On Gaza and the struggle to restrain Trump

Israel’s war on Gaza has already facilitated the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. The chances are that it will free him up significantly to go further in office than he managed the last time he was in power.

Trump is both like and unlike the fascists of the 1930s. He’s lazy, cantankerous, incapable of building a consensus among U.S. institutions. He doesn’t want or need to. His model isn’t the abolition of democracy exactly, so much as the creation of permanent advantages for his party and his class. But there are good reasons to assume that his ability to do harm will be worse this time than it was last time round. His desire for vengeance is greater. He has a very similar relation to a party (i.e., the 6 Jan people) to the one Hitler or Mussolini had, only mediated through social media rather than dues payment or party publications. The state and public opinion will treat this election as a retrospective approval of the 6 Jan attempted coup, even if there are any individuals who miss out on a Trump pardon.

The question, really, is what sort of processes might push Trump to go further even than he has gone already?

In the election, the Republicans had a much easier story to tell than the Democrats. They wanted the war and wanted Israel to win. They invited Netanyahu to address Congress and they were the people in the room to applaud him. Netanyahu was one of the first to congratulate Trump on his victory. The Democrats had a much harder story to tell. They wanted their base to believe both that they were delivering an Israeli victory, and that they were acting as a limiting force preventing revenge from tipping over into murder. That story was incoherent from the start of the incursion into Gaza, at which point it became clear that this was going to be one of the most protracted and violent processes of mass killing anywhere in the world since 1945.

The Democrats have funded the war and supplied, with their British allies, the intelligence which is being used to enable the technological mass murder of civilians. They were in favour of Israel against the international order, against the world court, against any limits on military power. All the latter, they insisted, could be ignored for the sake of a much-loved ally. To the extent that the Democrats briefed that they were restraining Israel, that country’s actions showed either that they were telling lies or that they were weak. Red line after red line was crossed, the Democrats alleged that Israel would agree to a peace deal when it didn’t, would hold back from the bombing of hospitals when it didn’t, wouldn’t assassinate its enemies until it did, wouldn’t take part in genocide but it had. This is why Biden seemed old and doddery—because he couldn’t do anything to use all those dollars and those guns except to achieve different outcomes from the ones in which he claimed to believe.

In the American political system, presidents are weak because they depend on support in Congress to pass legislation, and it is rare for a President both to have majorities in both houses, and the good relationships needed to pass significant laws. Yet presidents are strong, in the sense that the Constitution gives them unlimited control over U.S. military power. Biden and Harris armed Israel. But they also told a significant group of their voters that they did not want or believe in the war. That combination made no sense to anyone.

So, what happens next? Counter-revolutionary politics rise with the combination and inter-relationship of significant events. A useful historical analogy is the original age of fascism which derived its power from the combination of Mussolini and Hitler’s victories. The former represented such a breakthrough that within weeks of coming to power there were imitative pro-fascist groups being set up in almost every country in Europe. Hitler copied Mussolini’s march on Rome. He didn’t call his party fascist because he had ambitions for domination. On capturing state power, he set off a dynamic of emulation, rivalry and competition which encouraged both parties to act further to the right. Sometimes, e.g. over Austria, they competed. Sometimes, e.g. in Spain, they fought in alliance. The two regimes pushed each other on and on—culminating in the Second World War.

What this piece is trying to explain, at the level of theory, is what sets off these dynamics of rapid counter-revolutionary advance.

On the left, several Marxists have theorized the ideal circumstances for revolution as a dynamic of permanent revolution. In their “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” published in 1850, Marx and Engels described the socialist revolution as one which spread ever deeper in terms of the change it was trying to achieve:

It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world—that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it.

In his “Results and Prospects,” published in 1905, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued that part of the process which enables this ideal condition of an onward, ever-deepening revolution, was that the underlying social movement had spread across borders. He wrote that the Russian working class “will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe … it will cast [itself] into the scales of the class struggle of the entire capitalist world.” (This lack of international revolution is part of why the Russian revolution of 1917, in the end, failed to achieve its goals of working class self-governance). Trotsky was right—the way you get Marx’s deeper social change is by spreading the revolution across borders.

A process of permanent revolution on the left is different from what happens when you see counter-revolution on the right. The Left and the Right do not exist in comparable relations to the existing capitalist world—the Left is always cutting against significant social processes (the domination of society by the rich, people’s alienation and lack of belief in our collective power); the Right is always cutting with them. Nor are revolution and counter-revolution two identical processes just going in opposite directions. They are not like a film that you watch sometimes on play and sometimes on rewind.

But to comprehend the circumstances taking place around us, it is useful to understand that there is a counter-revolutionary process taking place in the world, and that there is a certain broad analogy between the revolution which communists want to see and the way in which history now seems to be turning against us and the people we see as allies.

There exists within the Left a revolutionary camp, made up of people who want to push history as far as it can go in the direction of democracy, social democracy and, as Marx and Engels put it, towards the abolition of private property. Just as we exist, so do a further group of people on the other side of politics, let us call them “fascists,” who want to see the destruction within society of any remaining elements of social democracy—the incorporation of trade unions into the state, the destruction of any remaining social elements to the state (the NHS, Obamacare), the silencing, and jailing or murder of left-wing activists.

What makes a social revolution possible is a process in which people connect their social and political demands. In the ideal version of permanent revolution, this might mean something like workers go on strike to improve their living standards, they come into conflict with the police, they lose all trust in the existing state, a strike-wave raises new economic and political demands, with the economic and political driving each other on until the only solution is plainly social revolution. In the present-day circumstances of permanent counter-revolution, the far right insists that it has both economic demands (the removal of migrant workers, supposedly to help the white working class) and political solutions, Trump’s promise to be dictator on day one. The two sets of demands fit into each other, and drive them both on.

When revolutionaries imagine the transformation and destruction of the existing state, we often conceive of this as a process of prefigurative confrontations, in which we take on key state institutions and defeat them until we acquire such power on the streets that even key state institutions are vulnerable to us—we dream of storming parliament, of capturing the Winter Palace. So too do our antagonists on the right. Unlike us, in the United States, they have recent experience of achieving at least one of those symbolic victories—January 6.

There is, on both Left and Right, a long history of people capturing certain surface elements of the state without taking over its real apparatus. So, for example, in Italy today, you have a party of fascist origin in government without that party having governed according to the full fascist program. Elections still happen, large parts of the press and broadcasting are still controlled by people who aren’t fascists. The Brothers of Italy haven’t built a one-party state.

This is the point at which we should be taking seriously Trotsky’s insistence that permanent revolution can only be achieved by an international process. The same is true of the counter-revolution. It can go, on any durable basis, from political victory to social revolution only by taking power in several nation states at once.

This is why the ongoing war against Gaza is so important for life under Trump. For the historical significance of fascism was that it was a rebound from colonialism to the West. Under classical imperialism, Europe had exported war and genocide to the countries of the global south. Fascism reversed that process, making war possible again between major states, telling Europeans that the colonial killings which had been legitimate when practised against native people could be done with impunity against fellow Europeans since they also belonged to a category of racial inferiors.

Gaza has been the colonial war reappearing, with the thirteenth richest country in the world measured in GDP per capita, treating its subject population as so subhuman that they are the legitimate targets for mass death. And the world’s great powers, rather than expelling Israel from their ranks, have equipped that state with the guns and intelligence to complete their task.

Every moral line that was drawn after 1945 to stop fascism and genocide from coming back, has now been crossed by Western societies. If Trump, being the sort of politician he is, should say—that he too wants his wars, he too wants his racial victories—then he can expect no sanction for demanding them. In making excuses for Israel’s war, Biden and Harris have made it easier for Trump to say that he can do what he likes and who cares what the rules say.

The point of this piece is not to make predictions about what Trump will do. My comments are directed rather to participants in the popular movements trying to restrain him. The facts of Israel’s war and the western support for it will make life much harder for those of us who are genuinely committed to resistance—to stop the war—and to stop him.