Maurice B. | Red Phoenix correspondent | New York–

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

—Martin Niemöller

Hardly a month into the second Trump administration, and these infamous words become a stark reminder of the consequences of inactivity, indifference, or even naivete. We would like to believe that what we are witnessing in front of us is not happening, that possibly there will be a vestige of the liberal bourgeois order that will speak out for us in these dire times. Our justifiable fear and distress for the future in front of us is no laughing matter, and is no reason to turn to your neighbor, coworker or comrade and throw blame. We cannot fool ourselves into believing that the victory of MAGA, Trump, Elon Musk and their lackeys appeared from thin air – these monopoly capitalists’ and tech billionaires’ rise to power is a direct result of capitalist development. It has been made clearer than ever that their fascist, eugenicist, xenophobic, transphobic, and anti-worker ideology has an impassioned and loyal support base among the petty-bourgeoisie and big bourgeoisie that is willing to sow insurrection, disinformation and unfettered hatred at their enemies – whether real or perceived – often in spite of the truth (as they stand against it frequently). Following his ominous statement in December 2023 that he would be a dictator on day one of his re-election, Trump has used his presidential power to attack immigrants, transgender people, “radicals,” and all beneficiaries to “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies, including women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, the disabled, the elderly, and religious minorities. In this new era of Trump, the war against the working and oppressed classes is open and apparent.

Manipulating the desperation of the masses of the American people, the Trump administration has forgone legal loopholes and has bent legality altogether to effectively forge their “reborn America,” targeting the most vulnerable members of our population and anybody left of their reactionary politics of bigotry and nationalism. In 1930s Germany, Nazis hunted journalists and Reichstag deputies along with the communists. Today, Trump is firing his enemies at the DOJ and terminating DEI programs. Tomorrow, he may be imprisoning them in El Salvador or making use of Executive Order 14164 (reinstatement of the death penalty) to outright murder his political opposition legally.

We are all quite aware that comparisons to Nazism, Hitler, or German Fascism are abundant in our post-WWII world but we cannot blissfully ignore the similarities between the past and the present. During the rise of Hitlerite Germany, public perception of the Nazis was largely that they were absurd and overly obsessive – cult-like, even. We can all remember back in 2015, when Trump announced his intention to run for president and many people laughed it off. Throughout his first term, he was the crux of countless Saturday Night Live skits and John Oliver monologues, but this term has already proven to be different. As with the Nazi Party and Hiterlite Germany, the MAGA movement doesn’t appear so absurd now. It shouldn’t take us to see a politically-motivated public shooting by the Proud Boys or reports of torture and death in Guantanamo or renewed violence in Palestine to begin to understand that we are dealing with decaying rotten capitalism fighting back against the tide of history. We cannot forget the words of Comrade Dimitrov: “Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class … In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

Trump has begun a trade war, left the United Nations Human Rights Council, and vowed to take ownership of Gaza to “level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs,” while cozying up to the war criminal Netanyahu openly and unapologetically. Other genocidal and expansionist threats include military force against Panama for ownership of the Panama Canal, the desire to make Canada “the 51st state,” and the material plunder of Greenland. Hitler called for Lebenstraum and Generalplan Ost as he plotted for German control of Europe and then the world. We must not allow ourselves to sit back and watch while the convicted felon Donald Trump stokes all too familiar flames of war, depression, and ethnic cleansing. It is our duty as communists, as revolutionaries, and as workers to stand up and organize ourselves to combat the enemy within our walls. 

Fight back against the vile tide of reaction and fascism. Don’t let the reactionary ideals of science denial, replacement theory, and the overarching program of Project 2025 allow you to become distracted. Your fellow worker is not your enemy. Elon Musk is your enemy; Robert F. Kennedy is your enemy; Marco Rubio is your enemy; Donald Trump is your enemy.

From 2015 to today, MAGA has amassed a legion behind the cult of personality of Donald Trump, and after his electoral defeat in 2020, has used social media and the content creator community to organize their supporters for the victory we have witnessed in the 2024 American presidential election. In the last 4 years, the MAGA movement went from an embarrassed and seemingly defeated political movement to an emboldened and reinvigorated bureaucracy of capitalists, fascists, and reactionaries determined to utilize Trump’s second term to dismantle the social safety nets that millions of Americans depend on to survive — SNAP, FAFSA, Medicare, and Medicaid — while lining their own pockets and that of their businesses with millions in tax cuts and federal deals.

With Elon’s purchase of Twitter, he transformed the social media platform into an echo chamber for reactionary, misogynistic, and xenophobic content, where account “verification” could be bought by anyone, and those that went against these changes were either algorithmically shadow-banned or banned from the website outright (including journalists often critical of Musk). Following the Jan. 6 insurrection, X, TruthSocial and other online bastions of right-wing content became forums for insurrectionists, sympathizers, and those previously undecided to have their perspectives acknowledged and endorsed. Musk’s purchase of the platform and subsequent ideologically-charged changes and rhetoric as CTO (former CEO) of the platform led to a mass exodus of users as it became all too clear that Musk and his supporters were providing a “safe space” for fascists, white supremacists, and all other kinds of dangerous reactionaries to spew hate and disinformation without any true resistance.

The grassroots #50501 protests (“50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”) that began on Feb. 5, were an outpouring of spontaneous political action from liberals and the general left that is par for the course in our disorganized labor and communist movements. It was lacking organization and concrete political demands but it most importantly showed that the working class will not go away silently into the night. The masses of the people mobilizing from Rhode Island to Nevada gathered outside city halls and their respective capitol buildings to let their demands be heard. The working class reminded the bourgeoisie that the world is ours to inherit as it is our children’s and theirs after them. That it is not the plaything of billionaires, tech industry elites, and reactionaries. We will not allow tomorrow to be the next Nazism but the reincarnation of true Bolshevism for the liberation of the masses. The future is ours to create.

To all of these changes in the political climate and federal government, our instinct as a class, as revolutionaries and as Marxist-Leninists, is to hit the streets amongst our class brothers and sisters, to lock arms and face our enemies with heads held high and chest poked out, ready to conquer the forces of reaction. And that is all good, it is essential work. But it cannot be all that we do. It cannot become cyclical or habitual to mobilize but never to organize. The greatest detriment to our potential as a class, as the workers and toilers of the United States and of the world, is our inability to organize ourselves like a fist against the forces of capital, of reaction, of fascism. We desperately need organization to win and to save the concessions afforded to us by bourgeois neoliberal democracy. We need a party of the working class, a vanguard to lead our political work moving forward, so that these next four years will not become the precedent to WWIII but the precipice to proletarian revolution. So that throughout these next four years, we can amass our forces into a movement that not only surpasses that of MAGA and the Trumpites but puts their greatest “achievements” to shame and condemns their memory to the dustbin of history.

Categories: U.S. News