Shots fired! The attempted assassination of the once and possibly future Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump is just the latest signpost of fast-rising fascism and nearing world war. As imperialist China advances at the U.S. rulers’ expense, the Republican Party stands united behind an incoherent, incompetent grifter with no principle beyond his own self-interest. The Democrats are fractured over Genocide Joe Biden’s public displays of mental and physical decrepitude. Together, the two parties are exposing the capitalist bosses’ desperation, decay, and unbridgeable divisions.
In short, the U.S. ruling class is a hot mess. Their cherished liberal democracy–based on voting and the myth of workers’ “freedoms”—is on life support. Their one way to check their death spiral, even temporarily, is to resort to fascism–to more aggressive state terror and direct control by the capitalists themselves. We cannot vote our way out of fascism; we must fight back to destroy it. Progressive Labor Party fights both the open fascists backing Trump (see page 1) and the liberal fascists of finance capital (see letters on page 6) while organizing to arm the working class with the most advanced ideas. In this period of unsustainable instability, the liberals remain our greatest threat because of their ability to declaw the ferocity of our class and mislead us into a fascist movement. From the United States to South America to the Middle East to Africa to Asia to Europe to the Caribbean, workers need a real solution to the perpetual crisis of capitalism. Communism is what you are looking for.
Failing empire splits the ruling class
At no other time in history has the U.S. empire faced so many rivals—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—with so much military and economic might. Arch-rival China is on a clear trajectory to become the next dominant imperialist superpower. The U.S. is a shell of the country that dominated the globe after World War II. The old U.S.-led “rules-based international order doesn’t really exist anymore…China is…building its own alternative order. As the old order unravels, these overlapping blocs are competing over what will replace it” (Foreign Affairs, 6/18). To prevail in a profit-driven system, the capitalist bloodsuckers have only one choice: world war.
Meanwhile, two competing factions of U.S. bosses are deeply divided over the role the country will play in the world. On one side are the finance capitalists, represented by the Democratic Party, whose profits are tied to controlling international markets and the flow of oil. This wing historically has controlled the government and state apparatus, and has been more willing to sacrifice some short-term profits for long-term gains.
On the other side are the Small Fascists, represented by the Republican Party and Trump (see box for details), who are reluctant to contribute in the name of U.S. global supremacy. Case in point: In 1944, the U.S. bosses were willing to pay 94 percent in taxes (CBS News, 12/7/11). In 2018, the Small Fascists cried about a 23 percent tax rate (New York Times, 5/3).
Both of these gangs are huge threats to the working class. We call the finance capitalists Big Fascists for their bigger money, bigger weapons (at least for now) and bigger danger to mislead and disarm our class. We call the more domestic-oriented wing Small Fascists—although, if given the opportunity, they’d have an equal capacity for state terror and racist and nationalist violence.
Over the last half-century, as imperialist China began to threaten their dominance, the Big Fascists’ suffered a series of humiliating defeats, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Now the liberal rulers are trapped by their own contradictions. On the one hand, they need to scapegoat groups of workers—chiefly immigrants—to keep our class divided and deflect blame from the bosses’ dysfunctional system. At the same time, they need a multiracial mass military willing to sacrifice their lives for a fading empire that makes workers’ lives unlivable.
Small Fascists encroach on state power
Amid the rotting of U.S. imperialism, the Small Fascists saw a window of opportunity. What began as a fringe Tea Party movement after the 2008 economic crisis has now penetrated into every pillar of the state, from Congress to the courts to the White House. Trump instigated a rebellion after losing the 2020 election, and sounds ready to do the same on a larger scale this time around. The Supreme Court, packed with Trump appointees, has ruled that presidents have impunity to do whatever they want. The bosses appear to have passed the point where they can settle their differences without blood on the ground.
The vile Trump—sexual predator, self-serving felon, born-again hypocrite—is of course a danger to the working class. But he’s also a problem for the bosses. He has no coherent strategy to advance the interests of the U.S. ruling class or even the Small Fascist wing. Like Biden, he reflects U.S. decay. Even so, the Small Fascists have successfully hijacked the Republican Party, which seems far more disciplined and unified than the Democrats at the moment.
In his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, Trump’s running mate, the brazen opportunist J.D. Vance, blames the white working class for their problems under capitalism. He’s also called for cutting off welfare benefits (states.aarp.org, 9/8/22). Meanwhile, Trump's white racist base is gaining traction among some Black and brown workers (NYT Times, 7/15) who have seen little but growing inequality and the gutting of social services under Big Fascist rule.
Riding with Biden into fascism
As the pathetic election spectacle in the U.S. sputters on, it’s the Big Fascists who continue to slaughter our class in Gaza. After tens of thousands of survivors had fled to Al-Mawasi, a designated “safe zone,”
Israel’s Nazi bosses used made-in-U.S. bombs in one of the bloodiest atrocities of a nine-month genocide (NY Times, 7/15). The current official death toll in Gaza is nearly 40,000. Every hour, the U.S.-Israel fascists drop 42 bombs, destroy 12 buildings, kill 15 people and injure 25 more(OCHA, 11/1/23).
Genocide Joe boasts about the “toughest set of reforms to secure” the U.S.-Mexico border “ever in history” (CNN, 2/23). He’s used his Border Patrol gestapo to match Trump’s deportation numbers (Immigration Policy Institute, 6/27). But Biden’s concentration camps have triggered little mass protests, no rebellions in the streets. Compared to 2020, the working class has “cooled down,” just as Biden’s Big Fascist masters hoped, though the movement against the Gaza genocide is a glimmer.
There is no lesser evil among capitalist bosses—only evil. No matter which murdering monster occupies the White House, we can’t afford to be complacent. Workers, youth, and soldiers are losing their illusions about U.S. democracy. Those who supported the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were gravely disappointed by her defense of genocidal Zionism. Those who joined the largest protest movement in world history after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor got crumbs in return. But without organized fightback and communist consciousness, disillusionment can turn into isolation and aimless, suicidal violence, as we saw with Thomas Crooks. Cynicism is not the answer.
Fascists on the attack, we fight them back!
The bosses will have you think that the only choice we have is between open fascists and liberal fascists. But there is always another way: communism.
Progressive Labor Party has long warned of deepening splits among the bosses, of rising fascism and possible civil war. But communists must do more than warn workers; they must also prepare workers to fight back. A mass, unified, multiracial working class is the one thing the bosses cannot control—and cannot overcome.
We can't predict when or where the next world war will begin or how the devastation will play out. So, friends, what can we do? We can share this editorial with our folks and cultivate deep political and personal relationships with more of our class siblings. We can dare to defy our local bosses by uniting with other workers for what's in our best interests. We can strive to motivate everyone around us to commit to fight like a communist for life. Progressive Labor Party doesn’t have the numbers to turn the guns around—yet. But what we do today—and what we refuse to do—counts. Fight fascism! Choose the only way out of the hellscape of capitalism–choose communism!
Define to fight it - Information Box
Capitalists compete by any means necessary. Much like smaller criminal gangs, different groups of capitalists battle one another to secure territory, resources, and exploitable labor–the basis of their profits.They have created the state as a mechanism to manage and protect this ruthless profit-driven system. Through laws, police, prisons, elections, the military, schools, the media, and other institutions, the bosses have built a dictatorship to keep themselves in power—and keep the working class out of power.
Fascism is a stage of late capitalism in crisis where the liberal democratic veil peels away to reveal a rotting dictatorship. The bosses use state terror to discipline their own class and enforce compliance by the working class–both essential conditions for waging global war. Fascism is marked by more direct and centralized rule, with intensified racism, sexism, and nationalism.
The Big Fascists are the dominant finance capitalists, principally the multinational banks and oil companies (JPMorganChase, ExxonMobil). They’re trying to build a multiracial, patriotic coalition to back U.S. imperialism and protect their far-flung profits. This is the wing that plays the drums of World War III.
The Small Fascists are mostly domestically oriented capitalists, spearheaded by the Koch, Mercer, DeVos, and Coors families, along with Richard Mellon Scaife, Harry and Lynde Bradley, John Olin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch and a cast of other billionaires. They want to cut taxes for short-term profits and are reluctant to invest in costly ground wars to defend the global U.S. empire. Their agenda includes a racist gutting of social services at home and a retreat from U.S. imperialist alliances, including NATO.
Violence, a tool of the capitalist state - Information Box
Violence is part and parcel of the capitalist system. As CHALLENGE goes to press, the motives of 20-year-old Thomas Crooks are unclear. Whether this was an act of lone-wolf vigilantism or one backed by either side of the U.S. ruling class, it’s clear that both the Small and Big Fascists, cynical opportunists who they are, will exploit the incident for votes.
Before the blood dried on Trump’s ear, all shades of Democrats, from so-called socialist Bernie Sanders to Nancy Pelosi, quickly tweeted that “violence has no place in our democracy.” This is the same U.S. democracy that was built through genocide and enslavement. It’s the same democracy that spawned the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, that has lynched, deported, and incarcerated our class, that threw workers of Japanese descent into concentration camps, that terrorized Muslim workers after 9/11—and that’s just within the U.S. borders. The Big Fascists became the world’s biggest gangsters through violence on the daily.
But responding to organized state violence with acts of individual violence can only hurt the working class. To defeat the capitalist bosses, workers need mass, organized violence. We need communist revolution.
