“Where Is America Going?” provides an outline of the revolutionary processes developing in American society—and how we must prepare as communists. All party cells studied and discussed a draft version of this document in April and May. It was then discussed, amended, and approved by the Second National Congress of the RCA on May 31–June 1 in Philadelphia.

Introduction: Back to fundamentals

There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. Such are the epoch-making times we are living through.

This is not merely a transient political or economic crisis, but a crisis of the regime of bourgeois rule and of world capitalism itself. No one alive today has seen anything like it. After a long delay, we have returned to an epoch of world revolution.

Eighty years since the end of World War II, the accumulated contradictions of capitalist imperialism have reached a tipping point. The tectonic plates of class and world relations have shifted, and the relative decline of US imperialism has accelerated. A new equilibrium must be set. The unraveling of the liberal postwar order will have far-reaching consequences for world relations, mass consciousness, and the class struggle.

According to Donald Trump, “America is back” and “the golden age of America has only just begun.” The zig-zags and chaos of his second term will be a small price to pay for the “renewal” of the “unstoppable” American Dream. But his bluster is a tacit admission that the status quo isn’t working for anyone, including the ruling class. The deep-seated crisis of confidence in capitalism’s ruling institutions reflects an even more profound crisis of the system itself. No number of slogans, speeches, or executive orders can recreate the unique confluence of factors that fed the illusion of American exceptionalism.

Capitalism is historically exhausted as a force for human progress. There is no solution to the converging economic, political, and social crises within its bounds. At the same time, the objective conditions for socialism are beyond rotten-ripe. Only by abolishing the nation-state and the market economy can we unleash humanity’s full potential.

Since they all operate within the bounds of capitalism, neither the traditional liberals, conservatives, MAGA, or the liberal-socialist reformists can provide a lasting solution. Economically and politically, the interests of the workers and the capitalists are diametrically opposed. Only a class-independent policy and organization can smash through the gridlock.

The belated socialist revolution and absence of a mass revolutionary communist party—or even a reformist labor party—compound the contradictions further, allowing populist demagogues to fill the void. As a result, the process of political clarification and the construction of a class-independent party will be messy, prolonged, and nonlinear.

Although the process is uneven, these cold, hard truths are slowly sinking in and having a transformative effect on the consciousness of millions, opening tremendous opportunities for building the RCA.

It is frankly astonishing how dramatically quantity has been transformed into quality in the recent period. The Hegel quote with which we opened the draft 2020 US Perspectives document is more relevant today than ever:

Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown—all these betoken that there is something else approaching. The gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings into view the form and structure of the new world.

All of this needs to be thought about deeply—and acted upon. To win the political confidence of the advanced layers of workers and youth, we must not only describe the crisis of capitalism, but explain events in real time as they unfold, while identifying concrete opportunities for expanding our forces. This is the combined science and art of revolutionary theory, perspectives, party building, and leadership.

The class war is fought, not only through strikes and mass uprisings, but with the weapon of ideas. However, formulating correct perspectives and preparing efficiently and effectively for revolution requires more than rote memorization and repetition. As Trotsky explained:

Our superiority over our enemies lies in possessing the irreplaceable scientific method of orientation—Marxism. It is the most powerful and, at the same time, subtle instrument—to use it is not as easy as shelling peas. One must learn how to operate with it. Our party’s past has taught us through long and hard experience, just how to apply the methods of Marxism to the most complex combination of factors and forces during the historical epoch of sharpest breaks.

This is why the RCI emphasizes the importance of not only studying history, economics, and philosophy, but of applying this knowledge to the real world. We study Marx’s analysis of capitalist political economy in its “pure” form as a baseline for analyzing the system’s epoch of terminal decline. We grapple with the labor theory of value and untangle the relationship between wage labor and capital to get to the root of capitalist exploitation, overproduction, and crisis.

We study classic examples of the class struggle, the rise and fall of states and empires over the millennia, and revolutionary victories and defeats to better understand our times. History may not repeat, but it rhymes, and recognizing the patterns that emerge—including the parties, personalities, programs, and their underlying class interests—allows us to shorten the lag between events and our ability to understand and intervene in them.

And, of course, we work patiently and deliberately to acquire an intuitive “feel” for Marxist philosophy and its application to living phenomena. As it turns out, the fundamentals of dialectical materialism are relatively simple:

• Nothing exists outside of the material universe. Consciousness is a property of matter organized in a particular way.
• Matter is infinite, interconnected, and in eternal flux as it moves through endless space and time—there is no beginning or end to time or the universe.
• Quantitative accumulations lead to qualitative leaps as quantity is transformed into quality—just as quality can be transformed into quantity.
• There is an inherent unity and interpenetration between apparent opposites, e.g., North and South, positive and negative—you can’t have one without the other.
• The whole can acquire emergent qualities far greater than the sum of its parts—even though it is still made up of parts.
• Everything eventually turns into its opposite and is sublated in a dialectical spiral of development, as the negation of the negation is negated ad infinitum.
• In the historical process, as in nature, a deeper necessity is often expressed through what appear on the surface to be accidents.
• And perhaps most importantly: the truth is always concrete.

Unfortunately, it is easy to approach these ideas in a one-sided, mechanical, and thus false way. It is not enough merely to be “familiar” with these ideas in the abstract. Beneath their apparent simplicity lies boundless depth. As Hegel famously noted: “What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is ‘familiar.’”

Applying these ideas to dynamic reality takes effort, patience, time, creativity, boldness, and humility in equal measure.

We must also have a sense of proportion and understand the limitations of perspectives, as vital as they are. The world is more unpredictable than ever and we don’t have a crystal ball. We should avoid being overly categorical and not get lost in the weeds trying to figure out precisely who, what, when, and where different individuals or layers of society will do this or that. Events are moving quickly, and our short-term perspectives are confirmed daily.

Our main task, therefore, is to identify and draw out the primary threads, analyze them, and then weave them back together into a coherent whole. Through a series of successive approximations, we can triangulate our understanding of reality ever more precisely.

Inevitably, we will make some mistakes. However, mistakes in prediction and timing differ greatly from mistakes in method. If we recognize, analyze, and learn from our errors, we will emerge with an even stronger understanding of the Marxist method and will be less likely to make similar mistakes in the future.

Marxist theory is a guide to revolutionary action, not an abstraction for its own sake. As Clausewitz explained, “In the same way as many plants only bear fruit when they do not shoot too high, so in the practical arts the theoretical leaves and flowers must not be made to sprout too far, but kept near to experience, which is their proper soil.”

Our organizational tasks flow from our perspectives and cannot be separated from them. Only in this way can we correctly orient our expanding forces in preparation for the even greater events yet to come.

The world’s hegemon no more

It is ABC for Marxists that politics is concentrated economics and foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy—and vice versa. But never before have local, national, and international events been so deeply intertwined. Though we must proceed by analyzing various aspects of what is happening separately, starting with the world situation, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with a single, dialectically contradictory process.

The titanic struggle between declining Western imperialism and ascendant Chinese and Russian imperialism is the outward expression of a deeper realignment. At root, it reflects the changed balance of global economic power, and in particular, military-industrial power. It is a life-or-death game of inter-imperialist chess, with each side seeking to defend its national interests by exporting not only capital and commodities, but also crisis, unemployment, and social unrest.

To understand the events unfolding today, we must briefly trace the path that led us here. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British Empire generated over 20% of the world’s income, controlled roughly 20% of its landmass, and governed more than 25% of its population. After a tense transition, US imperialism emerged from the inferno of World War II as the undisputed capitalist superpower, counterbalanced by the nationalized planned economies of the Soviet Union and later, Mao-era China.

With its economy intact and running full throttle, the US supplanted the British as the world’s biggest lender and military power. The Marshall Plan, Bretton-Woods system, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, NATO, and a worldwide network of military bases cemented its dominance. The dollar was imposed as the world’s reserve currency, giving American finance capital enormous leverage over its enemies and allies alike.

The US was truly a colossus, accounting for roughly 50% of world GDP, 60% of world industrial production, and 70% of world gold reserves in the war’s aftermath. But the US occupies just 6% of the world’s landmass and contains less than 5% of the world’s population. All things being equal, larger countries and populations with access to more natural resources and ever-improving technologies should eventually reach similar levels of economic development.

But all things are not equal, and very few countries actually have the capacity to achieve this. One reason is that US imperialism couldn’t allow it—the stakes were too high. It had barely scraped through the economic and social dangers posed by the Great Depression, and besides, the world was on its knees, and there were superprofits to be made. It has fought tooth and nail ever since to stem the world economy’s tendency to seek its level.

US foreign policy since World War II, and especially since the Soviet collapse, can be summed up as follows: keep the US on top and the superprofits flowing, while preventing any serious geopolitical rivals from emerging, especially in Eurasia, which comprises 36% of the world’s landmass and has 70% of its population. For decades, US imperialism successfully exploited the workers and resources of the world—by any means necessary.

From espionage, bribes, coups, and assassinations to sanctions, embargoes, loans, invasions, and occupations, US imperialism divided and conquered and ruthlessly defended its interests wherever it could. It deliberately kept the world’s poorest countries underdeveloped, subservient, and dependent. As Lenin explained, it is not through military might alone, but above all, through the banks and the export of finance capital that imperialism dominates the planet. This was the primary source of American preeminence in the decades following the last World War.

But it could not stop the inevitable. Despite its huge lead coming out of the gates, the US now accounts for just 27% of nominal world GDP, roughly half its postwar peak. This is still an imposing number for a country its size. As the Financial Times opined in an article about American hubris: “A coroner examining the corpse of American unipolarity would return a verdict of death by natural causes, not suicide or misadventure.”

Nonetheless, the changed balance has unavoidable consequences. If the relative weight of a country’s finance capital declines vis-à-vis its rivals, so must its capacity to project power and impose its will. There was once a time when the American president could merely lift his finger to get his way. That’s not the world we live in today. US imperialism is no longer the only game in town.

Globalization and its discontents

To one degree or another, geographically distant peoples and economies have been interconnected for millennia. Profit-driven commerce has moved commodities and people around the globe for hundreds of years. However, it only seriously took off with the advent of imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century. It went into overdrive after World War II, and received a new impetus after the fall of the Soviet Union. The stimulating effect of this process can hardly be overstated: between 1950 and 2023, the volume of world trade grew by an astonishing 4400%.

Globalization is the system’s attempt to overcome the built-in barriers to unlimited capital expansion: the nation-state and the market economy. These organic features of capitalism, which were historically progressive as capitalism emerged from feudalism, can no longer contain the productive forces the system itself has unleashed.

As Marx brilliantly explained in the The Communist Manifesto:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule … The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

Because workers produce more value during the labor process than they are paid back in wages, they cannot buy back all the commodities they produce, leading to gluts on the market and periodic crises of overproduction, which can take different forms. To remain solvent and competitive and to avoid the social unrest that accompanies factory closures and layoffs, producers are compelled to sell the excess commodities to other markets.

Another solution is to develop more efficient technologies or to find cheaper sources of labor, raw materials, and productive capacity. Those who achieve this can sell commodities produced more cheaply at the old price, leading to higher profit margins and driving competitors out of business. However, due to the unplanned, competition-driven nature of the system, every capitalist is trying to do the same thing. The most dynamic competitors eventually catch up and the market is saturated. What were once advantages can turn into their opposite and the cycle is repeated.

Even if they do business internationally, capitalists are ultimately rooted in one nation state or another, and they depend on the state’s foreign and domestic apparatus to defend their collective “national interests.” As tensions over increasingly saturated markets rise, colonies and other spheres of political and economic influence must be conquered, divided, and redivided, whether through diplomacy, trade wars, or open military confrontation.

The Soviet Union and China suffered from severe bureaucratic deformities. Nonetheless, insofar as capitalism had been expropriated, they remained workers’ states and served as a counterbalance to American imperialism. By the late 1970s, countries with nationalized, planned economies covered a third of the globe.

On the basis of their planned economies, the masses’ quality of life steadily improved. However, the bureaucratic nature of these regimes doomed them to eventual stagnation and collapse, as predicted by Trotsky. The fall of the USSR, and the restoration of capitalism in China and across the Soviet sphere were world-historic defeats for the working class. It opened vast new markets, sources of natural resources, and pools of cheap labor to Western capital, giving it a new lease on life. The counterweight to full-spectrum, uncontested US hegemony disappeared.

Giddy with power and greedy for profits, US imperialism declared the “end of history.” It overextended itself militarily, and at the same time, it deindustrialized as the capitalists moved production to countries with lower wages and fewer environmental and labor protections. The capitalists made enormous fortunes—but at a considerable cost to US imperialism’s long-term prospects and stability.

Not only did this process accelerate the rise of China as an advanced industrial economy, but it also ruined the lives of millions of workers across the “rust belt,” thus planting the seeds of Trumpism. It also gave rise to the largest world working class in history. Compared to the not-too-distant past, when a majority of humans were peasants, serfs, or slaves, the class balance of forces is overwhelmingly in favor of the workers.

In 2023, approximately 3.5 billion people were employed worldwide, compared to 2.23 billion people in 1991—an increase of over one billion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Of these, 816 million were industrial workers, 914 million toiled in agriculture, and 1.7 billion sold their labor power for a wage in the service sector. While astounding in and of itself, it’s not just the raw number of workers that matters, but their role in generating humanity’s wealth. Above all, it is their capacity to bring bourgeois society to a screeching halt if they withhold their labor.

This is yet another insoluble contradiction for the capitalists. As Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers due to competition by the revolutionary combination due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

China and Russia: Rising superpowers

For decades, the US ruled the roost and had de facto vertical and horizontal control over its subordinates and supply chains. But nothing lasts forever, and everything eventually turns into its opposite. As Trotsky wrote in 1939 in “Marxism in Our Time”:

After the Versailles Treaty was signed it was generally believed that the terrestrial globe had been pretty well subdivided. But more recent events have served to remind us that our planet continues to contain lands that have not yet been either plundered or sufficiently plundered.

 

The United States is alarmed by the encroachments of “outsiders” in Latin America. The struggle for colonies continues to be part and parcel of the policy of imperialistic capitalism. No matter how thoroughly the world is divided, the process never ends, but only again and again places on the order of the day the question of a new redivision of the world in line with altered relations between imperialistic forces. Such is the actual reason today for rearmaments, diplomatic convulsions, and war alignments.

Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is no longer on its knees, and China graduated long ago from being a second-rate platform for producing cheap plastic toys. The US can no longer do more or less as it pleases and must take the rest of the world into account in a way it hasn’t had to in 80 years. As the former Austrian diplomat Karin Kneissl expressed it, “geography and history are back.”

According to the IMF, when ranked by Purchasing Power Parity, China is now the world’s largest economy, followed by the US, India, Russia, and Japan. A few decades ago, in 1960, the US, Soviet Union, West Germany, UK, and France made up the top five in rankings of nominal GDP.

Between 2003 and 2007, the US led in 60 of 64 critical technologies, with China leading in just three, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. By 2023, China led in 57 out of 64 of these technologies, and the US only had the edge in seven.

In 2023, renewable energy made up 35% of China’s electricity mix, while in the US, it was a mere 9%. That same year, China produced 8.91 million new energy vehicles (NEVs), a 34.15% increase from 2022, compared to just 1.2 million made in the US. China is also a major exporter of capital and loans. It has already edged out the US when it comes to Foreign Direct Investment in Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world.

Musk boasts constantly about the wonders of SpaceX—despite the problems plaguing its Starship rocket. But the reality is that the US is also in danger of losing the new space race. There are currently around 10,000 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in space, more than 7,000 of which belong to Starlink; China plans on launching 40,000 of them over the next decade. As for Russia and Iran, they are working closely together to launch satellites, and India recently sent a lunar lander to the moon. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, has announced plans to work with China to build an automated nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035, which would help power a joint lunar base. They claim that  the necessary technological solutions to pull off a humanless, fully autonomous construction are “almost ready.”

Another graphic example is the shipbuilding industry, which has commercial and military implications. In 2023, Chinese shipbuilders accounted for 33 million tons of capacity, more than half the world’s total, and received 74% of orders for new ships. All of the world’s largest shipping lines are reliant on Chinese-made ships to facilitate world trade. Meanwhile, the US—which was the world leader after World War II—accounted for a mere 64,809 tons, just 0.1% of the world’s capacity.

To be sure, the US still has advanced military capabilities, above all, its top-of-the-line fleet of submarines. But there’s a simple reason Trump has proposed negotiating arms cuts with China and Russia to allow for “more productive spending”—the US has also largely lost its advantage in this all-important field.

Putin’s Russia inherited an unparalleled military tradition from the USSR, including an advanced armaments industry—one of the few sectors that wasn’t privatized after the Soviet collapse. Unlike the West, which focuses on bells, whistles, and maximum profits, Russia produces weapons systems primarily aimed at ensuring its national defense. The same goes for China and its primarily state-owned military industry.

Military might is not merely a function of military spending. Russia’s military budget may only be twice as large as Great Britain’s, but its armed forces are at least ten times larger and unquestionably superior, in both technology and operational experience. Forced by necessity to ramp things up in its war with the West in Ukraine, Russia now produces nearly three times as many artillery shells as the whole of NATO combined. And China is not far behind technologically, with an industrial base that dwarfs every other country on earth. From China’s DeepSeek AI breakthrough to Russia’s unstoppable hypersonic missile technology, all of this, taken together, represents a sea change of epic proportions.

You can only punch above your weight for so long, and US imperialism has stretched itself thin, bullying and beating up lightweights—and the US has even failed at that on several occasions, including in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Despite its superhuman efforts to maintain its privileged position, other true heavyweights have emerged in the form of Chinese and Russian imperialism, and their domination of BRICS. Globalization has turned into deglobalization. Trade patterns are shifting, and the US and its currency are no longer guaranteed to be at the epicenter.

Imperialist retrenchment and “fortress America”

As communists building in the US, we must be clear: the main enemy is at home. US imperialism is the most powerful and reactionary force in the world. But its decline relative to other rising powers is accelerating relatively rapidly.

The bubble of so-called American exceptionalism has burst. Either US imperialism retrenches by choice, or it will be cut down to size by others through economic and possibly even military force. This is the essential meaning of Trump’s program: “America First,” “economic nationalism,” “Peace Through Strength,” “Fortress America,” and the revival of “Manifest Destiny.”

The more farsighted representatives of American capital can see the writing on the wall and understand the need to regroup. US imperialism can no longer afford or maintain its role as the world’s policeman. If it is to stand any chance at stopping China from achieving critical mass in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, it must first beat an orderly retreat to the one region where it still has an advantage—the Americas.

As Marco Rubio told Megyn Kelly:

There are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again … It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power … That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually, you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

In other words, US imperialism ran into the military-industrial brick walls built up over the last few decades by China and Russia. They are no longer merely regional imperialist powers, but global ones.

This explains Trump’s interest in the Arctic, Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, as well as his efforts to extricate the US from Europe. As he stated in his inaugural address, the US “will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.”

American imperialism’s renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere and reset of relations with Russia is intended to position it for an even sharper push into the Indo-Pacific in the future. Trump wants to keep more money at home to rebuild America’s military-industrial strength instead of fruitlessly trying to police the entire world.

Although Obama attempted a “pivot to Asia,” the Biden-Harris administration refused to fully recognize the changed balance of forces. Its failure was epitomized, above all, by the humiliating strategic defeat suffered by the US-led Western coalition in its thinly veiled proxy war with Russia via Ukraine.

Ukraine was seen as the pathway toward regime change and the strategic defeat of Russia, which would facilitate doing the same in China. Western sanctions were supposed to “turn the ruble into rubble.” Some even dreamed of breaking Russia apart and cannibalizing it like China was in the late 19th century. Instead, the Democrats brought the world to the verge of World War III, NATO suffered a strategic defeat, and they ended up with regime change in Washington through the sidelining of their own incumbent and the election of Donald Trump.

Like the emperor with no clothes in H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale, Western imperialism’s liberal world order has been exposed. To distract everyone from this embarrassing and alarming reality, Trump is behaving like a circus ringmaster in a reality TV show. Or, as geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar calls it, the “no rules–based international disorder.”

However, despite all the chaos and mud-slinging, Trump’s foreign policy is actually fairly rational, at least from his perspective. He aims for strict prioritization at all levels, no matter how much the liberal-neoconservative state apparatus, mainstream media, and other institutions of traditional bourgeois rule push back. As a recent White House memo put it, “agencies should focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated.”

American capitalism needs a leaner and meaner state apparatus to confront the new economic and military realities, which means maximizing its return on every investment. Dismantling USAID and putting “little Marco” and a FOX News host in charge of the departments of State and Defense is the foreign policy analog to DOGE’s efforts to gut the federal government. As Pete Hegseth said, it’s “a recognition of hard power realities on the ground.”

Might still makes right, but if you can’t beat them outright, the American imperialists will do whatever they can to undermine their opponents in the hopes of eventually regaining the upper hand. US arrogance pushed China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea together to defend their respective national interests. Now, the US wants to drive wedges between them.

However, after decades of bait-and-switch lies and tricks, it is unlikely the Russians will be fooled again, or that the Chinese would ever opt for the Americans over their geographic neighbors. After suffering two world wars started by Western powers, the humiliation of capitalist restoration, and encirclement by NATO, Ukraine was likely the last straw when it comes to the Russians’ illusions in normalizing relations with its imperialist rivals in the West. Russia’s longstanding Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, has long considered the US “agreement incapable.”

While they would surely like to negotiate a new security architecture for Europe and would engage in any commercial relationships to its benefit, Russia has retooled its economy as a result of Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine, and is pursuing its own “pivot to Asia” and the non-Western world. It’s not a tiny detail that 85% of the world lives in countries that have not sanctioned Russia.

As Trump himself admitted, Russia holds all of the cards in the Ukraine War, and the ever-transactional Donald can see that it’s no use throwing good money after bad. As he put it in his inimitable style: “The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably more than anything else ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.”

Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force, which in nature is often a form of friction. For decades, US imperialism has been living on the inertia of the past—and the friction acting upon it from all sides is rising.

Like any dying organism, American capitalism may experience brief spurts of revival. Trump seeks to infuse the system with fresh momentum through his disruptive actions. But everything he has proposed still amounts to secondary adjustments without changing anything fundamental. Only a revolutionary impulse from the only historically progressive class can break through the logjam of capitalism and get society moving forward again with real and lasting dynamism.

Trump shreds the postwar liberal world order

In his heart of hearts, Trump is a street-smart New York City real estate gangster and entertainer. Since US imperialism can no longer dominate every corner of the planet, he seeks to negotiate a division of the world into old-style spheres of influence. Each mafia boss would run their own protection rackets and do more or less as they like within their own fiefdoms—even if there are some residual tensions on the borders and in regions like Africa, which do not fall neatly into a single great power’s sphere.

Already, Ukraine is being torn apart like a wildebeest carcass on the savanna. Even the European Union may not survive the “electroshock” of Trump 2.0, as Emmanuel Macron described it. As the Athenians told their intended victims before the Siege of Melos in 416 BCE: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Although it remains US imperialism’s key geopolitical challenge, even a certain rapprochement with China cannot be ruled out. Both sides are interested in negotiating mutually beneficial deals wherever possible. This would allow them to buy time and build up strength for the inevitable confrontations of the future. Trump may even try to make nice with BRICS for similar reasons.

However, like everything else in the universe, any equilibrium will be relative and short-lived. As long as the nation-state and capitalist market economy remain in existence, clashes of one sort or another between the major powers are unavoidable. There is no honor among thieves. US imperialism’s rivals will hardly stand idly by while it gets its house in order and will do their best to fill the vacuum left in the wake of its strategic retreat.

It is in this context that Trump has unceremoniously jettisoned the liberals’ hypocritical “rules-based international order” in which US imperialism determines the rules to serve its interests. As a businessman, Trump believes that what is good for business is good for America, and if normalized relations with Russia offer more overall than the current arrangement with Europe, then so be it—conventional rules or norms do not bind him.

However, after dominating the world scene for so long, being merely one of three great powers represents a paradigm shift in world relations that will reverberate far and wide. Globalization was more than an economic and military project; it was also a political and ideological outlook. Now, all that has been shattered.

The liberal-imperialist mask of the so-called “Western values,” “defense of democracy,” and the “inviolability of human rights and national borders” have been unceremoniously dropped. Time is running out, and US imperialism can no longer afford the smiling mask of hypocrisy—it needs to get straight to its cruel and calculated business openly and directly.

In a Fox News interview in March 2025, Marco Rubio openly admitted that the Ukraine war is “a proxy war between nuclear powers.” Or, as Trump said many times, Greenland has “incredible natural resources,” “we need [it] for national security,” and “one way or the other, we’re going to get it.”

It’s survival of the fittest when it comes to making profits and exporting crisis and upheaval. Nowhere is this being more acutely felt than in Europe. Deindustrialized and demilitarized, the Western edge of Eurasia can no longer play the role it has since the Renaissance. This, too, marks a colossal paradigm shift.

It was precisely Europe’s geographic and political atomization that gave rise to the competitive state system, which in turn facilitated the emergence of capitalism in that part of the world. But Europe’s former dynamism has now turned into its opposite. Twenty-seven nominally independent countries crammed into the Frankenstein’s monster of the EU can’t compete with the likes of the US, China, and Russia.

The European bourgeois have been emasculated and are in shock at the Americans’ about-face and the sudden end of their “special relationship” with the world’s Godfather. The so-called “collective West” is collective no more. It’s not for nothing that Martin Wolf of the Financial Times penned an article titled: “The US Is Now the Enemy of the West.”

Propped up by US imperialism in the postwar epoch to counter the Soviets and prevent Germany from rising too far, Europe is now seen as a liability and a rival, or at best, a second-rate, dependent vassal. As an old proverb says, “the sheep will spend its entire life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd.”

After 80 years of relative stability, the European bourgeois grew soft and complacent. They forgot that when it comes to imperialism, there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests. Nor are there permanent borders or nation-states. The bitter truth is that Europe, as it has existed for centuries, must die so that American imperialism might live a little longer.

NATO, without its American imperialist backbone, is untenable. Trump’s demand that its members spend 5% of GDP on weapons—to be purchased from US arms manufacturers—is politically impossible. It would require brutal austerity and unprecedented attacks on the working class, which would inevitably lead to plummeting support for any government implementing them—not to mention massive social unrest. His threat of 25% tariffs on all goods from the European Union—which Trump claims was “formed to screw the US”—may be the final curb stomp.

Without preferred access to the US market, ultracheap Chinese commodities, affordable Russian energy, and US military protection, the Europeans will have to face down their increasingly angry workers by themselves. As the Financial Times commented in an article titled “Europe Must Trim Its Welfare State to Build a Warfare State”:

Anyone under 80 who has spent their life in Europe can be excused for regarding a giant welfare state as the natural way of things. In truth, it was the product of strange historical circumstances, which prevailed in the second half of the 20th century and no longer do.

These are the very real ramifications of US imperialism’s changed priorities. Trump should remember, however, that what goes around comes around—and revolutions do not respect borders.

Tariff wars and the new “New World Order”

Just as the British Empire withered on the vine once it lost its dominions, American imperialism cannot function as it did just a decade ago and must change the contours of its domain. While embracing favorable trade relationships anywhere he can find them, Trump’s priority will be to consolidate the US’s position in the Western hemisphere.

A key part of his strategy is to reset the country’s steep trade imbalance with the rest of the world. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent plainly stated: Trump’s goal is “to rebalance the international economic system.”

Biden is a brazen warmonger, but Trump is hardly interested in peace, as his unprovoked bombing of Yemen clearly shows. He’s merely shifting priorities and leaning further into economic forms of warfare. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, trade wars are simply a variation on a theme. Warren Buffett agrees: “Tariffs are actually … an act of war.”

No longer able to directly compete in the world market against the industrial monster it helped create, it is compelled to turn its back on “free trade.” Although the US has always had some protectionist measures in place, Trump’s turn toward tariffs is a sign of weakness, not strength.

After renegotiating NAFTA during his first term, Trump has already torn up the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. His threatened tariffs on Mexico and Canada target the country’s first and third biggest trading partners. Although their economies are already tightly integrated with the US, he aims to bring the country’s near abroad to heel fully. His threat to use military force to hunt down narcotraffickers in Mexico is also intended to have a chilling effect—though following through could explode in his face.

Trump is under pressure from many big corporations not to start a full-scale trade war. He has already pulled back several times. In the short term, tariffs are likely to intensify the very inflationary pressures that helped lead to Biden’s demise. If he follows through with reciprocal trade policies and tariffs on all US trading partners, we could see the biggest global economic conflict since the early 1930s. This would likely mean a big decline in trade and cuts in production.

And while his on-again, off-again tariff threats risk making him look like the boy who cried wolf, the one country Trump has not backed off of is China. However, he is playing with fire and the lives of billions; his effort to tip trade in his favor through aggressive bullying is an enormous gamble. Just as US imperialism would likely suffer terrible losses in a direct military confrontation with Russia or China in their respective regions, it remains to be seen whether its already debilitated economy can withstand an all-out trade war.

The Chinese embassy in the US minced no words on social media: “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.” The Chinese have also called on the rest of the world to make mutually beneficial deals with them instead of the Americans, who always renege on their agreements and slap sanctions and tariffs on countries willy-nilly.

In Trump’s view, these measures will bring in trillions of dollars and create jobs like never before. However, as the Financial Times correctly noted, “tariffs won’t bring back America’s unipolar moment.”

Furthermore, just as Western sanctions compelled Russia to revamp aspects of its economy, and China to innovate, Trump’s tariffs have sparked a revival of Canadian and Mexican industrial nationalism. While they may not have the clout of the US or China, they can also impose some costs on the American economy. Mexico, China, and Canada accounted for 40% of all goods imported into the US last year. Trump’s bullying could well push them closer to China—precisely what he’s trying to cut across.

As Foreign Affairs noted:

During the Cold War, Washington regularly used economic coercion against allies. Previous administrations differed from Trump in tone, but the substance of the threats was often similar: follow US policy priorities or face serious economic damage. Trump is attempting to exploit this underappreciated power in his bid to break up multilateral alliances and craft a new US-led sphere of influence in which Washington enjoys unfettered primacy in its dealings with individual states. Trump has a crude diplomatic manner and deficient strategic foresight. But he has an intuitive grasp of how to use leverage in bilateral negotiations in which his opponent holds a weaker hand. In Trump’s first term, his team learned that the commercial bullying of rival countries is often ineffective but that it can quickly force US allies to submit. Now, he appears to be doubling down on attempts to shore up American power by pushing friendly countries into deeper dependence on the US market and the dollar.

 

This strategy, however, is likely to work only in bilateral relationships in which the United States is unquestionably economically dominant. As the global economic order moves in a more protectionist, mercantilist, and multipolar direction, it is increasingly uncertain how many countries will fall into this category. The calculus looks different for the United States’ neighbors in North America and countries deeply dependent on US assistance for their survival, such as Ukraine, than it does for other European and Asian economies. Trump’s efforts to boss around Canada and Mexico may well continue to work, but for the economies of Eurasia, the appeal of alternatives, such as greater interregional exchange and integration into Chinese supply chains, will rise rapidly.

Trump oozes confidence and has hit the ground running. However, managing the decline of US imperialism while remaking the postwar order won’t be smooth or easy. He can’t decouple meaningfully from the world economy, and he can’t snap his fingers to reclaim the country’s military-industrial preeminence. William McKinley and Dwight Eisenhower may be his presidential role models, but there’s no question of bringing back the conditions that existed in the 1890s or the 1950s.

All this being said, we shouldn’t write US imperialism’s epitaph yet. It may not be what it once was, but it remains a formidable power. Trump goads others to pursue economic nationalism because, with a handful of exceptions, most countries can still be easily intimidated if not entirely dominated by the US. Trump’s early clashes with Panama and Colombia are clear examples. Small nations, be warned!

And let’s not forget: despite pushing for a peace deal in Ukraine and the short-lived ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, Trump continued to arm Israel to the teeth. He may prefer to focus on China and his domestic agenda, but the Middle East is a hornets’ nest kicked by imperialism for over 100 years, and the US is still the world’s policeman. As long as the Zionists remain in power in Israel and have the support of Washington, achieving any stability in the region will be virtually impossible.

Just because Trump and his cronies recognize the transformed circumstances doesn’t mean they will simply roll over or stop jockeying for supremacy. Again, they are merely signaling a change in focus, not overall strategy. Just ask Cuba and Venezuela, who have seen an intensification of sanctions and other forms of imperialist pressure.

For their part, China, Russia, India, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the world’s global and regional powers have their own angry working classes and other internal contradictions to contend with. Formations like BRICS are also impermanent marriages of convenience tailored to suit the current situation. One thing is sure: not everyone can come out as a winner; history is littered with the ruins of empires that couldn’t keep up with the Joneses.

The postwar boom was enabled, in part, by the massive destruction of the productive forces during World War II. But due to the class balance of forces and the existence of nuclear weapons, the bourgeoisie cannot resort to all-out world war—unless they want to end their system and our species altogether. So, Trump is left with the option of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

World imperialism is in truly uncharted waters. Big power politics and a modern version of the Great Game are back on a higher level than ever. The current world order took two devastating world wars and the deaths of tens of millions to establish. Even if it’s not entirely clear what will replace it, Trump is doing what he must because continuing on the same path is no alternative at all.

In the absence of a mass revolutionary working-class alternative that can overthrow this irrational system in the short term, it’s going to be a painful, protracted process. But make no mistake: history wastes nothing, and Marx’s mole continues to burrow beneath the surface.

Crisis of the regime

When it comes to the unity and interpenetration of world and domestic events, Trump is both cause and effect, and a classic example of accident expressing necessity. He is both a symptom and an accelerant of processes that were underway long before he formally entered politics.

Mirroring his efforts abroad, Trump has also moved aggressively to effect a paradigm shift on the home front. To a lesser degree, Dick Cheney did something similar in 2001 when he gutted the federal government and filled it with neocons—reflecting the short-lived “unipolar moment” of the post-Soviet world. Now it’s Trump’s turn.

His furious onslaught of executive orders, appointments, and proposals has thrown the liberal world into a panic and has them questioning his sanity. But as Shakespeare’s Polonius put it, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” And yet, it is a kind of madness.

During the course of the Great Depression and in the aftermath of World War II, the American ruling class built a vast bipartisan bureaucracy that metastasized into a self-perpetuating, permanent administrative apparatus. Trump’s confrontation with the old guard has taken the form of a scapegoating dogfight against that machinery, which he and his supporters have dubbed the “deep state.” As he expressed it, “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.” As Vladimir Putin aptly told a reporter in 2017:

I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third—Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do—and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.

For many decades after World War II, the bipartisan apparatus maintained the continuity of bourgeois rule across administrations. But it has taken on a parasitic and profoundly corrupt life of its own. That was perfectly fine when things were going more smoothly, and most people weren’t paying much attention to what was going on at the top. But the masses’ ire has been roused by decades of crisis, and the governmental apparatus is under intense scrutiny. Most importantly, the machinery was built to serve the needs of an overwhelmingly rich and dominant imperialist hyperpower, and is no longer appropriate for the transformed world of today.

On some level, Trump and his advisors understand that sweeping changes to the discredited status quo are required, starting with foreign policy, streamlining the state bureaucracy, and balancing the federal budget. If changes are not made from the top, even bigger changes will be imposed by the enraged masses from below. Confronted with this precarious reality, the old guard establishment was paralyzed. Unable to continue ruling in the old way but offering nothing to replace it, they paved the way for a reality TV tycoon to win the White House—twice.

Early in Trump’s first term, Steve Bannon called for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” After being thwarted by “the swamp” during his first term, Trump is far better prepared this time around and aims to drain any fight it has in it during his first few weeks in office. Trump is laying off staff en masse and slashing funding—the lifeblood of any entrenched and corrupt bureaucracy. In so doing, his aim is to cut down the debt, eliminate opposition, and shape the federal bureaucracy to better fit the system’s current needs.

In Trump’s administration, it’s DOGE whiz kids in T-shirts and hoodies who are setting the tone and throwing the entrenched establishment for a loop. But the stakes are enormously high, and “the blob” will not roll over without putting up a fight. As the neocon stalwart Bill Kristol put it: “The deep state is far preferable to the Trump state.” From their point of view, Trump introduces a strong element of unpredictability that threatens to further undermine their system.

Infighting in Washington

During his 12 years in office, Franklin D. Roosevelt made significant changes to the state superstructure, posed as a “friend of the workers,” and created New Deal programs such as Social Security. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs included Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, and the Food Stamp Act.

As a result, the current state apparatus has long been associated with the Democrats, who are considered the “left” in American politics. However, neither Roosevelt nor Johnson had anything to do with the “left.” Their limited state intervention aimed to stave off revolution and preserve bourgeois rule during the Great Depression, and to supercharge US imperialism during World War II and the postwar boom.

So, although Trump frames his blows against the “ball of worms” as an attack against “woke Marxism” and “the left,” it is no such thing—that’s just smoke and mirrors. Far from “restoring the people’s republic,” Trump is acting out of hard-nosed economic and geopolitical necessity to defend the core interests of his faction of the ruling class.

But in doing so, he has demoralized huge swaths of the federal bureaucracy, and this will have wide-ranging repercussions. One function of that bureaucracy has been to serve as a shock absorber to ease the pressure from below in times of economic and social crisis. The same goes for what remains of the social safety net and the system’s many checks and balances, intended as guard rails to prevent overreach by the executive branch. If these are undermined or removed altogether, what’s to prevent a future left-populist president from ruling by decree once Trump’s right-populist variant runs its course?

The vicious infighting at the top injects even greater volatility into an already chaotic equation. Far from leading to a new equilibrium, it could accelerate the chaos and rising discontent with the existing state of affairs.

As communists, we fight Trump, not from the impotent perspective of the liberals, but from the standpoint of working-class independence and the need for a socialist revolution. Instead of picking and choosing which policies we support and oppose in isolation, we always start by examining the broad class interests behind them. When analyzing any phenomenon, we have a simple rule of thumb: we support that which increases the unity, confidence, and consciousness of the world’s working class, and oppose anything that works against this.

As such, we don’t take sides in the cage match between Trumpism and the other factions of the US and world ruling classes. However, this doesn’t mean we’re indifferent to the massive cuts and layoffs being inflicted on essential social programs and federal workers. We oppose layoffs of ordinary federal workers, privatization of the Post Service, and cuts to social programs. It will not be lost on many of Trump’s supporters that while he claims to be attacking the entrenched bureaucracy, the vast majority of those being chainsawed are ordinary workers who process applications for Social Security and other benefits.

As always, we take the side of the workers—an injury to one is an injury to all! Not only do we oppose the “deep state”—we oppose the bourgeois state as a whole, no matter which party is in power. Communists fight for a workers’ state and a workers’ government, whose first order of business will be to nationalize the key levers of the economy and begin dismantling the institutions of capitalist rule.

We stand for workers’ democracy, in which the majority truly rules. Democratically elected councils will combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions, as opposed to the farce of bourgeois democracy with its fraudulent checks and balances intended to preserve the status quo.

All officials and representatives will be directly elected and recallable by those who elected them, and be paid no more than the average wage of the workers they represent. In a future workers’ democracy, there will be no room for gerrymandering, the unelected Electoral College, judges or officials appointed for life, or the grossly disproportional Senate. The terrifying “bodies of armed men,” courts, and prisons required by the capitalist minority to keep the working majority in check will be replaced by the armed people and institutions suitable for the new society in formation.

On the basis of the most modern technology, the democratically and rationally planned economy will speed us towards a worldwide society of superabundance within a generation. As class distinctions rapidly recede and then disappear altogether, the workers’ state itself will atrophy of its own accord. As Engels explained in Anti-Dühring:

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.

And in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State:

The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

Austerity and deregulation

Trump may have a general idea of what he intends to do, and plenty of tactical attacks prepared to keep his opponents off balance and guessing what his next move will be. But he has no secret ace up his sleeve that can reset the fundamentals and compel decrepit American capitalism to return to the vibrant, historically progressive days of its youth. He can’t get apples from a rotting pear tree. Nor is he about to uproot the rot by nationalizing the economy and running it under democratic workers’ control.

The only way forward for humanity is to abolish national borders and the market economy. This is the inexorable direction being taken by history, driven by the development of the productive forces. Yet Trump’s “solution” is to push hard in the very opposite direction, towards “economic nationalism.”

But there’s an enormous elephant in the room that threatens to inflict a frightening cost on the political representatives of capital if they follow through: the need to drive down the living conditions of American workers even further. There is no alternative if profits are to remain high and the country is to regain the competitive advantages it had in the past. In a nutshell, this sums up the crisis of the regime of bourgeois rule.

A glutton for praise and adoration, Trump seeks to manage his supporters’ expectations to soften the inevitable backlash. As he posted on social media when he announced his impending tariff war: “This will be the golden age of America! Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!)” And as he told Congress, there will be “a little disturbance” and “a little bit of an adjustment period.”

However, American workers, small farmers, and business owners didn’t vote for “pain,” “disturbance,” or an “adjustment period.” In exit polls on election night, 75% of voters agreed that inflation was a “hardship.” They believed Trump when he promised to “bring down prices, starting on Day One.”

In the final analysis, they voted for good jobs, wages, quality, affordable healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure, and security. They simply want more money in their pockets to deal with rising living costs, whether it comes from higher wages, lower taxes, more robust benefits, etc. After decades of running in place to avoid falling into the abyss, they didn’t sign up for more belt-tightening to further an abstract political ideology or enrich the billionaires. Those who tipped Trump over the electoral edge didn’t vote for continued inflation, mass firings, closed National Parks,  government shutdowns, cuts and delays in essential social services they depend on, wild gyrations on the stock market, lost retirement savings, or a recession—which Trump says he can’t rule out.

In February, US-based employers announced plans to cut 172,017 jobs, a 103% increase from a year earlier and the highest February total since 2009, at the peak of the “Great Recession.” Tens of thousands of federal workers have been placed on administrative leave, laid off, or terminated, effective immediately, leading to chaos in the machinery of state.

The IRS’s workforce may be cut by half, and 70,000 workers at the Veterans’ Administration are on the chopping block as DOGE orders it to “resize”—despite Trump’s saccharine praise for military personnel. Social Security employees—who help ensure that 73 million Americans receive their benefits—are being cut by half at 1,200 field offices around the country, leading to fears the entire system could collapse. Trump and Musk have actively undermined the program’s integrity with ridiculous claims that millions of dead people receive fraudulent benefits.

Programs that provide food assistance and support for impoverished children, the elderly, and premature babies are also being gutted. Millions of jobs are at risk, including eldercare providers, addiction specialists, maternity services staff, and medical facility workers, as well as employees throughout the food supply. Rural areas will be hit especially hard, and even librarians, public utility workers, EMTs, and firefighters are under threat. Already, service workers in areas hit early by federal layoffs have been affected, as the economic chain reaction works its way down the ladder.

After promising to “love and cherish” Medicaid, Trump’s Republicans have passed a budget that mangles the program. And if the Education Department is dismantled by former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, as promised, even more working-class and poor communities will be impacted. But all of this also affects Republican districts, and many Trump voters are already expressing buyer’s remorse. Many fired federal workers are veterans, some of whom voted for Trump. As for inflation, Trump may succeed in blaming Biden for the first few months, but eventually, he will be held responsible.

As for his promise to cut bureaucratic red tape, only time will tell what medium and long-term effects will result from his incremental deregulation of financial and energy markets, the food supply, health and human services, tax system, environmental protections, the military, and more. But a measles outbreak in Texas among populations known for their anti-vaccine stance hardly bodes well.

Trump’s policy is essentially protectionism abroad coupled with austerity and selective “libertarianism”at home—all to enrich his already filthy rich billionaire buddies further. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that this runs counter to Trump’s promise to make the American majority “rich and great again.”

His is literally a government of billionaires and everyone can see in it a return to the spoils system of the Gilded Age—minus the top hats and monocles. Millions of Trump voters are hoping against hope that enough of the largesse will eventually trickle down to them to take the edge off the constant uncertainty of their lives. But what happens when it doesn’t?

As the saying goes, to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. No one will lament the demotions and firings of a few generals and top bureaucrats. But if you break too many working-class eggs, you will end up losing your base of support. The working-class anger will take aim at Trump himself—threatening the entire system.

Constitutional crisis

Marx explained that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In other words, the government exists to defend the class interests of the capitalists. However, the ruling class is far from homogeneous.

While its interests are diametrically opposed to the workers’, it has its own inner divisions and differences. Like pigs around a trough, they more or less get along when there are enough profits to be had by all. But in times of crisis, the squealing, snarling, shoving, and back-biting begins. It is a self-evident fact that the capitalists’ warring factions are bitterly divided over how best to confront the existential threats they face.

In the absence of a mass working-class alternative, the void has been filled by the right-populist hybrid of Trumpism. After decades of dysfunction, lies, and betrayals, the liberals and traditional conservatives are in shambles. Desperate for a change—any change—millions of Americans opted to give the MAGA demagogues a chance, with even more American voters opting out of the electoral contest altogether for lack of a real alternative. Surely, they thought, nothing could be worse than the Biden years! But things can get worse.

In an attempt to slow down the decline of American capitalism, Trump and his reactionary cronies have tossed out the old playbook and embarked on a reckless and risky experiment with no guarantee of success. Though they may not be explicitly clear about it themselves, the deeper historical necessity they express is an attempt to save capitalism from itself and the growing anger of the masses.

Trump has messianically declared that “God saved him” to “make America great again” and that “it will be the greatest honor of my life to serve, not once but twice or three times or four times.” He even posted a quote attributed to Napoleon to justify his actions: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” In the case of Elon Musk, he didn’t even go through the motions of actually being elected or confirmed by anyone. As the world’s richest man, he answers to literally no one—not even Trump.

Trump has declared a national emergency at the border due to fentanyl trafficking and the “invasion” and “occupation” of the country by criminals and drug cartels, now designated as terrorist organizations. To aid in his efforts to aggressively patrol the border, he has threatened to use the federal military for domestic law enforcement within US borders, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

He has also promised to invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which severely curb free speech, civil liberties, and immigration. As for the Supreme Court, which is supposed to serve as the check-and-balance of last resort on abuses of power, it is stacked in Trump’s favor and has already granted him de facto blanket immunity for actions carried out while in office.

That being said, the Supreme Court must continue the pantomime of standing above the fray, lest it lose its tarnished authority altogether. When conflict does inevitably arise between the executive and the courts, historical precedent shows which side will emerge victorious. After 1832’s landmark case, Worcester v. Georgia, Andrew Jackson famously declared, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” When push comes to shove, the power of enforcement lies with the executive branch, and Trump fully intends to use this fact to his advantage.

Trump has leaned fully into the “unitary executive theory,” a semi-Bonapartist reading of Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution, whereby all executive power flows directly from the president. His non-stop confrontations with the courts are intentionally stretching the country’s governing document to breaking point. He calls his course of action a “revolution of common sense.” Musk has referred to a “much needed” “Second American Revolution.” For their part, the liberal-conservative establishment considers it a “constitutional” or “palace” coup.

In a certain sense, they are all right. Crafted to meet the needs of rising American capitalism, the Constitution is a fundamental pillar upon which the entire edifice of bourgeois rule rests. However, it reflects a world and balance of forces that no longer exists. Amending it requires broad consensus, which is nonexistent, and can take decades. Short of a revolutionary crisis, there is no question of the ruling class convening a constituent assembly to draft a new one, as that would unleash social forces that could quickly blow beyond the artificial constraints of capitalism. So they must make do with what they have. Unless and until it is tossed out altogether, a rolling constitutional crisis is the new normality.

Far from serving “We the People,” it is a bourgeois constitution that defines and upholds bourgeois property relations and the structures of a state to match. Nor should we forget that the Founding Fathers modeled their statutes on the Roman Republic, which was an imperialist oligarchy of slave owners long before the Empire was formally declared. Some, including Alexander Hamilton, argued for a monarch instead of a president.

Although we defend basic democratic rights insofar as they facilitate the struggle for building the proletarian party and preparing for the socialist revolution, we do not pick one or the other bourgeois side in fights over the Constitution. As with all other questions, we always take a class-independent position. Echoing its opening lines, communists stand for genuine rule by “We the People”—by which we mean the working class, which is the overwhelming majority of modern society.

All that being said, we must be careful and precise in our wording. Elaborating a Marxist analysis is not as simple as slapping a general-purpose label on something. Historical parallels and analogies can be useful to help frame our understanding of certain processes, but they are also inherently limited. “Similar to” is by no means “the same as.”

All phenomena must be analyzed concretely. Even if “elements” of Bonapartism can be discerned, it does not mean that Trumpism is the same as full-blown Bonapartism. Far from true Bonapartist “rule by the sword,” dictatorship, mass imprisonment, and executions of his enemies, Trump must make do with bravado, social media, executive orders, economic coercion, fights in the courts, and intensified clampdowns to send a message and appear as a strongman. Much of his apparent power stems from the fact that the Republicans currently control both houses of Congress—and he controls them.

However, neither Trump nor Musk can square the circle of capitalism’s inherent contradictions. While they aim to make significant changes to the bourgeois state apparatus, they cannot do without just such an apparatus. Despite the theatrics, they actually have minimal room for maneuver. And as we will see, he doesn’t have anywhere as big a mandate as he imagines. Far from a well-orchestrated authoritarian coup, his cabinet ushers in an almighty era of dysfunction and divisions at the top.

As CNN pointed out:

Every political action causes a counter-reaction. And the first signs of friction are appearing that could slow the president’s shock-and-awe start to his administration. It’s unlikely to stop Trump’s aggressive power plays, but it shows that even he is not immune to political gravity.

 

There’s little sign that he faces any imminent and meaningful opposition from congressional Democrats, whose glum and lame acts of protest during his primetime speech only exposed their powerlessness.

 

But the complications of a softening economy do now seem to be weighing on Trump’s behavior. The impact on regular Americans of Elon Musk’s bid to shred the federal government has prompted GOP lawmakers to demand a role. The Supreme Court just issued a ruling that could frustrate the administration’s attempt to shut down foreign aid. And more court rulings reining in Trump’s power grabs mean that the coming months are likely to be more impeded than his first six weeks in office.

We must, therefore, be absolutely clear: despite the panicked bleating of the liberals, Trumpism is neither Bonapartism nor fascism. In Italy, Germany, and Spain, the fascists mobilized petty-bourgeois paramilitary thugs to impose a reign of terror, militarization, and war. They smashed the workers’ organizations and threw their leaders and millions of others into prisons and concentration camps.

Today’s class balance of forces—which is overwhelmingly in favor of the workers—precludes this, even if there is massive confusion and the workers’ leaders are in bed with the bourgeois. Far from crushing the workers under a jackboot, Trump has promised them a new Golden Age and co-opted their unions. Instead of perpetual war, he campaigned on cutting back bloated military spending and direct imperialist intervention in the hopes of allocating more resources for its strategic competition with China. Trumpism is packed with contradictions, and we must be exacting in our analysis.

Liberals and liberal-socialists on life support

Both major parties are mired in crisis, but the Democrats are clearly the worse for wear. As they scramble to get their bearings ahead of the 2026 midterms, many honest rank-and-file activists —and some not-so-honest ones—are tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out how they ended up in such a mess.

First of all, let’s remember that the Democrats were once home to both Confederate slave owners and Tammany Hall. Due to FDR’s policies in the early 1930s, they were able to pose as the “progressive party of the working man,” a label they carried into the postwar period and beyond. Whatever was left of that image was shattered during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who used the remaining “left-progressive” cover provided by his party affiliation to ram through blatantly anti-worker policies at home and abroad.

Coinciding with the post-Soviet years of US-dominated hyper-globalization, he jumped openly into bed with Wall Street and the neocons, slashed the social safety net, and opened the floodgates to deindustrialization and the devastation of the Rust Belt. Although the 2000 election was bitterly contested, the same basic trajectory continued during GW Bush’s two terms. After another eight years of betrayed “hope” and “change we can believe in” under Obama—who presided over the aftermath of the “Great Recession” and prepared the way for the war in Ukraine—the stage was set for some serious political fireworks.

On the one hand, we saw the rise of Bernie Sanders and his call for “revolution against the billionaire class.” On the other, we saw Trump’s in-your-face demagogy and promise of a return to American greatness. Although both campaigns appealed to the working class, they gave the pent-up anger a populist rather than a clear class expression. Trump’s combative bravado appealed to many, and to his credit, Sanders put “socialism” front and center for the first time in nearly a century. CNN host Michael Smerconish summed up the worries of the ruling class: “Can either Coronavirus or Bernie Sanders be stopped?”

Given the prolonged crisis of capitalism and the lack of a viable working-class alternative, the emergence of populism and reformism in some form was inevitable at a certain stage. Classical social-democratic reformism tended to accompany periods of prolonged boom that allowed for genuine reforms, thus reinforcing the illusion that capitalism could work for everyone and that a revolution wasn’t necessary. The authority built up during the boom years allowed these parties and leaders to derail one revolution after another.

In recent decades, however, reformism has reared its head during periods of crisis, without the benefit of a boom, as a stopgap to hold back the rising tide of revolution. After the 2008 crisis, hatred against the political establishment was reflected in a collapse of the political center and the rise of new parties and more radical political figures around the world. From Podemos in Spain to SYRIZA in Greece and across Latin America, the reformists led the masses into a disastrous dead end. The modern American version of liberal-socialist-reformism took things to the next level of absurdity. Individuals like then-Jacobin editor and current The Nation president, Bhaskar Sunkara, actually believed they could take over an institutional bourgeois party controlled by billionaires

No matter what form reformism takes, we should always bear in mind the following:

• Reformism without real reforms doesn’t have any legs;
• Betrayal is inherent in reformism, whether its advocates are being devious or merely naive.

When push came to shove in 2016, Sanders recoiled from the brink. Instead of breaking with the Democrats and launching an independent socialist party—which would have been wildly popular—he returned to the establishment camp, and bent the knee to Hillary Clinton. Only Trump had the nerve to take his campaign to the end.

For her part, Clinton treated the legitimate, albeit misdirected anger of blue-collar workers with scorn and referred to them as a “basket of deplorables.” Smug and entitled to the very end, she cynically played the gender card and called on people to vote for her because she was a woman.

The Democrats could have embraced Sanders’s brand of soft-liberal-reformism and funneled the decades of accumulated discontent into their party. They almost certainly could have ridden that wave to victory in 2016. This would have cut across Trumpism in its infancy and kept the mass frustration within safe channels, at least for a little longer. But they were even more horrified by the forces the Sanders campaign had unleashed than they were of a Trump victory—which, in any case, they considered impossible. So they doubled down on Hillary Clinton, one of the most hated politicians of all time.

This volatile mix brought Trump to power and allowed the Republicans to cynically steal the mantle of “working-class” party from the Democrats. As Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington recently said of her own party: “[Democrats] don’t respect people that work for a living.”

Following the pandemic, economic collapse, George Floyd movement, and another sell-out by Bernie, the liberal establishment tripled down with Biden—who only narrowly eked out a win in 2020. After initially assuring voters that Biden was in top form and the best possible candidate, they quadrupled down on the status quo with the debacle of the Harris campaign. For millions, Trump’s promise to “end American decline” rang more true than the Democrats’ hollow assertion that “America is already great.” Even the liberal frenzy over “Russiagate,” January 6, Trump’s 34 felony convictions, and the threat he posed to “democracy” couldn’t prevent him from winning a second term—and even made him more popular among some layers.

Biden’s parting speech was a pathetic par for the course:

I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked …

 

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

 

We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.

 

They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers won rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen, and we’ve got to do that again.

 

In the last four years, that is exactly what we’ve done.

 

People should be able to make as much as they can, but play by the same rules, pay their fair share in taxes.

As if the United States hadn’t always been run by a virtually unchecked handful of ultra-wealthy people! The US is a bourgeois democracy, which means only the rich are free to run the show, and very few have a genuinely “fair shot” at getting ahead. While bemoaning the modern incarnation of the ever-present oligarchy, his real intent was to feebly apologize for capitalism in an attempt to safeguard his disappointing legacy. And if you read between the lines, it is easy to see that he fears the masses “punishing the wealthy” far more than he fears Trump.

Furthermore, there’s nothing new here. Over two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” Even FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, considered it “one of the strangest anomalies in all history” that America, democratic in form, is autocratic in substance: “America, the land of majority rule but controlled … by monopolies that in their turn are controlled by a negligible number of their stockholders.”

The Democrats are in total disarray and have passively enabled Trump’s takeover of the federal government. Aside from impotent heckling, they haven’t even pretended to be a genuine opposition. As always, as a capitalist party, they are more terrified of mobilizing the considerable anti-Trump sentiment among large swaths of workers than they are of having the entire postwar setup eviscerated by Trump and his MAGA wrecking ball—because such a movement could quickly get out of their control.

While voting to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Bernie Sanders whimpers that “what Musk is doing is illegal.” And although his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour reveals the combative mood that exists among some layers, in its current form, it merely parrots the Democratic establishment and will serve only to release a bit of pressure.

As for DSA’s former darling, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she has dropped any pretense of being a “socialist” and has been thoroughly co-opted by the party machine, doing little more than threaten to file articles of impeachment against the justices of the Supreme Court.

Lesser evilism isn’t dead yet

That being said, the Democrats cannot be written off altogether. Like a pack of undead zombies, they can continue limping along until conditions change and a new chance to pose as the “lesser evil” emerges. As an institutional party, it will take more than a defeat on the scale of 2024 and Trump’s purge of the “deep state” to kill it off once and for all. Until a mass working-class party truly turns American politics upside down, the Democrats can, and almost certainly will make a comeback. Only time will tell what form this might take.

In recent years, the lines between the so-called “left” and “right” wings of the ruling class parties have been blurred beyond recognition. As a result, for millions of people, the superficial and subjective differences between the “lesser” and “greater” variants of “evil” have disappeared altogether. As Gore Vidal famously said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

However, with confidence in both liberalism and traditional conservatism hollowed out, we shouldn’t be surprised if the Democrats try their luck as left populists. An organic “Tea Party-moment” and the rise of left-populism in and around the Democratic Party seems likely, given the grassroots anger and lack of alternatives. If they were to go down this path, we would be confronted with a revival of lesser evilism, which we must inoculate our comrades against.

As always, the Democrats would do everything in their power to keep any such movement within safe channels. It would be a trap for honest leftists who would take false comfort in the numbers of a class-collaborationist popular front. Many would be susceptible to revived illusions that the Democrats can be “pushed to the left.” But there would be plenty of individuals who could be won directly to the RCA on a principled basis, once they realize that the kind of party they are looking for already exists and that they can play an active role in building it.

For communists, “left” or “right” is ultimately a function of a party or politician’s relationship to social classes and the means of production. History has given rise to many peculiar hybrids, some of which have represented an important step forward, even if they remained within the bounds of reformism. However, in the final analysis, only a party that stands for working-class independence and the struggle to bring it to political and economic power should fully qualify as “left.”

Communists should not refer to the Democratic Party as “left” and the Republican Party as “right.” Both are our irreconcilable class enemies! At most, they represent two political factions of the same reactionary class. While remaining friendly to those confused workers who, for lack of an alternative, still prefer the Democrats to Trump or Trump to the Democrats, we cannot be associated with either party in any way, shape, or form. We oppose Trump for our own reasons, on a class-independent basis.

One of the most trenchant critiques of the liberals, conservatives, and reformists was given by Malcolm X in 1963, in the context of critiquing the mainstream civil rights movement, albeit from a Black nationalist perspective:

The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.

 

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

 

Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football, and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These “leaders” sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains.

 

These “leaders” are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.

As for the so-called “left,” other than the still-embryonic forces of the RCA, there is no left worthy of the name. The CPUSA and DSA’s class-collaborationist policy of trying to push the Democrats to the left has been a catastrophic failure—precisely as we predicted. Given the political vacuum, DSA, the CP, Greens, or other similar formations may enjoy a growth spurt now and then, and we may yet find individuals accidentally in their orbit who are a good fit for the RCA. But broadly speaking, the road to the future mass American revolutionary party does not pass through any of these parties.

The same goes for the incorrigible Stalinists, who are cosplaying reformists at heart. These organizations’ activist tendencies may catapult them into more prominent “leadership” roles of whatever protest movements emerge, but fundamentally they uphold class-collaborationist positions that offer no real solutions for the working class. As for the ultraleft “Trotskyist” sects, they do nothing but tarnish the name of that great revolutionary. Even if they achieve temporary numerical success, none of them have built anything of substance, and none of them ever will—it is impossible to build anything healthy with unhealthy political DNA.

At a certain stage, some accidental figure, party, or other mass movement may emerge to fill the gaping political vacuum—and we may be compelled to reorient our perspectives and forces to connect with it. But for the moment, the field is wide open to the RCA, and we should concentrate on finding fresh forces who skip the stage of reformism altogether and make the leap directly to revolutionary communism.

The bankruptcy of identity politics and the Green New Deal

Since the ruling class cannot maintain its power and privileges through carrots and sticks alone, it must also utilize other, more subtle methods. “Divide-and-conquer” is a millennia-old tactic used by propertied minorities to dominate propertyless majorities by turning them against each other instead of against their rulers. Identity politics, “intersectionality,” the “culture war,” DEI, “wokeness,” and “anti-wokeness” are merely modern iterations of this diversionary tactic, used by both wings of the ruling class to muddy the waters of the class struggle.

Identity politics in one form or another has been part of American politics since the country’s inception. From the beginning, US capitalism was built on immigration and slavery, and the ruling class realized early on the utility of weakening working-class unity by injecting racial and ethnic identity. Since then, this divisive filth has metastasized.

Cultured in the petri dish of petty-bourgeois academia, and consciously pushed by agents of the bourgeois state, the postmodernist variant of identity politics has percolated throughout society. Its effusion has been enabled by the absence of a more widespread and coherent expression of working-class consciousness, which can only emerge on the basis of active, mass class struggle. On the surface, these ideas can seem “progressive,” insofar as they draw attention to the historical injustices and myriad forms of oppression suffered by the majority. In practice, however, identity politics plays an atomizing role and cuts across the cardinal rule of revolutionary communism—class independence and unity of the working class.

Whether they are Black, female, or gay, the billionaires have far more in common with others from their social class than they do with workers who share their racial, gender, or sexual identity. One group stands as exploitative owners of the means of production who profit from the labor of others—and therefore stands to gain from maintaining the systemic roots of oppression. The other consists of those who must sell their labor power for a wage if they want to eat and have a roof over their heads. Identity politics blurs these lines and serves as a cover for class collaboration.

In the recent electoral cycle, the patent rottenness of these ideas had become apparent to millions who saw through the liberals’ cynical appeals for votes on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender. Lip service to the concrete problems of everyday life is not enough. For example, DEI policies at corporations like Target have done nothing to address the systemic racism that gave rise to the historic George Floyd movement.

Disgusted by the lack of options and unable to distinguish between “evils,” millions of voters from racial and ethnic minorities sat out the election altogether. Others cast a vote for Trump on the basis of pragmatic self-interest, under the assumption that things couldn’t possibly deteriorate more under him than they had under Biden. As explained ahead of election day by the Wall Street Journal:

Trump is drawing more support from Latino voters than any GOP nominee since George W. Bush, current polling shows. His support among Black voters, if polling trends hold until Election Day, would be stronger than recorded for any Republican nominee in exit polls dating to 1972.

 

That outcome, say GOP leaders and analysts, holds a lesson: It was wrong to think the minority voters most open to the party see politics primarily through the lens of race and ethnicity, with immigration as a paramount issue and a liberal immigration policy the preferred course. Instead, they say, the GOP found it could succeed best by arguing it could lift minority voters economically.

2024 shattered the Democrats’ smug confidence in the idea that “demography is destiny”—i.e., that a growing Black and Brown population would automatically translate into Democratic electoral dominance. A New York Times-Ipsos poll from January 2025 found that a majority of Americans feel the Democratic Party doesn’t share their priorities: “The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration,” whereas they saw the Democrats as “caring” more about “abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change,” in that order.

However, since Trump can’t resolve the contradictions of capitalism through the force of personality alone, he will prove equally disappointing. The only real “demographic destiny” is that the working class is already the overwhelming majority of society, and will eventually move into action as a class.

As we’ve explained time and again, the slow but sure process of class polarization in this country is refracted through the distorted prism of the two capitalist parties. In this context, the “death of woke” is a welcome and necessary stage of the process of clarification. While many of its advocates are naively well-intentioned, “woke” is not only “broke”—it is fundamentally reactionary. Despite this, like lesser evilism, identity politics has not been killed off altogether, and will continue in some form until a truly mass working-class consciousness emerges and wins political power.

In the meantime, it is the right-wing variant of the “culture war” that dominates public debate, with Trump’s demagogic attacks against immigrants, trans people, etc.  After the Washington DC-bound airliner collided with a US Army helicopter, Trump immediately blamed “DEI hires”—a blatant dog whistle. The liberals’ contemptuous sops to the oppressed have led to a reactionary backlash, particularly against trans people. Since they limit themselves to performative bandaids and quota-based tokenism within the limits of the system, the Democrats have made trans individuals more vulnerable than ever to Trump and his extremist supporters’ scapegoating.

As with their fixation on identity politics, the liberals’ “Green New Deal”—which unsurprisingly removed guarantees of healthcare, jobs, food, and housing from the original proposal when incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act—has discredited the idea of fighting climate change. The liberals’ half-measures did nothing to slow down global warming and served only to give renewable energy and the fight against climate change a bad name. Millions see it as a ploy to shift the burden onto the working class, forcing them to tighten their belts and accept inflationary prices in pursuit of an abstract goal—while the big energy companies got richer than ever. Despite promising to be the “climate president,” Joe Biden oversaw the highest-ever production of oil and gas of any country in history, and presided over a shift away from renewables toward the end of his term. Yet again, it was all talk and tokenistic pandering to “progressive policy,” and no action.

All of this again underlines the central thesis of the document: there is no solution under capitalism, and the only way forward is class unity.

Instead of quotas to divide up resources made artificially scarce by capitalism, communists fight for quality jobs, healthcare, education, food, and housing for all. Instead of fighting over crumbs from the capitalists’ table, we fight for the entire table. And instead of tinkering with capitalism within its narrow limits, we fight for social ownership of the means of production and meaningful action to mitigate, if not reverse, the effects of human-driven climate change.

MAGA fills the vacuum—sort of

It is in this overall context that the revamped Republican Party was able to step into the political void. Trump is a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. But after decades of liberal-conservative cynicism and crocodile smiles, he is currently seen by many honest workers as a savior and breath of fresh air.

Marx explained in the 18th Brumaire that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Under certain conditions, individuals can put their particular imprint on a definite historical process. Trump is undoubtedly a world-historic figure and a president sui generis. He may lie and spew nonsense 90% of the time, but the 10% truth he does speak can be disarmingly frank and candid.

Henry Kissinger seemed to recognize this in 2018 when he commented that Trump “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” As BBC commentator Kamal Ahmed said, “We don’t need to take Trump literally, but we do have to take him seriously.”

Trump beat Harris according to the rules of the game, cashing in on the visceral hatred of the old-guard establishment to secure 312 electoral votes versus his rival’s 226. But he hardly has an overwhelming mandate. Even after the catastrophe of Biden-Harris, Trump’s margin of victory in 2024 was only slightly higher than in 2016. The combined difference in the swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin was just under 230,000 total votes out of more than 152 million cast across the country—a tiny fraction of a percent. Seventy-five million voted for Harris, and 90 million didn’t bother voting at all—far more than the 77.3 million who cast ballots in his favor. All told, more than 77.8 million people cast a ballot for someone other than Trump. Ultimately, the decisive factor was not a massive surge in support for Trump, but a precipitous fall in turnout among former Democratic voters.

Every president gets something of a honeymoon with the voters, but no honeymoon lasts forever. The relative handful of voters who put him over the edge will not wait indefinitely for him to deliver on his promises. As of February-March 2025, just weeks into his second term, Trump had a 45% overall job rating. At the same point in his only term, Biden was polling in the mid-50s. It took Trump 2.0 just three or four weeks to fall into negative ratings territory. Compare this to seven months for Biden, 17 days for Trump in his first term, and 18 months for Obama.

As for the all-important independent “swing” voters, 59% said they disapproved of Trump’s performance so far. Many are disconcerted by his commitment to imposing conservative social policies on the entire country, which contradicts his alleged support for states’ rights. As free-speech advocate Jonathan Friedman put it, “It’s quite clear that this is an effort to commandeer the federal government to win the culture war, so to speak, once and for all.”

Some have even referred to it as a “cold war” between “red” and “blue” states. However, this is just part of the distorted class polarization. The mainstream media constantly asserts that Trump’s election represents a “shift to the right.” This is only true within the painfully narrow parameters of the present American political spectrum. What is really taking place is an almighty polarization in both directions, reflecting the widespread rejection of the status quo.

Given the state of the Democrats, there has been a definite electoral shift toward the rebranded “pro-worker” Republicans. In 2020, 42% of young men polled identified as Democrats and 20% as Republicans. By the 2024 elections, 32% said they were Democrats and 29% Republicans. And yet, the shift of views on healthcare, for example, are not markedly to the right. 60% of that same group agreed that “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it,” down a mere 4 points since 2020. 54% agreed that “the government should spend more to reduce poverty,” down only 2 points in the same period.

Abortion rights and raising the minimum wage are also broadly popular, including among certain layers of Trump’s supporters. In the 2024 election, a majority of voters in the “red states” of Arizona, Missouri, and Florida voted for measures to expand or protect abortion rights. This reveals that there is ultimately a class basis to the simmering discontent despite the electoral confusion.

Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” fossil fuels policy and improved relations with Russia may lower energy prices temporarily. But it will exacerbate the climate crisis, which is increasingly concrete—just ask the people of Los Angeles.

As of March, inflation hasn’t abated, and 62% of those polled in mid-February said they didn’t think Trump was doing enough to address it. And yet, 81% of voters told pollsters the economy was “very important” in determining their 2024 vote. For the overwhelming majority of America’s 163.9 million workers, “it’s the economy, stupid” still trumps all other considerations at the ballot box.

Trump’s economic policy is essentially an extreme version of trickle-down economics. He is convinced that making the billionaires even richer will magically lead to generalized prosperity. But the very existence of billionaires precludes the enrichment of tens of millions of people. American workers are pragmatic if nothing else, and the proof of Trump’s pudding will be in the eating.

Trump is faced with an unsolvable conundrum. No president can make the market economy work for everyone because it is designed to continue enriching the billionaires through the exploitation and impoverishment of workers. Furthermore, you can’t control or plan what you do not own. Even a force of nature like Trump cannot bend capitalism to his will. He has no clue as to its inherent contradictions and no intention of addressing them.

He has vastly overpromised, saying that “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” And if that’s not enough, he will “fix everything,” “cut energy costs in half,” and bring “the best jobs, the biggest paychecks, and the brightest economic future the world has ever seen.” However, talk is cheap, and delivering on this scale is impossible.

As for Wall Street, most CEOs have resigned themselves to Trump despite their former hostility, at least publicly. They clearly hope his cuts to taxes, regulations, and government will lead to a billionaire bonanza. But his whiplash governing style has already given them plenty of white-knuckle moments, and the stock market has been a rollercoaster. Instability and disruption may lead to mega profits for some, but generally speaking, they are as bad for business as they are for politics.

Biden’s fitness to rule was rightfully questioned on many levels. However, there are already doubts about Trump’s cognitive state and his claim to be “a very stable genius.” Trump lives in a bubble of chaos and drifts into unhinged rambles with increasing frequency. Like Biden, Trump will be 82 years old by the end of his new term.

Presidential hopefuls, including Vance, Rubio, and Gabbard are bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the big man and dream of extending MAGA’s rule beyond 2028. However, because it is a cross-class electoral coalition, MAGA is unstable by its very nature. The interests of the working majority and the billionaire minority are irreconcilable and cannot cohabitate indefinitely in the same political “big tent.”

Even the hard-core right populists and tech billionaires are finding it hard to get along, with Steve Bannon calling Elon Musk a “truly evil person” and “parasitic illegal immigrant” who wants to “play-act as God.” Marco Rubio and Musk are also allegedly already at odds.

As hated and discredited as the Democrats currently are, they will almost certainly be back in some form. But sooner or later, the pendulum will swing far past both major parties into genuine “left” territory, on a mass scale. The lack of a viable labor party is clearly a net negative for American workers at this stage. But this, too, can turn into its opposite, and we can predict that the capitalists will regret not having a reformist labor party in place to more easily control the workers once they move in a revolutionary direction.

The crude “black or white” pragmatism of the American outlook has an undoubtedly conservative influence. However, it has a potentially revolutionary aspect as well. If neither MAGA nor the Democrats can meet their needs, American workers will have no option but to take matters forcefully into their own hands. They will learn through experience that the original promise of America—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is impossible under capitalism and can only be realized through the socialist revolution.

A deindustrialized mountain of debt

Underlying all of these processes is the generalized crisis of capitalism. No economy can decouple from the rest of the world, and without a stable economic foundation, no society can enjoy lasting social equilibrium.

US-centric globalization drove the world economy for decades. But the US is not the juggernaut it once was, and the world is increasingly multi-nodal. While nominally the largest market in the world, the US economy rests on the quicksand of enormous debt. This includes nearly $18 trillion in household debt and an eye-watering $36 trillion in national debt, i.e., debt that the government owes to others plus debt it owes to itself. In February 2025, the US debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 123% of GDP. For comparison, consider that China’s stands at roughly 80%, Mexico’s at less than 50%, and Russia’s at 20%.

This effectively means that the entire US population would have to work 100% for free for nearly one-and-a-quarter years to pay it all off. This is obviously physically impossible. It is even more impossible on a world scale, which is saddled by over $315 trillion and a record debt-to-GDP ratio of 328%. Such levels of debt slavery are unsustainable. Many societal collapses and revolutions have been caused by debt-triggered avalanches, going back to antiquity.

And remember, this debt must be paid back with interest. In 2024, the federal government spent $892 billion on interest payments alone, a whopping 13% of total expenditure—more than the topline budget for “defense” and nearly four times as much as US companies invested in building manufacturing capacity that same year. And why should they invest? Capitalists produce goods for sale at a profit, not for human needs. If the market is already saturated—i.e., if consumers don’t have enough money to buy your products—why make more?

Overproduction of consumer goods and overcapacity—overproduction of the means of production—is rampant worldwide. In the US, capacity utilization is around 78%, meaning 22% of already existing plants sit idle and unproductive. Little more than a snap of the fingers would be needed to set millions of workers producing billions of useful items. But that can’t happen under an irrational system like capitalism—it simply wouldn’t be profitable for the capitalists to do so.

Instead of plowing earnings into productive investment, many major companies artificially inflate their stock’s value on the market by buying back shares in their own companies. These buybacks rose 300% over ten years. In 2022 alone, share buybacks jumped 22% to a record $1.31 trillion. This speculative skewing was accelerated by Trump’s first-term tax cuts and massive corporate handouts during the pandemic.

After years of Keynesian debt spending that drove up inflation and lined the pockets of big business, Trump has opted for a volatile combination of heightened protectionism abroad plus austerity and deregulation at home—all in the name of “liberty.” In his view: “Tariffs are the most beautiful word. I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich.” But the reality is far more complex than that.

To be sure, tariff revenues could be used to pay down the national debt. This would clear some space for renewed Keynesian spending in the future, which will almost certainly be needed to bail out the system yet again. But tariffs disrupt the “normal” functioning of capitalist supply and demand, and are all but certain to prolong inflation. Most importantly, they won’t automatically force manufacturers to “reshore” to the US. Nor will deportations and other restrictions on cheap immigrant labor.

In the 1950s, manufacturing accounted for 21–25% of US GDP. In 2023, it accounted for just 10.3% of GDP. In June 1979, US manufacturing employment peaked at 19.6 million. Today, there are 12.8 million manufacturing workers in a total population that has risen by over 50% since then. It’s easy to see why Trump wants to bring back the manufacturing backbone that made America a great power in the first place.

However, for the US to fully reindustrialize and catch up with China would be a Sisyphean struggle requiring enormous investment in infrastructure, dramatic changes to the education system, and a “race to the bottom” of real wages. Here are a few examples:

• Whereas building a nuclear power plant in China may take 5–7 years, it can take 10 years or more in the US—at triple the cost.
• The average US manufacturing worker earns $30 an hour, compared to $7 an hour in China.
• China currently churns out over 3.5 million STEM graduates annually, compared to 584,000 in the US.

Only unprecedented government investment and subsidies could hope to close the gap; even then, it would take time. Assuming sufficient reserves in the US Treasury existed to fund crash programs to build infrastructure and educate millions, this is the opposite of Trump’s mantra of privatization and lower corporate taxes. If they opt to print more money to cover expenses it would only feed inflation. And without state investment funded by encroaching on private property, workers’ wages and living conditions would degrade even more precipitously—which is a recipe for open class war. Trump can’t have it both ways.

The reality facing US workers

Benjamin Disraeli is credited with saying that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” With assistance from the mass media, data can be manipulated and presented to defend virtually any argument. However, in the final analysis, all the official statistics in the world couldn’t convince voters that “Bidenomics” was working. The fact that the wealthiest 100 Americans saw their collective riches grow by 63%—an incredible $1.5 trillion—under Joe Biden says it all.

But there’s more. A more nuanced and targeted post-election review of the economic facts conducted by Politico found that it was not voters, but the Democrats who were woefully disconnected from reality:

If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7%. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today …

 

If you track everyone in the workforce—that is, if you include part-time workers and unemployed job seekers— … the median wage is actually little more than $52,300 per year … American workers on the median are making 16% less than the prevailing statistics would indicate.

 

An alternative [inflation] indicator that excludes many of the items that … focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities … reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35% faster than the CPI [Consumer Price Index].

 

When our more targeted measure of inflation is set atop our more accurate measure of weekly earnings, it immediately becomes clear that purchasing power fell at the median by 4.3% in 2023.

The latest research on income inequality shows that the top 10% of earners capture nearly half of all income, while the bottom 50% get just 13%. As for wealth inequality, in the first quarter of 2024, the top 10% of earners owned 67% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owned 2.5%. The bottom 50% of Americans possess a smaller share of wealth today than in 1990, when they owned 3.5%.

Just 10% of the population—households bringing in $250,000 a year or more—account for half of all consumer spending. In a market economy, spending can be broadly equated with quality of life, and inflation continues to erode it for the majority.

In other words, the true measure of a society’s inequality and relative standard of living is the proportional share of the national income that goes to each segment of the population, not the absolute numbers of iPhones, Happy Meals, and other gadgets you can afford to take the edge off the drudgery of working life. But even that aspect of the “American Dream” may be over.

As a major toy retailer expressed when Trump first threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese imports from 10% to 20%: “Every plan we have to mitigate a 10% tariff is not workable based on a 20% tariff. There are things you aren’t able to physically produce here, and toys are one of those. A $10 baby doll will go to $30. Is that what the consumer wants?”

Decades of expanding credit and cheap imported commodities helped keep the US economy going far beyond its “natural” limits, leaving Americans massively “overleveraged”—a fancy term for being in debt. As of early 2025, the share of households seriously behind on credit card payments was at 14-year highs, and delinquent payments on auto loans were at 30-year highs. A record 4.8% of 401(k) account holders took early withdrawals from their retirement savings last year to prevent home foreclosure or to cover medical bills.

Consumer spending tanked in January as uncertainty over what Trump’s policies would mean for the economy set in. After growing by 2.8% in 2024, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta predicted US GDP would contract by 2.4% in the first quarter of 2025. The 11-point drop in the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index between December 2024 and February 2025 is the steepest to start a year since 2009. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index’s 9-point drop over that span is the deepest since records began in 1978.

Real, inflation-adjusted wages for the lowest-paid American workers have stagnated or fallen since the 1970s. From April 2021 to April 2023, real wages for all workers fell for 25 consecutive months, before rising by a mere 0.8% between May 2023 and May 2024. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, the US billionaires’ wealth surged by 70%, or $2.1 trillion.

Current trends comparing worker productivity to hourly compensation reveal an inconvenient truth: American workers’ wages are “too high” for the capitalists to make the kinds of profits they expect, and “too low” for the workers to claw back the ground they’ve lost over decades. This is where the unstoppable force hits the immovable object.

The day after the 2008 election, a reporter asked residents in South Chicago what the election of the nation’s first Black president meant to them. As one off-camera resident excitedly interjected, “Jobs, baby!” Needless to say, things have not improved meaningfully for the majority since then.

Quality jobs that outpace inflation remain the litmus test for any president. The expectation that Trump could make good where others failed is the fundamental reason he was given a second chance. If he is unable to deliver, he will have bigger problems than the Mexican drug cartels to deal with.

As for the next economic crisis, slumps are as inevitable under capitalism as hurricanes on planet Earth—the only question is when and where they will hit, and how hard. Instead of spending too much energy trying to predict the timing and character of the next “big one,” we should be motivated by the fact that we are still far too small to take full advantage of such a situation, and that the bigger we are when it finally comes, the better positioned we will be.

Perspectives for the class struggle

Led by class collaborationist hacks with narrow political horizons, American organized labor has steadily declined for decades. Although union workers earn an average of 18% more than their non-union equivalents, just 11.1% of workers were represented by a union in 2024. However, this average hides the disparity between representation rates in the public (32.2%) and private sectors (5.9%).

Despite this relative strength, when faced with mass layoffs and the elimination of collective bargaining rights for tens of thousands of TSA workers, the federal workers’ unions have done little more than write letters, file legal complaints, and produce “Executive Order toolkits.” They have organized no strikes, workplace occupations, or walk-outs—just a handful of poorly attended informational pickets to let off steam. This is where the dead-end of “partnership with the bosses” leads. Relying on the capitalists’ anti-labor courts and laws, divorced from mobilizing the workers’ power, is a sure road to failure.

There have been many interesting and instructive labor struggles in recent years—from strikes at Boeing, among teachers, nurses, and academic workers, to efforts to unionize Starbucks and Amazon. Many lessons can also be drawn from the railroad workers’ rejection of their contract and the imposition of a deal by  the Biden-Harris regime. However, according to official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, there were just 31 major work stoppages in 2024, idling 271,500 workers. This is up from the all-time low of five in 2009, but it remains a far cry from the hundreds of strikes seen annually even during the postwar boom. To illustrate this, consider that between 1948 and 1973, the year with the lowest number of major strikes was 1963. Even at that low point, there were 181 strikes, involving over a half million workers.

As Trump initiates a campaign of open belligerence against workers across the hemisphere, the labor leaders have, in effect, said, “We can work with this!” This is particularly scandalous considering that some lead “international” unions that include Canadian workers. As the saying goes, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” However, the labor leaders didn’t even go through the motions of opposing Trump other than calling on their members to vote for the Democrats—while some supported Trump outright.

Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the RNC, is a prime example of their crude brand of economic nationalism. UAW President Shawn Fain, who has proposed a de facto general strike for May 1, 2028, is another. As he wrote on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration:

We do not agree with Trump on much of his domestic agenda, but we hope to find common ground on overhauling our devastating trade policies and rebuilding US manufacturing. Trump has promised to enact tariffs to protect workers, and we agree that tariffs are a necessary tool. As long as corporations can ship jobs out and ship products in at rock-bottom rates without penalty, they will continue doing so.

 

We agree that we need a strong system of tariffs that serve the national and working-class interest. Tariffs should bring jobs back to America, put products in communities such as Belvidere, Illinois, and push companies to invest in good jobs, not exploit workers abroad.

As if the profit-greedy capitalists can be “pushed” to do anything without mass strikes, millions on the streets, and the threat of revolutionary expropriation! Despite paying lip service to the working class, in practice, solidarity and strength through international working-class unity have been thrown out the window. Fain’s use of the phrase “our trade policies” shows how even a so-called “left” trade union leader identifies the interests of the working class with the capitalist class.

Workers in the US have common interests with Canadian and Mexican workers—but not with their American bosses. We reject the false idea of “partnership” and “national unity.” There can be no “partnership” between the horse and the rider! Neither capitalist free trade nor capitalist protectionism can resolve the crisis facing the working class. Class collaboration is class collaboration, no matter which party you collaborate with.

Unions are a basic form of economic self-defense, without which workers are mere raw material for exploitation. Communists wholeheartedly support them—but they are woefully insufficient on their own. Collective political action is required as well. Just as unions represent individual groups of workers against individual groups of capitalists, a class-independent workers’ party, which can take many forms, would represent workers as a class against the parties of the class enemy.

The reality is that most workers don’t yet think about themselves as part of a class. In the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, they are conditioned to think first and foremost about what’s in it for them as individuals. Though mainly aggregated in large cities, most are atomized and alienated, and do not work collectively in massive factories as in the past. Overproduction of skilled workers worldwide makes millions vulnerable and less likely to risk their livelihoods. They are tied to the status quo by thousands of consciously conceived threads to keep them from rocking the boat, from mortgages and other loans to keeping up with the latest on Netflix or Instagram.

However, the laws of capitalism still apply: workers must sell their labor power for a wage, and they form a class in opposition to the class of exploiters. Great events evoke great changes in mass consciousness—and many great events are in the works. Bitter lessons about the reality of the class struggle, which have been buried for decades, will need to be relearned. And although sellouts and bad contracts are demoralizing, the working class has not been defeated—it hasn’t actually engaged in a serious fight for decades.

The labor leaders are more closely fused than ever with the capitalists and their state. They are an objective barrier to unleashing the class struggle and do everything they can to tamp down the workers’ fighting spirit. Eventually, the current crop of labor leaders will be pushed toward class independence or pushed out altogether—the workers will have no alternative.

Most pro-Trump workers will likely maintain a “wait-and-see” attitude for the time being. There are as many unknowns for them as there are for him, and it will take a while for things to play out. But they won’t give him carte blanche forever. Eventually, Trump will be seriously tested by an especially reckless policy or major labor struggle. Will he intervene on behalf of the bosses and risk losing his fake pro-worker credentials? Or will he opportunistically side with the workers and risk emboldening other workers to move into action?

Sooner or later, it will become clear that Trump’s policies are no more a solution to American capitalism’s problems than Biden’s—and many workers will turn against him and look for a class solution.

American labor unions are plagued with problems due to their current leadership, but they remain basic units of the class struggle. Those already in existence are destined to be renewed, and new ones will be formed as American workers realize that individual solutions lead nowhere and that mass, united, class-independent action is the only solution.

The postwar boom isn’t returning, and the piles of combustible material lying everywhere in American society will only grow higher. Given the state of organized labor, the spark for the next mass movement or struggle may come from outside its ranks, as happened after the murder of George Floyd.

Immigration

One potential spark is the increasingly thorny question of immigration. At root, this is a class question, one in which imperialism, the state, the culture war, exploitation, oppression, labor, class struggle, drug cartels, and more collide. Immigration in its present form is also a clear example of the retrograde nature of the nation-state and a reflection of the decline of American imperialism.

In its energetic, expanding youth, American capitalism couldn’t get enough immigrants. There were seemingly limitless forests to clear, lands to farm, railroads to build, and mines and factories to work. The capitalists’ paid agents scoured the world for desperate people willing to pull up stakes and risk it all on a trans-Atlantic or Pacific voyage to the New World.

In addition to exporting capital to profit from cheap labor abroad, they imported cheap labor to profit from here at home. It was a win-win for the capitalists no matter where they invested.

Even Ronald Reagan granted legal status to three million undocumented immigrants when he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Now, the bourgeois pay billions to build walls, round people up, and deport them.

Of course, individual capitalists have different attitudes, depending on which sector their capital is invested in. Some want the basic laws of supply and demand to dictate the flow of capital and the movement of people to maximize their profits. They understand that without immigrants, the country would face a critical shortage of workers and demographic crisis as a result of its shrinking and aging native-born population. Others aim to repatriate capital and seal up the borders. But they can’t have their cake and eat it too. This is yet another unresolvable contradiction of capitalism.

As of June 2024, 120 million people worldwide—1.5% of the total population—have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Civil conflict, climate change, and economic and political instability are the main drivers—all of which are directly or indirectly functions of imperialist plunder and proxy wars. In the case of the US, there are an estimated 13.7 million undocumented immigrants, mainly from Latin America, most of them crossing the border into parts of the US once stolen from Mexico.

The class-based double standard is glaring—Trump offers $5 million “golden visas” to the wealthy to attract capital and skilled labor, while it’s police dogs, drones, and detention centers for the poor, who will be driven even deeper into the shadows of the economy to ensure their families’ survival.

This vast, vulnerable population is a big reason the prolongation of the “American Dream” was possible. Low wages, backbreaking labor, and virtually nonexistent protections have kept the construction, agricultural, food service, and hospitality industries going for decades. Not only that, but workers living in the US without papers pay billions into Social Security with little hope of ever seeing a penny.

Scapegoating immigrants is a keystone of the ruling class’s “divide and rule” strategy. Trump’s executive orders to rename the Gulf of Mexico and make English the country’s official language—for the first time in history—are like red meat to his MAGA base. Never mind that tens of millions of American citizens speak a non-English language at home.

During last summer’s RNC, speakers whipped the audience into a frenzy over the alleged spike in “migrant crime”—despite data showing that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than native-born people. According to Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, President Biden “welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists, and the price that we have paid has been deadly.”

As a result, a recent Harvard Youth poll found that 53% of young Americans “believe that the US is experiencing an immigration crisis at the Southern border,” with only 16% disagreeing.

And yet, just 36% of young Americans favor building a border wall, with 45% opposed. Significantly, 50% agree that “immigrants improve the culture of the US,” while just 17% disagree. Only 21% agree that “immigrants increase crime in my community,” while 45% disagree. The sentiment is similar when asked whether “immigrants are taking jobs that should go to Americans instead,” with only 24% agreeing and 48% disagreeing. The poll also found that:

• 60% have had immigrant classmates
• 46% have immigrant friends
• 41% have worked alongside immigrants
• 40% have immigrant neighbors
• Only 12% would feel uncomfortable with an immigrant neighbor

In other words, immigration and immigrants are part of the fabric of American society, and despite the rampant racism and xenophobia fomented consciously by the ruling class, most young people reject this poison.

As for the Democrats, most of them offer little more than “kinder, gentler” repression at the border,  and a convoluted and expensive “path to citizenship.” Biden deported more immigrants than Trump did in his first term, and even more on average than Trump during the first few weeks of 2025.

As for the labor leaders’ abandonment of immigrant workers in the face of increased demonization and repression, this is yet another expression of their class-collaborationist rottenness.

Communists stand in class solidarity with our immigrant class brothers and sisters. Far from standing “for or against” the MAGA bogeyman of “open borders” under capitalism, we fight for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and all artificial borders. Shoulder-to-shoulder with the workers of the Americas and the world, we fight for a socialist federation and a planned economy on a world scale. This is the only way out of the societal impasse and the nightmare of imperialist-driven immigration.

Palestine movement

Another aspect of Trump’s reactionary immigration policy is the McCarthyite witchhunt against non-citizens who have participated in the pro-Palestine movement. By threatening to cut funding for schools alleged to have “tolerated antisemitism,” they seek to intimidate and silence political activists they see as a threat. Although legal permanent residents are formally granted all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship other than the vote—including the right to free speech—they have vilified and arrested Colombia University activist, Mahmoud Khalil.

Since October 7, 2023, millions of people, especially the youth, have participated in the Palestine solidarity movement. From marches and rallies to student encampments, workers and students have openly opposed the US government’s seemingly endless supply of weapons and aid to Israel’s murderous government. “Genocide Joe” and the Democratic Party were exposed as the hypocritical warmongers they have always been, which contributed to their electoral downfall in 2024. A layer of these protestors were radicalized in the direction of communism, and some have joined the ranks of the RCA.

However, the movement lacks backbone, something only the organized working class can provide, as it has the ability to shut down the factories and ports that produce and export armaments and supplies. In the absence of a bold revolutionary leadership, reformists inevitably fill the vacuum and will always choose the path of “least resistance” to the class enemy. Thus, the movement failed to meet its most basic demands, despite the participants’ best efforts and intentions.

Nonetheless, although most movements and strikes fail, workers learn from these temporary setbacks. Communists must accompany them through these experiences and help them draw the necessary lessons to prepare for the next wave of struggle. None of the contradictions that sparked the protest movement have been resolved and Trump has doubled down on US imperialism’s support for the Zionists. Increased imperialist tensions, military spending, rearmament, and war remain squarely on the agenda. They can again become a focal point of youth mobilization, along with the impending climate catastrophe that threatens the survival of our species.

Conditions and consciousness

Marx wrote in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, people inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

 

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated previously. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical—in short, ideological forms in which people become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge individuals by what they think about themselves, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.

 

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Penned in 1859, these lines offer astonishing insight into the processes unfolding around us today—with one important difference. At that time, the objective potential for a higher form of human social organization was barely evident in embryo. The essence of Marx and Engels’s genius lay in their recognition of where the historical process was heading, decades ahead of time.

Today however, the objective conditions for the socialist revolution and the transition to classless, stateless, moneyless communism are so overripe they have become somewhat putrid. Having survived long beyond its “best by” date, sick and decaying capitalism has introduced an incredible array of distortions into human relations and mass consciousness.

A pervading sense of dread and malaise crushes millions. Over the course of 2024, 23% of adults experienced a mental illness, equivalent to nearly 60 million Americans. 47% of Americans polled last year believe another civil war is likely in their lifetime.

Despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the Golden Age of capitalist America is over for the majority, and they can feel it in their bones. There is a conspicuous disconnect between the astronomical wealth generated by the workers and the amount they receive back for their efforts. They are compelled to sacrifice their fleeting time, health, and happiness merely to enrich a disgusting minority of socially inessential parasites. If the likes of Musk, Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg each spent $1 million a day, it would take them hundreds of years to run out of money.

All layers in society are infected with contradictory moods, but the youth, in particular, can see that the way the system works is a feature, not a bug. They do not believe the lie that every generation will have it better than the one before them. They can see the dislocation that lies in store as US imperialism thrashes around in a vain effort to maintain its historic dominance.

Recent polls show that only 20% of American adults believe the US “stands above all other countries.” 88% think the political system is “broken,” 68% believe the economic system “unfairly favors the wealthy,” and 72% think the government “primarily serves elites.” Only 25% of 18–29-year-olds agree that “capitalism is working for the average American.” 93% of Gen Z want to own a home, but 60% worry they won’t be able to.

And as Semafor reported in May 2024 :

As part of the online poll of 943 18–30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”—only 7% disagreed.

 

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people” [our emphasis].

However, there’s a dialectical flip side to the pessimism and distress. The objective conditions for a world of prosperity and plenty for all already exist. As Lenin put it, despite its depravity and barbarism, “imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat.”

Prepare for revolution!

History has witnessed the rise and fall of many empires and civilizations. Many fell as a result of disease, drought, famine, and other natural disasters. Others fell to the superiority of rival powers or collapsed under the weight of their own economic contradictions. They became overextended, lost legitimacy among the governed, and suffered demographic decline. The crises we are living through today are the death throes of a system in terminal decline.

However, collapse is not the only option humanity faces. A revolutionary way out is inherent in the situation. Economic crisis leads to social and political crisis, which eventually leads to a revolutionary crisis. And while the Third American Revolution won’t begin next week, we are on an inexorable road towards such conflagration.

Lenin explained that there are three main objective conditions that characterize a revolutionary situation:

• The ruling class is divided and unable to rule in the old way;
• The middle, petty-bourgeois layers are vacillating even more than usual;
• The working class can no longer tolerate the status quo and begins to storm into the breach opened by the general instability and divided ruling class.

Or, as he phrased it even more concisely, “The bottoms don’t want, and the tops cannot live in the old way.”

However, a revolutionary situation is merely half of the equation. For the working class to successfully seize political and economic power, a fourth factor is needed: a revolutionary leadership at the head of a revolutionary party. And not just any revolutionary party, but one of sufficient size built patiently over decades, trained in Marxist theory, the methods of Bolshevism, and rooted in the working class.

As Trotsky succinctly put it:

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat … The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of proletarian leadership: its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its death agony.

Building a leadership that can smash through the many obstacles standing in the way of class-independent workers’ action is the most urgent problem of our time. There have been many inspiring revolutions over the past century. But only the Russian Revolution of October 1917 went all the way. All the others failed due to the absence of what Marxists call “the subjective factor.”

A quick look at the state of the US today shows that Lenin’s first and second conditions are in full swing, while the third and fourth are still in their early stages. However, history shows that, while working-class consciousness tends to lag behind events, it can catch up with a bang—and we have no control over the grand tides of history. As Alan Woods says, “The workers will move into action when they are ready, and not a moment sooner.”

What we do have control over is the urgency with which we build the revolutionary subjective factor. In this, quality counts as much as quantity. It’s not merely how many books you read or meetings you attend, but what you get from them. And that depends on how thoughtfully you engage with and discuss the ideas with others. As we build the party and prepare for revolution, we must fully internalize the fundamentals of Marxism and learn from the victories and tragedies of our class—and we need to do it now.

The ruling class has also learned from past revolutions, and, in their own way,  understand the role of the subjective factor. They spend billions to prepare alternative leaderships to fill the vacuum when the existing state institutions are suspended in midair by the action of the masses. Time and again, they have hijacked and derailed mass movements and revolutions by finding ways of gaining the leadership of the masses. Spontaneity is undoubtedly a powerful force, but it is insufficient to ensure a revolutionary victory. As Lenin explained in What Is to Be Done:

This struggle must be organized, according to “all the rules of the art,” by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organization of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary.

Five years have passed since the George Floyd movement shook the world. Had the RCA been present nationwide in sufficient quantity and quality, we could have given that raw explosion of anger a clear class expression and focus. Needless to say, we were not in such a position at that time. But who can deny the revolutionary potential revealed by the mobilization of 26 million Americans in the middle of a pandemic?

A tremendous amount of energy was expended with little to show for it, as the Democrats proved yet again why they are the “graveyard of progressive movements.” Since then, there have been no movements or strikes even approximating that scale. But the pressures of life under capitalism are intractable, and eventually, we will face a tsunami of class struggle—this is the perspective we must prepare for.

The mass sympathy expressed for Luigi Mangione is a symptom of the class rage simmering beneath the surface. The sentiment among ordinary workers across the political spectrum was clear. As a Guardian opinion piece put it: “Killing people with paperwork instead of a gun doesn’t make you any less of a murderer.”

American communists have a particularly important role to play in the fight against imperialism. In the years to come, we will be subjected to extreme pressure by those who want to push us off course or compel us to abandon the fight for socialism altogether. As an organization and as individuals, we must steel ourselves politically and psychologically. We must stand firm and confident in our ideas and perspectives. We must remember that you can’t have revolution without counterrevolution, and that periods of exhilarating upsurge are inevitably followed by periods of demoralizing defeat if you don’t win—and vice versa.

Flowing from his studies of human social evolution, the pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan was optimistic about the future. As he wrote in the final pages of his masterwork, Ancient Society:

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense; its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding, and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners.

 

The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence, and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

This is the spirit of revolutionary optimism and the long view of history that should fill us if we have truly understood the central theme of our perspectives: the potential for building a world of superabundance has never been greater, but there is no way out of the existential crisis facing human civilization within the limits of capitalism. The task of the RCA is to make that potential actual.

Far from being an abstract question, the survival of our species is as concrete as it gets. As Trotsky eloquently wrote, “Capitalism today exists, not only in defiance of the demands of historical development, but also of the elementary demands of human life.”

And as Marx summarized his worldview, “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”