capitalism, “traditional values,” and the worldwide projection of aggressive military power through foreign invasions. Founded by neocon stalwart Bill Kristol, it took pride in calling itself the “in-flight” magazine of Airforce One under George W. Bush. After running for two decades, the magazine folded the year Trump won. Kristol ended up spearheading the “Never Trump” current in the GOP, which failed to gain momentum. He endorsed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. Other self-avowed “Never Trumpers” like JD Vance and Lindsey Graham went the other direction; they kissed the ring at Mar-a-Lago and became “born again” Trumpers.

Ten years since Trump’s first term, MAGA’s momentum is failing. As we predicted in the November 2024 issue of The Communist:

Trump has overpromised, and given the crisis of the system, he will be forced to underdeliver. In fact, if  implemented, many of his proposals—such as mass deportations and sky-high tariffs—will only exacerbate the problems, and millions may end up with buyer’s remorse.

This is exactly what has played out. His tariffs were a flop and he has failed to tame inflation or boost the economy. His “Big Beautiful Bill” was a tax cut for billionaires and an increase in military spending, raising the federal debt even further. His terror campaign against immigrant workers provoked a historic backlash, depleted the workforce and led to net population decline—with zero benefits for native-born workers, who have watched unemployment tick upwards. Even his release of the Epstein files backfired. He was forced to make them public after reneging on his campaign promise, and his DOJ utterly botched the release, blatantly covering up for alleged perpetrators and revealing the names of victims. To this day, the coverup continues, with half the files still unpublished.

Does this mean we’re watching the death throes of MAGA? It seems likely that the movement won’t survive his second term as a viable electoral force. What gave Trumpism the appearance of invincibility wasn’t the political cunning of its figure head. It was the dogged loyalty of his base. As long as the faithful remained committed to Trump, trusted him, and gave him the benefit of the doubt, they would turn out reliably to vote for him and the candidates he endorsed. For a few electoral cycles, Trump held supreme leverage over his party. But everything has its limits. If his base becomes demoralized, if they feel betrayed, if they decide their hopes were misplaced, then this unholy cross-class alliance breaks down.

Polls indicate that a hardened core of MAGA “lifers” are sticking by their leader no matter what. Many of these voters may truly align themselves with his actions. But for the tens of millions of working-class people who voted for him merely because they hoped their living conditions would become more bearable, every major event since the 2024 election has served to erode their illusions.

According to a January 2026 poll by the Pew Research Center: “Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year. That change has come entirely among Republicans.” Trump voters under 30 have been the fastest group to break away. In the first eight months of Trump 2.0, his approval rating among this group suffered a 54-point net negative swing, according to a July 2025 CBS poll.

Alongside this process are indications that the “culture war” politics of recent years is losing steam on both sides of the bourgeois aisle. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the White House jumped at the chance to rally the base around a MAGA martyr. They packed a football stadium with 100,000 people for a prime-time spectacle that was part funeral, part Evangelical megachurch service, part MAGA rally, complete with fireworks. That same week, Vice President JD Vance made the bizarre decision to personally host an episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast, where he alternated between nostalgic reminiscences and ominous vows of retribution against the violent menace of the “far left.”

It seemed all but assured that Kirk’s assassination would lead to a reactionary backlash, inflaming the culture war and cutting across the healthy fracturing of MAGA’s cross-class coalition. However, Kirk’s approval rating actually dropped posthumously as a curious public looked up his YouTube channel and was repulsed by his vile rants. Kirk was promptly forgotten. This goes to show how shallow the culture war divisions really run, compared to the deep-rooted class interests that ultimately underpin society. The average Trump voter doesn’t want blatant race-baiting or dehumanizing diatribes against trans people—most of them just want stable jobs, affordable housing, and for inflation to go down.

As part of the liberal media’s “soul-searching” in the wake of the Democrats’ punishing 2024 defeat, numerous columns acknowledged the waning appeal of identity politics. One such New York Times article, titled “Why We Got It So Wrong,” puzzled over how an overtly racist, sexist, xenophobic candidate managed not only to win the popular vote against Kamala Harris, but also a majority among white women and Latino men, and to gain significantly among Black voters as well, as compared to 2020. By contrast, Harris outperformed her billionaire opponent among voters who earn more than $100,000 per year.

While the right triumphantly declared that “woke is broke,” liberals and soft lefts lamented the apparent rightward shift of the country. We explained at the time that this was a mirage. Americans hadn’t become fundamentally more conservative, racist, or anti-immigrant—they were mostly just fed up with their falling living standards and an establishment that didn’t even acknowledge their discontent. A mass workers’ party providing a clear class explanation would cut across this distorted expression of legitimate anger. In its absence, Trumpism became the only force that tapped into the mood, manipulating it by combining reactionary scapegoating with promises of economic revival.

The liberal media had spent the Biden years talking about how great the economy was doing, and decrying gloomy public sentiment as an irrational “vibecession.” Harris talked up the wonders of Bidenomics, and when asked what she’d do differently if she were elected, blandly replied: “nothing comes to mind.” It doesn’t take a raging right-winger to cast an angry vote against politicians like this! For millions of people struggling to make ends meet, the idea that “America is already great!” was a spit in the face.

A Wall Street Journal article titled, “The New Driving Force of Identity Politics Is Class, Not Race,” got closer to the truth with the following observation:

New fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race. The shift helped deliver the White House to Donald Trump and could continue to alter the political landscape if more Americans identify themselves less in the context of race and gender and more as belonging to a certain economic class.

As if to complete the above idea, The New York Times correctly added a word of warning:

Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago … If Mr. Trump and his coalition fail to create something better than what they have replaced, they will suffer the same fate they’ve inflicted on the fallen Bush, Clinton, and Cheney dynasties. A new force for creative destruction will emerge, possibly on the American left.

By all accounts, millions have now verified through their own experience the abject failure of this administration “to create something better than what they have replaced.” The million-dollar question is: where will they turn now?

You can’t replace something with nothing

Even as Trumpism falls apart, the Democrats are more hated than ever. And for good reason. In the consciousness of wide swathes of the working class, and the youth in particular, the party has become synonymous with everything they hate about the status quo. The discontent that first fueled the rise of Trumpism grew out of the deindustrialization of Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and the post-2008 “jobless recovery” under Obama. The forever wars abroad, coupled with declining living standards at home, were a prelude to the dystopian pandemic lockdown, Ukraine debacle, Gaza genocide, and out of control inflation.

Trump’s appearance on the political stage in 2016 was mirrored on the left by the sudden rise of Bernie Sanders. This marked the entry of “democratic socialism” into the mainstream. But by running within the Democratic Party, he blew the opportunity to give the mass anger a leftward expression—not once, but twice. As a result, Trump was effectively handed a monopoly of anti-establishment messaging, while Sanders drifted rightward and was fully absorbed by the establishment.

In 2020, after sabotaging Sanders in the primaries, the Democratic Party chose one of the most colorless and uninspiring politicians in the nation’s history to run a “lesser-evil” campaign devoid of any message other than “vote for me—I’m not Trump!” The miserable experience of Trump’s first term had largely faded into the background by the end of Biden’s time in office. Biden’s one-term presidency crashed and burned after a catastrophic debate revealed his evident cognitive decline, belatedly forcing the Democrats to swap horses in midstream. By 2024, a significant layer of the working class decided that, given the options, Trump was the lesser evil after all.

Today, even as they appear poised to profit in the 2026 midterm from the Trump 2.0 disappointment, the Democrats are still polling at all-time lows. A March 2026 survey by NBC measured the popularity of a wide range of topics, people, and institutions. On the list were prominent public figures and politicians from both parties, technologies like artificial intelligence, and government agencies like ICE. The Democratic Party had the second-lowest level of support of any item on the list.

However, we can be sure that lesser-evilism will rear its head again. The defeatist assumption that the two-party system is an insurmountable fact of life has kept the class struggle in a political straitjacket for generations. But even this pillar of bourgeois stability will eventually crumble. Support for a third major-party alternative in the US has hovered around 60% since 2013.

According to research by Gallup last fall:

While 55% of Americans say they are at least “somewhat likely” to vote for third-party candidates, only 15% say they are “very likely” to do so. But when asked how they would vote if a third-party candidate they preferred was unlikely to win, more Americans say they would change their vote rather than stick with that candidate.

In the absence of a viable mass initiative to create such a party, which would require immense resources, large numbers, political clarity, and a nationwide campaign, this mood remains an abstract aspiration—for now. The labor leaders are entirely in bed with the bosses and have failed abjectly in their responsibility to represent the workers, not only in economic struggles, but in politics. However, they cannot hold the floodtide of class anger back forever. Sooner or later the dam will burst—but not of its own accord.

As difficult as the path may be, the effort to build a mass alternative must begin with modest inroads that pave the way for a decisive tipping point down the road. Even a handful of independent working-class candidates, if they adopted an aggressive class-struggle program addressing the burning needs of ordinary workers while exposing the hypocrisy and class interests of the two ruling parties, could gain an echo and build the needed momentum for a nationwide campaign. Above all, this will require unapologetic and uncompromising class independence. Not “progressive” politics, left-liberal reformism, class-collaborationist “democratic socialism,” or amorphous “anti-elite populism,” but a clear and consistent message that this is a matter of class against class.

Genuine class-struggle politics haven’t seen the light of day in mainstream American politics since the early 20th century. The heroic labor battles of the 1930s and 40s receded into distant memory during the prolonged upswing of the post-WWII boom. Decades of modest growth and relative prosperity blunted the edge of the class war and the fighting traditions were lost.

By the 1980s, when the capitalist offensive resumed in earnest, the timid union leadership rolled over and allowed the bosses to squeeze the workforce and extract one concession after another. Even the concept of class identity was deliberately blurred. Business-friendly labor leaders adopted chauvinistic “buy American” slogans, and cast unions as pillars of “middle-class” America. This degeneration of the labor movement has contributed to a feeling of helplessness at the thought of challenging the bosses in the workplace or at the polls.

We should not underestimate the negative role played by the present labor leadership in undermining the confidence of the working class. For example, despite the mass mood in favor of a general strike against ICE, the unions only called for a “day of action.” In the end, even without a militant and thoughtful leadership, the working class in Minneapolis achieved a partial victory against Trump and ICE in January.

The labor leaders should have broadcast this far and wide and turned this movement from a defensive one into an offensive one, and from a local movement into a national one. The working class would have made further gains and pushed the ruling class back. Instead, only our members and periphery really understand the meaning of this victory. The potential for a nationwide offensive by the labor movement remains. At a time when Congress and big business have dismal approval ratings of 16% and 22% respectively, labor unions poll at 68% support.

It is the task of communists to break down the psychological barriers and alien-class prejudices that hold the working class back from recognizing and exercising its tremendous potential power. The obdurate pessimism that has plagued several generations of the so-called “left” and the labor leaders is the result of a low political level, narrow provincialism, and a short historical memory. Cut off from the ideas of genuine Marxism for generations, the working-class movement was deprived of an advanced guard that could provide orientation and point the way forward.

Into the political vacuum stepped “left academics” and petty-bourgeois postmodernists, who managed to make a bad situation worse, injecting all manner of confusion. The rise of identity politics was a further setback that helped pave the way for the culture-war games of the two ruling parties, instead of placing workers on a class-war footing to confront them.

The RCA is steadily assembling and training the cadres who will lead this effort in the years ahead. From coast to coast, RCA branches play the role of training grounds providing the political education, historical lessons, and the practical skills that will allow our comrades to gain influence within the working class and become the backbone of tomorrow’s labor movement.

Conducting systematic work in the unions, building up class-struggle rank-and-file opposition currents that can raise the political level and advance an alternative to the business as usual bureaucrats, and eventually providing direct leadership to the struggles that will point the way forward for the working class nationally—these are the tasks that we are preparing for. In due time, as we gather sufficient numbers, we will be able to run candidates for office on the basis of revolutionary electoral campaigns that can tap into the boiling anger of the class and put forward the message that the working class is waiting desperately to hear: we need a party of our own as a first step toward winning political and economic power for the majority.

Zohran Mamdani and “left populism”

In the meantime, other forces will attempt to step into the gaping political vacuum. “Left populist” candidates are already cropping up within the limited parameters of the Democratic Party. Most of them combine an affordability message with anti-billionaire rhetoric, while stopping short of calling themselves socialists (let alone communists). In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in last year’s New York City mayoral race, and in the context of widespread grievance over Trump’s handling of the economy, we will likely see many more “left populist” or mild reformist campaigns of this sort.

Paradoxically, Zohran’s election contains lessons—which are lost on the reformists—that point to the need to break with the Democrats, not work within them. The fact that a quarter of New Yorkers identified themselves as “democratic socialists” in exit polls tracks with last year’s YouGov survey reporting that 28% of big city residents see communism favorably. People are not afraid of radical politics—on the contrary, they’re sick of the tepid status quo options they’re usually presented with. Zohran attracted large numbers, not because of the ballot line he was running on, but precisely because he appeared to come from outside the Democratic Party establishment, as opposed to the billionaire-backed Andrew Cuomo.

Zohran’s grassroots campaign managed to assemble 100,000 volunteer canvassers, bringing an unknown candidate who was polling at 1% at the start of the year to a resounding victory in the November 2025 election with a turnout of over a million votes. This shows that an energetic campaign with simple but bold demands and mass organizing can gain a wide echo and become a decisive factor, seemingly out of nowhere.

Unfortunately for those who had sincere illusions, the results of Zohran’s first months in office also confirm the need for class independence, in a negative sense. He campaigned on a popular platform of taxing the rich, freezing rents, establishing city-run grocery stores with more affordable prices, and universal childcare. While the mainstream media and the political establishment advised him to moderate expectations and prepare to make “practical” compromises, we argued the opposite. All of his demands and then some were more than realistic—but only if he mobilized workers with class-struggle methods and placed the burden of cost on the billionaires and transformed this into a national struggle.

He has opted instead to pursue a partnership with New York’s Democratic Governor, Kathy Hochul, who opposes raising taxes on her wealthiest constituents. Predictably, Zohran is facing a severe budget shortfall. Rather than utilize this as grounds for mobilizing a mass struggle with strike action, tenant organizing, and mass rallies, he has warned that he may be forced to place the bill at the feet of the working-class voters who put their faith in him last fall. If he continues down the route of class collaboration and playing by the rules of capitalism, all the energy and hopes he inspired will turn into bitter frustration.

The problem with populism is that it tries to appeal to “the people” in the abstract, regardless of their class. But it is precisely this lack of class independence that dooms them to failure. Even if they appear radical on the surface, such campaigns inevitably lead to disappointment over broken promises and dashed illusions, giving rise to cynicism, demoralization, and even more volatile expressions of desperation. Polarization always has two poles, and if “the left” is tarnished and seen as a dead end, some will lend credence to demagogues on the far right.

If a mass communist party were running candidates in the November midterms, it would undoubtedly do very well. In the absence of such an alternative, the population’s anger will be expressed as an anti-Trump and anti-Republican vote. Much can change in politics in a short time, but the Democrats are almost certain to do well in November. We could also see an uptick in protest votes for left-wing candidates like Kshama Sawant and the California Green Party’s candidate for governor, Butch Ware.

Should the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate, they will tend to make deals with Trump, but there will be massive conflicts as well. The Democrats will have an eye on recapturing the White House in 2028. We can anticipate battles over the budget, government oversight, and possibly another round of impeachment. Communists will skillfully use this discord to put forward our ideas of class-independent politics, while the reformists tail the Democrats.

Furthermore, in the absence of a visible and successful point of reference for the class struggle, the sense that voting in elections is an ineffectual waste of time could give rise to more extreme forms of direct action, and even acts of individual terror.

Marxists oppose individual terror not for moralistic or pacifist reasons, but because it is counterproductive. It cuts across the urgent task of fostering working-class solidarity and confidence in our collective power to fight back as a class.

That being said, incidents such as the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO, Brian Thompson, and the apparent attempt to burn down Mar-a-Lago by 21-year old Austin Tucker Martin, are symptoms of deep frustration at the lack of political options. They are warning signs of a trend that could become more common as the crisis of society intensifies. Both Mamdani and Mangione are unmistakable products of the period we’re living through.

US economy on a cliff’s edge

The fundamentals of the US economy are as unsound today as at any time since the Great Depression. Not only is another cataclysm of that scale not ruled out—it is all but inevitable. The factors that could tip the teetering system off the knife’s edge are many: the AI tech bubble, a collapse of the $2 trillion private credit market, the global energy crisis sparked by Trump’s war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an extreme weather event, another pandemic, etc.

Gita Gopinath, former chief economist at the IMF, estimated that up to $35 trillion could be wiped out if the current AI bubble results in a crash along the lines of the last tech bubble.

I calculate that a market correction of the same magnitude as the dotcom crash could wipe out over $20trn in wealth for American households, equivalent to roughly 70% of American GDP in 2024. This is several times larger than the losses incurred during the crash of the early 2000s … The global fallout would be similarly severe. Foreign investors could face wealth losses exceeding $15trn, or about 20% of the rest of the world’s GDP.

Big Tech companies have accounted for one-third of US GDP growth over the past decade. Private companies are on track to spend $700 billion on the AI infrastructure buildout this year alone. Given the chronic overproduction and the resultant investment desert throughout the rest of the economy, this narrow slice of the market has generated an all-consuming vortex of capital. Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that investment in information-processing equipment and software accounted for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Without the spending on data centers, advanced chips, and other AI components, GDP would be flatlining and the US would already be in a technical recession. In other words, the entire economy is being propped up by a sector that has yet to turn a profit.

The buildout is on a scale unseen since the railroad boom of the early industrial revolution. Then, as today, a single market captured an enormous share of the nation’s capital investment. By the end of the 19th century, capital spending on railroads accounted for 60% of the stock market. The race for an ever-greater share of the market led to an uncontrollable stampede similar to the data center building frenzy we see today. The boom eventually led to a devastating bust: half of all railroad tracks that were built ended up abandoned as a cascade of bankruptcies devastated the railroad companies. The ensuing Panic of 1873—also known as “The Long Depression”—prepared the way for a strike wave that reached insurrectionary proportions across the US.

We don’t know exactly how the AI bubble will play out, but the disruption and social instability of its sudden burst could be staggering. For now, the highest-valued companies of all time—and along with them, the wealthiest capitalists in the history of our species—are swimming in the eye-watering profits of this speculative frenzy. The world’s wealthiest 500 capitalists increased their wealth by $2.2 trillion last year, thanks to this boom. The year before that, the richest 400 Americans saw their wealth grow by $1 trillion.

By contrast, the latest generation of the working class has truly been ground down. Millennials and Gen Z—who together comprise a majority of the US labor market—entered the workforce in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Since that period, the wealth of the top 0.1%—roughly 130,000 households—increased from $10 trillion to $14.4 trillion. The wealth of the bottom 50% has remained at or below $2.5 trillion for the last 20 years.

Working-class households have been hanging by a thread for years. During the Biden days, the government touted the official U-3 unemployment figure of 4%. Politico published an article that looked under the hood: “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” It turned out that this figure included homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” And if one counted as unemployed “people who can’t find anything but part-time work or whose wages are below the poverty line,” the percentage shot up to a whopping 23.7%. In other words, nearly one in four workers was functionally unemployed.

And this was before Trump took office. Since the start of his new term, the job market has lost over a million jobs, and the economy has added fewer jobs than any year outside of a recession since 2003. The official U-3 unemployment has crept up to 4.4% while the broader U-6 figure suggests some 14 million workers are functionally unemployed as of spring 2026.

One-third of the population say they are skipping meals or driving less to pay for healthcare, and around 16% put off surgery or medical treatment because they can not afford it. 60% believe life in the US is getting worse while only 20% say they are getting better.

The gathering storm

The reality of American decline has never been more apparent. Never before have so many social metrics pointed to the same inevitable conclusion.

In September 2025, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Faith in the American Dream Is Fading as Economic Pessimism Grips the Nation.” In alarming tones, it revealed the results of a poll showing that a record “70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did.” The share of the population who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living has fallen to just 25%, the lowest figure since surveys began asking that question in 1987.

Not only have living standards been squeezed for half a century, as measured by workers’ wealth and income—even workers’ lifespans are in decline. A Boston University study calculated 14.7 million excess deaths in the US when compared to rates in other high income countries from 1980 to 2023. This is driven primarily by rising mortality rates among working-age Americans. The decline in US life expectancy since 1980 is part of the widening “death gap” between rich and poor. The death rate—the ratio of deaths to overall population—in the poorest US counties has risen by 570% over the past 40 years.

Last year, the Harvard Youth Poll reported that just 13% of young people think the country is “headed in the right direction.” Their research also reveals the feeling of alienation stemming from society’s general decline: 58% of young adults find “little or no purpose or meaning” in their everyday lives. As one participant in the survey put it:

I would really like to have some sort of meaning from working towards a goal or cause that betters humanity as a whole. I see the world falling apart and no direction for humanity, and I’d like to do something about it.

Taken at face value it would be easy to draw pessimistic conclusions. However, as Marxists, we understand that beneath the surface of apparent doom and malaise, behind the moods that pollsters write off as apolitical apathy or dejection, something else is being prepared. The number of people who see a world on fire—and who feel a burning need deep inside to do something about it—is growing daily. All of the miseries and enraging injustices of life under a decaying system will not be wasted, but will fuel the rise of a new force in American politics.

As Lenin said in a speech to the Swiss socialist youth in January 1917, just on the eve of the Russian Revolution and the wave of revolution that swept over Europe in the proceeding years:

We must not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution. The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood; and the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie, and its servitors, the governments, are more and more moving into a blind alley from which they can never extricate themselves without tremendous upheavals.

Just as in Russia in 1905, a popular uprising against the tsarist government began under the leadership of the proletariat with the aim of achieving a democratic republic; so, in Europe, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat against the power of finance capital, against the big banks, against the capitalists; and these upheavals cannot end otherwise than with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, with the victory of socialism.

The deep well of social discontent in US society will eventually find its expression as a bona fide working-class movement. We are unfazed by the fact that the American working class does not yet see itself as a political force with interests and demands of its own, let alone as the force that will take the reins of society. Life teaches—and the experience that tens of millions of workers will undergo in the coming period will drive more and more people towards class struggle, towards the labor movement, and towards the fight for socialist revolution.

The American Revolution of 250 years ago was preceded by a gradual shift in mass consciousness as the colonists began to see themselves no longer as subjects of the King. They began to recognize themselves as a separate people, and to see that their own interests were impossible to reconcile with the old order that ruled over them.

In our time, this process is repeating itself on a higher level. Millions have seen the face of the Epstein class that rules over us. They have begun to recognize the gulf that separates this handful of billionaires, who commit the most heinous crimes with impunity, who stand above the law, who hold the levers of power in their hands. They have watched politicians who promise peace launch one bloody war of aggression after another. They can see that the same people who bomb schoolfuls of children protect predators who traffic and abuse them.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, once wrote, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” An almighty storm is being prepared, and when history presents the workers of this country with the opportunity to throw off this tyranny, we must ensure it isn’t missed.