Surrounded

Sailors of the Kiel Mutiny

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Sun-Tzu

Great part of the information obtained in War is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is of a doubtful character.Carl von Clauswitz

As the primary season for the 2016 election began the Republican Party trotted out a normal campaign with normal candidates and normal policies. Whether out of any real strategic understanding or merely as a show to serve his purposes in the event of a defeat, Trump proposed, instead, an openly fascist direction for the party. By slicing off all hard right sections of the party he was able, first, to prevent any normal candidate from assembling a critical mass and then, finally, push them all out of the way.

Coming from outside the GOP, Trump, and by Trump I implicate all who circle him for their own and his reasons, was able to see the hollow state of the party and the opportunity to reconstitute it around a fascist program. But I should be more precise. Where does Trump’s program break with the normal of his party and of the Democrats as well?

The aim of fascism is to protect a capitalist order which can no longer rely on the legal norms of the bourgeois state to sustain it. It attempts the criminal eradication of any organized defense by the working class of its interests to relieve the pressure on a capitalist system in crisis. And crisis is the watchword of Trump’s administration as it was of his campaign.

Recurrent in his rallies was the message that if he did not succeed this time there may never be another another chance. And here we have a clue to the nature of his crisis. 2008 marked a break in global capital. Measures taken at the time have not resolved the situation but papered it over with promises to be extracted from the living standards of workers from every country. Even so, for those at the upper reaches of the economy I can understand a sense of foreboding but don't believe they are panicking about their position. In the homeland of the American empire there appears to be a continued preference to rely on traditional power structures rather than leap into the unknown of fascism. Particularly under the leadership of Trump.

There is, however, a case to be made for the impending demise of the GOP. As a mass party its appeal has been declining and as an instrument of the ruling class it has become increasingly unnecessary. Trump found an audience among the party's leftover base, those who are exposed to the ill winds of austerity and also uncomfortable with the neighbors who were taking shelter from the storm beside them.

With no revolutionary movement as yet in view Trump's flock has to content themselves with the Democratic Party as their sworn foe. It is the historic mantle of the Republicans, relentless champions of capital against its class enemy, against socialism in the disguise of the party of the New Deal. It is this identity which ensures that the GOP, having taken up the crusader's cross, can never return to its pre-Trump formation.

So we have a cluster on the right based on remnants of the 20th century Klan under the direction of a television imago of wealth. They are well drilled as an audience but are unproven in political battle. They have been deployed prematurely against an enemy that is, at this point, hardly more than a projection of their class anxieties.

2008 showed, as a crisis of credit, the hollow center of global relations of production. Every year since the last decades of the previous century has shown the critical situation we are in with regard to planetary systems. And the last hundred years demonstrates the extreme danger from our overdeveloped ability to wage war against ourselves. Anxiety is universal but we are still in the early stages of a crisis which will proliferate everywhere and continually present new facts on the ground.

Trump and the Republicans are not mistaken about who has them surrounded. They serve to remind us, as that party has always done, that it is the political program of the working class, socialism, that threatens capital’s grasp on power. But their concept of socialism is antiquated and spectral. They have the worst sort of general staff, one with no certain intelligence of its opponent. Not surprising. Their opponent, the workers of this country and around the world, have not yet taken the field in the form required to protect their interests and that of humanity.

Now who must do something about it? This is what I believe: the days of special political parties are over. The political organizations which will take part in the change of today will consist of the large majority of the population. For, except for those who are part of the special interests which continue to hold on to power, the large majority of the population in every country, advanced and backward, is involved in what is taking place, and is, to use the words of the Times Literary Supplement, a “sort of traitor” to the governments which are over it. The large majority of people have to form some sort of political organization and bring this to an end.    C. L. R. James - World Politics Today, 1967