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The following article was written last July. It therefore does not take into account the latest developments, which have been unfolding at an accelerated pace since then. However, none of these developments, such as the agreement on tariffs between the United States and the European Union reached in the meantime, appear to us to alter the initial political direction we intended to put forward.
“The struggle for democracy thus represents a powerful diversion to tear workers away from their class terrain and drag them into the contradictory acrobatics where the state operates its metamorphosis from democracy to fascist state. The fascism-antifascism dilemma thus acts in the exclusive interest of the enemy; and antifascism and democracy chloroform the workers, leaving them to be stabbed by the fascists, stupefying the proletarians so that they can no longer see the field and the path of their class. These are the central positions that the proletarians of Italy and Germany marked with their blood. It is because workers in other countries are not inspired by these political truths that world capitalism can prepare for world war.”
(Bilan #13, fascisme-démocratie : communisme, 1934, translated by us)
The election of Trump and his Make America Great Again seems to crystallize and boost the general rise, and even accession to power, of nationalist right-wing, so-called “populist”, conservative and religious forces internationally. The first six months of Trump governance have clearly shown that the man the American bourgeoisie and its state apparatus have chosen as president is both the product of a given situation and an active, even central, factor in accelerating the process leading to war and redoubled attacks on America’s working class.
Trump’s return to power has definitively confirmed the end of neoliberalism, economic “globalization” [1] and the free market, and the return of protectionism and exacerbated nationalism. Since the turn of the century, so-called “globalization” had enabled capital to stave off the explosion of its contradictions through industrial relocation and the explosion of debt and deficits. The accumulation of capital was able to continue, thus ensuring a minimum of political and social stability. Until then, the authoritarian, anti-globalization rhetoric of the nationalist, anti-globalization right did not correspond to the global needs of capital. Where these forces did come to power, in Brazil (Bolsonaro), Argentina (Milei), Hungary (Orban), it was only in “secondary” or peripheral countries from the point of view of global capital, and in response to particular circumstances – essentially linked to the historical weaknesses of national capital. Only Giorgia Meloni’s Italy seemed to concern one of the most important countries in the European Union. In this case, as in Marine Le Pen’s in France, the discourse and policies put forward hardly differed from the “classic”, previously “liberal” right parties, to the point of envisaging alliances, or even mergers, between the so-called “classic” and “populist” right-wing parties [2]. The inadequacy of a large part of the political personnel – the Democratic Party in the USA, most of the political parties that have dominated Europe for decades, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats for the most part – to the new situation, requires replacing personnel and political forces with the so-called “populist” and nationalist parties in particular, or an overhaul of the old teams so that they free themselves from the neoliberal flavour of imperialism of the past. With Trump, the American bourgeoisie is overnight changing the rules of the game it had itself established and which no longer suit it. The adaptation of the old parties linked to the decades of “globalization” is sometimes slow in coming, as shown by the indecision of a large part of the political apparatuses and personnel of the main bourgeoisies of the European Union [3]. The political discourse of the nationalist right finds itself in line with the needs of the times. And its political personnel, however caricatural, provocative, cynical, vulgar, corrupt and “ignorant” they may be, are very often, depending on the country and its history, the most capable of personifying and carrying forward the new economic, political and ideological policies that the march to generalized war demands.
This break with economic liberalism has resulted in the emergence of ideological themes emphasizing nationalism, tradition and Christianity, in opposition to the so-called globalism, “moral decadence”, “wokeism” and anti-racism of previous policies. The establishment of ideological polarization is also a product of, and a factor in, the dynamics of preparation for war.
Finally, at the political level, advancing a false –from the class point of view of the proletariat – alternative between authoritarianism-liberalism, dictatorship-democracy, whatever the final choices of each bourgeoisie for the teams in government, whether nationalist extreme-right or “democratic” and left parties, aims to confine proletarians to the terrain of capital, to prevent any significant class struggle and, if need be, to divert any working-class struggle from the terrain of class, economic and political demands, to that of the defense of democracy. For American workers, the choice is not between Trump and democracy, between King or No king – which the demonstrations organized by the left of the Democratic Party aim to impose – but between the defense of their own class interests and those of American capital, whatever is the team in power. For example, by making the defense of migrant workers subject to arbitrary and violent arrests and deportations in the neighborhoods a moment of affirmation of proletarian unity and solidarity.
Trump and the Far Right: the Adaptation of State Political Apparatuses to Today’s Situation
“In short, all Fascism’s innovations, from an economic point of view, lie in the accentuation of economic “disciplining”, the linking of the State and the great Konzerns (appointment of commissioners to the various branches of the economy), and the consecration of a war economy. Democracy, as the flag of capitalist domination, cannot correspond to an economy cornered by war. (...) German fascism can be explained neither as a class distinct from capitalism, nor as an emanation of the exasperated middle classes. It represents the form of domination of capitalism, which is no longer able through democracy, to link all classes in society around the maintenance of its privileges.” (Bilan #16, L’écrasement du prolétariat allemand et l’avénement du fascisme, mars 1935, translated by us)
The choice by the bourgeoisie of the world’s leading capitalist and imperialist power of a right-wing nationalist and religious team can no longer be considered marginal or accidental, still less the expression of a loss of political control by the bourgeoisie [4]. The Trump phenomenon, his speeches, “his thinkers” and the policies put in place, both internationally – imperialist – and domestically – against the proletariat in America – express this push towards nationalist and “authoritarian” solutions, which bourgeois leftist forces present as “anti-democratic”. Above all, it reveals the urgency for the American bourgeoisie to react faster than Biden and the Democratic party did to its international decline and internal contradictions, especially in the face of rival China. Between Biden and Trump, there are few imperialist or economic ruptures. When there are, whether to directly counter Russia or not, whether to develop renewable power or not, they are tactical. Trump is merely accelerating, albeit brutally, the upgrading of the entire productive and military apparatus of the American state, relocating industries, protectionism and the capture of international capital by blackmail and force, to face up to China and other imperialist rivals. The tariffs demanded by Trump are a continuation of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, so decried by the European Union for its protectionism.
Focusing on the various ideologues, all particularly “enlightened”, even exalted [5], of the Silicon Valley techno-sphere, may help to understand why the tech giants turned away from the Democratic party and joined Trump and his “populism”. Not only did they materially support Trump’s campaign, they even ventured to provide an ideological framework for Trumpism, at least with the techno-positivism. The interest and “theoretical” quality of the libertarian thinking of Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin and Marc Andressen [6], to name but a few, based on their writings and interviews, are dismaying in their childish banalities about Man, Good and Evil, and even about the Antichrist. Claimed by vice-president JD Vance, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto of Anderssen proposes “becoming technological Supermen” and “the apex predator” [7]. This is worthy of the speculations and delusions of teenagers dazzled by their own success in high-tech, who devise ready-made systems of which they would be the demiurges, thanks to their intelligence and to Artificial Intelligence. Let us pass over the “theoretical” feebleness of these libertarians and other techno-positivists, which speaks volumes about the historical weakening of bourgeois thought. Thiel himself admits to “remain committed to the faith of [his] teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual [sic!] [8].”
The Contradictions of American Capital
More interesting because more political are the speeches and interviews with the economist Stephen Miran and Vice President JD Vance. Trump has placed the former at the head of his government’s Council of Economic Advisors to guide and dictate the “disruptive” economic policy that the American bourgeoisie feels it must now impose on the world. His remarks explain the material historical reasons for the brutal, unilateral policies of the American bourgeoisie, both internally and in terms of international relations. He says a great deal about the sense of urgency among its main fractions, which has led them to prefer the unpredictable Trump, now the disruptive one, to the reasonable and reassuring Democrat Kamala Harris.
“With no major geopolitical rivals, U.S. leaders believed they could minimize the significance of declining industrial [output]. But with China and Russia as not only trade but security threats, having a robust and well diversified manufacturing sector is of renewed necessity. If you have no supply chains with which to produce weapons and defense systems, you have no national security [9].”
There can be little doubt that the entire American bourgeoisie, including the Democratic Party, agrees with this assessment. Is it not to this situation, ensuring national security – in other words, preparing for war – that Bidenomics intended to respond? The difference with the Democrats is that the most enlightened Trumpists are aware of the urgency of “resolving”, or postponing, the contradiction in which American capitalism finds itself today. Because of its power and international centrality, it directly concentrates and materializes the highest point these global capitalist contradictions have reached today: namely widespread overproduction and increasing difficulties in realizing surplus value extracted from wage labor. For American capital, these contradictions materialize in an exponential public and private debt as it tries to remain “competitive” with its rivals, despite the growing risks of this abysmal debt.
The urgency of the situation can be seen, not least, in the fact that US debt servicing – what the US state has to pay annually to “honor its debt” – now exceeds the defense budget. For the American bourgeoisie, the contradiction is becoming acute and – to use a fashionable word – almost existential: on the one hand, a weak dollar is needed to be able to produce goods in the United States at a price that can at least compete on the world market, including the American market. On the other, there is the need to finance the deficit and debt – which Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill [10] has just revived, much to Elon Musk’s dismay – by attracting foreign capital. This requires that the dollar remains relatively strong, and that lenders retain sufficient confidence in America’s ability to service its debt. Until now, American indebtedness seemed unlimited simply because the dollar was the international reserve currency and the central bank, the Fed, could print as much as it wanted. Today, however, the economic impasse of global capitalism and the resulting push towards generalized war have rendered yesterday’s recipes obsolete. The U.S. bourgeoisie has realized that the monetary and financial policies of the past – the very ones that helped overcome the 2008 crisis – have in the end further accentuated the historic weakening of U.S. capital. Worse still, the more “classic” policies – i.e., slower to implement and become effective (from the point of view of the American bourgeoisie) – pursued by Biden’s Democratic team have failed to reverse the trend towards economic and industrial decline vis-à-vis rivals and China in particular – as evidenced by the US trade deficit [11]. For Miran, American capitalism is faced with a contradiction:
“Synthesizing these properties of reserve assets, if there is persistent, price-inelastic demand for reserve assets but only modestly cheaper borrowing, then America’s status as reserve currency confers the burden of an over-valued currency eroding the competitiveness of our export sector, balanced against the geopolitical advantages of achieving core national security aims at minimal cost via financial extraterritoriality. The tradeoff is thus between export competitiveness and financial power projection. Because power projection is inextricable from the global security order America underwrites, we need to understand the question of reserve status as intertwined with national security. America provides a global defense shield to liberal democracies, and in exchange, America receives the benefits of reserve status—and, as we are grappling with today, the burdens. This connection helps explain why President Trump views other nations as taking advantage of America in both defense and trade simultaneously: the defense umbrella and our trade deficits are linked, through the currency [12].”
Miran’s political – not economic – proposals clearly show that it is no longer a question of the American bourgeoisie trying to fend off the effects of capital’s economic contradictions, as in 2008, for example, but of securing access by force and violence – ultimately war – to the Titanic’s sole lifeboat at the expense of all others. Immediately, they are nothing more than a racket, pure and simple, particularly on the European and Asian “allies”, EU states, Japan, Korea... :
“How can the U.S. get trading and security partners to agree to such a deal? First, there is the stick of tariffs. Second, there is the carrot of the defense umbrella and the risk of losing it. Third, there are ample central bank tools available to help provide liquidity in the face of higher interest rate risk. (…) Such an architecture would mark a shift in global markets as big as Bretton Woods or its end. It would see our trading partners bear an increased share of the burden of financing global security, and the financing means would be via a weaker dollar reallocating aggregate demand to the United States and a reallocation of interest rate risk from U.S. taxpayers to foreign taxpayers. It would also more clearly demarcate the lines of the American defense umbrella, removing some uncertainty around who is or is not eligible for protection.” (emphasis added)
It is clear. American imperialism wants to have its cake and eat it too. It aims to keep the extravagant “advantages” of the almighty dollar, threatening any attempt to substitute another currency such as the Chinese renminbi or the euro. And it calls on – or “orders”, to be more precise – its allies, particularly the European, Japanese and Korean ones, to shoulder the weight of the “burdens” of maintaining the dollar, under the blackmail – worthy of the Mafia – of no longer assuring the recalcitrant American nuclear protection. Gone are the days of the G7 and other conclaves of Western powers who took the time to meet and discuss the establishment of monetary, financial and trade rules. Time is running out, and the American bourgeoisie is no longer trying to mask its diktats with a few diplomatic concessions. It is time for blackmail and ultimatums. The crassness and vulgarity of real estate developer Trump are more appropriate than the supposed elegance and politeness of Democratic diplomats à la Antony Blinken. Will the American bourgeoisie succeed in imposing what amounts to a veritable tribute and definitive vassalization of Europeans [13]? There is no doubt that this is one of the issues at stake in the antagonism between the two continents, and in the aggressiveness – unimaginable until recently – shown by the Trump administration towards Europe, foreshadowed by Vice President J.D. Vance’s violent and provocative speech in Munich in February 2025.
The So-called “Pro-Worker” Discourse of the Trumpists and the So-called “Illiberal” Right-Wings
It turns out that Vice President JD Vance plays a central role in the all-out offensive of the American bourgeoisie, if only by providing ideological and political coherence to reindustrialization and high-tech innovation, and a purpose: “national security”, in other words, preparation for imperialist war [14].
“There were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization. The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things. The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain, while the poor countries made the simpler things. (…) But it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends. Now, that was the first conceit of globalization.
I think the second is that cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American firms got addicted to. Now, if you can make a product more cheaply, it’s far too easy to do that rather than to innovate. And whether we were offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies. (...)
But the fundamental premise, the fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country. For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor – both overseas and by importing it into our own country – and we got lazy. We overregulated our industries instead of supporting them. We overtaxed our innovators, instead of making easier for them to build their great companies, and we made it way too hard to build things and invest things in the United States of America. (…)
We believe that tariffs are a necessary tool to protect our jobs and our industries from other countries, as well as the labor value of our workers in a globalized market. In fact, combined with the right technology, they allow us to bring jobs back to the United States of America and create the jobs of the future [15].”
The last paragraph is no different from the rhetoric put forward by the Biden administration and the aim of Bidenomics. But who was best placed to “undo forty years of failed economic policy”? The Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, the Clinton, Obama and Biden clans, all of whom have been trained in and embraced “liberalism” and “globalization” for decades? The old guard of the Republican Party, Bush and company, whom Trump has supplanted and marginalized from the party? Or the reactionary isolationist currents, such as the Tea Party of the Obama years, which Trump was able to embody and unite? And whose nationalist, protectionist, reactionary and even racist ideology of always corresponds to the current moment?
It is worth pausing here, briefly, to consider the arguments put forward by JD Vance on the addiction of American capital to cheap labor. It would be reductive and missing the point to reduce his remarks to mere demagoguery – though it is – to secure the votes of part of the working class, or to the simple objective – also real – of winning the widest possible working-class support for preparations for generalized war. The need for American capital to “re-industrialize” on its own soil – in preparation for war, let us not forget – cannot be achieved by totally forgetting the laws of the capitalist mode of production, in particular the law of value, even if it means spiraling into debt.
Vance notes the link between technological “innovation”, including in Artificial Intelligence, “re-industrialization” on American soil and a trained and educated – therefore higher value and, in general, “better paid” – workforce. The American bourgeoisie, or at least its current Trumpian sectors, is aware that it needs workers capable of applying the modern techniques and tools that high-tech is developing. So there is also an “economic” interest, for American capital as a whole, in getting rid of untrained, uneducated “cheap labor” today, in addition to the class political interest of dividing the proletariat as a whole as far as possible between skilled and unskilled labor sectors. This was exactly the same policy Roosevelt pursued in the 1930s, with the help of the unions, bringing together skilled industrial workers, in return for their definitive integration into the state apparatus. The violence, brutality, arrogance, contempt, humiliation, racism – all of it is to vomit – that the U.S. bourgeoisie uses against immigrant workers, or supposedly so because of the color of their skin, does not respond to a simple racist deviation by Trump. It is a general anti-working-class policy, a first direct, massive and far-reaching attack on the proletariat as a whole in the United States, the ’coherency” of which JD Vance presents to us in the context of the race to war.
“All of this is why the president is approaching the issue of illegal immigration as aggressively as he has, because he knows that cheap labor cannot be used as a substitute for the productivity gains that come with economic innovation.” (idem)
In economic terms, Trumpian policies, and more generally those of the nationalist right, signal the end of “globalization”; in ideological terms, the return of nationalism and so-called democratic “anti-statism” in libertarian fashion; and politically, the transgression of the classic rules of bourgeois democracy in favor of an executive with no counter-powers, ready to use the most brutal repression, including violating the US Constitution itself, capable of making decisions in a hurry and with unprecedented attacks on the proletariat. The parallel with the 1930s is worth the detour:
“Fascism channels all the contrasts that endanger capitalism and directs them towards its consolidation. It contains the desire for calm of the petit bourgeois, the exasperation of the hungry unemployed, the blind hatred of the disoriented worker and above all the capitalist will to eliminate any element of disturbance of a militarized economy, to minimize the maintenance costs of an army of permanent unemployed [16].”
For many, bourgeois ideologues and politicians, especially leftists, but also sometimes within the revolutionary camp, the fact that important sectors of the working class vote for Trump, Meloni or even Marine Le Pen in France, would be the sign of a dynamic of retreat and even more accentuated dissolution of the proletariat as an exploited and revolutionary class at the same time. We have already [17] recalled that the fact that a third of workers registered on electoral lists vote for right-wing parties was not a new phenomenon. Far from it. We can even say that it is a constant. In the 1960s, for example, 30% of workers voted for the Republican party in the United States or for the Gaullist one in France. Nothing fundamentally changed then. The polls do not show any real movement that would express a particular dynamic of retreat from class feeling. On the other hand, it is true that the most disoriented and less combative workers are all the more attracted to the expression of blind anger, bitter and even hateful, racist in particular, while the proletariat as a whole fails to display and ’offer’ any class alternative, let alone a revolutionary perspective, apart from a few rare episodes of struggle. We also know that it is precisely in the mass workers’ struggle that the workers voting for the right, Trump and others, and those voting for the left, will be able to join and identify with their whole class in collective struggle.
The rise of right-wing forces, sometimes called “radical”, is therefore neither irrational nor accidental. It responds to the needs of the hour for capital as a whole to the point that the policies pursued by Biden were going in the same direction. It is likely that more classical political forces will also seek to implement them. Politically, from the point of view of the proletariat, the danger lies not in the rise to power of radical right-wing forces per se, but in the establishment of an alternative above class divisions; the illiberal-liberal, authoritariani-democratic, right-left, all modern forms of the false – from the proletarian point of view – opposition between fascism and antifascism. The genuine alternative is between bourgeois anti-working-class policies for the march towards war and working class resistance to these attacks.
In the 1930s, fascism in Germany and Italy and the Popular Front in France and Spain, far from excluding each other, represented two moments of the same process towards war. The fascism-antifascism dilemma was the last decisive factor in the ideological defeat of the international proletariat and its dispersion-division in the face of capital. Without making it an absolute pattern that would be repeated in the same terms – the differences are numerous between the 1930s and today – the historical issue revolves around the proletariat’s ability to establish lines of defense against the attacks to come, whatever the governments’ colors, to regroup and unite there in struggles, strikes, and demonstrations and not fall into the trap of defending democracy and anti-fascism or anti-Trumpism. It is only from these lines that the course towards war can be halted and then reversed, to open the way for insurrection, destruction of the capitalist state and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy and the Rise of Fascism in 1933-34
“For democrats and social democrats, fascism does not represent a bourgeois movement; for them, capitalism cannot survive without democracy (…). For two years, the problem for capitalism was to prevent workers from using their strength and the strength of their organizations to wage class struggles in the midst of an economic crisis. Social democracy was in its position to defend capitalism once again. It told workers that the only way to avoid the “worst” was to abandon all labor struggles, as these could only play into the hands of fascism.
When social democracy urges workers to stop defending themselves through violence, to leave the initiative of “criminal violence” to fascism, to even allow fascist gangs to commit crimes, it remains perfectly consistent with its historical role. According to the great wisdom of the social democrat, the workers would therefore have no blood on their hands and could remind bourgeois governments of their responsibilities.
Liberal and democratic capitalism, hearing the “voices” of the proletariat, would thus, thanks to divine intervention, manage to rediscover its sadly lost “soul.” And, ultimately, the proletarians would once again become the sheep of the faithful flock, calling their shepherd to order, while capitalism would continue to administer the pills of freedom and democracy. However, history is not made up of peaceful encounters between sheep leaving or returning to the flock and the shepherds, owners, and immutable guardians of the latter. But history, and the history of capitalism, is one of economic and class upheavals; and if, in the absence of a class party, the economic crisis with no way out meets a crisis with no way out for the revolution, the social organism that has been unable to rebuild itself on a proletarian basis, through the victorious insurrection of the proletariat, rebuilds itself, reorganizes itself, relaunched as it finds itself in the opposite direction, on a capitalist basis, to appear henceforth through the fascist executioner.
Did not the Italian Social Democrats first, followed by the German Social Democrats, urge the workers to watch out for Mussolini’s syphilis or Goering’s morphine addiction, the opposition of the King of Italy or President Hindenburg, the liberal Giolitti or the nationalist Hugenberg, or, finally, the revival or revolt of the bourgeoisie against fascism? Thus the workers will decide to wait for capitalism to deliver them from fascism: in the meantime, all opportunities for proletarian struggle will be nullified, and we will finally arrive at situations where the bourgeoisie will be able to rally the workers around it for the outbreak of the war.”
Bilan #3, January 1934, translated by us
[1] . For the sake of convenience, we have adopted bourgeois terms such as “globalization,” “populism,” etc. As for the former, it was indeed in the 19th century that the “globalization” of capitalism took place.
[2] . We do not have the capacity to check if, and to what extent, this phenomenon is expressed on all continents and countries, particularly in so-called ’democratic’ countries like Japan and Korea. As for the ’authoritarian’ regimes, China and Russia for example, the national state capitalism inherited from Stalinism was precisely built on and from a war economy and under the openly dictatorial grip of Stalinism. It can nevertheless be noted that the Putinist ideology is very close to the Trumpian MAGAs.
[3] . It suffices to see the little movement that the EU makes to date on Mario Draghi’s report of September 2024. This report urgently recommends a European plan equivalent to that launched by Biden, the Bidenomics, which can be summarized as a remake of the New Deal launched by Roosevelt in the 1930s. Or again the hesitation and refusal to define and share a revival of military production that supercedes the rivalries within the EU; or on the purchase, or not, of American war materials with European funds.
[4] . It is, once again, the position of the unspeakable ICC: Trump’s election “represents a resounding failure for the more ’responsible’ faction of the US bourgeoisie.” Neither Populism nor Bourgeois Democracy…). The reader can also refer to the critical article [only in French] that Le Prolétaire #557 dedicates to the position of the CCI : Le CCI et le «populisme». Les élections américaines sont-elles «un échec cuisant pour la bourgeoisie américaine»?
[5] . “You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. ‘One world or none’, ‘Antichrist or Armageddon’, on one level, are the same question.” (New York Times, Peter Thiel and the AntiChrist, June 26th 2025)
[6] . Extracts : “Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. (…) We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance. Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it. (…) We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.” (Marc Anderssen, Techno-Optimist Manifesto, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/).
[8] . Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.
[9] . Stephan Miran, A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf.
[10] . Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that the US Senate and House of Representatives have just adopted should increase the US deficit by an additional $3.8 trillion, and this despite drastic cuts in social spending, medicaid and the SNAP food aid program. In addition to tax cuts for the richest, this law provides that “National security spending would be increased to more than $1 trillion per year (+13% over current levels), including an increase of $113 billion for the Pentagon budget.” (Le grand continent, https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2025/05/21/les-mesures-fiscales-du-nouveau-budget-de-trump-creuserait-le-deficit-de-pres-de-4-000-milliards-de-dollars-dici-2034/)
[11] . “The trade deficit of the United States rose over the year 2024 to nearly 920 billion dollars, up by more than 17% over one year (+133 billion dollars), according to data published on Wednesday by the Department of Commerce.” (Le figaro, Le déficit commercial américain se creuse à 920 milliards de dollars en 2024, February 5th 2025)
[12] . Stephan Miran, Op.cit., emphasis added
[13] . This article was written before the commercial “agreement” between the EU and the US on import rights announced by Trump and Von Der Leyen at Trump’s golf course in one of those scenes of public humiliation of which Trump has become the master.
[14] . In this, the Trump language is not different from Biden’s.
[15] . JD Vance at the American Dynamism Summit, march 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/advisory-vice-president-jd-vance-address-american-dynamism-summit.
[16] . Bilan #16, op.cit.
[17] . See Revolution or War #8, What Significance and Implications Do the Parliamentary Elections in France Have for the French and International Proletariat ? (June 30, 2017), footnote 7 : “In the years 1960 and the following decades, there was around 30% of the workers who voted for De Gaulle and the nationalist and authoritarian right that he represented. From this point of view, the “blue collars” vote to Marine Le Pen is less important than the De Gaulle’s in the 1960… just before and after the massive strike of May 1968. In the United States, ‘In the 1980 and 1984 elections, Reagan averaged 61 percent support among the white working class, compared to an average of 35 percent support for his Democratic opponents, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.’ (The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, Ruy Teixeira, Brookings Working Paper, April 2008)” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/04_demographics_teixeira.pdf). Nothing new thus, nor qualitatively different, in the “blue collar” vote pro-Trump contrary to the media campaigns on this topic.
.png) The Working Class will Pay the Costs of the Tariff War, Unless … (Battaglia Comunista) |
We reproduce below an article published of Battaglia comunista, newspaper of the ICT in Italy, which seems to us to complment our previous article on extreme right-wing populism and Trumpism. It provides a broad outline of the genesis and history of the economic contradictions of capitalism since the end of post-reconstruction war in the 1960s until today and explains why and how the American bourgeoisie embarks on protectionist and aggressive policies both vis-à-vis the imperialist rivals, China first of all, but also vis-à-vis the Western “allies”, who nonetheless remain economic rivals. But above all, it shows how the exacerbation of these economic contradictions can only, in turn, “exacerbate [...] imperialist conflicts and a clear tendency towards global war.” The reader used to read us knows how much we insist, since our constitution as a group, on this question and on the alternative revolution or war.
That the main organization of the proletarian camp clearly defends this perspective, actually opens a dynamic of “objective” regrouping of the most lively and dynamic forces – groups, circles and individuals – of the proletarian camp and the communist Left around this general analysis and the resulting political orientations. That we do not necessarily share the theoretical framework of capital crises – Grossmann-Mattick – advanced by the ICT and that some of our members – we are not homogeneous on the question – believe that the text reduces too much the contradictions of capital and their expressions to the mere “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, is all secondary and do not detract from the political, that is class, value and correctness of the article that we endorse.
The Working Class will Pay the Costs of the Tariff War, Unless…
« Dear friend, I’m writing to you... »
This is, more or less, how Trump’s letter to von der Leyen starts. In it, the US president announces the imposition of a 30% tariff on European goods imported into the US, in addition to equally heavy tariffs on automobiles, aluminium, and steel.
The letter was expected, but the announced measures went far beyond Brussels’ worst fears, as it had expected a tariff of around 10%. It may be that American arrogance is part of Trump’s usual tactic of exaggerating his demands before reaching a ’deal’ at a lower level, which is still highly problematic for those facing sanctions. However, the fact remains that this attitude is indicative of an acceleration in US imperialism’s aggressiveness toward both enemies and ’friends.’ All of this, in turn, shows just how deep the crisis facing US-made capitalism and, more generally, the process of global accumulation, is. This crisis hasn’t just begun today, nor even in 2007/2008 with the sub-prime mortgage cyclone, but dates back over half a century, when, in the early 1970s, the fall in the rate of profit became more obvious and set in motion a series of upheavals and changes in the global economy, with all the consequences we are currently experiencing. Then, as now, the crisis demonstrated — and demonstrates — clearly that in the world of capital, which has been imperialist for over a century, there are no
selfless friendships, but only power relations, in which there is no hesitation about trampling on ’friends’ to defend and impose one’s own interests. What the US administration is doing today has the same rapacious logic as the measures taken by previous administrations, but now the context has worsened in several respects.
On 15 August 1971, Nixon more or less confirmed the end of the boom in the post-war cycle of accumulation and the opening of a new historical phase, the current one, dominated precisely by low or at least insufficient profit rates, despite all the measures implemented by the international bourgeoisie over the past fifty years. Then, Washington renounced the Bretton Woods agreements (1944), decoupled the dollar from the gold standard, devalued it, and imposed import duties on foreign goods. The US had ’discovered’ that its economy had lost its infamous competitiveness compared to that of ’friendly’ countries (Germany, Japan, Italy, etc.), and so it began to offload its difficulties abroad. Many ’friends’ and ’allies’ suddenly found themselves with a lot of devalued dollars and suffering an increase in the price of their goods on the American market. The shock was great, and among the consequences was increased unemployment and inflation. As always, in a crisis, if the bourgeoisie — or some sectors of it — catches a cold (perhaps a severe one), the working class catches pneumonia, because it is exposed, necessarily scantily clad, to the icy winds of the crisis by ’its own’ bourgeoisie.
We won’t dwell on the implications of 15 August 1971, because that would take us too far afield, and in any case, the issue has been extensively covered in our press ever since [1]. Here, we are interested in highlighting the predatory and genetically violent nature of imperialism, that is, capital.
As recently as 1973, after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab countries, the US reached an agreement with Saudi Arabia to raise the price of oil and sell it in dollars
[2], which had the dual effect of undermining competing ’national’ capitalisms (once again Japan, Europe...) and strengthening the ’exorbitant privilege’ of the dollar, the currency used in international trade but printed by the Federal Reserve, with all that this entailed in economic and therefore imperialistic terms.
Despite these measures, the USA’s ’real economy” has struggled to regain its post-war momentum. Foreign goods continued to occupy an ever-larger share of the US market. Thus, with the ’Plaza Accord’ (New York, 1985), Reagan imposed a sharp devaluation of the dollar on the then G5 and Canada — up to 51% against the yen — in an attempt to make American goods more competitive.
Financial and monetary sleights of hand may provide temporary relief to capital’s weary lungs, shifting the problems, or rather the underlying issue — the falling rate of profit — in time and space, but they do not solve it; rather, they widen its scope. The abnormal growth of financial speculation and the intensification of labour exploitation in all its forms have not revived the ’animal spirits’ of the market; if anything, they have powerfully fuelled its most brutal and destructive aspects. In other words, they have sharply accelerated the tendency toward generalised war, the only ’solution’ to its contradictions that capital has available.
Furthermore, as the possibilities for political management of the crisis have progressively shrunk, especially for reformism and Keynesianism, a political class is emerging that has risen directly from the bourgeois slums. They have always been there, of course, but until recently, relegated to the less presentable ranks of the family, due to their brutality, crudeness, and vulgarity: characters somewhere between the ’bar room idiot’ and the neighbourhood bully. But, faced with a worsening crisis, good manners don’t count. The Trumps, the Mileis, and their ilk, are the expression of a bourgeoisie that is increasingly struggling to manage its own world.
And Trump doesn’t even know where the ’good manners’ of a Biden or an Obama lay. Both Biden and Obama had already resorted to protectionism and caused major problems for their ’allies.’ Trump’s rudeness and vulgarity has raised eyebrows and concerns even among a segment of the American upper middle class, the very ones who lent a decisive hand to God in making him the chosen one (didn’t He save him from an assassination attempt?). His administration, and the Democrat governments that preceded it, are clear that imperialist domination over the world cannot be exercised without the support of a solid and technologically advanced manufacturing base. This base has been greatly weakened since the 1970s, due to offshoring, yet the domination of the dollar and the excessive power of giant hedge funds must be backed by overwhelming military superiority. This, taking us back to the very start of this game of Snakes and Ladders, presupposes an industrial apparatus fit for purpose. Tariffs are supposed to do this: force ’friends’ and enemies alike to open factories in the US — something that has been happening for years, though not at the pace desired by MAGA — to buy even more weapons, to subscribe to very long-term government bonds, to patiently endure the devaluation of the dollar, to allow, for example, agri-food products full of nasty chemicals into the European market, to eliminate taxes, however modest, on internet giants and, more generally, on American companies. And this is what the G7 did in July, bowing to the ’Godfather’ who, from the White House, makes the entire world ’offers it can’t refuse,’ because he puts on the ’negotiating’ table not a gun, but B-2 bombers, thousands of nuclear weapons, and a market that is very difficult to ignore. Given the way the capitalist world system has been configured in recent decades, it’s doubtful, to say the least, that tariffs, in and of themselves, can revive the industrial America of the 1950s and 1960s. They certainly put a heavy burden on competing capital, which, in turn, exacerbates imperialist conflicts and a clear tendency towards global war.
Meanwhile, the billionaire president, the one who passes himself off as a friend of America’s blue-collar workers, has resumed the work begun in his first term — and left essentially untouched by Biden — confirming tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, claiming to believe that the wealth thus saved by millionaires and billionaires will trickle down; something that, of course, has never happened. On the contrary, that wealth is also fuelled by cuts to the meagre existing welfare system — healthcare, food stamps, and the education system — especially in the poorest areas of the country: to the most destitute and oppressed sectors of the proletariat — we’re talking tens of millions of people. To them, it ’gives,’ so to speak, a handout, abolishing taxes on tips paid to workers, for example in the restaurant industry, and on overtime. It is effectively a ’little handout’, not for the working class, but for the bosses, who thus avoid having to squeeze wage increases from their own pockets. A paltry sum, in exchange for the destruction of healthcare, schools, the environment, the prospects of millions of young people, and beyond.
But what is the European bourgeoisie doing? So far, it has been spitting and punching, incapable of overcoming national selfishness or establishing a true state, with all that that would entail. The bourgeoisie’s thinkers, starting with Draghi, preach that the EU must overcome paralysing divisions. But while Draghi thinks from the perspective of ’European’ capital, ’national’ capital struggles to transcend its narrow horizons. In this climate, various forms of populist nationalism thrive, true Trojan horses for American imperialism, which has always interfered heavily in the affairs of others to influence them, naturally including Italy. While it once resorted to massacring defenceless people through the so-called ’rogue’ services and their fascist henchmen, today the political descendants of that murderous milieu head governments and hold numerous seats in parliaments. To sabotage the emergence of greater political autonomy from Washington and, ultimately, a truly imperialist European state, there’s no need, for now, to bomb trains or allow unwelcome politicians (like Aldo Moro)
[3] to be killed: right-wing populist and fascist forces are more than sufficient for the task.
What the bourgeoisie does interests us, of course, but less so than what the proletariat does. In this so far asymmetric economic war between the bourgeoisies, it is the wage-earning class that is called upon to foot the bill, both present and future.
Tax cuts for the wealthy have already been mentioned. Regarding the disruption caused by tariffs (and the associated rearmament), the European Trade Union Confederation has estimated that, in the event of ’moderate’ tariffs, at least 700,000 jobs in Europe would be at risk; for Italy alone, which exports heavily to the US, the figure is between 100,000 and 180,000. But that’s not all: if, as the president of Confindustria, among others, has said, the 13% devaluation of the dollar in recent months must be added to the 10% tariffs mooted in early July, the real tariff is 23%. Imagine if higher tariffs were to be imposed on 1 August! Where will the bosses go to find the competitiveness lost due to Washington’s friends? It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize in (bourgeois) economics; a simple, healthy class instinct is enough to immediately understand that wages, workloads, the pace of work, and job insecurity will be called upon, as much as, and more than ever before, to plug the gaps in domestic profits. By the way, a Reuters article — cited by Corriere della Sera — says that behind the resilience (a much-vaunted and somewhat clichéd word) of the Chinese economy to the Trump’s tariffs ’lies a lifetime of wage cuts and double and triple jobs’ (Corriere della Sera online review, 16 July 2025). No surprise there.
For decades, our class has failed to respond, or has responded too weakly, to the systematic attack launched by the international bourgeoisie. We have discussed the reasons for this substantial passivity many times, and we know full well that a class revival will not be easy, but there is no alternative. Either the proletariat ceases to be the sleeping giant it is, or it is destined to be crushed even more by the mechanisms of capital, until it finds itself in the meat grinder of imperialist war, as unfortunately is already a reality for segments of the proletariat and the dispossessed masses of the world.
Anyone therefore, who takes up a class point of view, from the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of this decadent and murderous society, cannot stand by the window, cannot allow capital and its representatives – whether more sleazy or more “honest” – to drag us into their abyss of death and planetary destruction.
Translated from the Italian by the CWO
[1] . See, for example, The End of Bretton Woods: A Contemporary Analysis and 1971-2021: 50 Years Since the USA Reneged on Bretton Woods
[2] . For a longer explanation see Oil and the Shifting Sands of Imperialism
[3] . Aldo Moro (1916-78) was a member of the Italian Christian Democratic Party and five times Prime Minister of Italy. A promoter of the “Historic Compromise” with the Italian Communist Party, he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978. The Christian Democrats and Communists refused to negotiate for his release and his body was found 55 days later on 9 May 1978. This was in the “years of lead” when all kinds of dirty operations were to be found in Italian Cold War politics such as the P2 masonic lodge and “Operation Gladio”, a right wing plot to keep the Communist Party from power. As a consequence many theories and conspiracy theories have been aired about “the Moro Affair” ever since.
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Fight Back Against all Sacrifices that Capitalism Wants to Impose to Prepare its Generalized World War! (International Leaflet – IGCL) International Situation / Wednesday, 10 September 2025 |
Below we reproduce the two leaflets we distributed in April-May and in June. The first was international. The second was aimed at the United States at the very beginning of the spontaneous demonstrations in the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles against the brutal and arbitrary arrests of thousands of “illegal and legal” immigrant workers. The first responded to the widespread declaration by all national bourgeoisies of the arms race and its implications for the living and working conditions of the international proletariat, and the response it demands.
Fight Back Against all Sacrifices that Capitalism Wants to Impose to Prepare its Generalized World War!
Workers of all countries, world capitalism is unleashing a massive “class war” against all. The attacks against our living and working conditions are going to intensify. They are already intensifying. We will – we already do – have to fight them back.
Workers of all countries, these fights cannot be effective if they remain isolated and dispersed. The only path to go is the one of extending, generalizing and unifying as widely as possible any mobilization, whether strike, street demonstration or mass delegation.
Trump and the US capitalist class show world capitalism’s only future: inescapable generalized imperialist war. Their aggressiveness, provocations and cynicism show the degree and the dramatic seriousness of the contradictions and the impasse of US and world capitalism. Economic competition and rivalries are now extending to imperialist and direct military competition and rivalries between the great powers. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East herald general conflagration. Crisis and war feed each other directly. All workers, all proletarians now have to pay not only for the crisis, as before, but also for the preparation for generalized war.
In face of its economic and imperialist difficulties, and in particular in face of China’s rising imperialist global power, the US capitalist class thinks it can supersede these difficulties by “making the rest of the world pay for it”, thanks to the power of the dollar and its military hyper-power. By doing so, it provokes a greater exacerbation of the economic crisis, to the extent that almost all bourgeois economists and specialists now predict a world recession. By doing so, it exacerbates even more the imperialist and military antagonisms, up to the point that every capitalist country, from Europe to Asia, America and Africa, is now raising their defense budget and calling for “rearming”. Eight hundred billion euros for “Rearm Europe”! Who will pay for these 800 billion, if not the population, and first and foremost the salaried workers?
There again, Trump and the US capitalist class show the way by brutally and suddenly laying off hundreds of thousands of Federal workers. Make no mistake, Trump and US capitalism are no exception. All ruling classes are already leading direct attacks against the workers due to economic crisis and the world competition. Key industrial sectors, such as the car industry, are announcing mass lay-offs and intensified exploitation for the ones who keep their job. There is no doubt that the tariff war will do the same in China and elsewhere. Everywhere, cuts on social benefits and social services are planned and spending on national health services is drastically reduced.
Workers of all countries, have no illusions : only a dynamic and “threat” of a generalized and united working class response can compel the ruling classes everywhere, whether around the Trump administration or the current Chinese government, to withdraw or soften their attacks… and slow, at least a little, the drive towards world war. Because only the further development of the struggle of the international proletariat can oppose the generalized massacre of a third world war. Thus, there is no alternative other than to reject altogether the attacks on our living and working conditions that world capitalism wants to impose on us.
As soon as the attacks begin…
Organize however numerous you are and call for fellow workers to join you and prepare the fightback! Do not remain isolated at home or anywhere, use your smartphones and networks only to gather geographically and mobilize collectively, favoring “in person gatherings” whenever they are possible!
Set up rallies, general assemblies – not assemblies by internet or on social networks! – and protests, street demonstrations and direct them to other workplaces!
Call on them for active solidarity and, when it is possible call on them to join you in the demonstrations, in the rallies, in the pickets, and even to go on strike.
Advance the most unifying demands possible to which as many workers as possible from other workplaces and corporations can adhere.
International mass struggles and strikes against capitalism! This is the way not only to resist, but also to end capitalism and imperialist war for good. It is time to prepare to fight back all together!
Proletarians of all countries, unite in the struggle against capitalism!
International Group of the Communist Left, April 24th 2025
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