The main wing of the U.S. ruling class is on the offensive to contain President Donald Trump’s threat to the liberal world order—the military, political, and economic system that sustained the U.S. bosses’ dominance—and profits—since World War II. Whether or not Trump winds up getting impeached or indicted, the chaos surrounding the White House is a stark sign of the decline of the U.S. empire.
On August 21, special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller won convictions on eight counts of financial fraud against Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Minutes earlier, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud and directly implicated Trump in a campaign finance violation. On September 5, the New York Times, the main wing’s leading mouthpiece, published an Op-Ed piece by an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration.”
The author acknowledged that main-wing operatives in and around the White House “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations….to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
In particular, the Op-Ed cited the president’s “preference” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a main-wing imperialist arch-rival, and for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a leaning that could imperil the U.S. military presence in South Korea and its ability to deter or attack China.
On September 7, ex-President Barack Obama broke with tradition and openly savaged his predecessor’s “threat to our democracy”—in other words, capitalist dictatorship. On September 11, Simon & Schuster published Bob Woodward’s Fear, which depicts “a dysfunctional White House where some of Trump’s own aides think he is a danger to national security” (cnn.com, 9/12). Woodward is the Washington Post editor who once helped bring down Richard Nixon, another president who proved too unreliable for the main wing. Fear sold 750,000 copies in one day and immediately became one of Amazon’s top-five sellers for 2018, along with other Trump takedowns by Michael Wolff and former FBI director James Comey.
Rulers’ split is getting bloodier
Accelerated by the global erosion of their political and economic influence, the split within the U.S. capitalist class is growing clearer and sharper by the day. Finance capital, represented by the Democratic Party and traditional Republicans (see box), needs to rein in Trump and his racist base to protect institutions like NATO and prepare for World War III with inter-imperialist rivals China and Russia. These Big Fascists are pulling out the knives against domestically oriented capitalists like the Koch brothers and the Mercer family. For their part, the Little Fascists are advancing their isolationist, “Fortress America” agenda through the erratic Trump, his “anti-globalist” policy-makers like Steven Miller (and formerly Steve Bannon), and media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire and Breitbart News.
The recent weeks’ events show that the main wing rulers (Big Fascists), however weakened, still hold the upper hand. But regardless of how the bosses’ infighting plays out, the international working class will be assaulted by rising fascism, murderous racism, economic crisis, and a looming global conflict that could kill untold millions. Only a mass communist, anti-racist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party(PLP), can defend our class against the growingly desperate bosses. Only a communist revolution can smash the capitalists’ state-terror apparatus and put an end to imperialist war.
Fall of the American Century
As Obama noted in his speech at the University of Illinois, Trump “is a symptom, not the cause” of the U.S. capitalists’ disarray. In 2016, when this unstable con man exploited gutter racism and weak opposition all the way to the White House, it revealed that the main wing was losing its grip—both on its own capitalist class and on the loyalties of workers.
The finance capitalists’ decline was driven by two catastrophic failures. First, after spending $5.7 trillion on war in Iraq, the second-leading source of cheap petroleum, U.S. imperialism finds itself in a weaker position in the Middle East than before. Iraq’s oil supplies remain insecure. European allies are turning to meet their energy needs from Russia, which is also calling the shots in war-devastated Syria.Second, the financial crisis of 2008 was spurred by short-term greed and a general lack of discipline in main-wing financial powers like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Obama’s subsequent bailout of banks and other financial institutions cost $17 trillion.. By 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund(IMF), China had surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest economy (bbc.com, 12/16/14). By 2050, the U.S. economy is projected to rank third, behind both China and India (fortune.com, 2/9/17).
It’s not Trump—it’s fascism
Trump himself is a minor historical figure. He will likely be neutralized by the upcoming midterm elections and most likely forced out, one way or another, by 2021.
But the Trump phenomenon is highly significant as a marker of rising fascism worldwide. It reflects the advanced decay of the post-World War II order and the glaring inability of the profit system to meet workers’ most basic needs. The extreme instability of capitalism worldwide has generated massive unemployment and wage stagnation, the erosion of the European safety net, an epidemic of opioid addiction and suicide, and a more than 68 million refugees, internally displaced people, and asylum-seekers (www.unhcr.org).
To divert workers’ anger from the capitalist rulers’ failures, the bosses are blaming the most vulnerable victims—with a vengeance. Hence the monsoon of anti-immigrant racism, a basic building block of electoral success for Trump and his European counterparts. Open fascists have taken power in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. They represent significant opposition forces in Germany, France, Britain, and Greece. In the September 9 parliamentary elections in Sweden, until recently romanticized by the bosses’ media as a bastion of enlightened “social democracy,” the fascist Sweden Democrats polled a record 18 percent (rt.com, 9/9). The liberal world order is in retreat. Internationally, the bosses’ current crisis presents PLP with a significant opportunity. By strengthening our anti-nationalist, anti-racist fightback, by uniting with immigrant workers wherever we are active, we can both grow as a revolutionary organization and lay bare the insoluble contradictions of capitalism.
Liberals are the main danger
As the U.S. approaches its midterm elections this November, the Big Fascists are positioning themselves as defenders of “democracy”—a gross distortion of their true history as racist mass murderers. The bosses are hoping to counter workers’ cynicism—and the alienation of Black, Latin, and younger workers, in particular—with fake “socialists” like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, militant-sounding liberal misleaders like Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, and the Black gubernatorial candidates in Georgia and Florida. All of these Democratic Party politicians depend on and defend the capitalist system. When push comes to shove, they will betray the working class on the road to fascism and genocide.The over-the-top celebration of war criminal John McCain (see page 4), whom Ocasio-Cortez lauded for his “human decency,” was designed to rally both workers and capitalists around the embattled liberal world order. Obama’s headlining appearance at the dead senator’s funeral, side-by-side with George W. Bush, reflected a concerted, bipartisan effort to revive the main wing. Leaders and stooges of finance capital are pointing the way to a more lethal form of fascism than Trump and his cronies could even imagine.
But working-class fightback is alive and well. Workers and students in many cities are standing up to attacks on immigrants by both ICE and Trump’s gutter-racist base. These struggles are opportunities for working-class consciousness to take root. With PLP involvement and leadership, the working class will take the only alternative to fascism, big and small—the path to communism revolution.
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Who’s in the main wing?
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class represents the interests of finance capital. It includes the largest banks and financial institutions, like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, as well ExxonMobil and other multinational corporations. Together they established the post-World War II imperialist liberal world order, in which the U.S. dominates the world economy by controlling Middle East oil and guaranteeing that the U.S. dollar remains the worldwide reserve currency. They created and control institutions such the World Bank, NAFTA, the IMF, and other international economic institutions. They created NATO and other military and political alliances. Over the last 60 years, these international agreements and institutions have brought these capitalists billions of dollars in profit—all paid for with the blood and misery of tens of millions of workers exploited across the globe.