By DAVID RENTON*
There is good reason to assume that Trump's capacity for causing harm will be worse this time than last time. His desire for revenge is greater
1.
Israel’s war on Gaza has already made it easier for Donald Trump to win the US presidential election. The chances are that it will free him up significantly to go further in office than he did last time in office.
Donald Trump is both like and unlike the fascists of the 1930s. He is lazy, cantankerous, incapable of building consensus among US institutions. He neither wants nor needs to. His model is not exactly the abolition of democracy, but rather the creation of permanent advantages for his party and his class. But there is good reason to assume that his capacity for damage will be worse this time than last. His desire for revenge is greater.
He has a very similar relationship with a party (i.e. the people of January 6) to that which Hitler or Mussolini had, only mediated through social media rather than through the payment of party dues or party publications. The state and public opinion will treat these elections as a retrospective approval of the January 6 coup attempt, even if there are individuals who lose Donald Trump’s pardon.
The question, really, is what kind of processes could push Donald Trump further than he already has?
In the election, the Republicans had a much easier story to tell than the Democrats. They wanted war, and they wanted Israel to win. They invited Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, and they were the ones who showed up to applaud him. Netanyahu was one of the first to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory. The Democrats had a much harder story to tell. They wanted their base to believe that they could secure an Israeli victory and that they would act as a restraining force, preventing revenge from turning into murder. That story was incoherent from the very beginning of the Gaza incursion, when it became clear that this would be one of the most prolonged and violent mass murders in the world since 1945.
The Democrats financed the war and provided, along with their British allies, the intelligence that would be used to enable the technological mass murder of civilians. They were for Israel against the international order, against the world court, against any limits on military power. All of these, they insisted, could be ignored for the sake of a beloved ally. To the extent that the Democrats said they would restrain Israel, that country’s actions showed either that they were lying or that they were weak. Red line after red line was crossed: the Democrats claimed that Israel would agree to a peace deal when it would not, would refrain from bombing hospitals when it would not, would not murder its enemies until it did, would not engage in genocide but would do so. That is why Joe Biden looked old and dispirited—because he could do nothing to use all those dollars and those weapons except to achieve results other than those he claimed to believe in.
In the American political system, presidents are weak because they depend on Congress to pass legislation, and it is rare for a president to have majorities in both houses and the goodwill needed to pass meaningful legislation. Presidents are strong, however, in the sense that the Constitution gives them unlimited control over US military power. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris armed Israel. But they also told a significant group of their voters that they neither wanted nor believed in war. That combination made no sense to anyone.
So what happens next? Counterrevolutionary politics emerges from the combination and interplay of significant events. A useful historical analogy is the original era of fascism, which derived its power from the combined victories of Mussolini and Hitler. The former represented such a breakthrough that within weeks of coming to power, imitative pro-fascist groups sprang up in almost every country in Europe. Hitler copied Mussolini’s March on Rome.
He did not call his party fascist because it had ambitions of domination. By conquering state power, he unleashed a dynamic of emulation, rivalry and competition that encouraged both parties to move further to the right. Sometimes, for example in Austria, they competed. Sometimes, for example in Spain, they fought in alliance. The two regimes put pressure on each other – culminating in the Second World War.
What this article attempts to explain, at the theoretical level, is what triggers this dynamic of rapid counterrevolutionary advance.
2.
On the left, several Marxists theorized the ideal circumstances for revolution as a dynamic of permanent revolution. In their “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” published in 1850, Marx and Engels described the socialist revolution as one that spread ever deeper in terms of the change it sought to achieve: “…our interest and our task are to make the revolution permanent until all more or less possessing classes have been removed from domination, until state power has been conquered by the proletariat, until the association of the proletarians, not only in one country but in all the ruling countries of the whole world, has advanced to such an extent that competition between the proletarians in these countries has ceased and at least the decisive productive forces have been concentrated in the hands of the proletarians.” For us it cannot be a question of transforming private property, but only of its annihilation; it cannot be a question of covering up class oppositions, but of suppressing classes; nor of perfecting the existing society, but of founding a new one.”
In yours Balances and Perspectives, published in 1905, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued that part of the process that enabled this ideal condition of progressive and ever-deepening revolution was that the underlying social movement spread across borders. He wrote that the Russian working class “will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and therefore the fate of the entire Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe… in the balance of the class struggle of the entire capitalist world.” (This lack of international revolution is part of the reason why the Russian Revolution of 1917 ultimately failed to achieve its goals of working-class self-rule.) Leon Trotsky was right—the way to achieve Marx’s most profound social change is by spreading the revolution across borders.
A process of permanent revolution on the left is different from what happens when you see a counterrevolution on the right. The left and the right do not exist in comparable relations with the existing capitalist world – the left always attacks significant social processes (the domination of society by the rich, the alienation of people and the lack of belief in our collective power); the right is always aligned with them. Revolution and counterrevolution are not two identical processes that just go in opposite directions. They are not like a film that you watch sometimes normally and sometimes rewinding.
But to understand the circumstances occurring around us, it is useful to understand that there is a counterrevolutionary process going on in the world, and that there is a certain broad analogy between the revolution that communists want to see and the way history now seems to be turning against us and against the people we consider our allies.
There is a revolutionary camp within the left, made up of people who want to take history as far as possible in the direction of democracy, social democracy and, as Marx and Engels said, in the direction of the abolition of private property. Just as there is another group of people on the other side of politics, let's call them "fascists", who want to see the destruction of any remaining elements of social democracy in society – the incorporation of the trade unions into the state, the destruction of any remaining social elements of the state (public health), the silencing and imprisonment or murder of left-wing activists.
3.
What makes a social revolution possible is a process in which people link their social and political demands. In the ideal version of permanent revolution, this might mean something like workers going on strike to improve their living standards, clashing with the police, losing all confidence in the existing state, a wave of strikes giving rise to new economic and political demands with the economy and politics pushing each other forward until the only solution is clearly social revolution.
In the current circumstances of permanent counterrevolution, the far right insists that it has both economic demands (the removal of migrant workers, supposedly to help the white working class) and political solutions like Trump’s promise to be a dictator on day one. The two sets of demands fit together and drive both.
When revolutionaries imagine the transformation and destruction of the existing state, we often conceive of it as a process of prefigurative confrontations, in which we take over key state institutions and defeat them until we acquire such power in the streets that even key state institutions are vulnerable to us – we dream of storming parliament, of capturing the Winter Palace. The same is true of our right-wing antagonists. Unlike us in the United States, they have recent experience of achieving at least one such symbolic victory – January 6.
By making excuses for the Israeli war, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have made it easier for Donald Trump to say he can do whatever he wants and doesn't care what the rules say.
There is, on both the left and the right, a long history of people who have captured certain superficial elements of the state without taking over its real apparatus. Thus, for example, in Italy today we have a party of fascist origin in government without that party having governed according to the full fascist program. Elections still take place, much of the press and television are still controlled by people who are not fascists. The Brothers of Italy (Brothers of Italy) did not build a one-party state.
This is the point at which we should take seriously Leon Trotsky’s insistence that permanent revolution can only be achieved through an international process. The same applies to counterrevolution. It can only move, on any lasting basis, from political victory to social revolution by seizing power in several nation-states at the same time.
This is why the ongoing war on Gaza is so important to life under Donald Trump. For the historical significance of fascism was that it was a recuperation of colonialism for the West. Under classical imperialism, Europe exported war and genocide to the countries of the global south. Fascism reversed this process, making war between great states possible again, by telling Europeans that colonial killings that had been legitimate when carried out against indigenous peoples could be committed with impunity against fellow Europeans, since they too belonged to an inferior racial category.
Gaza has been the rebirth of colonial war, with the world’s thirteenth richest country measured by GDP per capita treating its subhuman population as so subhuman that they are legitimate targets for mass murder. And the world’s great powers, instead of expelling Israel from their ranks, have equipped it with weapons and intelligence to complete their task.
All the moral lines drawn after 1945 to prevent the return of fascism and genocide have now been crossed by Western societies. If Donald Trump, being the kind of politician that he is, says that he also wants his wars, he also wants his racial victories, then he cannot expect any sanctions for demanding them. By making excuses for the Israeli war, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have made it easier for Donald Trump to say that he can do whatever he wants and that he doesn’t care what the rules say.
The purpose of this article is not to make predictions about what Donald Trump will do. My comments are directed rather to those involved in the popular movements trying to stop him. The facts of Israel’s war and Western support for it will make life much harder for those of us who are genuinely committed to resistance – to stopping the war – and to stopping Donald Trump.
*David Renton is a political activist. Author of, among other books, Fascism: history and theory (Usina editorial). [https://amzn.to/4govomr]
Translation: Sean Purdy.
Originally published on the website rs21: Revolutionary Socialism in the 21stst Century.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
