• Organise the working-class fightback
• Fight for socialist change
Josh Asker, Editor of the Socialist
Is this the future capitalism has to offer?
Donald Trump has entered office for his second term as US president with a storm of executive orders promising to cut government jobs, attack migrants and “drill baby drill” for climate-damaging fossil fuels. Nearly 60 were signed in the first 24 hours.
Reactionary bile drips from his every word.
While at least for now the world’s richest men – the tech bros – are cosying up to Trump, large sections of the capitalist class fear the instability that he brings. They fear the economic consequences of his volatile rule, among other things. But above all they fear the working-class resistance that his policies will provoke, in the US and internationally.
Trump won because the Democrats lost. Because of working-class discontent with rising prices and falling living standards under Joe Biden.
In fact, behind the bravado and beneath the veneer of absolute dominance, the first cracks have already begun forming between different sections of the capitalists who have temporarily swung behind Trump.
For example, Trump’s high-profile former strategist and ‘Make America Great Again’ enthusiast Steve Bannon told Musk: “I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend”, referring to the issue of migrant visas.
A majority in the US reject Trump’s most reactionary rhetoric. 70% believe abortion should be legal in all or the majority of instances, for example. Millions can be mobilised in opposition to attacks on a women’s right to choose and on other issues too.
81% of voters said the economy was their number one issue in the election. But Trump will not make working-class Americans feel richer. On the contrary, by trying to rule in the interests of the super-rich capitalist elite, he will provoke workers’ struggle. Trump enters office with the level of strikes at their highest level in a generation.
Through those struggles, the question of the working class having its own independent political representation and party will be writ large. The emergence of such a force, from the world’s most powerful working class, in the world’s biggest capitalist economy, would send shockwaves around the world.
In deepening crisis, the profit system is revealing a very ugly face in the form of Trump and others like him. At the same time, the working class internationally is only just beginning to re-enter the stage.
By building and strengthening mass organisations and parties of the working class, and fighting to take power and wealth out of the hands of the capitalist bosses into the hands of the working class democratically, the rule of the bosses can be brought to an end.
That is capitalism’s future.
Read more:
- ‘Trumpism and it’s limits’ and ‘Trump’s second presidency begins – interview with a US socialist’ at socialistparty.org.uk