By MST, Chilean section of the IWU-FI
The American working class and the peoples of the world are threatened by the direct fire of the most dangerous and reactionary ultra-right of all. That which responds directly to the interests of the big monopolies and finance capital, headed without counterweight by the tycoons of US imperialism. The same 1% of the world’s super millionaires who, according to the NGO Oxfam, own 95% of the world’s wealth.
This ultra-minority, that holds the power on the planet, is ready for anything: to starve us to death, to take away our rights and freedoms, to condemn us to the absolute control of machines and artificial intelligence, to the destruction of the ecosystem that makes our lives possible, and to lead us into a apocalyptic third world war.
Now it is not about a crazy outsider who has been embraced by the big tycoons and even the far right after he came to power after a questionable election in 2017. Now it is about the direct power of those same tycoons, and that same far right, who use Trump’s limitless ambition to carry out their direct attack on people, workers, migrants, women, dissidents and even those who are their closest capitalist allies. Their aim is to reassert their privileged place in the imperialist concert by deregulating, eliminating pacts, to remake them in their own way, and directly attacking their own working class and closest allies.
This is not simply a new Trump administration. It is the government of an unhinged, misogynistic, exploitative madman, with the boss and head of one of the largest financial and industrial empires on the planet. The Trump 2.0 government is really the Trump-Musk government.
When standing up to the criminal is better than standing up to the fraudster
Even if no one can expect anything good from this pair of madmen, their way of acting does have something that we revolutionaries emphasise. They lay the interests of the social class they defend sufficiently bare for no social fighter to be fooled. The imperialists in particular, and the capitalists in general, have learned – through fear of revolutions – to cloak their interests behind a ‘democratic’ regime, which, like a poisonous spider, hides the real class character of the dictatorship of capital. They make agreements and alliances, supposedly for the good of the people, when in reality these same alliances carry the poison of big business. They hide them behind cassocks and pulpits; behind supposedly noble politicians who appear to be looking out for the welfare of all; behind supposedly inexperienced young people; behind pacts and agreements that trade union bureaucrats, far removed from their rank and file, pass off as progress for the workers.
The ultra-right is not interested in any of that. It prefers to impose its interests with a fist, without pacts or social agreements, bypassing its multilateral organisations, blackmailing the people, and putting a gun to the chest of friends and adversaries.
Their great weakness is that they do so without the protection of a criminal dictatorship, like Pinochet’s, nor without the backing of fascist gangs who can do the dirty work from below, by beating up demonstrators and workers inside their own marches and unions, as the Nazis did with Hitler.
They use and rely on the more ‘Bonapartist’, less democratic, aspects of the same ‘democratic’ regime that brings them to power to advance their aims. In fact, they come to power thanks to the rottenness of the whole capitalist democracy, with its traitorous left and its inoperative progressivism, but they continue to rely on them to impose their extreme interests.
Their Achilles heel is that, as long as they do not physically defeat the masses, as did the genocidal dictatorships in Latin America at the end of the last century, or fascism in Europe at the beginning of the last century, the possibility of the people rising up and overthrowing these ultra-right governments is something we can count on, and that is what we must encourage from the very day they assume power.
The flame of a pilot that can be extinguished at any time
The second Trump-Musk administration is inspired by the triumph of Milei. They used this clown as a test pilot, as a guinea pig, which they hoped would prove that the ultra-right agenda can be realised by relying on the very democracy they repudiate. With the pilot lit, they are now trying to impose reaction on a Dantesque scale at the very heart of world imperialism.
However, this fragile pilot has just faced a real hurricane which, if it continues with equal vigour, will extinguish it. Last week, two million Argentinians marched against the fascistic agenda of this unhinged ultra-right-winger.
