Julien Charles
The optics don’t lie: Loutish appearance, fraudulent tan, fake hair, babbling a litany of lies in poorly worded English—Donald Trump is a perfect representation of the cabal of capital he represents. Unlettered, amoral, avaricious, and rapacious. He represents no country—that is a distraction—rather, he serves the capital class, a ruling cartel of cynical exploiters whose defining characteristic is that they are the opposite of everything they claim.
To give but one example, Trump’s White House proudly declares that in the U.S. military, “we leave no American behind.” Warren Gunnels, staffer for Bernie Sanders’ doomed electoral bids, noted that, “68,000 Americans die each year for lack of healthcare, some 800,000 citizens are homeless, and nearly half of cancer patients lose their home within two years of their diagnosis.”
Trump now seems to revel in the open hypocrisy of his positions. Having allied himself with the National Security State, reversing the mistake of his first term, he feels untouchable. He has capriciously and frivolously backed the ongoing genocide in Gaza, given Tel Aviv free rein to expand its ethnic cleansing campaign into Lebanon, and launched a halfwitted and grotesque war on Iran that announced itself by slaughtering hundreds of innocent school children. The President seems perversely energized by defying the public will, which would have halted all of those criminal endeavors.
In his grotesquery, he is uniquely American: crude and ignorant, venal and pompous. An embodiment of ruling-class vice, a cavalier criminal who flaunts his gangsterism with contempt for the masses. Want a perfect metaphor for Trump? Take W.H. Auden’s infamous ogre,
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
And yet: Trump is another in a long line of bootlicking Boomers putting the final nails in the coffin of the country they were handed at the height of its prosperity. But the generational saga is a side story; the real story is the servile behavior of Washington leadership to the narrow interests of elite capital. Its protagonists are legion, and extend well beyond the vulgar figure in power today.
The Common Heirs of Violence
Abraham Lincoln once said that capital is the fruit of labor, and without labor, it wouldn’t exist. To produce capital, the proceeds of labor had to be expropriated. Which is why the capital class are the lineal descendants of the thieves of the land and plunderers of resources, who stole common wealth and then invented a system of exploitation to extract even more wealth from those they had brutally dispossessed.
Read the history of the enclosure of the commons. Read what life was like for the feudal class, then how it changed once labor was driven into the cities and put into the harness of wage slavery. Read about contemporaries who argued that wage labor was worse than chattel slavery.
That is the capital class that President Trump serves as court jester, a carnival barker, a fake thug reading a script on the silver screen. While uniquely boorish, he was preceded by cretinous Joe Biden, a peer and colleague in sycophancy to the donor class of billionaires and managers of capital. Service to money power—and its corollary devastation of the working class—has always been a bipartisan project.
This service to elite capital is in effect the project of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, per Vladimir Lenin. Imperialism is the enrichment of the few by force, on a global scale. As Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill has noted, the principal impediment to imperialism is socialism. Therefore, it must be suppressed and ultimately destroyed.
This point is critical to understand because if it is not, the uneducated masses will again vote for Democrats, who will continue the project of imperialist ruling-class enrichment by other means. Where Republicans prefer boots on the ground and the spectacle of overwhelming power, Democrats prefer covert ops, special forces, and mercenaries. Where Republicans prefer blunt speech, Democrats prefer dissembling eloquence. When Republicans often make fools of themselves by boldly declaring the courage of their convictions, Democrats disguise their real loyalties beneath a patina of gentle rhetoric, kindly sops, and threadbare platitudes. But don’t be fooled, both serve the same master: capital.
Conservatives are often so thoroughly indoctrinated by neoliberal economics and the propaganda of patriotism that they believe that sycophantic capitulation to billionaires is the path to general prosperity, celebrating their own immiseration as it happens. Fools can be forgiven.
Okay, Boomer
Not so scheming political frauds; Democrats by another name. In their rambunctious youth, Boomer liberals learned something of the evils of capital exploitation and its inevitable transition into monopoly capitalism at home and violent imperialism abroad. But not enough. Given the choice of a lifetime of struggle against a frighteningly oppressive system with a monopoly on the means of violence, or a softening of their rhetoric and collaboration with the rulers of capital, they chose the latter.
But they overlooked the historical reality that capitalism—as a system—unrelentingly aims at full-spectrum profiteering. During the post-Depression era, its roughest edges were temporarily softened thanks to the global threat of socialism. But the collapse of the Soviet Union led, quite predictably, back to the hyper-exploitation and hyper-profits that the dictatorship of capital prefers.
This ahistorical idealism led liberals to support a system that was, as political scientist and author Barrington Moore Jr. wrote, “the predatory solution of token reform at home and counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad.”
In practice, the system they promoted undermined all of the values they claimed to cherish. And they knew it.
Words & Deeds
In a society like the U.S., dedicated to economic and military barbarity but still maintaining a thin gloss of a once-moral sensibility, words necessarily disguise deeds. To paraphrase early public relations guru Walter Lippmann, a society surviving on a ruse of democratic choice must use the manufacture of opinion to sustain itself. And that means the manipulation of words.
Liberal politicians are practiced in the rhetorical arts. Conservative politicians rarely are. This is why it is increasingly important that liberal deeds are uncovered and wheeled into the spotlight, lest another generation be fooled into thinking simply voting blue will fix things. But it won’t. Just ask yourself:
Who was the original party of slavery? Democrats.
Who whipped up racist hysteria against Germans and led a previously pacifist nation into the gruesome slaughterhouse of World War I? Democrats.
Who threw 120,000 Japanese-Americans into detention camps? Democrats.
Who dropped nuclear weapons on innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Democrats.
Who cynically escalated the racist anticommunist war in Vietnam? Democrats.
Who utterly demolished Libya, collapsing the security anchor of North Africa with the highest standard of living on the continent? Democrats.
Who pulverized Syria by arming terrorists, wrecking the country, and creating the largest refugee crisis of this century? Democrats.
Who poured billions into CIA cutouts and neo-fascist organizations in Ukraine and finally sponsored a coup d’etat that installed neo-fascists and neoliberal technocrats in power, turning a blind eye as they proceeded to massacre ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine? Democrats.
Who pushed for NATO integration in Kyiv while massively arming neo-Nazi sympathizers across Ukraine, fuelling a NATO war with a motivated nuclear power? Democrats.
Who declared Venezuela a national security threat and enacted brutal sanctions against the population for the crime of pursuing their own economic interests? Democrats.
Who armed, funded, diplomatically defended, and proved to be a faithful partner in Israel’s open genocide against the Palestinian people? Democrats.
Who voted for Trump’s deranged Secretary of State Marco Rubio? Who voted for Trump’s insane military funding bill? Who castigated the president for not being bolder in his illegal war of aggression against Iran? Who in recent presidential campaigns declared Iran was job one and would be attacked? The answer to all four questions is the same: Democrats.
It’s a stomach-turning record of betrayal of every principle of peace and justice and fairness and free expression and anti-racism that liberals claim to stand for, which makes their criminality that much more sickening.
And that’s just foreign policy, but it is where the most damage is done. Domestically, liberals will tolerate mass suppression of free speech, illegal mass surveillance, the purging of socialists from the political system, the systematic dismantling and disempowerment of worker unions—so long as their privileges are maintained.
See outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s revelations about former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, a scandal so large it is hard to imagine the scope of it. Fauci was deified by the liberal class, his critics demonized, and those who merely questioned official policy censored from the platforms of speech by, you guessed it, Democrats.
Suffice it to say, the dictatorship of capital in Washington and across Europe is illegitimate and criminal—and it encompasses Democrats and Republicans and almost all mainstream parties in Europe. It deserves to be abolished and its leaders and employees placed in the dock in The Hague, the International Court of Justice, or perhaps a new, non-Western institution that the servants of imperialism haven’t compromised.
A Long Tradition of Class Betrayal
The point is that a major reason the dictatorship of capital has sustained itself is the false hope so powerfully presented by the liberal class. The promise of accelerating prosperity and freedom for the masses is betrayed by historical analysis. Thanks to the analytical methods of historical materialism, and aside from the inexorably exploitative role of capitalism itself, we know that the historical function of the liberal class is to forestall genuine socialist revolution and to steer authentic leftist movements back into the narcotic embrace of the Democratic Party, often called the graveyard of movements.
Why do liberals behave this way? To protect their privileges, according to Bolshevik hero Vladimir Lenin. In Lenin’s caustic takedown of Karl Kautsky, the poster boy for liberal fecklessness, the top Bolshevik cites a letter of Engels when the latter lamented “repulsive…bourgeois ‘respectability.’” He was talking about what he elsewhere called “an aristocracy among the working class”, a “privileged, protected minority” that permanently benefited from the largesse of imperialism, over and above any temporary advantage meted out to the mass of workers.
This labor aristocracy, a parasite on the back of the ruling class, its janitorial staff, as it were, betrays their class interests in exchange for the status and bourgeois respectability mentioned above.
Lenin describes how “...the political institutions of modern capitalism—press, parliament, associations, congresses, etc.—have created political privileges and sops for the respectful, meek, reformist and patriotic office employees and workers, corresponding to the economic privileges and sops. Lucrative and soft jobs in the government or on the war industries committees, in parliament and on diverse committees, on the editorial staffs of ‘respectable’, legally published newspapers or on the management councils of no less respectable and ‘bourgeois law-abiding’ trade unions—this is the bait by which the imperialist bourgeoisie attracts and rewards the representatives and supporters of the ‘bourgeois labour parties.’”
This is the modern liberal and its Democratic Party in a nutshell. Hard to believe a man analyzing European politics in the early 1900s could so aptly describe American politics in the 2020s. But that’s what the materialist conception of history delivers.
Coda to a Collapse
This is an early and marginal draft of the history of the end of the American Empire, the latter being an open wound on the world whose demise will very likely either lead to a global hegemony of market socialism or a retrenchment of capital in the form of a digital dictatorship, one that may paradoxically offer a measly universal welfare in exchange for labor’s complete subjugation.
Yet the opportunity to seize the future to shape a global socialist society for all mankind is within reach—and depends on a capacity to understand the history of capitalist brutality. The brave writer and U.S. foreign policy critic William Blum, author of Killing Hope and Rogue State, once wrote,
“The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living and don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window. That is exactly who we are.”
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Seems the monsters are anxiously lighting their firebombs. What will the masses do?
