“America will never be a communist country,” declares the 30-second advertisement now appearing on American television. Images of Donald Trump flash across the screen alongside boasts about tax cuts and economic performance, before the message arrives at its most revealing line: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The White House calls it an “educational” public-service announcement; the administration says such spots simply encourage Americans to “love their country.”
This is precisely what Marxism-Leninism exposes beneath Trump’s slogan. Capitalist private property is neither sacred nor timeless. It is a historically determined social relation and, therefore, one capable of being superseded. No presidential declaration, television commercial or anti-communist campaign can abolish the antagonisms generated by capitalist production itself.
The very insistence that communism must “never” come is politically revealing. The United States possesses an immense apparatus of economic, military and ideological power, yet its government still spends public money broadcasting anti-communist messages. The advertisement reportedly cost $14,000 and aired on Fox News and Newsmax; another version contains Trump promising to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism.”
Why such insistence? Because anti-communism is not simply a Cold War fossil. It remains an ideological defence of capitalist property and class power. Behind the abstract invocation of “America” stands something far more concrete: the right of a small owning class to command the decisive means of production and appropriate the wealth created socially by millions.
Trump and his imperialist apparatus may promise to defeat Marxism, but they cannot abolish the material reality Marxism identifies. Modern capitalism has socialized production on an immense scale while preserving private appropriation. Factories, transport networks, laboratories, communications systems and enormous supply chains depend upon the coordinated labour of millions, while control over the wealth they produce remains concentrated in comparatively few hands.
Capitalism continuously expands humanity’s productive powers while subordinating them to profitability. Technological advances capable of reducing necessary labour coexist with insecurity, unemployment, intensified work and extraordinary concentrations of wealth. Productive capacity becomes ever more social while ownership remains private. The system therefore produces not only commodities and profits, but the material conditions for its own transcendence.
American capitalism historically possessed additional means of softening these antagonisms at home. Leninist analysis long emphasized that imperialist superprofits could provide the material basis for concessions to privileged sections of the working class and labour bureaucracy, helping cultivate reformism and class collaboration. This never abolished exploitation; it helped obscure its antagonistic character.
Nonetheless, imperialism cannot and will not permanently purchase social peace. As international competition intensifies, profitability is defended, social protections are attacked and wealth becomes still more concentrated, the foundations of the old compromises become increasingly unstable. Capital demands sacrifices from labour precisely because accumulation recognizes no permanent social truce.
Trump’s degenerated nationalism cannot resolve this either. Behind the rhetoric of a supposed “unified national interest” stands a capitalist society divided by class. The worker who sells labour power and the corporation purchasing it do not occupy the same position merely because both carry American passports. Fake patriotism cannot dissolve ownership, and flags cannot abolish exploitation.
Nor does imperialism represent an escape route. In Lenin’s analysis, imperialism marked capitalism’s monopoly stage: the growing concentration of production and capital, the dominance of finance capital and the struggle among great capitalist powers for markets, resources and spheres of influence. Today, gigantic corporations, financial institutions and military-industrial interests remain inseparable from the functioning of American state power.
The slogan that capitalism must last forever is therefore an absurd and hideously anti-scientific invention: the desire of a possessing class elevated into political doctrine. History has repeatedly demonstrated that no ruling class possesses an eternal mandate.
Socialism, of course, does not arrive automatically. History is not an escalator carrying humanity peacefully toward communism. Revolutions can be defeated, counterrevolution can triumph and entire historical periods can be marked by retreat. The prevalence of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union demonstrated the reality of such reversals; it did not demonstrate that capitalism had overcome its fundamental antagonisms, still less that the class struggle had disappeared.
Capitalism continues producing its own potential gravedigger: the working class. It concentrates labour, organizes production collectively and binds billions of human beings into a common international economic process. But objective conditions alone do not produce socialism. They must be transformed into conscious political struggle, organization and revolutionary power. That is the Leninist element absent from every bourgeois caricature of Marx: history creates possibilities, but classes make history through struggle.
This is why the real answer to Trump extends far beyond Trump himself. Presidents may proclaim communism impossible, billionaires may finance anti-communism and states may distort Marxism, criminalize communists or present capitalism as the final form of civilization. None of this can stop the development of the very forces and antagonisms that undermine such claims from within.
The United States is not some miraculous exception to the laws of capitalist development. Beneath the mythology of American exceptionalism remains the same fundamental relation: labour produces, capital appropriates; production becomes increasingly collective, while control over wealth becomes increasingly concentrated. No amount of patriotic mythology can repeal political economy.
Capitalism had a beginning. There is no materialist reason to believe it possesses no end. Its defenders may surround it with flags, police power, television propaganda and declarations of permanence, but none of these can transform a historically transient system into an eternal one.
And this is precisely what Trump’s boast fails to understand. The future of American society will not be decided by the confidence of a president, the wealth of its monopolies or the volume of its anti-communist propaganda. It will be decided in the struggle between classes, in the growth of consciousness and organization, and in the capacity of the working class to convert the contradictions of capitalism into revolutionary change.
The American ruling class may insist that its order is eternal. History has already buried many ruling classes that believed the same thing.
So the real answer to Trump’s proclamation is not hesitation, apology or prediction dressed as certainty. It is the materialist recognition that capitalism is neither natural nor permanent, and that no imperial power stands outside the movement of history.
No, President Trump: America WILL Actually Be a Communist Country!
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
