Ten Principles for the Coming Resistance to MAGA ~~ Paul Street

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/18/ten-draft-principles-for-the-coming-resistance/

~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~

Image by Jon Tyson.

The entire US system must be dismantled if burning children in a hospital is the lesser evil.

– Hadi Nasrallah, October 15, 2024

Note to readers: The author is aware that the coming election’s outcome is uncertain and that Kamala Harris could squeak out a highly contested victory in a process that seems likely to include and elicit considerable political violence. I do not think the case for “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” is rendered any less compelling or urgent if Harris comes out the winner than if Trump is granted a second term. This is made clear in principles 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

“Why Can’t We Just Call it Fascism?”

While Kamala “I Support the Child-Burning State of Israel” Harris can prevail in the coming likely prolonged US presidential election saga of 2024-25, it’s hardly too soon to start thinking seriously about the resistance that will be required in the United States (US) after the demented fascist maniac Donald “Good Genes” Trump returns to the White House. The orange sack of Fascist shit’s return to power is the most likely ultimate outcome of the noxious electoral clusterfuck pitting the Hitler-channeling malignancy Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump against the fake progressive, cold-blooded mass incarcerator and genocidal imperialist Harris. Many key pieces, both legal and extra-legal, are in place for a successful Amerikaner coup – a second Trump presidency. The Biden administration is helping re-elect Trump with its criminal imperial policies in Ukraine and especially the Middle East, showing us that it values immolating and otherwise killing Palestinians and Lebanese civilians more than it values “saving democracy.”

Herr Trump this fall has left little doubt about his fascist essence.  He has set Jewish Americans up as scapegoats and for retribution if he loses. He has continued his arch-racist Nazi-like attacks (“they’re eating the pets!”) on legal Haitian immigrants. He continues with his wild Hitlerian lies about the “stolen” 2020 election, foreign countries supposedly sending hardened criminals (“their worst people”) into the US, and Democrats’ mythical recruitment of “illegal” immigrants to vote against him. He says that police should be granted “one really rough day” to end urban crime – a not-so-veiled call for a day of extrajudicial assassinations in the nation’s Black and brown ghettos and barrios. He continues to absurdly call the deeply conservative corporate and imperial Democrats “Marxists” and even communists, referring to the centrist Harris as “comrade Kamala.” He has just called for the National Guard and Army to be deployed to crush “radical left” activists – those he calls “the enemy within” and the primary threat to America – after the election.

This is straight up classic fascist rhetoric, not to be laughed off. Every day brings a new outrageous Nazi-like statement from Donald “I’ll Pardon Border Patrol Agens Who Shoot Asylum-Seekers” Trump and/or his fellow neofascist, white supremacist, and textbook sociopath running mate JD “Women Belong in the Home” Vance.

With three weeks to go to the holy election day, Harris has been forced to weakly acknowledge that the Trump campaign is “about fascism.” This belated public recognition — hard to deny at this point — came in a contentious interview with the popular Black talk radio host Charlamagne tha God:

Harris: “One [choice], mine, is about taking us forward and progress and investing in the American people, investing in their ambitions, dealing with their challenges. And the other, Donald Trump, is about taking us backward.”

Charlamagne: “The other is about fascism. Why can’t we just say it?”

Harris: “Yes, we can say that.”

(Harris then pushed back on Charlamagne’s suggestion that Trump and his team and party are getting ready to steal the election.)

Ten Draft Principles

Here are ten things to keep in mind as we develop a real people’s resistance following the distinct possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of a RepubliNazi Trump-Vance regime:  

1. A new and horrific level of Amerikaner Christian fascist and white nationalist consolidation will be underway. Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s re-ascendancy will mean a dramatically sharpened consolidation of Republi-fascist power in the United States.  The nation’s powerful executive branch will have fallen under nearly complete fascist control in a nation where the Reichmost of the two viable ruling class political parties already holds the powerful Supreme Court and possibly both houses of Congress, certainly including the powerful US Senate (thanks to the 2024 Senatorial election lineup). Half of the nation’s powerful fifty state governments are already under Republi-Nazi domination.  And this time, Donald “Retribution” Trump will preside over a party and executive branch far more united and determined to conduct the takeover and makeover of US government and society on Christian white nationalist grounds than in 2017-21.

Donald “Project 2025” Trump’s victory and the heightened consolidation of fascist power will represent a stark existential threat to basic civil liberties, “democracy,” social justice and decency, and to truth and to life itself. Donald “Drill, Drill, Drill” Trump and his party are openly ecocidal and pandemicist in a time of escalating environmental catastrophe and epidemiological crisis. They are determined to create a white-supremacist, arch-patriarchal world in which might openly makes right and truth – the very notion of objective reality – is obliterated. The deranged, orange-brushed Dear Leader and his party are eliminationist agents of many-sided annihilation.

2. The whole US capitalist-imperialist ruling class, including its members aligned with the Democratic Party and who do not want a fully fascist America, must be understood as leading culprits behind this cataclysm. The nation’s owners and their many allies and agents in the nation’s legal, intellectual, and political superstructure had the power and every opportunity to take the Hitler-channeling malignancy Donald “Take Down  the Metal Detectors” Trump out of the game.  They failed to do this basic decent thing even after a horrific Trump presidency that ended with the pandemo-fascist murder of hundreds of thousands of US citizens through Donald “Shoot Some Clorox” Trump’s fanning of Covid-19, a draconian response to a great popular movement against racist police violence, and a many-sided coup attempt including a physical assault on the US Capitol. Even after Donald “Retribution” Trump’s open effort to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, the US ruling class left “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Noam Chomsky’s accurate description of Trump in January 2020) free to make a third viable and second victorious charge for the most dangerous job in the world. Our imperialist masters kept this fascist maniac and the movement behind him in play, granting him a third shot at destroying human society. For this they must never be forgiven. Some of “our” big capitalists, including the world’s richest parasite (and son of South African apartheid) Elon Musk, are very much behind the fascist project.  (Please see points 4 and 5 below for more on the capitalist-imperialist Democrats’ responsibility for the Trump-Vance regime.)

3. There is no such thing as a legitimate fascist government. Even if Donald “Crush the Enemy Within,” Trump returns to power in an outwardly “clean” fashion– by supposedly winning the Electoral College without help from vote manipulation/suppression/cancellation and the intervention of the Trump High (Supreme) Court – it must be understood that there is no such thing as a legitimate fascist government. Never forget that Hitler rose to power in Germany through constitutional, legal, and bourgeois-electoral means and consistently strove to wrap his criminal fascist dictatorship in the cloaks of legalism.  For what it’s worth, an unpolluted/uncorrupted Trump victory is impossible given the Republifascists’ many coup plans and actions already underway and in place.

The only appropriate response to a fascist government, however, it takes power, is mass resistance aiming to collapse that government and install a new and revolutionary one that will crush fascism and work to transform society in such a way that fascism can no longer emerge.

A US “labor movement” true to its purported mission of representing working people would conduct a general political strike demanding the removal of the anti-worker Republi-Nazi Trump-Vance regime within at least the first three months of Donald “Strikers Should be Fired” Trump’s second presidency.  May First, 2025 should bring tens of millions into the nation’s streets and public squares calling for the malignant fascists Trump and Vance to be removed from power.

4. The resistance must NOT be about putting the criminal, ruling class, and fascism-enabling Democrats back in the White House.  That’s just for starters. We do not oppose the contemporary US-American equivalent to the Nazis (the Republifascists) in order to back “the equivalent of the Weimar Republic in the U.S. today, the Democratic Party and the ‘Liberals.’” (B.Avakian, 2005). The dismal, dollar-drenched and demobilizing Dems – leaders of the party that liberal left political scientist Sheldon Wolin aptly termed “the inauthentic opposition” in 2007 –  have long demonstrated their fascism-facilitating capitalist-imperialist and objectively white supremacist essence. Having engaged in the Weimar-like enablement, appeasement and conciliation of the other major capitalist-imperialist party after that party went full-on fascist, they are at the very least junior partners in the nation’s fascisation even as they are targeted for elimination by that fascist party.

The deadly Dems’ latest damning doings include the election and conduct of the decrepit war criminal “Genocide Joe” Biden. Joe “Re-Elect Adolf Trump” Biden as president has:

+ sparked a reckless imperialist proxy war with nuclear Russia – a war that has helped spike global prices while bringing the world closer to nuclear than any time in recent memory.

+ funded, equipped, and militarily and protected Israel’s vicious war (also inflationary) of livestreamed genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Israel’s horrific attacks on Lebanon and Iran.

+ fueled inflation with massive imperial expenditures on criminal and price-boosting wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

+ “overseen the largest cuts to social welfare ever coming out of the pandemic, e.g., [slashing] food stamps, Medicare, child tax credit” (Arun Gupta).

+ overseen a significant expansion of domestic oil and gas drilling amidst a climate catastrophe driven by the wildly excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

+ failed to use his power to preserve women’s right to an abortion in all fifty states

+ failed to promptly and properly prosecute the Republi-Nazi Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump despite abundant evidence of his criminal assault on the 2020 election and other high state crimes.

+ signed on to a right-wing border bill meant to steal the Republifascists’ white-nationalist and nativist thunder – a bill defeated in Congress only because the de facto House Speaker Donald “I Love Kyle Rittenhouse” Trump wanted to deny Biden a legislative victory on “border security.”

Even if Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris had been able get past the Electoral College and the numerous steep legal and extra-legal obstacles she would have faced to taking the White House, the right-tilted US slaveowners’ Minority Rule regime would have prevented her from making herself and her party look like desirable and progressive alternatives to the Republi-Nazi party.  That’s if Kamala “I’m Down with Planet-Cooking Fracking” Harris even cared to try to do that. A center-right Dem who speaks the insipid Clinton-Obama/neoliberal language of “getting things done on a bipartisan basis,” Harris as president would have continued each of the disastrous Biden policies mentioned in the previous paragraph along with the continued brazen US military encirclement and provocation of China.

Kamala “Don’t Try to Escape the Hell US Imperialism Made of Your Country” Harris ended her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention by promising to keep the US military “the most lethal fighting [killing] force on the planet” – a promise of future epic US war crimes.

As is shown by Joe “Never Been Much on Women’s Right to Control Their Bodies” Biden’s massive expenditures on behalf of Ukraine and Judeo-fascist Israel while masses go without proper social protection and storm relief in the US, the militantly imperialist Democrats care more about slaughtering people abroad than they do about helping distressed masses in their own country, among their own purported base.  They privilege backing Zionist ethnic cleansing and provoking nuclear Russia over “saving [bourgeois] democracy” in “the homeland.” They have shown themselves willing to alienate younger voters and decent people of all ages with their sickening “ironclad support” for the child-burning Judeo-fascist state of Israel’s sickening crimes against humanity, broadcast to the world in history’s first live-streamed genocide.

A Twitter poster (@HadiNasrallah) recently said something profoundly eloquent: “The entire US system must be dismantled if burning children in a hospital the lesser evil.” (Please see point 6 on “the entire US system.”)

5. Voting and the Democrats didn’t and won’t stop Trumpism-fascism.  The Dems voted Trump out of the White House in 2020 and the Republifascist movement only grew stronger over the last four years. You can’t defeat fascism through elections and you sure can’t defeat fascism when you don’t even forthrightly call it out by name. The “bipartisanship”-trumpeting Weimar party refuses to call the Reichmost party what it is because doing so: (a) would mean acknowledging how incredibly horrific politics and society have become in a nation they habitually and doctrinally celebrate as gloriously free, democratic, “opportunity”-filled, and “exceptional” –  the “City on a Hill” and “the envy of the world for 240 years” (the last phrase belongs to bloody-jawed Joe Biden); (b) would mean confronting their ugly history of enabling, conciliating, and collaborating with a fascist party (in the name of “reaching across the aisle”); (c) could stir up masses of people beyond bourgeois electoral politics in ways the Democrats could not control. That’s why the dismal Dems and their media allies prefer to call the Republifascists “weird,” “un-American,” “creepy,” “populist,” and “undemocratic” instead of (homegrown American) fascist.

(While she passively agreed with Charlagmane’s use of the word fascism to describe the Trump campaign since the accuracy of the description is now too graphically obvious to deny, notice that Harris did not say and never says “the F-word” in public.  This telling silence has been standard Democratic Party practice even as a fascist sat in the White House for four years and as fascism has gained power in the country ever since. Privately top Democrats are quite aware that Donald “Shoot the Protesters in the Legs” Trump and his party are fascist. Obama said it privately to Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton – “we’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House” – eight years ago. After Trump won, Obama went out to the Rose Garden to tell the world that he trusted Trump to keep the flame of American “democracy” alive and well. He did not publicly utter, write, or tweet the words fascist or fascism in connection with Trump at any point during Trump’s presidency.)

6. Capitalism-imperialism is the taproot and ultimate culprit. Beneath and beyond the nation’s ruling class, the US class rule system – capitalism-imperialism – is the main underlying force driving the consolidation of Amerikaner fascism. As I have explained in my book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America and in numerous essays and commentaries before and since that book came out, fascism – the breaking of the “outer shell of democracy” (Avakian’s excellent metaphor) atop the underlying class dictatorship of capital – is the outcome of the capitalist order. Capitalism-imperialism is hard-wired from its mode of production up to expose the inauthenticity of its politicians’ democratic pretenses, delegitimizing “democracy” while causing recurrent crises that require big government “solutions.” The lasting defeat of fascism requires the defeat and transcendence of capitalism-imperialism.

At the same time, 21st Century fascism is a symptom of an ecocide and war-generating capitalist order that is now canceling prospects for a decent future – through environmental calamity and/or nuclear war – even if bourgeois electoral and the rule of law democracy can stay intact to some significant degree in the US.  With or without full fascist consolidation, the system faces humanity with a stark choice: either the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all” (Marx and Engels, 1848). It’s not all or only about fighting fascism. Capitalism will not likely go down without fascism in the US but it will take us all down regardless of what form(s) of rule it permits atop its political system.

7. Repolarization. The US capitalist-imperialist political order has sharply polarized the nation along the partisan and related regional and social lines of fascist “red” versus bourgeois democratic “blue.” The resistance we need should understand “red” America as brown, the shirt color of Hitler’s early paramilitaries.  As communist revolutionaries argue, it must work to re-polarize the nation between (a) masses of decent and truth-seeking people, under the real red banner of revolutionary socialism and (b) the fascism-promoting red, white, and blue ruling class (internal divisions notwithstanding) and that ruling class’s capitalist system. The 2024 election was an abject moral atrocity symptomatic of a sick society that needs to be radically reconstructed.  Any system that gives you the “democratic” choice between a malignant fascist sociopath like Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump (“red”) and a mass incarcerator and imperialist genocide apologist like Kamala “I Support Israel’s Right to Murder Palestinian Children” Harris (“blue”) is a regime long past its overthrow date.

8.  A real Resistance is a serious, sustained, and well-organized  commitment and movement, not a matter of going to periodic marches and rallies to vent our frustration. The airport protests (against the Muslim travel ban) and the March for Science and demonstrations against child separations at the border and against the fascist shooting in El Paso were great momentary expressions of popular anti-fascism during the first Trump, presidency. But such short-lived and narrowly focused protests fell far short of the goal of driving out the Trump-Pence regime.  The remarkable George Floyd Rebellion was an extraordinary mass social movement against racist police state violence but it too failed to spark a national political movement for the removal of a white-supremacist and fascist president the way that president needed to be removed.  It got sucked into the quadrennial US capitalist election madness after if not before the Trumpist-fascist paramilitary teen Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives march in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And ballot-fetishizing third party left campaigns are no less sucked into the bourgeois electoral bullshit than are major party ones.

+9.  The resistance must recruit among the United States’ disproportionately nonwhite armed forces. Trump’s Hitlerian call for the deployment of the military to carry out mass deportations, “end crime in one day,” and crush left protests must be countered with outreach to soldiers and officers, many of whom will not be comfortable with such fascistic assignments.  The resistance cannot succeed without assistance from a significant part of the US military.

+10. Crisis as opportunity. Trump’s re-ascendancy must not be seen as a cause for fatalistic resignation, flight, “internal exile,” and other forms of surrender. Just to be clear: we are not “accelerationists.” The system is the accelerator.  We didn’t want or work for a second Trump term. Not at all. (This isn’t a re-do of the early 1930s German Communist Party’s terrible slogan “After Hitler, Us.”) But once Trump’s unacceptable re-installation occurs, and it looks like it very well may, it should be seen as presenting opportunities on the path to revolutionary liberation. The change in US ruling class governance from long normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy (such as it is) to openly authoritarian “rule of men” fascism will simply not fly with a vast swath of the US populace. This radically reactionary break will outrage millions and throw US society up for grabs like no time in recent historical memory. American “late capitalism” will face a “legitimation crisis.” The great majority of US-Americans want nothing to do with a fascist USA; it’s only a fifth of the nation that wants a Christian Fascist dictatorship. Eight in the US Americans do not want that.

Masses who formerly thought that there was still room for the improvement of life and society through incremental reforms, direct service, self-help, voting, localism, trade unionism/collective bargaining, identity politics, cultural rebellion, academicism, cowering under the umbrella of the dismal Dems, and the like will have the veil taken from their eyes. Childish faith in the seductive “siren songs” and paralyzing “quicksand” of the “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (Avakian’s excellent phrasing) will be discredited like never before.  Many US-Americans will become more receptive to something that revolutionary communists have been saying for many years,  regardless of who sits in the White House, atop the world’s leading criminal Empire: only an actual socialist revolution to create a world beyond capitalist class rule and beyond all forms of exploitation and oppression can create a decent future worthy of our best human nature.

The intensified polarization of the USA between “red” and “blue” from the ruling class on down through society and including members of the US military (at all levels) portends a level of superstructural and societal chaos that is historically characteristic of nations on the brink of revolutionary change. Bourgeois democracy US-American-style (loaded down with a host of “outlier” Minority Rule structures and practices reflecting the nation’s slavery-based origins) is pretty much all played out now. As revolutionary communists have been saying, the future is already radical. The only question now is, will it be radically terrible or will it be radically emancipating? It can be the revolutionary “reconstitution of society at large,” or the radically reactionary “common ruin of all.” Five hundred years of capitalism has brought us to this choice. If we get organized to take advantage of the current deepening crisis and chaos to build a real movement to undertake what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. called at the end of his life “the real issue to be faced – the radical reconstruction of society itself,” we can perhaps earn the undying gratitude of future generations.