By the National Council of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America
Something big is happening in this country. Simply calling it “fascism” seems correct. But to understand why now and what is to be done, we must understand where it’s coming from. We need to look at the economic and historical, global and domestic context for fascism today. U.S. society is being disrupted at its foundation.
The people of this country and the world are well into an economic and social revolution.
Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, the economic revolution began replacing millions of U.S. industrial workers with robots. Digital technology made it possible to offshore millions more jobs into a global production system. Over the last four to five decades, this expulsion of millions of workers from their connection (in production) to the capitalist class disrupted society at its foundations. Everything built on that connection – public education, public health, affordable housing, the electoral party system – began to be undermined.
This break in the relation between the working and owning classes also adds political energy toward legal and political changes that promote wealth accumulation beyond the typical labor vs. capital relationship. These changes may rest on capitalist exploitation, but are less based in actual production and employment – for example, hedge funds where investors speculate on the ratio of occupied to unoccupied housing, glacier-melt rates or billions in cryptocurrency, etc.
We have referred to this broken connection between classes in production as an “antagonism at the economic base of society.” The State is no longer rooted in a stable connection between the working class and the capitalist class. Objectively, government’s imperative – to ensuring workers are healthy and educated enough to work – is declining. Its role shifts ever more rapidly to coercion.
Now we’re seeing it. Trump and his associates came into office hollowing out government and changing the State to correspond to the ruling class’s changed needs. Yet, they messengers, not the underlying cause. These disruptive changes are political effects of the economic revolution. By just about any definition, the lying, terroristic, precedent-setting brutal form of rule being imposed by the Trump administration is fascistic.
This definition was used to understand the fascism of the last century: “The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie – bourgeois democracy – by another form – open terrorist dictatorship.” (Dmitrov). Though many events of the day resemble 20th century German and Italian fascism, this definition doesn’t tell us what’s happening now in this country and why.
FASCISM TODAY
Fascists in the 20th century agitated popular anger and discontent after World War I and a sense a loss of place in a society that was undergoing huge changes at its economic foundation. Their regimes shaped political and social superstructures that supported and accelerated industrialization and capitalist production relations in their respective countries. That was 20th century fascism’s historical purpose.
Today’s fascism has a different purpose. It does not primarily aim to develop industry and support capitalist production relations. It aims to support and prolong other forms, relationships and investment schemes that depend ever more remotely on production, while preserving private property relations.
This doesn’t mean the end of all industrial production or mining. High-tech companies still need steel and minerals. Having offshored so much production and jobs, the U.S. ruling class needs domestic supply chains – and the State facilitates their needs. Despite the continuing need for some labor at least, the diminishing connection between working and capitalist classes in production means worsening conditions for the working class – including depletion of land and water, with horrific consequences for nature and human life.
In this sense, the motion toward fascism today is a political expression of the social revolution that began with robots replacing factory workers.
For decades, some analysts for the ruling class have described the legal changes eroding the responsibility of the State/government to care for its people.
In 2003, Philip Bobbitt, a Columbia University constitutional law professor, wrote an 800-page book applauded by business leaders. The foreword to the book summarizes Bobbitt’s thesis: “now the development of computers has destroyed the nation-state. Not the State itself, as Bobbitt is at pains to show: the State will always be necessary to provide security, fiscal organization and law. But just as princely states mutated into dynastic territorial states and they in their turn into nation state, now, nation-states are mutating into what Bobbitt terms ‘market states.’ … ” (Page xviii.)
Bobbitt is explicit about this “market-state.”
“The revolution in information technology that has so empowered non-governmental groups cannot function in a non-State environment. … It is the national-State that is dying, not the State. With it will go much of the power and influence of the great international institutions of the society of nation-states, institutions like the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. This void will be filled by institutions and rules that reflect the new society of market-States; when this order changes, as is now happening, the institutions of the society composed of states inevitably changes also.” P 363-64.
“The market-State is largely indifferent to the norms of justice or, for that matter, to any particular set of moral values so long as the law does not act as an impediment to economic competition…” (p 230)
“In the market-state, the State is responsible for maximizing the choices available to individuals. This means lowering the transaction costs of choosing by individuals and that often means restraining rather than empowering governments.” (p 230)
“In the market-state, the marketplace becomes the economic arena, replacing the factory. In the marketplace, men and women are consumers, not producers (who are probably offshore anyway).” (p 230)
Whether or not they read Bobbitt’s 800+ pages, the ruling class is moving on its conclusions – in elite university business schools, at the Heritage Foundation, in Wall Street lobbying arms. They have political power, so they don’t have to announce these things to the general population. But they know what they need and how to get it.
WHAT THE RULING CLASS / BIG BUSINESS NEEDS
The ruling class does not need to preserve capitalism. They need to protect private property under new conditions. Bobbitt described the type of changes to the political superstructure they need. The Trump administration seems to be heading in that direction. Trump is simply talking louder and running faster on the same path. But the legal changes that support money being made off money go back decades:
In the late 1980s through early 2000s, what a former chief economist for the World Bank called a “quiet coup” occurred through reckless deregulation of the financial sector. This cleared the way for new financial products like credit default swaps, securitization, irresponsible loans and financial derivatives – all amounting to speculation – bets – on interest rates and debt. Whether or not debts get paid, financial investors make their money, based ever more remotely on the actual production of homes, cars or whatever the loans were taken out for.”
– Then the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 cleared the path for financial institutions to control the majority portion of key industries and infrastructures. In 2000, to “modernize” and “enhance the competitive position of United States financial institutions and financial markets,” the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) cleared the way for all sorts of new speculative products, many of which we still see rolling out today.
– After the inevitable financial crash in 2007-08, the 2008 bailout and restructuring of the financial sector was the largest ever transfer of public wealth to private interests. The cost to the federal government amounted to $15,000 per man, woman and child in the United States. In the first half of 2009, the top six banks got $30 billion in profits.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” accelerates privatization of public education for private equity profit. The new school voucher provision – which uses public funds to help parents pay for private-school – is expected to transfer $4 billion to $51 billion in public funds to private schools and companies contracting with districts, including private equity-owned firms. (https://www.levernews.com/private-equitys-new-playground-americas-schools/)
Despite declining real wealth from U.S. production, investors still seek returns to fill their coffers. This drives financialization of basic needs – education, housing, healthcare – along with speculation on interest rates, future prices and housing supply. All this amounts to stronger bonds of debt for the working class.
Trump and his family are deeply involved in cryptocurrency, another high-tech financial product. Wyoming proudly pledges no regulation on crypto – they need only a Wyoming address. Thousands of companies are registering there, driving Jackson Hole housing costs beyond what the few remaining workers can afford.
The military industry thrives on war – through international weapons sales and the increasing domestic operation of both military and police. High-tech companies are now heavily invested and profiting wildly from military applications.
But what is happening is not the cause of what is happening. Changes at the economic foundation of society have opened new avenues for profiteering. Then, at a certain point, broader political change reorganizes society to serve these new forms of private property – as predatory and rapacious as they are. The Trump administration’s hollowing out of government and disregard for human life perfectly serve investors in these growing sectors of the economy.
These changes meet specific needs of certain sectors of the economy, but no section of the ruling class has an agenda compatible with working-class needs or program.”
The relative weakness of the United States in the emerging multi-polar world order shapes ruling-class political needs.
We are witnessing the end of U.S. world dominance – a dominance built on slavery, genocide and colonialism. French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd noted that the inevitable defeat and withdrawal from Ukraine “will have dramatic consequences for the Empire that those from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan did not have. This is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale in a context of massive deindustrialization in the United States. …”
The ruling class needs lies to keep the population in darkness, division and repression to keep it from uniting to fight in their collective interests.
War globally and the inevitable and sharp declining livings standards in the United States present U.S. revolutionaries with heavy responsibilities and opportunities to develop the political consciousness of our class.
This moment demands that we speak out against our ruling class’s crimes worldwide. The end of U.S. dominance presents the responsibility and the opportunity to overcome the national chauvinism that has prevented our working class from thinking and fighting in its actual interests – conscious and united against its ruling class
Incomes and privileges enjoyed by a significant section of the U.S. working class came at the expense of millions of oppressed worldwide. That relatively privileged position of workers in the imperialist core has crippled the revolutionary movement for over 100 years. Today’s geopolitical situation holds the potential to bring that chapter to a close. The blocks to unity and consciousness originate in this country’s founding on genocide, colonialism and slavery. The beginning of the end of U.S. dominance holds potential for our class’s unity and consciousness – accomplishing that depends on the thinking and work of revolutionaries.
This economic revolution and the social effects are being fought out politically, in forms particular to time and place. Nationalism is ever-present in fascism. In this country, nationalism takes the form of the colonial status of the Southern Black Belt and the legal and extra-legal violence and oppression against the African American people – a continuity, in evolving forms – from slavery to today.
More specifically, the Jim Crow regime imposed on the South after the Civil War and Reconstruction’s violent overthrow shape how the ruling class exercises political power to this day. They rely on the oppression of African Americans to control the entire working class. As revolutionaries, we must assess: Do the economic changes and resulting social devastation for broader sections of the working class reveal ruling class weaknesses in their historically evolved mechanism of rule? How do we focus where the ruling class is weak?
From U.S. history through to what our ruling class is doing today to protect its interests at our expense, this situation today calls for the solution which is political power for the working class to govern in its class interests. Today it’s either fascism or a new society where the wealth of society is owned in common and distributed to meet the essential needs of humanity and nature itself.
Published on January 5, 2026
This article originated in Rally!
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