Our government’s criminal actions, and its schemes to commit future crimes, are of a nature that’s going to require a new strategy from our popular movements. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that it’s no longer enough to speak truth to power, because at this point our rulers are acting too brazenly for journalistic exposure to have a sufficient impact. In the last week, it’s become clear just how true this is. The president is posting direct evidence of the U.S. military blowing up crowds of civilians, and bragging about it on the basis that these crowds were supposedly enemy fighters.

This was an extremely weak cover story, and it was easy for observers to clear up that the U.S. had actually bombed a Yemeni tribal gathering. But as far as those in power are concerned, that does not matter. They’re now fully comfortable with sharing proof of war crimes that they would have tried to hide in the past; the imperial system has reached a new stage, where it seeks to go on the offensive without any restraint. And this shows that to fight back against the imperial system, we’ll need to come to a new stage in our revolutionary practice. A stage where journalistic or commentary sources, like my own platform, adopt a role of facilitating mass organization and mobilization.

Exposing power is secondary to the work we must do within the class struggle. That’s always been true, but up until the recent developments in global conflicts, our movements had for a long time been largely detached from the struggle’s practical aspects. The communist movement, at least in the USA, had been just talk; then with the Ukraine war, our geopolitical clash reached a critical stage, and suddenly the world’s socialist orgs had an opportunity to impact history’s direction. If they were to be principled in opposing NATO, and in supporting Russia’s anti-fascist war, then they would be able to truly break from liberal reformism. And a great deal of these orgs failed the Ukraine test; which makes it totally unsurprising that they then failed to combat the Gaza genocide.
Now, as the empire and its proxies expand their offensive, we face another decision point.

We can choose to tail behind the ruling class, de-mobilize on Palestine, and forsake the class struggle; or we can wage the next stage of this fight, refusing to be compromised by reformism and opportunism. So much momentum is building for the global proletarian movement, and we could soon bring about unprecedented workers gains. Pambis Kyritsis, general secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions, has assessed how much strength we’re seeing emerge from the working masses:

The encouraging and hopeful element in the depressing picture of today’s world, is the fact that workers do not passively accept the neoliberal capitalist, anti-popular, and anti-labor offensive. Millions of workers around the world are choosing the path of struggle to defend their trade union, social, and political rights. With militant mobilizations in every corner of the globe, they are demanding work with rights that ensures the satisfaction of their contemporary needs. The WFTU members or friends are always on the frontlines of these struggles. The response of bourgeois governments to the just popular demands is the sharpening of state repression and authoritarianism…But we also have weapons. Strategically much more powerful than theirs. We have our ideology and our class orientation, our history and our action, our militant spirit, and our moral advantage. But to utilize these weapons, we need good organization, enlightenment, and ideological and political education.

The effort to crush worker struggles is intertwined with the effort to persecute Palestine supporters. This is one reason why the pro-Palestine movement’s only viable future is in organized labor: for our free speech to survive, we’ll also need to preserve the right of the workers to defy their employers. The deportations and disappearances of pro-Palestine activists are partly about making labor defenseless; about establishing a precedent for targeting labor organizers through the same means. In this new phase of repression, the only labor figures who aren’t at risk are the ones which side with capital.

With the White House’s campaign to dismantle unions, there is growing potential for polarization inside organized labor; for the labor elements which support the imperial state to expose themselves, and for the principled elements to revolt. More unions keep speaking out for Palestine, and now they’re voicing solidarity with the students who’ve been targeted by ICE. The anti-imperialist movement, the civil liberties movement, and the other parts of our revolutionary struggle have a significant pull within unions, because the most advanced among the workers are not fooled by ruling class propaganda. The question is whether we’ll be able to build an independent workers force; one that can keep agitating for the revolutionary positions inside the unions, leading and assisting the workers in their struggles, and defending the workers against the crackdown.

This is where we come to the pivotal question in this era of our political practice: how to respond to the state’s efforts at crushing us? How can we keep our operations going as the repression gets worse, and more organizers get subjected to the fate that Mahmoud Khalil has? The history of counterrevolutionary violence shows that to overcome this threat, we’ll need to avoid relying on any wing of the ruling class. It’s the working masses who are our most important friends amid this crisis, and we have to lead the masses towards defeating the state.

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Ernest Mandel, one of the authors of the 1966 book The Catastrophe in Indonesia, diagnosed why Indonesia’s communist party had failed to defend against the previous year’s political mass murder campaign. It was because the party felt it could depend on the allyship of President Sukarno, and on the national bourgeoisie that Sukarno represented. Mandel observed the ineffectual nature of the warnings the party had issued about the coup, which didn’t come with the actions that would have given the people a real chance for fighting back:

These warnings, voiced on the very eve of the country’s counterrevolutionary coup, then already in full preparation, came without any previous or accompanying measures for broad mass mobilizations, without preparation for a general strike, without preparation for arming the masses, without concrete warnings about the impending army coup. The warnings could only heighten the determination of the counterrevolutionaries to strike immediately. They could not create adequate means to prevent or to reply to the counterrevolution. It is not surprising that under these conditions the only response this belated warning evoked was the desperate action of a small group around Lieutenant Colonel Untung and not a mass uprising…they relied on Sukarno instead of mobilizing the broad masses in defense of the revolution and the PKI, not only before the reactionary coup of October 1-2, but even after the coup.

In today’s USA, there are plenty of political actors who want to get dissident organizers to subordinate ourselves towards a certain wing of the ruling class. Among these actors are the leftists who tail after the Democratic Party, and who’ve been trying to build an “anti-Trump” movement. These radical liberals do pose a threat, in that they’re working to advance the NGO infiltration of the pro-Palestine movement. But this element lost its cultural relevance a while ago, when the Obama-style political brand collapsed. At this stage, by far the biggest ideological threat is the “dissident right,” which tails behind the Elon Musk wing of monopoly capital.

The message this element puts forth can be summarized as: “trust the plan.” Which is the same attitude that was held by Indonesia’s complacent socialist leaders: supposedly, the people will be able to gain victory if we put our faith within a specific procedure, one whose success depends on the goodwill of those in power.

It’s a mechanistic way of thinking about political struggle, where somebody believes everything will simply fall into place if we stay on a predetermined path. And as our rulers keep going on a rampage, it’s becoming clear that not too many people are willing to embrace this kind of thinking. This is what I saw when I found a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff tried to present Trump’s uncritical appeasement of “Israel” as being the guaranteed route to peace; and he avoided answering Carlson on the question of what Israel’s long-term plans for occupation are. Witkoff insisted that if we can just get rid of the “terrorist” groups which are resisting Zionism, then all countries will normalize with the Zionist entity, and “peace” will be achieved. This level of lying was too much for the majority of viewers to overlook; the video’s comments were filled with people who saw how absurd these arguments are.

Across the ideological spectrum, the people are realizing the malign nature of their government. They’re seeing that our rulers are determined to carry out an ethnic cleansing, and to destroy entire countries for the sake of protecting this crime’s perpetrators. They see more and more opponents of this plan being disappeared, putting everyone’s freedoms under threat. They’re also experiencing the economic catastrophe that’s come about from Washington’s war provocations. A consciousness shift has occurred; there already is a widespread mass will to fight back against these schemes. Now we must give the people the means to overcome the crackdown’s next stage, and overthrow their imperialist dictatorship. We will need a collective, mass organizational force, one that can keep going forward no matter how severe the repression gets.

The parts of the U.S. communist movement that have broken from liberalism are making good progress in building this force. The American Communist Party has been meeting the practical needs of the masses, and leading the struggles of the workers, in ways that have gained it great momentum since its founding last summer. And given the African People’s Socialist Party’s success in beating federal charges, the ACP will be able to defend itself should the state target its members in the same way. There will come a point, though, when the ruling class runs out of patience for years-long legal efforts, and tries to destroy us through swift violence.

There are forces in our government that don’t want to wait another moment until they can attack freedom in unprecedented ways. Forces that are even more dangerous towards liberty than the Trump officials behind the ICE detentions. In the long term, the Trump wing is not the biggest threat we’re going to face; the even bigger danger comes from the liberal wing, which is right now planning its revenge. There is a growing conflict within the ruling class, and though we can take advantage of this conflict, it’s leading the most aggressive and powerful elements of the bourgeoisie to carry out recriminations. Recriminations that will be vastly bigger than the Russiagate censorship, which was how the liberal monopolists reacted to Trump’s first term.

They’re much madder now, because the tariffs have broken the neoliberal doctrine’s cultural grip. The guardians of the traditional liberal order see this as unforgivable; and their wrath isn’t even mainly directed at Trump himself. Their biggest fear is that the people will take advantage of the possibilities Trump has helped open up, and replace neoliberalism with socialism. As the ACP’s chairman Haz Al-Din has written:

TRUMP TARIFFS ARE THE BIGGEST ASSAULT ON NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC DOCTRINE in American history. They have begun a REVOLUTION in economic thinking. Regardless of your views on them, they have now opened the door to all manner of heterodox, unconventional economic theories that lack 'expert' approval. The institutional academic 'experts' are reeling, crying, panicking. They are broken and humiliated. It is good to see them brought down, broken, and trampled underfoot popular political will…There must be immense short-term sacrifices to make our country industrially self-reliant. It is time to stop plundering developing countries, and work ourselves to make our country great…While the neoliberal 'experts' lie defeated on the ground with a boot on their neck, the door is open to begin advocating construction of Socialism with American Characteristics. Trump will not do it. What America needs is a mass popular movement that will push this revolution to its conclusion, toppling the neoliberal hegemony entirely.

This development has empowered the people, while driving the most zealously liberal elements of the deep state insane. Or rather more insane than they already were; we can’t forget that they tried to assassinate Trump twice, which could have sparked a civil conflict and vastly accelerated the country’s collapse. These two attempts failed because they weren’t organized by the dominant parts of the deep state; only by certain rogue actors, who were willing to defend neoliberal dominance at any cost. As the security apparatus mobilizes to crush the people, it will be much more unified. When these forces next hit back, they’ll hit back in ways we can’t imagine. We can guess large parts of how the counter-attack is going to look, though, and we must prepare accordingly.

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There are dozens of countries that the U.S. empire has invaded, destabilized, and kept under dictatorships or occupations; therefore, we can look at these countries to get a sense of how our ruling class will treat us. We can study Indonesia, and Palestine, and Yemen, and Iraq, and numerous other cases. It’s essential for us to study these things, and to take seriously the prospect that our government will apply the same methods from these foreign projects to the United States itself. There’s another aspect of this history, though, that we can’t afford to overlook. This is the part where the U.S. government has used psychological tactics, from propaganda to actual mind control, in order to proliferate ultraviolent mindsets among Americans.

These types of manipulation don’t just have the potential to mobilize anti-communists towards violence. They can also draw members of the struggle into the same perilous state of mind, where somebody has been persuaded to wantonly use violence or promote violence. There’s a difference between this kind of foolish behavior, and doing something like voicing support for Luigi Mangione; when communists support Luigi, or Hamas, or anyone else who’s used violence to combat oppression, it’s for principled reasons. Our class enemies want us to use the idea of revolutionary violence in an unprincipled way, and embrace ultraviolent practices that will alienate the masses from us.

Great numbers of the masses already support Luigi; that’s part of why we should support him. If a group that claims to represent the masses starts embracing behaviors which are objectively anti-social, though, and entertaining elements which don’t have the proletariat’s interests in mind, then this group lose. The danger is that in our desire to fight back against the state’s violence, we’ll fall into these self-destructive habits.

One of these habits is the act of fetishizing gang culture, and acting like the lumpenproletariat’s interests are synonymous with those of the workers. Another one is the glorification of drugs, which is quite prevalent within the New Left. Another one is to simply say things that you cannot say, and make threats of terrorism. The ACP has fostered a culture that firmly rejects all of these left-wing deviations, so in that area our movement has already won. But there are plenty of ostensibly communist orgs in this country that absolutely help cultivate such dangerous stupidity. It’s within the PSL’s membership where we’ve seen individuals who are willing to post some of the most explicit threats of violence that ACP has been subjected to. Though the left has become irrelevant in terms of its potential for mass pull, its ultraviolent elements continue to pose a security threat, and we need to pay close attention to this danger.

As we keep building this movement, and working to keep ourselves safe, the strategy we must adopt is one of maintaining a balance. A balance in all areas of how we think and act, where we avoid falling into any counterproductive pitfalls. It’s easy to react to something you experience in a way that ends up hurting you, at least if you haven’t yet been trained in how to stay grounded. Both the left-wing and right-wing deviationists have done this. And as our ruling class reacts to today’s crises by spreading ever-more chaos and fear, many people will be susceptible to this error. But when one has come to understand the nature of this conflict, and the role that revolutionaries have within it, they can gain clarity in what their task is. And they can stick to this task, via the guidance and support which a party provides.

What we are fighting against, in strategic terms, is the effort by our rulers to bring civil war upon the USA’s people. A civil war in which chaos and violence become ever-more prevalent, and the people are made into the victims of this engineered insanity. Our class enemies are mobilizing all the different ultraviolent societal elements, from radical liberals to neo-Nazis to criminal elements, as part of a project to terrorize and paralyze the masses. They see that the system is collapsing, and they want to inject reactionary violence into this process so that any revolutionary effort gets thwarted.

Part of this involves manipulating leftists into exacting violence against their fellow organizers; part of it involves recruiting alienated men into assassination efforts, like happened with the 20-year-old who put a bullet through Trump’s ear. Whichever elements the feds are targeting with this manipulation, the goal is to bring strategic chaos, which the state hopes it can manage.

We can make this project backfire, but we must be willing to change our tactics as the conditions keep evolving. We cannot be mechanistic, which means we can’t treat the chaotic events our society is experiencing as simply being all bad. It’s quite possible that the killing of Brian Thompson will be an early part in an American Years of Lead, where the country experiences a series of political attacks. Should a Years of Lead come, we won’t be able to stop it from happening; we’ll only be able to take advantage of it, and rally the masses as it further disrupts the liberal order.

Another development that we can’t overlook the value of is the tariffs, which have come precisely because the ruling class thought it could create managed chaos. Trump was allowed to win because the elites wanted to enact radical reforms, ones that could save the system. Now that they’ve gotten these reforms, it’s come with costs they didn’t anticipate, and the country’s revolutionary progress has been accelerated. It doesn’t matter that Trump has backed down by temporarily pausing most of the tariffs; there’s no reversing these gains they’ve brought for our cause.

Now the elites are going to unleash hell upon this country’s working class, pursuing even greater economic shock policies and carrying out an ever-more violent purge. We can overcome these attacks, but we can’t let the enormity of our task lead us to lose our balance. We will outmaneuver our class enemies, if we can navigate the next crises with flexibility. Like our allies abroad have done, we have to turn the tools of our enemies against them; this is how we must respond as the onslaught gets directed towards us.

Republished from Rainer’s Newsletter

​When Euripides asked Socrates his opinion on the book On Nature by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535-475 BC), Socrates answered that the part he understood was excellent, as was the part he did not.

These are the two faces of Heraclitus. On the one side is the obscure philosopher, the ‘Dark Riddler’ whom even Socrates had trouble comprehending. On the other side is the profundity of a work worth exploring, a work that is rewarding in its depth. This duality is expressed in the lyrics of the ancient tragical poet Scythinus:

Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to travel.
Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light.
But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.
(Diogenes Laertius IX, 16)

Hard and rewarding is Heraclitus, but also mystical, since an initiation into his work by an acolyte is required. In this regard, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is similar: an undoubtedly difficult, often inaccessible philosopher, whose secrets can best be revealed through a proper introduction.

Hegel himself also felt the attraction of Heraclitus. That is made explicit in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1830), where he notes: “Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic” (trans. E.S Haldane, p.278). However, Hegel’s reading of Heraclitus in his Lectures is not that of a historian studying a historic persona; it is a tribute to a spiritual predecessor to whom the foundations of his own philosophy can be traced.

One problem with this spiritual descent is that it entails a lot of anachronistic speculation. It is very doubtful that Heraclitus really meant things the way Hegel interpreted them. Moreover, the work of the Ephesian today survives only in fragments retrieved from the works of Greek, Roman, and Christian authors who also often distorted the meaning of the original. Hegel doesn’t really tackle this issue at all, and often takes the fragments out of their original context, offering at best ambiguous interpretations.

Yet despite the issues of how he interpreted the fragments, Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus conceives the spirit of the Greek philosopher in a unique manner. Behind the multiple layers of Hegel’s ideas, the Heraclitean logos (λόγος) or ‘divine principle of reason’ still shines brightly. Furthermore, Hegel was one of the few, if not the first, Western philosopher in centuries to properly understand the Heraclitean principles of constant flux and the unity of opposites, which ideas also form the basis for Hegel’s dialectic. This means that Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus is a good introduction to the Greek’s most complex concepts, and an even better introduction into Hegel’s own philosophy. This is akin to the way Homer’s epics are more useful in understanding Homer’s own time than understanding the later Greek Bronze Age they were read in, in which they were already regarded as ‘classics’.

Heraclitus According to Hegel

‘Dialectic’ means an interpretive process incorporating contradictory ideas to reach a conclusion. Let’s look first at dialectic as Heraclitus uses it.

The dialectical method is comprised of three moments. In the first, the ‘moment of understanding’, one idea (for example, Being) is firmly defined. In the second moment, called ‘the dialectical’, we pass on to the completely opposite idea (Non-Being). The third moment is the ‘speculative’, and it leads to a understanding of the unity of the two previous ideas, which are now reconciled (in this case, in Becoming).

Heraclitus’s dialectic is a positive one: it does not aim at proving what does not exist (like the Eleatics), or that all opinions are relative (like the Sophists). Instead it searches for what exists, what is true. Hegel credits Heraclitus with conceiving the developed dialectic form. According to Hegel, Heraclitus was the first to formulate that the ‘Absolute’—the all-inclusive whole or unity that underlies everything—exists in the unity of opposites, first as a ‘Being’, and secondly as a constant ‘Becoming’. The main philosophical adversary of Heraclitus was Parmenides. Against Parmenides’ aphorism that ‘‘the one… is, and it is not possible for it not to be’’, Heraclitus believed that everything is in flux—that everything is Becoming—and so in a certain sense what is, at the same time, isn’t.

For Hegel, with Heraclitus, philosophy reaches the high plateau of ‘speculative form’—a kind of thinking that is able to explain everything without gaps. For him, previous thinkers, such as Parmenides and Zeno dwelt with an ‘abstract understanding’ of, presumably, lower value. Additionally, Hegel thinks that Heraclitus is unjustly called obscure. Given that complex language is needed to describe complex ideas, Heraclitus is instead a master of complex concepts. Those unable to fully grasp them confuse complexity with obscurity in order to justify their own failure in understanding. Here, Hegel again invokes Socrates’ saying that ‘it would take a Delian diver’ to get to the bottom of Heraclitus; the process reminds him of fishing for pearls.

The Logical Principle

For Heraclitus, two opposing things unite in one to create harmony, and everything that exists is constituted through the struggle of its opposing parts. This is expressed in multiple fragments of his writing, such as the following:

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre
(B51, trans. T.M. Robinson, 1987).

Another formulation of this principle is found in his statement that honey tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the sick. In this case, honey is one thing with two opposite qualities, just like seawater is both death for humans and life for fish: “The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive” (B61).

Interpreting these fragments, Hegel deducts that “the truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and… of the pure opposition of being and non-being… Being is and yet is not” (Lectures p.282). This is the primary Hegelian logical principle (his version of the logos): the unity of Being and Non-Being which together constitute ‘the Absolute’. Furthermore, in Hegel’s Science of Logic (1816), after a first examination, pure Being and pure Non-Being are found to be notions void of meaning if viewed independent of each other (§132-134). Instead, it is only in terms of the transition from a state of nothingness to a state of existence that they can both be properly defined and understood. This movement from one state to another is Becoming. This is the only constant, and it is becoming which logically synthesizes nothingness and existence.

The principle of constant movement, of Becoming, is also key in understanding Heraclitus. Plato encapsulates it perfectly in his dialogue Cratylus (402a): “Heraclitus says, you know, that all things move, and nothing remains still and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.” But the most famous examples, by far, are Heraclitus’ own river aphorisms:

You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. (B12)
We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not. (B49a)

The world is in flux, nothing remains the same, everything is changing, everything is becoming: Panta rhei—‘Everything flows’—is the philosophy of Heraclitus concentrated in two words. This constant movement of Being requires the activity of Being dividing itself into opposites that are both distinct entities and parts of Being.
In his lecture on Heraclitus, Hegel takes these ideas a step further to explain identity. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity, and since “each is the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ as its ‘other’, we here have their identity.” The point is that without the ‘other’ and its implications there is no subject, since the subject can only be defined by something other than itself. So the identity of a thing is the result of a dialectical process. This is exactly why in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807, Φ 178) Hegel writes that self-consciousness exists only by being recognized by another self-consciousness. But this illustrates well how for both Heraclitus and Hegel the universe is not definite and stable but moving and changing. Being is a process—that of Becoming.

Time & FireThe German goes on to interpret two more basic Heraclitean concepts: time and fire.

Time for Heraclitus is the very embodiment of Becoming, and its first form. It is pure Becoming, and the harmony of the opposing Being and Non-Being. Hegel opines that “in time there is no past and future, but only the now, and this is, but is not as regards the past; and this non-being, as future, turns round into Being” (Lectures, p.287).

For Heraclitus, fire is the elementary principle out of which everything is created and to which everything returns. It can take the shape of everything and everything can take the shape of fire, in a process of continuous creation and destruction. Hegel argues that Heraclitus didn’t really believe that everything is made from fire in the way that Thales thought that everything came from water; rather, he chose fire as a metaphor of a force that constantly shifts its form. Fire never stays still and is always in unrest. Unlike earth, air, or water, which often appear static, fire is itself a process. In these senses, fire can be viewed as representing the idea of Becoming in terms of the natural process of material transformation—as opposed to time, which is the abstract representation of the process.

The natural processes represented by fire destroy and create matter. These are two distinct paths; indeed, in Heraclitus we encounter a ‘way downwards’ (ὁδός κάτω), where fire becomes moisture, which then becomes water, which then condenses to become earth; and a ‘way upwards’ (ὁδός ἄνω), where earth becomes water, then water gives form to everything else. Like everything else, this is a process that never ceases. Hegel says that the way upwards is the process of differentiation and creation that leads to Being; and the way downwards is the process of destruction, leading to Non-Being. “Nature is thus a circle” concludes Hegel.

Consciousness & Truth

Expressing his admiration for Heraclitus’s ability to explain the dialectic using simple analogies drawn from daily life, Hegel says that he has “a beautiful, natural, child-like manner of speaking truth of the truth” (p.293). There’s something deeply entertaining in reading one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time claiming that Heraclitus, a.k.a. ‘the Obscure One’, has a ‘child-like manner’ of speaking the truth. Hegel also sees in Heraclitus the origins of other concepts central to his system of thought, such as the unity of object and subject, the omnipresent nature of the Absolute Spirit (Geist), and the unity of experience. These ideas are thoroughly explored in the third section of his lecture, which answers the questions: ‘How does logos come to consciousness?’ and ‘How is it related to the individual soul?’ Hegel believes that the Greek rejected sensuous reality as the area where one can find the truth. If for Heraclitus everything that is also is not, that means that all we observe as real is also not real. Following this path, Hegel concludes that “not this immediate Being, but absolute mediation, Being as thought of, Thought itself, is the true Being” (p.294). In other words, it is not through observation, but only through reason, that one can discern the truth.

Hegel gives another interesting interpretation to some Heraclitean fragments about sleep, learning, and reality:

All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep. (B21)
Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men who have barbarian souls. (B107)
The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios. (B40)

Hegel interprets these fragments to show a distinction between particular and universal reason—between the thought of the individual (or subjective consciousness) and the Idea (objective or Absolute consciousness) or as Heraclitus names it, the logos. ‘Consciousness’ here refers to cognitive awareness, and it is often used interchangeably by Hegel to denote both the subject’s consciousness of an object, and also the subject’s self-awareness. According to Hegel, Heraclitus first established the unity of the subjective and objective consciousness—a key Hegelian idea—when he implied that the waking man is related to things universally. Sextus Empiricus expresses some relevant ideas on this issue in Adversos Mathematicos, VII.127-133. Here he relates that for Heraclitus, sleep is a state where our senses, our anchors to the world, stop functioning. The subject stops communicating with the logos, the objective consciousness, and this isolation makes what we experience in our sleep a dream. The only connection with the world in this sleeping state is our breath, which is likened to a root keeping us attached to reality. In contrast, when we are awake, we establish a fragmented but real conscious relationship with reality and the logos. If Sextus correctly understands Heraclitus, Heraclitus is also rejecting those who claim to have received wisdom from God in their sleep.

In another fragment, Heraclitus seems to advocate that we can reach objective knowledge of the logos. This may appear to go against his doctrine of constant flux, which implies that empirical knowledge is meaningless since things change all the time. However, here Heraclitus advocates using changing empirical observations to come to an unchanging knowledge of reality:

Though this Word [Logos] is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep. (B1)

Commenting on this fragment, which is thought to be the introduction to Heraclitus’s book, Hegel says (pp.296-97):

Great and important words! We cannot speak of truth in a truer or less prejudiced way. Consciousness as consciousness of the universal, is alone consciousness of truth; but consciousness of individuality and action as individual, an originality which becomes a singularity of content or of form, is the untrue and bad. Wickedness and error thus are constituted by isolating thought and thereby bringing about a separation from the universal. Men usually consider, when they speak of thinking something, that it must be something particular, but this is quite a delusion.

Hegel concludes his lecture on Heraclitus with a modification of the words of Socrates he used for his introduction:

What remains to us of Heraclitus is excellent, and we must conjecture of what is lost, that it was as excellent. Or if we wish to consider fate so just as always to preserve to posterity what is best, we must at least say of what we have of Heraclitus, that it is worthy of this preservation.

Author

​Antonis Chaliakopoulos is an archaeologist from Athens interested in the reception of classical art and philosophy.

This article is based on America’s Protectionist Takeoff, 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (ISLET, 2010), my review of the political dynamics and economic theory that guided America’s rise to industrial power.

Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.

His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful. That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.

This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be widespread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation.

Introduction

America’s remarkable industrial takeoff from the end of the Civil War through the outbreak of World War I has always embarrassed free-market economists. The United States’ success followed precisely the opposite policies from those that today’s economic orthodoxy advocates. The contrast is not only that between protectionist tariffs and free trade. The United States created a mixed public/private economy in which public infrastructure investment was developed as a “fourth factor of production,” not to be run as a profit-making business but to provide basic services at minimal prices so as to subsidize the private sector’s cost of living and doing business.
The logic underlying these policies was formulated already in the 1820s in Henry Clay’s American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements (public investment in transportation and other basic infrastructure), and national banking aimed at financing industrial development. An American School of Political Economy emerged to guide the nation’s industrialization based on the Economy of High Wages doctrine to promote labor productivity by raising living standards and public subsidy and support programs.

These are not the policies that today’s Republicans and Democrats advise. If Reaganomics, Thatcherism and Chicago’s free-market boys had guided American economic policy in the late nineteenth century, the United States would not have achieved its industrial dominance. So it hardly is surprising that the protectionist and public investment logic that guided American industrialization has been airbrushed out of U.S. history. It plays no role in Donald Trump’s false narrative to promote his abolition of progressive income taxes, downsizing of government and privatization sell-off of its assets.
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What Trump singles out to admire in America’s nineteenth-century industrial policy is the absence of a progressive income tax and the funding of government primarily by tariff revenue. This has given him the idea of replacing progressive income taxation falling on his own Donor Class – the One Percent that paid no income tax prior to its enactment in 1913 – with tariffs designed to fall only on consumers (that is, labor). A new Gilded Age indeed!

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_taxes_by_type.pdf

In admiring the absence of progressive income taxation in the era of his hero, William McKinley (elected president in 1896 and 1900), Trump is admiring the economic excess and inequality of the Gilded Age. That inequality was widely criticized as a distortion of economic efficiency and social progress. To counteract the corrosive and conspicuous wealth-seeking that caused the distortion, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Law in 1890, Teddy Roosevelt followed with his trust busting, and a remarkably progressive income tax was passed that fell almost entirely on rentier financial and real estate income and monopoly rents.

Trump thus is promoting a simplistic and outright false narrative of what made America’s nineteenth century policy of industrialization so successful. For him, what is great is the “gilded” part of the Gilded Age, not its state-led industrial and social-democratic takeoff. His panacea is for tariffs to replace income taxes, along with privatizing what remains of the government’s functions. That would give a new set of robber barons free reign to further enrich themselves by shrinking the government’s taxation and regulation of them, while reducing the budget deficit by selling off the remaining public domain, from national park lands to the post office and research labs.

The key policies that led to America’s successful industrial takeoff

Tariffs by themselves were not enough to create America’s industrial takeoff, nor that of Germany and other nations seeking to replace and overtake Britain’s industrial and financial monopoly. The key was to use the tariff revenues to subsidize public investment, combined with regulatory power and above all tax policy, to restructure the economy on many fronts and shape the way in which labor and capital were organized.

The main aim was to raise labor productivity. That required an increasingly skilled labor force, which required rising living standards, education, healthy working conditions, consumer protection and safe food regulation. The Economy of High Wages doctrine recognized that well educated, healthy and well fed labor could undersell “pauper labor.”

The problem was that employers always have sought to increase their profits by fighting against labor’s demand for higher wages. America’s industrial takeoff solved this problem by recognizing that labor’s living standards are a result not only of wage levels but of the cost of living. To the extent that public investment financed by tariff revenues could pay the cost of supplying basic needs, living standards and labor productivity could rise without industrialists suffering a fall in profit.

The main basic needs were free education, public health support and kindred social services. Public infrastructure investment in transportation (canals and railroads), communications and other basic services that were natural monopolies was also undertaken to prevent them from being turned into private fiefdoms seeking monopoly rents at the expense of the economy at large. Simon Patten, America’s first professor of economics at its first business school (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), called public investment in infrastructure a “fourth factor of production.” 1 Unlike private-sector capital, its aim was not to make a profit, much less maximize its prices to what the market would bear. The aim was to provide public services either at cost or at a subsidized rate or even freely.

In contrast to European tradition, the United States left many basic utilities in private hands, but regulated them to prevent monopoly rents from being extracted. Business leaders supported this mixed public/private economy, seeing that it was subsidizing a low-cost economy and thus increasing its (and their) competitive advantage in the international economy.

The most important public utility, but also the most difficult to introduce, was the monetary and financial system needed to provide enough credit to finance the nation’s industrial growth. Creating private and/or public paper credit required replacing the narrow reliance on gold bullion for money. Bullion long remained the basis for paying customs duties to the Treasury, which drained it from the economy at large, limiting its availability for financing industry. Industrialists advocated moving away from over-reliance on bullion by the creation of a national banking system to provide a growing superstructure of paper credit to finance industrial growth.2 Classical political economy saw tax policy as the most important lever steering the allocation of resources and credit towards industry. Its main policy aim was to minimize economic rent (the excess of market prices over intrinsic cost value) by freeing markets from rentier income in the form of land rent, monopoly rent, and interest and financial fees. From Adam Smith through David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, to Marx and other socialists, classical value theory defined such economic rent as unearned income, extracted without contributing to production and hence an unnecessary levy on the economy’s cost and price structure.

Taxes on industrial profits and labor’s wages added to the cost of production and thus were to be avoided, while land rent, monopoly rent and financial gains should be taxed away, or land, monopolies and credit could simply be nationalized into the public domain to lower access costs for real estate and monopoly services and reduce financial charges.

These policies based on the classical distinction between intrinsic cost-value and market price are what made industrial capitalism so revolutionary. Freeing economies from rentier income by the taxation of economic rent aimed at minimizing the cost of living and doing business, and also minimizing the political dominance of a financial and landlord power elite.

When the United States imposed its initial progressive income tax in 1913, only 2 percent of Americans had a high enough income to require them to file a tax return. The vast majority of the 1913 tax fell on the rentier income of financial and real estate interests, and on the monopoly rents extracted by the trusts that the banking system organized.

How America’s neoliberal policy reverses its former industrial dynamic

Since the takeoff of the neoliberal period in the 1980s, U.S. labor’s disposable income has been squeezed by high costs for basic needs at the same time as its cost of living has priced it out of world markets. This is not the same thing as a high-wage economy. It is a rakeoff of wages to pay the various forms of economic rent that have proliferated and destroyed America’s formerly competitive cost structure. Today’s $175,000 average income for a family of four is not being spent mainly on products or services that wage-earners produce. It is mostly siphoned off by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector and monopolies at the top of the economic pyramid.

The private-sector’s debt overhead is largely responsible for today’s shift of wages away from rising living standards for labor, and of corporate profits away from new tangible capital investment, research and development for industrial companies. Employers have not paid their employees enough to both maintain their standard of living and carry this financial, insurance and real estate burden, leaving U.S. labor to fall further and further behind.

Inflated by bank credit and rising debt/income ratios, the U.S. guideline cost of housing for home buyers has risen to 43% of their income, far up from the formerly standard 25%. The Federal Housing Authority insures mortgages to guarantee that banks following this guideline will not lose money, even as arrears and defaults are hitting all-time highs. Home ownership rates fell from over 69% in 2005 to under 63% in the Obama eviction wave of foreclosures after the 2008 junk-mortgage crisis. Rents and house prices have soared steadily (especially during the period the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low deliberately to inflate asset prices to support the finance sector, and as private capital has bought up homes that wage earners cannot afford), making housing by far the largest charge on wage income.

Debt arrears also are exploding for student education debt taken on to qualify for a higher-paying job, and in many cases for the auto debt needed to be able to drive to the job. This is capped by credit-card debt accumulating just to make ends meet. The disaster of privatized medical insurance now absorbs 18 percent of U.S. GDP, yet medical debt has become a major cause of personal bankruptcy. All this is just the reverse of what was intended by the original Economy of High Wages policy for American industry.

This neoliberal financialization – the proliferation of rentier charges, inflation of housing and health-care costs, and the need to live on credit beyond solely one’s earnings – has two effects. The most obvious is that most American families have not been able to increase their savings since 2008, and are living from paycheck to paycheck. The second effect has been that, with employers obliged to pay their labor force enough to carry these rentier costs, the living wage for American labor has risen so far above that of every other national economy that there is no way that American industry can compete with that of foreign countries.
Privatization and deregulation of the U.S. economy has obliged employers and labor to bear the rentier costs, including higher housing prices and rising debt overhead, that are part and parcel of today’s neoliberal policies. The resulting loss of industrial competitiveness is the major block to its re-industrialization. After all, it was these rentier charges that deindustrialized the economy in the first place, making it less competitive in world markets and spurring the offshoring of industry by raising the cost of basic needs and doing business. Paying such charges also shrinks the domestic market, by reducing labor’s ability to buy what it produces. Trump’s tariff policy does nothing to address these problems, but will aggravate them by accelerating price inflation.

This situation is unlikely to change any time soon, because the beneficiaries of today’s neoliberal policies – the recipients of these rentier charges burdening the U.S. economy – have become the political Donor Class of billionaires. To increase their rentier income and capital gains and make them irreversible, this resurgent oligarchy is pressing to further privatize and sell off the public sector instead of providing subsidized services to meet the economy’s basic needs at minimum cost. The largest public utilities that have been privatized are natural monopolies – which is why they were kept in the public domain in the first place (i.e., to avoid monopoly rent extraction).

The pretense is that private ownership seeking profits will provide an incentive to increase efficiency. The reality is that prices for what formerly were public services are increased to what the market will bear for transportation, communications and other privatized sectors. One eagerly awaits the fate of the U.S. Post Office that Congress is trying to privatize.

Neither increasing production nor lowering its cost is the aim of today’s sell-off of government assets. The prospect of owning a privatized monopoly in a position to extract monopoly rent has led financial managers to borrow the money to buy up these businesses, adding debt payments to their cost structure. The managers then start selling off the businesses’ real estate for quick cash that they pay out as special dividends, leasing back the property that they need to operate. The result is a high-cost monopoly that is heavily indebted with plunging profits. That is the neoliberal model from England’s paradigmatic Thames Water privatization to private financialized former industrial companies such as General Electric and Boeing.

In contrast to the nineteenth century’s takeoff of industrial capitalism, the aim of privatizers in today’s post-industrial epoch of rentier finance capitalism is to make “capital” gains on the stocks of hitherto public enterprises that have been privatized, financialized and deregulated. A similar financial objective has been pursued in the private arena, where the financial sector’s business plan has been to replace the drive for corporate profits with making capital gains in stocks, bonds and real estate.

The great majority of stocks and bonds are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent, not by the bottom 90 percent. While their financial wealth has soared, the disposable personal income of the majority (after paying rentier charges) has shrunk. Under today’s rentier finance capitalism the economy is going in two directions at once – down for the industrial goods-producing sector, up for the financial and other rentier claims on this sector’s labor and capital.
The mixed public/private economy that formerly built up American industry by minimizing the cost of living and doing business has been reversed by what is Trump’s most influential constituency (and that of the Democrats as well, to be sure) – the wealthiest One Percent, which continues to march its troops under the libertarian flag of Thatcherism, Reaganomics and Chicago anti-government (meaning anti-labor) ideologues. They accuse the government’s progressive income and wealth taxes, investment in public infrastructure and role as regulator to prevent predatory economic behavior and polarization, of being intrusions into “free markets.”

The question, of course, is “free for whom”? What they mean is a market free for the wealthy to extract economic rent. They ignore both the need to tax or otherwise minimize economic rent to achieve industrial competitiveness, and the fact that slashing income taxes on the wealthy – and then insisting on balancing the government budget like that of a family household so as to avoid running yet deeper into debt – starves the economy of public injection of purchasing power. Without net public spending, the economy is obliged to turn for financing to the banks, whose interest-bearing loans grow exponentially and crowd out spending on goods and real services. This intensifies the wage squeeze described above and the dynamic of deindustrialization.

A fatal effect of all these changes has been that instead of capitalism industrializing the banking and financial system as was expected in the nineteenth century, industry has been financialized. The finance sector has not allocated its credit to finance new means of production, but to take over assets already in place – primarily real estate and existing companies. This loads the assets down with debt in the process of inflating capital gains as the finance sector lends money to bid up prices for them.

This process of increasing financialized wealth adds to economic overhead not only in the form of debt, but in the form of higher purchase prices (inflated by bank credit) for real estate and industrial and other companies. And consistently with its business plan of making capital gains, the finance sector has sought to untax such gains. It also has taken the lead in urging cuts in real estate taxes so as to leave more of the rising site value of housing and office buildings – their rent-of-location – to be pledged to the banks instead of serving as the major tax base for local and national fiscal systems as classical economists urged throughout the nineteenth century.

The result has been a shift from progressive taxation to regressive taxation. Rentier income and debt-financed capital gains have been untaxed, and the tax burden shifted onto labor and industry. It is this tax shift that has encouraged corporate financial managers to replace the drive for corporate profits with making capital gains as described above.

What promised to be a harmony of interests for all classes – to be achieved by increasing their wealth by running into debt and watching prices rise for homes and other real estate, stocks and bonds – has turned into a class war.
It is now much more than the class war of industrial capital against labor familiar in the nineteenth century. The postmodern form of class war is that of finance capital against both labor and industry. Employers still exploit labor by seeking profits by paying labor less than what they sell its products for. But labor has been increasingly exploited by debt – mortgage debt (with “easier” credit fueling the debt-driven inflation of housing costs), student debt, automobile debt and credit-card debt just to meet its break-even costs of living.

Having to pay these debt charges increases the cost of labor to industrial employers, constraining their ability to make profits. And (as indicated above) it is such exploitation of industry (and indeed of the whole economy) by finance capital and other rentiers that has spurred the offshoring of industry and deindustrialization of the United States and other Western economies that have followed the same policy path.3 In stark contrast to Western deindustrialization stands China’s successful industrial takeoff. Today, living standards in China are, for much of the population, broadly as high as those in the United States. That is a result of the Chinese government’s policy of providing public support for industrial employers by subsidizing basic needs (e.g., education and medical care) and public high-speed rail, local subway and other transportation, better high-technology communications and other consumer goods, along with their payments systems.

Most important, China has kept banking and credit creation in the public domain as a public utility. That is the key policy that has enabled it to avoid the financialization that has deindustrialized the U.S. and other Western economies.

The great irony is that China’s industrial policy is remarkably similar to that of America’s nineteenth-century industrial takeoff. China’s government, as just mentioned, has financed basic infrastructure and kept it in the public domain, providing its services at low prices to keep the economy’s cost structure as low as possible. And China’s rising wages and living standards have indeed found their counterpart in rising labor productivity.

There are billionaires in China, but they are not viewed as celebrity heroes and models for how the economy at large should seek to develop. The accumulation of conspicuous large fortunes such as those that have characterized the West and created its political Donor Class have been countered by political and moral sanctions against the use of personal wealth to gain control of public economic policy.

This government activism that U.S. rhetoric denounces as Chinese “autocracy” has managed to do what Western democracies have not done: prevent the emergence of a financialized rentier oligarchy that uses its wealth to buy control of government and takes over the economy by privatizing government functions and promoting its own gains by indebting the rest of the economy to itself while dismantling public regulatory policy.

What was the Gilded Age that Trump hopes to resurrect?

Trump and the Republicans have put one political aim above all others: cutting taxes, above all progressive taxation that falls mainly on the highest incomes and personal wealth. It seems that at some point Trump must have asked some economist whether there was any alternative way for governments to finance themselves. Someone must have informed him that from American independence through the eve of World War I, by far the dominant form of government revenue was customs revenue from tariffs.

It is easy to see the lightbulb that went off in Trump’s brain. Tariffs don’t fall on his rentier class of real estate, financial and monopoly billionaires, but primarily on labor (and on industry too, for imports of necessary raw materials and parts).

In introducing his enormous and unprecedented tariff rates on April 3, Trump promised that tariffs alone, by themselves, would re-industrialize America, by both creating a protective barrier and enabling Congress to slash taxes on the wealthiest Americans, whom he seems to believe will thereby be incentivized to “rebuild” American industry. It is as if giving more wealth to the financial managers who have deindustrialized America’s economy will somehow enable a repeat of the industrial takeoff that was peaking in the 1890s under William McKinley.
What Trump’s narrative leaves out of account is that tariffs were merely the precondition for the nurturing of industry by the government in a mixed public/private economy where the government shaped markets in ways designed to minimize the cost of living and doing business. That public nurturing is what gave nineteenth-century America its competitive international advantage. But given his guiding economic aim to untax himself and his most influential political constituency, what appeals to Trump is simply the fact that the government did not yet have an income tax.

What also appeals to Trump is the super-affluence of a robber-baron class, in whose ranks he can readily imagine himself as if in a historical novel. But that self-indulgent class consciousness has a blind spot regarding how its own drives for predatory income and wealth destroy the economy around it, while fantasizing that the robber barons made their fortunes by being the great organizers and drivers of industry. He is unaware that the Gilded Age did not emerge as part of America’s industrial strategy for success but because it did not yet regulate monopolies and tax rentier income. The great fortunes were made possible by the early failure to regulate monopolies and tax economic rent. Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes tells the story of how railroad and real estate monopolies were carved out at the expense of the economy at large.

America’s anti-trust legislation was enacted to deal with this problem, and the original 1913 income tax applied only to the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. It fell (as noted above) mainly on financial and real estate wealth and monopolies – financial interest, land rent and monopoly rent – not on labor or most businesses. By contrast, Trump’s plan is to replace taxation of the wealthiest rentier classes with tariffs paid mainly by American consumers. To share his belief that national prosperity can be achieved by tax favoritism for his Donor Class by untaxing their rentier income, it is necessary to block awareness that such a fiscal policy will prevent the re-industrialization of America that he claims to want.

The U.S. economy cannot be re-industrialized without freeing it from rentier income

The most immediate effects of Trump’s tariff policy will be unemployment as a result of the trade disruption (over and above the unemployment flowing from his DOGE cutbacks in government employment) and an increase in consumer prices for a labor force already squeezed by the financial, insurance and real estate charges that it has to bear as first claims on its wage income. Arrears on mortgage loans, auto loans and credit-card loans already are at historically high levels, and more than half of Americans have no net savings at all – and tell pollsters that they cannot cope with an emergency need to raise $400.

There is no way that disposable personal income will rise in these circumstances. And there is no way that American production can avoid being interrupted by the trade disruption and layoffs that will be caused by the enormous tariff barriers that Trump has threatened – at least until the conclusion of his country-by-country negotiation to extract economic concessions from other countries in exchange for restoring more normal access to the American market.

While Trump has announced a 90-day pause during which the tariffs will be reduced to 10% for countries that have indicated a willingness to so negotiate, he has raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%.4

China and other foreign countries and companies already have stopped exporting raw materials and parts needed by American industry. For many companies it will be too risky to resume trade until the uncertainty surrounding these political negotiations are settled. Some countries can be expected to use this interim to find alternatives to the U.S. market (including producing for their own populations).

As for Trump’s hope to persuade foreign companies to relocate their factories to the United States, such companies face the risk of him holding a Sword of Damocles over their heads as foreign investors. He may in due course simply insist that they sell out their American affiliate to domestic U.S. investors, as he has demanded that China do with TikTok.
And the most basic problem, of course, is that the American economy’s rising debt overhead, health insurance and housing costs already have priced U.S. labor, and the products it makes, out of world markets. Trump’s tariff policy will not solve this. Indeed, his tariffs by increasing consumer prices will exacerbate this problem by further increasing the cost of living and thus the price of American labor.

Instead of supporting a regrowth of U.S. industry, the effect of Trump’s tariffs and other fiscal policies will be to protect and subsidize obsolescence and financialized deindustrialization. Without restructuring the rentier financialized economy to move it back toward the original business plan of industrial capitalism with markets freed from rentier income, as advocated by the classical economists and their distinctions between value and price, and hence between rent and industrial profit, his program will fail to re-industrialize America. Indeed, it threatens to push the U.S. economy into depression – for 90 percent of the population, that is.

So we find ourselves dealing with two opposing economic philosophies. On the one hand is the original industrial program that the United States and most other successful nations followed. It is the classical program based on public infrastructure investment and strong government regulation, with rising wages protected by tariffs that provided the public revenue and profit opportunities to create factories and employ labor.

Trump has no plans to recreate such an economy. Instead, he advocates the opposing economic philosophy: downsizing government, weakening public regulation, privatizating public infrastructure, and abolishing progressive income taxes. This is the neoliberal program that has increased the cost structure for industry and polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors. Donald Trump misrepresents this program as being supportive of industry, not its antithesis.

Imposing tariffs while continuing the neoliberal program will simply protect senility in the form of industrial production burdened by high costs for labor as a result of rising domestic housing prices, medical insurance, education, and services bought from privatized public utilities that used to provide basic needs for communications, transportation and other basic needs at subsidized prices instead of financialized monopoly rents. It will be a tarnished gilded age.
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While Trump may be genuine in wanting to re-industrialize America, his more single-minded aim is to cut taxes on his Donor Class, imagining that tariff revenues can pay for this. But much trade already has stopped. By the time more normal trade resumes and tariff revenue is generated from it, widespread layoffs will have occurred, leading the affected labor to fall further into debt arrears, with the American economy in no better position to re-industrialize.

The geopolitical dimension

Trump’s country-by-country negotiations to extract economic concessions from other countries in exchange for restoring their access to the American market no doubt will lead some countries to succumb to this coercive tactic. Indeed, Trump has announced over 75 countries have contacted the U.S. government to negotiate. But some Asian and Latin American countries already are seeking an alternative to the U.S. weaponization of trade dependency to extort concessions. Countries are discussing options to join together to create a mutual trade market with less anarchic rules.

The result of them doing so would be that Trump’s policy will become yet another step in America’s Cold War march to isolate itself from trade and investment relations with the rest of the world, including potentially with some of its European satellites. The United States runs the risk of being thrown back onto what has long been supposed its strongest economic advantage: its ability to be self-sufficient in food, raw materials, and labor. But it already has deindustrialized itself, and has little to offer other countries except for the promise not to hurt them, disrupt their trade and impose sanctions on them if they agree to let the United States be the major beneficiary of their economic growth.

The hubris of national leaders trying to extend their empire is age-old – as is their nemesis, which usually turns out to be themselves. At his second inauguration, Trump promised a new Golden Age. Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time, famous for his gold coinage in particular. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great. 

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial gold and silver, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus optimistically set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire – but it was his own. 

Fast-forward to today. Like Croesus hoping to gain the riches of other countries for his gold coinage, Trump hoped that his global trade aggression would enable America to extort the wealth of other nations and strengthen the dollar’s role as a reserve currency against foreign defensive moves to de-dollarize and create alternative plans for conducting international trade and holding foreign reserves. But Trump’s aggressive stance has further undermined trust in the dollar abroad, and is causing serious interruptions in the supply chain of U.S. industry, halting production and causing layoffs at home.

Investors hoped for a return to normalcy as the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared upon Trump’s suspension of his tariffs, only to then fall back when it became clear that he was still taxing all countries 10 percent (and China a prohibitive 145 percent). It is now becoming apparent that his radical disruption of trade cannot be reversed.
The tariffs that Trump announced on April 3, followed by his statement that this was simply his maximum demand, to be negotiated on a bilateral country-by-country basis to extract economic and political concessions (subject to more changes at Trump’s discretion) have replaced the traditional idea of a set of rules consistent and binding for all countries. His demand that the United States must be “the winner” in any transaction has changed how the rest of the world views its economic relations with the United States. An entirely different geopolitical logic is now emerging to create a new international economic order.

China has responded with its own tariffs and export controls as its trade with the United States is frozen, potentially paralyzed. It seems unlikely that China will remove its export controls on many products essential for U.S. supply chains. Other countries are searching for alternatives to their trade dependency on the United States, and a reordering of the global economy is now under negotiation, including defensive de-dollarization policies. Trump has taken a giant step toward the destruction of what was a great empire.

Thanks to the Democracy Collaborative.

Republished from Michael Hudson's blog

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), ‘and forgive them their debts’ (2018), J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.

Image by Lux Enigma from Pixabay

​Footnotes

1. The three usual factors of production are labor, capital and land. But these factors are best thought of in terms of classes of income recipients. Capitalists and workers play a productive role, but landlords receive rent without producing a productive service, as their land rent is unearned income that they make “in their sleep.”
2. In contrast to the British system of short-term trade credit and a stock market aimed at making quick gains at the expense of the rest of the economy, Germany went further than the United States in creating a symbiosis of government, heavy industry and banking. Its economists called the logic on which this was based the State Theory of Money. I give the details in Killing the Host (2015, chapter 7).
3. America’s deindustrialization has also been facilitated by U.S. policy (starting under Jimmy Carter and accelerated under Bill Clinton) promoting the offshoring of industrial production to Mexico, China, Vietnam and other countries with lower wage levels. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies playing on native Americanism are a reflection of the success of this deliberate U.S policy in deindustrializing America. It is worth noting that his migration policies are the opposite of those of America’s industrial takeoff, which encouraged immigration as a source of labor – not only skilled labor fleeing Europe’s oppressive society, but also low-wage labor to work in the construction industry (for men) and the textile industry (for women). But today, by having moved directly to the countries from which immigrants performing U.S. industrial labor previously came, American industry has no need to bring them to the United States.
4. The White House has pointed out that Trump’s new 125% tariff on China is on top of the 20% IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) tariffs already in place, making the tariff on Chinese imports an unpayably high 145%.

WASHINGTON DC, April 5 (RTSG) – Thousands of protestors gathered in Washington DC this month to protest against the war in Palestine. Among the attendees was Norman Finkelstein, an American political-scientist and journalist who has spent decades advocating against the state of Israel and the war against Palestine. He has called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state” and says that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid against Palestinians. He has also spoken many times in support of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group which the United States has labelled as a terrorist organization.

We asked Finkelstein what he thought about this event, and if the showing there was a sign that more people were becoming aware of the movement.

​Finkelstein said that “It (the National March for Palestine) was a good showing, but it was almost all non-white. I don’t know why we lost the white folks who were coming out. It felt like it was not as representative. Much less diverse than it was say in November.”

When asked if this was because of a perceived threat to white people, Finkelstein replied “The threat is really not to folks like me, the threat is to the people who came. So they showed real courage, right, coming. I’m not sure, I don’t know what the answers are but it was very noticeable.”

Other attendees were also interviewed by RTSG News.

Em, a 51 year-old cook from Pittsburgh, said that “looking back at how Israel was created and the role of world banks” led him to become an activist for Palestine. “Once you start doing your research, man, you just can’t stop if you’ve got a heart and some moral conviction.”

“The biggest issue is that people are still acting like sheep until they wake up. People are cheap and very ignorant; they think it’s cool to just be the way we are.”

When asked if part of the problem was corporate influence in politics, Em replied that “[People] believe capitalism is flawless. I’m not saying we should ditch capitalism overnight—that’s what we have—but when corporations have more power than the workers, that’s a serious problem.”

We asked if this meant that people were waking up about the situation in Gaza. Em replied “It’s a nice crowd, right? But if people were really waking up, we’d have millions coming together—everyone from all over, even from places like DC or three hours away like Philadelphia.”

“This is serious stuff, yet if anyone knows anything, we’re just not coming together enough. It might be better than it was two or three years ago—even five years ago—but consider what happened recently: the country voted for someone who one minute said he’d lower prices and then switched to raising them, and then went on to talk about tariffs and taxes. It’s all so contradictory.”

“I believe it all comes down to getting money out of politics.”

RTSG is an international research collective that brings reality to a world of Fake News. We prize our independency, reliability, and discipline. We will only post the truth, and nothing but the truth.

With modern quantum physics, the great metaphysical split between philosophy and natural science is almost undeniably appearing to come full circle. In a reverse-event, the questions that separated physics from critical and transcendental philosophy seem to be the very questions that are today uniting them: can an object be defined in isolation? Is the position of the observer inscribed in the substantial world itself? Can the material world form a coherent, unified totality? These are the problems of physics today, and yet they have also been the problems of philosophy for around 200 years.

In 1991, Deleuze and Guattari saw an ally in physics when confronted with ‘the last question that the philosopher ever asks themselves’: What is Philosophy? Yet their use of physics was to extract models of chaos, of continuously varying virtual objects, and of an infinite multiplicity of abstracted intensities, which might point philosophy in a new direction. In other words, for Deleuze & Guattari, natural science did little more than provide certain possible horizons, new models of thought, which philosophy could appropriate and develop. This is radically different to what the development of quantum physics implies for the history (not the future) of philosophy. This latter problem, of reinterpreting the history of philosophy according to contemporary epistemes, is if anything where Slavoj Žižek sees his role: it is not about what physics means for philosophy, but of what philosophy means for physics. Unfortunately, however, Žižek’s method of reading modern science into philosophy - specifically, into Hegel and occasionally into Lacan - goes astray almost immediately.
​
Since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it seemed Hegel at once needed rescuing. No sooner was the foundation of dialectical idealism laid, than Hegel began being misinterpreted as some mystical obscurantist or simple evolutionary philosopher of endless antitheses and syntheses. Several figures, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Alexandre Kojève, and the anti-Hegelian avatars of French Theory, seemed to have contributed to a perpetual misreading of the rigorous processes of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. With Badiou, Žižek, Jameson (and the Ljubljana School more generally), however, Hegel was re-situated as an anti-teleological thinker of ontological paradoxes par excellence.

Of all three, Žižek’s reading of Hegel - the same reading which allows him to recognise Hegel’s greatest accomplices as Lacan and quantum mechanics - is the most straightforward: reality is ontologically incomplete. Yet it is exactly this conclusion which seems to betray Hegel, Lacan, and quantum physics. These ontological systems are not incomplete, they are what I would call hyper-complete: they are structured by conceptual systems that are in a perpetual overestimation, or non-identity, with themselves, and from this they produce indeterminate excesses that are entirely superordinate to the very planes on which they operate. In other words, if Hegel and quantum physics stand for anything, it is not incompleteness, but (as I will argue) the complex position of an indeterminacy that presupposes a determined, yet self-contradictory, totality.


Hyper-completeness, not Incompleteness

As I mentioned in Part 1 of my disagreements with Žižek, in Less Than Nothing, an otherwise impressive and monumental piece of theory, Žižek’s uniting theme across Hegel, Lacan, and quantum mechanics is that epistemological insufficiency is in fact ontological incompleteness. In other words, our inability to effectively and totally know an objective reality - no matter what experimental apparatus we use - reveals an incompleteness located in reality itself. But is a systematic, ontological ‘incompleteness’ really the red thread from Hegel to quantum physics? This conclusion seems to not only depart from all three, but to miss the more interesting conclusion: that Hegel, Lacan, and quantum mechanics furnish a far more perplexing hyper-completeness of reality. Their totalising, logical functions contradict themselves and furnish qualitatively irreducible contradictions. This abruptness to Žižek’s positions is also what forces him to prematurely dismiss figures such as Jung, Heidegger, or Nietzsche, who I generally would defend alongside Lacan and Hegel.

For Jung (as I am arguing in an upcoming essay for Psychoanalytic Dialogues), the collective unconscious and its archetypes are superordinate abstractions derived by the contingent, everyday structure of consciousness. The mythological archetypes are the ‘exceptions’ produced by the finite imperfections of consciousness that consciousness itself is unable to account for. The archetypal position is not what is left incomplete in human consciousness, but what is all too human, and even hyper-human, in human consciousness. For Nietzsche, similarly, the all-too-human is not a subordinate incompleteness, but a topographically higher mode of human drive. The will to power, for example, is a dizzying departure from nature, rather than a remnant of humanity’s natural ground. It expresses a human impulse that humanity itself fails to coherently assimilate. Madness is, for Nietzsche, therefore more rational than sanity itself.

We see a similar avowal with Lacan, where the same superordinate position can be ascribed to the Real. The Real is not a simple remainder of the process of symbolisation, an abnormal x that forever fails to find its place in the Symbolic (which is how Žižek describes it in The Sublime Object of Ideology). This view of the Real implies that the Symbolic is a consistent totality - yet if Lacan insists on anything, it is that the Symbolic, or language, is irreconcilable with itself. It produces enigmas and contradictions that are only possible because language is already there, and inevitably fails to account for its own consequences. Hence why language indefinitely displaces its own implications in the register of the (always absent) big Other.

The Real is for Lacan a distortion of the Symbolic that is produced by the Symbolic itself. Much like rules can’t be broken if the game itself is thrown away, if the Symbolic is taken away, so is the Real. To put it in a slightly awkward way, the Real is more Symbolic than the Symbolic itself, since it is the culmination of the inconsistent logic of the Symbolic that this logic cannot in turn assimilate. The important point is that the Symbolic is not incomplete, and the Real does not reflect this incompleteness. The efficiency of the Symbolic is rather in excess of its own comprehension. It produces certain infinite complexities which it cannot in turn account for, and it is here where the Real emerges. The Real is therefore the symptom of the hyper-completeness of an unstable Symbolic structure - it is a testimony to the fact that there is far more to be said about the Symbolic than about whatever preceded the Symbolic, and far more to know about the Symbolic than the Symbolic can know of itself.

With Hegel (who Žižek inevitably comes to rely on even more than Lacan), the notion of ‘incompleteness’ is just as inadequate. The Badiou-Jameson-Žižek reading of Hegel as anti-teleological is of course true: Hegel does not suggest that there is some imminent point which Spirit tends towards in which everything is known and predicted. Absolute knowledge is instead an avowal of the radical openness, the infinite formal possibilities, which are constructed by a conceptual knowledge that presupposes only itself. What is nevertheless most striking about Hegel’s system is not the incompleteness that leaves any determinacy open, but the indeterminacy that is furnished by determinacy itself.

There is a straightforward view of the ontological development of Hegel’s Science of Logic: from indeterminacy, to determinate being or existence, to essence, and finally to the concept. But this entirely misses the retroaction of the concept upon its own ground. Indeterminacy is not a prerequisite to determinacy, but a function of determinacy - it is the indeterminate core of any determined being which allows it to be framed as its own opposite. This is why Hegel is able to insists that his Doctrine of Being can begin either with Being or with Nothing: the negation of being is a feature of being itself. Being presupposes the very thing which it fails to account for - it exists only by incorporating the discrepancy that is furnishes as irreducible to itself. In another perspective, nothing negates itself in order to produce a being that is other than itself, infinitely presupposing nothing as the mode in which existence can be expressed. It is not incompleteness, then, but a conceptual indeterminacy, which drives Hegel’s Logic towards the Concept. That which escapes the Concept is not its incompleteness, but the indeterminate excess that the Concept is itself responsible for.

The famous Hegelian line that substance appears as subject, and in so doing reconstructs substance as presupposing its own (subjective) disparity towards itself, does not mean - as Žižek seems to imply - that substance, or ontological reality, is merely incomplete. It means rather that it has an indeterminate affinity to the very thing it cannot account for: the subjective position as inscribed within the a-subjective. The very important shift from incompleteness to indeterminacy is also one that is at home in quantum physics. Insisting on a type of a priori incompleteness in the subatomic structure of the world misses what Leonard Susskind suggests is a kind of production of indeterminacy in quantum states. Whether we argue that the function of consciousness is entirely incalculable, or whether we argue that observation internally determines the observed thing, the crux of quantum entanglement is indeterminacy. For example, the method of aligning a measurement apparatus with possible values of a degree of freedom such as quantum spin (i.e. independent of spatial coordinates), will have the very odd effect of influencing the values given off by this spin. There is, of course, something there to be measured - but in order to be there, it has to produce an indeterminacy regarding its own probabilities.

My insistence on indeterminacy over incompleteness may seem trivial, but I would argue that it is a crucial distinction. Incompleteness implies that whatever problem there is with reality, it is subordinate, a simple failed programming. Indeterminacy, however, is based on the fact that reality is too complete for its own good, that it is all too real. Just like the Lacanian Real is not simply what was left out of the process of symbolisation, but a disorienting, self-contradictory augmentation of the paradoxical effects of the Symbolic, Hegel’s ontology - like Nietzsche’s will to power, Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, or Jung’s collective unconscious - all depart from a superordinate, all too real indeterminacy: a hyper-completeness which leaves the ‘world’ (in Badiou’s sense) fundamentally irreconcilable to itself. Hegelian ontology is not simply an incomplete contingency that inevitably assimilates its own incompleteness. It is a system which realises itself by departing from itself, by furnishing the very indeterminacy that can be articulated only at a self-reflective distance. Žižek mistakenly insists on incompleteness, the far less interesting counterpart to the paradoxical function of indeterminacy - and it is this which leads Žižek towards an understanding of God which misses the very abnormality about God that God misses about Himself.


God as a Middle-Management Bureaucrat

In good Schellingian spirit, Žižek comes to rely on a reformatting of God in order to elaborate his ontological position. Unlike Schelling, however, who uses God as an impersonal embodiment of the rationality of the Naturphilosophie, Žižek’s use of God to explain what he calls ‘ontological incompleteness’ is brief: God is a lazy programmer. He simply could not be bothered to constitute an absolutely complete reality, and the ‘holes’ in reality which remains to be patched up are finally being revealed with the help of quantum physics.

But if it is not incompleteness that God left lying around in the world, but rather an unnameable, hyper-complete indeterminacy, then I would suggest that God is not so much lazy as he is reckless. To be reckless does, after all, take more energy than to be lazy, and the superordinate discrepancies of the world can only be accounted for by an irresponsible overinvestment rather than a lazy underinvestment.

This unregulated excess of activity is in fact the defining feature of Schelling’s God, and it is this feature which Žižek’s lazy God misses. Schelling’s God constitutes Himself by an auto-generative capacity to negate His own infinite negative contraction into nothingness. God posits Himself as the very origin from which He emerges as a systematic feature of reality. In other words, and as Die Weltalter argues, God posits Himself as preceding His own existence, as the possibility of His own past. God is thereby forced to insert a disparity, a retroactive void, between Himself and His own emergence. This is where the famous line of the extra-divine in the divine itself comes from. What is most central to God is the very thing which cannot be subsumed by God. Schelling’s rational God is therefore in excess of Himself: not incomplete, but more God than God. Žižek’s reading of God as lazy is therefore misguided.

God is not simply a lazy programmer - he’s an irresponsible automaton. In other words, if God is anything, He is the type of late capitalist managerial figure who confidently represents an economic process that He cannot himself understand or account for. The reality furnished by God is a reality that produces an endless series of antagonisms - He is the signpost of a system (like decentred post-Fordist capitalism) so automated that it becomes unable to catch up with its own consequences. God’s political economy is, in other words, not incomplete, but hyper-complete: it’s totality reaches beyond itself into a purely virtual discrepancy. Žižek’s suggestion that reality is incomplete - and its theological, Hegelian, Lacanian, and physical correlates - misses what is most evident about these systems, and about reality itself. There is no a priori gap that always remains to be filled, but rather a higher-order discrepancy, a productive consequence that cannot be re-assimilated. Reality is, in other words, far too real for reality itself to make sense of. 

​Pope Francis, who passed away on April 21, 2025, at the age of 88, was a figure of profound complexity, embodying both the contradictions of his time and the potential for transformative change within the Catholic Church. The socio-political changes in his home Argentina influenced Jorge Mario Bergoglio's viewpoint as the first Jesuit to become pontiff and the first Latin American pope. Pope Francis was an unexpected ally in the fight for social justice, especially because of his outspoken support for the Palestinian cause and his sharp criticism of global capitalism and neoliberalism.

​Despite having Catholic roots, his pontificate upended the status quo and served as a ray of hope for progressive ideas in a sea of conservatism. This article explores Francis's legacy, criticizes his early silence during the Argentine dictatorship, examines his progressive contributions—including opening up to the People's Republic of China and political engagement with individuals like Fidel Castro and contrasts his approach with that of his predecessor, John Paul II, whose anti-communist stance during the Cold War sided with Western interests.
 
Early Days of Silence
 
During Argentina's Dirty War (1976–1983), a time of severe state repression under a military dictatorship, Jorge Bergoglio's early career took place. An estimated 30,000 people went missing as a result of the regime's targeting of academics, labour unionists, and communists who were thought to be dissenters. Bergoglio was accused of collaboration as the leader of the Jesuit order in Argentina, especially in the abduction and torture of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. Critics, particularly human rights campaigners and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, felt that his silence throughout this period amounted to tacit support for the junta.
 
Nonetheless, the story is not biased. According to some reports, Bergoglio spoke with junta authorities to arrange the priests' release and helped others flee persecution in order to work behind the scenes to defend people. He visited her to show concern for priests working in slums, according to Alicia Oliveira, a friend and former Argentine judge who remembered him as being extremely critical of the dictatorship. These contradictory reports show how complicated his activities were at a very dangerous moment.
 
The Constructivist Lens: Contextualising Silence
 
From a constructivist approach, Bergoglio’s silence must be interpreted within the socio-political setting of Argentina in the 1970s. The dictatorship and the Catholic Church, a significant institution in Argentina, were closely linked, with some priests publicly endorsing the government's anti-communist campaign. Conservative Christians who supported the junta and economic interests frequently vilified communism and socialism as the "work of Satan." The Church leadership, especially the Vatican under Pope Paul VI and subsequently John Paul II, saw liberation theology, a movement that attempted to reconcile Christian teachings with Marxist critiques of structural inequality as heretical.
 
The limitations of Bergoglio's surroundings are reflected in his lack of engagement with liberation theology during this time. He worked as a Jesuit leader in an environment where open disagreement may result in persecution for both himself and the people he was responsible for. Despite criticism, his cautious attitude was perhaps a practical reaction to the oppressive environment. However, his exposure to the injustice and poverty of Argentina's slums, along with the emphasis on the poor in liberation theology, sowed the roots that would eventually grow into his papacy's progressive objectives.
 
Progressive Ideals and the Gospel as Communist
 
Pope Francis changed the tone of the Catholic Church when he took office in 2013, focusing on compassion, humility, and helping those who are less fortunate. He broke with the opulence of his predecessors by choosing to live in a modest Vatican guesthouse instead of the Apostolic Palace and by dressing simply. He denounced the "economy of exclusion and inequality" in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, saying, "Such an economy kills". This critique of capitalism resonated with Marxist critiques of systematic exploitation, presenting Francis as a critic of global economic processes.
 
Francis deviated significantly from the Church's conventional position by being inclusive of the LGBTQ+ population. A change toward pastoral care over judgment was signaled by his 2013 statement, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?". His words encouraged discussion and acceptance, which was in line with progressive movements that supported equality, even if he did not change Church teaching on homosexuality.
 
Communism and the Gospel: A Sociological Interpretation
 
In a 2022 interview, Francis made one of his most striking claims: “If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus”. This provocative statement reflects a sociological interpretation of the Gospel that critiques wealth accumulation and emphasizes communal welfare. Scholars like Terry Eagleton contend that Jesus' teachings, in particular, his exhortations for wealth redistribution, charity, and a rejection of material excess, reflect the class struggle and egalitarian tenets of Marxism. According to Eagleton, the early Christian communities as they were portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles shared resources to make sure no one was in need and lived in a manner reminiscent of socialism.
 
This connection is further highlighted by Francis's involvement with liberation theology. While he originally distanced himself from its Marxist features, labeling them as “ideological exploitation,” he subsequently welcomed its focus on the poor. His 2013 encounter with Gustavo Gutiérrez, a major liberation theologian, and his integration of issues like land, work, and housing into his World encounter of Popular Movements, reflect a reconciliation with the movement’s basic concerns. Francis was an appealing figure for Marxists looking for partners in the struggle against tyranny because of his nuanced approach, which enabled him to combine traditional Christian ideals with revolutionary social philosophy.
 
Constant Assistance to Palestine
 
One of the most notable aspects of Pope Francis's pontificate, especially in the latter years, was his dedication to the Palestinian cause. He was praised by activists for his persistent demands for peace in Gaza and his direct interaction with Palestinian people, which was in line with Marxist criticisms of occupation and imperialism. Francis called for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and assistance for a "starving people that aspires to a future of peace" in his final public speech on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, from St. Peter's Basilica. He also denounced the "deplorable humanitarian situation" in Gaza. This message, which was read by an assistant because of his deteriorating health, demonstrated his constant attention to the suffering in the area.
 
Francis, who was hospitalized with pneumonia in early 2025, called the lone Catholic church in Gaza every day throughout Israel's war operation, giving prayers and solidarity. Israel responded diplomatically to his vocal condemnation of Israel's conduct, which included a statement in November 2024 urging the international community to look into whether the campaign amounted to genocide. With his support for Palestinian self-determination, Francis was able to establish himself as a moral voice opposing what many Marxists perceive to be imperialist aggression.
 
The Catholic Right and Conservative Critics
 
Conservative Catholics strongly opposed Pope Francis's progressive views, especially in the US, where a traditionalist movement became stronger while he was pope. Clergy and lay critics were among his detractors, accusing him of confusing fundamental beliefs like marriage and sexuality and of assuming an authoritarian leadership style while posing as humble. His economic criticisms and his use of inclusive terminology, such as referring to transgender people as "daughters of God" in 2023, were viewed as breaking with precedent.
 
Notable opponents included U.S. conservative media sources like EWTN, which exacerbated opposition, and Cardinal George Pell, who anonymously wrote a report calling Francis's pontificate a “disaster”. In response, Francis criticized his detractors' "backward" views, saying that holding onto tradition while denying doctrinal progress was a "suicidal attitude”. In contrast to his critics' dogmatic views, he emphasized the Church's function as a "field hospital" for a suffering world.
 
Diplomatic Overtures to China
 
Pope Francis’s efforts to improve relations with the People’s Republic of China are equally noteworthy. Since taking charge in 2013, Francis has expressed a desire to visit China and has taken concrete steps towards fostering better ties. The preliminary agreement on the appointment of bishops in China, agreed on September 22, 2018, was a historic step. This accord, while not creating official diplomatic relations, provides for a collaborative procedure in which China selects bishops and the pope has the ability to appoint or reject these suggestions.
 
The 2018 accord, characterized by Vatican officials as "not political but pastoral," seeks to reconcile the Catholic Church in China by guaranteeing bishops are in communion with Rome while still being recognized by Chinese authorities. Following the deal, Pope Francis accepted seven Beijing-appointed bishops, eliminating censures against those consecrated without papal authority. The arrangement has been extended several times, the most recent being in October 2024 for four years, suggesting that coordinated efforts are being made to maintain this sensitive partnership. 
 
Despite these limitations, Pope Francis' approach represents a long-term engagement and dialogue strategy aimed at establishing a Catholic Church presence in China that respects both religious freedom and national sovereignty. This approach stands in stark contrast to earlier popes' more hostile views, especially John Paul II, who played a key role in the demise of communist governments across Eastern Europe.
 
Conclusion
 
Pope Francis' papacy, which ended on April 21, 2025, changed the Catholic Church's role in a divided world. His progressive perspective, centered on compassion, economic critique, and solidarity with disadvantaged people like Palestinians and the LGBTQ+ community, challenged the Church’s conservative orthodoxy. Francis connected Christian ethics and revolutionary social philosophy by participating in liberation theology, establishing engagement with China, and applying a sociological lens to the Gospel, winning both acclaim and ire. His early quiet during Argentina's Dirty War is still debated, but his subsequent acts indicate a pragmatic growth molded by sociopolitical circumstances. In contrast to John Paul II's anti-communist campaign, Francis' legacy is a nuanced, inclusive ecclesiology that positions the Church as a moral counterbalance to global imbalances and a beacon for progressive development in the face of enduring conservative resistance.

INTRODUCTION

On April 4, 2025, a YouTube user under the name “Brandon Torres” uploaded a video titled “The Nonsense of MAGA Communism.”[1] The video repeats a familiar litany of long-debunked arguments against the American Communist Party (ACP) and the broader MAGA Communist tendency—arguments that rely less on theory or substance than on smears, moral panic, and liberal dogma. Beneath the surface, the video reflects a deeper anxiety brewing within the professional-managerial left: anxiety over the fact that, for the first time in generations, Marxism-Leninism is breaking out of the subcultural bubble of academia and NGOs and reconnecting with the American working class.

For decades, communism in the United States has been confined to elite spaces—academic departments, nonprofit bureaucracies, and online echo chambers detached from the material struggles of the people. MAGA Communism represents a serious challenge to this status quo. It reorients Marxism toward praxis, reclaims language and symbols abandoned to the right, and engages with the people as they are, not as liberal moralists wish them to be. That is why the response from the mainstream left has not been rigorous debate or ideological critique—but hysteria, character assassination, and ideological distortion.

This document exists to answer that distortion. It offers point-by-point rebuttals to the major claims made in the video, exposing the flaws in its reasoning, the hollowness of its accusations, and the liberal chauvinism behind its worldview. More than a defense of MAGA Communism, this is a challenge to the left’s inherited dogmas—an invitation to return to the great revolutionary tradition of Marxism-Leninism.

CLAIM:
“The ACP is not a communist party; it’s a far-right fascist movement in disguise.”

RESPONSE:
This is the central smear of the entire video, and it hinges not on serious political analysis, but on aesthetic discomfort, guilt-by-association, and Cold War liberal moral panic. Rather than engaging the ACP’s actual political platform—canceling debt, public housing, nationalizing industry, ending imperialism—the video dismisses it as mere “branding.” At one point, the narrator even declares, “It’s not socialism—it’s national socialism,” invoking Nazism to condemn the ACP without ever seriously grappling with its political program, class analysis, or materialist method.

This line of argument is rooted in the discredited logic of horseshoe theory—the liberal myth that fascism and communism are two extremes that bend toward each other.[2] Popularized during the Cold War to delegitimize any revolutionary politics, this framework refuses to understand fascism as a class phenomenon and instead reduces it to a vague spiritual disease: the domain of “bad people” with “bad thoughts.” In fact, the narrator never even defines what he means by fascism. Is he referring to historical Italian fascism? German Nazism? No—what he means by “fascism” is nothing more than cultural noncompliance. To this mindset, a “fascist” is simply anyone who defies the liberal global order. “Fascist” becomes a slur, not a concept. It is a variation of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, weaponized against the very class the left is supposed to represent.[3]

This rhetorical move has deep roots in the postwar liberal tradition, especially in Theodor Adorno’s 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, which pathologized political dissent by attributing fascism to a set of psychological traits.[4] Rather than explaining fascism as the crisis response of capitalism in decay, Adorno redefined it as a personality defect—a mental virus lurking in the minds of working-class men with “rigid views,” “sexual repression,” or “deference to authority.” In this framework, everyone becomes a potential fascist, and the only antidote is psychological re-education under liberal hegemony. As Haz Al-Din writes: “The word Fascism today means malign sovereignty: sovereignty that is misaligned, unaligned, or even nonaligned with the American unipolar global system.”[5] Whether it’s a nation that refuses the IMF, or a man who refuses to put pronouns in his bio, both are guilty of “fascism”—because they disobey.

Haz continues: “The malign individual is an outlaw, a criminal. The malign sovereign is a Fascist, because their sovereignty is used in an illegitimate way.”[6] In other words, what liberals fear isn’t fascism—it’s disobedience. Their view of fascism is not materialist, but metaphysical. They imagine fascism as a dark force inside people’s souls—a form of secular original sin—and they smear anyone who threatens the liberal consensus with this label, regardless of what they actually believe.

While Western leftists treat fascism as a metaphysical force—an ever-looming “dark side” to be warded off through institutional moderation, moral posturing, and elite managerialism—Marxist theory identifies fascism through its class character. Fascism arises not from irrational passions or ideological extremism, but from the ruling class’s desperation to preserve capitalist rule in moments of systemic crisis. It is not the opposite of liberal democracy, but rather its final line of defense when democratic forms can no longer contain working-class resistance. As Georgi Dimitrov famously explained, fascism is “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[7]

In this context, MAGA Communism and the ACP represent not a slide into reaction, but the reassertion of working-class agency against globalist imperialism and monopoly capital. Far from being fascist, the ACP is grounded in a concrete Marxist-Leninist analysis of the American condition: that the American proletariat—deindustrialized, dispossessed, and betrayed by both parties—must be organized, radicalized, and led to seize state power. This is not a descent into fascism, but a revival of the revolutionary and democratic potential of communism in a uniquely American form.

CLAIM:

“MAGA Communism is contradictory. You can’t be both MAGA and Marxist.”

RESPONSE:

This claim reveals a profound misunderstanding—not only of MAGA Communism, but of Marxism itself. It assumes that “MAGA” refers exclusively to Donald Trump the individual, rather than to the mass political phenomenon that emerged in 2016: a diffuse but real working-class rejection of the neoliberal consensus, of Washington elites, globalism, and perpetual war. As Haz Al-Din has written:

“Having its origins in a rather accidental confluence of circumstances, in Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, the movement has become the host of every possible real counter-hegemonic ideological tendency within the United States.”[8]
In this light, MAGA is not a loyalty oath to a billionaire—it is a signifier of mass alienation, of cultural and class dislocation, of workers (especially rural and deindustrialized) looking for anything outside the ruling liberal order. MAGA Communism seeks not to endorse reactionary politics but to meet these people where they are and channel their anger toward the real enemy: finance capital, imperialism, and the capitalist state.

This strategy is not new. It is precisely the approach taken by Lenin, Mao, and every successful revolutionary movement in history. Mao famously insisted:

“As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them, but should befriend them, unite with them, convince them and encourage them to go forward.”[9]

By contrast, Western academic Marxists today have adopted what Carlos L. Garrido calls a “purity fetish.”[10] They demand that workers adopt perfect ideological positions before they can be accepted into the struggle. Garrido criticizes this approach for treating people's ideas as static, rather than dialectical and changing through struggle. It is a fantasy of organizing from the top down—lecturing the working class from a podium of moral superiority, rather than organizing with them in real life, in their language, on their terms.

As Haz Al-Din further clarifies:

“The unity of Communism with MAGA is nothing more than the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. But this unity will not be accomplished by attempting to enforce the condescending tone-policing of Western Marxists, but by a genuine praxiological encounter between Communist partisans and the people.”[11]

To reject MAGA Communism because some of its audience holds “incorrect views” is to reject the Marxist tradition itself. Revolutions are not made by perfect people. They are made by the conscious transformation of imperfect people—through struggle, through encounter, through praxis.

CLAIM:

“They quote Dugin and LaRouche — that proves they’re fascists.”

RESPONSE:

This accusation rests entirely on guilt-by-association, not on serious ideological critique. The video implies that engaging with the thought of Alexander Dugin or the history of Lyndon LaRouche is equivalent to endorsing fascism outright—a standard that no serious Marxist thinker has ever upheld. MAGA Communism and the American Communist Party (ACP) are not defined by any figure or phrase but by their fundamental commitment to applying Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions of the United States—what we call socialism with American characteristics.

Let’s take the case of Dugin. Members of the ACP have critically engaged with Dugin’s work—especially his critiques of Western unipolarity, liberal hegemony, and the globalist erosion of national sovereignty. These critiques resonate with Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism, but this does not mean wholesale endorsement. The video conveniently ignores that Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory” explicitly rejects fascism, as well as liberalism and communism, aiming to forge a new ideological synthesis outside of the 20th-century tradition.[12] Dugin has publicly opposed Ukrainian neo-Nazis, a real fascist force backed by NATO and the U.S., while Western liberals have remained shamefully silent or complicit.[13]

But on what grounds does this video label Dugin a “fascist”? It is not because of his actual positions—it is because he is Russian, and the West is currently in a geopolitical war with the Russian Federation. Western leftists, despite their anti-establishment posturing, act as faithful ideological defenders of NATO and the Western global order. Anyone who offers a civilizational or national critique of U.S. unipolarity—especially from outside the Anglosphere—is reflexively branded a fascist. This is Western chauvinism, plain and simple. And when leftists join in, they become useful idiots of imperialism.

As for LaRouche, the connection is even more tenuous. The video attempts to construct a lineage between the ACP and LaRouche based on vague thematic overlap and a handful of social media soundbites. But this is not how Marxists analyze ideology. There is no doctrinal influence from LaRouche in the ACP’s theoretical documents, platform, or political analysis. The entire line of attack amounts to a kind of “smear-by-Google”: a name is invoked, its aesthetic or historical associations disapproved of, and then others are condemned by superficial proximity. That is not dialectics, it is liberal moralism.

Marx himself engaged extensively with right-wing and bourgeois thinkers—from Hegel to Ricardo to Edmund Burke—to understand the terrain of capitalist ideology. Reading or referencing a thinker has never equaled endorsement in the Marxist tradition. It is part of theoretical struggle. If we must now treat every non-liberal philosopher as radioactive, then Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all revolutionary theorists would be disqualified by today’s purity-obsessed left.

CLAIM:

“ACP rejects class struggle and replaces it with conspiracies about ‘international finance.’”

RESPONSE:

This is a dishonest strawman and a deeply ironic one. The ACP and the broader MAGA Communist current are rooted in Marxist-Leninist class struggle, not in conspiratorial thinking. Our critique of finance capital is not some fringe departure from Marxism—it is directly in line with Lenin’s own analysis in his classic pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.[14] In that work, Lenin describes how industrial capital merges with banking capital to form a financial oligarchy that dominates not only national economies but the global system. This is not a “fascist dogwhistle”—it is basic Marxist analysis.

To quote Lenin:

“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies.”[15]

To call any critique of financial capitalism “fascism” is not only historically illiterate, it is politically bankrupt. It treats the word “finance” as a red flag, rather than a material category. But worse still, it smuggles in a dangerous, liberal-idealist assumption: that to criticize finance capital is somehow antisemitic. This is not only false—it is itself an antisemitic idea.

Why? Because it equates Jews with finance, banks, and monopoly capital—a racist and essentialist stereotype that Marxists have always rejected. The irony is that the only people making this association between Jews and finance are the Western leftists who launch these accusations against the ACP. They imply that every time MAGA Communists refer to “Wall Street” we are secretly talking about Jews—which is absurd, offensive, and insulting to both working-class Jews and to the integrity of revolutionary theory.

Marxists do not attribute capitalism to ethnic groups—we understand it as a historically specific system of class relations. When the ACP critiques finance capital, we critique an institutional structure of global power, not a religious group. The charge of antisemitism is increasingly weaponized to shield the core structures of global capitalism from critique. In this, certain Western leftists ironically share common ground with Zionists: both use the accusation of antisemitism not to protect Jews, but to silence revolutionary criticism of global systems of domination. For Zionists, it is deployed to defend a brutal apartheid regime. For Western leftists, it functions to defend the imperialist financial order—the IMF, NATO, the Federal Reserve, and the global regime of unipolarity. In both cases, the charge of antisemitism is cynically deployed—not to protect Jews, but to silence critiques of the status quo.

CONCLUSION

The ACP and the broader MAGA Communist tendency represent a genuine threat to the left-liberal status quo. Not because we are “fascists in disguise,” as hysterical critics claim, but because we are doing something that neither the mainstream left intelligentsia have managed in decades: reconnecting communism with the actual working class of this country.

Unlike the insular subculture of academia, NGOs, and professional activist circles, the ACP speaks directly to disaffected workers, rural poor, deindustrialized communities, veterans, small business owners crushed by monopolies, and those millions of Americans who know something is deeply wrong with the system, even if they don’t yet speak the language of theory. These are the very people the liberal left has written off as “deplorables,” “reactionaries,” or “fascists.”

MAGA Communism breaks every rule of the neoliberal left's etiquette. It challenges the identitarian fragmentation that has replaced class politics with a never-ending moral audit of individual behavior. It refuses to treat “incorrect” opinions as moral contamination. It rejects the hyper-individualized, therapeutic worldview that has neutered socialist politics and replaced revolutionary struggle with lifestyle branding. And most importantly, it doesn’t just critique empire—it seeks to destroy it. The ACP doesn’t exist merely to “raise awareness.” It exists to organize power, to reclaim national sovereignty from finance capital, and to end U.S. imperialism—not just in theory, but in practice.

And so, the defenders of the globalist liberal order strike back. Not with open ideological debate, but with smears, guilt-by-association, and pseudo-psychological pathologizing. Unable to challenge the ACP’s platform, critics resort to innuendo: if we engage the working class on their terms, we must be fascists; if we critique finance capital, we must be antisemitic; if we challenge liberal norms, we must be dangerous. These are not arguments. They are the desperate cries of a moribund professional-managerial left that fears losing its monopoly on opposition politics.

But the terrain is shifting. The old gatekeepers are losing control. A new American Marxism is emerging—one that is rooted, strategic, anti-imperialist, and unafraid. And that is why they are so desperate to shut it down.

Author
​
Jonathan Brown is a historian and sociologist who serves on the Department of Education of the American Communist Party. He sits on the editorial board of Red America journal and is the editorial director of Southern Worker.

​In 1890 the polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest mind America has given birth to, delivered his Harvard University Commencement address on the subject of “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” With the succession of the South, Davis, who had been a Representative, Senator, and Secretary of War throughout his career, would now ascend as the President of the Confederacy. For decades after his death and the fall of the “rebels,” Davis would be celebrated as a hero, a great man of history. Till this day, various states of the U.S. South continue to celebrate June 3rd, his birthday, as an official holiday.
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Speaking in the last decade of the 19th century, the allure of Davis was still alive and well, and in this context Du Bois would reflect on what Davis’s persona, his figure, means for civilization. Du Bois tells us that “there is something noble in the figure of Jefferson Davis: and judged by every canon of human justice, there is something fundamentally incomplete about that standard.” Here was a figure that by the dominant standards of the time was a “success.” He rose to the highest halls of power, and inspired millions of faithful believers in the process. But the values that he fought for along the way, the values that earned him the positions he acquired, would be worrisome by anyone committed to a sense of rational and just civilization.

Davis was, for Du Bois, a representative of a different type of civilization: Teutonic Civilization, where “individualism is coupled with the rule of might,” and governance is carried out with “the cool logic of the Club.” Teuton here, for Du Bois, is not the anthropological category used for early Germanic tribes. Instead, it is a civilizational paradigm. This paradigm, this civilizational model, writes Du Bois, “has made the logic of modern history.” Teutonic Civilization is premised on “the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.” Davis was an archetype, at the level of the individual, of the sort of men Teutonic civilization produces and exalts. For a civilization where “people fight to be free in order that another people should not be free,” Du Bois holds, Davis stands as a heroic representative. At the youthful age of 22, Du Bois provided his audience with a dialectical analysis of the different types of individuals various societies and civilizational models produce and uphold as idols.

Civilization enriches humanity culturally, intellectually, and materially. Teutonic civilization does the contrary, it takes from humanity, retards development, and makes the goods which have been universally produced for all to enjoy the privileged property of a select few. Since 1890, Teutonic civilization – which can perhaps be more accurately labeled anti-civilization – has dug its claws deeper into the American trajectory. In the minds of many people around the world, today American civilization is par excellence Teutonic civilization. American life doesn’t seem to be able to exist without waging hybrid war on most of humanity. This is a very unfortunate predicament that has befallen my country, considering how it was, in fact, the American revolution which was the first anti-colonial struggle in the hemisphere, a struggle that affirmed the right of every nation to make their own revolution. In doing so, it would inspire all of the subsequent anti-colonial struggles of the period, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Haitian Revolution of 1804. It is one of the great tragedies of history that the country born out of affirming the right to revolution has been the keenest on preventing others around the world from affirming that right. Just as the values that have predominated have not been those of the American civilizational paradigm – the democratic creed of Jefferson, Paine, etc. – the individuals that are upheld – in most instances – as examples of success are, like Jefferson Davis, archetypes of Teutonic anti-civilization.

Mike Pompeo, the bastard child of Deep State institutions and institutionalized Calvinist insanity, is one of today’s many representatives of Teutonic anti-civilization. His career, whether in Congress (2010-17), as CIA Director (2017-18), or Secretary of State (2018-21), is marked by his bellicosity against any country which dares to stand up for itself and affirm its sovereignty from U.S. meddling. While pretending to be a “Christian,” his work is dominated by the most un-Christ-like activities, from lying to wage hybrid war on countries to complicity in crimes against humanity – there has not been one regime change operation in the last decade he has not loved. His life’s project is captured nicely in a statement he made at Texas A&M University, describing his time as CIA director: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” I must have missed those sections of Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 in the Bible, where cheating, stealing, and lying for the interests of the financial elite is presented as the Christian way of life.

There is something very interesting about the last sentence of his statement, which implies that lying, cheating, and stealing are part and parcel of the “glory of the American experiment.” The question to be asked here is the one that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed for us long ago – which America? The America of the poor working majority? Or, the America of the few owners of big capital. Like Jefferson Davis, who was a representative of the Southern Planter (i.e., slave-owning) class, the champions of Teutonic anti-civilization, Pompeo is the champion of the parasitic elite that goes around plundering and debt trapping for its financial interest – something it does to both foreign lands and to the American people and resources. He is a champion of the Teutonic civilization which has occupied America since the counterrevolution of property in 1876, when the northern forces betrayed the promise of radical, abolition democracy given to the enslaved black working class of the U.S. south.

Over the last decade, Teutonic Pompeo has been complicit, supportive, and instrumental in the following crimes of U.S. imperialism: spearheading the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, which included imposing criminal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), assassinating the heroic terrorist slayer, General Qasem Soleimani, and unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal), which put humanity on the precipice of WW3; he supported and spearheaded efforts to sanction and overthrow sovereign governments in Latin America, from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, which was successfully overthrown in 2019 (the coup government would be defeated within a year); he gave, like most AIPAC-bought American politicians, unwavering support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, where he was the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit an illegal settlement; against China, he has waged a comprehensive effort to intensify the New Cold War under the guise of combatting “communist authoritarianism,” arguing that “if we bend a knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.” This attitude has been central to his support for provocations in the South China Sea, his criminal promotion of Separatism, and his proliferating of the Sinophobic “China Virus” rhetoric during the Covid Pandemic. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a life committed to being a “swamp monster,” a shill for the parasitic American deep state.

How such a figure was able to attach himself to the Make America Great Again movement (MAGA) remains a mystery to some. How could the MAGA base, which is animated by discontented working class people seeking to end the “forever wars,” dismantle the deep state, and reindustrialize the country to usher in a new era of prosperity for American workers, support a shill like Pompeo, who is a representative of everything they hate? Simple, they never did. Even back when Pompeo was a part of the first Trump government, him and other Warhawks like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams were despised by the working class MAGA base. In fact, in these sectors the dominant narrative for why Trump failed to substantially follow through on the promises of dismantling the deep state in the first term is credited to Pompeo and the other cohort of Warhawks, who duped innocent Mr. Trump into supporting policies contrary to the narrative that won his popular base over to him. 

The simultaneous presence of swamp monsters like Pompeo with a campaign and movement aimed at “draining the swamp” is not to be scoffed at simply as an inconsistency in Trump’s judgment. We should not dismiss this contradiction by simply attributing its source to subjective factors such as these. Instead, this contradiction – that between a movement aiming to “drain the swamp and the swamp monsters within its highest quarters – is objective in character. This contradiction is the basic dynamic that is animating both Trump and the MAGA movement. It is the “principal contradiction,” as Mao would say, which is structuring the internal movement of this political process. The MAGA phenomenon is a microcosm that reflects the larger tensions within the American trajectory. It is a process wherein the two Americas of Dr. King can be found. It is a true unity of opposites, and the struggle of these opposites steers its trajectory.

In 2016, this MAGA microcosm of the larger contradiction of the American trajectory was still quite embryonic in character. The contradictions seemed manageable. For any process pervaded by such tensions, the first few moments always give the illusion of a reconcilability on the horizon. It is this youthful mirage which always emerges at the beginning of similar processes which led to the tradition of modern utopian socialists in Europe and America. The utopians, working at the time when the contradictions of industrial capitalism had just started manifesting themselves, held that these could be escaped from and harmonized. Their idea was not – as Marx and Engels would later postulate – to identify the basic contradiction, understand its fundamentally antagonistic character, and side with the principal aspect embodying the potential for a new world (the working class). Instead, they fell for the mirage, and held that the basic contradictions could be undone, not dialectically overcome. It took time for the mirage to be pierced, and for the fundamentally antagonistic character of the contradiction to become evident to serious observers. Only with time, with the development of the object of study itself, was the transition able to be made from this utopian framework to scientific socialism.

Today we are in a similar period of transition for the MAGA movement. The mirage of the potential harmonization of its basic contradiction is pierced by the reality of its development. In other words, the contradiction is demonstrating its fundamentally antagonistic character. The objectivity of the tension between the progressive MAGA working class base (which stands against war, the deep state, and for economic prosperity) with the Teutonic elements in its leadership (while Pompeo is no longer in the government, other Pompeos have taken his place – Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Mike Waltz, et. al.) is showing itself to be untenable. The antagonistic character of the contradiction is heading towards a rupture – toward the eventual divorcing of the progressive MAGA working class elements from the swamp monsters and Warhawks that occupy leading positions in Trump’s government. 

Plastered across X (Twitter), the most politicized social media platform in the West, are post from working class MAGA people expressing their discontent with Trump’s regime. The phrase, “Trump has betrayed MAGA,” has become popular in some of these spaces, especially after the recent bombings of Yemen. MAGA commentators have noticed how, back in May of 2024, Trump critiqued the Biden administration for bombing the courageous Yemeni resistance, stating the following:

“It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.”

Where did this diplomacy style go? Were Biden’s bombs any less destructive than Trump’s?

While he has taken steps to end the proxy war against Russia, the campaign promise of ending the war on day one is still waiting to be materialized after three months. Additionally, figures like Colonel Doug Macgregor have explicitly criticized the performative de-escalation of Trump on this issue, which hasn’t significantly addressed, in concrete material terms, the bellicosity of the Zelensky regime.

Other sectors of MAGA have criticized Trump’s willingness to follow Israel’s lead in military affairs, particularly in the Middle East. Many take issue with his readiness to escalate tensions with Iran, including his threats to bomb its nuclear facilities. Such an action, they argue, would not only destabilize the region but could trigger global chaos with unpredictable consequences. Journalists like Tucker Carlson, who are bit more consistent with popular MAGA sentiments than those in the government, have even gone as far as criticizing the sanctions regime the U.S. applies to nations across the world. In a recent interview with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Tucker expressed his confusion at how such a policy, which has never achieved anything but making people suffer, continues to be used. While commentators like Carlson and Macgregor continue to be supportive of Trump, the popular MAGA base is estranging itself more and more from Trump.

These discontent workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses, who are growing more impoverished and drowning deeper in debt as time passes. This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It's sad. Is all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project.

America is in a similar turning point as it was at the time of the Civil War (the second American Revolution). At that time, two routes were presented to the American trajectory. One path led deeper toward Teutonic anti-civilization. The other toward the construction of a fully American civilization, premised on a radical, abolition democracy. For a period of time, America affirmed the later path. It ensured, for a small but not insignificant period of time, that the interests of human beings and civilization were primary. It was this period of social upheaval and revolution that led Du Bois to compare the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Bolshevik, Chinese, and French Revolutions. In 1876 this hope collapses. The northern capitalist class (which could’ve very well played a role akin to the one played by the national, patriotic bourgeoisie in China) betrayed black and white workers in the South, who were building their own dictatorship of labor. Du Bois described this poetically when he said that “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the aftermath of this betrayal, those who were betrayed didn’t simply give up on their ideals. On the contrary, as Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In the face of the betrayal of the ideal by the ruling class, the popular base, the black workers, affirmed that it was only through their emancipation that the ideals could be realized. Today the working class MAGA base is faced with the same predicament the black proletariat, as Du Bois called it, was in. Its leaders have betrayed its ideals. Neither Trump nor his government of Warhawks will seriously dismantle the deep state, end the “forever wars,” or uplift the lives of the American worker. The MAGA worker is coming to realize this, and with this realization comes another one – only they can save themselves. These ideals, which affirm a rupture from the path of Teutonic anti-civilization, and toward a genuine American civilizational project, will not be enacted by the whims of billionaires like Trump, but through the struggle of the discontented worker affirming his power.

If the tendencies we have outlined continue, it is likely that in the coming years we will be seeing the clear divorce of MAGA from Trump. The American worker will, in time, come to realize that only socialism – a society of, by, and for the people, can actually Make America Great Again. Seismic shifts, not just in the country’s trajectory, but in geopolitics as a whole, will occur when this realization emerges and is acted upon.