Donald Trump has won the US presidential election, securing both an electoral and popular majority, and control of the senate and the house, to add to the Republican party’s control of the high priests of the constitution, the supreme court. Trump's victory was spawned from the total failure of the Democratic party to turn out over 10 million workers who voted for them in the 2020 election, or inspire any more to support their sclerotic politics of Bipartisanship and Bidenism. The Democrats, the Party of Bourgeois Order – the representatives of the American Finance Capitalists - spent its administration crushing the working class at home with strike breaking, inflation, mass deportations and police repression, and the international working class abroad with inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine, and the continued superexploitation of the global periphery.
The Democrats initially sought to run their corpse candidate and President Joe Biden, whose failing mental faculties epitomise the semi-terminal decline of US empire and the bloated, necrotic politics of international capital. A switch to Kamala Harris by the Party of order sought to swindle the American working class with the appearance of change in a so-called ‘politics of joy’ cloaking the continuation of the Biden regime, and all its pro-capital, anti-worker facets. Their tough on crime, anti-immigrant, billionaire backed, and Cheney influenced campaign sought to embrace reaction - while raining lofty attacks at their Bonapartist enemy; Trump. It is no surprise that they suffered a defeat in the election.
Trump’s Bourgeois party of reaction, that of the petit bourgeois, the national bourgeoisie in the extractive industries, and increasingly the big tech ‘entrepreneurial’ capitalists, was able to hold onto and to a small extent expand their support in the working class, exploiting the unpopularity of the Party of Order. With chunks of Trump’s own 2016 agenda adopted by the Democrats; building the wall and deportations, expanding the US’s confrontation with China and support of its client states such as Israel and strengthening the US repressive apparatus, Trump pushed further on each and every point - winning out the struggle to represent the interests of an increasingly concretised coalition party of reaction.
While Trumpism itself is certainly not fascist, as many on the ‘left’ claim, the coalition of reaction contains within it the core of a counter-revolution that could, under differing subjective and objective conditions, form the basis for a US fascist movement. Namely, Trumpism embodies the attempt to roll back the material gains won by women in the long revolution, driven by the desire to restore US social reproduction through the intensification of patriarchal oppression. With the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s, enhanced by the global reorganisation of the working class which has seen women enter en masse into immensely profitable service industries abandoning the rural and agricultural patriarchal family form, women made significant material gains throughout the 20th century. Trumpism has successfully capitalised upon the reaction to this combined force of reorganisation and revolution through a virulent enforcement of patriarchal ideology and social reproduction founded upon the family model - embodied in restrictions on abortion, contraceptive access, and thus blatant attacks upon economic and social rights won by women.
This policy, central to Trump’s campaign, won large sections of men to his flag, who seek the mediation of their oppression in the workplace through the subordination of women in the home. The small business owners who flocked to Trump, and the far-right paramilitaries within the MAGA movement further elucidate a potential core for a serious fascist movement. However, without an organised proletarian threat, a merged, strengthened, socialist workers movement, a communist party, there is no threat to the American bourgeoisie strong enough for them to hand them the reigns of the state and political power to. Thus, the material basis for fascism is null. There is no need for a mass movement of reaction in the streets - one that seizes state power from the bourgeoisie and preserves its economic power - when there is no threat to this state or economic power. Instead, the party of reaction, the Republicans, will implement their measures with all the countenances of bourgeois civility, within the legitimated state apparatus of the bourgeoisie.
In so-called Australia, the petit bourgeois radical party, the Greens, have taken Trump’s election as an opportunity to raise the call for the withdrawal from AUKUS with an appeal to the so-called unique threat posed by Trump. We reject the notion that US imperialism should be somehow more staunchly opposed when it wears a reactionary mask as opposed to its progressive one. We do not value the preservation of the Australian bourgeois state. Our aim is not to secure it from a “dangerous” or “unstable” US headed by Trumpist reactionaries. Instead, the Australian working class must head the break with US imperialism outright - regardless of its shape or form. In Australia, it is as correct to oppose US and Australian imperialism and the rule of capital under the democrats as it will be and was under the republicans.
For the international working class, while much is up in the air on the specific policies of the incoming Trump administration, the fight against imperialism will go on. It is clear also that this seed of fascism in the form of the counter-revolution against feminist gains must be combatted wherever it arises. It is only a matter of time until many of the sentiments expressed in a clarified form in the Republican party of the US cohere politically in other countries (as they already have in South Korea) and mount their own attacks against feminism, the working class, and the liberal capitalist order. Communists and the working class everywhere must be prepared - however we can, to the best that we can be. In the US, the socialist movement should use the defeat of the Party of Order to rally its disaffected proletarian supporters to its banner - and be wary of its attempts to pivot from its right appeal in governing to its turning left and co-optation of social movements in opposition.
In Solidarity,
The Revolutionary Communist Organisation
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