Which way out of Trump hell? Liberal, Dem-Soc, or Communist?

By Charles Andrews*

The working class knows who Donald Trump is.

Masked ICE goons rip people out of their workplace, school, and home. Police club demonstrators who shout against genocide in Gaza. High schools and colleges fire teachers who let students discuss the history of Zionism. Eight hundred employees of the weather service, NOAA, are fired; when disaster strikes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) cannot dispatch enough staff to the flooded or burning land. 

A million federal workers are stripped of their right to collective bargaining. Sick people on Medicaid are told they must find a job before a doctor will see them. Scientists must stop their research into cures for varieties of cancer, maybe the cancer you will get. Three hundred thousand private-sector workers at companies with federal contracts lose their minimum wage guarantee of $17.75 per hour.

How do we crush the oppressors who are crushing us? We have a choice of three main strategies.

Liberals campaign to get back the democracy we were taught in high school civics class. Progressives among them call on the Democratic party to broaden its “messaging” to appeal to all working people.

Democratic socialists campaign for reforms of capitalism and to elect their candidates. They expect to get to socialism (such as they understand it) by voting and other legal means.

Communists join the fightbacks bursting out against Trump’s repression, and they build the  politically independent vehicle of working-class power: a revolutionary communist party, ready to take the socialist-communist road.

Trump and the forces behind him are often called fascist or on their way to fascism or authoritarianism. The first question to settle is: where is fascism among political regimes?

The Capitalist Republic and Its Variations

The state power that we live under is a capitalist republic. It is a republic because most of “we, the people” never participate in governing; that would be a democracy. James Madison laid it out: a republic is governed by “a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” We get to vote for one or the other of them. 

The state is a capitalist republic because its fundamental purpose is to protect and grow capitalists’ riches. The U.S. Constitution states that no person may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

We are told that democracy and fascism are opposites. But every democracy is a democracy for a particular class. We are not taught which class enjoys democracy in the capitalist republic – the capitalist class. This is bourgeois democracy.

(The French word “bourgeois” means capitalist, especially referring to capitalist political institutions, culture, and ethics. The noun “bourgeoisie” is a synonym for the capitalist class.)

Bourgeois democracy and fascism are opposite forms of a capitalist republic. Both deploy the two main tools of the exploiters’ class rule, ideological fraud and repressive force.

Bourgeois democracy flourishes when people put their hopes in the fraud of freedom, opportunity, and progress. To be sure, bourgeois democracy will use repressive force against any threatening group action.

Fascism uses open force routinely. The usual cheery ideology has lost its effect. Fascism peddles racial superiority/inferiority, glorifies thuggery, and directs mass discontent at some ethnic, religious, or social group – anyone except the exploiting class.

Capitalist republics have moved back and forth along the range anchored by bourgeois democracy and fascism. Germany in the 1920s had the Weimar Republic; in 1933, the capitalists handed power to the Nazis when all other attempts to suppress working-class struggle had failed; after World War II, western Germany became the Federal Republic, adorned with several political parties, regular elections, and proportional representation.

Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and other countries have gone through fascist or military dictatorship, only to revert to bourgeois democracies. Throughout these changes of form, the capitalist class remained the ruling class above parties, a junta, or a dictator. The economy remained capitalist.

Since the Civil War in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States has stayed close to the bourgeois democratic endpoint overall. But whenever a section of the masses wanted unacceptable democracy, the republic suppressed them with lawless violence.
– Black people, especially in the South, were denied the vote, due process, trial by a jury of one’s peers, and other bourgeois democratic rights. Instead, they got Klan lynchings, organized and overlooked by the local sheriff.
– Copper miners struck Phelps Dodge in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917. They demanded relief from 12-hour shifts six days a week. They wanted steady pay instead of wages pegged to the price of copper. The corporation told the state power and vigilantes to get going. They packed 1200 miners into railroad cattle cars and dumped them in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
– After World War Two, the government made it impossible for communists, trade union activists, and leftist liberals to hold a job and rent a place to live, let alone exercise rights of free speech and association. The “Red Scare” went well into the 1950s.
– Today, people who call out the Zionist genocide in Gaza and defy Zionist ideological dictatorship in the U.S. are kicked out of school and out of a job.

Disintegration of the Capitalist Republic

The Trump administration is a form of capitalist republic. It has rapidly moved toward the fascist endpoint of the spectrum. There is no need to argue whether or not it is fascist. On one hand, repression has not yet reached the depths to which Nazi Germany sank. On the other hand, victims of ICE raids know something of what Gestapo victims went through.

The Trump administration has taken a big step in a process that has been underway for 25 years. The U.S. capitalist republic is disintegrating. 

Some mileposts of the disintegration:

– Al Gore won the presidential vote in 2000, but the George W. Bush camp refused to accept the vote count in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the tally with a clearly illegal ruling. The justices chose the president themselves by a five-to-four vote. One of the four, Justice Breyer, wrote as openly as he dared about the damage to the myth of bourgeois democracy: “Above all, in this highly politicized matter, the appearance of a split decision runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure. It is … a vitally necessary ingredient of … the rule of law itself.”

– When Donald Trump announced his first candidacy in the summer of 2015, the news media gave endless coverage to this entertainment celebrity, this tax-evading real estate wheeler-dealer. In the 1950s, the three big television networks would have ignored anyone like him who tried to run for president. The chief executive of CBS and the publishers of The New York Times and the Washington Post held regular chats with Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. (Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers, New York, Henry Holt, 2013, p. 125.) The ruling class was more unified then. The news media in 2015-16 were ecstatic that the Donald Trump show boosted ratings and sold lots of commercials. They sacrificed the overall class interest in order to attract a big audience.

– An unprecedented near-coup erupted on Jan. 6, 2021. Never before had a mob (recruited with money provided by a wealthy heiress) invaded the Capitol building. It nearly blocked the certification of the new president. The division between Trump and some generals paralyzed federal response. The Capitol police force barely managed to push back a crowd that was out for the blood of congresspersons.

The U.S. cannot return to a clean bourgeois democracy, to solid respect for the rule of law amongst capitalists, recognized limits on executive power, and judicial neutrality between contending capitalists. Political disintegration is the consequence of an economic reality.

Previously, capitalists could find opportunities for new investments despite having to pay the prevailing wage. Prosperity alternated with depression, but the trend was overall development. Even during the depression of the 1930s, mass movements won big victories. Confronted by the automobile workers’ sitdown strikes in 1936-37, General Motors and Chrysler chose to recognize the United Auto Workers. (Ford held out until 1941.) GM agreed to $25 million in wage increases. The bosses wanted to get on with making cars and money. GM’s profit for 1937 was $196 million.

Since then, however, capital accumulation – the reinvestment of profit for more profit – has run into an impassable barrier. The development of new industries that employ lots of workers on assembly lines and in mills is past – unless really cheap labor is available in China. What accumulation there is goes into high-tech advances, which generate a sliver of jobs and are quickly monopolized. Stagnant accumulation drives down wages and working conditions. Then capitalists launch services based on cheap labor, like Uber. The weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers in private industry peaked in 1973, and they have not recovered in fifty years. This never happened before. Capitalism has entered its final phase of decay.

In addition, U.S. capital no longer dominates the world capitalist economy.

Trump and the Capitalists

Bourgeois democracy used to give its liberal ideology some credibility by conceding a handful of key social programs. Now the capitalist class wants to get rid of them. People who get their health care by way of Medicaid are told they should get jobs filling in for deported farmworkers. The Treasury Secretary boasts that savings accounts for newborn children could be a back door to destroy Social Security.

The imperial strategy that has worked well for U.S. capital since World War II is broken. China’s state and private capitalists outsell the U.S. in global markets, including the U.S. itself.  They finance railroads and ports in underdeveloped countries in order to grab raw materials. A high policy official in the Biden administration admitted in July, “Since the global financial crisis [of 2008] and the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been clear that the United States is overstretched.” So the U.S. cancels aid programs that bought it goodwill in the old days, goes wild with tariffs, and accelerates military spending.

The Trump administration, fronted by a senile narcissist, is on the rampage in the U.S. and around the world. It is the best that the capitalist class has found to do the job. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the World Economic Forum that the tariffs may be “a little inflationary” but are “good for national security,” so “get over it.” He endorsed the rollback of diversity programs, saying that corporations were “devoted to reaching out to the Black community, Hispanic, the LGBT community, the disabled,” but liberals must recognize that we “got to go back to being more practical.”

Some capitalists wish the Trump gang would do things more smoothly. Some capitalists may want to ease out the lunatic at the top. None of them cares to restore the bourgeois democracy of yesteryear.

Liberal, Social Democratic, or Communist Strategy?

How can the working class – the overwhelming majority of the people – fight Trump hell?

Liberals want to get the U.S. back to democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy, and their chosen vehicle is the Democratic Party. Indivisible, a network of local groups founded and run by Democratic operative Ezra Levin, summed it up in the two-word slogan for its June 14 rallies: “No Kings.” Step one is to take back Congress in 2026. 

Some liberals, also called progressives, admit that the Democratic Party has given up on a broad working-class base. But do they know this happened when Jimmy Carter was president (1976-1980)? Bill Clinton (1992-2000) completed the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party. Its core voters today are upper-income professionals. Progressives urge party leaders to talk more about working people’s economic concerns, health care, etc. Sorry, but “messaging” is just corporate marketing to attract customers (voters).

Democratic socialists campaign for reform after reform. This is how they expect to get to socialism. In 1899, Eduard Bernstein in Germany argued that a socialist party could keep winning reforms and seats in parliament. For a while, it could, which supported the illusion of getting to socialism without revolution. But almost all struggle today is defense against cutbacks, privatization, and imperial aggression; what are democratic socialist theorists smoking?

The center of democratic socialism in the U.S. is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Many of its rank-and-file members are active fighters for the needs of working people. However, the DSA platform adopted in 2021 talks more about democracy without reference to class than about socialism. DSA regards the state as an institution that one class or another can take control of. No, the state machine belongs to a class.

DSA calls for public ownership – but not overall planning and allocation of investment. Instead, “Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible.” The companies are diverse in form, but all run for profit. DSA’s “socialism” is that the government will tax much of the profit. Cooperatives will give workers more say on the job, while stimulating them to work hard for their share of company earnings. Such market “socialism” failed in Yugoslavia. It failed in the Mondragon group of “worker-owned” firms in Spain. It created one of the most unequal distributions of income in the world in China.

DSA never speaks of revolution and forbids members of any “self-defined democratic-centralist organization” (read: communist) to join. Instead, DSA imagines “a second constitutional convention to write the founding documents of a new socialist democracy.” DSA had better consult the ghost of Salvador Allende. He was elected president of Chile in 1970. He began to move to socialism without overthrowing the capitalist republic. The military establishment killed him and thousands more in 1973.

DSA steers members to elections, to resolutions and legislation at city councils and other government bodies, and support for trade union officials (until they become undeniable sellouts). DSA’s Feb. 6 statement about Trump did not hide what comes first: “fighting to win the battle for democracy at the ballot box, in the labor movement and in our neighborhoods.”

Communists combine militant participation in mass struggles with agitation, education, and organization for a communist party, the indispensable weapon for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. A socialist state replaces the capitalist republic. A planned economy of no rich and no poor replaces capitalist exploitation. Socialism has a direction and a goal; it is a series of communist projects to get rid of every holdover of class society.

There is no hiding that revolution requires a deep commitment. History and a scientific analysis of modes of production establish that revolution is inevitable. But we do not know when. Revolution cannot happen before the masses want it – and when they do rise up, a communist party must be ready.

The liberal strategy cannot revive bourgeois democracy, and democratic socialist confusion actively holds back the movement. There is only one way out. The working class can destroy the capitalist republic and set up its dictatorship of the working class. A majority class makes itself the ruling class, suppressing its enemies, as any state power must. This state protects the new society in which workers plan what must be done and organize their liberated labor to do it.

Class analysis helps us evaluate the liberal, democratic socialist, and communist strategies for dealing with Trump hell. His regime makes it impossible to avoid political choice. We will figure out the right thing to do, then do it.

* Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus and other books.

The article was also published on the New Worker