MAGA Regime: Billionaire “Populists” on the Warpath
Democrats Reap Bitter Fruit of Scorning the Working Class

Trump 2: Gearing Up
for Rule by Decree

2024 Elections: X-Ray of Decaying U.S. Imperialism
For Hard Class Struggle Against Capitalist Reaction

The 2024 U.S. election is a turning point in recent history, which even imperialist liberals and conservatives recognize as the end of an era. That is the era of U.S. global hegemony since World War II. The “American Century” is over. The victory of Donald Trump was against the Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Republican “establishment,” the partner parties that alternated in office in a “Cold War consensus.” Their defeat reflects the long-term decline of the United States in the world capitalist economy, and now also in its failing military power. Around the planet, from Ukraine to Gaza, wars have broken out, U.S. allies have slipped the leash, proxy regimes are foundering, coups d’état occur even in U.S.-backed “democracies” – all reflecting the fact that the world is no longer at Washington’s beck and call.

On the home front, in the United States but also in most other imperialist countries, the decay of capitalism has meant that living standards of the working class and much of the middle class are falling. Inflation has eaten up incomes so that millions of people have difficulty paying for essentials: groceries, gas for their cars, rent and mortgages, electricity and heating bills. This is a main reason for the decline in votes for the Democrats in the November 5 vote, and also for the electoral appeal of Trump and his right-wing populist MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) Republicans, as well as far-right parties in Europe. The result could be, not a new era of uncontested “conservative populist” rule, but rather a period of sharp social conflict … and an accompanying rise in repression, increasingly using police-state measures to quell unrest.

Lots of people are plenty scared. The Democratic Party is gravely wounded. It lost a large part of the youth and many liberals over the genocidal U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian people in Gaza. The erosion of working-class support for the Democrats has reached the breaking point. In exit polls, among voters without a college degree (widely used as a stand-in for blue-collar workers), Trump had a 13-point lead over Harris. The biggest shift was among Latino voters, men and women, barely half of whom voted for the Democrats, rather than by a 2-to-1 margin in the past. The big issue for Republicans was immigration, as Trump whipped up hysteria against “illegal migrants.” But, notably, while Trump got 3 million more votes than in 2020, Harris got 6 million less votes than Biden in 2020. The key fact electorally was that this time, millions of Democrats sat it out.

Break with the Parties of Capital –           For a Revolutionary Workers Party

So rather than a sharp shift to the right of the U.S. population, the 2024 election was a vote – active and passive, from the right and the left – against the Democratic Party. To understand this, it is important to look at what did not happen. Trump’s huge advantage among white voters without a college degree did not increase, and even fell slightly among men. Fox News reported that voters from union households voted for the Democrat Harris by 54%, down only slightly from Biden’s 56% in 2020. (Trump’s gains were mostly among non-union households, 82% of the electorate.) Most importantly, the vote of social discontent went to the Republicans, not to Democrats, who were seen as the party of disdainful elites responsible for escalating wars and architects of policies that have impoverished working people.

Similarly in Europe, social democrats and the major trade unions are hardline backers of the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, with most of the “far left” in tow. These forces of the “center left” also support and enforce the austerity policies, directly linked to the war drive, that are impoverishing the working class and much of the middle class. It is not surprising that in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere, right-wing populist, fascistic (fascist-like) and outright fascist parties are harvesting protest votes, as are pro-Russian rightist parties in Eastern Europe (Moldova, Romania, Slovakia). From the U.S. to Europe, the responsibility for right-wing gains lies squarely at the feet of reformist left and labor misleaders who have long since thrown in their lot with imperialism. In line with this, they have worked to chain the working class to so-called moderate or “progressive” sectors of the ruling class.

In the United States, during the election campaign, the Internationalist Group warned:

“So in November, U.S. voters will have the ‘choice’ between immigrant-bashing fascistic Republicans preparing to introduce police state measures, and a Democratic ticket that smears pro-Palestinian protesters as “antisemitic” and is careening toward a thermonuclear World War III. ‘Pick your poison’ is no answer. We say: no vote to any capitalist party or politicians.”

So Democrat “Genocide Joe” Biden’s vice president Kamala Harris lost and Republican wannabe “Dictator on Day One” Donald Trump won. His minions are now busily churning out executive orders to be issued on Inauguration Day of Trump 47,¹ January 20, or soon after. The white vans of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police, the hated migra, are being readied to snatch immigrants off the streets – and even from schools, hospitals and churches, mostly off-limits in Trump 45. The demoralized Democrats are lying low or, like New York City’s widely loathed mayor Eric Adams, eagerly kissing the ring of the “Don.” Not looking good.

With the opportunist left impotent and the sellout labor bureaucracy discredited, it is urgently necessary to organize a hard-hitting class opposition to the new imperialist regime, and against all the capitalist parties and politicians. Rather than looking to isolated adventures, it should base itself on the mass organizations of the working class, to undertake powerful labor- and union-led action to defend immigrants and fight to stop the mass deportations being prepared by Trump, using the deportation machine ramped up by his Democratic predecessors. It must defend all vulnerable populations, among them gay, lesbian and transgender people, who are on the hit list of Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynist reactionaries. And it should prepare for workers defense groups against the would-be fascist stormtroopers who consider themselves “Trump’s Army.” Despite his victory at the polls, the minority of hard-core Trumpers intent on participating in bigoted rampages can be defeated.

Trump frothed at the mouth during the election campaign, vowing to purge leftists from every institution. He is gearing up to go after pro-Palestinian protesters and leftist professors, threatening to cut off funds from cities, states and institutions that resist his desired Gleichschaltung (the Nazi purges) of universities and schools. In this situation, the last thing his intended targets should do is “duck and cover.” This threat cannot be soft-soaped or slow-walked, it must be faced and mobilized against head-on.

Various pollsters, “moderate” liberals and some social-democratic “Bernie bros” counsel ditching defense of marginalized and oppressed sectors and “focusing on the bread-and-butter issues.” Revolutionary Marxists call to unite the working class as the tribune of all the oppressed, on the basis of a revolutionary program to bring the workers to power. What’s needed is to forge a genuinely communist vanguard with a revolutionary program to mobilize our power, the power of the working class at the head of all the oppressed, in defense of the democratic rights of all. Break with all the capitalist parties – Build a class struggle workers party to fight for a workers government!

The Election Campaign: Democrats Write Off the Workers

In the Electoral College, the highly undemocratic body whose votes determine the victor in presidential elections, Kamala Harris lost by a substantial margin (226 votes, to 312 for Trump). But in the popular vote, the margin was far smaller, with Trump scoring 49.9% of the vote and Harris 48.4%.  In the elections to the House of Representatives, the Republican majority narrowed to three seats as the Democrats picked up a seat overall. The basic fact is that the U.S. is very sharply – and very evenly – divided, so that fairly small shifts in votes have big electoral consequences. It's not like the 1972 elections, when Republican Richard Nixon got 61% of the vote against Democrat George McGovern’s 38%, and Nixon took every state in the country except Massachusetts. Even so, three years later, Nixon was out, forced to resign over Watergate.

In the wake of the Democrats’ defeat in 2024, once it sank in that Harris got millions less votes less than Biden in 2020, they started coming up with all sorts of excuses: “the Democrats’ ground game was not very good,” “Kamala didn’t have as much time to campaign,” “there wasn’t enough money available.” Nonsense. Kamala Harris’ campaign raised a whopping $2.9 billion for the election, spending $700 million just on media, while Trump raised $1.8 billion, including $277 million from Elon Musk. The dollar “democracy” of U.S. capitalist rule has rarely been more flagrantly on display. The big money was with the Democrats, and the election was dubbed the “battle of the billionaires.” So now what’s a billionaire Democrat to do? Give a million bucks to Trump’s inauguration, as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg et al. have done.

Another theme was that Trump’s win, and Harris’ loss, was mainly due to sexism, racism and xenophobia: against having a black and Asian American woman president. Obviously, there is a lot of male chauvinism the world over, and the Trump campaign ran a hyper-macho campaign with gross sexual innuendo. It was dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. Behind all the attacks on “childless cat women” and “childless sociopaths” by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, behind the talk of “tradwives” who stay at home to take care of the kids, they want to force women to be baby factories. Yes, women tend to vote Democrat, but in 2024 a majority of married women, and about half of women with young children, voted for Trump. So it’s not just about sexism.

There was also plenty of nostalgia for “the way things used to be.” At a Pennsylvania rally, Trump said, enough talk, let’s listen to some good old tunes. So for half an hour he was humming along to “oldies but goldies.” No doubt for some of those at the rally that might mean “Take me back to old Virginny.” A lot of the white evangelical vote is interlaced with pining for the pre-Civil War South. The Southern Baptist Convention, after all, was founded to defend slavery and is still essentially segregated (as are many other churches), over 90% white, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans. But the songs at that rally included Elvis Presley, “Y.M.C.A.” and others from the Sixties and Seventies. So, while “dog whistle” appeals to racial prejudice are fundamental to Trump’s pitch, it’s not just about the racism.

Trump’s campaign reeked with xenophobia. Signs at the Republican convention called for “Mass Deportations Now” and “Stop Migrant Crime.” It reached grotesque proportions as Trump and Vance retailed the (luridly false) scare story of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, supposedly eating pets. In 2016, Trump called Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, this time he labeled undocumented immigrants “monsters,” saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Yet he got significant support from Latinos: up more than 20% in the Bronx and along the Mexican border. Partly, this reflects conservative religiosity among substantial parts of the Hispanic population, and also anger over the Democrats’ failure to deliver on immigration reform. But even many immigrants, Latino and others, bought the lie of “illegal” immigrants “stealing U.S. workers’ jobs.” So it isn’t just xenophobia either.

Even the culture war over pronouns reflects a more general alienation from the Democrats. For sure, the Republican campaign’s viciously effective ad, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you,” expressed the hysteria whipped up in right-wing media against vulnerable gay, lesbian and transgender people, vituperating against “men playing in girls’ sports” as a mortal threat to civilization. It fed off the vile campaign that in the last several years has produced more than 500 anti-trans, anti-gay bills in 41 states, scores of which have been enacted. But it also expressed a deep-seated sense that the Democratic Party no longer speaks for or represents working people … which, of course, it never did. So it’s not just about transphobia and homophobia.

There has been a systematic misinterpretation of the election results in the liberal media reflecting the bourgeois identity politics pushed by the Democrats, to the exclusion of economic factors that drove much of the vote to Trump. Obama accused black men of not wanting to let women get ahead, but said nothing about how black male workers have been particularly hard hit by the economic crisis, laid off in far larger numbers during the COVID pandemic, and still “overworked, underpaid and overwhelmed.” The nostalgia also reflects economic difficulties, as many working people are hard put to pay for food, fuel and housing. Wages adjusted for inflation are still below what they were pre-pandemic.

Working people are hurting, and many see Democratic Party politicians as living in another world. Who could believe Biden’s fairy tale (in his 2024 State of the Union speech) that the U.S. economy was “the greatest comeback story never told”? The Democrats say inflation is falling, yet even by official statistics, food and beverage prices are up by 23% over 2020. The price hikes of basic staples are even higher: eggs +160%, orange juice +90%, sugar +70%, coffee +60% since 2019.³ Rents have skyrocketed, up at least 25% just about everywhere in the country. This is reflected in strike demands for cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) raises, from student workers at the University of California to Boeing aircraft workers in Seattle.

Various post-mortems on the elections attest to anger among working-class voters against the Democrats. The deindustrialization of the Rust Belt – the band from southeast Wisconsin to western Pennsylvania that is the historic heart of manufacturing in the U.S. – is key. According to an in-depth article, following Bill Clinton’s enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), from 1997 to 2020, more than 90,000 U.S. factories closed, over 70% of industries that could move did so, unionization was defeated by threats to move, the unionization rate in the private sector fell by half, and “Americans without college degrees have lost nearly $2,000 in wages” largely due to “free trade” agreements, from NAFTA on.⁴

Over time, many workers concluded that the Democratic Party had written them off, in favor of becoming the party of an educated elite. It was deliberate. In July 2016, during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer summed up the calculation: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” It didn’t turn out that way, not in 2016 or 2024, as the Democrats lost Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Trump, who along with his fascistic vice-presidential running mate JD Vance cynically posed as defenders of American workers’ jobs.

Meanwhile, Harris’ campaign went all-out to hype support from a rogue’s gallery of Republican rightists, while seeking to compete with the Republicans on who was “tougher on immigration and the border,” “law and order” and jingoistic U.S. imperialist militarism.⁵

In 2024, there were three major changes in voting patterns that led to the Democrats’ defeat: first was the millions of former Democratic voters who didn’t vote at all this time; second was a substantial shift to the right of Latino voters, and third, much larger, was the estrangement of large sections of the working class from the Democratic Party. The “New Deal coalition,” which since the 1930s bound workers to the Democrats through the union bureaucracy, keeping a lid on their struggles in exchange for a few crumbs from the capitalists’ table, has been broken. But although some have bought the MAGA fool’s gold, workers are not wedded to Trump and the Republicans either. We must step up the fight for a workers party and a workers government.

Trump Government of Billionaires Prepares Police-State Measures

Since his first campaign and presidential administration, Donald Trump’s politics have been widely characterized as “conservative populism.” Of course, “populism” is a vague term, often used by “mainstream” bourgeois politicians to refer to “mavericks” who play to their electoral base instead of enforcing unpopular governmental dictates. More generally, “populism,” whether of “left” or right, refers to a stance of opposition to rule by elites. Trump certainly rails against “Democratic elites,” but attempts by right-wing ideologues like Laura Ingraham to portray this real estate grifter (and heir), who trades on his image as a multibillionaire, as a “man of the people” fall flat. And as he has assembled his incoming regime, the U.S. president-elect has enlisted some of the wealthiest of the capitalist elite in a government of billionaires.

More specifically, it is a government of billionaire businessmen, like Trump himself. First up were the Wall Street billionaires Howard Lutnick as secretary of commerce and Scott Bessent as secretary of the treasury.⁶ But that was only the beginning. According to a head count by ABC News (17 December 2024), 13 of the top posts in the Trump administration are set to go to billionaires, making this “the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history.” This list also includes the secretary of education, a slew of ambassadors and, of course, the co-chairs of the notional “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy (net worth $1 billion) and Elon Musk (net worth $486 billion).

If Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in his 1863 Gettysburg Address sums up the ideological claim of U.S. bourgeois “democracy,” this government of, by and for billionaires would be its antithesis. (In reality, bourgeois “democracy” has always been a particular political form of the class dictatorship of capital.) Naturally, the presence of rich people atop government is nothing new. By the late 1800s, the U.S. Senate was known as a “millionaires’ club.” Since the election, Senator Bernie Sanders has been denouncing “oligarchical” rule. But this is no less true of the Democrats, whose presidential nomination he sought. The role of “the donor class” in pushing aside Biden, and pouring hundreds of millions into the Harris campaign, was blatant.

This drives home that, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, the government is the “executive committee of the ruling class.” And as Leon Trotsky added in a 1940 introduction to an abridgement of Marx’s Capital, “Today monopolists are the strongest section of the ruling class” (Marxism in Our Time). The whole machinery of the state – centered, as Engels and Lenin put it, on the “special bodies of armed men” of the repressive apparatus (the military, police, courts and prisons) – serves to enforce the interests of the dominant class, in modern times the capitalists. What’s (marginally) different in Trump’s regime is that, not content to buy politicians to do their bidding, corporate titans are playing an openly direct and dominant role in government.

One reason for this shift is Trump’s mantra of running government like a business. So why not bring in businessmen to run it? He didn’t succeed in his first administration, and he won’t this time either. The mega mogul Musk, who recently endorsed the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) in upcoming elections there, proposes to slash $2 trillion from the federal government budget, about a third of the total. Ramaswamy talks of cutting 75% of the 2 million federal workers. Both of these supposed “experts” in “government efficiency” are calling for eliminating civil service protections and for mass firings, to go along with the mass deportations of immigrants. The attempt to do this will produce chaos.

Of the non-billionaires among Trump’s picks, the two that have caused most uproar are Matt Gaetz, nominated for attorney general (since dropped out), and Pete Hegseth for war secretary. Objections to them evaded fundamental political issues such as, in Gaetz’s case, hobnobbing with Holocaust deniers and white supremacists and calling to “hunt down” anti-racist protesters; or with Hegseth, labeling Muslim communities an “existential threat” to the U.S. and crusading to turn the military into a “Christian weapon” (Politico). And then there is the nomination of anti-vaxxer wing nut Robert Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services. Almost all of Trump’s draft picks lack any semblance of competence or experience leading large organizations. They will all be at war with the departments they are supposed to lead.

This will produce satire and ridicule, and already has.⁷ Trump’s plans have been called a real-life rendition of Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning, a hallucinatory account of Richard Nixon, upset that the heroic Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had become world-historic figures with “a terrific rating.” Or there is Ishmael Reed’s (now not-so) surreal first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), about a used car salesman, Harry Sam (a cross between Nixon and “Doc” Duvalier in Haiti), who named a nation after himself, and even posed as a worker (Trump in a McDonald’s apron handing out fries?). But the more sinister reality of MAGA Trump World is that to carry out their program would require a bonapartist “strong state.”⁸

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump unleashed non-stop vitriolic rhetoric against anyone, or group, or movement he singled out as “evil.” While Nixon kept an “enemies list,” the next U.S. president wants to put those he hates behind bars. During his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump had crowds repeatedly chant “lock her up.” Now he has said he intends to do just that. Would he really do it? Why not, the Democrats tried to do it to him, using every imaginable charge to keep him from running from president again, from inflating the value of his real estate (horrors!) and paying off an adult movie actress trying to shake him down to keeping official documents (in a bathroom!) and inciting an “insurrection” which was closer to a lynch mob.

The wannabe strong man who rails against the “Deep State” that rules Washington whatever administration is in office, who declares that his goal is to “dismantle bureaucracy” and “drain the swamp,” actually proposes to beef up even further the repressive powers of the state. Donald Trump wants an authoritarian regime with unchecked military and police powers. He has called to use the military to squelch demonstrations (“riots”) and, together with local police, to round up immigrants (“illegals”). His “border czar” Tom Homan is calling to build more concentration camps with “100,000 beds” for mass deportations. He foams at the mouth with fascistic rhetoric, vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists” and “radical left thugs” who he calls “vermin.”⁹

The Democrats say this is really directed at them, and it undoubtedly is. (After all, he labeled “Comrade Kamala” Harris “a communist…. She is really a Marxist.”) But even though liberal Democrats may be the ultimate targets, this rhetoric will be used to go after actual leftists, who his “alt-right” acolytes see as “snowflakes” that will just melt away when they face the heat. Attacking socialists or communists or anarchists could be a warm-up act before going after top Democrats, or it could be a fallback in case Trump runs into obstacles in the courts. But in any case, his most virulent followers may take his rhetoric literally. Genuine Marxists and communists must take it seriously as well.

U.S. Imperialist Hegemony Down the Drain, World Capitalism Putrefying

As Trump and his henchmen gear up to crack down, there is not likely to be any substantial resistance from liberals. Those who pinned their hopes on Kamala, or Biden, are in a deep depressive funk.  The day after the election, a number of schools, including top private schools in New York, had “mental health days,” so that students (and teachers) could “process” the results. Unlike in late 2016, when there were sizeable anti-Trump rallies (where Democratic hacks yelled at us to “go back to Russia”!), or in early 2017, with the huge women’s marches in Washington, Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere that brought over 2 million people into the streets to protest Trump, now Democrats are demoralized. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote (6 November 2024) that it is time to mourn, later for organizing.¹⁰

Or not, because the Democratic Party today is non-viable. It won’t turn to the left, as Bernie Sanders and some other liberals hope. During the campaign, Harris doubled down on the “moderate Republican” option, highlighting war hawks Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney (aka “The Prince of Darkness,” mastermind of the disastrous Iraq war), giving Trump the opening to pose as a peacenik, warning of the danger of World War III. The Dems have burned their bridges with the working class. Perhaps they will try to rebrand as the party of the “moderate” center, which will leave the liberals and reformist left out in the cold. Even though the U.S. electoral system makes it near impossible to organize a large “third party,” the bankruptcy of the Democrats is patent.

Many of the reasons for the Democratic fiasco were self-inflicted. The “ironclad” support for Zionist Israel in the genocidal slaughter in Gaza, the U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia sinking ever deeper into the Ukrainian mud, of course. But also inflation and the immigration uproar. The huge influx of 2 million immigrants, more than at any time in U.S. history, was the result of Biden’s Cold War policy of encouraging immigration from Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. As for the escalating post-pandemic inflation, aside from profit-gouging by grocery monopolies, this was in good part a result of the “American Rescue Plan” which pumped $1.9 trillion into the U.S. economy while the output of durable goods, for example, stagnated or fell.

The Biden administration basically consisted of diehard leftover Cold Warriors. Substitute the word “authoritarianism” (the Bidenites’ term for Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Hungary…) for “communism” and it’s a continuation of the imperialist anti-Soviet drive, but at a time when the U.S. no longer has the economic and military strength to actually dominate the world.  In his first press conference in 2021, Biden said that the world was at an “inflection point” in “a battle between the utility of democracy in the 21st century and autocracies.”¹¹ When Russian president Putin asked for security guarantees against encroachment by NATO, Biden refused. Instead, Washington rushed arms to Kiev, setting off the anti-Russia Ukraine war.

Biden kept repeating the triumphalist, arrogantly imperialist mantra of the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” even after the phony “New World Order” of supposed “liberal democracy,” that U.S. rulers proclaimed with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, had run out of steam. Democrat Bill Clinton started the march of NATO into East Europe in 1999. Meanwhile, the push for militarized repression on the domestic front did not start with Trump’s rants against “Black Lives Matter” marches in 2020 (when Biden said “shoot ’em in the leg”). From 2009 on, Democrat Barack Obama funneled Bearcat armored cars and heavy weaponry to local police, equipping them for civil war. And then the cops used that arsenal on antiracist protesters in Ferguson in 2014. What a surprise!

Behind all of this is the reality of decaying capitalism. Beefing up local police forces was in part a response to the fear of unrest due to the 2007-08 financial crash (when Obama bailed out Wall Street banks) and ensuing depression. That crisis, which impoverished whole sections of the middle class as foreclosures forced people from their homes into living in trailers, fueled the rise of the ultra-rightist “Tea Party” wing of the Republican Party, a precursor of the Trumpian MAGA. Today, a major factor in the rise of far-right parties internationally, as well as the uproar over immigration, is the gutting of social services (such as the National Health Service in Britain, or Social Security in Mexico) as public funds dry up.

Historically, the economic ruin and desperation of petty-bourgeois sectors brought on by capitalist economic crisis creates prime recruiting ground for fascistic and fascist forces. The lowering of living standards and the increasingly precarious livelihoods of working people is the main factor pushing many into the arms of Trump. The Democrats don’t see (or care about) this as they see their future with the college-educated middle class whose incomes have remained steady while the 63% majority without a bachelor’s degree run up credit card debt to make ends meet. No wonder that many with lower family incomes fumed at Biden’s plans to write off college debt, and voted for Trump.

The perpetual economic crisis facing working people is a byproduct of the hollowing out of the U.S.’ industrial base as companies moved production offshore under a “free trade” regime. With this “globalization,” the Democrats foresaw the United States as a kind of rentier power that would live off the profits derived from shifting manufacturing to lower-wage countries, to Mexico, or Brazil, or Indonesia, or Bangladesh, etc. That deindustrialization not only eliminated hundreds of thousands of relatively well-paying industrial jobs, it so weakened the industrial base of the U.S. that today it cannot produce the weapons to supply Ukraine. It has exactly one plant (in Scranton, Pennsylvania) producing 155-mm. shells that its Ukraine proxy regime needs for its artillery.

The U.S. plan to feed off the rest of the world parasitically requires a strong military, yet its military domination has sharply diminished. This was announced by its 2021 ignominious flight from Afghanistan after losing a 20-year war against poorly armed Islamic jihadists. It was underscored by Washington’s inability to defeat Russia in the U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war over Ukraine from 2022 on. It was also a factor in Hamas’ decision to launch a war against the Zionist occupiers in 2023, and in the U.S.’ Israeli ally and client state’s refusal to heed Biden’s pious entreaties in 2024 to use smaller (U.S.-supplied) bombs rather than larger (U.S.-supplied) bombs, for appearances’ sake, in their joint genocidal war on the Palestinians.

Then, the day after a U.S.-negotiated “ceasefire” in Lebanon, leaving the Israeli invaders in place, Turkey launched an offensive by its Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist clients in Syria – who over years received up to $18 billion in “humanitarian” aid from the U.S. – that in one week toppled the al-Assad regime. So now the region is being carved up between a Greater Israel led by the fascistic hardline Zionist Netanyahu and a Greater Turkey led by the would-be sultan Erdoğan with his ambitions to restore the “glory” of the Ottoman Empire. Contrary to illusions of a “multipolar” world, the intermediate powers of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bloc played no role at all as the Middle East went up in flames.

All of these developments – the economic and military weakening of U.S. imperialism, the economic ruin experienced by sectors of the middle class and working class in the U.S., the growth of far-right, fascistic and fascist parties internationally, the crisis over mass immigration – as well as other phenomena such as the horrendous death toll of the COVID pandemic – are a reflection of the increasing decay of capitalism. And they are exacerbated by the absence of any militant opposition from the left and labor movements, which are beholden, body and soul, to the imperialist rulers. Whether it is leftists in Europe supporting Ukraine (and thus NATO) or unions in the U.S. going under without a fight, this opens the door to the reactionary right.

Transitional Program for International Socialist Revolution

But what will unchallenged U.S. imperialist hegemony be replaced by? In the U.S., Trump and his mafia of “made men” (and women), wholly dependent on the whims of the Don, will be at odds with most of the government institutions they now head. In spite of the Democrats’ demise (and depression), the new regime will be pushing policies that in many cases are opposed by half the country, and in some instances (over abortion, for example) by close to two-thirds of the U.S. population. The spectre of I.C.E. vans prowling the streets looking for immigrants to snatch will be deeply upsetting, and mass deportations on the scale he has proclaimed would cause the collapse of a number of industries, starting with the food supply. This is a recipe for one hell of a mess.

Internationally, the European imperialists are in no position to replace the U.S. in waging war on Russia. “Conservative populists” and fascists cannot produce stable rule on either side of the Atlantic. Much of Latin America may react against the aggressive “American” expansionism of the new “Trump Doctrine.” The Middle East is already exploding while the BRICS bloc is a cipher, internally divided and impotent. Trump and his imitators in Europe, Asia and Latin America may want to impose the police-state rule of a bonapartist “strong state,” but this cannot be easily accomplished. As dying U.S. imperialism lashes out, the stage is set for chaos across the globe … and for sharp class struggle.

The Biden administration, as we warned, has been hurtling toward a nuclear World War III targeting Russia and the bureaucratically deformed Chinese workers state, constantly escalating in Ukraine, where the League for the Fourth International calls to defend Russia and defeat the U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war. While Trump is reputed to be less of a war hawk against Putin’s Russia, and has wined and dined China’s president Xi Jinping, his foreign policy nominees are virulent anti-communist Cold Warriors. Their first targets could well be Venezuela, and the Cuban deformed workers state, both in precarious economic condition due to draconian U.S. sanctions. As over Ukraine, the LFI defends the targets of imperialist attack. And we call for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Near East.

The world situation of extreme danger cries out for proletarian revolutionary internationalist leadership. In such circumstances transitional demands come to the fore, “to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution” (Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program). Thus in many industries, the fight for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay is posed, but also a struggle for workers control of production, starting with union safety committees. Against fascist gangs and racist attacks, workers defense is needed, for example to protect immigrant communities and abortion clinics. Against mass deportations, it is crucial to set up committees to defend immigrants in workplaces and schools as well as rapid response teams in the community.

The Internationalist Group calls for workers and immigrants action to stop deportations, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, and the right of everyone residing in the U.S. to stay here. Such demands, as well as for the right to free abortion on demand and for free quality public education and health care for all, are simply for democratic rights. Yet under conditions of decaying capitalism, when they are constantly being slashed, such rights can only be fully realized through socialist revolution. Building a revolutionary workers party is key not only to leading these struggles to their conclusion but also in today’s battles where, for example, the fight for simple trade-union demands cannot be waged without breaking through the capitalist straitjacket of no-strike clauses or bans and the whole panoply of anti-labor laws.

The leadership we need must be a multiethnic, proletarian vanguard based on the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky. Donald Trump with his ravings may be one of a kind, but he’s not the first would-be dictator the world has faced. Drawing on the lessons of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Trotsky and the Trotskyists in the 1930s uniquely put forward a revolutionary program, against the betrayals of social-democratic and Stalinist misleaders, for united workers action to stop Hitler’s Nazi fascists. Today as then, the program of intransigent class struggle  is key to mobilizing the power of the working class to defeat the mortal threats, amid many unknowns, facing humanity. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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