Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP
Overall, Trump 2.0 is something that is working in the favor of our ruling class. The purpose of letting Trump win was to use him as a vehicle for enacting radical reforms, reforms that were intended to ensure the U.S. empire’s continued stability. And this plan has been successful, because the crises which have come from Trump’s aggressive government cuts, tariffs, and domestic military deployments are for the most part shocks that the elites anticipated.
On paper, American monopoly finance capital is effective in its efforts to consolidate power, and to avert a crisis that would take on an actually revolutionary character. Yet there are risk factors that have emerged independently from the elite’s designs, and this is leading the elites to take additional measures; ones that are more chaotic and terroristic.
The people become radicalized, & the rulers turn to old fascistic tricks
The rise of the Luigi movement, which has so far produced one other successful vigilante attack against a CEO, is a development that fundamentally threatens the plan our society was supposed to adhere to during the new Trump era. For the economic shocks to pay off, the people would have needed to be diverted away from a revolutionary mass movement. The people were meant to be fully demoralized and demobilized, letting capital’s next attacks go on unimpeded. Yet class solidarity and proletarian consciousness have revealed themselves once again, proving that the masses are a lot more advanced than our rulers want to believe.
In response, our imperial deep state has continued to escalate its efforts at sowing reactionary violence, with one aim of this being to make the masses live in fear. Last month, when an individual who had been taken in by a fed-run neo-Nazi murder cult attacked a Catholic school in Minneapolis, this did succeed in changing how many people relate to their world. It did make locals and others wonder if they can go to work, or practice their faith, without being murdered or seeing their children be murdered. This is a completely rational fear, and it won’t be able to go away until the terroristic forces behind the shooting have been made a thing of the past. Yet from the terrifying reality that our society is facing, where our own government is cultivating monsters who want our deaths, can come a unity around defeating these forces.
This isn’t the first time the United States has seen its ruling class cultivate fascistic anti-humanism in reaction to growing radicalization among the people. And history shows that when the revolutionary forces aren’t adequately prepared, these reactionary diversions can be highly effective. In 1935, William Z. Foster observed how though the workers were becoming conscious and organized, racial supremacist ideologies were gaining a major presence:
The many fascist and semi-fascist demagogues and organizations penetrating the masses constitute a real menace. Vast numbers of the hungry, confused and politically unorganized and inexperienced masses, seeking a way out of their intolerable situation, are falling victims to the increasing flood of reactionary and fascist demagogy. These masses consist not only of the urban petty bourgeoisie and farmers, but also workers. No reliable statistics or other clear indications are yet at hand to show to what extent this specifically American fascist agitation has penetrated the masses, but that it has made such headway is manifest. The Communist Party is making considerable progress in winning the masses, but the fascist, semi-fascists and other reactionary capitalist demagogues are going much faster. They are undoubtedly establishing a broad mass base; the plain lesson of which is that we Communists must double and treble our united front fight against fascism.
This radicalization that the masses had been undergoing was something which happened on its own, due to the people reacting towards their conditions. It didn’t mean that the communists had already won; they would need to put in the work, and actively insert themselves into the masses.
Modern anti-fascism requires a struggle against radical liberalism
We know how the story of 1930s class conflict ended: the communist party was led down a “liquidationist” path, and thereby weakened itself to the effect that the American workers movement could be crushed. As we face a new moment of mass radicalization and fascist reaction, we must learn from these past errors. We must ensure that our modern workers organizations stay on the revolutionary path, and go into the masses in a serious fashion. This means empathizing with why so many of the masses have embraced Luigi.
The Minneapolis shooter, and the other murder cult members who’ve chosen an anti-social path, are different versions of monsters like the slain United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Whether someone is physically committing murder, or forcing people into situations where their deaths are inevitable, they’re advancing the anti-human goals of our ruling elites. Our elites hold a distinctly nihilistic, destructive, and ultraviolent view of what a society should be like, so much that they don’t believe in society. They’re the ones who’ve orchestrated the Gaza genocide, which is the ultimate manifestation of all the other kinds of violence that they commit.
In the face of this violence, many of the masses have already concluded that the perpetrators have forfeited their right to grace or to mercy; which has to do with a philosophic moral debate, one that will need to be settled separately from the practical class struggle. But the fact that these popular sentiments exist means we have the basis to prevail in this struggle.
The support for an uncompromised, ruthless fight against capital is there among the people. And when our rulers work to make sure that the people experience horrors, they’re trying to stop this support from turning into a collective workers organizing effort. They are counting on the people to respond towards the crises we’re facing by becoming anti-social ourselves, and gravitating towards self-destructive projects like the Minneapolis shooter did.
In the modern United States, this effort to divert the masses away from revolutionary politics looks different than it did in Foster’s time. Today’s era is one where the American people are not just growing more economically desperate, but largely becoming lumpenized; i.e. pressured into relying on sources of income that are either illegal, or would be illegal under socialism but get elevated under capitalism. A big example of this is the recent rise in the sex industry, which is not only largely legal but is upheld as “empowering.”
Our ruling class is working to lumpenize the masses to a degree that wasn’t the case prior to America’s bourgeois cultural revolution, when the old constraints of bourgeois sexual morality got replaced by what Lenin called the “superabundance of sex theories.” One of these theories being that sexual exploitation is actually something revolutionary, instead of a weapon used by our class enemies. This is just one area of the effort to engineer our society’s collapse; there’s a CIA campaign to glorify drug use, as well as a glorification of the gangster aesthetic. (This is particularly being pushed on “generation alpha.”) Our ruling institutions want the youth to respond to their era’s economic bleakness by embracing a lumpen lifestyle, and turning their backs on anything collective or constructive.
It’s from the growing lumpen social base that this new generation of neo-Nazi terrorists is able to find recruits. The Minneapolis shooter was one of the alienated lumpen individuals who could be groomed into violence by trained manipulators within U.S. intelligence, and thereby help inspire more desperate people to continue the murder cycle. The modern version of the old American fascism is a mishmash of radical liberalism and Hitlerism, fusing the superabundance of sex theories, national nihilism, hatred towards the “backward” masses, and “triumph of the will” idealism where violence is seen as an achievement in itself. Nothing less than a strong, mass-centered, collective organizational effort can rescue our society from these forces. As the agents of destruction seek to subdue our popular power, we must stand up together, and use this power without fear.
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