The Next Imperialist-in-Chief

The remaining U.S. presidential candidates—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—all aspire to be the next master of U.S. imperialism. The next president will be expected to unify the bosses’ ranks while beating discipline into a disaffected working class—all to prepare for an impending global conflict with imperialist rivals like China or Russia or both. All three candidates reflect the movement of the capitalist ruling class toward fascism, the stage of capitalism in crisis and decay, when the bosses’ sham democracy no longer serves their needs (see box).
The good news: These conditions are also ripe for building a communist movement by Progressive Labor Party.
Imperialism Drives Fascist Path
The latest electoral circus is unfolding amid a sharpening, high-stakes competition that challenges the U.S. in every corner of the globe. China is pushing for control of the South China Sea; Russia is inserting troops into the Ukraine. In Syria, a vital crossroads in the oil-rich Middle East, Russia is quickly becoming the dominant imperialist.
The rulers’ move away from liberal capitalist democracy and toward fascism is compelled by their need to prepare for the coming world war while extracting even more profit from the labor of the working class. It’s the bosses’ last gasp to save monopoly capitalism. For the international working class, this trend translates into increased racist unemployment, lower real wages, dysfunctional schools, mass deportations, more open state terror against working-class women and men, and hyper-nationalist politics backed by a swollen military and militarized police forces.
No Unity Among Thieves
As the U.S. bosses struggle to maintain their status as the world’s most profitable—and lethal—imperialist power, they are hobbled by infighting. The main finance capital wing, represented by giant banks like JPMorgan Chase and oil companies like ExxonMobil, is committed to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and worldwide. The subordinate wing of U.S. capitalists, represented by Koch Industries, its Tea Party allies, and other domestically focused bosses, are less willing to foot the tax bill for an even larger Middle East ground war. Meanwhile, some new-generation, Silicon Valley billionaires seem up for grabs—or coercion. The bosses’ factional fault lines are deep, complex and fluid.
The battle between these capitalist factions is playing out in the U.S. Congress, the military, the presidential election, and the mass movements they’re trying to build to mobilize the working class to their side.
Splits in the ruling class matter. The better we understand the current crisis of capitalism, the better we can turn attacks on the working class into opportunities to smash the bosses and build communism. At the outset, we must smash the illusion of a “lesser evil” in this capitalist election dogfight. Whatever their differences, all bosses are dedicated to the exploitation of the international working class. All of them are ready and willing to intensify their murderous oppression of workers in the U.S. and throughout the world. All of them—and the politicians they use to confuse and mislead us—are our mortal class enemies.
Why Trump Matters
Donald Trump stands to become the first openly racist and sexist major-party presidential nominee of the modern era. In contrast to George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, who coded their racist appeals as candidates into “acceptable” language, Trump brazenly vilifies and scapegoats Mexican workers, Muslims, and undocumented immigrants. He routinely insults women. He calls for mob violence against anti-racist protesters, a hallmark of rising fascism. Trump has done his best to undermine working-class unity, the main threat to the capitalist bosses.
For the rulers. elections are a critical tool both to keep workers tied to capitalist ideology and to sort out their own differences. While hardly the main wing’s first choice among Republicans, Trump has succeeded in splitting the base of the Tea Party. He has effectively poached masses of workers organized by Koch-funded groups (Bloomberg, 11/20/15).
Trump’s volatility and constantly shifting positions may seem to cloud his ultimate allegiances. But his growing support among mainstream Republicans, along with his appointment of second-generation Wall Streeter Steven Mnuchin as his national finance chairman, suggests that the main capitalist wing will be banking on one of two contingencies. Either Trump will lose the general election (as of now, the likelier eventuality), or he will win and the biggest bosses will find a way to control him.
The Danger of Hillary Clinton
In the meantime, Trump’s public gutter racism has helped embolden President Barack Obama to escalate the sexist, racist deportations of women and children fleeing capitalist violence in Central America. (Over a recent six-month period, as the New York Times reported on May 13, the capture of families at the southwest border was up 131 percent over the same period a year earlier.)  Looking forward, Trump’s extreme racist rhetoric will give Hillary Clinton cover to “more safely embrace the Bill Clinton years,” an administration responsible for the mass incarceration of Black workers and a welfare system overhaul “that cut federal assistance to the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years” (NYT, 5/17).
By scapegoating, brutalizing, and impoverishing the most vulnerable U.S. workers, Bill Clinton advanced the bosses’ move toward fascism in the 1990s. (It’s a long process!) Regardless of who is elected in November, we can expect this trend to accelerate.
Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate, is an established stooge of finance capital. No active U.S. politician is more experienced at attacking the working class domestically or internationally (see CHALLENGE, 3/23). As a U.S. senator, Clinton backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed more than a million to maintain U.S. control over Middle East oil. As Obama’s secretary of state, she engineered the devastation of millions in Syria, Libya, Haiti and Honduras. The New York Times, the leading mouthpiece of the bosses’ main wing, has applauded Clinton for her decades of service to U.S. imperialism (NYT, 4/21).
From the bosses’ point of view, Clinton’s negatives are her broad unpopularity among young workers and students and her weakness for fat speaking fees (read: bribes) from Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs. Could she sell a military draft, a necessity for a global ground war? Could she mobilize a mass movement for fascism? It seems unlikely but, again, the shift to fascism is a long-term process. A holding pattern under Hillary may be the best the bosses can do for the next four years.
How Workers Get Berned
For left-leaning workers and youth, Bernie Sanders is a deadly choice. More than any other candidate, he has used his “outsider” status to set forth the fascist agenda the U.S. rulers need to remain top-dog imperialists—even if most of them are not yet ready to accept it. Beyond their own disunity and lack of discipline, the bosses must surmount the Vietnam Syndrome, a working class that is weary of “war and remain[s] suspicious of foreign entanglements” (NYT, 4/21).
Much of Sanders’ platform is designed to bring the finance bosses into line. His push to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, eliminate offshore tax havens, increase regulation of Wall Street, and improve infrastructure and military efficiency are essential to the bosses’ preparations for the next world war. Essentially, Sanders is echoing the call of billionaires like Warren Buffett, who see the danger of short-term greed to the long-term interests of their class. While workers are bled dry under fascism, the bosses must also take some of the losses, at least in the short run.
Sanders’ platform is geared to win the working class to global war with phony promises to raise wages. Even as he criticizes Hillary Clinton’s pro-war record, he endorses Obama’s eight years of imperialist war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. As commander-in-chief, Sanders vows on his campaign website, “I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly.” As an “independent” U.S. senator, he “always ‘supports the troops’ [and] never opposes any defense spending bill.…Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel” (Counterpunch, 9/30/11).
Sanders’ immediate appeal to the ruling class is his demonstrated ability to build a mass movement and bind disaffected workers and young people to the capitalist trap of electoral politics. A big part of “feeling the Bern” is the reform promise of higher wages in a country where median household income fell significantly between 1999 and 2013, even after controlling for an aging population and a smaller average household (fivethirtyeight.com, 9/22/14). Historically, however, full-blown fascism reverses any short-term gains for workers and devastates their standard of living, since the big capitalists are now ruling without constraints.
Capitalist-directed mass movements are critical to rising fascism; that’s why the bosses are fighting to control the leadership of organizations like Black Lives Matter. The rulers use mass movements to pressure (or eliminate) rogue bosses, and also to enforce loyalty to the rulers’ anti-worker agenda, often under a populist or anti-racist facade.
Turn Imperialist War into Class War
Workers in Ferguson and Baltimore have showed the way forward for the international working class: multiracial fightback. Led by Black workers and youth, these rebellions inspired millions worldwide.
World War I brought the Bolshevik Revolution; World War II brought the Chinese Communist Revolution. World War III, when it comes, will lead to international communist revolution—if PLP has organized a mass communist party to seize the day. In periods of impending world war, economic crisis and intensifying fascism, workers, students, and soldiers are wide open to revolutionary ideas.
Our Party is fighting for communist revolution because capitalism can never serve the working class. Only communism will smash the bosses’ dictatorship. Workers built this world; workers know best how to collectively run it. We don’t need politicians—we need communist state power!

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Fascism: Define It to Defeat It

Fascism is not inevitable. Fascism only becomes inevitable if the working class follows the line of reformism, of trust in the capitalist state.
—R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1934

The Progressive Labor Party has characterized the current period as one of rising fascism, a transitional phase between capitalist democracy and mature fascism.
While we believe that capitalist democracy is still primary in the U.S., we can see elements of full-blown fascism in the:
world’s largest prison population and highest incarceration rate, with Black workers imprisoned at more than five times the rate of white workers;
mass deportations and terrorization of undocumented families;
routine police violence against Black, Latin workers and youth;
militarization of police in places like Ferguson, Missouri;
open, racist scapegoating of immigrant and Muslim workers.
Fascism is the true face of capitalism—the state of the profit system in decay, when the bosses can no longer rule in the old, “democratic” way. As rivalries sharpen among imperialist powers, leading inevitably to broader global conflict, the ruling class rips off the mask of liberal capitalist democracy within its own country. In a desperate effort to protect their capital, put down resistance, and raise funds and troops for war, they turn to naked intimidation and open state terror—to unrestricted rule.
The transition from capitalist democracy to fascism is a natural process of capitalist dictatorship. It’s a deadly mistake to view one as contradictory to the other. While liberal democracy is the characteristic form of rising capitalism, fascism is the deepest form of monopoly capitalism, in which a small group of corporations and billionaires control the lion’s share of a society’s wealth.
While the phenomenon is best known for its bestial manifestation in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s, fascists of that era also seized state power in Italy, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Portugal, and found willing collaborators for fascist regimes in France, China, Denmark, Norway, and more than a dozen other countries.
The particularities of fascism may vary, and there is no way to predict the precise form it could take in the U.S. But history points to certain critical elements of capitalist dictatorship in its most transparent form:
Fascism typically begins with ruthless disciplining within the ruling class, to bring unity to its ranks. In Germany, in 1934, the main wing of the Nazis exterminated the rabid SA paramilitary (the Brown Shirts), whose leadership had called for nationalization of major industries and was viewed as a threat by Krupp, IG Farben, and other major German companies and banks. In today’s U.S., the big finance capitalists, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, will eventually either bring the Tea Party wing (including the Koch brothers) to heel, or eliminate it.
Fascism is characterized by intensified racism, sexism, and nationalism, a wholesale attack on workers’ living standards, and ultimately the mass murder of workers both internally and through imperialist war. It uses these tactics to target and destroy sections of the working class—the ultimate exercise of divide-and-conquer.
For the bosses, fascism is a temporary solution to the perpetual crisis of capitalist overproduction—it weeds out the competition. The slaughter of workers and wholesale destruction of industry during World War II paved the way for the “postwar prosperity” of the 1950s and ‘60s, when capitalists in the U.S. and Europe hauled in record profits.
The fascists’ next step is to attack the one force with the potential to defeat them. It’s no accident that communists were the first to be sent to the Nazi death camps. With communists out of the fray, save for a small underground, it was far easier for the Nazi administration to round up Jews, trade unionists, and other targeted groups.
When capitalism has decayed to fascism, there is no turning back to the false refuge of liberal democracy. Misleaders—like the Social Democrats in Nazi Germany, or Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton today—serve only to foster illusions, encourage pacifism, and pave the way for the fascists. They must be seen for who they are: deadly collaborators of the big capitalists. They cannot be part of any anti-fascist force. Only mass, organized violence can stop fascism in its tracks. Communism—the dictatorship of the working class—is the only alternative to fascism. Only a mass, international communist party, PLP, can eliminate fascism for all time by destroying its capitalist roots.