Editorial Board
Donald Trump, in spite of all the legal troubles hurled at him by the top of the old-state, is slated to become the 47th President of the United States. Cashing in both the popular vote and the electoral college, Trump will become the main boss of the US imperialist war machine, and it is the Democrats’ fault. A second Trump term is the just desserts of the Democratic Party, who lost the popular vote precisely because of the Biden-Harris administration’s role in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
In 2020, the Democrats took the White House by an above-average lead, running on the sole platform that Biden was not Trump. Having failed to accomplish being the “lesser” of two-evils, at least in the eyes of millions, this election did not go as planned. The extremely farcical nature of the electoral cycle, marked by record campaign spending, political violence, and desperate theatrics peddled by both sides will only increase cynicism in the electoral farce. The ruling class is forced to outdo itself each election cycle to differentiate the two faces of imperialism as the masses grow increasingly discontented and disillusioned with bourgeois democracy. Many Democratic voters are losing faith in the farce while many Republican voters will find themselves regretful and rejecting it too.
While a second Trump term will not amount to the implementation of fascist rule on January 20th, as the Democrats have claimed, it will further the trend of reactionization, concentrating power around the executive branch in more glaring and vulgar forms. This is the direction things have been going independently of the gangster capitalist Donald Trump, who will fill the role in the most obnoxious manner.
The ultra-reactionary Donald Trump will continue to increase attacks on the working class in an effort to overcome the economic crisis through the destruction and denigration of the productive forces, aimed at increasing the rate of exploitation combined with mass layoffs. He has gestured all throughout his campaign to undermine and destroy labor regulations by appointing key officials like the billionaire capitalist Elon Musk to “cut costs,” meaning to fire workers for union activity. The economic crisis will not be overcome by a second Trump administration; instead, it promises to get worse for the broad masses of mainly working people, but also for small businesses and intellectuals.
Combined with the attacks on the working class is the persecution and superexploitation of migrants in the US. Trump rode to victory not only on the rightful cynicism of the masses toward his Democrat rival, but on a wave of national chauvinism and bigoted hatred for migrants, who he has promised to deport in unseen proportions. While the Biden administration accomplished more brutality here, Trump has promised to outdo him in this term, and will likely do so.
The so-called migration crisis is the problem of imperialism, its role in undermining the economies of the oppressed nations, and forcing workers and peasants to seek employment abroad. This is a problem dating all the way back to colonialism, with the colonial power historically forcing the colonial subjects to migrate from their damaged homeland and seek out a life in the very country responsible for their misery, and this is the root of migration to the US today. Capitalists seek cheap labor, using the southern border as a valve, and the global economic crisis of imperialism has reached the stage in which the workers and the tools of production must be destroyed to overcome the problem of falling profits, making Trumpist rhetoric and jingoism desirable to the ruling class.
Trump, like his ultra-reactionary followers on local and state levels, seeks to abandon all talk about legal accountability for police terror and to shamelessly defend the most brutal police with the utmost hatred for the masses, especially Black people. They plot to unleash more police with more militarization combined with the Army and National Guard in the brutalization of mass movements, carrying out swift and merciless repression and restriction of democratic rights. They promise to abandon the pretense of the Democratic Party, which seeks to use low-intensity counterinsurgency to stifle and repress the justified rebellions of the people, a plot which saw a lot of success in the last term—only Palestine solidarity was able to break through the protest embargo imposed by the Democrats on the grassroots level. The precedents set by the outgoing administration, especially the old laws brought back into action in response to the January 6 riots, are now going to be used by the Trump administration to repress the people.
The far-Right reactionaries who rally around Trump will receive the inspiration they have been looking for, based on the fact that their figurehead has triumphed over his legal troubles, becoming the first felon to hold such an office, and among this reinvigorated mass movement, the fascist organizations which have been quietly regrouping are sure to swim. Reactionaries among the people all over the country will be inspired to live out their sick fantasies, with gun in hand, leading to an increase in modern day lynchings and mass shootings.
Internationally, despite Trump’s promises of ending the war in Ukraine and achieving a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian resistance, US imperialism will continue to seek to maximize its plunder of the world through collusion and contention with other imperialist powers. It was Trump’s Abraham Accords, continued by the Biden-Harris administration, that aimed at preserving US domination in the Middle East by legitimizing Israel with bribes to the puppet Arab states in order to pivot to East Asia and contain Chinese social-imperialism. What monopoly media describes as Trump’s “isolationist” foreign policy really just represents a varied approach to maintaining the contested hegemony of US imperialism in contrast to the policy of the Democrats, who today are the war hawks.
At the same time, a second Trump term also means more explosive mass movements, and movements that have been boiling over since the last Trump term now promise to erupt. Contradictions internationally and nationally will intensify, and the storm centers of the Third World, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East, threaten to set off conflagrations across the world. The electoral farce is concluding, but the struggles are calling and there are great battles ahead.
The masses, and especially the working classes, clamor for leadership over their justified rebellion against reaction. Within days there will be an expansion of the mass movement which has been growing against the crimes of US imperialism, promising to spread to a broader anti-Trumpist movement. The next four years will be years of uprisings, and while they cannot repeat the specific and unique conditions of the last Trump term, they threaten to be just as explosive in new ways. All things point to an increasingly revolutionary situation, in which revolutionaries are sure to be generated among the best sons and daughters of the proletariat. They are conditions and times which the existing revolutionary forces, scant as they are, must make proper use of.
The spontaneity of the masses cannot accomplish any durable change; revolutionaries must consciously seek to guide the justified rebellions, to organize them into a greater force, ultimately into a political party of the proletariat, which struggles to become the recognized vanguard. This is unimaginable without revolutionary theory, without unity under the all-powerful revolutionary ideology of the international proletariat: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo. Conditions are forcing the small number of revolutionaries in this country to mature quickly, to choose to unite under Maoism or to be destroyed in the process of dispersal, which gives full play to reaction and revisionism to continue to traffic in the interests of the masses.
The Worker stands with the masses, the exploited and oppressed, as an organ of revolutionary working class expression, in service of the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the USA. In the turbulent years ahead, we pledge to remain at our posts diligently serving the people. We call on all readers and supporters to get organized, to deepen the struggle for unity under Maoism, to take up or hold their posts in making Maoism the commander and guide of the revolution in this country. Please reach out if you would like to get involved.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
