A coordinated working class counter-offensive needed to create a socialist world
Trump’s economic and political policies in his second coming as US president have opened up a qualitatively new and decisive phase in the economic and simultaneous political crisis of US and global capitalism. On “Liberation Day” Trump swung the wrecking ball he came armed into office with against friend and foe alike. He unleashed the highest tariffs in a century, surpassing those imposed by US imperialism in 1930, a year after the worst crisis of world capitalism at the time – the Great Depression.
Treasury Secretary billionaire Scott Bessent set out the Trump regime’s programme: it is aimed at “addressing the ‘imbalances’ in the world economy promising a ’blueprint for the restoration of equilibrium of the global financial system and the institutions designed to uphold it.’” Over a long period, successive US administrations have been hostile towards all post-World War 2 (WW2) global political and economic governance institutions whose construction it had itself supervised. During his 2019 election campaign Trump denounced the UN.
“We want to support religious freedom for all… We are aware that many UN projects assert a global right to taxpayer-funded abortion on demand. Global bureaucrats have absolutely no business attacking the sovereignty of nations that wish to protect innocent life. There’s no circumstance under which the US ill allow international entities to trample on the rights of our citizens,’
Trump’s persona is repugnant. There is a ceaseless outpouring of abhorrent racist and xenophobic remarks from his speeches and “Truth Social”- his X account. He engages in unrestrained insults on other nations including former allies. Haitians in the US eat cats and dogs. Immigrants are criminals, rapists and released from mental institutions.
He has portrayed the US, astonishingly, as a victim of other nations feeding on it like parasites, engaged in rape and pillage through the trade surpluses they have with it. The tariffs he has imposed on friend and foe alike will put all this to an end he rages. He has threatened to annex Canada, repossess the Panama Canal and take over Greenland. His most outrageous exhibition of coldblooded inhumanity is his portrayal of Gaza as a piece of real estate to be ethnically cleansed and turned into a Riveira on the bones and graves of tens of thousands of Palestinians whose genocidal slaughter by the far right Israeli regime the US has aided and abetted.
Trump, however, is no alien from outer space. However outsize his persona is in US politics and the Republican Party in particular, he is a political representative of US imperialism. His speeches draw on the legacy of imperialist plunder, rape pillage, plunder and genocide, that line the US’s path to its ascendancy to the most powerful economic and military hegemon in world history.
The character of the Trump 2.0 regime
The Trump regime is in essence a continuation of all previous ones in domestic and foreign policy. It is as blood thirsty and rapacious in its imperialist ambitions as all its predecessors. It differs from them, however, in the more brazenness of its methods and policies. To draw on those traditions, Trump has not had to travel too far back into US history.
After WW2, the US postured hypocritically as the evangel of humanitarian aid, human rights and democracy. But under the new, rules-based world order it had crafted for the world, the US ruling class’s congenital lust for blood was never satiated. The Gulf Wars, invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were not new. They had been preceded by the establishment of the State of Israel as a giant aircraft carrier in the Middle East, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the facilitation of regime change through assassinations, coups and direct military intervention in South America, Asia and Africa.
The conquest of electoral power by the type of regime Trump heads reflects significant changes in the capitalist ruling class and a deep polarisation between the classes in the US. These changes have occurred against the background of a prolonged economic crisis that is deepening in the US and globally. The US’s decline as global economic hegemon, particularly versus China, has provoked a reaction from US imperialism that precedes Trump, to arrest and reverse this and reestablish it hegemony.
Trump’s regime has come to power against the background of the failure of all the efforts of all its predecessors to do so. That the faction of the Republican Party Trump leads came to power, reflects the collapse of the political authority of the traditional bourgeois in both parties and their further drift to the right. His Vice-President Vance, for example, denounced him as a threat to democracy and Hitler before.
Before this evolution in the traditional leadership of both main parties, they had been able to manage the affairs of US capitalism with a seamless transition from the Democrats to the Republicans, from Tweedledee to Tweedledum and back. The presidency and composition of the House and Senate changed, but the policies remained fundamentally the same.
For the first time in the post WW2 era, the handover was threatened. Trump has since pardoned the those convicted over the Jan 6 Capital Hill riots instigated under claims that the elections had been stolen. Trump has tapped into a deep hatred particularly for capitalist elite that the Democrats in the main are associated as a result of the decline in living standards, the end of the American Dream – the certainty that successive generation would enjoy a better life. This has been fuelled by the searing inequalities between the classes which developed under the policies of the Democrats and Republicans alike.
Despite losing the 2020 elections his return has been stunning: winning the popular vote and control of the coveted “trifecta” – the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Republic Party is now under the control of a more stridently isolationist, a masculine nationalist and right wing populist faction. Trump’s capture of the Republican party had been consolidated after his 2020 defeat. Such is Trump’s confidence that he has even floated the idea of a constitutionally prohibited third term. “Trump 2028” t-shirts and baseball caps are part of merchandise.
It has a more virulent disdain for all the policies, ideas, practices and institutions associated with those of the traditional bourgeois of both parties. Trump’s Republican Party is much more in tune ideologically with a more openly reactionary layer of the capitalist class like particularly the tech billionaires whose companies dominate the stock markets.
These include billionaire Pieter Thiel, co-founder of Pay Pal with the South African born Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, both infatuated with authoritarianism and fascist ideas. Thiel says he has come to the conclusion that freedom is incompatible with democracy. Musk has made fascist salutes in public, embraced the far right AFD in Germany and Melei of Argentina who gifted him a machine gun. Both the content of the Trump administration programme and its accompanying rhetoric reflects its dominance within the Republican Party.
Trump’s New World Order
As an expression of US imperialist ambition, the phrase “new world order” is not new. It was used even before WW1, by George Bush senior at the end of the Cold War and later in the Gulf War, as well as by George Bush Junior in the 2003 Iraq war amongst others. The striking irony of Trump’s “new world order” is that it is aimed at tearing up the foundation of the one constructed under Roosevelt’s supervision in 1947 at Bretton Woods. In that sense it represents an admission that not only Roosevelt’s, but all his successors’ efforts to achieve this “new world order” at various times afterwards have failed.
That decline is expressed most visibly in the US’s position economically in relation to China. According OECD 2023 Trade in Value Added database, the US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. However, China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined and is in a dominant position in global supply chains.”
This explains the virulence of this particular populist strain of American nationalism that marks the speeches of Trump’s team. China’s rise must be halted and the US restored to its former hegemony over all, is the meaning “make America great again.”
The US earned notoriety over the years for its habitual use of its UN Security Council veto power to eg defend the Israeli regime’s violation’s UN resolutions on Palestine and now its genocide in Gaza. In 2002 George Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002. It provides immunity for US army personnel from prosecution for war crimes by the International Criminal Court which it does not recognise. It is nicknamed and authorising the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, located in The Hague.
During Trump’s first presidency he spread Covid 19 conspiracy theories and promoted fake cures, referring to it as the “China virus”. He issued an Executive Order withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation (WHO) “due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19.” In addition to continued arms supplies including 2000 pound bombs to Israel, Biden cut United Nations World Refugee Agency funding to aid Israel’s propaganda about its genocide and to use starvation as a weapon of war.
Now it is taking aim at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The US has paralysed the WTO, the body set up in 1947 to settle trade disputes to avert tariff wars, such as those the US imposed in 1930, that contributed towards the outbreak of WW2. It has refused to approve the filling of vacancies on the WTO Appeals Body preventing it from forming a quorum to settle disputes accusing it of undermining US sovereignty.
Foreign Secretary Marco Rubion has demanded that the WB should abandon its “woke capitalism” programmes such as climate change and diversity, inclusion and diversity (DEI) which the Trump administration has subjected to intensified attack at home. Though unlikely to be caried though, talk about the US withdrawing from the IMF to intimidate it, has been set into motion in Washington. Trump has also broken with bourgeois protocol by publicly condemning the Federal Reserve chairperson for not heeding his call for interest rates to be lowered but putting the question of his dismissal into the public domain.
The Trump regime’s actions have set alarm bells ringing worldwide amongst its allies raising fears of a world economic recession and even the collapse of the world financial system. The IMF describes what is unfolding as follows: “The global economic system under which most countries have operated for the last 80 years is being reset, ushering the world into a new era. Existing rules are challenged while new ones are yet to emerge.” (April 2025 International Monetary Fund Blog). Ray Dalio, CEO of Bridgewater Hedge Fund, the world’s biggest, says “we’re in a ‘once-in-generation’ economic shift that ‘threatens the existing world order.” (Fortune, 23 April 2025).
Promoting right wing populism and creating fear
To buttress his economic programme ideologically, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” programme has been framed in language and justification not dissimilar from George Bush’s threat to unleash “shock and awe” against an America “under threat of terrorism” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Trump is attempting to create a sense of siege and hysteria to secure public support for draconian actions against even judges pointing out his breaches of the law. Without an official declaration of a State of Emergency the country has been portrayed as being in one. This has been used to justify the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrest of a Wisconsin judge, the defiance of court orders, the deployment of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operating like far right militias to carry out random violent raids everywhere including in the courts in a xenophobic witch-hunt for illegal aliens.
Both at home and abroad, Trump’s regime has simultaneously embarked on an attempt at a full frontal assault on basic human rights and reforms won through working class struggle. This includes policies to promote racial and gender equality, freedom of speech, the right to protest, and programmes to combat climate change. In the climate of hysteria portraying the country as experiencing the equivalent of an invasion, Trump has attempted normalise suspension of civil liberties through practices like detention without trial widely practiced by eg the apartheid regime, state-ordered kidnapping, the denial of legal representations and disappearance common under military police dictatorships.
Trump’s open support for racist formations like AfriForum spewing racist bile with false claims about a “white genocide” and expropriation of land from whites in SA, underlines his regime’s right wing populist character. In 1990, the apartheid regime, attempting to save itself from defeat, repealed “petty apartheid” laws. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act enacted in 1953, segregated the use of public facilities by race to maintain white supremacy. By Executive Order, Trump has in effect exhumed it from apartheid’s grave, by abolishing laws prohibiting racial segregation in amenities for US Federal government contracts.
The Enemy Aliens Act of 1798 has been invoked to justify mass deportations of immigrants portrayed as criminals, murderers, rapists and escapees from mental asylums. Haitians have been accused of eating pets. This law, which can be invoked after a declaration of war only by congress, has been used only 3 times – all in wars. It was used for detentions, expulsions, and restrictions targeting German, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese, and Italian immigrants based solely on their ancestry in WW2. The law is notorious for its role in the internment of Japanese people which even Congress, presidents, and the courts have been shamed into apologising for.
In this attempt to create a climate of fear and terror even justices of the court are not exempt. As if to test how far the administration can go, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a Wisconsin judge for allegedly facilitating the escape of an “illegal alien” from arrest by ICE goons. Trump is attempting to intimidate the institutions of bourgeois rule to cow them into submission and thus remove any possible obstruction to the Maga programme. To align society ideologically with its reactionary aims, Trump has blackmailed universities and schools with threats of funding cuts to force them to in effect re-write the curriculum. To align them with MAGA’s ideology, they are being blackmailed to end DEI-related hiring and employment practices and studies on history from the standpoint of the racially oppressed, the former colonised as well as womens’ studies and gender equality.
The American chapter of PEN (a global literary organization founded in 1921 that promotes literature and defends freedom of expression which stands for “Poets, Essayists, and Novelists” and now includes writers of all forms, including journalists, historians, editors, and playwrights) has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, in the US. This is a number not seen since the McCarthy era with-hunt against communism of the 1950s. The majority of these banned books are written by and about Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and LGBTQ+ authors and characters. The pretext for these bans, is amongst others, depictions of sexuality, language, and themes like race, religion, or political ideologies that chat challenge Maga’s ideology.
The list of frequently challenged and banned books include: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1984 by George Orwell, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
Although a judge has stopped the enactment of legislation providing for imprisonment for stocking banned books denouncing it as medieval, it reveals the extremely reactionary character of this regime and its willingness to draw upon the methods of fascism itself.Following the 2023 defeat of the right to abortion won in the 1973 Roe vs Wade judgement, by a Supreme Court of Trump appointed judges doctors and health care workers have been threatened with heavy fines, imprisonment and disbarment for merely assisting without providing treatment in
termination of pregnancies.
To repurpose the state for the Maga programme, even the sacred bourgeois doctrine of the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary has come under attack. It was invented to lend legitimacy to the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class behind the appearance of independence of the judiciary. However, the Trump regime has dispensed with such pretences. He has defied court orders and denounced judges suspending his Executive Orders as leftist radicals, socialists and Marxists.
Far right allies abroad
Trump’s US is mimicking at home the practices of the very military police dictatorships it has helped to install worldwide especially in the neo-colonial world over decades. It has legitimised authoritarian far right ideas and methods borrowed from fascism. The president of the most powerful country on the planet has provided libertarian, far right and fascists forces worldwide with a point of reference and the mantle of legitimacy.
Elon Musk gave video-linked endorsement of the right wing populist anti-immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany) as the only salvation for Germany. He supports a British activist member of the far right, Islamophobe English Defence League serving a prison sentence for contempt. He accepted a gift of a machine gun from far right Argentinian President Melei symbolising the swingeing social spending and job cuts through his Department of Government Efficiency. Trump has contracted the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” El Salvador president Bukele to imprison deportees indefinitely in inhumane conditions without visiting or legal representation rights and to defy a US court order to return a wrongfully deported US citizen. He has encouraged Bukele to build more prisons to accommodate “homegrown criminals” including US citizens. Other far right leaning leaders like Italy’s Meloni and India’s Modi have visited the White house to endorse of be endorsed by Trump.
Tariffs a declaration of war on the working class worldwide
These developments have not fallen from a clear blue sky. There is method in the madness. They are rooted in the US’s decline as the world’s dominant economic hegemon. The entire US ruling class is determined to arrest this decline and to restore its position as the unquestioned global power.
This does not mean however, that the ruling class as a whole is necessarily in favour of Trump’s methods. Every serious crisis of capitalism produces divisions within the ruling class about the best way to protect their system. Trump represents that section, a determined minority funded by right wing oligarchs, that wants to go much further than all the measures taken previously to maintain the US’s global hegemony including an assault on democracy itself whatever the cost.
The US’s tariffs policy is in fact a declaration of war on the working class who will pay for them. Both in the US and abroad from the fall out will job losses, higher prices, rising inflation and further neo-liberal cuts in social services.The “Make America Great Again” campaign is calculated to hide from the working class the US capitalist class’ culpability for polycrises. The capitalist ruling classes have brough the world to the point where the world faces even worse threats from the combination of the devastating effects of climate change, mass unemployment and poverty, savage social spending cuts, and ever more brutal wars.MAGA is consciously fuelling racism, xenophobia, and misogyny to sow divisions and animosity amongst the working class to paralyse their ability to unite and resist. These methods are driven by fear that the working class will break their shackles and rising up against capitalism itself.
The Trump Republican faction enjoys the support of a section of the capitalist class prepared to go much further than the rest of their class to do what they believe necessary to preserve their system. But as the growing criticisms from within the ruling elite shows, Trump’s actions are considered reckless and a danger to the capitalist class as a whole. This explains the tariff pause within a week of “Liberation Day”, the electronic goods and strategic rare earth minerals Chinese imports and now auto parts exemptions.Contrary to White House claims, these were not part of the plan all along. They resulted from the reaction of the bond markets, White House meetings with CEOs of retail giants eg Walmart and Target, the alliance of universities to resist his blackmail to change curriculum, suppress freedom of speech and the right to protest and to expel pro-Palestinian foreign student protestors, thousands of whose visas have since been reinstated. The capitalist class has found it necessary to pressurise Trump to act with restraint if not change course altogether to preserve their system from the excesses of one of their own.
As early as 2020, a leading newspapers of world capitalism, the Financial Times, expressed concern about of right wing populism from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself. It warned in an editorial (31 December): “Groups left behind by economic change are increasingly concluding that those in charge do not care about their predicament — or worse, have rigged the economy for their own benefit against those on the margins. Slowly but surely, that is putting capitalism and democracy in tension with one another.
Since the global financial crisis, this sense of betrayal has fuelled a political backlash against globalisation and the institutions of liberal democracy. Right wing populism may thrive on this backlash while leaving capitalist markets in place. But as it cannot deliver on its promises to the economically frustrated, it is just a matter of time before the pitchforks come out for capitalism itself, and for the wealth of those who benefit from it.”
It concludes with a call for capitalism with a human face. “As Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and other founders of the postwar order realised as early as the 1930s, capitalism’s political acceptability requires its adherents to polish off its rougher edges.”
Those social democratic reforms have been under relentless assault by the capitalist class since the rise of neo-liberalism in the early 70s. They arose out a set of geo-political circumstances that have ceased to exist. They were concessions forced on the capitalist class by the insurgent strike waves at the end the war in the advanced capitalist and the anti-colonial uprisings. But they had merely been tolerated by the capitalist class as a necessary overhead to soften relations between the classes thereafter. But they had become too costly for the capitalist especially as the rate of profit declined. The end of the post-war boom was expressed the first synchronised global capitalist crisis since WW2. It put an end to an exceptional 25-year period in capitalism’s 400-year history. It precipitated the beginning of neo-liberalism, the rolling back of the state in the economy, privatisation, outsourcing, attacks on social benefits etc. It was the beginning of the era of what came to be called neo-liberalism. The prefix “neo” occupies the same place in “neo-liberalism” as it does in “neo-colonialism – a return to the original in a new form under new historical circumstances.
Trump represents and even personifies all the features all of capitalism’s barbarism accumulated over centuries of the very pillage, plunder and rape he accused the world of perpetrating against the US on “Liberation Day”. He is surrounded and ideologically led by the tech oligarchs, a breed of neo-liberals that has evolved out of the conditions created by the pioneers of the early 1970s from the Chicago School for whom the establishment in 1973 of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship provided the laboratory for those ideas at the 40 018 killed, tortured or imprisoned.
They draw their inspiration from the pre-WW2 “liberal” capitalism of Frederick Hayek, considered one of the preeminent intellectual inspirations for free market economics, and the first to win the Nobel Prize for economics. A review of Quinn Slobodian’s “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right” captures the different personalities of Team Trump competing for repugnance amongst themselves. For them “the real threat to liberty (are): welfare, immigrants, and demands for racial, gender, disability, and environmental justice.” The “freedom” that billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder with Elon Musk of PayPal has concluded is incompatible with democracy is the freedom to exploit and oppress without restraint to create the society depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave New World” on MAGA’s banned list.
What are the prospects of Trump’s tariff war?
Just as the attempt of his predecessors to create a new world order before failed, so too will Trump’s. in !928, Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October Revolution, criticised the failure of the now Stalin-controlled Communist International’s Draft Programme for its 6th Congress to recognise the global significance of the rise of the US. To work out the perspectives that follow from that analysis and to prepare the programme, strategies and tactics accordingly. The essence of these perspectives weas confirmed by events. Trotsky developed them further in the light of unfolding events, predicting, in 1933, the outbreak of WW2 and the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler.
He pointed out that, following its rise to world dominance before WW1, the US’s new role would be followed by “the inevitable further development of American expansionism, the contraction of the markets and European capital, including the European markets itself, entail the greatest military, economic, and revolutionary convulsions, beside which all those of the past fade into the background…. “the further inexorable pressure of the US will reduce Europe to constantly more limited rations in world economy; and this implies…a monstrous sharpening of inter-state state relations in Europe accompanied by furious paroxysms of military conflict, for states as well as classes fight even more fiercely for a meagre and diminishing ration as for a lavish and growing one.”
The US subsequently entrenched its role as world economic and military hegemon after WW2. Trotsky’s criticism had also dealt with the perspectives of what would follow the US’s ascendancy.
“… that it is precisely the international strength of the US and her irresistible expansion arising from it, that compels her to include all the powder magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure, ie, all the antagonisms between the East and the West, the class struggle in Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all wars and revolutions. On the one hand, this transforms North American capitalism into the basic counter-revolutionary force of the modern epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of ‘order’ in every corner of the terrestrial globe; and on the other hand, this prepares the ground for a gigantic revolutionary explosion in this already dominant and expanding world imperial power”.
Trump and his cabal suffer from the same delusions that afflict all ruling elites in all their variegated forms throughout history – emperors, feudal aristocracies, military dictators, fascist regimes, and bourgeois democratic republics. They confuse the temporary with the permanent; the ephemeral with perpetuity.
The ever more strident criticisms directed at Trump by sections of the bourgeois are intended to distract attention from the reality that he is acting on behalf of their class to overcome the crisis of capitalism. They are setting him up as a lone deranged wolf and to distance themselves and even remove him when his actions reveal themselves for what they are in the eyes of the working class, and they rise up against him and the capitalist system itself.
Trump’s regime is not fascist in spite of the infatuation of some of his cabal with it. It does not have the social base of fascism, the crazed and ruined petty bourgeois and lumpen proletariat. The capitalist class historically had no fundamental differences with all fascist dictators. Hitler came to power with support of the German bourgeois. He was entertained by the British royal family. The US, France and Britain turned away Jews fleeing the Holocaust or interned them in camps. Thei support for Israel is not in defence of Jews, but in the interests of imperialism in the Middle East. They shared a utilitarian attitude towards the very bourgeois democracy ushered in during their ascendancy over feudalism. They use it only as a shield to obscure their economic dictatorship provided the working class does not use it to threaten to overthrow their system.
As Trotsky explained: “The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilability of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions…The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.”
In his review of the book, Inside Right: A Study in Conservatism, Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar who, as Ian Gilmour, was a Tory MP from 1962 to 1992, sitting in the cabinets of both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, Peter Taaffe shows how this is confirmed by this quote from Gilmour’s book:
“In the British system the duties of Opposition are almost as important as those of the governing party. Their prime responsibility is to preserve the allegiance of their followers… to parliamentary democracy and to the freedoms that go with it. This is in a sense a governing function, and that is why the leader of the Opposition is paid by the state… the opposition should be helping to deliver the consent of their party to the parliamentary process. “Conservatives do not worship democracy. For them majority rule is a device. … majorities do not always see where their best interests lie and then act upon their understanding. For Conservatives, therefore, democracy is a means to an end not an end in itself. In Dr Hayek’s words, democracy ‘is not an ultimate or absolute value and must be judged by what it will achieve’. And if it is leading to an end that is undesirable or is inconsistent with itself, then there is a theoretical case for ending it.
Trump is not the cause of the crisis. The crisis is objective. Trump is merely attempting to solve this crisis by what the bourgeois would hypocritically denounce as unconventional methods. He and his cabal are in fact drawing upon all the political filth of the sewer of capitalist ideology and imperialist aggression that flows underneath its history.
The crisis is objective. It is than expression of the accumulated contradictions of capitalism: (i) private ownership of the means of production and exchange that production for private profit is based and (ii) the insuperable barrier of the nation state. The former brings the classes in every capitalist society. That conflict can only be resolved by the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
The latter inevitably brings the ruling capitalist classes based on the nation states the bourgeois democratic revolution created into collision with each other. The growth of the productive forces within each nation state cannot be contained within its boundaries leading historically to colonialism and imperialism. The era of globalisation created the illusion that the answer had at last been found. It has proven to be an illusion. Trump’s imperialist aggression is an emphatic confirmation of this fact.
World Wars 1 and 2’s barbarism were imperialist conflicts to resolve the contest for global economic supremacy by force. A third world war is held in check by the fear of mutually assured destruction because the nuclear arsenals possessed by especially but not only the US and Russia would destroy the planet. Even Trump understands this, hence his pressure on Zelensky to submit to Putin’s imperialist annexations of Crimea. But the threat remains nonetheless. A nuclear war can be triggered as accidentally as it was but discovered just in time during the Cuban Missile crisis and nuclear annihilation averted.
Only the working class can take society out of this quagmire and avert the extermination of humanity and all life on the planet. Trump’s attempt to reclaim US imperialist resembles the behaviour of the Bourbon dynasty of France who remembered nothing and forgot nothing.
In this 50th anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam, Peter Taaffe’s Empire Defeated spells out the lessons of that heroic struggle for today. “17m peasant in the north, together with their 23m compatriots in the south defeated the strongest military power on the globe in this epic 30-year war. It was a war…. conducted both in Vietnam and on the ‘home front’ of the US. The war showed that the US population is not one reactionary mass. The working class in particular, together with young students and intellectuals played their part in humbling the US giant.”
Trump is attempting to implement the programme developed during US imperialism’s ascendancy, in the period of its decline. To secure his base he portrayed himself as an outsider, a self-made billionaire who enriched himself pledging to drain the swamp in Washington – the political seat of the capitalist elite. That illusion will burst in his face. Those sections of the population and the minority of the working class who voted for him in an election in which 100 million did not vote, will turn on him. Workers of all lands unite to create a socialist world.
Build a mass workers party on a socialist programme in every country!
