For a brief moment, the chainsaw became the symbol of the panoply of policies pursued by the Trump administration, carried through in frenetic tempo by the team led by Elon Musk, to diminish or even to destroy the services provided by the so-called “welfare state”. The American president, whose strategy we have likened to the Nazis' "Blitzkrieg" from its inception, has launched a major assault on public services under the pretext of cutting government spending, using Elon Musk and his team as his stormtroopers. It is as if a wrecking ball is targeting U.S. state agencies one by one. The fact that Argentine President Javier Milei gifted Musk a chainsaw during his visit to Washington and Musk raised it in the air like a rock musician playing an electric guitar symbolizes this aspect of the situation most vividly. Milei himself, since taking office in Argentina, has been making dramatic declarations about shutting down ministries and cutting services, following the same aggressive approach. Uneven and combined development! In this regard, the U.S. has taken its cue from Argentina!
Trump, Musk, and their wrecking crew claim that the goal of this assault is to drain the swamp of "waste, fraud, and abuse." They say they have discovered, for instance, that people over 300 years old are receiving pensions. But the real goal is entirely different. Fascism is a radical counter-revolutionary movement. Compared to it, the old neoliberals—Thatcher, Reagan, even Pinochet, and the leaders of the 12 September 1980 coup in Turkey, Evren and Özal—seem like well-behaved children. The Trump administration still exhibits characteristics of proto-fascism, but it carries this radicalism in its bloodstream. What is happening is the continuation in extremis of policies designed to make the working masses pay for the economic crisis that the capitalist world economy entered in the late 1970s. These policies, based on cutting or even eliminating public services, are now escalated, in the environment of the post-2008 Great Depression, to ever newer heights. The goal is not to prevent "waste, fraud, and abuse"; it is to cut the support the public provided to a population already impoverished by the capitalist crisis and to atomise the working masses. The best evidence for this is the attack on Medicaid, which provides partial health coverage for the 70 million poorest people in America. Another example is the plan to lay off tens of thousands of employees at the agency serving disabled war veterans. Yet another is the planned assault on Social Security. Musk even considered (just as Milei has proposed for several ministries in his country, Argentina) shutting down the Department of Education (yes, you have read that correctly, the Department of Education!).
The economic tasks facing twenty-first-century fascism differ somewhat from those of the classical fascism of the 1930s. Classical fascism came to power in a period when capitalism had not yet resorted to the safety valves known as the "welfare state" or the "social state." To put it plainly: the 1930s were the period before the "Lenin effect," before the influence of the October 1917 Revolution and the workers' state on the rest of the world. The public services referred to with grandiose-sounding names like the "welfare state" were a form of fortification developed by capitalism to compete with the rights that workers and labourers had won in the Soviet Union and later in other workers’ states. This was capitalism’s riposte to socialism—an attempt to counter its influence.
For about three-quarters of a century, the history of the twentieth century was shaped under the influence of the October Revolution. We have been insisting on this for a long time. When capitalist restoration took place from 1989 on in those countries where workers' states had earlier been established, this fortification was no longer needed. One aspect of neoliberalism and globalisation was the dismantling of this now-unnecessary structure. But this process remains incomplete. Proto-fascist Trump, in alliance with the world's richest capitalist, Musk, an alliance highly significant in its very existence, is undertaking the completion of the job that Thatcher and Reagan started—this time using very radical methods. Just look at the sheer grandeur of the October Revolution! The revolution has collapsed in its homeland, yet even 30-35 years after that collapse, its traces still persist in other parts of the world. The bourgeoisie is still having to struggle against these.
To summarise briefly: What Trump and Musk are doing together may look like madness; it may seem like a chaotic process, as if it were handing the U.S. Treasury over to a 19-year-old engineer. But there is a method behind the madness. The goal is to dismantle social services as quickly as possible and to atomize the working class—that is, to leave them isolated as individuals deprived of social support.
21st-century fascism (for now, proto-fascism) must rid itself of these "unnecessary costs" in order to resolve capitalism’s crisis!
Breaking Up the World Market
But the matter doesn’t stop there. Trump is also working to shatter the unified world market that imperialist countries, and at their head the U.S., have strived to build since the end of World War II—using tariffs, threats against different factions of the bourgeoisie, and increasingly strict security regulations on production and trade. The liberal wing of the bourgeoisie, more and more being pushed to the margins, watches in horror as the free trade system, which has been built step by step over 80 years—through institutions like the Bretton Woods system, GATT, the "most-favoured-nation" rule, and the World Trade Organization—is torn apart by Trump's powerful chainsaw.
And why is this? According to the bourgeois media, bordering on stupidity, Trump is simply at a loss to understand that a trade deficit is not necessarily harmful for the country in question, that shielding American industry from foreign competition through tariffs will lead to inflation and lower productivity growth, that allowing U.S. capitalists to produce in low-wage countries with minimal environmental regulations does not necessarily harm American workers, or that importing agricultural products benefits American consumers. Philosophical idealism has poisoned the entire universe of liberal intellectuals. They reduce the enormous transformations happening in the world to the ignorance of a single man. "Oh, if only he knew a bit of economics! Oh, how unfortunate that he misunderstands everything!"
Our explanation, on the other hand, goes back to the 2008 financial collapse and the onset of the Third Great Depression that followed. A faction within the international bourgeoisie in al countries has since developed a firm belief that the failure of the globalisation strategy has proven that nationalism is the only solution to the capitalist crisis, a crisis that has been going on since the mid-1970s. Using economic nationalism to secure one’s own nation's survival in an integrated world was the policy of classical fascism in the 1930s, particularly of the Nazis. We have long predicted that this deeply contradictory economic policy of fascism would gradually spread within the international bourgeoisie. Of course, over time, we have started to say, "See, it is spreading." Now, we say: fascism (though still in its proto-fascist phase) is capturing the world's most powerful country! But the thinkers, academics, and media warriors of the liberal bourgeoisie still continue to naively say, "He doesn’t understand!" Once again, there is a method behind the madness!
Trump is constantly pressuring American capitalists to "return to the country and produce here." Unbelievably, Trump is also telling the capitalist classes of the neighbours of the United States, Canada and Mexico, "If you want to be free from tariffs, close your factories, invest in the United States, and produce here." Trump is squeezing Taiwan and the Taiwanese company TSMC, the world's largest and most advanced semiconductor chipmaker, to invest $100 billion in Arizona, USA. Trump is rewarding the capitalists of a number of traditional industries (iron and steel, aluminium, metallurgy in general, automotive in particular, etc.) that are already producing in the United States by imposing tariffs on imports. In addition to making Chinese products more expensive through tariffs, Trump is depriving China’s capitalists of the world's largest market by restricting or banning, on the grounds of "national security", the import into the United States of the goods they produce, thus helping American capitalists in their competition against Chinese capital. The point is not that Trump "doesn't get it", it's that liberal idiots "don't get it"!
Splitting the North Atlantic Alliance
But that’s not the end of the matter, either. The chainsaw is also being used for a third operation: severing America’s relations with its allies, some over a century old (e.g., the UK) and others about 80 years old (e.g., Germany and Italy).
Trump first set this policy in motion with threats to turn NATO partner neighbouring Canada into the 51st state of the United States, to take control of Greenland (territory of fellow NATO member Denmark), to send troops into the southern neighbour and special trade partner Mexico under the pretext of fighting drug cartels, and to seize control of the Panama Canal—despite Panama being one of the most pro-American countries in Latin America. Now, with his latest moves on the Ukraine issue, he is recentring this policy into its main trajectory. His decision to adopt a strategy based on nearly secret negotiations with Putin’s Russia to end the war—essentially abandoning the joint NATO policy with Europe the U.S. had pursued since the war began—might seem at first glance like a stance specific to the Ukraine crisis. But that is not the case. The issue runs much deeper.
From Trump’s perspective, the European Union (EU) is a bloc of countries established to “screw” (sic!) the United States. His reasoning goes like this: The EU, with its population of 450 million (which was even higher before Brexit at 520 million), is pursuing an economic project to build a vast European market capable of competing with the U.S. Meanwhile, member countries keep their military spending to a minimum and rely on the U.S. to provide security through massive defence expenditures. Trump bluntly states that this is an unfair and unacceptable arrangement. During his first term, he had already signalled this by telling European countries at a G7 summit in Canada that they must significantly increase their military spending in the form of their contributions to NATO. Now, he is taking an even more radical stance: The EU is not an irresponsible ally for the U.S.; in Trump’s logic, it is an adversary trying to undermine America—perhaps even a future enemy.
The North Atlantic alliance, which Western imperialism has carefully preserved since World War II, is now in tatters. The world is being splintered along new lines. Trump is preparing for a stronger confrontation with China by abandoning Europe—even the UK, which has been America’s “special ally” for a century—and instead moving closer to Russia.
Once the race begins, new dynamics emerge, and the developments unfolding in the U.S. start to spread to other countries. Now, fearing that they will no longer benefit from the American military umbrella against Russia, EU countries are immediately prioritising rearmament. While, on the one hand, the EU’s foreign (female) policy chief, Kaja Kallas, responds to Trump’s crude remark about the EU “screwing” the U.S. by explicitly using the same verb in her reply, essentially saying, “No, we’re not out to screw the US”, on the other hand, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a hardliner, has embraced the slogan “ReArm Europe” and proposed a budget of 800 billion euros, along with economic measures to support this rearmament. The ideologues of the European bourgeoisie are in agreement: major “sacrifices” must be made from the so-called “welfare state”. In other words, just as capitalist corporations attack their own workers whenever they face trouble with competitors, bourgeois governments of capitalist countries immediately turn against their own working class when faced with external threats.
Who is really “gambling with World War III”?
We warned before Trump came to power: the aging fascist is in a hurry. Just over a month has passed, and the previous world order is already cracking at its seams. How did Trump scold Zelensky? By telling him, “You are gambling with World War III.” What he really means is this: “You can’t gamble with it—when the time comes, I will.” Our warnings concerning a new world war since 2016 went unheeded on the left. Now that Trump has himself uttered the WW word, so to speak, perhaps many on the left will awaken to the reality.
As for the working class, class-conscious workers should not listen to Trump or Erdoğan—they ought to lend their ears to the Marxists.