PARTISAN!

Edith Fischer presents her key takeaways on what the 2024 US elections show about the class dynamics at play (and not at play) in the United States today.

1. The Fall of the House of Biden

The polls are in, and the decision is final. History has rendered its judgement upon the entire world of institutional liberalism, and it has found it sorely wanting. Kamala Harris, who unified the whole of respectable society, from Dick Cheney to Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, has been tossed aside by the American voters. The House of Biden, the dreams of a restored liberal order in the wage of the political earthquake of Trumpism, has been shattered. There could not be a more thorough denunciation of the career of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. than to see his entire political legacy devoured by the baying hordes of petit-bourgeois reactionaries that make up the ascendant MAGA Movement.

2. What Was Bidenism in Power?

And what a legacy! In power, Bidenism can best be understood as the left-wing of Trumpism. Under Biden’s leadership, the anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration carried on in earnest. The trade war with China escalated significantly, as Biden continued the bellicose policies towards Iran and Cuba. Most importantly, Biden expanded the scope and degree of industrial planning carried out by the American state, bringing to an end decades of market-oriented industrial policy.

Bidenism will be remembered as a political interregnum, a period of political consolidation between the two Trumpist revolutions.

3. The Democratic Party

Who are the Democrats? First of all, they are the party of the Haute Bourgeois, of high finance, of the transnational corporations. Overwhelmingly, the largest bloc of capitalists supports the Democrats, along with the various institutions of the state: the civil service, civil society, Harvard and Yale, the military bureaucracy, the intelligence services. This class is represented in politics by the Yankees, the multilateralists, the liberal internationalists; they are the party of the United Nations, NATO, and free trade. In short, they are the Party of Order.

However, like all bourgeois parties, the Democratic Party is a coalition of broad class forces that are cohered together in order to win elections. Nowhere is this more true than in America, where the party-state is so institutionalised as to make serious political fragmentation functionally impossible. The Democratic Party is a coalition of the urban middle classes, of professionals, managers, and petty-capitalists, intellectuals and public servants, with organised labour, represented by the social-imperialist AFL-CIO, and the politicised layers of black and migrant working class. 

This coalition is not a stable one. The Democrats rely on mobilising its working class base in order to win elections, however, it must ultimately govern in the interests of its ruling class benefactors. This creates a particular political dynamic which has been widely commented upon by the socialist movement. The bourgeois liberals and republicans are quick to mobilise the spectre of reaction in order to mobilise their base, whipping them up with fears of an imminent clerical-reactionary take-over of the state apparatus. However, in practice, the Democrats are not interested in mounting a “resistance to fascism” – they are a party of the bourgeoisie and will ultimately seek the unity of the bourgeois state over any popular front of all classes. Inside the Democrats, the most advanced sections of the American workers are strangled.

4. The Democratic Vote Collapses

The reasons given for the collapse of the Democratic vote are multitude. Were the democrats too woke? Was it young men, or black men, or hispanic voters, who turned the tide? Were they insufficiently supportive of Israel’s racial holy war in Gaza?

All of these answers are transparently an attempt to elide the real cause of the Democratic Party’s defeat. The reality is simple. The Democratic Party offers nothing to its multiracial working class base, and in turn they did not vote. Voter turnout has fallen significantly since the 2020 election, and the Democrats were unable to rally the popular front they constantly attempt to summon. The Democratic Party is led by a liberal political caste that is wholly out of touch with reality, and unable to produce a politics with mass appeal. Every celebrity endorsement and hand-shake with Liz Cheney widened this gyre. And so the House of Biden, and the dream of a Harris presidency, died.

5. The Republican Party

Enter the Victors. The Republican Party that has taken power is also a coalition. This is the party of extractive capital, of mining and logging, of the rancher capitalists and farmers, of agricultural producers, and of small and medium capitalists in the countryside. If the Democratic Party is the party of the universities, then the Republicans are the party of the country clubs and the chambers of commerce. Importantly, this election saw the defection of a bloc of financial-technology capital to the Trump campaign. The Republicans are the party of the frontier, of the Cowboys, of Manifest Destiny.

Behind them, they draw up the entire middle strata of the American regions. The local elites of the towns, the Evangelical Churches and traditionalist Catholics, petty producers and independent contractors, all the varied layers that stand against the proletariat and gather them up behind a reactionary political program. In turn, layers of the American working class, in particular white, non-unionised workers, have long supported the Republican Party.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party, this coalition seems to be a stable, unshakeable bloc in American political life. And certainly, it is more disciplined than the Democratic base. However, the Republican coalition is just as fractious and filled with its own internal factions. Christian theocrats, ethnic nationalists, Barstool-Sports libertarians, and Silicon Valley anarchists are not natural allies. What draws them together is a common sense of grievance – a sense that their position as the rightful rulers of the social order is being denied by liberal political domination over the state apparatus.

6. Fascism, Reaction, and Bonapartism

Is Trump a fascist?

Fascism is not a catch-all term for reactionary, undemocratic political formations. Nor is it a synonym for racist nationalism. Fascism is a counter-revolutionary political movement of the petit-bourgeois and declassed social strata that seeks national rejuvenation through a corporatist mobilisation state. Fascism is a militarised movement directed at the power of the working class and its democratic organisations, often utilising paramilitary squads in the streets. It is counter-revolutionary in this sense (and from the standpoint of social development). However, it is also revolutionary in the sense that it seeks to overturn the existing liberal order and undertake a nationalist revolution.

While the MAGA Movement absolutely has a fascist element (JD Vance may actually be a fascist in the European corporatist mode), the majority of this coalition are not fascist, nor are there mass fascist organisations in the United States. The character of the Trump regime will not be fascist, but Bonapartist – a political movement that seizes power and seeks to co-opt a broad coalition of radicals and reactionaries, ruling against the existing state elite in the service of a faction of the ruling class. It is through this analytical rubric that much of Trump’s activities make sense – his appointment of neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, libertarians and labour conservatives side by side. These are all the disparate factions of American reaction, welded into the political office behind the charismatic figure of Trump.

In this sense, the movement that Trumpism is most comparable to is Boulangism – the populist-revanchist movement around French General Boulanger in the latter part of the 19th Century. This movement brought together radicalised social strata and forged an inchoate coalition around “General Revenge” and the demand for war with Germany. In doing so, Boulanger promoted a schizophrenic politics of reactionary socialism – attacking political elites and exploitation, while stirring up nationalist sentiment. However, the movement was not able to forge itself into a political party, and died with the general.

7. The Petit-Bourgeois Revolutionaries

The program of Trumpism in power is more radical now than it was eight years ago. Trump’s base, and his coalition, has radicalised, and the traditional bourgeois leadership of the Republican party has either been jettisoned or bent the knee. Gone are the days of free trade republicans: Trump promises radical economic nationalism, a brutal tariff regime that is guaranteed to drive inflation, and a recession-inducing wave of austerity in the Federal government. The aim, if one sees behind the bluster, is to unleash a storm of inflation and unemployment that would see workers wages be reduced to poverty levels. It is only on the basis of such a dire assault that domestic manufacturing and small-capitalist profitability be restored. This will no doubt provoke a furious response in one form or another. But with the American working class disorganised, there is no clear road to smash the Trumpist program.

Such a revolutionary program is also going to shatter the Trumpist base. The small and medium capitalists are certainly fervent in their support of economic nationalism and attacks on the wage rate. But inflation will also decrease their savings, devalue their assets, and tighten their ability to consume the luxuries they so covert. This layer may soon find itself high and dry as the economic shocks shake the nation.

8. They Rally Round the Family

Another pillar of the Trumpist coalition is a defence of the family in a period where it is increasingly challenged by the development of capitalist civilisation. With birth rates falling, America is reliant on immigration to sustain the population growth the capitalist accumulation demands. However, mass immigration destabilises the ethnic coalitions that guarantee the power of local elites, especially outside of the big cities. The only alternative to immigration is to re-invigorate the family unit, which functionally means throwing women into domestic servitude. Attacks on abortion, attacks on gay rights, the demands to censor pornography and crack down on “sexual degeneracy” – all of these calls act to defend the family, which is in fact the nucleus of private property.

We should not underestimate the popularity of patriarchal ideology, especially amongst the young. Reactionary patriarchal politics plays on the oedipal structure of the family unit, and it stirs up great feelings of resentment and disappointment. Importantly, in response to the counter-revolutionary wave in the realm of sexual politics, the communist movement must forge its own path that both acknowledges the problems of the existing bourgeois hegemony, while not indulging in the reactionary oedipal fantasies of the right.

9. With a Pocket Full of Shells

There is a misapprehension, even by some socialists, that Trump and his coalition are opposed to war and military adventures abroad. Even more absurd is the claim that Trump is some kind of anti-imperialist. Trump’s initial cabinet is a war cabinet. Staffed with anti-Iran hawks, militarists, and China cold warriors. Whatever isolationist rhetoric Trump might pander to, he is not opposed to the fundamental dynamics of the American empire, or even to military intervention. What Trump is seeking is a renegotiation of the terms under which the empire is organised.

The view that the small and medium capitalists are less imperialist than their haute bourgeois cousins is erroneous in the extreme. Nicolas D Villarreal outlines this fact masterfully in his essay, To Hell with the American Gentry:

The problem of allocating surplus with limited economic growth is one that has had a time-honored, consistent solution for those societies that are unable to give up the bloated excesses of their ruling classes: imperialism. It should be noted that Trump’s insistence on withdrawing the US military across the world wasn’t so much about non-intervention as securing better terms of payment for US support, to turn the US empire once again into a profit-making enterprise. Due to strategic nuclear arsenals, it is no longer possible to conduct the kind of wars that would vastly reduce foreign capital and competition to rubble, therefore saving profit rates from their inexorable decline. However, more extensive exploitation of natural resources and labor in Latin America and Africa is possible. The continued rise of petty-bourgeois power entails a movement away from the global trade system supported by the American military, and instead towards the old way of exclusive spheres of influence. 

Because of this necessity of imperialism to support such an “aristocracy”, this paradise for the gentry will still entail massive financial monopolies, only ones that are pointed outward rather than inward. This is necessary to impose the vast rents on the countries within the empire’s sphere of influence, to gorge on ever more labor time and resources. A never-ending primitive accumulation is the sublime American dream they so desire. A stillborn world, one where capitalism’s explicit social relations are suspended in time and the real logic of capital suppressed so as to prevent any threat to those same relations.

10. Where is the Working Class?

The workers who did not vote, certainly did not move over to Trump’s camp. They largely did not participate. Here we should remember the words of Mike Davis in Prisoners of the American Dream:

In no other capitalist country is mass political abstentionism as fully developed as in the United States, where a ‘silent majority’ of the working class has sat out more than half the elections of the last century. Arguably, this mute, atomized protest is the historical correlative of the striking absence of an independent political party of the proletariat in the country that once invented both the labor party and May Day.

This political disillusionment and disorganisation of the American working class is primarily the product of a decades-long marriage between organised labour and the Democratic Party. A marriage which has brought the American working class to ruin. 

It would be a mistake to tail any kind of Democratic party led “resistance” to the Trump administration. This would simply be another popular front, another opportunity to draw the workers movement into the defence of liberal capitalism. Instead, communists must look to the politically disorganised and disengaged American working class, both native and immigrant, and seek to organise a broad struggle against racism, against patriarchy, and for workers power. Vitally, the American working class needs a party of their own, a socialist labour party that can lead the working class to political power. Only with the triumph of the American working class, and the creation of a new republic, can Trump and the world that created him be relegated to the dustbin of history.