In Trump’s America, the historical goals of the proletariat do not change

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 22; February 2025)

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In the last period, the world situation has been marked by two wars – in Ukraine and in Israel/Palestine – directly affecting the interests of the major imperialist powers, by economic-political confrontations with inevitable military extensions throughout the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen –, by growing tensions on strategic maritime routes – Baltic, Black Sea, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, the Indo-Pacific, South China Sea and the surrounding areas – by the countries of sub-Saharan Africa in permanent turmoil, where influences and alliances are being redrawn against a backdrop of guerrilla warfare, where the former Western colonial powers are increasingly being ejected from the territories they once dominated, and where Eastern imperialisms are penetrating with ever greater audacity.

This world situation reveals once again what Marxism has always predicted: competition between the great imperialist states, eager for economic territories and new markets for their commodities and capital, not only increases their antagonism, but pushes them ever further towards generalized war; it then will be a question of redrawing a new imperialist world order in which the powers that currently dominate the world – the United States of America and China, with the second and third-ranks imperialist powers in tow – will strive to dominate their adversary in order to make their interests prevail over the whole planet. It is in this context that the US presidential elections took place, which could determine the fate not only of the West, but of the bourgeois world in general.

Therefore we can only deal with this subject from the point of view of the changing of the guard in the White House sanctioned by Trump’s victory on November 6.

Our article on the presidential election (1) highlights an unpleasant reality, but one that must be faced head-on with an understanding of its causes: the arrogance of bourgeois political power must not only be seen in the ways of doing, presenting and speaking of its leading representatives; it must also be seen in relation to the general subjugation into which the proletarian class is plunged in America, and elsewhere.

The more submissive and defeatist the proletariat is, the more the bourgeoisie mocks it, deceives it, scorns it, treats it as something worthless. It is only when proletarians raise their heads, enter into struggle, show their antagonism to the bourgeoisie and their willingness to use force to obtain satisfaction of their immediate demands, that the bourgeoisie says it is ready to “dialogue”, to show interest in their demands; then there are no elections where candidates do not declare their determination to satisfy their most pressing demands. According to journalists in the various US media, Trump’s election campaign was marked by promises to workers to fight high inflation and competition from non-American products, both to raise the value of wages and to increase domestic production and fight foreign competition in order to defend American jobs.

But back in September 2023, during the strike at the Big Three (Ford, GM and Stellantis), both Biden and Trump intervened to “support” the workers’ demands. Biden visited GM strikers in Wayne to say: “Corporations are making huge profits, and they need to share them with workers. You deserve meaningful raises”, and Trump in Detroit for an election rally, declaring: “I am here to defend the working class, fight the corrupt political class, protect American jobs and the American dream against foreign products” (especially against Chinese production, far more advanced in the electric car sector). The things responsible for workers’ miserable living conditions would therefore be superprofits (for Biden), foreign products, especially Chinese (for Trump) (2).

Nothing new under the sun!

When bourgeois politicians argue that workers are right to demand higher wages and greater job security, they are doing their job as hucksters. From the height of their social privileges and billions, it costs them nothing to say a few words in support of the proletarians’ basic demands; but none of them thinks of explaining how – thanks to their intervention, for which they demand their vote – their general living conditions will improve. They claim that it is only through “economic growth”, i.e. increased productivity and victory in competitive wars, that the proletariat’s living conditions will improve. Provided, of course, that the impenetrable laws of the market do not get in the way....

Will our “heroes” be able to bend the economic laws of capitalism according to which it is the ever-increasing exploitation of wage labor that guarantees capitalist profits and overprofits, and it is the hyper-craziness of mercantile production that creates the increasingly ruthless competition in the international market and causes the economic crises that have been crises of overproduction for more than a century and a half now ?

Measures taken by the bourgeois powers to resolve the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production may temporarily alleviate the pressure on the general living conditions of the proletarian masses, but they are and will prove ineffective in the long term. If one sector of the proletariat is better paid, it is because other sectors are less so. Capitalist production is so interconnected in all its sectors and productive processes, and at international level, that its production costs depend on the continually fluctuating average prices of all the different components needed for final production (just think of energy costs) and of the workforce employed, including the costs of storage, conservation, distribution and disposal of unsold quantities.

Only in certain phases of capitalist development has the dominant bourgeoisie of the industrialized countries been able to intervene effectively in favor of the general living conditions of the proletarian masses. For example, the end of the second world imperialist war coincided with the start of a cycle of strong economic expansion; then, in all the developed countries, both those not ravaged by the war (such as the USA, Canada, Spain, etc.) and those whose priority was reconstruction (most European countries, Japan, Russia, etc.) the bourgeoisies adopted a policy they had never followed during the long period of unlimited classical liberalism: “a form of self-limitation of capitalism”  that “leads to a levelling of the extortion of surplus value around an average.” (3), i.e. «a new method of planification for running the capitalist economy».

This policy was certainly not due to the goodwill of capitalists who, after the immense holocaust of the world war, would have decided not to be as ruthlessly hungry for profit and blood as before. In reality, the dominant bourgeoisie had learned its lesson not only from the war that had just ended, but also from all the previous ones, and from the way the proletarian movement had reacted to capitalist exploitation and war – since Europe in 1848, Paris in 1871, Russia in 1917, Germany in 1919. To avoid facing a revolutionary movement from a proletariat which, for its part, had accumulated class communist experience and tradition, and as they divided the world into zones of influence, the post-war bourgeoisies drew from the experience of fascism in Italy and Germany what they needed to consolidate their political power. This consisted in generally applying and institutionalizing the policy of class collaboration introduced by fascism, and reinforcing it with the new method of economic planification mentioned above; i.e., with this self-limitation of the extortion of surplus-value around an average which satisfies the needs of the capitalists, while responding in the most generalized way possible to the most pressing needs of the proletarian masses.

The policy of social shock-absorbers is exactly in line with this approach. The fact that it was presented and implemented in democratic forms rather than totalitarian and fascist ones, as in the days of Fascist Italy and, in the much more organized form of German National Socialism, undoubtedly helped to bind the broad proletarian masses to the fate of bourgeois economics and politics – all the more so after they had been deceived, disoriented and betrayed by the official communism that had imposed itself under the name of Stalin.

Beyond democracy’s smooth talking on infinite freedoms, the development of capitalism in its imperialist phase works precisely against these freedoms. Economically, it tends to build ever larger and more powerful monopolies, to the point of bending states to their interests; politically, it tends to increase authoritarianism, which is merely the antechamber to open totalitarianism. The state presents itself as the supreme authority above the classes, capable of reconciling the interests of all social strata; in reality, it has always been the instrument for defending not the “rights of everyone”, but the interests of the great economic and financial powers against the rights and interests of all those who have not been absorbed by these great powers. The latest Covid-19 pandemic amply demonstrated this reality, even though it was clothed in democratic and parliamentary forms.

 

The basic conditions of the proletariat are the same, in the USA like everywhere in the world

 

When the bourgeoisie feels the need to involve the proletarian masses in support of its general interests – for example, during general elections or pre-war tensions – it sets in motion its usual propaganda machine; the main representatives of the various parties vying for government positions spout the classic refrains about defending national production, the family, workers and democratic rights... One of the arguments used to gather votes is to promise workers that their immediate conditions will improve thanks to lower taxes and increased investment in national production, which they claim will improve the living and working conditions of the working masses. This is how the bourgeoisie deals with workers: as a class for capital, i.e. a class exclusively for capital and its valorization. As Marx demonstrated, capital is only valorized by wage labor, i.e. by the systematic and ever more intensive exploitation of the working class.

It is obvious that the immediate interests of the proletarian class concern their working and living conditions within the capitalist system of production, and they do not go beyond this system. The living conditions of proletarians depend on the wage system that regulates relations between workers and capitalists, and on the working conditions in which they operate. If they do not work, proletarians do not eat. The fact is, there is not enough work created by capitalism for all the proletarians: unemployment, i.e the industrial reserve army, is an inescapable reality of capitalism. This industrial reserve army is at the disposal of capital and can only weigh on the proletarian class as a whole by developing what is inevitable in a mercantile framework: competition with active proletarians. Unemployed labor power is a low-cost commodity, but also a commodity that does not always find an outlet on its specific market, the labor market. As with all commodities without a market outlet, the fate of this labor power-commodity is the same as that of all others: sale or trash.

Every city has its suburbs, every suburbs has its slums; the more capitalism develops, the more cities spread out and the more they divide into a small central part – rich and affluent, full of stores and luxury establishments, also full of headquarters of major industries and banks – a larger part for the so-called middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, and an even larger part – peripheral, degraded and underserviced – for the proletariat and sub-proletariat. Naturally, the economic disorder that characterizes capitalism, with its growths, crises and recessions, is also reflected in the layout of cities: they change ever more frequently, either by acquiring new transport lines, or by making use of certain spaces and land obtained by emptying entire neighborhoods to make way for new buildings and that manner, getting a grip on land rents. From this point of view, American cities have shown the world what “progress” in modern cities is all about: the differentiation between “residential” neihbourhoods, the so-called cities with their skyscrapers, and the luxury buildings housing big banks, stock exchanges and multinational corporations; working-class neighborhoods, right up to the extreme suburbs where the immigrant, impoverished, unemployed and marginalized masses are concentrated, neighborhoods notoriously forgotten by public institutions, with the exception of police forces.

Given the proletariat’s total dependence on capital, the workplace is of utmost importance to every proletarian. The proletarian sells his labor power to the capitalist in exchange for a wage; if he does not sell it, he receives nothing and falls into marginalization.

Today, proletarians’ distance from the struggles and class tradition of the past has made them completely forget what the European and American proletarians of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century had acquired. The direct implantation of capitalism in America, without having to pass through the long historical phase of feudalism, paved the way for the emergence in the young American proletariat of social elements that took decades to manifest in Europe: in particular, the emergence of a workers’ aristocracy coexisting with the masses of indiscriminately immigrant and migrant workers, multinational and multiracial workers, tendentially unified by their immediate living and working conditions, beyond their differences of origin. From the start, proletarian union organization tended to take on the characteristics of a violent and potentially revolutionary antagonism; this is shown by the history of the Western Federation of Miners and above all the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the Wobblies). Between 1905 and 1920, they represented much more than an economic defense association, a revolutionary syndicalism tending towards class solidarity, “workers’ power” and the Big Union for workers’ emancipation; they did not want to confine themselves to defense against the effects of capitalism on workers’ lives, but they also wanted to embark on the road to emancipation from capital (4).

Despite its distance from the revolutionary experiences of European communism and particularly from bolchevism, the IWW made contact in 1919 through Big Bill, its principal representative at the time, with the Communist International as soon as it was formed. The very foundations on which the IWW was organized favored what could have been the Wobblies’ future political leap towards revolutionary communism. This leap did not happen, mainly because of the absence of proletarian revolution in Europe and the degeneration of the Communist International a few years later. And it is also because of this failed political development of the American worker’s movement, and the counter-revolution that succeeded in defeating the communist revolution in Russia and internationally, that the already present and interclassist AFL union ended up taking over, setting the American proletariat back for decades from the terrain of classist struggle to that of interclassism and collaborationism with the capitalists.

It is this situation, totally unfavorable to class struggle, that the American proletariat must overcome if it wants to not only defend itself on the immediate economic terrain, but act on the more general anti-capitalist political terrain – the only terrain on which it can wage the struggle for its emancipation from capitalism; the only terrain on which it can cease to be a class for capital, and assume its historical characteristic of a class for itself, a revolutionary class.

The American bourgeoisie has not directly matured from centuries of class domination and international domination that the English or French bourgeoisie can brag about ; but its very youthful constitution as a ruling class, after triumphing over the colonizing English bourgeoisie and then being victorious in the American Civil War against the retrograde, slave-owning South, enabled it both to exploit to the full extent the immense mineral and natural resources of its vast territory and to push ahead a forcible technical and scientific development of national industry so as to be able to attack competition on the international market with numerous advantages.

American capitalism thus simultaneously expressed the bourgeois tendency towards interclassism, by seeking to consolidate ties with the worker’s aristocracy, and a social pacifism riding on the plurinational and multiracial wave of the “we are all Americans”; and the opposite tendency towards violent antagonism with the working masses, based on national and racial discriminations, subjecting them to conditions of misery and precariousness – with the exception of the most educated professional strata, better paid and enjoying privileges and advantages to make them feel members not of the working class but of the middle class.

In reality, as demonstrated over the years by the great struggles in the sectors of the automobile, construction, transport, airport, etc. which have almost unexpectedly shaken the equilibria founded on persistent collaboration between classes, what the American proletariat lacked, and what it still lacks, is the classist and revolutionary experience that the European proletariat, by contrast, has had. The serious historical problem facing the American proletarian class consists in Marxism’s difficulty of penetrating – and therefore of the revolutionary maturation of the workers’ movement – which the European proletarian movement has experienced in the past. Through the insurrections of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian revolution of October 1917 and the revolutionary attempts of the 1920s, the proletariat of Europe was able to physically experience the historical value of class struggle carried through to the end, right up to the seizure and exercise of power, the historical value of the socialist proletarian revolution to which it can relate after all its defeats. And this historical circumstance gives European communists the task of importing Marxism even into the ranks of the American proletariat.

The American proletarian movement has historically evolved in the shadow of the political development of the young bourgeois class; it assimilated in a very short time the socially and nationally dominant bourgeois ideological vision according to which being American, beyond one’s social condition, nationality or race of origin, was an internationally recognized “quality” enjoyed by bourgeois and proletarians alike, something they both could be proud of. Of course, this did not mean that there was not a fierce racism on the part of dominant whites against the black, yellow or Chicano populations – and this racism still persists. Racism is an integral part of the American white bourgeoisie’s ideology of economic, social and cultural domination, even in a democratic environment. But the social antagonism between the exploited (the proletarians) and the exploiters (the bourgeois) is stronger than democratic ideology, because it is based on material and historical class conditions that no ideology can eradicate. This in no way detracts from the fact that the establishment of modern capitalism in a vast virgin territory like America was a very special historical condition; it facilitated the use of the proletariat (doubly dominated when it is black, even after being “freed” from slavery): through its labor – that is, through the exploitation of its labor power – it helped to make America ideologically and materially as great as capital made it economically. A perfect synthesis of why the bourgeoisie considers the proletariat exclusively as a class for capital.

The struggles of the American proletariat have been marked by a very high level of social conflictuality; but they have never succeeded in generating political avant-gardes, if not at the level of the combative syndicalism of the Wobblies or the anarchists; they have never found a response in terms of the formation of a class political party. Such an answer can only be found through the penetration of Marxism into the workers’ movement, i.e. the theory of communist revolution, the only path to proletarian emancipation from capitalism. Such an objective is fundamental, not only for the American proletariat, but for the world proletariat, because capitalism can never be definitively defeated until its strongest and most historically resistant imperialist pole, the United States of America, is mortally wounded.

This historic task of the revolutionary struggle of the American proletariat, complemented by the revolutionary struggle in Europe, is a decisive step on the road to the emancipation of the proletariat worldwide.

At the time of the first imperialist world war, the fate of the communist proletarian revolution was linked to the revolution in Europe. After the second imperialist world war, it is inevitably linked to the proletarian revolution in America. It is to achieve this goal that communists of the past and the present have had to work, and must continue to work, without forgetting that the first step towards world proletarian revolution is the class struggle that proletarians must unleash in every country against their own bourgeoisie.

 

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(1) See « Trump’s Election and the American Working Class » in this issue.

(2) See «Has the American Working Class Awakened?», in Proletarian n° 20,

(3) “Force, Violence and Dictatorship in Class Struggle (Part III)”, in Communist Program, n° 3, May 1977, p.31. Available  on  our  website:  https://pcint.org/40_pdf/270_Communist_ Program/CP_03-w.pdf

(4) On the history of the IWW and the magnificent struggles of the American proletariat, see : « The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood », https://archive.org/details/autobiography ofb0000vari_x3q5

 

December 2024