Stop Trump, build working-class politics

Picture: Ted Eytan

At our Workers’ Liberty conference on 27-28 April, a majority resolved that “We advocate US socialists support a vote for [Harris] to stop Trump, in the context of a political perspective emphasising the need to build a working-class political pole independent of the Democrats, and to build labour and socialist organisation and struggle to fight the policies of a [Harris] government and organise resistance to Trumpism. US socialists who pursue a ‘no vote for [Harris]’ intervention in the election, or rally behind [Cornel] West, are wrong”.

A minority voted for this view: “In the 2024 presidential election, [Harris] represents a substantial lesser evil than Trump. However, to call for a vote for [Harris] to provide such an ‘endorsement’ from the AWL is politically wrong-headed and serves no purpose. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that we do not have a credible socialist candidate in this election. Our slogans in the election should continue to focus on the need for independent working-class politics and organisation to combat the threat of Trumpism and the ‘two-party’ system”. (The April texts read “Biden”, not Harris.)

On the nature of Trumpism, a majority voted for this: “Trump is a strong-state, anti-democratic, racist thug. He is personally rude, ignorant, spiteful and strange. But Trump is not a fascist, or neofascist or similar. Nor is there a fascist movement in the US, only scattered, small self-identified fascist groupings. Trump is a far-right rallying-point for the amorphous MAGA movement, floating alongside and underneath the Republican Party. This movement bases itself on identity and grievance politics, nativism, white nationalism, conspiracy theories. The political context which accompanied Trump’s rise is a very different context to that which saw the rise of fascism after 1918 — experience of world war, high inflation, mass unemployment, weak bourgeois-democratic institutions, the Russian Revolution and mass movements of workers in Germany and elsewhere.

“Current conditions are not a ‘crisis’ in anything like the same way. Trump owes his popularity to: the ongoing effects of the 2008 financial crisis, the perceived threats to the US as a global power, effects of a pandemic, perceived downsides of globalisation, and the failures of the Democratic Party under both Obama and Biden. To state clearly that Trump is not a fascist is not to minimise the threat Trump poses: he and the Republican Party are a menace. It is a statement which aims for clarity. The word ‘fascism’ has a precise meaning; we try to use words carefully, to avoid misunderstandings and calibrate our responses in line with our movement’s traditions.

“For Trump to be a fascist he and the movement around him would have to match the criteria which our movement originally used to designate Mussolini’s movement, and the German Nazis that followed, as a distinct, new type of right-wing political force. Trump leads no mass movement or militias; he does not put people on the streets to fight for him (aside from 6 January 2021, and that’s far more complex than stating the event was a ‘coup’ attempt). Trump’s movement is not a movement of crisis. Trump himself is a ‘small state’ low-tax capitalist man and a bad fit for the corporatism of e.g. Mussolini.

“Trump has opted to circumvent, manipulate and when it suits, performatively denounce, the existing bourgeois democratic framework in the US. He has not, so far, sought to smash it, or anything like that. The existing framework, as deeply flawed as it is, and despite the 6 January 2021, is robust. He has not won his court cases over the ‘stolen election’ for example. He has been resolutely rebuffed. It is more useful, that is more relevant to the current context and more precise, to define Trump as an authoritarian, far-right, populist demagogue with US peculiarities; he is part of a global set which includes Erdogan, Orban, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders and others. None of these figures, nor the societies some of them rule, are fascist”.

A minority voted for this: “The Trump movement is at least a quasi-fascist or incipiently fascist movement. It has coalesced different strands of the long-brewing US far right behind an authoritarian leader. It has an active base in local gun clubs and churches. It has drawn in the militia movement, previously distant from electoral politics. A Trump victory will be a major defeat and setback (in world politics, not just the USA) compared to even a business-as-usual Democrat victory. This even though fascistic measures after a Trump victory will almost certainly be slower than in say Italy in 1922-6”.