Why I am Not Panicked About Trump

Revolutionary Defeatism is the Way Forward

Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash

It should be well known that my political stances and orientation are pretty far-left. For those who did not receive that memo, let me remind you that they are.

It should be no surprise, if you follow my work on Substack, that my orientation leans more heavily into Marxism and Marxism-Leninism in particular. I think hiding our political inclinations is foolish at this point and only works to stifle the conversation.

This means I am at odds with liberals and liberalism in general. Liberalism is the political justification for capitalism in its current iteration. Liberalism supports imperialism, exploitation, and genocide. Smarter people than myself have written about the perils of liberalism since before I was born.

However, this short piece is not primarily about the contradictions of liberalism. It is about the inclination of those on the left to consider recent events related to the Trump administration. I don’t need to cite any piece that relays the fact that at the time of publishing this piece, the stock market is doing poorly, the Trump admin is effectively gutting the federal government, and there is a ton of economic/social uncertainty right now. I am not one to mince words; the situation in America might get worse after I have finished writing this.

I am stating these facts and tapping into your feelings, dear reader, in an attempt to gather your attention. Let me make this well known…

1. You are NOT going to vote this problem away.

2. The Democratic Party is NOT going to save you.

3. Capitalism is NOT going to get better.

4. Panicking about current events is NOT the way forward.

American workers are notoriously chauvinistic and short-sighted regarding their interests. This is part of the reason the labor union movement is at an all-time low when compared to previous decades. Much of what remains basically follows the Democratic Party.

There is no wonder so many working class people are panicked about what Trump is doing. I unironically appreciate what Trump is doing.

No, I am not a right-wing shitbag who sucks off Trump every chance I get. I appreciate that Trump is ruining the US empire because a weak empire can be defeated. A weak empire cannot effectively mount a defense against the opposition. Vladimir Lenin knew this during the first World War when speaking about Tsarist Russia, which is part of how the October Revolution was successful.

During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.

The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War by Vladimir Lenin (1915)

While Lenin was speaking about a specific historical context in a different country, what we get is the general stance of revolutionary defeatism. As the revolutionary class of the proletariat, we want the defeat of the bourgeois capitalist government.

Lenin wanted Tsar’s Russia to be entralled in civil war during the inter-imperialist World War 1 because he believed no worker should die for inter-imperialist conflicts. In the vein of Lenin, I would argue that the proletariat of America should want its destruction in its current iteration.

It is the imperialists and capitalists who panic about the stock market crashing under Trump. Anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist leftists should be rejoicing, as we want the abolition of America to begin with.

America is and has been the military strong arm of capitalism after its start as a settler-colonial state. America is irredeemable; nationalistic arguments are inherently reactionary and right-wing. Leftists should want the destruction of capitalism and America specifically in order for there to be peace and progress in the world.

Leftists need to adopt revolutionary defeatism. We want America, in its current form, and capitalism itself to fail. Only through this failure is revolution feasible and preferable to the status quo.

The fear of Trump ruining the American economy is based on a center-right ideology, which is the political bedrock most people follow in America follow. While we are not in a war like in Lenin’s time we have to remember war is often inevitable in a capitalist system as it goes into crisis. I will quote the resolution adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Second International, which Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg sponsored.

Wars are favored by the national prejudices which are systematically cultivated among civilized peoples in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity.

Wars, therefore, are part of the very nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system is abolished or when the enormous sacrifices in men and money required by the advance in military technique and the indignation called forth by armaments, drive the peoples to abolish this system.

Resolution adopted at the Seventh International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart (1907)

You might again reply that we are not at war currently in the United States. Do you think the actions of the current Trump administration will not lead to further conflicts? Do you think issues pertaining to trade and outright military aggression will not lead to further wars?

As explained to us in the above quote capitalism often depends on war to solve it’s contradictions. Part of this dependence is to solve the problem of overproduction as outlined by Marx and Engel’s themselves:

In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

What Marx and Engels are describing here is basically imperialism, war, and austerity. Capitalist productive forces produce too much, so much more than there is to consume. This waste leads to crisis as the bourgeoisie lose profits. To overcome this problem, the bourgeoisie must do one of three options, “conquer new markets” (imperialism), “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” (war), and or more thorough exploitation of old markets (austerity measures like neoliberalism).

Capitalism in it’s crisis and instability to maintain itself will dissolve into reactionary stances like fascism and will pursue measures like war to maintain itself. This is well known in the Marxist canon. As Trump’s America becomes more unstable more reactionary measures, like war, would be pursued. This is done to preserve capitalism, this is probably why Trump is giving the Pentagon a trillion dollars as if they don’t waste enough money.

This is being said to inspire leftists to not cave into liberal framing concerning the economic situation in the USA. Capitalism has ALWAYS been an unstable system prone to crisis, it has been that way since Marx’s time and it is that way now. Leftists should be working towards the total abolition of capitalism rather than trying to preserve it. Trump is doing the left favors right now by delegitimizing the US and weakening an empire that has been the primary threat to leftist movements worldview for decades.

We as leftists need to be revolutionary defeatist and push for the change away from capitalism.