One hundred days into the Donald Trump presidency, the bosses’ mouthpieces have rated it a failure by all measures. Trump’s health care bill “is a zombie. His border wall is stalled. He’s only now releasing basic principles of a tax plan. Even his executive order on immigration is tied up in the courts” (New York Times, 4/26).
Trump’s ineffectual and volatile administration heightens the insecurities of the finance capital, the U.S. bosses’ main wing: Citigroup, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase. What the rulers call the Liberal Order (read: U.S. imperialist hegemony) is in danger. Trump has failed to take steps to reverse the U.S. capitalists’ faltering attempts to reassert their dominance. Most dangerous for the bosses, Trump has failed to prioritize the rebuilding of working-class confidence in capitalist institutions. As the Council on Foreign Affairs, the finance capitalists’ leading think tank, observed with naked alarm:
A hostile revisionist power has indeed arrived on the scene, but it sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world. Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gone—but they have usually ended in murder, not suicide...(Foreign Affairs, May/June).
Liberal Order: Out of Order
Today, the reign of U.S. imperialism is in jeopardy. The internal crisis of U.S. capitalism, coupled with ever-fiercer challenges from rising Chinese and resurgent Russian imperialists, are exposing the inherent and lethal instability of the capitalist system:
… [A]mid a wider crisis across the liberal democratic world... governing coalitions that built the postwar order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile, vulnerable in particular to far-right populism. Some date these troubles to the global financial crisis of 2008, which widened economic inequality and fueled grievances across the advanced industrial democracies, the original patrons and beneficiaries of the order. … Western publics have increasingly come to regard the liberal international order not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states but as a global playground for the rich and powerful (Foreign Affairs, May/June).
As U.S. power declines, and inter-imperialist competition intensifies, the Liberal Order is teetering. The capitalists’ concern over the growing mass base for fascism around the world—expressed as hyper-racist nationalism from the U.S. and France to Turkey and Iran—reflects their inability to control events as they unfold.
To solve their growing problems, the U.S. bosses must resort to wider conflicts and heightened fascism to discipline their own class as well as the working class. They need racism to divide and exploit workers. But they also need patriotic unity to recruit massive numbers of ground troops for their next world war. As their imperialist rivals grow in strength, potential flashpoints for World War III are multiplying. The bosses worry that the U.S. could “stumble into” war before it is ready:
There is a real risk that events will turn out far worse—a future in which Trump’s erratic style and confrontational policies destroy an already fragile world order and lead to open conflict—in the most likely cases, with Iran, China, or North Korea.
Possible Hotspot: Korea
In some ways, North Korea is to China as Israel is to the U.S. While dependent on its powerful imperialist sponsor for trade and aid, its bosses operate relatively autonomously in their home region. Meanwhile, South Korea has been under the military thumb of the U.S. military since the Korean War ended in 1953. The U.S. bosses view the Korean peninsula as a key part of its Pacific sphere of influence, along with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and Guam. The U.S. needs to sustain its alliance with these nations to counter recent Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.
While North Korea’s nuclear missiles have shown uneven reliability, they are theoretically within striking distance of vital U.S. interests, including cities like Los Angeles and San Diego, the main port of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
The bellicose ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, is a problem for both China and the U.S., though for different reasons. “China does not gain if North Korea destabilizes East Asia, or starts a regional arms race that leads Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear weapons” (The Economist, 4/22). In addition, China needs a stable North Korea as a buffer against South Korea, with its 28,500 U.S. troops massed on the two countries’ border. But the Chinese bosses are struggling to rein in their client state:
North Korea’s development of nuclear and missile technologies also intensified the situation in Northeast Asia, giving Washington an excuse to enhance its military deployment in the region…This would render China with no cards to play in the face of the US and South Korea…At least for now, what North Korea is doing goes against China’s strategic interests... If the North Korean nuclear issue boils over, a war on the peninsula is unavoidable (Global Times, 4/27).
Diplomatic cooperation between China and the U.S. buys time for both rivals to prepare for a bigger war.
Build a Communist Order
Though the U. S. empire is in decline, it remains, at least for now, the number one imperialist, and a threat to workers everywhere. Hundreds of millions are fed up with the Liberal Order. The crucial question before our class is this: To whom do we entrust our future? Whose leadership will we follow in the coming struggles against racism, sexism, exploitation, and imperialist war?
In past crises, the working class, led by its international communist party, has taken up the challenge. Twice in the last century, in the Soviet Union and then in China, it has seized power and built a society run by workers. The fact that these revolutions were reversed, primarily because of political weaknesses, doesn’t change the fact that communists led workers to take state power. And communists, especially the heroic Soviet Red Army under Joseph Stalin, led workers to smash Hitler’s fascism in World War II.
Capitalism is a deadly system. It serves the needs of the capitalist bosses by attacking the world’s workers. It cannot be reformed to meet workers’ needs. There are no lesser evils, “good” corporations, or “friendly” cops. Sooner or later, the capitalist profit system must resort to racist, fascist terror and war.
The long-term goal of Progressive Labor Party is to lead the working class in a communist revolution to take power once more. This time we will destroy capitalism once and for all, along with the racism, sexism, and imperialism it feeds on. We will build a communist world that serves the needs of the international working class, not the bosses’ profits—from each according to commitment, to each according to need. It is not an easy fight. Yet even in the current period, we are growing modestly.
And we can continue to grow. Join PLP! Help make it a mass party of the working class, a party steeled in fighting and giving leadership in small and large battles against the bosses—in the factories, unions, schools, churches and community organizations. Each new member of PLP, each new CHALLENGE subscriber, becomes a step forward on the long march to working-class liberation.
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What is the Liberal Order?
The Liberal Order rose at the end of World War II, when U.S. imperialism became the world’s leading capitalist power. In 1991, the formal collapse of the Soviet Union—after decades of decay into state capitalism—left the U.S. bosses virtually unchallenged to create a world in their image.
Globally, this meant creating institutions and alliances and trade agreements to legalize imperialism. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank were formed to legitimize exploitation and wars that mainly benefitted the U.S. ruling class..
The Liberal Order has coerced the U.S. working class into relying on the bosses’ trade unions, police departments, the media, the court system, and the electoral system and political parties. Many Black and Latin workers long ago lost confidence in these ruling-class institutions because of racism. The latest crisis of capitalism has led many oppressed white workers to share their alienation. This is a threat to the U.S. bosses, because it opens the door for more rebellions, strikes, and fightbacks. It’s also an opening for workers to learn and take up communist ideas.