By Internacional Socialist League
Trump returned to the White House and kicked the legs from under the table on which the entire world imperialist configuration was arranged, with all its institutions, alliances, trade agreements and delicate balances of power. It is impossible to predict how the chips that are now flying through the air will fall, but it is clear that nothing will be as before. We are witnessing changes similar in magnitude to those that took place at the end of WWII or after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Capitalism has not recovered from the systemic crisis that erupted in 2008, nor can it do so without a new world war that the main powers still feel unprepared for or a monumental leap in exploitation that the resistance of the working masses has not yet allowed. The imperialist bourgeoisie needs more repressive regimes to break this resistance and impose a level of super-exploitation that can save it from the crisis. This necessity leads a sector of the ruling class to support and propel the current rise of the far right and shifting of the bourgeois political arc as a whole towards the right and authoritarianism.
Trump is part of this global phenomenon, which his triumph also feeds back into, strengthening other expressions of the far right around the world. Unlike his first term, he now has the direct backing of a sector of the bourgeoisie, particularly big tech, meaning the world’s richest men, and the active or passive support of most of the US ruling class.
This support is rooted in a conclusion that the US bourgeoisie has been arriving at: the inter-imperialist agreements based on US hegemony established after WW II and the capitalist globalization propelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union no longer serves them. For two decades now, US domination has been declining as regional competitors and China globally have grown stronger. The US bourgeoisie as a whole knows that a change is needed. Not all are convinced that the one Trump, Musk and Co. is the right one, but since it is the only one being raised, they are willing to see if it yields results.
This project seeks to impose a structural transformation of the US political and economic regime and the global geopolitical configuration in order to increase the profits of US capitalists both in absolute terms, increasing the exploitation and extraction of surplus value, and in relative terms, capturing a greater portion of the global mass of surplus value at the expense of competitors.
Since Trump took office, his Administration has implemented a battery of measures to minimize the social functions of the state, from pausing all international aid to disarming the ministry of education. Elon Musk was given superpowers to try to cut $2 trillion, one third, from the national budget. An unprecedented adjustment that will fall on the whole of the US working people. The Administration has intensified the persecution and criminalization of immigrants, deepening their super-exploitation, which generates extraordinary profits in key sectors of the economy and pressures all wages down.
The new Administration is also pushing forward a structural political transformation that aims to impose a more authoritarian and repressive regime. The pardons granted to fascist militants who attacked Congress in 2020, the brazen political persecution, including kidnapping and deporting Palestine solidarity activists with legal residence and Venezuelans to Bukele’s concentration camps are some of the most glaring examples of this orientation.
They need this authoritarian turn in order to push through their austerity plans, but it is also part of the “culture war” they wage to consolidate a reactionary social base rooted in sectors of the working class and petty bourgeoisie. The Administration’s blatantly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic and nationalist positions and its attacks on the rights of all oppressed sectors serve this purpose.
The Trump Administration’s domestic policy is centered on intensifying exploitation in order to increase capitalist profits. Its foreign policy aims to achieve the same objective by allowing the US bourgeoisie to take a bigger share of global surplus value at the expense of competitors from the rest of the world.
Its protectionist nationalism and the tariffs it is imposing on imports from rivals like China and historical allies and trading partners like Canada, Mexico and Europe alike, give local capitalists the advantage in the powerful US market. Some of these measures harm US multinationals that have a large part of their production installed abroad. The Administration bets on forcing them to repatriate their operations, strengthening the national bourgeoisie as a whole.
To the same end, the Trump Administration has provoked a global change in the imperialist geopolitical configuration. It has broken the main alliances and multilateral organizations from which the United States has projected its power since WWII. It conceives that entire setup as an unnecessary expense with an obsolete purpose, a ball and chain that has caused US imperialism to fall behind against its competitors and has to be cut off to defend US hegemony.
The Administration intends to replace that setup with a new order based on the law of the jungle, raw capitalism. It seeks to negotiate a new division of the world with the main military and economic powers at the expense of the rest, to reach an agreement in which the United States, still wielding the strongest power, maintains its superiority. Trump’s negotiations with Putin illustrate this orientation, and Russia’s close relationship with China opens the hypothesis that the latter be included in an eventual global negotiation. However, no agreement between the main imperialist powers would eliminate the competition, disputes and conflicts between them.
This strategy implies further subjugating all the semi-colonial countries in its reach as well as historical US allies like Europe, Canada or Japan. Trump employs a mafia style extortion to impose tributary commercial relations on them and break their sovereignty to seize the territories and conditions that he deems necessary to better position US imperialism against the other emerging powers.
The negotiation between Trump and Putin to divide Ukraine’s territory and resources between Russia and the US behind the backs of the Ukrainian people and the EU is the clearest example. Trump’s intervention to end the “visible” war in Gaza and enable the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians while expressing his intentions to found a US colony in Gaza goes in the same direction. So do Trump’s announcements of his intention to colonize Greenland and take control of the Panama Canal and his threats of annexing Canada.
It remains to be seen how much of this project the Trump Administration actually achieves. But we are already facing a structural change in the configuration of world imperialism. Although they seek to create a new world order to save capitalism from its systemic crisis, they are more likely to generate a more unstable and conflictive world, a global disorder such as we have never seen. By calling into question all existing relations of power, alliances, agreements and disputes that provided some level of stability, numerous borders, sovereignties and zones of influence will again be disputed. The process of reconfiguring the order they seek to build will unleash more regional conflicts and wars.
This is particularly clear and alarming in Europe, whose ruling class, abandoned by its US protector and pressured by Russia on the offensive, has every intention of entering the race by recovering as an imperialist power in its own right. The EU states and the UK have launched a rushed militarization, doubling or tripling military budgets, reconverting their steel, automotive and technological industries toward arms production and relaunching or strengthening their nuclear weapons programs.
In addition to creating a more dangerous and war-prone world, rearmament will imply an austerity and attack on the standard of living that European workers have not faced in decades. This in a context that has, on the one hand, the rise of the far right, the shift to the right of all political forces and the advance of anti-migratory, authoritarian and reactionary policies that will deepen with militarization and austerity; and on the other hand, the recent years’ rise in the class struggle that indicates that the bourgeoisie’s plans will provoke a strong resistance.
The imperialist offensive is one part of the current process of polarization, which also has resistance, mass movements, strikes, rebellions and revolutions on the other side. In intensifying the class struggle, this offensive can also clear some obstacles of ideological confusion and generate more space for the revolutionary left.
The world’s leading imperialist power has abandoned its democratic disguise, burying Western imperialism as the embodiment of the liberal democracy and humanitarian capitalism fable. Revolutionaries will once again be the only defenders of freedom, democracy and self-determination. The ongoing negotiation on Ukraine unmasks both NATO and Russia, revealing the purely imperialist interests of both. It also exposes Zelensky and the craven Ukrainian bourgeoisie, willing to surrender the country and its people to negotiate part of its wealth. It reveals that the only true friends of the Ukrainian working people are the revolutionaries and peoples of the world who supported the Ukrainian people and their resistance against the Russian invasion and the interference of all imperialism from the beginning.
Revolutionaries need to analyze the profound changes that are underway in order to intervene in the acute struggles that are coming. We cannot predict the outcome, but we can confidently say that the attacks on the working masses will become more acute, that there will be resistance, that the defense of democratic rights will become more important, that as long as we are not defeated, there will be opportunities to build revolutionary parties and that if we advance in the principled regroupment of revolutionaries, the opportunity will rise to build a strong revolutionary International.
April, 2025
¹ This text was sent as a contribution from the ISL to the to the III International Meeting to be held in Paris from May 16 to 18. The two previous meetings were held in Milan.
