The communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung said that “All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.” Current events are proving Mao right.
An ominous turn of events for the oppressor class
President Trump and the other reactionaries of our time are posturing themselves as strong. Trump is making dictatorial moves like his declaration of national emergency, he recently made a fascistic appeal for his armed supporters to politically defend him using violence, and he’s continuing his usual bluster against immigrants. Yet Trump is only strong within the government because the Democratic Party has failed to put up a serious opposition to him. Throughout America, Trump is wildly unpopular, and there’s growing opposition to his pro-corporate, pro-war agenda.
Around the world, people are rising up against the neoliberal order. Since the end of 2017, the amount of worker rebellions around the world has been exceptional, with strike action in America alone now being at a 32 year high. Tens of thousands of workers have gone on strike since the beginning of this year, and this upward trend likely hasn’t reached its peak. Indeed, all signs say there are even bigger acts of anti-corporate resistance to come. Last month’s worldwide climate strike, which was participated in by students and led by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, showed that young people especially are becoming mobilized to fight corporate power.
In an interview four years ago, the socialist writer Chris Hedges said that “[a revolutionary consciousness] is definitely building. But until there is an ideological framework that large numbers of people embrace to challenge the old ideological framework, nothing is going to happen. Some things can happen; you can have sporadic uprisings as you had in Ferguson or you had in Baltimore. But until they are infused with that kind of political vision, they are reactive, in essence.” The situation has since changed. Frameworks for the people to channel their discontent are emerging, with the Yellow Vest movement being a major example. There’s also been increasing working class interest in socialism, which represents the logical conclusion of the end to neoliberalism and austerity that the Yellow Vests are demanding.
In addition to America’s looming economic downturn and the discrediting of American imperialism that Trump’s belligerent foreign policy has created, the Trump White House faces another crisis in the upwelling of organized anger at corporate oligarchy. This is the crisis that all the other capitalist reactionaries around the world are facing, one where the vulnerability behind their power becomes visible as the people assert control.
The reactionaries prepare to fight back
The attacks on socialism that Trump, Fox News, and other pillars of the right have lately been making do not come from a position of strength. They’re part of a reaction to the siege that 21st century capitalism has come under as extreme worldwide inequality provokes the threat of revolution.
A veiled sense of desperation is obvious in the statements of red baiters like Laura Ingraham, who recently said that today’s left “responds to peace and prosperity with socialism.” Her language resembles President Macron’s attempts to delegitimize the Yellow Vests, with Macron having recently saidabout them: “We are attached to constitutional rights, but we’ve got people who through all means quite simply want to make a wreck of the republic, to break things and destroy.” Both Ingraham and Macron make completely dishonest arguments; America is a nation that’s perpetually at war and unable to keep around half of its people out of poverty, and French lawyers have widely denounced the government’s treatment of Yellow Vest protesters. The defenders of ruling class interests are increasingly needing to invert reality. They’re claiming that the revolutionaries threaten liberty and justice, even while they themselves undermine these things in their efforts to crush the opposition.
The behavior of Trump, Macron, and other reactionary world leaders also reveals how much the ruling class is coming to fear an uprising. Throughout history, fascism has tended to be the outcome of capitalist societies because the capitalist class will always make alliances with fascists in order to safeguard their power in times of crisis. This is what’s happening now. Macron’s authorization for police to shoot Yellow Vest protesters, Trump’s increased militarization and weaponization of American police forces, and the alliances that Netanyahu’s Israel has been making with neo-fascists like Jair Bolsonaro all show how reactionaries act when under siege.
Keeping up the will to resist
While addressing the issue of defending from the violence that reactionaries are capable of, Mao said: “imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are — paper tigers. On this, we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers that can devour people. On this, we should build our tactical thinking.” As the reactionaries of our era consolidate their power and prepare to lash out violently, we need to apply this to our own revolutionary approach; we need to take the threats from the reactionaries seriously while recognizing how unstable their power is.
To master this mindset, we can take example from the people of Palestine. As they continue with their protests for freedom, Israel is attacking them with increasing brutality. The IDF routinely violates international law in response to the Great March of Return demonstrations, with Israel having shot four Palestinians, six journalists, and three medical volunteers just in the last week. Israel’s goal is to terrorize the Palestinians into submission, and it’s doing this through the most barbaric tactics imaginable: the bombing of Gaza; the cutting off of water supplies to Palestinian communities; hate crimes against Palestinians from Israeli settlers.
Yet the protests, and the indefensible responses to them, are causing a shift in the favor of Palestinian rights on the international level. BDS and the overwhelming condemnations of Israel’s human rights abuses are putting strain on the Zionist project, and an eventual end to settler colonialism in Palestine is clearly inevitable. Even in the case of arguably the most oppressed people on earth, determined efforts towards resistance can defeat the reactionaries.
If the world’s socialist, social justice, environmental, and anti-imperialist movements follow the lead of the Palestinians, the paper tigers will crumble.
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