Mussolini from Queens
- bolshievince
- Nov 16, 2016
- 7 min read

Donald J. Trump's ascent from the fascistic abyss to the US Presidency reminds me of the words of the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned for many years by Benito Mussolini and the Blackshirts. "The Old World is dying away," wrote Gramsci, "and the New World struggles to be born. Now is the Time of Monsters." Gramsci referred to the psychic turbulence that is manifested in periods of historical transition between socioeconomic systems (such as between feudalism and capitalism, and from capitalism to socialism). In such epochs, old certainties are crushed under the boots of the senile society's death march. Timeworn, bankrupt political and economic systems languish, but linger on. Mysticism becomes a refuge from reality. Masses put their hopes in saviors and messiahs. The social ground seems unsteady. Strange phantasms pervade the atmosphere. These are the signs of a systemic social crisis. They herald the appearance of monsters like Mussolini and Trump, who are vomited up from social decay to play their grotesque roles.
Trump and Mussolini both emerged in periods of capitalist decline. During their rise to power, both men made use of cynical demagoguery. They played on existential fears of growing insecurity. They posed as populist rebels fighting the hated system. But in reality, both upheld the system, the rule of the oligarchs, hiding this fact by sowing illusions of national grandeur, whipping up chauvinism, and deflecting popular anger away from the system onto innocent scapegoats.
Similarities aside, Mussolini and Trump rose to prominence in very different contexts. Mussolini seized the power in Italy with the threat of armed force. He extinguished democratic forms of capitalist rule using the tactic of Blackshirt intimidation (with his March on Rome in 1922). Trump, in comparison, came to power by quasi-democratic means. He has to share power with many other scions of the US ruling class. He won an election of sorts, but that process is dominated by big money, voter suppression, and the two-party duopoly -- all pillars of capitalist rule in America.
But let us be clear. The USA is not facing fascism at the current juncture. Despite the election of a reactionary demagogue to the highest office, fascism is not an immediate prospect. For fascism is an open dictatorship. It overturns the constitutional order. It is a political response by the oligarchs to revolutionary developments in society that endanger the capitalist system itself (as in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Chile during the 20th Century). Democratic forms of government and constitutional rights are liquidated under fascism. Organizations of the working class, such as labor unions, political parties, and civic organizations are suppressed and their leadership is incarcerated or killed. Quite often even bourgeois political parties are outlawed, to prevent any open opposition.
This is not the political situation in the USA today, nor is it likely to be the case in the immediate future. Yet, it is undeniably true that certain trends in society are moving in a fascistic direction. Some aspects of a fascist regime are emerging in outline. For starters, bourgeois politics is losing legitimacy because of endemic corruption and the supremacy of monied interests in the process. This can feed alienation and boost authoritarian tendencies. There is also a significant far-right militia movement in the country. This could develop into future battalions of American Blackshirts. Repression of minorities is spiking. Police forces are being militarized; and some law enforcement agencies are reservoirs of the Klan. These things are all warnings of a potential rise of fascism. What's missing, at this stage, is a revolutionary crisis of the system. There is no necessity for the oligarchy to take extreme measures such as fascist rule.
We must remember that fascism is only one possible form of capitalist rule. It is not favored under ordinary circumstances. It only appears when there is a critical threat to the existing order; and there is no such threat today. Although resistance to the system breaks out in movements of the oppressed (Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, Occupy Wall Street, immigrant rights, etc.) they are not of a magnitude to seriously challenge the system. They can be dealt with using the repressive apparatus of the democratic capitalist state (the police forces, the state militias and national guard, the military, the law courts and penitentiaries). In reality, spontaneous disturbances, protest movements, and single-issue struggles will not be enough to topple the entrenched system of racism and capitalist class rule. That will require the working class and oppressed to consciously organize under a banner of revolutionary social transformation.
The capitalist Republic will wear a democratic mask for as long as it can. Bourgeois democracy, with its illusions, its traditions, is a far better cloak for the rule of Capital, and a more subtle tool, than naked class oppression. Nevertheless, whatever political situation arises, the capitalist bourgeoisie have proven to be very flexible in their forms of class rule. They can operate under a democratic republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a fascist regime. Their only sacred criteria is 'The Rule of Capital over Labor.'
At this stage, the US ruling class can still profit from the existing quasi-democratic order. The setup is favorable enough for them. Little is blocking their way to a new onslaught of austerity against workers. They can accomplish their main goal quite handily, which is making the workers pay for the crisis, from within the system itself. There is no need to hand total power to someone like Trump, in a Faustian bargain that may come back to bite them -- especially now that manna from heaven has fallen on the Republican Party in the elections. They will soon assume majority power in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. These Republicans, the conservative wing of the establishment, will also appoint socially regressive judges to the Supreme Court who are a threat to minorities and women's rights. If all that isn't bad enough, most State Governors are also Republican Party stalwarts.
Some early Trump selections of advisers and cabinet members could be a warning of worse things to come. They indicate once again that Trump's proclivities are authoritarian. His early picks, such as far-right Steve Bannon as Strategic Adviser, and Klan sympathizer Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, show a contempt for conventional niceties of establishment rule.
And of course it goes without saying that the handpicked functionaries of Wall Street will once again run the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Bank and other financial agencies. This is the way it works in the USA. Just recall that Citibank picked Barack Obama's cabinet in 2008; then ponder on the fact that such patrician domination of the finances of the bourgeois Republic goes back to and before the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age.
Under Trump and the Republicans, we can expect a more rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Current flimsy banking regulations will be scrapped. There will be even more obscene levels of speculation and larceny.
The atomised workers and poor can expect the worst. There will be reductions of social services, stagnant wages, benefit cuts, creeping privatisation of education, and costly health care premiums and deductibles. There will be an uptick in racial oppression and police violence. It will be a concentrated assault on the workers and poor.
The Right has been empowered, but the Trump Presidency is worrisome to the ruling class. They would prefer a respectable figure in the White House, not a racist and misogynist con-man. The situation is a problem for the pacification and management of the masses, at the very least. Rather, the establishment wanted Hillary Clinton, a trusted servant of Wall Street and the Pentagon with a liberal veneer. But they got The Donald instead: a jack-in-the-box with a grimacing face, who spits incendiary sparks into the dry tinderbox of a divided society.
For the oligarchs, there is a danger that Trump may awaken resistance in the working class. History shows, after all, that the whip of oppression and counter-revolution is often answered by resistance and revolution. Furthermore, Trump, the celebrity pied piper, carelessly sows illusions and fantasies among his followers, which could rebound on the ruling class itself. He is raising unrealistic hopes about his ability, as a savior billionaire, to solve their economic problems, which he is definitely unable to do. For these knotty problems are symptoms of an organic crisis deep within the subterranean processes of international capitalism. They are the result of dialectical entanglements within the global economy which are revealing the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself.
The world economy is in dire straits. Vast pools of stagnant capital accumulate at the apex of the class pyramid -- unable to find profitable fields for investment. Gargantuan quantities of unsold commodities glut the market: including oceans of petroleum, seas of natural gas, mountains of iron ore, lumber, rubber, steel, coal, copper and chemicals. Unemployment tears apart the social fabric, as in Europe, where joblessness of youth in many countries ranges from 20 to 50 percent. Global growth is anemic at best. Levels of inequality have spiked to unheard of levels, to the point where just 65 plutocrats own as much as 3.5 billion people (half the world's population).
With productive investment on the wane, there is instead a speculative orgy of easy money and paper profits, inflating many dangerous bubbles. The purchasing power of workers is sagging; levels of student, household, corporate and sovereign debt are in the stratosphere. Global trade is grinding to a halt; trade deals are imploding; protectionism is spreading a 'beggar thy neighbor' psychology, which promises a common ruin. The struggle among the capitalist nation states for control of the world market, via diplomatic extortion and militarism, intensifies apace. All of these strands in the tightly woven knot of world economy have come together to undermine the profitability and sustainability of the system (although you wouldn't know it by looking at stock markets alone).
In fact, these severe economic problems are largely out of the control of any human being, nation state or international agency. Capitalism is not a system based on foresight and predictability, nor is it amenable to rational planning on a national or world scale. It operates through the clash of opposing interests and blind forces, such as competition and monopoly, supply and demand, wages and profit, boom and bust. Therefore, all of Trump's empty promises and bravado will soon enough be exposed as lies before the people. Deceived followers will be left with only the bitter taste of Republican austerity. Many hopes will be dashed. Frustrations will rise. There will be unexpected backlashes against the system.
That is why, with few exceptions, the wallets of the rich and powerful favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump during the election. Even the notorious Koch brothers threw filthy lucre and verbal support her way. For the farsighted bourgeoisie can see that Trump poses an acute risk to social stability. They may agree with his attacks on the social safety net, public education and environmental protection, and they may support his schemes to commodify health care and boost military spending, but the ruling class thought it prudent to support Clinton, a dependable ally over many decades.
But now, all the electoral bets of the ruling class are off. We are entering new terrain of the class struggle. The election of Donald J. Trump as President will only spread the pestilence whelming up from the bowels of a putrefying social system.
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