Despite the smoke and mirrors over “corruption” in Ukraine, the Donald Trump impeachment proceedings expose the intense fight between two factions within the U.S. capitalist class. The battle between the main wing, Big Fascist liberal bosses and the Small Fascist, more domestically oriented bosses is based on something more fundamental than any “quid pro quo” in Kiev. It reflects a sharp difference over how to manage the U.S. bosses’ decline.
The U.S. rulers’ real conflict is over how to deal with the rise of the Chinese bosses as a global superpower and to preserve their vast investments in Middle East oil and around the world. Workers have no side in this fight. Both capitalist factions will give us fascism, though in different forms. For the international working class, the only choice is communist revolution—to eliminate inter-imperialist war and fascism by smashing capitalism for all time.
Ukraine and the death of the liberal world order
Trump’s impeachment was initiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other politicians controlled by the Big Fascists, the same group that established the liberal world order after World War II. These main wing bosses invested trillions of dollars and decades of effort into dismantling the old Soviet Union, the first workers’ state in the history of the world. Even after the USSR was dissolved in 1991, the U.S. rulers continued to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. Toward that end, they backed anti-Soviet dissenters, corrupt politicians, and open Ukrainian fascists (Nation, 2/22).
By contrast, the domestic bosses’ isolationist playbook calls for ceding geopolitical ground to its other imperialist rival Russia. As the Daily Caller News Foundation, a Small Fascist media outlet, stated: “We need Ukraine like an alcoholic needs a drink… [The State Department has to stop] keeping our assumptions exactly where they were in the fall of 1977, when fighting the Soviet menace consumed a lion’s share of the federal budget” (RealClearPolitics.com, 11/15). However self-serving or uneven Trump may be, he is carrying out the Small Fascists’ Fortress America strategy.
Ukraine’s local bosses are adjusting accordingly. Billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who not long ago financed military attacks against eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Donbas region, is now pursuing closer ties to Russia: “EU and NATO won’t take us, but Russia is ready to welcome us”(New York Times, 11/13). Further, Trump’s military withdrawal from Syria has surrendered a big piece of the Middle East to Russian and Iranian control. This is the real reason for Trump’s impending impeachment: his retreat from the U.S. empire.
A tale of two capitalist factions
Since the 1930s, the Big Fascists have dominated the U.S. capitalist class. Led originally by the Rockefeller family oil and financial monopoly, they have pulled the puppet strings of every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the exception of Trump. In 1945, by incinerating hundreds of thousands of workers with atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. the Big Fascists established themselves as the leading genocidal butchers of the new world order. Over the 75 years since, they have butchered our class in Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Congo, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Mexico—and in dozens of other countries, including the U.S., all to preserve the profits they’ve stolen from our class.
For decades, the Small Fascists have rankled over being taxed to pay for wars to protect the Big Fascists’ multinational investments, which compete with their own domestic-centered businesses. They have consistently opposed U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as an unfair government subsidy to their imperialist competition, like Exxon Mobil.
This domestic faction is currently led by the ultra-rightwing Koch family and Koch Industries, the top supplier of capital equipment for the petroleum industry and the second-largest privately held company in the U.S. The Kochs have financed numerous gutter racist and fascist organizations around the world, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and assorted white nationalist militias.
The unholy Trump-Koch-fundamentalist alliance
The Koch family fortune got a huge boost with the ascendance of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) at domestic oil and gas wells, to the point where the U.S. is now a net energy exporter for the first time in many years. It also gave the Kochs ample funds to consolidate their control over the Republican Party. The Small Fascists replaced traditional Big Fascist Republicans with Tea Party members and other compliant politicians. In 2016, they saw their opportunity to seize control of the presidency. The Koch family alone budgeted $889 million for the campaign.
Trump and the Small Fascists struck a deal. In exchange for choosing Koch protégé Michael Pence as his vice-presidential running mate, Trump received the Kochs’ backing, along with the support of big-money Christian fundamentalists. The ability of this unholy alliance to seize the White House reflects a longterm liberal decline, the result of more than 20 years of failed Middle East wars and the 2008 economic crisis. Though they’ve have had some differences over trade and immigration, Trump has mostly done what the Small Fascists want, especially in foreign policy, taxes, and regulation. For now, at least, he’s kept their support.
Oppose all fascists
It’s not hard to see that the Koch faction is clearly fascist. Open racists have been energized by the Trump presidency. Attacks by white nationalists are on the rise, from Texas and South Carolina to Syracuse, New York. This Nazi scum has penetrated the White House in the form of “senior policy adviser” Stephen Miller (Guardian, 11/16). Anti-racist workers everywhere are understandably appalled.
But many workers fail to see the equally fascist character of the liberal imperialist faction and the Democratic Party it controls. Behind Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the Big Fascists have imposed mass racist imprisonment and intensified racist police terror. They have done—and will do—more to build fascism than the Kochs could dream of. That’s why Progressive Labor Party calls them the greater danger to our class.
To try to survive the deepening contradictions of capitalism, the liberal bosses will use fascism to crush the Kochs and their ilk. Trump’s impeachment marks their first big step in that direction. Then the Big Fascists will intensify their brutal exploitation of the working class, in preparation for leading the U.S. into World War III.
As communists, we must organize our fellow workers to act independently of the leadership of all fascists, Big or Small. We have a long road to travel—and a world to win!