When liberals have compared Trump to Caesar, they’ve unintentionally admitted to the doom of their own social system. Today, this comparison isn’t used nearly as much as it was during the first years of Trump’s political career, and this is because Trump hasn’t embodied the role that the liberal technocrats feared he would. He hasn’t destroyed the Atlanticist order, but rather consolidated U.S. power, advancing the war against Russia while shifting the costs of this onto Europe. Largely for this reason, Trump 2.0 is working out very well for the ruling class.
Liberal commentators thought Trump would be a repeat of Caesar—who they’ve vilified because he sided with the masses—even though Trump has consistently sided with the U.S. empire over the masses. Within this breakdown of the “Trump is Caesar” narrative, we find the larger trajectory of America’s class war.
The victory of the barbarians will be a good thing
It’s because Trump has taken on this anti-popular role that the MAGA base has been increasingly splitting from him—and thereby bringing America closer to the revolutionary scenario that these liberals have feared when they’ve brought up Rome. We’re headed for an outcome where the republic and the empire have both fallen away, and been replaced by the near-future’s equivalents of the German barbarians. Those being the forces of proletarian revolution.
The split within MAGA is a falling-out between the Zionist right—which by extension is also the Atlanticist right—and the parts of the popular masses inside MAGA which truly desire revolutionary change. These masses were hoping for Trump to be a Caesar, to be a reformer who defies the centers of power from within. But now that he’s been revealed to them as just another Bush, Obama, or Biden, the only way the MAGA base can go forward is by building an independent movement. A movement that can bring about victory for the barbarians, which have long been suppressed by America’s banker regime.
This gets to the true essence of the “make America great again” idea, which is not to literally bring America back to a specific past time but rather to rescue American civilization. The subject that MAGA seeks to uplift is a latent collective strength within America, one that’s been prevented from emerging by monopoly finance capital. When we overcome this tyranny, America will be rejuvenated by the barbarians, like happened to post-Roman society.
In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels identified the barbarians as being the force which could bring back a collective vitality that had been pushed down by the decadent old paradigm. He observed how
The old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth. Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians.
The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a further development of this new constitution. Within this new constitution, the whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.
When the barbarians got this opportunity, said Engels, they were able to return the lost structure of kinship to the underclass, and thereby bring civilization back from the ashes:
If in at least three of the most important countries, Germany, northern France and England, they carried over into the feudal state a genuine piece of gentile constitution, in the form of mark communities, thus giving the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the harshest medieval serfdom, a local center of solidarity and a means of resistance such as neither the slaves of classical times nor the modern proletariat found ready to their hand – to what was this due, if not to their barbarism, their purely barbarian method of settlement in kinship groups?…All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the Roman world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilization. And precisely the highest stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way upwards before the migrations, was the most favorable for this process. That explains everything.
This is the ultimate role of the MAGA base, and of the other elements in America with revolutionary potential: to rejuvenate our part of the world, which has the potential to rise in the same ways that other parts of the world are now rising. When the liberals characterize Trump and his supporters as barbarians, they’re reacting to the unavoidable breakdown of America’s bourgeois order, whose logical conclusion is the triumph of the American barbarians. Because they view the bourgeois order as fundamentally good, they’ve equated Caesar and the barbarians with evil, and made Trump into the scapegoat for the empire’s sicknesses. But the masses can’t be fear-mongered into propping up this system; they’ll continue to seek a route towards popular revolution.
Translating this momentum into victory
We could be advancing in the ways that socialist China is advancing; all that stands between us and this future is the American banking occupation. And as our third world war progresses, growing numbers of Americans are coming to understand this. Compared to pre-Covid times, our culture is now noticeably more pro-China, with Americans all across the ideological spectrum realizing just how far China has gotten. The view of China as a smoggy dystopia became stale a long time ago at this point, and awareness of the PRC’s achievements is expanding.
As our government continues to ramp up its wars, and soon pivots towards directly attacking China, this trend among the masses will continue. The question is whether we’ll be able to guide this spontaneous popular consciousness shift towards an actual proletarian revolutionary agenda.
As Lenin concluded: “the ‘spontaneous element,’ in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts [in tsarist Russia] expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.” Such is the character of incidents like the recent revenge arson by an Amazon employee, which has galvanized popular revolutionary sentiment in the way that the Brian Thompson slaying did. These developments are the first step in a process that can’t go any further until we take an active leadership role, and give the people the means to win.
It’s so important to emphasize this because in the case of the U.S. empire, we cannot simply wait for the barbarians to rejuvenate a collapsing civilization, like society could after the fall of Rome. In the absence of working-class organization, of mass education in revolutionary theory, all that will happen is decline without any renewal afterward—at least not after the passage of a long dark age. This is the existential peril we are dealing with: in the capitalist era, civilizational collapse is terminal unless the working masses organize. If we do build this power, though, we will achieve a level of civilizational strength that’s permanent in a way which no past popular victory has been.
The civilizations built by the German barbarians, Genghis Khan, and the other ancient revolutionaries were doomed, because capitalism would come to transform every corner of the globe. However, they provided us with examples in how to overthrow the modern versions of Roman decadence, and realize barbarian construction in its ultimate form—that form being communism. Theirs is the historical tradition that we are following as we wage our present fight.
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