Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

When the fascist Trump meets Marxist Dialectics

 

There is nothing exceptional about the history of the USA. Nor is Trump or Trumpism exceptional in any way. Liberals, old and new, captives of the capitalist fetishism of commodities promote the post-modern fixation on personality and privatization. Marxists are dialectical materialists. “Great men” spring from great crises, not great personalities. Great events and great causes erupt from the mobilization of the masses, living the class struggle, making revolutions to transcend the historic contradiction between class society and nature. 

Claims that Trump does not serve U.S. national interests, such as Atlantic magazine, show a lack of understanding as to what those national interests are. Trump’s crypto-fascist parasitic ‘chaos’ is attributed to his hyper-individualism. It is true that a national leader must have the required personal attributes to act in the national interests but that is because those interests are and always have been the interests of the capitalist ruling class. 

Specifically, in the U.S. today, this is the faction of the parasitic tech billionaires desperate to save as much property and wealth as possible, fictitious or not. It faces an economy about to crash and burn, provoking the wrath of the working masses; who, when facing misery, death and destruction, are capable of rising up and smashing the system. This is what makes Trump transition from a Bonapartist leader,  trying to balance the classes to keep the peace, into an open fascist leader as it becomes necessary to smash the threat of a workers’ revolution.  

The truth is that Trump is the ideal President to serve the tech billionaire ‘Robber Barons’ like Musk and Thiel to salvage dying capitalism as a launch pad for their post-human dystopia where machines do the work and redundant workers are locked up in concentration camps or otherwise eliminated. They know that global capitalism is in terminal crisis and actively destroying the ecological foundations for its existence. 

So it is not Trump’s policies causing “chaos”, but capitalism’s terminal crisis for which it has no solution, which forces him to attack the causes of the crisis, and why Trump and Musk had to seize power, concentrating it in the Executive, overriding the Constitution, Congress, Bureaucracy and Judiciary as outlined in Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation. 

U.S. imperialism causes crises, wars and revolutions

If Trump is a creature of his time, what is it that drives him? It is the decline and inevitable fall of U.S. imperialism which is now in its end stage. Trump may claim to be a second McKinley, the President who in the 1890s took the U.S. from an isolated country to one which would rule the world. The frontier was expanded from the borders set during the 19^th century to claim hegemony over its backyard in the Americas, and then further West to annex Hawaii, the Philippines, and sundry small Pacific island states. 

This expansion was the necessary transition from an ex-European colony to an imperialist power to escape the limits imposed on the development of capitalism trapped inside U.S. national borders. It wasn’t McKinley’s imperialist adventurism or the Spanish American war, both instruments of this expansion, but the law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF) first discovered by Karl Marx which created the necessity for a McKinley.

The LTRPF is not a natural law or a human one, but one historically specific to the development of capitalism.  It is an expression of the fundamental contradiction of capital between workers, the owners of their labor power, and their exploiters, the owners of private property, the capitalist ruling class. The ruling class which owns the means of subsistence gives workers the ‘freedom’ to choose exploitation or destitution. 

In the last analysis, this is a contradiction between humans struggling to retain part of their labor value for their subsistence as part of nature, against the ruling class expropriation of surplus labor power to drive down labor value below subsistence. The LTRPF results from the limit set by labor in the ‘class struggle’ to resist its exploitation by capital. When workers refuse further exploitation, employers have to find cheaper raw materials and labor, ‘counter-tendencies’ to the LTRPF, to restore the rate of profit. This is how national capitalism morphs into imperialist colonization to extract other nations’ resources and labor power. 

Yet the attempts to counter the LTRPF must ultimately fail because nature is more powerful than any ruling class. Capital destroying its own ecological foundations, mainly exhausting raw materials and the reproduction of labor power itself, enters a terminal crisis of falling profits from which there is no escape. So while the onset of U.S. imperialism under McKinley marked the birth of U.S. imperialism, the end of U.S. hegemony today signals its demise. 

Every crisis of falling profits over the 20^th century has destroyed capital by means of depression and war to restore profits. Each crisis got worse and the recovery of profits weaker. Since the end of the post war boom in the 1960s, the rate of profit has failed to recover to its postwar peak. And since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 imperialist profits have stagnated except for China. 

The Fall of the U.S. helps the rise of China 

It is not possible to fully understand the U.S. decline without understanding China’s rise, setting the scene for their imperialist rivalry today. To restore the rate of profit in its domestic industrial economy the U.S. fell into the trap of outsourcing raw materials and labor. As the instigator of the neo-liberal counter-revolution the U.S. bullied client regimes to off-shore sourcing of raw materials and labor power to pump out super profits paid in U.S.$. Neo-liberal profits rose but still fell short of restoring the post-war rate of profit. 

As a major recipient of U.S. FDI, China took advantage of this relationship by setting conditions that required joint ventures and technology transfer. As a result China led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) was able to install a state monopoly capitalist regime without becoming a new colony of the U.S.. When the LTRPF began to squeeze profits it could venture into a rapid imperialist expansion globally to become the U.S. main rival.

In the 21^st century the trajectories of the U.S. and China are growing further apart. The GFC was an acid test. China’s >10% growth rate was dented but recovered quickly while the G7 imperialists went into recession. Since then China’s GDP has never been < 5% while the G7 has stagnated. Other measures of the intractable U.S. economic decline all point to a terminal crisis. 

In this situation Trump as an instrument of the dominant tech faction of the ruling class has his policies pre-determined for him. That is: devalue and destroy unproductive capital and labor until capital flows into the high-tech industry and the rate of profit returns. In other words restoring the conditions for the production of value which makes a return to profitability possible. This is the classic depression or crash which marks every previous global crisis. 

However such a return to profitable production in the U.S. is futile. Tariffs will cause rising inflation of prices of production and result in stagflation that will bring about a capital outflow but rather its inflow. The U.S. cannot hope to compete with China’s labor productivity in any sector including AI. Nor can Trump offload the U.S. crisis by sanctioning or annexing other nations without war. The historical decline of the U.S. is too deep and ingrained to reverse against massive resistance from China and the BRICS and ultimately U.S. workers.

So if Trump cannot revive the U.S. economy to produce more value and restore the rate of profit, nor bully other countries to pay for its crisis, he is forced to make workers in the U.S. and in those countries targeted in his economic and hot wars pay the price of the terminal crisis. As his economic warfare fails to stop the coming crash he must resort to any methods necessary – from terrorism, genocide, war and ultimately fascism – to win the class war and smash workers resistance to his seizure of power! 

All of Trumps attacks on workers from the genocide in Gaza, bombing Yemen, the rights to work, labor rights, free speech and assembly, the press, to the rights of migrants, are unconstitutional and done in the name of security and reducing waste and corruption. Yet because these blatant excuses are already being ridiculed and opposed by those he is condemning to destitution, torture and death, he must move quickly to the seizure of state power in a fascist coup which expands his executive power at the expense of the other branches of government to smash resistance to his coup. 

Against fascism workers must fight for revolution!

Fascism is the means of last resort used by the capitalist ruling class to destroy the working class when it poses a revolutionary threat. We have shown how the objective situation of U.S. capitalism in a terminal crisis cannot restore profits when it has largely destroyed the conditions for its existence. It cannot compete in the production of value with the rise of China and the BRICS which will soon monopolize all inputs – critical raw materials, cheap labor, advanced technology etc – without going to war on its rivals which means in practice the working people of the world. 

To resolve the objective situation of the terminal crisis as capital destroys nature, driven by the contradiction between class society and nature in favour of the imperialist ruling class, Trump must resort to fascism to smash the subjective intervention of the working masses who produce the wealth, defending nature from total destruction, and the only class with the potential power to overthrow the ruling class and capable of building a new objective reality – the socialist future.  

It follows that only organized labor, united globally, and led by a new world party of socialist revolution, can meet the challenge of overthrowing decaying capitalism and building a socialist world where society lives in harmony with nature. In the U.S. working people must wake up to the immediate threat the fascist coup poses to their own survival and that of humanity. 

We must organize in our millions to resist this coup, revive the unions, create a fighting workers Labor Party, build councils and militias to expropriate the robber barons, bring down the Trump regime, installing a Workers’ Government’ with the power to set up a Workers’ state ruling in the interests of the working people. A Socialist United States would cease its domination of the world by its genocidal wars and create an example for workers everywhere to build a world federation of socialist states.

– Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA), U.S. Section of the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT),  04/02/2025