To justify these imperial ambitions he has said on several occasions, most recently on Christmas day, that expansion at Denmark's and Panama's expense is essential for "national security". China, apparently, has too much of a presence at the strategically vital waterway into the Pacific and, according to Trump, US shipping has to pay an unfair premium to travel through its gates. A demonstrably false assertion. On Greenland, Trump has shown an interest since someone, in 2019, showed him a world map and he couldn't work out why it wasn't part of the United States already. And there's the small matter of extensive mineral resources US mining interests wouldn't mind getting their hands on.
For such an overweening ego, Trump's rambling "interventions" owe something to an incontinent id. To suggest Trump has ulterior motives apart from whatever spark has lit the dim corners of his limited mind affords him too much credit, but that isn't to say those around him haven't. Offering territorial expansion would play well to the base, which has recently been riled up by a dispute between Musk and MAGA over work visas and immigration. A secondary consequence might be a repeat of what we've seen domestically from other billionaires, businesses, and institutions in pre-emptively bending the knee. For example, Jeff Bezos instructing The Washington Post not to endorse anyone at the election, and Mark Zuckerberg's scrapping of "biased" fact checkers in favour of "free speech" on Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps Panama, Denmark, and Canada will pre-emptively offer concessions to sate Trump's greedy eyes.
There's further method to Trump's madness. The reason why the likes of Musk are on board the Trump train is because their politics are determined by an experiment in naked class rule. This means scrapping as many checks and balances on capital they can get away with, winding down the federal government, which includes residual social security and health entitlements, and squeezing central funding to states' budgets. Needless to say, those who mistakenly thought Trump was protecting their meagre welfare cheques are about to find out what they voted for. What's left is going to be shaken down so more federal money pours into billionaire coffers, and they'll doubly benefit from tax cuts too (though these are now another MAGA bone of contention). What Javier Milei is doing to Argentina, and what Liz Truss tried doing here is the prize, and that is a further shift in the balance between capital and labour. Though given the state of US politics, this is a move on from the dominance of capital to its unquestionable authoritarian rule. The United States economy is to become even more a billionaire's playground, with the world's largest and most advanced military there to intimidate the rest of the globe into falling in line.
This is the project, at least where Trump's elite backers are concerned. But winding the Donald up and letting him waddle into controversy is a good way of generating interference, of continually creating spectacles and controversy while the real business of looting the state and securing an even more subservient class settlement proceeds relatively unnoticed.
It's impossible to say whether this project will be successful. Everyone has a breaking point, and not even Trump can rub the faces of his mass support in it indefinitely. The MAGA row over immigration might preface far more serious disputes to come if the incoming government and, especially, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency throws millions of federal employees out of work and ratchets up the difficulties for poorer Americans and those just getting by. That's the problem with projects aiming to implement naked class rule. Existing forms of political consent break down and the truth of a society becomes apparent to everyone. And history shows those situations tend not to end well for those who've brought them into being.
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2 comments:
Naked class rule is the project of the petty-bourgeoisie that forms Trump's base, not the bourgeois ruling class. Its why that petty-bourgeois base is not going to worry about the removal of remaining welfare benefits etc. But, as Marx and Engels set out, more than 150 years ago, the bourgeois ruling class long since grew out of that nonsense, and requires the increasing role of the state in planning and regulation.
In the 1920's in Italy, 1930's in Germany, Spain and elsewhere, the bourgeois ruling class did resort to fascism, which is itself a manifestation of the politics of the petty-bourgeoisie, but look at the conditions. In Italy, a mass workers movement was occupying factories and establishing workers councils and widespread workers control. In the 1920's, the German ruling class did not resort to fascism, but slapped it down. Only in the 1930's, as a last resort did it do so, as in Spain.
In Britain, although there were people like Mosely, the world's leading ruling class, at that time, did not resort to fascism, nor did that in the US, despite the support for it from powerful individuals such as Henry Ford. Why? It didn't need to, and as Lenin set out in State and Revolution, the bourgeoisie does not give up its preferred method of political regime, the parliamentary republic lightly. Where it did, it was because a revolutionary working class threatened its rule, and did so in conditions where that working class had already squeezed its profits.
The 1980's were a similar condition to the 1930's, but the ruling class did not feel the need to resort to fascism. Again, its profits were squeezed following the long rise in wage share of the 1960's, and 70's. That is not the case today, even. Relative profits are high. Labour shortages mean that wages are rising as they did in the 1960's, but not yet squeezing profits. The main problem caused by that is not for the bourgeoisie, but for the petty-bourgeoisie which as self-employed traders already with miserable living standards, they cannot raise their revenues, and as small scale employers of labour themselves, they find they can't get workers, or else have to pay those higher wages, and so get smaller profits.
In the 1930's, fascism solved a problem, but it can't solve the problem that the ruling class faces today, which is not the need to slap down powerful labour movements squeezing their profits, but is the fact that the mirage of wealth from rising asset prices it has relied on for the last 40 years has been shattered, as economic growth causes interest rates to rise, and those asset prices to crash. No fascism, no experiment in naked class rule can resolve that problem for them. On the contrary, the solution within a continuation of capitalism could only come from a return to the kind of progressive social-democratic regimes of the 1950's and 60's.
I think you're right not to take Trump's sabre-rattling too seriously, I doubt he takes it that seriously, at least not at face value. But it does have a serious purpose in that he wants both allies and enemies to be wary of him; the old saying is that you don't mess with the pub nutter. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and other Imperialists (who may be exempted from Imperialist label because ) get away with a lot of stuff because they know the liberal Western powers don't intervene as directly into proxy conflicts as they do. Yes, the West gives Ukraine and Israel etc... weapons and support, but they're not as directly involved on the ground as the "Eastern" Imperialists are in Syria, Yemen, Gaza etc...). But Trump sails a bit closer to their style of unstable strong man schtick (which I think is partly true and partly an act) and he has a bigger stick than they do, meaning they're a little more wary than with a more orthodox Western leader. In the West; NATO members have to be a bit more wary about freeriding on US security.
So for all his grotesqueness I think Trump will be a far more moderating influence on the other Imperialists than Kamala Harris would have been.
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