The day after Trump’s election an unprecedented stock market boom erupted with the fortunes of the ten richest capitalists in the country growing by $84 billion, an amount greater than any other single day in the history of Wall Street. The bonanza emerged due to a glut of speculative investments, some in expectation of Trump’s tariffs, cronyist dispersal of government contracts, and shooting down the potential regulation of Bitcoin which has become an easily manipulated free market cash cow for big capital to milk the savings of middle class investors. As sections of the big bourgeois salivate over the prospect of dismantling huge swaths of the Federal Government, liquidating its assets, and freeing up more government funds for their own capital accumulation, the continued trimming of regulations to allow for more freewheeling financial speculation, it all only works to hasten the eventual economic catastrophe. Yet in light of the momentary gains in the stock market following the election, the triumphant Trump has been hailed by the bourgeois as the most friendly president to Wall Street ever! This statement was made just weeks after over a dozen former Trump administration loyalists and John Kelly, a former military general and Secretary of Homeland Security under the President Elect, disclosed his open and repeated praise of Adolph Hitler while in office.

Thus in 2024, the capitalist class enthusiastically elected an out-and-out Hitler idolizer as their high chieftain, for the second time in the last decade. Despite the leftist howls and the raising of the bloody shirt of anti-fascism to defend democracy, we know that democracy is fascism and fascism is democracy, the two go hand in hand and are both as American as apple pie. The only way to stop the dictatorship of capital is through the dictatorship of the proletariat. What we have here is a perfect demonstration of the fusion of capital, democracy, and fascism. No matter if it unfolds in its fascistic or democratic veneer, for Capital’s continued accumulation the bourgeois will sacrifice all alleged high ideals & noble principles unleashing untold cruelty, carnage, destruction, and misery upon all life on the planet to ensure steady returns on their sacred dollars investments. For democracy has always only served as a means to the end of extending the absolute and totalitarian domination of their class dictatorship and justifying their imperialist military adventures as such nothing fundamentally changes with the return of Trump, only the continuation of a trajectory long set out before him.

The Republican Victory & the Election Casino

Beyond the billions invested into disgusting political propaganda to brainwash the working class into wasting their time voting for either of the capitalist class candidates, outside the hundreds of millions of dollars of speculative stock market investments, the sickening circus in 2024 also gave witness to the newly relegalized practice of outright gambling on elections which had been outlawed for many decades. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars of bets were placed on both candidates through online election betting markets. On their own, the bourgeois elections have become sources of casino-like speculation and capital accumulation, where an individual capitalist can make or lose tens of millions of dollars based on their chosen candidate being announced the winner.

In this way, the process of the elections has become increasingly commercialized and more directly tied to market dynamics, they reflect the divergent interests of the capitalist class voting with its dollars, expecting electoral returns on their investments, within the prevailing anarchy of production. For the capitalist class as a whole, it is callous economic calculations that drive and determine their ever shifting political commitments. In the policies of Trump, big capital best sees its interests of continued profit accumulation served at the moment, thus the once maligned Trump was elected head honcho of the bourgeoisie alongside his new sidekick Elon Musk who has been appointed leader of Trump’s presently only imaginary Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) a tongue in cheek nod to the humourous "meme" crypto-currency which was transformed into another speculative investment ponzi scheme by big capital investors to fleece working class and petit-bourgeois investors. The two are fitting leaders for the sleazy shakedown racket taking place by their clique of billionaires within the decrepit casino that is becoming the American bourgeois state.

Back in 2021, as we reported in TCP 36, the big bourgeois had made a huge vault to Biden and the Democrats, to the extent that Democrats were outspending the Trump campaign by an unheard of rate of three to one during the 2020 election. Amid the instability brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression that followed, and mass protests against police violence across the country, Biden was a candidate for the bourgeois who represented stability and certainty in economics and politics at the time; however, the immediate interests of the bourgeois have since shifted back over to the Republicans who have painted the state of the economy under Trump in delusional flowery colors, continuing to propagandize the working class masses with their deception that the state of the economy ebbs and flows almost completely dependent upon the policies of this or that president every 4-8 years so that increasing economic discontent of the working class masses is funneled back into one or the other of the two bourgeois parties every other election cycle.

Big Capital & Tech Swing to the Right

The Republican’s victory came amid a sharp swing in this electoral cycle of big capital from the Democratic Party camp to the MAGA platform mainly on account of Trump’s proposed protectionist trade policies and promises of tax cuts. The sharpest swing in support emerged from the wealthiest capitalists in the world within the tech sector who favor his hands off policies to artificial intelligence (AI) and Bitcoin amid his other deregulatory policies. Unlike the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump’s Republican Party agenda has now earned the support of the leaders of Silicon Valley, who have historically been staunch members of the Democratic Party’s "blue wall". Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and Tesla, who has become the richest man on earth (mostly from obtaining lucrative government contracts that propelled his companies), in 2018 described himself as a moderate who tended to lean Democrat, however in 2024 he personally stumped for Trump and donated over $140 million to the campaign. Providing incentive for Musk’s right turn, under the Biden administration Musk’s X social media network, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink companies have all increasingly become subjects of dozens of regulatory battles and overlapping federal investigations from all corners of the government putting them in jeopardy of losing lucrative government contracts they are dependent upon.

After the events of January 6th, 2021, Trump was removed from one of the largest social media platforms in the world, Twitter. Elon Musk subsequently purchased the platform in October 2022, rebranding it to X and adjusting its algorithm to propagandize and spread his rightist views and Trump loyalties and advance his personal celebrity status to which he, like Trump, has achieved a cult like following. Other Silicon Valley magnates such as Mark Zuckerberg who had previously booted Trump from his Facebook social network and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai CEO of Google lined up to kiss the Trump ring, congratulating him on his election win amid more subtle positive comments made during his campaign, despite the three not officially choosing to endorse either party. In a shift in policy, they all cracked down on leftist activism within their own companies this election and disallowed their social media and multimedia outlets from endorsing or expressing positive support for the Democrats.

This in itself represented a major shift to the right from these former extremely powerful bulwarks of "resistance" to Trump within the bourgeois, adding to a growing list of formerly liberal and "moderate" media outlets coming under the control of a small group of far right billionaires disinterested in liberal petit-bourgeois sentimentality and who wish to use their control of these communications technologies to reshape the society to more firmly conform to their bourgeois ideals. Drunk on power, many in the bourgeois now entertain lunatic dreams of attaining immortality through advanced medical procedures, transhumanist technologies, or, like Elon Musk only half jokingly aspires to become, "Imperator of Mars" as he receives billions in government grants to begin building a massive space infrastructure with his SpaceX program to start resource extraction projects in space. A slew of other lesser known but powerful venture capitalists within the tech industry such as David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Marc Andreessen moved their support of the Democratic Party to the Republicans.

The Faltering & False Democratic "Resistance"

The initial election of Trump in 2016 shocked the liberal establishment, not because anything he proposed to do was in substance radically different than the policies of the Obama administration but because he frankly and openly embraced the crude violent power games at the core of the bourgeois order and laughed off its hypocritical liberal veneer. The pacifying snake oil delirium of the Obama administration that was applied after the 2008 economic crash which exchanged the disastrous imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq for the clandestine program of targeted drone assassinations, was again exchanged for Trumps program of hunting of the "enemy within". The presidency of the first Black Commander in Chief, would see the rise of riotous street rebellions against the murder of Black and brown proletarians across the country, that eventually became known as the "Black Lives Matter" movement. The election of Trump in 2016 only threw fuel on this fire, and led to spontaneous street demonstrations across the country. The rage of these hyper exploited youth as a result for the inhumane senselessness of their murder in defense of property by the bourgeois police forces, transferred into rage against an entire system now openly demonstrating it’s hostility as Trump focused his tough on crime polemics against the BLM "terrorists".

Of course, as happened with the Black lives matters movement, the rage following Trumps election was all quickly tamed and diverted into reformist avenues by the grassroots elements of the Democratic Party apparatus, students and the liberal non-profit activist organizations who sought to profit off the situation and establish their political careers on the false hopes and dreams of "defunding the police" and other pie-in the sky solutions; however, a repeat of these events did not emerged in 2024, not because "no body cares anymore" as the pathetic liberals have been sobbing about, but because no one is surprised.

The last Trump term gave rise to the development of massive activist encampments attempting to surround and shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities in many cities, the return of the spontaneous mass action against police violence in the form of the rise of the 2020 George Floyd which left entire police departments burnt to the ground, amid a raging pandemic that resulted in a massive economic crisis and led to millions of workers being unemployed and living off of government subsidy checks. In addition to four long years of roving street brawls, with Trump supporters and anti-fascist frequently overrunning large sections of major American cities leaving thousands injured and many dead alongside them. The ultimate result of these years of dramatic activist, anti-fascist, and "abolitionist" street antics against the armadas of Trump supporting paramilitaries such as Proud Boys & Oath Keepers? Little more than stirring up more votes for their respective bourgeois candidates. The ensuing election of Biden allowed the illusion of bourgeois social peace to be restored and it was "back to brunch" for the middle class liberal intelligentsia, activists, anarchists, and anti-fascist adventurists who saw no reason to keep up their heroic resolve. Those who are serious about addressing the ensuing social crisis of capital know that it is only through the establishment of class unionism, via the active work within workers defensive organizations, diligently struggling to rebuild them with a classist character uniting our struggles and defending the most highly exploited, can we oppose the capitalist class offensive in a serious way that connects with the masses of workers on the grounds of the material economic struggle to see that ultimately it is synonymous with the political struggle between classes.

The Republican’s Agenda 47

The 2024 elections in the United States led to a sweeping victory for the Republican Party over the presidency and obtaining majorities in the Legislative Branch along with their continued retention of a majority in the Supreme Court. The program of the Republican Party under Trump is a platform called Agenda 47. The platform puts forward a program founded on a number of points. We will review them here to get a sense of the direction the Republican faction of the bourgeoisie wishes to move in with the understanding that what they are actually able to accomplish remains to be seen.

A central focus repeated throughout the Republican’s manifesto is the political persecution of "Marxists" and "leftists". The document focuses on creating systems to verify the "patriotic" commitments of school teachers before providing licensure. Additionally, it aims to create systems to overhaul the university accreditation system removing funding for campuses that endorse leftist views, while threatening to deport all immigrant students who engage in protests against the Israeli bourgeois states! actions in Gaza. The platform is also replete with condemnations of the "deep state", which represents established figures indoctrinated with the traditional bourgeois values within the state bureaucracies, who opposed Trump’s illegal methods in his previous presidency. He threatens to use his administration to imprison his former opponents and prosecute media outlets that censor Republican Party propaganda and its countless factual fabrications. He is calling for special councils to organize the purge of his political enemies within the bourgeois state with a particular focus on the mass firing of generals and admirals in the military and cleaning house within the intelligence agencies. Additionally, he promises to defund "sanctuary cities", which became a thorn in his immigration policies in his last term from Federal government support.

We can see in these proposed policies a parallel to the two historical "Red Scares" in America which have been perpetuated under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The same methods were employed by the bourgeoisie during the international revolutionary wave following the Bolshevik Revolution, and again under McCarthyism in response to the rising proletarian struggles after the conclusion of World War Two, to purge communist and leftist leadership from the universities, Hollywood, the government and of most importantly of the unions. Acts such as the Communist Control Act of 1954, outlawed the Stalinist Communist Party and criminalized participation in affiliation with "communist-action" groups.

How far reaching the political purges will be able to go under Trump is highly questionable, the effective execution of his measures would also likely create a brain drain within the bourgeois state and military structures making them increasingly ineffective and unstable. Additionally, his current list of proposed loyalist appointees features individuals with minimal experience in managing large organizations, which could likely lead to bogging down and complete dysfunction of critical institutions for maintaining bourgeois class repressive power as they are swallowed in internal fighting between the warring factions.

They aspire to realize the long standing Republican aim of abolishing the federal Department of Education and moving the education system to a private system in addition to calling for the funding of new pathways to obtain higher education through the creation of new patriotic universities backed by private financing and taxes put on the existing universities, that would offer free college alongside a nationalist indoctrination. Beyond this, they plan to roll back the Biden era SAVE plan which will result in many cases the doubling of student loan debt repayment costs for millions something that is virtually guaranteed to happen.

Central to their platform is the promise of organizing the largest mass deportation in US history. Trump boasts of immediately deporting millions of immigrants; however, his plan for implementing such a promise seems distant as was his promise of building a large wall on the southern border during his last term and he currently has no realistic plan for funding the project which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, his administration in his first term proved unable to deport more immigrants than other administrations, and his cruel policy of family separation, he was ultimately forced to reverse.

According to the Pew Research Center, "The share of workers who are immigrants increased slightly from 17% in 2007 to 18% in 2022. By contrast, the share of immigrant workers who are unauthorized declined from a peak of 5.4% in 2007 to 4.8% in 2022". Despite the fact that immigration levels in the United States have more or less remained stable over the last two decades, a manufactured hysteria over a number of falsified stories such as Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield Ohio which are consistently spread on the media to stir up the ages old racist misdirection of class antagonism onto immigrants stealing jobs, raping and murdering women and as the source of the drug epidemic and crisis. The actions by the Fed to crush the wages of workers by creating more competition for jobs and thus more unemployment through raising interest rates after the opening of the War on Ukraine is misdirected onto the immigrant who is blamed for "stealing jobs". The Republican Party machine and its associated media conglomerates stir up panic in their followers; however, as we have mentioned the true aim of this policy is not to actually stop immigration but to create a section of hyper-exploited immigrants stripped of all bourgeois rights that can be utilized in a matter analogous to slave labor. The mobilization of the military to assist with deportations would likely be used to assist with the building of more immigrant detention centers of which the state has only a limited number and can only deport as many as it can house in such facilities. Of course often immigrants will end up languishing in these centers for years and becoming subjected to years of prison slave labor. Corporations such as the GEO group run almost all of the states immigrant detention centers and like the planter class of old, require a constant expansion of hard on crime policies to keep fresh supply of slave labor and lucrative state contracts coming in.

In regards to race and gender issues, the Republicans renew their attack against their longstanding strawman of "equity and inclusion" policies, affirmative action, and the teaching of America’s history with racism in schools which the Republicans have titled "Critical Race Theory". They also aim at banning the teaching of "gender ideology" within schools and aim for reversal on gender affirming healthcare practices within the US government that will further limit healthcare access for millions of transgender and gender non-conforming people. The hard on crime policies that advocate for giving the death penalty to drug dealers alongside boosteristic comments regarding the police, and with his policies against minority groups and immigrants, it aims to keep some ethnic and gender groups in a position to be extra exploited layers for Capital, while the select few of vetted conformists are elevated to the ranks of the shrinking middle classes and labor aristocracies to serve capital. He has taken a more moderate position on abortion, while he now is peddling the idea of providing "baby bonuses" to increase the birth rate. Trump has departed from traditional Republican positions in regards to his support for fully funding Medicaid and Social Security.

As we discussed in TCP 60 a central component of Trump’s campaign has been the weaponizing of tariffs to wage economic warfare across the world in an acclaimed attempt to reshore industry back to the United States. For the national capital, reshoring industry is essential if the United States wishes to go to war with the world’s workshop, China; however, their success in doing this in a thorough way remains questionable. The likelihood of massive inflation if these policies are applied as presented in the campaign is guaranteed. To what extent Trump actually leverages the tariffs or merely uses them as a threat is yet to be seen; however, his promise of lowering inflation is highly contradicted by his promise of implementing astronomical tariffs on the U.S.’s two largest trading partners early in his presidency.

The Trump platform explicitly promises to prevent World War Three by bringing about a rapid end to the conflict in Ukraine. As we have reviewed also in TCP 60, it is already largely a lost cause with Russia’s eventual victory guaranteed, so for the bourgeois, a reversal in position on Ukraine is necessary at this moment. For U.S. imperialism a total victory in Ukraine is not necessary. Its larger objective of keeping German capital to the side of the US has been accomplished and a rapid escalation of the imperialist war at this very moment does not suit the interest of US imperialism, which is busying itself with an attempt to build up its productive industries ahead of war with China. Under Trump, he promises a whole scale re-evaluation of the use of the NATO coalition itself as it seems that some in the bourgeois hope to rekindle ties with Russia in possible hopes of isolating it from China by allowing Russia to develop more fully as its own regional imperialist power. A notion violently rejected by the established military heads within the bourgeois government. And it was for his position on Ukraine that he was initially charged and impeached by the Democrats during his presidency as we reported in TCP 18. Trump’s apparent "isolationist" agenda is built upon higher funding for the military and a doubling down on the Reagan era promises of weaponizing space and creating a missile defense "iron dome" around the United States.

The Trump campaign attempted to win over workers by flirting with the Teamsters and dressing Trump up like a McDonald’s worker and then a garbage man. His platform throws a bone at workers in promising to exempt service workers from taxation of their tips. Thus while the Trump campaign has signaled tolerance for the established regime trade unions, both capitalist parties Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: On the US Elections increasingly courting them in expectation of the need for pacified labor in advance of an inflating economy, the threats of a renewed Red Scare by Trump also aim at ensuring their subordination for Capital as it continues to develop its war economy. Likewise, he has also put forward plans radically breaking with established Republican policies by promising to create social programs to end homelessness, "clean up American cities", and has vague proposals for building new mega structure monuments to "patriotic" historical figures.

Another major focus of the manifesto is in regard to deregulations that benefit the US oil industry, and ending tax credits for electric vehicles to benefit US automanufacturers. While the presence of Elon Musk in the Trump administration, owner of the largest electric vehicle company in the United States, would seem to be contrary to this policy Tesla’s "unmatched" scale and longer history of making profitable EVs, could give it "a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment". Tesla’s lead in the U.S. market may also be buffered by higher tariffs on Chinese imports, which could "continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players (BYD, Nio, etc.) from flooding the US market over the coming years".

The Revolutionary Catastrophe

As the bourgeois continue to expose the naked reality of the totalitarian nature of their fascist democratic states and move forward their preparation for the next general inter-imperialist war, we do not despair because it is on this path that the historical stage for the revolutionary catastrophe will eventually be set and from the inherent instability of the capitalist economy, its unavoidable boom and bust cycles, the re-emergence of the class struggle on a mass scale is inevitable, if not immediate but assisted by the ever advancing communications technologies which when the time is right will provide the basis for a qualitative leap of the class struggle and the unification of the of proletarians masses under the revolutionary Marxist program. The continued liquidation of the democratic illusion will only help make the revolutionary necessity all the more obvious to the masses when this unhealthy capitalism finally explodes and the next general inter-imperialist war emerges. The re-establishment of a combative class unionism and its development into a generalized classist civil war united behind the slogans of revolutionary defeatism advanced by its international communist party will eventually result in the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat and the exit of the vicious domination of capital from history, even if today it seems a far off prospect. For now, the organized forces of the proletariat remain small, scattered, and disorganized; however, the rising waves of strike action and combative unionism across the globe show that the sparks of the live wire of proletarian struggle are re-energizing in a way that is already horrifying to the bourgeoisie.

Thus as big capital mobilizes itself for a speeding up of the liquidation of the middle classes that service its state and the creation of an enlarged section of hyper-exploited workers with precarious legal rights through its attacks on immigrants, amid the reorganization of its production system within its national territories in preparation for the next inter-imperialist war, it is completely rational how at this juncture Capital would move to take off its democratic velvet glove to take back up its iron hammer of fascism; however, as the forefathers of our Party in the Communist Party of Italy said when fascism first emerged in Italy to curb the revolutionary threat raised by the workers movement of the time, fascism is not a maneuver that will prolong the existence of this rotten putrefying system; to the contrary, it foreshadows its last act.