Trump and the question of Fascism

European elites are not happy with the victory of Donald Trump. Smug university ‘leftists’ are just as unhappy. The French fake leftist newspaper Libération called President-Elect Trump ‘American psycho’. They are horribly upset that political correctness may now be over. Their professional sophists have been brought in to clarify matters. Freedom of expression, they write, is not the freedom to say what you think but the duty to respect the thoughts of others. Ergo, I can only say things other people will like, what will not offend or upset people. We are at the bottom of the liberal trash can. Readers of Bret Easton Ellis will be surprised at the choice of ‘American psycho’ to describe Trump. In Ellis’ novel, Patrick Bateman is a psychopathic Wall Street banker, whose hobby is killing – sounds more like Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump! In these tenebrous times there is an eery sense of Macbeth’s forebodings: “Nothing is but what is not”.

The corporate-funded fake left website Democracy Now! are also mourning and weeping after the Trump victory. They ran a headline: ‘ From the first African-American president to one supported by the Ku Klux Klan: Trump wins in upset’. Democracy Now! are referring to David Duke, a ‘white nationalist’ who was formerly grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. There is one fundamental difference between David Duke and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!‘s anchor. Duke left the KKK many years ago and claims to no longer support them. Amy Goodman claims to be opposed to the KKK. However, when CIA-backed racist terrorists took over Libya in 2011, publicly lynching and beheading black Libyans, Amy Goodman supported the racist ‘revolution’ while David Duke opposed it. There have been thousands of lynchings in Libya and Syria since then and not once has Goodman spoken about the real reasons for the wars, not once has Goodman interviewed any of the journalists exposing the corporate media’s lies and disinformation against two world leaders of anti-racism Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Al-Assad.

Duke and Goodman have a lot more in common than most people realise. Duke bases his entire career on telling lies and fables about the Soviet Union and communist ideology. The same rabid anti-communism forms the basis of Democracy Now‘s liberal, anarchist ideology. But I have more respect for Duke. Although everything he says about communism is based on Cold War imperialist propaganda and lies spread by intelligence operatives such as Robert Conquest and dishonest historians such as Timothy Snyder, Duke is honest about what he stands for: He wants the return of the White, Christian elite and an end to Jewish domination of America. He wants to replace one ruling caste with another. He’s not pretending to be left-wing.

Goodman will be happy to see the United States erupt in civil war. She doesn’t need to worry, being massively wealthy and protected by the CIA. In fact, civil war will be good for Democracy Now!. They may get to act out the role of ‘revolutionaries’, Arab Spring style. When you have former Nazi collaborators like George Soros backing you, you have a good chance of success. Perhaps Goodman cares about her Jewish tribe, which is why Zionism funds her. Zionism hasn’t done much for the masses of working-class Jews struggling to survive in the desert of the Middle East under Likudnik reaction – surrounded by Wahhabi terrorists created by the Likudnik regime – but you won’t hear about that on Democracy Now!. So, with Duke and Goodman, you have white Christian supremacy versus Jewish supremacy. Perhaps they need each other!

So now the urban, White, ‘anti-racists’ are marching on the streets and getting increasingly violent. When Trump visits Europe there will be massive demonstrations and violence. The ‘hoodie-utionairies’ will be out on the streets. People are saying Trump is the new Hitler, which is about as stupid as saying Sanders is a socialist.

Geopolitics and the far right

Fascism was a reactionary social and political movement created by the European bourgeoisie in order to prevent proletarian revolution in a period where the world’s first socialist state was, through centralised state planning, proving that it was a superior mode of production. Fascist movements were a reaction to the threat of social revolution by the exploited against their exploiters. Petty bourgeois liberal leftists like to pontificate about the necessity of creating a ‘social republic’. In France, one of the leaders of the Nuit Debout movement Frederic Lordon repeatedly referred to this notion of a social republic. But a social republic is only possible on the basis of an alliance of classes under a strong nationalist voluntarist bourgeoisie.

It is ironic, therefore, to find the soi-disant ‘anti-fascists’ and the ‘fascists’ such as Marine Le Pen all calling for a ‘social republic’. The difference between the 1930s and today, however, is that then everyone was talking about socialism. The Soviets were building socialism according to the guidelines of scientific Marxism, while Italy and Germany were constructing capitalist states with a social orientation. But if the petty bourgeois leftists really wanted something like a ‘social republic’ today, they would be voting for the National Front, who are also calling for a ‘social republic’! The petty bourgeois far leftists and the petty bourgeois far rightists all want a social republic. The former are idealist and can never deliver while the latter are to a certain extent realist but deeply cynical and depressingly obtuse.

In the 1930s, Britain and the United States needed a strong Germany to counter-act the USSR, which is why they initially supported Hitler. They also needed to create a counter-movement which could be presented to workers as ‘socialism’. National socialism was the result. The National Socialist regime was used by the West to destroy the USSR – a fact acknowledged by the Soviets after the war. The West could not have openly supported the German regime as there would have been a worker’s revolt at home.Communist parties in Britain, France and the United States were organised and strikes could bring the country to a halt. As the USSR no longer exists, the geopolitical chessboard today is considerably different to the 1930s.

Today, ‘progressive’ forces are allied with Russia once again but there is a fundamental difference: The far-right in Europe is pro-Russian. That does not make the far-right good. The far-right or populist parties represent a nationalist bourgeois ideology and have emerged from decades of opposition to the revisionist USSR and PRC on the one hand and Trotskyite leftism on the other. When those two anti-communist ideologies become ‘The Left’, it is hard to blame people for being right wing! A huge segment of support for Donald Trump comes from the ‘Alt- Right’ which is a gallimaufry of contradictory ideas and paradoxical positions. Today’s populism is favourable to Eurasian integration and is formally democratic whereas the fascist movements of the 1930s were dictatorial and were used by the Atlantic powers to divide the European peninsula from the Eurasian landmass.

Today the Nazi regime in Ukraine is allied with the Western imperial elite. Fascism in the 1930s was a geopolitical instrument of Anglo-Saxon imperialism on the European continent. Populism today is becoming more and more an ally of Russian diplomacy against Western imperialism. Russian media outlets in France, for example, give far more favourable coverage of Marine Le Pen than the mainstream French media. Le Pen was forced to take a loan from a Russian bank to finance her election campaign as she claims that all the French banks refused to finance her. The Russians have no time for petty bourgeois leftism: They shot the Trotskyites in the 1930s and even in the worst hours of Soviet revisionism, the Russians and Central Asian brothers never forget the man Lenin called ‘Judas Trotsky’. It is one of the many reasons why one must always respect Russia!

In many respects, the reemergence of a nationalist Russia from the ruins of the post-Soviet space has led to an entirely new, geopolitical and ideological configuration of forces.What was considered right-wing and reactionary in the past has become to a certain degree progressive and even revolutionary in the present. In Spain in the 1930s, fascist rebels and Trotskyite ultra-leftists smashed the popular front of communists and liberals, keeping the oligarchy in power. Today, the internationalist comprador bourgeoisie, ‘Power Elite’ or ‘globalists’ seem to be threatened by the rise of populism in the same way oligarchs were threatened by social democrats in the 1930s, and once again the agents of the oligarchy are the Trotskyite leftists, calling for a ‘social republic’ yet perfectly happy when the Western elites they claim to oppose bomb social republics like Libya and Syria; leftists who scream ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ in the service of the most brutal form of Western neocolonialism.

From a communist perspective, populists are no less class enemies than progressive liberals were in the 1930s. But unlike the social democrats of the last century, there are almost no communists left today to pose a serious threat to monopoly capitalism. Marxist-Leninists today lack the unity and vision to become a force of revolutionary democracy. Many of them are more concerned about legitimising gender confusion on social media than proletarian revolution. The contradictions of the world imperialist system are leading to the rise of populism. And it looks increasingly likely that populism will constitute a new transitional epoch in capitalism. But will this new transitional epoch be good or bad? It is extremely difficult to say. Many of the social values populism promotes, ie the family, tradition, cultural authenticity etc are closer to proletarian values than the values promoted by liberalism. Communists will, therefore, have to play a key role in leading the transition from populism to socialism. But it will take at least a decade of historical and ideological revision and indefatigable activism for such a synthesis to come about. So, while right-wing populism is a mere re-marketing of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it nevertheless, expresses a capitulation to values closer to those of the proletariat. In Leninist terms, it represents a ‘New Economic Policy’ of imperialism in the global capitalist project: they want to take one step backwards in order to take two steps forward. Our objective should be to turn that backward step into an irrevocable retreat!

I have theorised this division at the heart of imperialism as a civil war between the national and the comprador bourgeoisie, or financial and industrial capitalism. An example of just how paradoxical all of this is for defining ‘left’ and ‘right’ is exemplified in Putin’s visit to Hungary last year, where the Russian leader paid tribute to the Red Army soldiers who died while crushing the counter-revolution in popular, democratic Hungary in 1956. Orban and his followers have been rewriting Hungarian history to present the Horthyist right as nationalist heroes, while Putin has appeased communists and nationalists alike in Russia by paying respect to the Red Army. Orban and Putin are ideologically similar, yet both leaders stand at the intersection of contradictory historical, ideological and geopolitical currents.

The emergence of a new discourse

The contemporary world imperialist order is breaking down. We are coming to the denouement of a global crisis of capitalism. The United States is faced with the reality that it can no longer outsource all of its industry to Asia. While it true that Donald Trump has a plethora of belligerent neocons running his foreign policy establishment, there is the possibility at the very least that the reconfiguration of geopolitical alignments due to the failure of NATO in Syria and the redefinition of what can be considered progressive in new media platforms, present the possibility of change in the direction of genuinely anti-capitalist forces. Whether the discourse is rightist or leftist, the increasing consensus is that capitalism is the problem and as Yeats put it ‘the centre cannot hold’.

There are some possibilities to consider about the Trump regime. It may no longer push with the same zeal the LGBT pseudo-science and brainwashing of young children. The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality may now no longer be persecuted and outlawed. Vice-President Pence, although a neo-con warmonger, has nevertheless progressive views on sexuality and favours the work of NARTH. That doesn’t make Pence a ‘progressive’ per se. But it might enable the leaders of the Black Liberation movement to be heard. They have denounced the LGBT movement’s role in waging war on the black male on behalf of a White supremacy  –  and Jewish supremacy in particular.

The thousands of distinguished scientists who have exposed the problems with Roger Revelle’s anthropogenic global warming theory may now be in a position to challenge establishment’s views on meteorology which are having a devastating effect on the lives of working people; that would be a major blow to globalisation and would also turn the public’s attention towards the nefarious and insane project of geoengineering – one of the greatest dangers facing humanity.

Donald Trump was so detested by the corporate media establishment, he had to turn to alternative media outlets for a fair hearing. That shows that the ruling establishment, which is so dependent on controlling discourse, is now seeking to co-opt alternative voices and redirect them towards the interests of the Trumpist faction of the ruling class. While news stations such as Alex Jones’ ‘Infowars’ often publish important and truthful news and analysis, their fanatical anti-communism, and Zionist influence make them a key part of the emerging Trumpist establishment.

Alex Jones’ role in getting Trump elected is a positive development in so far as it proves that the corporate media establishment no longer has any credibility, but Jones is every bit as much an ideological enemy of the working class as Donald Trump. A major part of the Infowars agenda is to spread lies and misinformation about any system which offers an alternative to capitalism. The fact that they do not even allow a discussion or debate on these issues shows a lack of sincerity in their ‘truth’ activism. The erratic, aggressive and psychotic behaviour of Alex Jones discredits genuine activism. In a nation where hundreds of thousands of people work in the ‘intelligence community’ one needs to maintain a constant attitude of scrupulous vigilance.

Close attention should be paid to how Infowars covers the next major terrorist attack in America or the United States, as it may reveal much about the nature of the emerging Trumpist establishment. Now that the ‘Islamic State’ has been created. The focus will be on ‘radical Islam’. The fact that Abdul Al-Wahhab, the nutcase who founded the violent anti-Islamic sect in the 18th century was a Jewish false convert to Islam will be ignored. Zionism is the enemy of the United States, not Islam.

What is remarkable about Trump and right-wing populists-in-general is the function of caricature and vulgarity in the articulation of discourse deemed by the establishment to be ‘taboo’ or ‘politically incorrect’. Appealing to the basest instincts of the lobotomised masses is classic ruling-class strategy- particularly in a period where confidence in ruling class ideology is almost nonexistent among the masses. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has also resorted to vulgarity in an effort to curry favour with the ‘ordinary man’.

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But Trumpist cognitive dissonance which relies on broaching taboo subjects and taking controversial positions such as the agenda of the LGBT movement and global warming are themes where scientific, Marxist analysis could infiltrate and deconstruct the specious debate by showing how the proliferation of pseudo-science and sexual perversion are symptoms of capitalist, political economy in terminal decline.

That is why a counter movement to Trump from the left cannot ‘get behind’ Trotskyite sell outs such as Bernie Sanders, as philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek argue. Leftists need to understand that Trumpism is closer to proletarian values as they exist under American capitalism; many of those values reflect agrarian pre-capitalist attitudes and Trump won precisely because workers could identify more with provincial, racist demagoguery than the pseudo-internationalist posturing of the petty bourgeois. They should also note, as James Petras points out, that many of the people who voted for Trump were from the educated but disenfranchised middle class.

Agrarian pre-capitalist attitudes to family and sexuality are more conducive to the altruistic relations of love and kinship needed to form a socialist society. Skepticism towards officially sanctioned ‘science’ that conforms with a liberal, finance capitalist agenda of imposing global governance through draconian taxation or a parasitical service economy, is an aspect evinced by many Trumpists and a considerable faction of the industrialist ruling class.

One faction of the oligarchy promotes pseudo-science to justify an agenda of global governance through taxation, while the other faction promotes the real economy. In this sense, the Republican ‘climate change deniers’ are more ‘left-wing’ than the Wallstreet carbon taxers. That is not to say that they don’t all kiss and makeup when they meet for sessions of the Council on Foreign relations and the Trilateral Commission. They all serve the same fundamental class interests but there are disagreements on policy.

There will be no ‘revolution’ in America if men are all effeminate, disarmed, pot-smoking hipsters demanding their government cloud seed their skies and thus spray them with toxic chemicals to “save the planet”. Arrogance and pride are the overriding features of many Sanderistas and Sorosite leftists ; there is no other way of saying it – they are incorrigibly stupid, whereas the Trumpists are not all stupid and many are capable of becoming a progressive force if an only if, they see Trump for what he is: a con man and a gangster (perhaps even worse but I hope I am wrong!) who has been chosen by one section of the oligarchy to more effectively run a crumbling empire.

In many respects, Trump could be described as another Obama. Obama was the black, liberal, educated good cop responsible for mass killing marketed as ‘humanitarian interventions’. Trump is white, conservative, brutish bad cop who not only wants to kill terrorists but their wives and kids too. Obama offered to be more conciliatory with Cuba and Iran and was to a degree, but left a trail of destruction everywhere else. Trump is posing as a Russophile who will back  President Assad of Syria but wants to bolster Zionism by opening an American embassy in Jerusalem. He also has raving maniacs in his foreign policy administration who want to bomb Iran!

Nevertheless, we must now think and try to work out the prospects for the possibility of a popular front against oligarchy, which takes into account the new geopolitical and class struggles of our time. I was recently asked on to a Press TV French programme on the philosophy of liberalism. I was asked to explain what liberalism was and why its era seems to have passed. I began by discussing Marx’s famous essay ‘Zur Judenfrage’- ‘On the Jewish Question’, where the German philosopher critiques the concept of human rights as being the philosophical expression of bourgeois property rights – a particularly Jewish concept. Then we listened to a recording of the French ‘alternative right’ philosopher Alain de Benoit, where he proceeded in a far more eloquent manner than I, to explain the same text. Communists and populists are sharing platforms, whether we like it or not and we are agreeing on lots of fundamental issues.

The necessity of a popular front

It is time to grow up and face the reality that the material forces of this world have brought people together from opposite philosophical and political traditions, representing or claiming to represent antagonistic classes. The social gains of the last century were won through the strategic vision of leaders who were capable of arguing the case of their class in platforms with class enemies. If there is anything good to say about the Trump victory, it is that Trotskyism, anarchism, social democracy and their liberal democratic paymasters are in crisis and will lose the hegemony they hitherto enjoyed.

We communists have a clear choice: neither populism nor liberal democracy, (“neither peace nor war”) or a strategic front or – at the very least – engaged dialogue with populism against Sorosite, petty bourgeois reaction in the service of liberal imperialism and Zionism. If we defend the former ultra-leftist slogan, we will undoubtedly become agents of chaos and destruction. If we defend the latter, we have the possibility at the very least of leading a movement against globalisation, human rights terrorism, endless wars and the reification of human life. People will have to understand that there are many fronts to the war – climate, gender, civil liberties, health, and many more.The war is being waged by capitalist internationalists who are fully conscious of their class interests and united on that basis. We need to do the same!

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Cover image thanks to Flickr user Gage Skidmore, used under Creative Commons. No alterations were made to the image.