Ultra-Reactionary Donald Trump Declares “Antifa” Terrorist Organization in Latest Effort to Expand Repression

Ultra-reactionary chief of US imperialism Donald Trump recently outlined his administration’s plan to broaden the scope of repression against the working-class and popular masses in the United States through a presidential memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”, released September 25. The memorandum comes on the heels of the 9/22 executive order titled “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization,” which decreed that “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

While some on the left have declared that “Antifa”, which is short for “anti-fascism”, is not itself an organization and is therefore not able to be repressed, the content of the executive order makes it clear that Trump and US imperialism show no concern for such semantics. An enterprise is not an organization, but an activity or a venture. This wording is carefully selected, as defining “Antifa” this way allows the imperialists to circumvent any pretext to basic democratic rights and due process by focusing their repression directly on activity and ideology, embracing all political activity of resistance—that is, explicitly not right-wing civilian terror—and in particular their sights are set against revolutionary struggle. As the memorandum says: “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government…”, etc.

The presidential memorandum reveals the thinking and intent of the administration for how to apply the 9/22 executive order. The memorandum grants sweeping authority to the executive and its agencies to “…investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.”

Providing funding or “material support” for organizations deemed by the government as “foreign terrorist organizations” is illegal, but federal law does not currently provide a definition for the term “domestic terrorist organization” which the executive order and memo apply to “Antifa” .

While the memorandum’s first two designations—“Antifa” and those “claiming to act on behalf of Antifa”—are to broaden the scope of repression against the masses rebelling across the country, the third designation is directed specifically at the Democrat mafia politicians, donors, and the NGOs that provide all manner of legal or monetary assistance to their reformist networks. In particular, Trump has set his target to be George Soros and his network of NGOs, hoping to land a blow to a leading figurehead of the opposing faction of the imperialists while sweeping up large segments of the rebelling masses in a “two-birds-one-stone” approach. This third designation should also be seen also in the context of the RICO charges applied, then dropped, against “Stop Cop City” activists for basic fundraising activities.

The fact that the Democrats are being targeted does not mean they will form a bulwark of defense of the rights of the masses. The Democratic mafia, for its part, denounces political violence as such, calling for a state of calm that gives cover to the developing crisis and state of exception. In the same vein, the opportunists’ denunciation of all political violence and attempts to distance themselves from it will not protect either themselves or the masses, instead only painting a rosy hew over the rotten nature of bourgeois democracy—the same democracy which the September 25 memo explicitly poses itself as defending against the revolutionary menace.

Executive Orders and Reactionization

While the commonly-held belief is that the legislature is the exclusive branch of government that makes laws, this is only a half-truth of bourgeois ideology. The majority of US law is regulatory and is created by the executive, while much of the rest of law is common law and is made by judges. With the rise of imperialism, regulatory laws and executive orders have assumed greater importance and have been expanded. Trump and his predecessors have presided over an extensive expansion of executive power, which is an expression of the increasing reactionization of the state in response to the generalized crisis of imperialism.

The bourgeoisie initially entered the stage of history under the watchword of the “separation of powers.” This was a useful weapon in the arsenal of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary period to weaken the power of the aristocracy and monarchy (the executive) through the power of the legislature, resting on the concept of “popular sovereignty.”

Yet the real history of bourgeois society knows no separation of powers. Instead, what unfolds is the increasing development of the hegemony of the executive over the other powers. While legislatures come and go, following the farcical logic of bourgeois democracy, the bureaucratic elements of the state machinery do not, and so their control by the ruling class is a key part of their bourgeois class dictatorship. The real work of governance lies with the army of officials of the bourgeois state, who are not elected. The bourgeoisie favors the executive due to its “elasticity,” meaning that it is more closely aligned to the direct interests of the capitalist class and therefore the expansion and control of this branch assumes the utmost importance in the era of imperialism.

In epochs like ours where the class struggle becomes most acute, legislative power tends to be restricted, with the legislatures in bourgeois dictatorships serving as mere “talking-shops” (Marx), with real power more and more concentrated within the bureaucratic executive organs. This process has accelerated with the transformation of capitalism from its stage of free-competition into monopoly capitalism, i.e., imperialism, and especially imperialism in its stage of advanced decomposition today. Monopoly and centralization in economics can produce nothing but monopoly and centralization in politics. Both the Democrat and Republican mafias strive to take as much power as possible over all three branches—but specifically the executive—into their hands in the interests of their respective faction of US imperialism.

Despite its status as sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, US imperialism is not immune to the general imperialist crisis, and political violence is growing in the US as a result. The masses are resisting attacks on their rights and living conditions—including with increasing, yet sporadic, individualist, and unorganized violence. Far more violent, however, is that of the reactionary ruling class, with its project of mass layoffs, mass deportations and ICE terror against immigrant workers, and the genocide against the resisting and victorious Palestinian people. As stated previously in The Worker, the increasingly-organized reaction is reaching a fever pitch, and the masses will fight back. The imperialists cannot destroy the rebellion of the masses through executive orders. Instead, they are succeeding in raising the masses’ anger and rejection of the status quo with their increasing repression.

Image: Donald Trump at an “Antifa Roundtable” with journalists at the White House October 8 where the memo was pitched to monopoly media and “independent”, far-right journalists. White House Photo.

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