Is Trump causing the collapse of the old world, or is it the other way around ?

The misinterpretations in moralistic commentary on Trump’s policies are intended to further disorient the working people…

It’s not Trump who explains the state of the world, it’s the state of the world that explains Trump and... everything else...

We hear people who are horrified by Trump’s policies exclaiming "Trump is a madman," "Trump is an idiot," "Trump is a public danger," "Trump is an absolute horror," etc. Even if they add that capitalism is to blame, like some far-left groups, their explanations are incomplete and, in fact, they explain nothing by saying all this.

Trump’s new American policy certainly seems to be a historic turning point, not only for the US but for the world. Some reformers argued that his program shouldn’t be taken literally and that he would inevitably back down once elected. This is not the case at all. Whether it’s the formation of his government team, his first executive orders, or his latest inflammatory statements, Trump has not backed down in the slightest.

Trump is at war with migrants, with workers, with American democracy, with South America, with international law, with international diplomacy, with Europe, with Africa, with peace, with democracy worldwide, with peace. Trump causes everything. Trump explains everything. That’s the comment we hear more and more. But this comment explains nothing. Why is the US shifting now ? Why does no force seem capable of stopping him or even opposing him ? Why can he act in a way that no American president has used before, not even the first Trump ? The favorable commentary offers no more explanation than the hostile commentary. Where does the change come from ?

Of course, it’s understandable that Trump’s thuggish methods are shocking. But condemnation isn’t an explanation. To say that "Trump is EVIL," "Trump is the devil," and that he must be exorcised is an almost religious reaction, but not a fighting strategy.

Both within the United States and in international relations, Trump is resorting to violence that was unheard of in so-called democratic countries or that was no longer used in international relations. He is replacing diplomacy with gunboat diplomacy, both domestically and internationally. However, there is a considerable leap from this to believing, or suggesting, that the personal character of the American president alone explains the entire new global situation.

It is clear worldwide that the situation is shifting towards increasing violence, increasing dictatorship, and increasing war and civil war. The USA is not alone in demonstrating this. Europe is too. Asia and the Middle East are as well. Africa too. Everywhere, entirely new things are happening. It is because the world has changed that the capitalist class is changing its policies. It is going directly to war against the people. It has decided to respond to the wave of Arab Spring uprisings with a counter-revolutionary offensive. It is ceasing to be on the defensive. It is attacking. This is not unique to any particular head of state. They are all changing. They are all taking the path of war. Because war is the order of the day in the world situation. And, more fundamentally, because capitalism is tipping over, collapsing, dying. And also because the people are revolting. It’s important to remember that the wave of revolts and revolutions around the world also had a completely new character, challenging old dictatorships, old clan systems, and rotten neo-colonialisms that had persisted for decades, even longer. Yes, people have risen up, and the ruling classes are changing their policies to respond. The capitalist class has an interest in not waiting for everything to collapse and must lead a preemptive counter-revolution.

It’s not enough to simply say, "Look, what Trump is doing is disgusting." If he can do it, it’s because the capitalist class believes it’s in its interest. And we must explain why it thinks its interest must be defended through entirely new methods. What has fundamentally and drastically changed in the world ?

Instead of recognizing that if there’s a global turning point, it’s because the system has reached the end of its tether—that of prolonging itself through artificial financial methods—it’s not just that the United States is at the end of its rope, but that the capitalist world as a whole has also reached its limit. It’s that the race among states to accumulate debt in order to bail out bankrupt trusts and banks has run its course. Their response is a new race to the bottom in debt, fueled by massive wartime military spending.

Some capitalists say "long live Trump," others say "down with Trump," but both aim to deceive the people, to bind them to false friends, to lead them down false paths. By giving them a false target. By giving them a false objective. By giving them a false explanation of the situation.

The so-called anti-Trumpers talk about peace and democracy. The pro-Trumpers talk about a resurgence of American or Western dominance.

Both sides are careful not to explain that the origin of the wave of popular revolt that began in 2010 stemmed from the global economic and social collapse of capitalism in 2007-2008. And that Trump’s aggressive and reckless policies are explained solely by big capital’s headlong rush into the abyss before it.

The pro- and anti-Trump bourgeoisies are careful not to mention that the reason for this collapse is global, not just American, and that global capitalism has reached unavoidable limits, limits it has been encountering since 2008. These limits mean that capitalism is incapable of pushing its own system any further. Its very success—the super-profits of a few billionaires—are such that they exceed the absorption capacity and the productive reinvestment capacity of big capital. This has forced the system to act recklessly, constantly producing bogus investments, like subprime mortgages, Bitcoin, or the delusional investments in AI.

To avoid making such a point, the comments assert : everything is Trump’s fault. It’s Trump’s own method, it’s Trump’s madness, it’s Trump’s aggression that explains everything in the world, that is the cause of everything. It’s worth noting that not long before, we were being told that Putin explained everything, or Netanyahu explained everything, or Erdogan in Turkey, or the Supreme Leader of Iran, or the dictator of North Korea, or even Macron explained everything that threatened the world…

It’s all the fault of one man. We’re all too familiar with this kind of explanation : the madness of one man to explain why a capitalist democracy suddenly descends into fascism and world war. It’s the lie we were fed for Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Yet behind this "madness" lay the massive financial and political support of the capitalist class—German, but also European and American—against the risks of a proletarian communist revolution.

But did the Spring uprisings pose such a threat to the owning classes ? Of course they did, even if the people are unaware of it ! Even if these same commentators are careful not to say so. It is precisely the reactions that followed that reveal it. This is particularly evident in the fact that so-called democracies like the USA, but also like France, did everything they could to help dictatorships crush the popular revolt. And the famous American, or French, democracy also violently crushed the revolt in their own countries. Let us remember the brutal repressions in Minneapolis and Paris ! For the wave of revolts and revolutions also reached the richest countries. This, too, is the novel aspect of the situation. The collapse originates from the dominant capitalist countries ! The violence of the capitalist response is explained by the fear of the owning classes. Trump and Musk make no secret of the fact that their motivation is hatred of the communist revolution, just as Hitler did not.

The moralizing commentators can’t admit it. If Trump is the fighter against communism in defense of capitalism, then they are forced to… support him !

This is the whole tragedy of American Democrats ! They can only gently and moderately denounce the method but… not the stated goals… Otherwise they are accused of supporting communism, which Trump does not hesitate to do.

The moralizing commentators on the situation, as well as the pseudo-democrats and reformists of all stripes, will say that the communist proletarian threat is a myth being stirred up by Trump, not a reality. But that’s wrong !

It is true that the wave of revolts and revolutions around the world has a social character, that it denounces the order of the capitalist class, that it does not only threaten a few dictatorships in poor countries, but also stirs up the working people of rich countries, and that it threatens capitalist power everywhere in the world. We saw this particularly with the Yellow Vests in France. We have recently seen that the mere fear of a resurgence of the movement from the grassroots of these working people has brought down prime ministers, destabilized anti-social attacks, especially on pensions, placed the government in a pre-revolutionary situation, destabilizing everything linked to the power of the wealthy, from parliaments to the bureaucratic apparatus of the unions.

This is the social and political destabilization that Trump’s policies seek to address, both within the USA and abroad.

To denounce Trump alone is to mistake the symptom for the cause of the disease. It prevents people from confronting the situation.

If Trump is stirring up counter-revolution in this violent, seemingly crazy but actually logical way, it’s because the American owning classes are indeed threatened by… social revolution, much more so than by China and Russia, than by Iran and North Korea…

The United States is divided, but not so much between Democrats and Republicans as between rich and poor. The MAGA movement’s main goal is to deceive a segment of the poor and turn them against the other segment. Because a fight between billionaires and the American people wouldn’t last a minute and would be won by revolution… One percent of the population can only govern against the entire population by pretending to defend the people’s interests. Hence Trump’s need to invent a multitude of scapegoats, such as immigrants, neighboring nations, economically competing countries, and so on.

Trump’s policies can only be explained if we understand the current state of the capitalist system itself, its total impasse, and if we understand that it is the impasse of capitalism that makes the communist revolution of the soviets inevitable !

Yes, what is inevitable is that the wave of revolts and revolutions, if it continues, will make people aware of the need to revive the Soviet revolution ! Far from being more crazy and blind than other heads of state, Trump is simply aware of this threat that hangs over all capitalist owners, in the USA as well as elsewhere, and even in Russia and China.

Wouldn’t pushing the American population to tear itself apart, deliberately fostering an internal civil war within the US, be dangerous for the ruling class ? Not if the bourgeoisie knows in advance that the collapse of the economic system will inevitably lead to such a civil war, the only way to avoid revolutionary dangers becoming to divert this civil war into a struggle between two bourgeois factions. Not if both sides are bourgeois and imperialist, just as the global bourgeoisie pretended to be divided between pro-fascists and anti-fascists at the end of the 1930s.

Of course, this isn’t about distancing ourselves from the people mobilizing against Trump, nor is it simply a matter of telling them that Trump = Biden = Obama is enough to address the situation. It’s about recognizing that the bourgeoisie is in no way threatened if we let the Democrats lead the fight against Trump, and also recognizing that this is a class struggle, in which only the communist and Soviet proletariat (not in the Stalinist sense, of course) can represent a real prospect. Even though young people, women, immigrants, Black people, homosexuals, etc., are mobilized and should not be overlooked, the root of the problem, the cause of the destabilization of the United States, is the class struggle. The foundation of this social and political destabilization is economic : it’s the collapse of global capitalism, starting with that of the US in 2007-2008, and its consequence, the fact that the ruling class knows that no matter how much it delays it, the result will be a new social revolution within the United States itself. His entire policy aims to divert the revolution, to create new oppositions, between whites and others, between Muslims and others, between men and women, between young and old, etc., so that the class opposition is diverted and drowned out, and also to ensure that the rebels turn either to Trump or to the Democrats, that is to say, in both cases, to their enemies.

The more the global economic situation deteriorates, the more states become bankrupt, and the more financial bubbles threaten to burst, the more we will find ourselves in numerous situations where the convergence between the "democratic" bourgeoisie and fascism will increase, with regimes becoming more and more extreme right-wing, as we see with the "democratic" accession of the extreme right to power in Japan, India and... the USA... This is not explained by political struggles, but by the fall of capitalism in 2007-2008, a fall which has not actually been followed by any recovery and cannot be.

What proves that the rise of Trump is not an epiphenomenon and is linked to such profound and even historic changes in the capitalist system beyond even a "simple" economic crisis, or the symptom of a capitalist impasse ?

First of all, it’s clear that Trump is more than just another political upheaval in the US. The American far right has never governed directly and openly. The desire to incite a domestic civil war has never been so blatant. Trump’s policy is to give state power the primary role of a far-right force in every sphere…

The American ruling class calculates that an internal civil war between rich and poor will become inevitable as soon as the economic collapse resumes, as it did in 2007-2008, and central banks and governments no longer have the financial means to contain the catastrophe. They even foresee a civil war between exploiters and exploited, since it has been avoided for many years, notably by 9/11, the American "wars on terror" coupled with the Patriot Act to control the working class and "left-wing" activists. The far right, however, has not been controlled or broken during this same period ; quite the opposite.

In all past attempts at organized far-right movements by the bourgeoisie, there was always a significant element of risk, particularly the risk that the far right’s rise to power would provoke a revolution, whereas the goal was to deflect or suppress it. In hindsight, one might argue that the far right has always succeeded : from Germany in 1918 to Germany in 1933, from Spain in 1936 to France in 1938, and so on. But this is false. Initially, the coup d’état by the Spanish army in Morocco, led notably by Franco, sparked the proletarian revolution in Spain. But there is another famous counter-example : the Russian Revolution itself, since it was Kornilov’s counter-revolutionary coup that paved the way for the Soviet revolution in October 1917. In any case, the calculated nature of the ruling class’s choices when a country slides into fascism in one way or another is no longer in doubt, even if some intellectuals continue to bombard us with the "conspiracy theory." It is no longer in doubt that it was not the fanaticism of the Nazi troops that created Nazism, but rather the choices of the trusts, the banks, and the General Staff, and these latter were by no means fanatical. The question has resurfaced for the ruling class since the historic collapse of the global economic system in 2007-2008, which was followed by a wave of revolutions in the Muslim world, but not only there. The American policy for responding to this is itself called "counterinsurgency," which means fomenting counter-revolutionary "insurrections," white armies, terrorist groups, militias of mass murderers, killers who eliminate activists and committed workers under the pretext of fighting terrorism or dictators. The far right is increasingly being called upon by the ruling classes to govern, as clearly demonstrated by the choice of Trump as head of the United States. It is no surprise that his chief defense advisor is an active-duty general specializing in "counterinsurgency" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump has only recently come to power, and he has already demonstrated that he is not afraid to incite all forms of internal civil war within the USA : against immigrants, against women, against homosexuals, or against Black people, but also against freedoms and democratic rights (press, demonstrations, unions, etc.). Even though Trump was elected, it is significant that the global capitalist ruling class is relying less and less on the so-called democratic political system to maintain world order and more and more on counter-insurgency terror and terrorist dictatorships, when it is not simply resorting to outright war.including the increasingly threatening world war between Western imperialisms and new imperialisms (China, Russia, etc.).

It was well before his last presidency that Trump began to say he wanted to respond to the American domestic situation with civil war…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5925

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5931

Is it all Trump’s fault ?!!!

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4714

Trump, a symptom of the capitalist impasse but not its cause…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4254

Civil war threatens the United States, but not only because of the Democrats versus Trump duel…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7993

After Biden, Trump is primarily at war with workers in the United States, and not just migrants…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8215

With Trump and his ilk around the world, the ruling classes will go to extreme lengths and are prepared to commit any atrocity to retain their power despite the collapse of capitalism. Their only limit will be when we—workers, women, and young people—decide to take matters into our own hands, organize ourselves into councils, choose our representatives, and decide the future of society.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4342

American fascist billionaires violently hostile to the proletariat and communism

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7892

Trump’s counter-revolution spells the end of America ! Now is the time for the revolutionary proletariat to put an end to imperialist domination of the world…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8493

The "great American democracy" is turning towards fascism

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6051

Another symptom that the system is rotten and corrupt : Epstein’s gang is not just Trump but the entire capitalist class !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8537

More than ever in the phase of capitalist collapse, marked by fascism, dictatorship and war but above all by the fall of productive investments, the working class must intervene, in the form of self-organized direct action, on the basis of its own political and social program.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8124

Democrats refuse to actually fight Trump, except electorally to take his place.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8576

Why the dynamics of capitalism run up against their own limits : its very success is stifled by the constraints of private ownership of the means of production.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3250

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7478

The only answer can be given by the workers’ soviets…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8277

Yes, power to the workers and communism are what’s relevant right now !

Yes indeed ! Big capital still has every reason to be afraid... of communism !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7912