On the re-election of Trump as US president

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On the re-election of Trump as US president

 

We have received correspondence from a comrade round the question of the advent of Trump 2.0, partly following a public meeting, and partly in response to an article. We start with some extracts, then follow with a response from the ICC on some of the questions raised, about populism, class consciousness, and the state of the class struggle.

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Following the public meeting

I think the ICC underestimates the importance of the rise of the far right.

You are, of course, right, that the election of Trump will make things far worse in some respects but your position on the “rationality” of the Trump faction is based on an assumption that things won’t get worse anyway.

The prospects of capitalism get grimmer by the day and the consensus of how to respond to this that exists within the bourgeoisie is breaking down. Mass deportations and ever more draconian immigration controls are inevitable policies for the central countries. As social and environmental breakdown continue to worsen, mass migration will increase exponentially.

If the ICC is correct in its analysis concerning the trajectory of the class struggle, then there will be increased confrontations with the working class as well which will inevitably take on a physical aspect. As bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these struggles, physical repression becomes the only option left. The question for the bourgeoisie is whether the verbiage of the liberal democratic state – “human rights”, “rule of law”, etc. – becomes more of a hindrance than a help in enacting necessary policies.

This is not just a US phenomenon. The far-right, in various forms, is gaining ground in most if not all of the central countries. The debates within the Tory party about UK membership of the ECHR, while presented as madness by the liberal wing of the media, are not simply the reactionary ravings of “swivel-eyed loons”. Whatever the surface ideological froth, they are rooted in a real material problem that the bourgeoisie is beginning to recognise the current structures of the state are not equipped to deal with.

The “loss of control” that the ICC points to concerning the bourgeoisie and its political apparatus is the product of irreconcilable contradictions at the material level of social management. To put it another way, the bourgeoisie are in deep shit and simply can no longer agree about what to do…

Comrades took exception to the weight I placed on the significance of the election result with regard to the consciousness of the working class.

Certainly elections are not the only phenomena we should assess in terms of analysing the balance of class forces; but the idea that they are meaningless is also wrong.

On the contrary, they are of great significance at any number of levels. Even assuming that the bourgeoisie have a preferred outcome (and the evidence suggests they don’t at the moment), with the election of Trump the bourgeoisie in the US has not the preferred outcome. Why not, for Trumpism isn’t a random anomaly after all the election then becomes a test of the level of ideological control the ruling class can exert over the mass of the population.

The ICC stated in the meeting that “Irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react. Not take where the class is in consciousness at any one time as an indication of what it is and what it is obliged to do.”

This, of course, is true in a historical sense; the revolutionary potential of the proletariat is not judged by this or that moment. But the topic of the meeting was not the general revolutionary potential of the working class, but the impact of the US election on the balance of class forces. The latter is, by definition, a temporal phenomenon that can only be assessed by the information we have to hand at the moment. The fact that the working class made a revolution in 1917 is of little help in establishing whether it will make one tomorrow.

If we want to understand where the working class is now, we really do have to understand its consciousness at the present moment. The only way to do this is to analyse the information we have available – the frequency of strikes and protest, their combativity and political content and … how the working class votes in elections.

Elections are not some irrelevant sideshow in the life of capitalist society. Leaving aside their importance for resolving bourgeois political conflicts, they are the principle means by which the non-bourgeois classes engage in political activity. This is likely to remain the case until the working class is ready to make its revolution, up and to including the point of dual power.

Acknowledgement of the importance of elections for assessing the immediate psychological consciousness of the class, in no way contradicts the fundamental lessons learned by the communist left with regard to democracy:

  • That parliamentary elections offer no opportunity to push working class interests – the choices offered at election time whether real or imaginary, are all bourgeois choices. No election result will ever change the situation of the working class.
  • Participation in bourgeois elections by revolutionaries is objectively counter-revolutionary. Such participation only preserves the illusion that elections can somehow be an arena for proletarian activity. Worse, it carries the danger of sucking proletarian forces into the state machine and thus neutralising their revolutionary potential.

If nothing else, elections offer us a chance to see how aware the working class is of the real function of the electoral apparatus: measuring turnout, who was voted for, etc.

In the initial stages of a rebirth of class struggle from a very low base, such as the current period, we might well expect to see an increase in working class participation in elections. This will be the first “port of call” for newly politicised workers, just as such workers will join unions and left-wing political parties. This is an inevitable stage of the development of proletarian consciousness. Indeed, it is this capture of initial proletarian consciousness by leftist parties and unions that is an essential part of their function for capitalism.

While our understanding of the unions and the left as a structure that impedes both class struggle and class consciousness is correct, this sometimes prevents us from seeing that these structures are themselves arenas of class struggle…

I also think that the ICC is overly wedded to its position on “the rupture”. It is true that there has been an upsurge in class struggle over the last few years but I think the ICC has been far too quick to leap on this and assume that this presages a long-term change in the fortunes of the class struggle.

There have been several of these false dawns before: I remember the enthusiasm the organisation had for the French and Spanish movements of the mid-2000s. Assuming these movements really did represent something deeper than their immediate results, this was quickly shipwrecked on the shores of the Financial Crisis. This was the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s and yet the working class, despite some very encouraging struggles prior to this, was unable to respond to the moment.

When a response did come, it took the form of the populist Occupy movement. This contradictory movement was characterised by heterogeneous ideologies, albeit with an openness amongst some to class positions, and a divorce from economic struggles of the class. In addition to the usual anti-capitalist ideologies, the movement became saturated with petit-bourgeois slogans about “fractional reserve banking”, the various sovereign citizen movements, in which we can see precursors of the degenerated conspiracy theories that are growing like a cancer in society today.

This gives the lie to the previous statement that the “Irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react.” The working class is not obliged to do anything as it has sadly proved over the last few decades. Maintaining this position, in the face of all the evidence since at least 1990, borders on religious conviction rather than a material analysis of the historical period.

This is not to say it can’t or won’t happen. I agree with the ICC when it says that the working class is undefeated, in so far as this means it maintains its revolutionary potential, not simply abstractly (as the paraphrase from the Holy Family quoted above indicates) but also in the current period: the historic situation is open and the class can still make a revolution.

But potential is not actuality and there are enormous barriers to that potential being actualised. And to say, even best case scenario, that the working class is at the “centre of the social situation” as one ICC comrade did in the meeting, borders on the delusional.

The working class has been able to launch a defensive struggle in recent years, in SOME sectors in SOME countries. While it is true that this is the most significant such activity in recent years, the idea that it is anywhere near what the objective situation requires is naïve to say the least…

After the Trump 2.0 article

One point of disagreement. I am unconvinced that "Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was."

Of course, it depends on whether we are talking about practicalities or ideology. Although Nazism was in practice was dedicated to rearmament and war right from the start, its rhetoric at the beginning was based very much on job creation. Although most Nazi "work creation" schemes were actually inherited from the previous government and quietly shelved (against a great deal of opposition from the gauleiters) in favour of rearmament.

Even after 3 years of the Nazi regime, "All evidence of public opinion suggests that whatever their resentment at the outcome of World War I, the German population was deeply afraid of a European war and would have welcomed a settlement on the basis of the status quo as of 1936." - Tooze, Wages of Destruction, p.205.

And much to the frustration of ideologues like Goebbels, Nazi ideology never penetrated particularly deeply into the population and in particular the working class. Repression eventually managed to crush the public dissent that was common in the early days, but adherence to the regime was largely one of passive resignation rather than active participation.

DG

 

ICC reply                                   

We thank comrade DG for his written contributions following the debate that took place at an ICC virtual public meeting which addressed the consequences of Trump’s return as US president, both at the level of imperialist conflicts and that of working class struggle. The comrade broadly agrees with the analysis of the ICC on the imperialist conflicts, on the non-defeated working class, and on the growing difficulties for the working class with the election of Trump, but has also expressed some serious disagreements on the potential for the development of the class struggle, which will be the main subject for our reply

Elections against the working class

Comrade DG devotes much of his text to dealing with elections which we should consider as some kind of barometer of the state of consciousness in the class. He writes: “If we want to understand where the working class is now, we really do have to understand its consciousness at the present moment” by means of “the frequency of strikes and protest, their combativity and political content and … how the working-class votes in elections”.

Here the comrade is victim of a sociological view on the working class. He equates the reflection and choices of individual, atomised workers with the conscious process of maturation of workers as a class. But democracy “turns the working class into a sum of individuals, of isolated, atomised, powerless ‘citizens’ and ‘voters’” [1]. And the electoral terrain is by definition the place where “we see atomised individuals, mystified and alone, confronted by the dismal future offered by capitalist society, and in many cases susceptible to the ‘simplistic and distorted’ explanations of populist politicians”[2].

Further the comrade tells us: “Certainly elections are not the only phenomena we should assess in terms of analysing the balance of class forces; but (…) they are of great significance at any number of levels.” The election of Trump for instance “becomes a test of the level of ideological control the ruling class can exert over the mass of the population”.

Here again we see that the comrade is not able to see a difference between the so-called consciousness of the workers, expressed in the ballot box, and the consciousness in the class prepared to defend its interests. Taking the elections as the measure for the development of the consciousness in the class, he might even come to the conclusion that the working class is characterised by complete submission to the dominant ideology.

But his view that we can take the result of the elections as a measurement of the bourgeoisie’s control over the working class is misleading. If Harris had been elected, there would be no less control over the working class.

One can even say that a Democratic administration has more means at its disposal to control the working class than a Republican administration. The first can cooperate with the trade unions and certain other leftist organisations. But all depends on the objective conditions of course: on a defeated or non-defeated working class. And in the present circumstances of a non-defeated working class, repression, which the comrade sees as “the only option left, as bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these struggles” does not work in the central countries of capitalism. And the more rational, intelligent factions of the bourgeoisie are quite aware of this.

Democracy is the greatest danger for the working class

“I think the ICC underestimates the importance of the rise of the far right. As bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these [workers’] struggles, physical repression becomes the only option left.”

To begin with the comrade makes no reference to the position of the ICC on the question of the far right and populism versus democracy, although we have written many articles on the subject.

In contradiction to what the comrade argues the ICC does not underestimate the importance of the rise of the far right. But (in contrast to the comrade?) it also knows that populism is not capable of unifying the bourgeoisie in the way that fascism did, it is instead a manifestation of the present inner disintegration of the bourgeoisie.

The comrade agrees with us that the working class is not defeated and (probably agrees with us) that the road is therefore not open to a new world war. Nevertheless, he tends to attribute to the far right of today more or less the same features as fascism in the 1930s: not immediately focused on rearmament but on job creation, not immediately able to mobilise the workers for war and finally taking refuge in massive repression: “Nazi ideology never penetrated particularly deeply into the population and in particular the working class”.  Only “repression eventually managed to crush the public dissent”. The formulation in the Trump 2.0 article (“Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was”) gets over an important difference between populism and fascism, but, of course, it also needs to be emphasised that populism is still a war ideology, even if it is not capable of mobilising the working class of the central countries for world war..

Here we will not deal further with the question of fascism. But more important is the serious underestimation by the comrade of the ideological impact of democracy, which is one of the most important instruments of the bourgeoisie to poison consciousness in the class.

Without understanding the significance of campaigns for democracy, it is easy to fall into the trap which argues that the right is the greatest danger. The ICC does not deny that the right wing of the bourgeoisie is a great danger, but it is convinced that the democratic left is a much greater danger. And this position has been defended by the ICC for fifty years. To give some examples:

“The left and the trade unions and more generally democratic institutions (...) constitute the main danger against the working class and not fascism” [3]

“The greatest danger to the struggle of the working class today, and to its ability to carry through its task of destroying capitalism, is not ‘fascists’, real or supposed, but the ‘democratic’ traps of the ruling class” [4].

In fact, democracy hides in a much more insidious way the dictatorship of capitalism and the totalitarian domination of its state than the right wing can ever do.

Denial of the rupture and lack of confidence in the working class

Despite his affirmation that the working class still “maintains its revolutionary potential (...) and that the class can still make a revolution” the comrade really underestimates the actual development of the class struggle when he writes: “It is true that there has been an upsurge in class struggle over the last few years.” But “the ICC is overly wedded to its position on ‘the rupture’.

The widespread international working class response, following the pandemic and in the middle of the campaign for military support to Ukraine, seems for the comrade at best “a beginning to react defensively to the actions of the bourgeoisie in some circumstances.”

Here the comrade shows that he has not understood the rupture. What is that precisely? The ICC has given lengthy coverage to it in its press. We have explained this in various articles already. The comrade may not have read them thoroughly, because he doesn't refer to them.at all.

It is “a specific task of the Marxist minority to see beyond appearances and try to discern the deeper developments going on within their class”[5].

What the ICC has said is that the response of the British working class was not limited to the attacks of the British bourgeoisie. It went far beyond the framework of the British national situation. It was actually a response of the working class to the whole period of austerity policies since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

“Like May '68 (but in a different context), the current international movement marks a break with a long period of retreat, characterised by disorientation, by a reduction of class consciousness and by workers' struggles often being completely isolated from each other. The current wave shows not only a development of combativity but also a return of workers' confidence in their own strength as a class and a deepening reflection, even if we are only at the beginning of this process”[6].

“The expansion of this wave can only be understood as the result of a change in the workers' state of mind, as the result of a long process of subterranean maturation within the class, of disillusionment and disengagement with the main themes of bourgeois ideology”[7]. Even if “the present struggles are a direct response to the rising cost of living, they are also the product of three decades of maturation in the working class, of a new step in the loss of illusions in the capitalist system”[8].

By contrast, DG argues that while “the working class has been able to launch a defensive struggle in recent years, in SOME sectors in SOME countries. While it is true that this is the most significant such activity in recent years, the idea that it is anywhere near what the objective situation requires is naïve to say the least”,

But what does the comrade mean when he says “not anywhere what the objective situation requires”? If he means a world revolution, then he is right. The present struggles are far away from an international revolution. But what does this mean for the tasks of the revolutionaries? Workers are not ready to launch a world revolution or even the mass strike, but should we disavow these struggles, even if they are a first step towards more important struggles?

This could lead us to a position similar to the one defended by the Essen tendency in the KAPD, who rejected the struggle for higher wages, since it would only distract the class from the final goal: “the creation of revolutionary workers’ councils and revolutionary Factory Organizations (Workers’ Unions)”[9].

According to the comrade “But I think the ICC has been far too quick to leap on this [the upsurge of the class struggle] and assume that this presages a long-term change in the fortunes of the class struggle. There have been several of these false dawns before”

It is certainly true that the ICC has made mistakes, erroneous estimations in the past 20 years. In the report on the class struggle to the 21st ICC Congress, we looked at some examples of our overestimating the class struggle over the previous 40 years[10]. But in our view underestimating the significance of the present upsurge would be a mistake in some sense comparable to those who saw nothing new under the sun in the struggles after 1968. Moreover in the period characterised especially by nihilism and a lack of perspective the underestimation of the struggle is certainly a greater danger and would tend to disarm the proletariat even more.

The comrade also attributes the ICC the position that “the irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react” But this is not the position the ICC defends and the comrade should know his. The ICC does say that the economic crisis creates the most favourable conditions for the revival of the working class struggle: “Its class struggle against the attacks of capitalism in crisis. The latter represents much more favourable conditions for revolution than war”[11].

It is good that the comrade has written his contributions, as it gives us the opportunity to explain the position of the ICC on the different questions raised in our press and at our public meetings. But the contribution of the comrade also shows the difficulty for an individual militant to resist the weight of bourgeois ideology. At a time when the world’s media inundate us with news of trade wars and imperialist conflict, it is an essential task for revolutionaries to show where the working class has broken with years of passivity. When we’re constantly warned of the danger of the right wing of the bourgeoisie, it’s more and more necessary to identify the insidious dangers of the left, the supposed friend of the working class. Our public meetings and our press are important forums for discussion on these questions.

 

ICC, April 2025

 

[10] Report on the class struggle (2015), International Review 156

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