Kevin Ovenden spoke to Saman Sepehri, a longtime socialist activist in Chicago, about the Trump administration’s first weeks, and what it means for the working class and oppressed

We spoke before the election and you outlined why a Trump victory was likely. How did Trump win?

The Democrats, after the initial bump of excitement when Biden dropped out to be replaced by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, did nothing. Worse than that. They ran on the vacuous slogan of Joy and Hope … and then nothing. It was continuity with the Biden administration, including genocide in Gaza. Walz had some personal appeal but he was shelved in favour of Harris on account of being too antagonistic to corporate America.

They offered nothing new and delivered exactly that. Trump won the popular vote (unlike when against Clinton or Biden) and he won every ‘battleground state’ which he had lost to Biden in 2020.

Two points to be made about this:

1. Trump did not gain a lot of votes (up some three million from 2020). The Democrats, however, haemorrhaged votes (six million down compared to 2020).
2. But Trump did gain and he started to erode and advance within the Democratic base’s demographics: gains among Blacks, Latinos and the working class as a whole.

This is a clear indication of how dead and spent the Democrats are. How empty their ‘liberalism’ and promises are in the age of crisis and decline of neoliberalism. People are not buying it any more.

The election, like many before, was not a ‘popularity’ but an ‘unpopularity’ contest. This time around the Dems won that with so many people turning away from them after being burnt over and over again. What had been the difference with the Dems (versus Republicans) is that they promised to help working-class people, the poor, the oppressed, women, LGBT+ communities, be the peace party, etc … and then over and over they dashed popular hopes.

They held the presidency for twelve of the sixteen years following the 2008 financial crisis. They were seen as liars. Even someone like Bernie Sanders ended up viewed the same way. From raising the spectre of a real break to then fizzle, fall back in the fold, line up and back Biden, Harris or whoever else they would have tossed out there. A few speeches and slogans but real break, or deeds? Nothing substantial. He did receive his share of assignments and chair position on senate committees.

The Democrats were seen as untrustworthy, obtuse, indifferent to people’s pain and problems, and just using them as political fodder to gain office. Nothing illustrated this better than their enabling and funding the genocide of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, after so many thought they’d be such a break with and improvement over the Trump administration with a big popular vote. Compare and contrast the actions of the Democrats, or even the ‘resistance’ of AOC and the Squad etc (Rashida Tlaib somewhat excepted) to the courage and resistance of Palestinians in Gaza.

Thousands upon thousands marching North … back home, despite every effort to erase them. A most basic act of resistance, by sheer existence, by saying ‘I AM’ that ‘we shall not be moved’ as a slogan of the 1960s civil-rights movement put it.

As the political fabric ruptures – not just in the US but globally – the Democrats insist on being the defenders of a more and more unsustainable centre and what was the status quo. The Republican Party has shifted to use this rupture in politics to break with the previous governing consensus.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are parties of and defending capital. But the Republicans can tack right to become more ‘radical’, open the door to the hard right and capture the discontent on the right. They still protect capital in doing so. (Even a shift all the way to fascism, if need be, remains protecting capital.)

The Democrats (or social democracy, labourism) wedded to capital, however, cannot do the same to the left as easily. To do so means tapping into the sentiments from the left, potentially opening the door to mobilising the working class, the oppressed and the forces hostile to capital. That is very dangerous today. It gives the space for politics to the radical left rather than the radical right. That is what we are seeing today in Europe as well.

Some have suggested since the election but especially after Elon Musk’s fascist salutes at the Trump inauguration, that fascism is taking power in the US. We are some distance from that but there is no doubt that there is a radicalisation in that direction. We are seeing a big shift towards authoritarianism in what was an already a highly repressive and anti-democratic state.

Yes, there has been the blizzard of Executive Orders, bypassing the Congress where Republican majorities are very slim. And Trump has moved fast on appointments in order to get what he can claim as results before getting bogged down in the House and Senate. This seems different from his first term. What is the overarching plan?

In 2016, Trump’s victory was unexpected. He did not expect it, nor was he ready for it. There was no grand plan, no real confidence. He chose Mike Pence as VP as a nod to other forces in the Republican Party.

There was no team. It had to be hammered together with an amalgam of those who were already on board and others they had to tap into in the Republican Party and elsewhere. There was Trump, a slogan (Make America Great Again) and individuals from different tendencies, some ideological, some more professional politicians (Steve Bannon and Mike Pence).

Given the surprise victory and Trump’s amateurish nature, some also rushed into the administration to stabilise it and to keep him from doing too much damage to the state. Special attention was given to the Department of Defense, the armed forces, the central bank and other core institutions. Those sent to stand sentinel were career politicians or career military of sorts, surrounding who they saw as a potentially dangerous clown to protect the state.

This time around, that is not the case. The Trump gang were prepared with a plan to attack from the get-go. You don’t have 1500 executive orders ready without preparation.

Trump’s 2025 cabinet is seen as a joke, unqualified, full of people with no policy or career backgrounds. That is all true, but there is another point to remember. The administration is very much ideologically more cohesive and loyal to Trump. They will carry out policy and orders. Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State, made this clear in an extensive interview this month. Trump had abused him in the most withering terms in the Republican primary process as he wanted to destroy a potential competitor on the right of the party. Now Rubio pledges loyalty and presents himself as the implementer of not only Trump’s foreign policy but as semi-authoring the change in overall approach. That is away from the US heading ‘international institutions’ and instead ruthlessly pursuing America First in a world of competing power centres.

So this time, the likes of Steve Bannon did not make the cut. And for others? Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Mike Kelly have had their security details removed, as well as Mike Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the head of the Armed forces) under Trump 1.0. They all had turned against Trump, calling him a danger with authoritarian or even fascistic tendencies. He cut them loose.

Broadly speaking, the US with its two-party system (both parties of capital) has had a social contract of political power sharing. The minority and the majority, especially when it flipped, did have a contract over how to share power and how to keep the state stable for the whole capitalist class.

That was all predicated on a certain stability of the system overall, where the differences are settled within the state, and elections became more about ‘whose turn it is’. The system is no longer stable. Internationally, economically as well politically – never mind the climate and its destructive effects.

So we are seeing that power sharing, that contract, being broken. January 6, four years ago was just a minor preview. This is not unique to the US. This time around, with the Trump team, we are seeing hard policy mixed with some unhinged things to appease sections of the base and exploit Democrat weakness. It is directed to put the opponents on the back foot and push authoritarian boundaries as much as possible.

It is designed to leverage, extort and extract as many concessions from one’s opponents as possible – in the kind of mafia-business way, Trump threatens Panama and Greenland – and to consolidate one’s base. It matters not that various domestic measures will be challenged in the courts. Let everyone go and get bogged down in courts. That is a win for Trump and the right wing. They’ll push on.

Moreover, they have stacked the courts. Not just the Supreme Court. That is the tip of it. But the Federal courts as well. The Democrats allowed Trump’s nominated judges to go through and yet did not put their own in under Biden when they controlled the Senate. There was even an outcry on the part of some Democratic senators (Dick Durbin, for example) who was begging the ninety-year-old Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein to resign or step away from the judiciary committee so the Democrats could vote their nominees in. She was too old and sick to show up to meetings and thus paralysed the committee.

We are in an unprecedented situation not just with the presidency, House and Senate in Republican hands, but also the Supreme Court with a right-wing majority of this type, and a Republican Party majority which is flirting with or enabling the hard right and with no commitment to the bourgeois state and its rules as in the past.

Given all that, this is not a stable situation. One-sided yes; stable, no. The old bourgeois-democratic rules are dying but there are no new ones yet. The old order is sidelined. Even Republicans like Cheney and the Koch Brothers, who were king makers on the Republican side, or Warren Buffet … all these figures are being shunted aside.

Enter Elon Musk and tech broligarchs who had been assumed to be ‘liberal’ five years ago. Bezos, Zuckerberg and the rest have relaunched themselves from products of sunny, liberal, hippy California to hard men looking to run the globe with their ‘masculinist’ energy and cooky reactionary philosophy.

Trump is supported, it seems, by a wider range of the billionaire class this time. Why is that? What are these figures looking for and what are the potential contradictions?

First, we have to see who they are. Most are hedge-fund, new tech or crypto-finance new right-wing money. Most are not the old productive capital, though that is not to say that those are structurally opposed to Trump or the promise of further deregulation and corporate tax cuts.

Honestly, I am not yet sure of some of the details but from what I have seen and read of others’ reports, I think it often comes down to simple cynical financial interests. Money and access. Last time around, Trump was not a sure bet or even close to it. More of a longshot. This time, he was a good bet if you want a seat at the table and access and influence.

Also the promises of tax cuts for the rich rather than taxing the rich is an incentive and they did not trust Biden on that after his abortive effort at a redistributionist programme. More important, however, is the access. Contracts with the US state – above all with the military – are as central to what was once regarded as the seemingly weightless and progressive tech sector as they have been to US manufacturing throughout modern capitalist history.

There is something quite important happening under this which is disturbing and dangerous. The cabinet and advisors are widely seen as buffoons and rogues – incompetents. Take Peter Hegseth, the Fox news commentator confirmed as Secretary of Defense. This person now has access to the highest level of ‘Top Secret’ information on US defence capabilities and its war machine, personnel and so on. And he can easily use this for personal purposes or pass it on to right-wing causes and militia types. There are already loose right-wing militia networks within the armed forces. He can protect them. Further, the Trump appointees do not have the same loyalty to the sanctity of bourgeois state and its secrets as was taken for granted under the old system.

What we are seeing with the new administration is a Hostile Takeover of the US state by Trump and Co. A kind of corporate raid to secure control of the most valuable piece of property which is meant to belong to the capitalist class collectively.

In that process, there is the promotion of directly sectional or private interests under new stewardship of US capitalism and imperialism. It is not just personal business interests. That’s always happened. It is a group of ideologically committed men (almost all men) – from the ultra-rich through to low-rent loudmouths like the Defense Secretary – united in radically reshaping state and society in a dystopian right-wing direction.

They will rip up, dismantle and chew through. They will take what they need and discard the rest. Musk who is central to this under the auspices of the newly made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which actually doesn’t have any legal status.

Musk and DOGE just had the USAID headquarters raided and took the classified and secret information at will. USAID is an instrument of US soft power and outright imperialist intervention. It’s not that which Musk is opposed to. It’s that he doesn’t get a cut and is not running it.

His team was also given full access to the Treasury’s database by another billionaire, Trump’s new treasury secretary Scott Bessent. That gave him access to one of the largest protected databases in the US government, including the personal information of tens of millions of people as well as corporate competitors.

As the Guardian and other sources reported:

‘Elon Musk’s government-slashing crew, the “department of government efficiency”, has been given access to the federal payment system, exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of Americans as well as details of public contractors who compete directly with Musk’s own businesses, an influential US senator has confirmed.

‘Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and the ranking member of the Senate finance committee, posted on Bluesky that sources had confirmed to him that the Treasury’s highly sensitive database had been opened up to the tech billionaire and his team.

‘… Wyden added that the data bonanza included “social security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors … All of it”.’

The reason people hire ex-Presidents or VP’s or cabinet members as consultants is their inside knowledge. Individuals do not become president or cabinet members or take government jobs for the pay. It is the level of insider understanding. But they are not supposed to divulge these inside secrets and workings of the state so as to destabilise it. At least according to the old power-sharing contract between the parties. That is what the oath is about; to serve the ‘nation, the constitution …’

Well, Musk, Trump and the rest of the corporate raiders have no such pretence and have gone directly for the source with the attitude that those who cry constitutional crisis are welcome to do so as much as they like. What are they going to do? Appeal to the Democrats?

The raiders will slash and shut down what they want. They will ‘take it off the books’. They will rip up the contract, leverage their power and renegotiate a new one, if need be, with better terms to themselves. Protest that ‘Congress must have a say’? Well, there are no elections until November 2026. They are playing Art of the Deal in the government. Push, leverage, renegotiate.

As you mentioned, Rubio has spelt out the transactional and confrontational thinking on foreign policy. The US is no longer trying to rule through international alliances – to its benefit and which it dominates – but instead in what it acknowledges to be a world of clashing power centres which it must dominate, not ‘lead’. What changes and continuities should be expected compared to the Biden regime?

Trump has and will unapologetically continue to back the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the expulsion of Palestinians and the ongoing genocide. Typically, the property mogul links this with the image of a redeveloped Gaza free of Palestinians and instead a resort for the rich, garrisoned by Israeli settlers.

He is shifting the discussion even further to erase the Palestinians as a people. This is a huge boost to Netanyahu and to every racist and fascist in Israel. He has already said: ‘You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.’ And then with Netanyahu sitting next to him in Washington DC, he repeated it: ‘I mean they’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.’

He also gave the green light to the on-going Israeli attacks and takeover of the West Bank (turning Jenin into Gaza) by commenting that ‘Israel is small … It doesn’t have much land.’ He will not express his ‘disappointment’ about Israel’s crimes as the Biden administration did.

Trump will allow a free hand without the song and dance of ‘we are doing everything we can’. He’ll act as a strong man alongside Netanyahu and do the boisterous posturing – ‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too.’ World opinion is shocked and frightened at the prospect.

Yet we have to ask: How did we get here? How did Gaza become a ‘pile of rubble’? Did the Biden administration do anything to stop Israel? Or did they continue to supply arms and fund the genocide in Gaza? Did they not triple the amount of aid to Israel in the last year?

The trajectory is not changing. Some Western politicians, who only now react in shock at Trump’s acceleration of the criminal endeavour, need to be told that that was already the direction.

The balance of continuity and change is probably best seen in the freeze on all US foreign aid. It was paused with the exception of aid to two countries: Israel and Egypt. They have historically been the two main beneficiaries of US military support.

Ukraine, however, did not get such a waiver. They want Ukraine ‘off the books’, as they say in corporate finance. Close it. They don’t have the same international foreign policy as the Biden administration, which at key moments upped the ante in Ukraine in the proxy war to enfeeble Russia.

Now in the White House, a simple calculation of cost/benefits is being made. The US has spent over $175 billion on the war in Ukraine, with Ukraine receiving over $106 billion directly, in the past three years. Israel receives on average $3.5b billion a year in aid. This past year they received $12 billion – that was courtesy of the Biden administration – to raze Gaza to the ground. Ukraine has cost the US more than what Israel has received directly over the past 25 years. Is it worth it? This is the cold calculation.

Write it off as a bad investment by the previous board and invest in other rapacious adventures instead. Never mind the meat grinder that this war has been, the human cost, the destruction and so on.

Moreover, they can shuffle the cost off to Europe. This is part of forcing Europe to pay more for Nato and for its defence in general. It means EU states taking money away from other fields, whether social spending or supporting domestic manufacturing and infrastructure. All of this helps US competition with Europe as well. It means buying US weapons. Demands will come for opening up further to US corporations and breaking the EU’s closed markets.

With the main focus being against China, forcing Europe to contribute more to Nato enables shifting military resources to the Pacific while also subordinating a stagnating Europe in decline to what Trump will project as a reborn America. US health and tech corporations see in Europe – and in Britain – a massive potential market, privatisations and taking out all sorts of competitors.

And a part of this shift is the lurch towards protectionism and tariffs. It is more than just Trump’s nationalist agenda, isn’t it? There is a global trend to ‘reshoring’ production and ‘shortening supply chains’ in the name of security and following the Covid shock. What will this mean for the US and global economy, and for workers?

Trump is selling tariffs as a way of protecting American workers from unfair competition and bringing jobs and manufacturing back to America.

But as Lindsey German in her piece in Counterfire explained, ‘… the trouble with tariffs is that the jobs won’t come “home” because capitalists will simply shift production from, for example, China, to say, Vietnam.  And the increased price rises which result will fall predominantly on workers, rather than on the billionaires who applauded at Trump’s inauguration.’

The tariffs will push the prices of goods up. That is especially in areas that will impact working-class people massively. Mexico provides much of the most common produce and food items for the US. We should be clear that this is not the same as arguing that the period of capitalist globalisation was good for workers. That is the claim by those defending capitalist ‘free trade’. In fact, the years following the Nafta trade deal between the US, Canada and Mexico saw widening class inequalities in each of the countries, a profits bonanza for the rich and a continuing squeeze on US labour.

Tariffs are in large part an ideological play to Trump’s right-wing nationalist base, rising xenophobia, racism and pitting workers here against other countries. In that way to wed them to the ruling class here as if they have the same interest as the Trump billionaires and rich.

Unfortunately, the unions in the US have been historically bad on this issue. They have accepted the logic that in order to protect the American worker, you have to protect American industry and therefore protect the interests on the international stage of American capitalism.

From protecting US workers against capital, you end up protecting US capitalists against other capitalists – and against their workers. For example, Shawn Fain, president of United Auto Workers (UAW) was seen as a militant for leading a successful strike of autoworkers. He campaigned for Kamala Harris wearing a ‘Trump is a scab’ T-shirt.

He wrote an opinion piece on 14 January in the Washington Post, titled ‘I’m the president of UAW. We’re ready to work with Trump’. In it he wrote: ‘We do not agree with Trump on much of his domestic agenda, but we hope to find common ground on overhauling our devastating trade policies and rebuilding US manufacturing. Trump has promised to enact tariffs to protect workers, and we agree that tariffs are a necessary tool. As long as corporations can ship jobs out and ship products in at rock-bottom rates without penalty, they will continue doing so.

‘We agree that we need a strong system of tariffs that serve the national and working-class interest. Tariffs should bring jobs back to America, put products in communities such as Belvidere, Illinois, and push companies to invest in good jobs, not exploit workers abroad.’

This is a massive setback; from a militant strike in the autumn of 2023 to agreeing on tariffs with Trump. Secondly, it was unclear how much Trump was going to stick with the threat of 25% tariffs, and how much of this was posturing and leverage for negotiation.

A 25% increase in the price of food and basic items would have had a detrimental effect on the economy and was taken off the table for thirty days when Canada and Mexico announced immediate retaliation. But this is far from the end of the matter in a world of ever more direct antagonisms and Trump seeking permanent leverage in it.

Incidentally, if you were ‘in the know’, there is money to be made from the on-then-off tariffs. They are enacted and stock markets drop. Then they are paused for thirty days, and stocks rebound. It is not as if Musk did not do the same type of manipulations with Twitter/X stock.

The rise of protectionism, tariffs and trade wars, however, is a real issue today. There is much more fierce national competition, with protectionism, trade wars and actual wars being more likely.

Domestically, a big range of oppressed and marginalised people are in the firing line. While claiming to be defending women, there is already a further assault on abortion rights after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Not only attacks on Black, civil, immigrant and LGBT+ rights, but also on freedom of expression and employment rights in universities, schools and government workplaces. Yet there seems less immediate shock this time than when, eight years ago, Trump brought in the ‘Muslim Ban’. Less mobilisation in response also. What are the prospects for that changing?

In the short term, not great on a large scale. The full spread of attacks, especially the threat of immigration raids, has had the desired effect of creating enormous fear and bunkering down.

For example, in Chicago a few years ago, after the Republican governors bussed immigrants here as a cynical tactic to pressure Democratic cities and mayors, and after the city ended its shelter program, there were homeless immigrants all over the downtown area. They were huddled at the entrance of grocery stores, busy intersections … entire families asking for money, or selling candy or other small things to make money.

Or there are known corners by large hardware stores where immigrants without papers would congregate early in the morning, as day-labourers waiting for someone to come by and hire a few of them for the day or so. Today, since the Trump administration made the threats of raids, they have all disappeared. I have no idea how they live now. They have been driven underground.

The left is miniscule, disorganised and does not have political weight even if it had a cohesive, collective political approach. The liberal or third-sector organisations are in shock and are paralysed. The Executive Orders cutting funding to even basic services such as meals on wheels for elderly and disabled people, have thrown all groups into chaos. And the Democratic Party and the connections these groups relied on has simply gone missing.

The resistance and organisation is probably going to come first from some particular place that was not expected. So in Chicago a few days after the raids were announced, the Secret Service showed up at a school to ‘interview’ an eleven-year-old student who had made anti-Trump posts and videos online. They knew full well that the parents wouldn’t be there. It was harassment and sowing fear.

But the teachers and unionised school staff had had training by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and they refused entry to the Secret Service. They protected the student. We may see things start at this level first, or in neighbourhoods, and then spread. We don’t yet know.

It would be wonderful if we had even a tenth of the organisation and ability of what the Communist Party in the 1930s was able to do here: organising anti-eviction squads to keep people from being tossed out. We do not, yet there is resistance developing. The CTU case is small in a vast country – but it is at least a first victory.

Moreover, in the past week or so, there have been sizable militant protests against the ICE border control force, notably in Los Angeles but also in Texas and a number of other states. There may be a revival of protests. We shall see.

Is there a feeling in Blue Collar America that Trump might deliver? What are people’s expectations?

Both domestically and internationally there is massive slashing of spending: Executive Orders which are simply freezing all disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, grants and loans.

Whether these get legally challenged or blocked, parts will be implemented. Though there are real problems. Under the kind of old Reaganite mantra that big government is bad government, the initial slash and burn Executive Orders inadvertently cut funding to Medicaid health funding and welfare payments that are actually very popular. When working people repeat the propaganda against ‘big government’, they do not mean health, education and disability payments to them and their family. Tactically, the government had to back off on some spending freezes.

The promise of a better living standard, which some people do expect, will not come true. There will be no money shared with Blue Collar America from the profits of the corporates. As programmes do end up getting slashed overnight, there will be chaos and extreme pain.

That will impact upon many of the desperate poor who were hoping to Make America Great Again because they were left behind and forgotten. People who rely on government assistance and who voted for Trump may soon have their assistance abruptly cut via a directive or by Musk taking over another department. The Treasury’s payment system is in the control of Musk and Trump. People may soon find themselves ‘off the books’ by completely authoritarian means.

The question is how much chaos and resistance this will produce, and how much of a risk this gang of corporate raiders are willing and allowed to take.

What is the state of the left? Many liberals seem to be in a state of moral collapse and did not expect to lose so badly in November. What about the left associated with the Democrats? And movement activists…?

The Democrats have evaporated. Until now they have been nowhere to be seen. Tim Waltz did post photos of his cat on his Instagram on ‘caturday’. Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters of the Democrat royalty finally showed their faces for a photo op at a protest in front of the Treasury on Tuesday last week (4 February).

The Democratic leadership is clueless. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) had its elections a few days ago. It was a whimper with a touted change slate being easily accommodated.

Meanwhile, people on the street, people who used to be committed Democrats and who used to put their hopes in them to defend their future and rights, are saying, ‘I don’t consider myself a Democrat anymore … they don’t do anything.’ The left which relied on liberal networks and contacts to mobilise is paralysed as well. It had no independence and that stands cruelly exposed.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has continued to shrink to half the size of what it was a couple of years ago, having grown out of Bernie Sanders’ two runs for the nomination. It still exists but not as a cohesive force. Its local chapters (branches) can be a place where people still coalesce and do some work. But that is chapter to chapter. The independent left is miniscule, and some have been stuck in niche propaganda politics.

It is a contrast to the UK, where the radical left has connected to broad mass politics and where it interacts with the political scene and parties, but is independent of the main parties. Call it a united front, call it what you will, but we can see a difference. Granted, the US political terrain is different but, still, the political approach does matter.

On the positive side, some of the healthiest elements of the revolutionary left are seeing this as a ‘wake-up call’ (their words) and are calling to work with others to develop a left pole, despite the differences, that is independent of the Democrats. They see this correctly as imperative since no one will save us from on high, and also the time is right to create something independent.

Finally, the extent of the cuts, shocks and chaos that the new administration is creating, and their hubris, complete contempt for any living thing other than themselves and anti-democratic instincts can easily lead to explosions of anger and mobilisations.

This is not a stable situation. Those at the top are also living through instability, counting on it to push things through. But it can backfire.

There is potential for organising and building for potential spontaneous fightbacks. If such mass mobilisations occur there is the danger of the hard right being called to the streets. The militias, the pro-Trump mobs and actual fascists. They have mobilised to a small extent. They are confident with Trump in office and Elon Musk giving the fascist salute.

We already had a preview of this during Covid with hard right ‘open it up’ crowds facing off against health workers. We saw it during the George Floyd protests with the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha Wisconsin, a seventeen-year-old right-wing kid, shooting people with an M-16 under police protection and getting away with it. And of course the 6 January 2021 storming of Congress.

This raises one last point. Some believe we already have fascism in the US. That this is it. I don’t believe that is the case. But all the elements for it are in place and developing. It is not inevitable. We can do something about it.

We have:

• Economic instability, and immiseration of layers of people
• Political instability with the old bourgeois order, the political centre, not holding but beginning to rupture
• Right-wing ideology promoting the scapegoating of ‘others’; blaming minorities, foreigners, immigrants, LGBT+ people, feminists, socialists … All wrapped up in an ethno-nationalist violent rhetoric against ‘the Left’
• Developing networks of hard-right elements, middle-class but also lumpen and poor, which are willing to become the physical forces.

But for fascism to develop, we also need parts of the state to provide the binding force to organise these elements on the ground. To provide the fascia, the connective tissue. (There are increasing border-patrol, police and military ties to fascistic militia in the US). That, and a state to direct it all and with parts of the ruling class to back it.

The old Italian fascist symbol is sticks bound together with a strapping around an axe. The masses tied by the connective political organisations and elements around the sharp brutal axe of the state.

Unfortunately, we have many of these elements developing, but disparately. They have not yet matured and cohered. The connections are being made between Musk and the fascists of the German AfD and other hard-right parties. There are his comments on moving on from German guilt for Nazism. These are the ideological ground preparations for normalising fascism and making it possible again. Trump’s comments on cleaning out the Palestinians add to this normalisation.

These are dangerous times. We need urgent and united action in response. An internationalist vision for change with connections of our own that speak to the working class, the oppressed and their struggles. That requires a radical, anti-capitalist and independent socialist politics.

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