The myth about Trump 2.0 representing something genuinely anti-establishment has had a lot of damaging repercussions. One of them is that the Gaza genocide has been enabled to accelerate, as the expectations for Trump to be an antiwar president distracted from Trump’s actual policy of speeding up Palestine’s extermination. This development alone is enough to discredit the worldview behind the Trump 2.0 psyop, in which supposedly we can reform our way out of an imperialist government; and indeed, many within the MAGA base have been reacting to Gaza by turning against Trump, showing that mass consciousness is becoming more advanced.
The American people are coming to the same conclusion that the communist William Z. Foster did when he was faced with the opportunism of Earl Browder, who took the communist party in a direction of trailing behind the Democratic Party. Like the political actors who’ve promised that Trump will fight for the country’s people, Browder sought to obscure how class struggle works; he acted as if the capitalists would freely give the workers their rights, without any need for the workers to organize on their own. As Foster observed:
Browder attempts to liquidate the class struggle by preaching an illusory harmony of interest between the workers and their class enemies, the big capitalists, in the postwar period. For, if what Browder says were true, that the capitalists would, of their own volition, radically improve the workers’ real wages, there would remain little or no basis for the class struggle. Browder’s idea, too, that the American big capitalists, in their “true class interests” virtually must make them not only raise the workers’ living standards but live in friendly harmony with the U.S.S.R., has nothing in common with the Marxist conception of classes and their roles. There is no Marxian principle which holds that social classes “must” follow “their true class interests.” Indeed, history is replete with examples of classes which, under immediate economic, political or ideological pressures, have violated their “true class interests,” with disastrous consequences to themselves.
The revolt within MAGA represents a moment where the USA’s people are learning this same lesson, as they’re confronted with the reality that a capitalist party or politician will inevitably betray the masses. For us to turn this consciousness shift in a productive direction, though, we will need to anticipate the next big catastrophe which Trump 2.0 is going to help produce: the catastrophe where the liberal wing of our deep state, out of desire to reassert control, carries out unprecedented attacks against our liberty and prosperity.
The Davos, WEF camp within the elites is absolutely planning to make a comeback after Trump is out; just because this camp allowed him to win without assassinating him, doesn’t mean the conflicts inside our ruling class have lessened. The dominant camp within the ruling class views Trump as a means for exacting radical reforms, ones that the elites hope will rescue the U.S. empire. It’s these reforms that are going to clear the way for what comes after Trump, which will be a “dark woke” techno-tyranny where all of the state’s repressive and surveillance tools get used to their full potential.
Two years ago, during the height of the Biden-era efforts at attacking the antiwar movement from the left, I predicted that finance capital would carry out a purge. A purge that would be about suppressing not just the working class, but also the lower rungs of capital. I still believe this crackdown is coming, and the events since then have given the highest levels of capital even more reasons to become aggressive; a split has emerged on the right over Palestine, and the conservative figures who’ve most vocally been speaking out on Zionism are likely to become subjected to serious retaliation. This doesn’t mean the “dissident right” isn’t controlled opposition; but if the Zionist fanatics among our elites have been exploding with fury over the Democrat Zohran Mamdani, the Palestine-sympathetic conservatives are going to be met with at least as much backlash.
The risk posed by the “dissident right” is similar to the risk posed by the Zohran campaign: that it will placate our popular movements, and leave us vulnerable to the state’s counterinsurgency. The system is setting up these compromised “dissident” politicians and commentators as fall guys, aiming to divert revolutionary sentiments into ineffective political projects. And when the deep state makes its big moves, these designated “anti-establishment” leaders could become swept up in the destruction.
This almost happened to Trump last year, when he was nearly assassinated; the only reason why none of the assassination attempts on him since then have succeeded is because not enough people within the power structure want him gone. Trump has been able to please enough of these deep state actors to stay alive, and this has delayed the next inter-elite conflict escalations for the moment; but we are headed for a phase in which incidents like the July 2024 Trump rally shooting have become common.
The only way we’ll be able to resist this violent campaign from our rulers is by giving up the reformist illusions that produced the false hopes around Trump 2.0. One of these illusions mirrors the Browderist narrative that Foster rebuked; the narrative where we can win over one wing within the ruling class, as this wing will supposedly follow its “true class interests.” With Trump, one of the expectations was that he would defy the deep state because he’s a businessman with his own interests, which are distinct from those of the liberal establishment. Indeed, lower-level capitalists like him do have different interests from the financial monopolists; this doesn’t mean, though, that he or any other “outsider” figure can’t be used as controlled opposition leaders for finance capital.
The lesson to take from this is not that all parts of the capitalist class are synonymous; the industrial capitalists get their profits through different means than the monopolists do, and understanding this is crucial to winning the class war. The lesson is that when we rely on an “outsider” candidate, that candidate will be either eliminated or assimilated into the system, and the power of the masses will be weakened in turn.
As dark woke advances its assault on the people, we’re going to be offered more “solutions” from the dissident right that involve appealing to or trusting in one wing of bourgeois politics. To stand any chance against the menace we’re facing, we’ll need a political project that’s genuinely independent to the working class, and has the goal of replacing the capitalist state with a workers state. The right opportunist forces have quite effectively sold the idea of “class peace,” and obscured the need for a proletarian struggle. But with the capitalist assault that dark woke represents, the contradictions within the “class peace” idea will be exposed, and the need for workers revolution will be made all the more apparent.
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