Trump, big business and the fascist menace
By Laura Fitzgerald, Socialist Party Ireland. 22 May 2025 This article was first published in ‘Socialist Alternative’ № 19, magazine of the Socialist Party Ireland Real life in 2025 reads like the plot of a dystopian miniseries. We’ve seen the richest man in the world perform Nazi salutes at the US President’s inauguration; that President’s first weeks have seen a torrent of ‘executive orders’ chock full of outlandish conspiracy fuelled reaction, targeting migrants, trans folk, people of colour, disabled people; the unelected billionaire Elon Musk heads DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), making swingeing cuts to thousands of public jobs and whole departments; the words ‘anti-racism’, ‘Native American’, ‘disability’, ‘biased’, ‘Black’, ‘climate crisis’, and ‘women’, are among hundreds of others that have disappeared from official US government websites (1); a Palestinian green card holder who led protests in his university against the genocide of his people was arrested and given a deportation order by ICE (2), while misogynist extremist and proponent of rape Andrew Tate is flown in(3). At once terrifying and absurd – and there’s plenty more that could be mentioned – this nightmare is unfortunately all too real for everyone that Trump’s politics threatens inside and outside the US. Trump’s second term is both coinciding with, and giving huge impetus to, a broader authoritarian, far-right shift politically across the world. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany received 20.8% in federal elections in February 2025, as part of a wave of electoral successes for far-right forces across Europe, which has resulted in far-right parties being represented in government, and even far-right heads of state, from Meloni in Italy, to Viktor Orban in Hungary. Modi, in power for more than a decade in India, has a band of fascists on the ground in the BJP supporting him. A capitalist system ensconced in a profound and multi-faceted crisis provides the backdrop to the system’s unfolding reactionary turn. But how far in a rightward direction can things be pushed? Is fascism once again on the horizon, heralded by Trump? And what can we do to stem the rising fascist tide? Reactionary ideology Far-right politics are always extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They lean into and seek to mobilise every existing supremacy within capitalist society, and deepen every corresponding oppression. This means that the far right are deeply and actively racist, misogynist, queerphobic, ableist etc. And of course it means that far-right politics stand for the class supremacy of the capitalist class, and the consequent deepening of the exploitation of the working class, the poor, and the environment. Far-right politics are reactionary – ultra-conservative – and they have been growing everywhere, including within and without the traditional political parties of capitalism. All of this poses a threat to the rights of exploited and oppressed groupings, and furthermore creates fertile ground for the growth of specifically fascist organising – the most extreme and dangerous of all far-right politics. In order to approximate answers to the questions posed about the fascist menace today, it’s worth looking back at when fascism rose in Europe in the inter-war period and took power in Italy and Germany, to determine its particular qualities, to help us understand developments today and of course to act accordingly. In his study of fascism, Marxist historian David Renton has written how: “Fascism is a reactionary ideology. Reactionary here is not used to mean that fascism sought to turn back the whole course of history, although there was a sense in which fascism sought a return to the past. Fascism was reactionary in that it aimed to crush the organised working class and to eradicate the reforms won by decades of peaceful struggle. Fascism did not exist to restore a mythical rural idyll, but to solve the problem of working-class hostility to capitalism.” (4) Fascism: the radical far right Fascists are always deeply hostile to socialists, to all organisations and movements of the left, including the trade union and worker movements. Fascism’s anti-communism / anti-socialism was one of its central tenets in the inter-war period. A defining feature of fascist politics is its enactment of physical violence against marginalised groupings. This violence is also concentrated heavily against the conscious expression of working-class politics, and the solidarity and unity of all the exploited inherent in it. The fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany represented a violent destruction of powerful socialist and working-class movements in both countries – movements that had mounted mass revolutionary uprisings in preceding years, threatening a liberatory alternative to capitalism and war. Fascist takeovers were not slow or creeping – they came at times of profound crisis for the system and represented the most brutal smashing of the threat posed to capitalist interests – by working-class struggle and organised socialist forces. Fascist violence in Italy amid Mussolini’s seizure of power was most virulent in industrial areas as opposed to rural ones, and within this, in districts that had had the strongest organised socialist presence in the workers’ movement.(5) There was a definite dual feature of the context of fascist victories in Italy and Germany: profound economic and political crises for the capitalist system was combined with the connected threat to that system of an organised and arisen socialist movement. This duality was the context in which the capitalist class rowed in behind the fascists’ counter-revolutionary takeover. Once in power, both the Mussolini and Hitler regimes ‘radicalised’, with their heinous politics and policies becoming more extreme. Both regimes affected each other and encouraged this process – as seen, for example, in how the anti-semitism in Italy, which descended into a genocidal massacre of Jewish people there, only became a central feature of the regime after Hitler came to power in Germany. A social movement Of course notable is that these fascist takeovers then meant that a dictatorship had taken grip. There were no more elections in Italy under fascism after 1924 or in Germany after 1933. So fascism always means dictatorship, and an extinguishing of any remaining semblance of democracy. Moreover, such a regime cannot tolerate and
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