Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.15
US PARLIAMENTARY CIRCUS: THE RETURN OF THE BUFFOON
The US elections were won by the Republican Party, with a majority in the Senate, in Congress and Trump re-elected as President. But this same Republican Party just a year ago was internally short-circuited, as manifested by the dismissal of the speaker of the House of Representatives and the difficulties and internal squabbles to appoint another one. In fact, four years ago the US bourgeoisie had desperately fled from the option of walled-in withdrawal (see "The Internationalist Proletarian", no.5, September 2020, p.18) and had embraced the fantasy of military diplomatic expansion currently embodied by the Democratic Party. What is more, at the beginning of the primaries an attempt was made to organize the alternative to Trump's re-election, with no less than 8 candidates running. Ron DeSantis even acknowledged that the previous elections had been won by the Democrats (high treason within the Republican Party) and Nikki Haley was the favorite of the Republican donors, but all of them, including Mike Pence, had to capitulate. The heterogeneous agglomerate that makes up Trump's court is full of former opponents and challengers in parliamentary politics who, however, have been bowing and joining the winning horse.
How has the process materialized whereby the Republican Party, and specifically its isolationist current, has gone from being repudiated by the US bourgeoisie and from being immersed in a paralyzing internal struggle to the overwhelming victory in the electoral circus?
Well, during these four years the material reality of the limits of the promise of recovery through military political expansion of the positions lost in the previous period has shown itself in front of the US bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in a whole series of external and internal incapacities (see "The Internationalist Proletarian", no.13, March 2024, p.27 and 28). Like a sarcastic allegory, in the scene of the parliamentary circus the internal and external material situation of the US was reflected, on the one hand, the isolationist illusion in the buffoon Trump and, on the other, the impotent diplomatic and military expansionism in the decrepit Biden.
With growing horror, the US bourgeoisie saw its present and expansionist future reflected in the mirror with each appearance of the decrepit Biden, who lost his train of thought and lost his memory, confusing the president of Ukraine with the president of Russia at the NATO summit, etc. Opposite to this vision of its future of "expansive impotence" stood the option from which it had also escaped in horror four years ago, the walled-in retreat embodied by the histrionic Trump.
Faced with this alternative, fruit of the material situation, the different sectors of the bourgeoisie debated, although a series of internal processes tipped the balance towards the Republican option. The anecdote needed to finish deciding the doubters in favor of Trump's option was provided by the "attack" on Trump's ear. At an election rally, after ducking at the sound of a gunshot, the former and future president stood up with his bloody ear and his fist raised, confident that he was not at risk, while the secret service carried out the corresponding choreography and the shooter, who had been in full view of everyone, was shot down. In the following days, Trump attended conferences and rallies with the complete certainty that he would not be the victim of a real attack, appearing with his ear bandaged (an ear, by the way, which is still as whole as it was before an alleged projectile made it bleed in gushes...), a symptomatic symbol of the limited level of "heroism" to which US imperialism can reach in its current historical situation.
From this moment on, the meetings organized by big companies, by the financial sector and by the technological sector, to unblock Trump's campaign multiplied and, also at this moment, Musk's full bet in the race to raise Trump began. The US bourgeoisie had taken it upon itself to put on the side of the histrionic Trump those who have to modulate in reality the promises and bravado of the electoral period, such as the new Secretary of the Treasury, a former Soros investor, or the integration of the resigned candidate Kennedy in the race for Trump.
The Democratic apparatus began to work at full speed to eliminate the image of the walking corpse that so graphically embodied the historical exhaustion of the current of military diplomatic expansion of the mirror in which the US bourgeoisie looks at itself. Biden was forced to desist and was soon replaced by another criminal with whom this current tried to present itself with a rejuvenated image: a woman of color who tried to attract sympathies in favor of abortion rights in her desperate race, obtaining at the last minute a record amount of campaign financing. She even promised to integrate a Republican into her administration. But it was too late.
And it was not only late because of the superficial fact of the time lag in the candidate's adjustment. The failure of the promise of the recovery of the military diplomatic expansion was a tangible and palpable fact for the bourgeoisie. The support of the petty bourgeoisie, the labor aristocracy and broad sectors of the working class for the illusion of the walled-in withdrawal was also a tangible and palpable fact. Besides, the mock attack had been a question of State, with the participation of the secret services in the "heroic" episode of the bleeding ear.
Several sectors of the US bourgeoisie resisted, but an important part would gradually join the side of the winning horse to try to assert its part in the new board of directors of the common interests of the bourgeoisie. Finally, even the currents that tried most to oppose until the last minute the reinstatement of the Republican Party in the government, have hastened to accept the electoral result and have demanded and promised a peaceful and orderly transition.
And this is how the grotesque little personage has once again been elected President of what has been (but is no longer) the hegemonic power in the development of capitalism after the Second World War, despite having entered into contradiction with large sectors of the American bourgeoisie and having been repudiated four years ago after the carnivalesque episode of the assault on the Capitol (see "The Internationalist Proletarian", No. 6, March 2021, p.21).
As we summarized in September 2022: "(...) behind the bluster of the histrionic buffoon there is a historical process of greater depth of which he is a mere reflection and which must be investigated and studied, in the same way that K. Marx explained in 1869 in his preface to the 2nd edition of ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’: ‘I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part’." ("The Internationalist Proletarian" No. 10, September 2022, p.32).
The policy of walled-in withdrawal was not the mere whim of a lunatic buffoon but the ideological reflection in a part of the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, labor aristocracy and part of the working class of the fact that the US after the second world war has not been able to restrain the development of the productive forces in the other areas of the world in a capitalist sense, nor their subsequent interconnection, of the fact that the center of gravity of capitalism has shifted to Asia and that the distribution of the world after the second world slaughter no longer corresponds to the reality of the current balance of power between the various imperialisms.
This retreat imposed by material reality and the impossibility of effectively reversing it, was reflected ideologically in these sectors as their own voluntary decision to disengage from the outside world in order to "make America great again". The acceleration of this retreat and the expansion of Chinese imperialism to occupy the vacuum left without resistance, determined the US bourgeoisie to attempt the swing towards military and diplomatic expansion, mistakenly identifying in the will of individuals what is in reality an inexorable material process (see in "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.6, March 2021, p.15 and p.18).
Thus the faction in favor of military and diplomatic expansion took the helm but, despite a series of initial "successes" such as the ritual ceremonies of NATO's resurrection and the calculated emboldening and luring of Russia into the trap set in Ukraine, the limits of the plan they tried to deploy became evident in the fundamental continuity in relation to tariff policies or in the exit from Afghanistan, in the inability to impose the blockade on Russian oil, in the ineffectiveness of the attempted isolation of Russia, in the inability to unite the G-20 countries while on the contrary the BRICS have relaunched their existence with the incorporation of new members, etc.
It is not the wills of this or that current that impose themselves on material reality but, on the contrary, it is material reality that imposes itself on the currents, determining not only their acts, but also their wills and the ideological explanation that they make from their acts and wills.
At the time of the previous replacement of puppets we made the following assessment: "The fall back of the US and the expansion of China is determined by the inexorability of the laws of capitalist production to which the US bourgeoisie cannot resist. Coming back to the previous strategy and the outcome that the US bourgeoisie can receive from it will be determined by these material facts: the fall back will continue or the return will be implemented in much inferior conditions." ("The Internationalist Proletarian" no.6, March 2021, p.15). And so it has indeed been.
It is precisely the material exhaustion of the attempt at diplomatic and military expansion that has manifested itself in the will of the US bourgeoisie to attempt a second edition of the walled-in withdrawal, integrating however in this second attempt the interests and perspectives of sectors of the US bourgeoisie that had been rather left out of its previous version: among them, the financial sector and the technological sector.
And at the same time, what the new US ruling current can do or fail to do (to what extent will it be able to drop the previous line of action in Ukraine or the Middle East and to what extent will it be able to carry out its promises of isolation in matters of tariffs, immigration, etc.) will be determined neither by its program nor by its electoral promises, but by the material reality in which the development of the productive forces, the displacement of the center of gravity of capitalism, the rupture of the distribution of the world, and the mad race of accumulation for accumulation that floods the markets towards the crisis of overproduction are translated.
Technological platforms
The incorporation of important Silicon Valley sectors in support of the Republican candidacy had been taking place beforehand and the prize for their early incorporation goes to Musk and Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of auditing the government's accounts through the pompous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
This transition had been prepared in advance with the whole process of buying Twitter and its conversion into X by the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; a process aimed at rehabilitating on social networks the disowned Trump whose profiles had been suspended by companies such as Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Twitter.
More recently came the conversion of the CEO of Meta and the founder of Amazon who vetoed the Washington Post from publicizing its traditional support for the Democratic nominee.
Meta has gone from being for Trump "an enemy of the people" (Expansión, 12-03-2024) to donating one million (followed immediately by another million from Amazon) for the inauguration of the new president. The executives of both companies participated in the trickle of exclusive dinners at the president-elect's mansion to pay obeisance to him and try to get past quarrels forgiven.
Companies like Meta have gone from manipulating search results and exercising censorship over content to harm the Republican Party, suspending Trump's profiles on their networks, etc. (see in "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.5, September 2020, p.19, "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.6, March 2021, p.21 and in "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.10, September 2022, p.31); to hire as director of global affairs a Republican sympathetic to Trump and to put its censorship at the service of the new ruling faction under the guise of "leaving it in the hands of the users".
This alignment is broadly a product of the lack of perspective of the illusion of diplomatic and military expansion but also of other factors: Trump's rectification of the qualified labor force, the need felt by these technology companies to seek State shelter, and the demographic and business shift to the southeastern United States.
The importance of these social networks for the shaping of so-called "public opinion", their capacity to guard and access a large amount of corporate information and their power to facilitate or prevent others from competing within their own platforms, makes them a matter of dispute between the different currents of the local and global bourgeoisie, which try to impose themselves on each other. Pressure is exerted through the withdrawal or influx of advertisers but also through fines, court rulings and bans.
In the US itself there have been judicial rulings against them as a product of the infighting between "small" and "big" capital, such as the following: "A US court has ordered Google to open its Android operating system to rivals by allowing them to create their own app stores and payment systems to compete with Google Play". (Expansión, 09-10-2024) and even raises the possible split of Google after a "landmark case in August, when a judge ruled that Google had violated US antitrust law and called the company a 'monopolist.'" (Expansión, 10-10-2024).
Outside the US, the EU in particular exerts continuous pressure against them with fines, injunctions and sanctions. The new US president "(...), blasted European Union regulators for targeting Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Meta Platforms Inc., (...) 'These are American companies whether you like it or not,' Trump said in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 'They shouldn’t be doing that. That’s, as far as I’m concerned, a form of taxation. We have some very big complaints with the EU.' (...) Trump specifically referenced a court case that Apple lost last year over a €13 billion ($14.4 billion) Irish tax bill." (Bloomberg, 23-01-2025).
The process of banning TikTok in the US has been following successive stages. It was Trump himself who initiated the process to force the sale or closure of TikTok, considered a tool of Chinese influence. More recently, he opposed the closure on the grounds that Meta would be left as a major media privileged and without competitor at the same time that an important part of Trump's electoral propaganda was developed on the TikTok platform. In the case of TikTok, the facts of control by the Chinese government and the banning of US platforms on Chinese territory are added. Symptomatic of this are Musk's statements that he was in favor of the continuity of this platform but claiming that if TikTok can operate in the US, its platform X should also be able to operate in China. The soap opera has continued with the pressure made by the complete closure by ByteDance, both TikTok and CapCut, Lemon8, Lark and Moonton mobile games (closure that was not necessary as only the new distribution of the apps was prohibited); which has forced the new President to extend for 75 days the authorization for Google and Apple to distribute these applications in their virtual stores.
As another sign of this rapprochement between the isolationist current and the tech companies, after deregulating artificial intelligence (AI) "a 'joint venture' on data center infrastructure was unveiled with SoftBank Group Corp, OpenAI and Oracle Corp. (…) The partnership, known as Stargate, will deploy $100 billion 'immediately' and have a goal of increasing to 'at least' $500 billion to build new infrastructure for OpenAI, including data centers and physical campuses (...)" (Bloomberg, 24-01-2025). In the madhouse of production anarchy, unsurprisingly, this initiative is opposed by Musk who has his own plans for AI.
Just a few days after this pompous proclamation foretelling “US dominance in AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has burst in with force. Their models with lower energy costs, less advanced chips and open-source code have the same performance as the most advanced US models. The immediate result: Nvidia's stock has dropped 589 billion (the biggest drop in history) and Microsoft's stock is also falling.
Demographic and business drift
The rapprochement of technology and industrial companies to the lap of the Republican Party has also been forged through a demographic and industrial shift to the US South that began gradually a decade ago but began to accelerate with the lockdowns in 2020: "More broadly, the entire South from here, north to Kentucky and west to Texas is where businesses are moving to, jobs are being created and homes are being bought. (...) For the first time, six fast-growing states in the South – Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – are contributing more to national GDP than the Northeast, with its Washington-New York-Boston corridor (...). A flood of transplants helped steer about $100 billion in new income to the Southeast in 2020 and 2021 alone, while the Northeast bled out about $60 billion, (...). The Southeast accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth in the US since early 2020, almost doubling its pre-pandemic share.
And it was home to 10 of the 15 fastest-growing American large cities. (...) 'We now have more employees in Texas than New York state. It shouldn't have been that way,' JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said, (...)" (Bloomberg, 29-06-2023).
The reasons are available space, a better connection to Southeast Asia, lower taxes and less regulation:
"As more export production destined for the US migrates to South Asia from China, the geographic edge is tilting toward the East Coast, which boasts quicker deliveries through the Suez Canal and across the Atlantic from such countries as India and Sri Lanka. [The port of] Savannah also stands to benefit from a host of domestic factors, including the US population shift to Sun Belt boom states, a growing auto industry in the South and something that ports crammed into the country’s largest cities lack: real estate, combined with the political will to expand." (Bloomberg, 14-05-2024).
"Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the latest big fortune to move to Miami this year (...) The exodus from Wall Street is more than palpable. In recent years, well-known figures such as investor Cathie Wood, founder of Ark Invest, have moved to Florida. Or billionaire Carl Icahn, a major shareholder in companies such as Apple and Netflix, who a few months ago left his native New York to settle in the sunny municipality of Sunny Isles Beach. (...) The great economic poles of the US are New York (Wall Street), San Francisco (Silicon Valley), Washington DC (the Capitol) and Los Angeles (Hollywood). However, the tax advantages implemented by other regions are displacing the power of these four cities. Miami (Florida) is the new low-cost financial center, while Dallas (Texas), Houston (Texas) and Nashville (Tennessee) have become the cheap alternative to San Francisco. Giants such as Tesla and Apple have not hesitated to expand their operational centers here and even move their corporate headquarters (...) Even Toronto (in Canada) is already disputing Los Angeles' leading role in the film industry." (Expansión, 22-11-2023).
"Just one year later [2014], the automaker Toyota announced the relocation of its US headquarters to the Lone Star. Since then, hundreds of companies in a variety of industries, but mainly tech, have followed suit, attracted by the minimal state intervention in taxation and regulation. Oracle, HP, 8VC, Dropbox, Elon Musk's entire corporate empire and the latest to take the plunge just a few days ago: Meta. (...) Of the approximately 300 companies that came to Texas between 2015 and last year, more than half have come from California. As of today, there are already 55 Fortune 500 companies, the highest number in any state, making it quite the economic powerhouse. So much so that if it were a country, Texas would have the eighth largest economy in the world" (El Confidencial, 13-01-2025).
Legal Proceedings
In spite of the bet of the faction in favor of diplomatic and military expansion to try to put Donald Trump behind bars or disqualify him, the truth is that every time they seemed to get closer to their goal, the judicial system has been postponing the proceedings, bringing them to a standstill, or canceling them.
The internal contradictions of the American bourgeoisie – increased by its process of material retreat – have manifested themselves in the contradictory rulings but the resultant of these rulings has been a de facto immunity. The reason for this result is on the one hand the existence of a social mass behind the bluster of the buffoon but also to a large extent the lack of material perspective demonstrated by the alternative approach, which has not been able – material reality did not allow it this possibility – to fulfill its auspice of regaining all the lost positions.
Even the verdict finding him guilty of 34 felonies that could carry up to 4 years in prison facilitated the role of persecuted martyr for buffoon Trump. This translated into increased fundraising for his campaign and even statements from several (previously anti-Trump) Wall Street figures against the verdict. "Jamie Dimon, [JPMorgan] just hours after the verdict, highlighted that the former president had 74 million people vote for him in 2020 and emphasized the need to respect them. (...) The remarks echoed comments Dimon made at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, when he said Trump was 'kind of right' on certain policies and that Democrats should 'be a little more respectful' of his supporters." (Bloomberg, 31-05-2024). The reasons are thus the admission of the existence of a social mass behind the little personage, the admission of the inevitability of certain policies that the Democrats have had to continue, reasons to which must be added the electoral promise to reduce taxes on large fortunes and the demographic and business shift to the South that we have seen above.
The bourgeois judicial mockery has reached one of its cathartic expressions with the subsequent "conviction" to "unconditional exoneration" to solemnly enforce that verdict, leaving it in nothing. And to finish showing the class arbitrariness of bourgeois justice, both the outgoing and the incoming president have made a festival of pardons, the outgoing one to pardon his entire family and extend a series of preventive pardons, and the incoming one to pardon the 1,500 condemned for the episodes of the carnival assault on the Capitol.
The situation of the working class
The domestic situation in the US continues to degrade, affecting the material living conditions of the working class and the proletarianizing petty bourgeoisie. The following data is a sketch of the situation in terms of food insecurity, housing and evictions, suicides, drug use, mental health, homicides and health coverage.
"13.5% (18.0 million) of US households were food insecure at some point during 2023. (...) Household food insecurity affected 17.9% (6.5 million) of households with children in 2023." (US Department of Agriculture, 01-08-2025)
Regarding housing: "Between 2015 and 2024, prices have increased by 54% in the US, 32% in China and almost 15% in the EU (...). In the United States (...) 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing (...)." (El País, 15-09-2024). "Eviction filings are more than 50% higher than the pre-pandemic average in some cities, according to the Eviction Lab, which tracks filings in nearly three dozen cities and 10 states. Landlords file around 3.6 million eviction cases every year." (Associated Press, 17-06-2023). "About 653,000 people were homeless, the most since the country began using the yearly point-in-time survey in 2007. The total in the January count represents an increase of about 70,650 from a year earlier." (Associated Press, 16-12-2023).
"The number of suicides in 2021 in the United States grew by 2,212 people, to 48,152 suicides, so on average 132 people commit suicide every day in the United States.
This figure implies that the suicide rate in the United States is 14.5 per 100,000 population, well above the worldwide average suicide rate of 9.14 per 100,000 population." (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 10-09-2024).
"For the first time since statistics have been kept, marijuana has surpassed alcohol as the daily drug of choice for Americans. In 2022 there were 17.7 million people who reported having consumed cannabis every day or almost every day (...) marijuana use has climbed 269% from 2008 to 2022, which corresponds with legalization efforts" (La Vanguardia, 28-05-2024).
Regarding firearms, in the US there are "more than 1,500 victims a year from unintentional shootings (...) About 20,000 homicides each year by firearms. More than 35,000 injured. Every day there are at least two mass shootings somewhere in the US" (Expansión, 23-03-2024).
"(...) two are the main factors that have turned the [New York] subway into something akin to the Wild West: the large volume of mentally ill indigents living in its facilities and the upward trend in the number of firearms permits New Yorkers have applied for since a Supreme Court ruling in 2022 liberalized the state's strict laws. Last year, the police licensing division received 13,369 applications to have a pistol or rifle in the home, up 80% from 2022 and nearly triple the number in 2019" (El País, 07-04-2024). The response to the situation described: "the governor of New York, has just deployed nearly a thousand National Guard soldiers armed with assault rifles who are conducting mass searches among [subway] passengers" (Expansión, 23-03-2024).
The evolution of these factors together with the insecurity of the commercial petty bourgeoisie in the face of robberies has been an element that has sustained the return of the Republican Party to government.
"Retailers have experienced a dramatic increase in theft losses. In 2022 they accounted for $112.1 billion, compared to $93.9 billion in 2021, according to the National Retail Security Survey 2023 (...) [in Philadelphia] the supermarket and hypermarket chain Target announced the permanent closure of nine stores due to the boom in theft. (...) Faced with crime, 30% of companies have opted to reduce or vary the selection of products in stores, 45% have cut hours and there are 28% who, like Target, have opted for the most drastic solution: closing stores. Although more drastic is the vision of Donald Trump, exposed on Friday at an event in California: 'Very simple, if you rob a store, you can expect to be shot on the way out!" (El País, 01-10-2023).
Symptomatically, "Geo Group, the second largest manager of prisons and mental health centers in the world, has risen 85% on the stock market since the victory of Donald Trump in the US elections was announced on November 5. The following day it soared 42.1%" (Expansión, 20-11-2024).
Regarding health care: "More than half (56%) of US working-age adults were insured all year with coverage adequate to ensure affordable access to care. (...) 9 percent of adults were uninsured, 12 percent had a gap in coverage over the past year, and 23 percent were underinsured, meaning they had coverage for a full year that didn’t provide them with affordable access to health care. (...) Nearly three of five (57%) underinsured adults said they avoided getting needed health care because of its cost; 44 percent said they had medical or dental debt they were paying off over time. (...) Nearly half of adults (48%) with medical debt are paying off $2,000 or more; half of those with debt said it stemmed from a hospital stay." (State of US Health Coverage, 21-11-2024).
Although the actual virtues of having health insurance are highly debatable... Significantly, in December 2024 the advisor of United Healthcare (largest private insurer by market share and charging more than 49 million Americans for health insurance) was assassinated. When the news was announced it received "23,000 celebratory emojis (...) before being withdrawn by the company" (El País, 08-12-2024). The reason for the rejoicing over his death are the systematic rejections of medical coverage with which the working class is swindled and condemned to deteriorating health and premature death. By way of example, "the coverage denial rate for seniors who had suffered falls or strokes increased 22.7% in 2022, up from 10.9% in 2020." Despite the limitations of such individual actions, the message of the parasite's liquidation was felt and, while companies rushed to remove organizational charts and photos of their executives from their websites, "insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield on Thursday, less than 24 hours later (...), rescinded a new policy limiting coverage for anesthesia during surgical interventions." (El País, 08-12-2024).
Only a proletarian revolution will truly settle the accounts with these thugs while implementing a fundamental point of the immediate revolutionary program[1]: "rapid abolition of the mercantile type of social security", that is to say, the elimination of the mercantile character of the access to the consumption fund and to the health services of those who cannot work. What in capitalist society is a juridical tangle and a permanent material swindle for the working class, could be replaced by criteria of extreme simplicity: general obligation to work and guaranteed access both to the common consumption fund and to the health means available both for those who work and for those who for justified reasons cannot work. Among the deductions from the social product before arriving at the individual consumption quota of which Marx speaks in the Critique of the Gotha program, when speaking of the first phase of socialism, are the health services, with the following significant additional observation: "Secondly, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society and it grows in proportion as the new society develops." (Critique of the Gotha Programme, K. Marx, 1875).
The straitjacket of integrated unionism
As we have seen in the preceding article of this issue of the magazine, the unemployment rate in the US has been and remains historically low at around 4%. We were able to observe in "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.9 (April 2022, p.13) that, due to the shortage of labor power commodity to cover the hardest jobs, the average wage growth of the lowest paid categories had been higher than that of those with higher incomes and, also, the indignation of the bourgeoisie in the face of such a situation.
Those who lagged behind in comparison with the increase in inflation were the groups of the labor aristocracy or close to it because of their working conditions and purchasing power. This is what has produced the series of strikes such as those of the screenwriters, the automobile strike, the Boeing strike, the dockworker’s strike, etc. These strikes have been characterized in some cases by being quite long (e.g. scriptwriters: 148 days, automobile: 45 days, Boeing: 53 days), achieving relative increases computed over several years[2] (e.g. Boeing 38% in four years, dockworkers: 62% in six years, automobile: 11% plus 25% in four years) and... in not having led to a rupture with integrated unionism or with parliamentarism, allowing themselves to be courted by both sides of the parliamentary circus.
The graph below with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the recent spike in the number of workers involved in a strike or lockout (much more scarce) and also the previous process of steady decline since the 1970s:
An electoral trick that has worked out well for the Republican Party (later copied by the Democratic Party) has been the promise to exempt tips from taxes. The basic situation: "a tipper can be paid only 2.13 dollars an hour (...) This sub-minimum wage system persists in 43 of the 50 States" (El País, 27-10-2024). Any minimally serious union claim should demand as a starting point the drastic increase of this sub-minimum wage to at least the minimum wage, if not more. But by promising the tax exemption of tips the Republican Party won the sympathy of a particularly exploited sector of the working class. This maintained the real core of the mechanism by which the hospitality employers can pay much lower wages and, moreover, the exploited working class in this sector is subjected to an accentuated servility towards the demands of the customer. Not by chance, in the first years after the October Revolution, waiters in Russia imposed the rejection of the very existence of tips.
The current favoring diplomatic-military expansion tried to launch an edition of the New Deal (see "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.7, July 2021, p.17) that combined an increase in state spending with the incentive to the creation and development of the straitjacket of integrated unionism.
Four years later, the current favoring the walled-in withdrawal has managed to win the support of broad sectors of the working class. This ability to delude broad sectors of the working class through the social stupefacient that is parliamentary democracy has been a decisive factor in the process of convincing a large part of the US bourgeoisie to try a second time the option of walled-in withdrawal.
The multimillionaire who was George Soros' right-hand man in the attacks against the pound sterling and the yen, now Secretary of the Treasury under the new government, explained himself in these terms, in the final stretch of the electoral campaign: "'one of the most important things' that Trump did was to turn the GOP (the Republican Party) into 'the party of the working class'". (Expansión, 15-10-2024).
This social support is a necessary asset in a State in which the lack of prospects of maintaining its diplomatic, commercial and military positions at world level condemn it to a growing series of antagonisms and internal conflicts. And while the Republican billionaire candidate courted labor corporatism without complexes, the "millionaire-only" Democratic candidate felt the need to explain herself by defining herself as "a 'capitalist' who believes in 'free and fair markets' and an 'active partnership between government and the private sector'." (Financial Times, 26-09-2024).
Once the elections were won, Republican Party nominated Lori Chavez-Dereme as Secretary of Labor, with broad support in integrated unionism and a supporter of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, legislation that would facilitate the formation of unions at the federal level. This is one more element of the continuity imposed by the material circumstances on the two contending currents, continuity in this case with the development of this facet of the attempt to reissue the New Deal: the strengthening of the straitjacket of integrated unionism.
Immigration
One of the banners of the isolationist current is to curb immigration and deport immigrants who do not have their papers in order. In fact, among the first executive orders of the new President are to suspend asylum, suspend birthright citizenship and declare a national emergency on the southern border and send in the National Guard, as the Republican governor of Texas had already done in April 2024.
It should be recalled that in June Biden himself, despite his speech and order to regularize undocumented immigrants married to an American, had signed "an executive order that will allow him to temporarily close the border with Mexico and suspend the receipt of asylum applications when the number of daily detentions of migrants outside official ports exceeds the threshold of 2,500 per day. The initiative will give border agents the authority to deport irregular crossers without giving them the opportunity to make an asylum case." (La Vanguardia, 05-06-2024).
As we showed with the data provided in "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.5 (September 2020, p.19): "The interdependence of the world market in which the US is submerged is absolute. The US cannot and will not be able to get out from it: the American economy completely depends on the world market even for the workforce supply". The US companies feed on the exploitation of the native and foreign working class, needing a great influx of non-regularized labor power commodity in order to be able to impose worse conditions and redouble their exploitation. It is this necessity of US capitalism that the Democrats protect by dressing it up as philanthropy towards immigrants. The ideological presentation of the isolationist current does not correspond to a real possibility of carrying it out but is apt only to produce a situation of complete helplessness of the wage earners which ultimately benefits their exploiters, even if in its implementation there are imbalances and inconveniences for the latter.
These are the statements of a small-bourgeois farmer and Republican voter: "'We have to secure our borders south and north, but you have to have a workforce in this country,' said DiMare, whose family has 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of tomato farms in Florida and California. 'There’s no doubt that is going to restrict and put pressure on farming and many other industries that rely on this workforce.' That’s because US farms run on an army of more than 850,000 crop workers, almost half of whom the Department of Agriculture estimates are undocumented (...) Some 160,000 of them move with the seasons (...) This complex system sustains America’s relatively cheap food supply" (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025).
The problem for this sector of the small and middle bourgeoisie is one of wage costs: "Since Governor Ron DeSantis pushed through one of the nation’s strictest state immigration laws in July 2023, more farmers have been forced to pay far higher wages for guest workers to replace undocumented laborers — a federally mandated $16.23 an hour instead of roughly $10 in cash for picking tomatoes." (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025) and also of supply shortages of the commodity labor force: "It’s already getting hard to find workers in Mexico willing to leave their families for months at a time because of rising wages and employment at home, said Myers, who hires about 90 H-2A workers a year. If farmers 'had to replace every falsely documented worker with an H-2A worker, it wouldn’t happen'." (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025).
In addition to the exploitation inherent in wage labor, undocumented wage earners, as well as documented ones, suffer from permanent abuse: "The H-2A system is also rife with abuse. The Labor Department has banned dozens of labor brokers for illegalities ranging from charging fees for a visa spot, piling on debts for transport and meals" (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025).
When the law that tightened repression against the immigrant proletariat went into effect in Florida, the statements of an evangelical pastor in the area were the following: "The day 1718 went into effect we met with the chief of police and other local authorities; they told us that they are not here to ask for papers (...) The raids of immigrants are not their business, but that of ICE and they are not enough." (El País, 23-07-2023). That is to say, the local bourgeoisie and its tools of local oppression were not going to hinder themselves in their exploitation.
But it appears that the anti-worker crackdown machinery has started to work this time: "There are signs the roundups are already beginning: On Jan. 7, Border Patrol agents raided businesses where migrant orange pickers congregate around Bakersfield, California, in what was dubbed Operation Return to Sender. Other migrants scared of being caught stayed home from work for several days, stranding crops, CalMatters reported." (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025). And farm-employer representatives have begun to complain: "'I don’t recall hearing of no-shows or a lot of worker fear prior to the president-elect’s threats,' said Michael Marsh, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers." (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025).
The electoral promises of the buffoon Trump collide with this material reality of the needs of US capitalism. They should clash against an organized network of native-born and immigrant workers that would stand up to all these ANTI-WORKING CLASS MEASURES, both of the current and previous administrations, extending struggle, solidarity and class unionism, breeding ground for the introduction of communist principles and aims. But the harsh reality is that this organization does not yet exist and the anti-working class employers’ action clashes mainly with itself. The evolution of the internal conflicts of the impasse into which US capitalism is entering will determine the real depth of the current administration's intent.
Precisely part of the support from the big tech companies is due to a change of course on H1-B visas in Trump's speech. This is by no means to say that there is a unanimous position in the amalgam of contradictory interests that make up the current Republican Party. But the integration of these business interests into this second attempt at a walled-in retreat is evident when the buffoon Trump comes out swinging against the controversy in his ranks by declaring, "'I've always been in favor of visas,' Trump told the Post in a telephone interview. 'I've been a believer in H-1B. I've used it many times.' 'You graduate from a college, I think you should automatically get as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country and that includes junior colleges too,' Trump said." (Bloomberg, 28-12-2024).
In the previous term, several types of visas were restricted, including the H-1B conflicting with tech, as would be the case if they were restricted now: "'There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,' Musk, who used an H-1B visa to work in the US" (Bloomberg, 28-12-2024).
Access to abortion
Labor shortages, the aging of the productive population and the need for cannon fodder in case of war drive sectors of the US bourgeoisie to limit access to abortion. As a result of the Supreme Court's decision in 2022 to remove federal protection of abortion rights and give each state the power to legislate on the issue, votes on abortion access were held in ten states in conjunction with the presidential election. Pro-choice amendments were passed in Arizona, Missouri, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, New York and Maryland, with more restrictive legislation in South Dakota and Nebraska.
No referendum can give stable guarantees in this respect, only the organization of struggle of the working class and the overthrow of the apparatus of class domination of the bourgeoisie can prevent this right of interference of the bourgeoisie in the reproduction of the working class. The position of the Communists in relation to abortion is published in the article "Against interclassism in the ‘women's question’" ("El Comunista" No. 55, p. 36): "Just as above we have denounced that one cannot pretend to "emancipate woman" from her commodity character without abolishing the general commodity character of all workers and eliminating the capitalist mercantile character of the present relations of production, we have to affirm categorically that, in these conditions of slavery, it is an inescapable duty for all members of the working class of both sexes to fight to prevent the class of modern slaveholders from having the slightest possibility of interfering in the decision of the women of our class to become pregnant or to have an abortion at any given moment."
Retracing the steps of diplomatic isolation
Among the first steps of the second attempt at walled-in retreat are several of an isolationist nature, some even pre-inauguration, linked to the approach of encouraging the exploitation of the oil business. "The Federal Reserve has withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for the Greening the Financial System, a global coalition of central banks engaged in the study of climate risk that was launched in 2017" (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025) and has been followed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). On its side, "The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, (...) JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December." (The Guardian, 08-01-2025).
Among the first executive orders are also the exit from the Paris Agreement (treaty for limiting global warming) and the World Health Organization.
The debt ceiling and the division among Republicans
The election of the speaker of the House of Representatives is one of the moments where the Republican Party has repeatedly shown the most visible signs of its internal differences and the struggle between them. In January 2023, it took 15 rounds of voting (the most since 1859) to elect McCarthy as speaker, elected with the final abstention of 6 Republicans. This election was premised on the possibility of impeachment in case of failure to meet the debt ceiling commitments. And so it was, in October 2023 he was impeached by a motion of censure from his own party for his agreement with the president to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a government shutdown. And once again, the Republican Party again demonstrated the competing interests within it. First, they tried unsuccessfully to elect their own nominee Steve Scalise, then they tried to nominate Jordan who was defeated by internal opposition, and finally they nominated and elected incumbent Mike Johnson who likewise needed 4 rounds to be elected.
On January 3, 2025, the speaker had to be re-elected, a figure necessary for the validation of the electoral results. Despite the electoral victory achieved and despite being a step towards taking the State machinery in their hands, even so, the Republican Party had to be negotiating with itself to get two of the three Republican representatives who opposed the election to agree to vote for Johnson. All this, preceded by a brawl in which the Republicans blocked the agreement reached between the speaker and Biden to raise the government's debt ceiling and then also voted against the agreement proposed by Trump himself. What is clear is that conflicting interests cohabit within the Republican Party: "There are many members beyond the three who voted for someone else who have reservations." (Bloomberg, 03-01-2025).
Come and see: the circus continues
Once the election was won, the buffoon Trump started the show: he announced 25% tariffs with Canada and Mexico, claimed that Canada should be the 51st state of the US, then threatened to "take back" the Panama Canal if they did not lower the tariffs, to invade Greenland if necessary and to put tariffs on the EU if it did not buy more oil.
After the inauguration ceremony, the show continued with the signing of executive orders. In addition to those related to technology, the exit of international organizations and immigration which we have already dealt with, the executive orders include ideological measures such as reintegrating vaccine objectors into the Army and the elimination of corporate policies called DEI (diversity, equality and integration); measures in relation to federal agencies such as the return to the office, the freezing of new hires and new regulations; measures in relation to energy including the opening of more areas to oil and gas exploration and extraction with the idea of refilling the strategic oil reserve and exporting oil worldwide and the limitation of areas for windmills to generate electricity; and measures in the automotive sector with the withdrawal of policies and subsidies for electric cars.
On tariffs and bravados
There has been one major absence among the measures immediately taken: the absence of new tariffs. For the time being, the tariffs have not been imposed on Canada or Mexico – although he promises to do so on February 1st – but neither have the tariffs of up to 60% against Chinese products been imposed. Trump's buffoonish statements: "'We have one very big power over China, and that’s tariff s, and they don’t want them,' the US leader told Fox News host (...) 'And I'd rather not have to use it. But it's a tremendous power over China.'" (Bloomberg, 24-01-2025). In reality, rather than a tremendous power over China, the proposed tariffs are a tremendous mechanism to put US industry itself in difficulty.... The US has chosen to use the threat of tariffs to make countries (such as Colombia but also China and India) promise to accept the return of immigrants expelled from the US. Of course, this does not mean that the US will not put the promised tariffs in place after a certain period of time, short or long. However, it denotes the style of the little personage who embodies the current resultant of the jumble of contradictory interests of the US bourgeoisie and is very reminiscent of the barking dog, but not much of a biter. Implicit in the situation of US imperialism is the difficulty of charting a clear course and the condemnation of successive swings in one direction and in the opposite.
Accidents, disasters and cyber-attacks
To the list of internal difficulties of US imperialism we will add some more. The flagship of US aeronautics (Boeing) is not getting its head above water amid failures, strikes, debts, layoffs and the departure of engineers. Hurricanes, floods and fires destroy everything in their path due to the poor state of infrastructure. Cyber-attacks follow one after another and, in the last known one, Chinese hackers managed to enter the Treasury Secretary's computer and “more than 400 laptops (...) as well as more than 3,000 files” (Bloomberg, 17-01-2025).
The social burden of war
In "The Internationalist Proletarian" no.8 (December 2021, p.5) we analyzed the economic cost and the soldiers killed in service, but we must add the fact that "more than 30,000 US soldiers committed suicide after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan: more than three times as many as those who died in combat." (Financial Times, 25-10-2023). This economic and human bleeding was one of the reasons that boosted the isolationist current and ended up determining the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In the internal fight for the distribution of seats, the most isolationist current managed to block Mike Pompeo as Secretary of Defense, to the shout of “Screw the war machine”. The first “successes” of the new current's entry on the scene have not been long in coming: first a cease-fire in Lebanon and then a cease-fire in Gaza. The next promise is to stop the war in Ukraine.
But as we have repeated so many times and will not tire of repeating, it is not going to be the will of individuals or even whole fractions of the bourgeoisie that will determine whether the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine continue but the material facts. "It is not about its awareness of the facts, not even its subjective will, this would not be Marxism. It is about what acts the American bourgeoisie (or fractions of it) is forced to carry out, due to the effect of their material situation. And in the current situation of imperialism, the US can only choose among loser moves. ("The Internationalist Proletarian" No. 5, September 2020, p.12).
[1]See in this issue of the magazine the development of another point of the immediate revolutionary program outlined at the general meeting of the Party, in Forlì, December 1952: "Cardinal point of the communist program: resolute struggle against specialization".
[2] Note a common deception with percentages. For example, Boeing signed a 38% increase over four years. This might look like 9.5% per year (with the incorrect calculation 38/4 = 9.5) but it is actually 8.4% per year since the correct calculation is: ∜(1+38%)-1=8,4%.