From the Secretariat of the American Party of Labor–
Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States. Although the election results for the U.S. House of Representatives have not yet been fully tabulated, the Republicans now have majorities in the Senate and the Supreme Court, and can be said to control all branches of the federal government.
Trump’s re-election is yet another step towards open barbarism and the institutionalization of a reactionary form of politics representative of the general decline of the American capitalist system. Trump’s victory opens a new period of potential violence against minorities, women, all marginalized peoples, and the working class at large, necessitating the organization of immediate resistance.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci
As some seem to have forgotten, Trump’s previous term was marked by policies that served to enrich the capitalist class, caused setbacks in civil liberties, pursued imperialist geopolitical goals which are partially to blame for today’s genocide in Gaza, and racist immigration regulations which ripped apart working-class migrant families. While the American people rejected Trump in 2020, as demonstrated by his loss in the popular vote, progressives have unfortunately failed to address the underlying material conditions which bolster Trump’s popularity by settling for neoliberal candidates and policies which continue to drive increases in economic inequality and social degradation. At a time when many working-class Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, are stuck as permanent renters, and have seen real wage decreases among rising inflation and costs of living, it should be no surprise that they have broadly rejected the neoliberal policies of the Democrats and that so many refused to participate in the electoral process.
Key to fighting against this current iteration of reactionary politics is understanding that it has developed due to the increasing inevitability of crises within both society’s economic base and social superstructure. American capitalism has long supported its continued growth and profit rate through the expansion of its markets globally, however in the current period of resistance to American imperialism, in addition to increased competition with other imperialist forces, American capitalism’s ability to expand has become limited.
American capital simply cannot continue to manage its internal contradictions, as the need to continuously increase its profit margins leaves less surplus time and revenue to be devoted to maintaining the complex ideological apparatuses which previously built a false trust between the working class and the bourgeois system. As a result of this dissipation of its hold over social life, capital is resorting to simpler and more direct modes of repression and control.