Trump and the Mobilization of the United States for Imperialist War

On September 30, hundreds of US generals and admirals, representing the entire top brass of the US military, gathered in Washington, DC, for an impromptu and “unusual” meeting with President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The purpose of the meeting was revealed when Hegseth delivered a passionate sermon to the officers, denouncing the degeneration of the War Department.

Predictably, the “liberal” propagandists, along with all the other bourgeois gossip columns that peddle “political news,” feign outrage at Hegseth for his alleged endorsement of “war crimes,” declaring his total “incompetence” and attributing it solely to his alleged “fascist/right-wing madness.” On the contrary, we communists emphasize that Hegseth’s threatening comments make perfect sense in light of the impending imperialist world war and correctly anticipate all the “Nazi-style” atrocities that American capital will require to defend its military hegemony and shift the burden of capital destruction onto the Chinese bloc.

But there is also another interesting concept in this meeting: Trump openly stated the need for a “rapid reaction force that can help quell civil unrest. He even told Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” referring to recent protests in the cities, as Minneapolis or Los Angeles. Trump adds that “this is going to be important for the people in this room [i.e., the military], because this is the internal enemy, and we have to deal with it before it gets out of control. It will not get out of control.” What could this “internal enemy” be, if not the proletariat?

The bourgeois state is well aware of the dangers that an insurgent proletariat would pose to it; regardless of whether this aggressive mobilization is really “optimal” for the immediate needs of the regime today, Trump and Hegseth are nevertheless perfectly right to recognize “the enemy within.” Whether or not such a response is appropriate to the “current” situation, it will certainly be the response of the bourgeois state tomorrow; and we might even say that Trump’s scathing references to “World War III” are unusually “honest” for a head of state.

It would be very naive of us to believe that, in the face of such and apparently disproportionate and aggressive mobilization of the repressive forces of the state, there is a real weakness in American democracy. The Trump administration’s mobilization of 4,100 armed men against just 1,000 unarmed protesters, helping to reinforce the image of a “fascist” government, mystifies the nature of the state and deceives the workers: on the one hand, it gives them the false impression that the executive power of the state is invincible, capable of circumventing and crushing every single revolt.

And secondly, the intensification of visible oppression drives them into the arms of bourgeois left politicians, who claim to restore democracy amid this madness.

The democratic political machine likes to present itself as the victim of a coup by Trump’s oligarchy with the recent purges of state officials; but in reality, there has been no coup: the current president’s program is entirely consistent with the interests of American capital, even if it appears to have violated a non-existent democracy. So this alleged Trumpian coup of 2025, if you will, was even more of a carnival farce than Mussolini’s “March on Rome”, because in that historical episode there was a combative proletariat lined up on the class front, while in the American case the proletariat was completely absent, there was no need to repress anything, but it was only an internal clash between various factions of the bourgeoisie vying for control of the state apparatus.

Of course, the political machine of the so-called democratic opposition would have American workers believe that it is only Trump’s “madness” that is pushing the United States to the brink of world war, but the truth is that politicians have no real power to decide this inevitability, they decide nothing more than minor statistical fluctuations.

The third imperialist world war is made inevitable by the economic laws of capitalism, in which no “head of state” has any independent power to “decide” the economic interests of his country and can only adapt, more or less effectively. Marx described the economic basis of such a war in Capital, Vol. 3, as the capitalist crisis (particularly in Chapter 15): “the inevitable production of a certain excess of capital that requires the destruction of this mass of capital, thus creating a situation in which every enterprise must engage in competitive struggle to save its own capital value from this burden, pushing for the destruction of this surplus capital of the weaker enterprises. At a higher geopolitical level, this manifests itself in a situation where “wars of invasion inevitably occur [between states and ‘blocs’ of states], with plunder and brigandage on both sides, for the division of markets and the subdivision and redistribution of the sphere of influence of finance capital” (Classical Theses and Party Assessments on Imperialist Wars, 1989).

This is in fact what happened in the imperialist world wars of the 20th century. To summarize greatly: all the European colonies and even Western Europe itself were subjected to American imperialism in the period 1914-1945, transforming completely from “great powers” to mere vassals. American financial and military hegemony thus absorbed 80% of the world’s territories, completely ousting the old European colonial empires (although some remnants stubbornly resisted), and the vast majority of the world’s coastlines became subject to the looming tyranny of American aircraft carriers.

The “socialist” bloc of Russian imperialism, of course, had been attempting to prepare an attack against the stronger US imperialism for more than 40 years, but was defeated in the late 1980s, giving rise to a new temporary moment of US “unipolar” supremacy.

This historical phase is marked by the rise of Chinese capitalism and imperialism, and the alliance that seems to be rapidly forming between China and Russia (which also includes Iran and other dependent states), as Asia’s “shield” against US invasion.

There is no way that China’s economic and military rise can ever be compatible with the existing prosperity of powerful American imperialism, which is economically compelled to defend its ability to set the rules of global capital accumulation in its own favor, i.e., the great prize it won in the Second Imperialist World War. And it must defend its military power on land and sea, its control over global finance, over the rules of international trade: in general, its ability to dictate trade terms to China and peripheral nations, rather than letting the People’s Republic of China dictate those same trade terms to the United States and those same peripheral nations.

Therefore, it is completely useless to speculate whether the government leaders of the United States or the People’s Republic of China want war or not, and whether we can commit ourselves to any “anti-war” policy. Even if those bourgeois politicians do not ‘want’ to go to war according to their “personal will,” their hands are completely tied by the economic laws of capitalism that inexorably lead to war. We also emphasize that this applies to the People’s Republic of China as well, despite all its disgusting pacifist demagogy.

All state governments know full well that “peace” is unthinkable (despite their propaganda), being the competition between capitalist giants the rule of the imperialist era. They know that for them the only “options” are a world dominated by China or by America. In such a situation, clearly the only choice for the Chinese is to work for a situation favorable to China “uber alles,” aiming to destroy not only the military power of the United States, but also that of yesterday’s Russian “allies,” if the balance of forces somehow allowed it, obviously subjecting the globe as much as possible to the domination of Chinese financial capital using the same brutal “techniques” employed by the United States.

The compulsion of Chinese capital for the unbridled expansion of its industry, its markets, its spheres of geopolitical and financial influence is qualitatively equal to that of the United States, even if not yet quantitatively. And therefore their “obstinacy,” their refusal to destroy their own capital, will be equally responsible with American imperialism for the next world war. It cannot be ruled out that Chinese imperialism will even launch the first attack, a “preemptive strike”, because it is convinced that if it does not act decisively, the United States will strike first and shift the “momentum” of the war to its side. In any case, any talk of alleged “aggressors” will only be an obstacle to the preparation of revolutionary defeatism among the proletariat.

It is a classic thesis of the party that capitalism constantly alternates between “democratic” and “fascist” modes of rule according to the needs of repressing the proletariat. But in the particular case of the current US administration, we assert that the apparent “rise of fascism” has almost no real substance and serves only to politically disorient the proletariat. Although some of the particularly “extreme” actions of the second Trump administration may be useful in mobilizing the nation and the working class for the future tasks of imperialist war, there is no guarantee that the bourgeoisie will keep Trump as the leader of this operation forever. In fact, as mentioned above, there are good reasons to believe that the current administration’s leadership style is actually unsuited to some of the technical tasks involved in such preparation, and that the most positive function of Trump’s theatrical antics would be to strengthen American anti-fascism, which today clings to bourgeois politicians for support.

In any case, there is no reason why US capitalism should not dump Trump when the time is right, replacing him at the last minute with a more palatable, technocratic, and “unifying” state figure to finally lead the American nation into imperialist war. This is likely to be the long-term outcome of this confusing situation, given that the American republic has always prided itself on the supposed righteousness of its “democratic” leadership, using it as a mandate for world imperialism. Today, we can even see American politicians preparing for this eventuality by reminding workers that old Roosevelt – an imperialist predator vying à la Mussolini –  was in fact the best exponent of the glorious American tradition of anti-fascism. In the long run, these statements are only part of US capitalism’s preparations to finally launch global imperialist war, a war that will surely be justified as a sacred anti-fascist crusade.

In the current historical phase, the culmination of this process of cajoling is what prepares the workers of the Western states to massacre without remorse many millions of proletarians of the opposing “fascist” faction. It is to this end that both the American and Russian regimes, now joined by the Chinese, have been working for over 70 years, constantly denouncing their rivals as fascists and promoting themselves as democrats. Especially in the case of American workers—who will surely be enlisted in the global conflict to once again serve as the “white guard,” occupying enemy territories and preventing the rebellion of the working class within. The only options available to it is to become the red guard of the future revolution or the white guard that prevents and destroys this revolution.

Faced with such a “casus belli”, all the exhausting agitation of American workers for anti-fascism, focused entirely on replacing Trump or the Republican Party with more “competent” and democratic leaders of the nation, will have led to nothing more than framing workers as the “white guard” of the future imperialist world war.

Whether it is a “Trumpist” or an “anti-Trumpist” — or some other future political abomination — leading the vanguard in the first battle, it really does not matter. Both parties are totally united in their goal of keeping the American proletariat subordinate to the national front.

It is common in American politics today to speak nostalgically of a return to the 1950s, the supposed prosperity of the post-World War II period, and this is encouraged by the political establishment precisely because it represents the opposite of what the working class should believe. The so-called prosperity of the 1950s was the result of the opportunistic corruption of the labor movement, the merging of the “workers’ parties” and union leaderships with the imperialist state at war.

The anti-fascist rhetoric about Trump only serves to worsen the miasma of nostalgia for this imperialist-opportunist orientation, and we cannot rule out the real possibility that the eventual leader of the first strike in the next global conflict will be modeled on the “Roosevelt model” that is so highly praised today. The recent victory of “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani is a good example of such social-democratic preparation foreshadowed in advance, in which the Democrats are clearly preparing to stage a comeback, should it be necessary to lead imperialist war under their direction: the proletariat will be doomed if it trusts them. The American and world working class has no chance of stopping such a war (or even mitigating its impact) through the miserable bourgeois politics of “working within the system,” because imperialism is driven to war regardless of who is nominally in command. Therefore, its political superstructure serves only to defuse and redirect proletarian energies, ultimately strengthening the war effort.

The bourgeoisie has more than enough flexibility to replace its political “mask” when the time comes to call to arms, but for now, the grotesque carnival of the Republican administration and the aspiring “Matteotti” who fight it are still very useful to its purpose. Until the working class frees itself from this control, the call to the working class to “defend democracy” at home will seamlessly transform into the call to “defend democracy” abroad, to destroy the Chinese threat to American imperialist power. The only thing that will ultimately be destroyed is not “imperial fascism,” which today is a truly universal scourge from Washington to Beijing, but rather the mass of excess capital that is currently suffocating the pores of global capitalism; the entire system will thus be prolonged for at least another half-century, infused with the fresh blood sacrifice of hundreds of millions of proletarians. The only way to avoid this catastrophe is for the working class to rely exclusively on its own strength, free itself from the short-term temptations and long-term dangers of opportunism in the political and economic spheres, and abandon national fronts.