As part of Rebel’s series of articles on the Trump phenomenon, American socialist Bill Mullen explains how Trump’s rule opens a new era of authoritarianism and has unmasked the true nature of the capitalist state.
“the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
—Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Revolutionary Marxists have always understood the capitalist state as a manager for ruling class interests. Lenin famously said the capitalist state functions to control class antagonisms so that the primary operations of capital can flow undeterred and the rich can stay that way.
Donald Trump has introduced a maximalist version of the corporate state in his bum rush takeover of America’s tottering empire. The lifelong CEO has entered partnership with neo-fascist tech bro Elon Musk to deliver the power of the state to a vanguard section of the American bourgeoisie which seeks a totalizing rule without limits both domestically and internationally. To that end the Trumpian state has broken with the “rules-based” post-war order of western liberal legality that the U.S. established in its own interests, and with the “rule of law” edifice that has always served as a wobbly protector of rights-based domestic liberalism. Trump’s executive orders have stretched beyond recognition executive authority and judicial restraint. Perhaps citing Napolean Bonaparte, Trump recently wrote on Truth Social and X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”
Trump has also revived classical American imperialist expansionism that shaped U.S. empire in the 19th and 20th centuries: his aspiration to annex, purchase or grant statehood to Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and Gulf of Mexico evoke U.S. territorial grabs of Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in 1898, and the additions of Hawaii and Alaska as strategic geopolitical military and commercial outposts in mid-20th century. His Satanic project to complete the Nakba and expel every Palestinian from Gaza in order to build a tourist resort makes a mockery of international law as it does global humanity. Finally, and relatedly, Trump has projected immigrants, migrants, gender non-conforming citizens, religious minorities, Palestinians, and people of color as domestic scapegoats for his malice meant to gin up a racist majoritarianism at home in support of the Trumpian new world order.
These ingredients of Trumpism arguably constitute a fascist process if not yet a fascist outcome. As Marxists understand it, fascism emerges from a crisis in capitalist production and accumulation which is solved by the suspension of legal norms, targeting of “internal enemies” as described by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, deployment of extralegal or paramilitary force, and the mobilization of a popular base to help carry out through violent means if necessary a reactionary agenda.
There is ample evidence that since the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the ascension of U.S. economic competitors, particularly China, and the erosion of U.S. political credibility globally fostered—ironically—by Trump’s 2016 election—the U.S. capitalist ship of state is in rocky, unchartered waters with no clear path forward. The subtext to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is an empire knowingly in decline. Indeed, the western liberal hegemonic order Trump now seeks to discard is both sign and symptom of western capitalism’s own wholesale failures to deliver to workers of the world, particularly in the global north, who like some sectors of the working class in the U.S. lurch now left and right in pursuit of a way out of the nightmare of global neoliberalism. Musk and J.D. Vance’s recent admonitions to the European Union to make more room for neo-fascist parties like the German AFD are not just dog whistles but marching orders for a global far right seeking to complete the unfinished revolution of 20th century fascism in the name of capitalist restoration for a few.
Elon Musk’s role in the “managing” of this right-wing revolution from above is multifold. Musk is a pro-apartheid South Afrikaner who has made the Tesla automobile the nexus between capital accumulation and an ethnonationalist state. His edict to forcibly retire thousands of federal workers using the same email message line he used to sack and replace or eliminate thousands of workers at Twitter- “fork in the road”- is the bureaucratic equivalent of the beerhall putsch to upend the state clumsily enacted on January 6th, 2021 at the U.S. capitol. Musk embodies—down to his fascist-encrypted “Roman salute”—the confluence at the top of U.S. capitalism with the bottom layer—what Trotsky called the “human dust” drawn to fascism.
Indeed, Musk mediates a variety of cross-class relations necessary to build a neo-fascist alliance under Trump: white supremacist tech bros at the top, a consumer middle-class strung out on his social media empire (or his cars) to navigate life under capitalism, and a deeply alienated working-class drawn to his own “smash the state” invectives by that same state’s failure to provide even palliative care for their immiserated lives. Musk now controls or has influence over several of the most important realms of the capitalist/ideological/state apparatus, like a modern-day cross between anti-semitic industrialist and car maker Henry Ford and Joseph Goebells. This point was driven home just this week when the Washington Post newspaper, owned by friend, Trump supporter and tech bro Jeff Bezos of Amazon, refused to publish a paid advertisement calling for the firing of Elon Musk.
None of this is to say that fascism proper has yet come to America. Thus far, pockets of the court system have temporarily forestalled some of Trump’s executive orders. Street protests against ICE raids, mass deportations, attacks on trans rights and health care, and protests against firings of federal workers have picked up in recent days without being repressed by the state. Some mainstream media and independent media outlets continue to exist and to foment criticism of the Trump apparatus. When neo-Nazis attempted to march in Cincinnati, Ohio, two weeks ago they were repelled by a multiracial anti-fascist street force with roots in one of that city’s most aggrieved Black communities. This is a good reminder as the British Marxist Stuart Hall once declaimed that “Hegemony is hard work.”
There is also low-level and uneven resistance in a fragmented American labor movement. Teachers’ unions from K-12 to higher education have called for opposition and “Days of Action” to Trump’s attempts to weaponize or dismantle the Department of Education in order to cut research funding, eliminate diversity initiatives, defund education, and smash any and all research dedicated to socially progressive matters. Large, mainstream unions like the Communications Workers of America and United Auto Workers have joined these efforts. Yet other important sectors of American trade unionism, like the Teamsters Union, have sidled up to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, pro-American jingoism and effectively helped hand deportation keys to the White House in the name of American workers.
The radical and Socialist left meanwhile remains a small, atomized force, in some cases leading, in other cases participating in, popular resistance movements against Trumpism. Many of the larger public demonstrations are now led by liberal Democratic groups predictably awakened by White House disinheritance and preparing for a chance at gains in the 2026 mid-term Congressional elections. The most constructive coalitional organizing from below has been around immigrant and migrant defense, which has converged progressive labor unions, long-time immigrant defense groups, student organizations, and Palestine activists. The latter group is seeking to gain its own footing after more than a year now of brutal suppression by the state, U.S. university administrations, and compliant capital. The relatively successful suppression of the massive uprising against the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza carried out with bipartisan political support by the two major parties was a foreshadowing of the “anticipatory obedience” to Trumpism that now makes successful mass uprisings an even heavier lift for the radical left.
What is needed more than ever is a nose-to-the-grindstone approach for those seeking to rebuild a true socialist alternative to the Trump nightmare. The revolutionary left should be helping to lead demonstrations against the new U.S. domestic and imperial order. It must remind people that the only means to ending the managerial capitalist state is through building workers power and refusing capitulation and obedience anywhere, anytime. We have seen glimpses of this potential in the era of long-American capitalist crisis the past twenty years: in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Palestine solidarity movement, in the return of socialist thought and ideas to the mainstream, and in the attraction of revolutionary ideas to a new generation that has themselves both shaped and been shaped by the whipsaw contradictions of American capitalism. Kendrick Lamar’s prophecy ironically delivered at the grotesque spectacle of the American football Super Bowl last week— “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy”—resonated with millions of American people who are still working to imagine that the right guy is themselves. Socialists can provide that spark.
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Bill V. Mullen is a member of the American Association of University Professors and of Socialist Horizon. His most recent book with Jeanelle Hope is The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books).
