The Spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown—all these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

—Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind

It never fails that, at momentous world historic turning points, it is very difficult to tell the difference between two types of twilight—whether one is first plunging into utter darkness or whether one has reached the end of a long night and is just at the moment before the dawn of a new day. In either case, the challenge to find the meaning—what Hegel called “the undefined foreboding of something unknown”—becomes a compulsion to dig for new beginnings, for a philosophy that would try to answer the question “where to begin?”

—Raya Dunayevskaya

by Franklin Dmitryev

Counterrevolution is the order of the day. It is not only the guiding principle of the Trump campaign but the dominant characteristic of politics worldwide. Although revolution itself does not appear to be on the horizon in the U.S. or in most other countries, and although economists and Democratic politicians keep assuring us that the economy is doing just fine, capitalism is stumbling through a global crisis, both economic and ecological, psychological and communal.

Amidst this “undefined foreboding of something unknown [and] gradual crumbling to pieces” (as Hegel put it), the ruling class detects undercurrents of revolt as well as portents of doom, whether from nuclear war, economic collapse, or runaway climate chaos. Unmistakably, things are falling apart in economics, politics, and thought. That is the brew in which counterrevolution festers, exacerbating the fever of capitalism’s grave contradictions and nourishing irrationalism, propaganda, deception, and manipulation. That is why fascism is on the rise not only in the U.S. but across the globe.

Donald Trump eked out a narrow victory in the November 2024 U.S. election, winning under half the popular vote and edging out Kamala Harris by less than 1.6% of the vote. The near-even split disguises the fact that this was no ordinary contest of two ruling class factions vying to maintain the social order by contending strategies that favor the interests of their own backers.

Rather, the guardians of the status quo faced off with a faction that actually advocates “Burning Down Washington to Save America”—up to a point. The latter, headed by Trump, present their counterrevolutionary campaign as a revolution, much as Hitler and Mussolini did a century ago. Their fake revolution aims to transform the status quo but only to shore up the existing class/race/sex hierarchy by turning back the rights of women, minorities and immigrants and making that the new normal.

Their fake revolution has no positive content, unless you count its promise to return to a past that exists only in fantasy but that represents that very real hierarchy and all its class divisions, exploitation, oppression, and violence. Its real focus is what Hegel called “merely negative….the negative which fails to see the positive” (Phenomenology, para. 59)—that is to say, the rage and fury of destruction.

Aside from a get-out-of-jail-free card—completing what Senate Republicans and the Supreme Court had already delivered to Trump—the foremost concerns that Trump vehemently campaigned for, over and over, are the destruction of his enemies, including “the enemy within” and the immigrants of color “poisoning the blood of our country” (plagiarizing Hitler). His enemies list includes the press that is not subservient to him, nonpartisan fact-checkers, and researchers into disinformation and hate speech. Aside from a tariff war and massive deregulation, the official acts he has repeatedly called for are prosecuting political enemies, in some cases executing them; deporting untold millions of people suspected of being undocumented immigrants, and in the process building concentration camps to lock them up in; and sending troops into U.S. cities to shoot “criminals,” including protesters.

GREAT REPLACEMENT MYTH UPDATED

The fever dream (it cannot accurately be called an idea or theory) underlying much of the Trumpist conspiracy myths and propaganda is the Great Replacement, that is, the white supremacist lie that “elites” (in the original lie, Jews) are orchestrating the replacement of white people by people of color, through open borders, interracial marriage, abortion, birth control, welfare, etc.—in other words the breakdown of white supremacy viewed through a distorting lens.

The 21st century version includes the fear that women are replacing men, and, as a barrage of Republican campaign ads howled, that Trans and nonbinary people are replacing our good little boys and girls (in the words of Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, they are going to “run over” our daughters). This, of course, plays on pervasive racism, sexism, queerphobia, narrow nationalism, and xenophobia. It exploits the alienation, precariousness and insecurity inherent in capitalism, which have greatly intensified since the 2008 global capitalist financial crisis, exacerbated by the catastrophically mismanaged COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic crisis.

While capitalist society always treated workers inhumanly, today we still suffer from the harsh restructuring that began in the 1970s. That ended the four decades of New Deal amelioration that had been put in place to stave off workers’ revolution during the Great Depression. The new restructuring was the rulers’ response to capitalism’s global economic crisis that burst out in 1973. It set in motion the decimation of sections of the U.S. economy like manufacturing, with workers replaced by automation or by low-wage near-slavery production in China and other countries.

At the same time as communities were decimated economically, corporations and the government, especially under Ronald Reagan, waged war on labor unions—one of the few places where workers could relate collectively as workers. Private sector union membership fell from 25% in 1973 to 8% in 2020. Strikes, which bring workers together in active relationship, also fell.

The ruling class accompanied this with an ideological onslaught that centered Margaret Thatcher’s mantra that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. That ideology pervaded the Democratic Party as well as the Republican, and polluted much of the Left too. Politicians generally disclaimed any real redress for workers thrown into a bleaker job market, with skills made obsolete, rights and protections torn away, control over one’s own life diminished. Trump and his predecessors like the Tea Party exploited the disarray and discontent of the restructuring left.

The Democratic Party leadership, including the Biden and Harris campaigns, tried to counter this by pointing to economic statistics as if they neutralized capitalism’s endemic precariousness, while capitulating to the right wing in policy terms by co-opting “border security” and attacking the Gaza solidarity movement. In fact, the Harris campaign shouted, “we are not the radical ones,” as if “radical” is a dirty word. As centrist and social democratic European parties have found, the attempt to co-opt far-right politics only cedes ground to and strengthens the Right.

HIDDEN SPECTER OF REVOLUTION

While most of the Left is in despair over the prospects of revolution, its specter is real enough to shape the approaches of the capitalists and their political representatives ever since the 2008 crisis. President Obama warned Wall Street in 2009 that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. In 2014 billionaire Nick Hanauer warned “My Fellow Zillionaires” that “the pitchforks are going to come for us [if they didn’t] preempt the revolutionaries….”

The Republican Party is trying to channel the simmering revolt’s potential energies into their fake revolution, substituting scapegoated social groups as the enemy instead of the failing system, while the Democratic Party tries to smooth over class divisions and yells the word “fascism” but undercuts any potentially revolutionary opposition to fascism.

Championing the status quo, the Harris campaign harped on how exhausted “we” are by Trump’s divisiveness and how we should all be united. Trying to paper over the divisions in society simply failed. Harris reflects the traditional class-collaborationist position of the Democratic Party that wants to smooth over class divisions—under the leadership of the capitalist class, of course, and thus maintaining the conditions for its exploitative existence. Her campaign was deliberately vague or ambivalent on many issues, although she did firmly side with fossil fuel production and anti-immigrant politics.

Harris alienated the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people by adopting the Biden administration’s almost total support for Israel’s war on Gaza with only token objections, and by shutting out even moderate Palestinian voices from the stage of the Democratic Party Convention. Prominent Democrats from Biden on down attacked the movement in concert with Republicans, charging it wholesale with antisemitism—yes, even the Jews for Palestinian liberation are charged with antisemitism! The Biden administration and the Harris and Trump campaigns all came down squarely on the side of genocide.

Harris did catch some fire with focus on freedom in the form of her vocal and occasionally passionate support for women’s right to control their own bodies, including bringing up how abortion bans have already led to women’s death. It was not enough to sway those who either thought other issues were more important or bought Trump’s lies that he would not ban abortion nationwide.

Trump, and the Republican Party that is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump cult, play up the divisions but try to deflect from class divisions to hatred and scapegoating of women, immigrants, Blacks, Trans people, the Left, Jews, Muslims, and any other convenient group. This kind of dehumanization of the Other points in the direction of genocide.

They rail against “elites” while protecting the real elites, like their own billionaire supporters from Elon Musk to Miriam Adelson, from Timothy Mellon to Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. (Harris’s centrism may be partly explained by her own coterie of billionaire supporters, including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg.) The rise in stocks, such as Musk’s Tesla, in the day after the election added $26 billion to Musk’s wealth alone, and $38 billion to the next nine richest men in the world.

DISTORTED AND MANIPULATED ELECTIONS

How is it that elections of this type are treated as a normal, democratic free choice by the populace when in reality they are corrupted by the economic-political power of corporations and billionaires, flooded with propaganda and manipulation—including both newspapers and social media newsfeeds shaped by owners currying favor with Trump, and false flag ads—misreported by news media focusing on horse races and prioritizing fearmongering over allowing voices of immigrants, Palestinians, and student protesters to be heard? These elections are run under rules dictated by gerrymandered state legislatures and the Trump/McConnell-stacked Supreme Court, which allowed a Constitutionally disqualified insurrectionist to run for president.

Social media played another role besides propaganda: worsening isolation and alienation, substituting doomscrolling for community. The Trump cult is both promoted by the algorithms (and directly by Musk in the case of X) and offers itself as an artificial community that has the answer to modern alienation.

MAGA and conservative ideology promise labor a fake dignity based on its place in a patriarchal/racial hierarchy without challenging the alienation at the heart of having no control over one’s own activity, which in effect becomes a commodity sold to the capitalist. As important as are higher minimum wages, better sick and maternity leave, and protection from heatstroke at work, what is needed is not just reforms but a rival vision showing that human beings can and must achieve self-activity and self-determination, in the labor process and in society as a whole.

The opposite to putting existing alienated labor on a pedestal is listening to the actions and voices of workers in revolt against that alienation. That is central to Karl Marx’s philosophy of permanent revolution, which grasps that liberation cannot be achieved by going backward but rather going through the positive that grows out of the negative of resisting commodity production’s alienation. That is, the process of human beings, as Subject of revolution, retaking their own objectivity. Crucially, we do have to fight the Trumpist Right on many fronts, and unseparated from that process and no less important than activity on the streets is the unfolding of a comprehensive philosophy for the reconstruction of society on totally new beginnings.

FEAR OF REVOLUTION SAPS DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY

Capitalist democracy once more revealed its weakness in the face of fascism: after sounding the alarm before the election about the destruction of democracy, afterwards Biden meekly met with Trump and promised a smooth transition. Now the Democrats put all their faith in the decaying institutions that put up such deplorably weak resistance to Trumpism. The reason is that they fear real self-determination of the masses—revolution—more than they fear fascism.

They are keen to lull the masses to sleep with false hope. As Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Only the appeal to impotent principles remained to it now, to principles that it had itself always interpreted merely as general rules, which one prescribes for others in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself.” The establishment’s defense of democracy is fatally compromised by its defense of only partial democracy and its insistence on defending the system’s antidemocratic aspects.

One sign of where we are headed was the barrage of racist texts sent to Black students at many colleges and even high schools right after the election, ordering them to report for slavery at plantations, and chillingly addressing them by name. Latino high school students received texts saying they had been “selected for deportation” and Queer students were told by text to report to a “re-education camp.” Horrifyingly, the slogan “Your body, my choice!” spewed by misogynist influencers has been spreading rapidly and is already being used by boys in high schools.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE IMMIGRANTS

Trump’s nominations of anti-immigrant extremists Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan show how deadly serious he is about his plans for “the largest deportation program in American history.” His program to deport “15 to 20 million” people, millions more than the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., involves building massive concentration camps (labeled “holding facilities”) that would dwarf the current prison system, and threaten to ensnare many citizens as well. Once again families would be separated en masse (at least 1,400 children are still separated from their families since the first Trump administration).

Communities would be decimated and terrorized. Agriculture and the food supply would be severely disrupted. Services from caregiving to construction would be disrupted too. Inflation and unemployment would spike for the entire population. This would be worsened by Trump’s planned astronomical tariffs, which are taxes that hit the working class and poor people the hardest.

For Trump and his minions, the cruelty and chaos are the point. He expects to get his way much more easily now that he has stacked the Supreme Court, which granted him total immunity for future crimes; taken full control of the Republican Party (now headed by his daughter-in-law); subjugated Republican members of Congress, who now control both houses; and learned to extract personal loyalty from all appointees.

Using the national guard and possibly the army, the operation that Trump says “will be a bloody story” would, according to a detailed analysis, “exceed the number of active-duty U.S. Army troops, detaining a population at least twice that of New York City, deporting them on thousands of flights”—a plan Pentagon sources confidentially labeled “insane.” This is the main reason that private prison corporations’ stocks soared after the election. It would also involve a tremendous increase in surveillance.

Of course, after all those millions are deported, it would be a shame to waste all that surveillance and detention capacity, so why not turn it on the whole population? All this would be a huge step forward in the militarization of society. The deployment of troops around the country would make it easier to use them to suppress protests, which Trump often labels “riots.”

ATTACK ON WOMEN’S HUMANITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION

As for women, ending abortion is only one step. The point is for the Christian nationalist men to subjugate women and determine “what we should think, what we should feel, in fact who we are!” In their planned future, abortion will be illegal in every circumstance, including for health reasons, even managing miscarriages. Rather than giving women timely abortions to rid their bodies of dead or dying fetuses that open the way for deadly infections, women will be forced to wait to see if they spontaneously abort, be given Cesarean sections—full-scale surgery that can be life-threatening and is certainly life-altering—or forced to give birth to dead fetuses or babies who will suffer horribly and then die in hours or days. This is already happening.

Birth control will disappear, either because it is deemed incorrectly to be an abortifacient or because sex is now mandated to be for procreation, not for pleasure. Republican judges and legislators are already legally declaring fetuses to be human beings from the moment of conception with rights of actual human beings that override the human rights of the women whose bodies they inhabit.

This means that pregnant women’s every movement can be monitored, what they eat and drink, how they drive, what medication they take. The list is both endless and disgustingly invasive. Not only will this reduce women to second-class citizenship, thousands of women will die—as they did before Roe v Wade, only this time it will not only be from self-induced or back-alley abortions, but dying in hospitals, waiting for the care they should have received. That too has already begun.

TRUMP’S COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY AGENDA

Other clear areas of the coming struggle under the whip of counterrevolution include:

• Trump is expected to give total support to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has brought famine to northern Gaza and devastated the entire territory, and to its de facto annexation of all Palestinian territory. Although he claims to oppose war with Iran, Trump is likely to be outmaneuvered and drawn in by Netanyahu if the latter chooses to escalate to all-out war.
• While Trump managed to attract the votes of numerous workers, especially white but also Black and Latino men, his pretense of being “for” workers will recede before assaults on rights to organize and strike, or even to blow the whistle about abuses, and the elimination—with much help from the Supreme Court and other courts—of regulations on businesses, while Trump, Congress, and “red state” governments will try to slash social benefits.
• The people of Ukraine are on the chopping block. Trump is already pressuring the country to cede territory to Putin, who could use it as a springboard for further aggression and territorial expansion in a time frame of his own choosing. European leaders are voicing the need to step up support for Ukraine but the far right is rising there too and most of it supports Putin.
• Climate denial and obstruction will now be in the saddle. In the absence of massive resistance, capitalist production threatens to drive the planet to a hothouse state exceeding anything seen in millions of years, long before humanity existed, and far more catastrophic than what is typically reported in the media. Trump’s nominations are full of climate deniers.
• The attack on science goes beyond climate. Trump’s nominees to public health positions have made careers profiting from healthcare disinformation—such as the part played by Robert Kennedy Jr. in the measles epidemic that killed more than 70 children in Samoa in 2019. Their mismanagement looms when the bird flu pandemic already raging through U.S. cattle farms threatens to become a human pandemic. A harbinger of things to come is the sabotage of state committees that review maternal mortality in Idaho, Georgia, and Texas to hide the carnage caused by abortion bans.

Each of these reflects fundamental problems that the world capitalist system has not only failed to solve but is in the process of making far worse. Each one reveals the need for revolution, without which capitalism threatens only to keep driving us backward to the point of extinction—not least because of fascism gaining strength worldwide.

Clearly we—all those who oppose the new fascism and hold out hope for a free future—need to build and organize massive resistance, and to make sure that is not spent only in activity, activity, activity, but strive to unite that activity with the rebellion in thought—spreading the truth about oppression and resistance, yes, but also facing the contradictions within the movement as well as society, and the ways the dialectic of liberation can grasp those contradictions and provide direction for the freedom movements toward the new, human society that is gestating within the old, decaying one.

ROLE OF THE LEFT

Where is the radical Left in all this? The worst part (not so radical, really, in the sense of getting to the root) are those who have long been leaning toward campism—ideologically picturing the world as divided into two geopolitical camps so that one must oppose the camp of U.S. imperialism by supporting its alleged opponents, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Campism is drawn toward Red-Brown alliances that bring together parts of the Left and far Right.

They repeated the old saw that there is no difference between the two capitalist parties, pointing out the Biden-Harris support for genocide in Gaza. This was countered by a number of statements from some Palestinian-Americans and other Arab and Muslim Americans arguing that Trump is far worse since he is expected to give Netanyahu free rein and he has promised to crush the solidarity movement.

The point is that—whether the campists touted voting for Jill Stein, who parrots Putin’s talking points and is enmeshed in Red-Brown relationships, or for the essentially unknown ultra-campist Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) candidate (as laughably recommended by at least one Trotskyist group), or not voting—they disastrously fail to grasp the current situation of capitalist crisis, counterrevolution, and fascism, precisely because they have succumbed to the ideological pollution to the point of getting sucked in.

Because revolution is no longer real to them, they swallow the most poisonous substitute for it by tailending state powers that are trying desperately to prevent revolution by co-opting it in the same way Trump attempts. Whether they intone the name Marx or not, none of them are guided by a philosophy that recognizes the self-developing Subject of the movements from practice as the central agent in social transformation, rather than state powers that are integrated into the world capitalist system.

On the other hand, many on the Left recognized the danger of Trump and Trumpism but, in their desperation to oppose it, found no alternative but to tailend the Democrats and in many cases virtually lost the ability to articulate serious critiques of Biden, Harris, et al. Whereas some of our friends on the Left kept up the criticism of Democrats while recognizing the clear and present danger of Trump, their attempt to pose a third alternative centered on independent organizing, which is needed, but mainly fell back into the old Trotskyist formula of calling for the eventual creation of a labor party.

Now that Trump has won, people are calling for resistance, protest, direct action, organizing. That is all correct, and yet what is missing is the needed rethinking and the raising of a banner of total transformation, not just return to the status quo ante.

NEEDED ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT

One symptom of the disorientation is the illusions some have voiced that a network of millions who voted for Harris is turning into a popular front to resist fascism, or that coalitions of non-campist leftists would form a “left pole” in the resistance, as if either of those could somehow substitute for the kind of organization of thought needed to create a polarizing force in ideas, which has been fatally lacking.

The Left is largely aware of its weakness in numbers and organizational strength, which pulls many of them to tailend, however reluctantly, parties like the PSL that manage to organize demonstrations. But they need to grapple with the Left’s weakness in the organization of thought. Heated debates about political positions cannot substitute for confronting the ideological weakness of the Left, rooted in its philosophic void. As we pointed out in “Trump’s coup threatens U.S. democracy”:

“It is this void on the Left that ceded the field for the Democratic Party and liberal democracy to pose as the alternative to fascism….

“What sort of banner has been raised by the Left that would show the masses a true alternative to both fascism and the crumbling capitalist society that fascism pretends to be an answer to? In truth the Left has mostly failed to raise a clear banner at all; a vocal segment is more interested in supporting ‘anti-imperialist’ monsters like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad than addressing or listening to the U.S. working class, and a great deal of the Left is more interested in unity of the Left as the supposed answer to the Right than in unity of the movement from theory with the movement from practice, and thus accepts the pro-genocide Left as a legitimate part of their ‘unity’—just as they often end up capitulating to the Democratic Party in practice, even moments after intoning that there is no difference between the two big capitalist parties.

“The fact is that the Left in general has no confidence in the self-activity of the masses reorganizing society, which is unseparated from their lack of confidence in the power of the Idea, that is, of philosophy of revolution.”

This critical moment calls for working toward a new revolutionary movement that breaks from the parts of the Left that have been sucked into tailending state powers or opportunism; a movement that enters into dialogue with the movements from practice—not as some sort of “Left populism” seeking to lead the masses but rather recognizing the quest for wholeness and freedom that goes beyond the immediate issues, as crucial as they are. A movement that can cut through the fakeness of putting labor as it is now on a pedestal and thus connect workers’ resistance to the vision of abolishing alienation. A movement that demolishes the demonization of immigrants by projecting the shared interests of workers across the world in opposing the true enemy, the capitalists who enable the wars, poverty, and climate catastrophes that force people to leave their homes. A movement that projects the breakdown of racism and sexism as a step toward new human relations that improve everyone’s lives. That is what Marxist-Humanism singles out in the revolt from below and at the same time in the way the Idea of freedom speaks.

Concrete projection of that liberatory banner—centered on both the necessity and the potentiality of a new society on truly human foundations, in which all people could flourish as human beings in the movement of self-development—is what is needed if we are to escape the cycle of oscillations between fascist horrors and the crumbling normal of capitalist liberal democracy.