You know why no one considers you the greatest living Marxist dialectician? It’s most likely because when you look at the Trump regime you don’t conclude:

“It is not at all far-fetched to foresee that some of the boldest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing militants of the future communist movement in America will consist precisely of workers who have passed through the school of Trumpism and drawn the correct conclusions from it.”

With your superficial grasp of what is actually happening in the world, you stupidly think that a mass movement mobilised by anti-migrant racism, a commitment to eradicating Palestinians, climate change denialism and medical quackery led by billionaires deploying its immigration services as a Gestapo and with armed militias on standby doesn’t offer much in the way of progressive potential. That is what makes you a member of the “miserable petty-bourgeois tribe”.

Sometimes you read an article that annoys the arse off you so much that you have to vent about it. The meaning of Donald Trump: a Marxist analysis by Alan Woods is one such piece if only because it is likely to have some influence on young people and the two “worker comrades” who each pledged £1000 as part of an increasingly cult like recruitment drive.

Hegel’s oak tree

A PDF of the article runs to 21 pages. It only on page 12 that he gets round to saying “Let us begin with the obvious”, a phrase that should have ideally appeared in the first couple of paragraphs. Much of what precedes is ponderous rhetoric about how silly The Guardian can be (admittedly, a fair point), six references to Trotsky with lengthy quotes, a name check for Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, something about trees from Hegel’s Phenomenology, that well-worn Spinoza quote about laughing and crying and a lengthy digression on Corbynism. A less cowed editor might have done a bit of pruning.

Woods accepts Trump’s victimhood bluster. “They launched a veritable tsunami of legal cases, aimed at putting him behind bars.” True, but to be fair, he encouraged his supporters to try and stage a coup on January 6^th. That is hardly the sort of thing bourgeois states typically turn a blind eye to. If there is a criticism to be made it is that they failed to get him locked up. It is stretching the truth a bit to argue “The main assault against democracy was in fact led by Biden and the Democrats”. Genocide Joe’s people rolled over when they lost the election and, as far as I can tell, have been on holiday since.

Although the article is dated March 21^st, this sentence was not even true when it was written “Biden and his gang did were infinitely more counter-revolutionary and disastrous and monstrous than anything that Trump ever dreamed of doing.” Biden and the Democrats are as responsible for the Gaza genocide as Netanyahu but the Trump regime is explicit in its determination to eradicate as many Palestinians as necessary to displace the remnant to Sudan or Somaliland. That is a qualitative escalation in the process of genocide.

You can’t argue with Woods’ data on the rise of Black (from 8% to 16%) and Latino (35% to 42%) support for Trump and the continuing impoverishment of much of the working class. A lot of what he says about the Democrats is right too. They are a mildly progressive bourgeois party who have overseen immiseration.

But there is more to politics than economics. Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil are now in Trump’s equivalent of a Siberian prison as warnings to students, academics and anyone thinking of taking to the streets that they could be next, especially if they are not white. In some respects, Trump’s contempt for bourgeois legal processes is similar to what a revolutionary or radical left government anywhere would be obliged to do.

Trump’s people mean what they say

Trump’s people are planning to convert the United States into a pseudo democracy and have started to lay the groundwork for disposing of anyone who gets in their way. One of the things that makes this easier for him is his use of the militant racism which is a feature of American society. Woods translates this lumpen, demoralised, reactionary support for Trump as “an immature reflection of their instinctive hostility to the capitalist system itself” which will push his supporters “sharply to the left”.

We all love an optimist, but this is a misreading of what these reactionary political movements do to mass consciousness. Like the greatest living Marxist dialectician, I too am sad that crystal balls haven’t been invented, and we can all take comfort from the fact that “History will present us with many surprises. Not all of them bad.” However, it is delusional and wrong to tell your followers that before very much longer the Trump movement will fracture throwing up a real fascist movement and create the space for a third party which will pull in supporters of the Trump movement to become the Communist vanguard.  At the moment I am inclined to believe those members of the Trump movement are telling the truth when they say they don’t want to relinquish power. They definitely mean it. There is probably a Trotsky quote about something like that but I can’t be arsed looking for it.