Written before he took office, but it is certainly apt given his first few weeks in power. An excerpt:
The incoming administration will be a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. To a degree unprecedented in American history, the oligarchy itself will exercise direct control over the state–from Musk, the world’s richest man and head of the Orwellian “Department of Government Efficiency,” to the assemblage of billionaires that will staff Trump’s cabinet and White House. As of mid-December, the total wealth of this top tier of the Trump administration was estimated at nearly half a trillion dollars.
The character of the new government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined.
Globally, the top 1 percent now possesses more wealth than the bottom 99 percent. According to the latest summary by Bloomberg News, the world’s 500 richest people “grew vastly richer in 2024,” reaching a new milestone: $10 trillion in total net worth. Bloomberg reports that “Eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people.”
The re-election of Trump is the culmination of an extended process of political reaction and a harbinger of what is to come....
The incoming administration is planning, from “day one,” to implement a massive assault on democratic rights, focused initially on immigrants and refugees. Among its most extreme proposals is the abolition of birthright citizenship, a cornerstone of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, adopted after the Civil War. The targeting of immigrant workers is the spearhead for a broader attack on the democratic and social rights of the entire working class, as the government prepares to enact further tax cuts for the rich and a coordinated assault on every social program won by workers through bitter struggle.
The processes clearly evident in the United States are in fact universal. Across the world, capitalist governments are staggered by massive political crises, confronting popular opposition and increasingly turning to authoritarian measures.
In Germany, the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is emerging as the strongest capitalist party, now with the open support of Musk and amidst the universal shift of the political establishment to the right. In France, the “president of the banks,” Emmanuel Macron, is now ruling in collaboration with the New Popular Front (NPF), handing the mantle of parliamentary opposition to Marine Le Pen’s fascistic National Rally.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government, which traces its heritage to Mussolini, is intensifying anti-immigrant policies, while Javier Milei in Argentina is providing the far-right model for social retrogression through the demolition of public services and labor protections.....
Underlying these interlinked crises is an oligarchy that subordinates all of society to profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. The fight against the oligarchy is by its very nature a revolutionary task. Its wealth must be expropriated and its stranglehold over economic and political life abolished. This requires the mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, to take political power, establish democratic control over the process of production, and reorganize society on the basis of socialism—that is, on the basis of social need, not private profit.
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