MAGA and the working class
The MAGA movement confirms the classic formulation of Marx
For many years, it seemed to me that the classic Marxist concept of the working class at the vanguard of socialist revolution is not consistent with U.S. realities and conditions. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was middle class students who were in the vanguard of the anti-war movement and an incipient anti-imperialist formulation. In contrast, most workers supported the war in Vietnam and possessed an aggressive and ethnocentric attitude with respect to other nations. In addition, the union movement emphasized wages and benefits, rather than a comprehensive critique that would point the way toward the expansion and development of national industry.
However, since that time, academics and activists, largely of the middle class, have failed to develop the anti-imperialist impulse of the late 1960s. To be sure, they have rejected Reaganism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, and they have been advocates for blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and ecological consciousness. However, they failed to personally encounter and take seriously the insights of the people’s movements of the Global South, which would have liberated them for constructive participation in the rapidly maturing worldwide anti-imperialist movement for a more just, democratic, sustainable, and multipolar world order. And which would have provided important lessons with respect to the role of the state in the economy, in which the state directs the economy in cooperation with big corporations, and where the public and private sectors work together in expanding national production and developing the national economy. Public-private cooperation has been the emerging practice of the socialist and progressive states of the Global South and East of the last half century, and appreciation of this important global tendency would have enabled U.S. public debate to move beyond the simplistic Big Government/laisse faire dichotomy and political division.
Compounding this historic failure of the U.S. middle class since the 1970s, academics and activists during the last decade have turned to a form of cultural Marxism that is not Marxist. Guided by post-modern assumptions, cultural Marxism constructs ahistorical and anti-empirical narratives with respect to race, ignoring the historic and permanent gains forged by the African-American movement from 1917 to 1988, and paying no more than superficial attention to the insights of its principal leaders. And it constructs narratives with respect to gender and sexual identity that ignore nature, and that depart from the equal rights agenda of the women’s movement in its earlier waves. Moreover, it has combined these theoretically dubious tendencies with intolerant authoritarianism that attacks with incivility all who raise reasonable common-sense objection. Such tendencies were an important factor, as nearly all commentators have observed, in the disproportionate support of the working class for Trump and the Republican Party in the 2024 elections.
Academics and activists tend to say that Trump supporters are racist and sexist, lacking the sophistication necessary for our times. But blinded by their own assumptions, academics and activists have not carefully observed, and therefore they do not understand, the MAGA phenomenon. Although it lacks consistent anti-imperialist consciousness, the MAGA movement reasonably and correctly responds to the American economic, political, and moral decline.
A first critical step in the U.S. spiral of decline was during the Truman administration, when the U.S. government launched the Cold War and failed to take steps toward the construction of a post-neocolonial world order, which was the best option of the historic moment, taking into account the worldwide rise of anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements, and taking into account the arrival of the world-system to its geographical and ecological limits. Subsequently, when the negative consequences of the Cold War became manifest, the American political establishment turned to neoliberalism, reducing the capacity of states throughout the world to take modest measures in defense of their peoples and their sovereignty. After that, the American political establishment turned to neoconservatism and imperialist overreach, embroiling the nation in costly endless wars that did little to promote American interests. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism, inasmuch as they are attacks on the states and peoples of the world, provoked a mass migration to the regions of the advanced economies, which the political establishment made little effort to control, in part because they themselves lacked national identity, and in part because some were positioned to benefit from the cheaper labor that undocumented immigrants provide. During all this time, the American political establishment made little effort to attend to the long-term development of the productive capacities of the nation, which would have been of great benefit to the working and middle classes; it was more oriented to short-term profits and financial speculation. When these dynamics are fully understood, it can be seen that the American political establishment has betrayed the nation and the American people.
If we look carefully at the MAGA program, rather than dismissing it out of hand, we can see that it responds to the various dimensions of the American decline, even though it lacks a consistent anti-imperialism. The MAGA platform proposes: effective regulation of immigration; development of the nation’s economy through economic nationalism; avoiding dysfunctional entanglements in other nations; and leaving divisive wokism behind. The disproportionate support of the working class for MAGA can be understood as an expression of working-class consciousness, where the working class is acting in defense of itself, in reaction to attacks on workers’ wellbeing, imposed by a bureaucratic state that has institutionalized the agenda of the political establishment and its middle class, academic, and activist allies.
In this new political context, it makes sense to invoke the classic Marxist concept of a working-class vanguard, of a movement for the taking of political power that derives its force from the support and active participation of workers. Carlos Garrido, Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and Secretary of Education of the recently formed American Communist Party, suggested to me a formulation of a vanguard constituted by the working class and all class forces that have an antagonistic relation with monopoly capitalism, such that the taking of political power by the working class would make possible a state that acts decisively in defense of all sectors of the people, including not only workers but also professionals and small businesspersons.
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The partisan and the MAGA movement
Haz Al-Din maintains that the critiques of the Left are dissociated from actual political struggle and contestations for political power, and therefore they are revolutionary only in appearance. He writes that leftists have disdain for the people; in their view, “people are too reactionary, too fascist, too immoral, or too stupid to accept the supposedly universal values of leftism.” Leftists have “a vicious, savage inhumanity toward all those who fall outside their own discursive community.”1
Invoking Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan, Al-Din maintains that the partisan, in contrast to leftists, actually contests for political power. Partisans go down to the people in order to establish a real experiential foundation for their premises. The partisan displaces the left-right ideological distinction by occupying an entirely new counterhegemonic space, which seeks to construct a new order that is based in the people and in commitment to eternal principles of social justice.
For Al-Din, the real political conflict in the United States today is not between the left and right but between leftism and partisanship. And in addition, he maintains, the MAGA movement is the only political space where partisanship exists, where there is a contestation for power rooted in the personal and concrete struggles and aspirations of the people. Therefore, Al-Din calls upon communists to go to the MAGA movement, seeking to transform its diverse earthly formulations into a more mature historical and political conceptualization.2 The MAGA Movement must be educated concerning the true characteristics of communism as formulated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the true characteristics of socialism as developed in practice in the Soviet Union and China.
I support this call, although I would give emphasis to Cuba and China, and I would stress the need to raise consciousness with respect to the nations that are attempting to construct socialism in the context of bourgeois political structures, such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. And I would seek to educate the people with respect to the worldwide anti-imperialist process of constructing in practice a more just and pluripolar world, in which socialist and progressive countries of the Global South and East are playing a leading role.
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Further considerations
The MAGA movement has a fundamental legitimacy, in that it is rooted in the working class and in middle America. It has attained an understanding of the unsustainability of endless wars and imperialist overreach, adopting the slogan “peace through strength,” which advocates a strong military that functions primarily as a deterrent and not as a force that intervenes everywhere. We must seek to educate MAGA toward a consistent anti-imperialism, in which it arrives to understand that the strengthening of the productive capacities of the nation can only be attained through cooperation and mutually beneficial trade with all the nations and regions of the world, as is persistently proclaimed by the leading socialist, progressive, and anti-imperialist states of the world.
The Trump-led MAGA movement has adopted a strategy of taking control of the Republican Party, rather than establishing a new political party. The MAGA movement has attained control of the Republican Party through Trump’s successes in the Republican Party primaries for three consecutive presidential elections from 2016 through 2024. It has won the presidency in the general elections of 2024, and Trump is effectively forming a cabinet in accordance with the MAGA agenda. It can count on the support of the majority of the Supreme Court on most issues, thanks to conservative Trump appointments during his first administration. And it controls state governments in many red states.
However, the MAGA movement has not attained full political power. The MAGA-controlled Republican Party has attained only narrow majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and not all Republicans are MAGA. And the MAGA movement does not have control of the federal state bureaucracy and its numerous departments. In addition, the MAGA movement does not have control of the media, think tanks, foundations, and higher education, although it has a minority institutional presence in all these areas.
The extent to which the MAGA movement will move toward full political power will depend in large part on the extent to which the second Trump administration can deliver on its promises. If the Trump administration has success in renewing the productive capacity of the American economy, its support among the people will grow, enabling the consolidation of its power in national institutions and in red and swing states.
The possible consolidation of political power by the MAGA movement should not be viewed as something sinister. MAGA’s emergence as a dominant political force in American institutions would be a good thing, if MAGA in conditions of partial political power acts in defense of the nation and the people. During the next four years, political analysts should assess the extent to which the second Trump administration promotes the long-term interests of the nation and the people, basing their analyses on careful empirical observation and not outdated ideological conceptions, distortions, and prejudices.
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“The Rise of MAGA Communism,” Infrared, September 19, 2022.
Haz Al-Din, who is now Chairman of the American Communist Party (ACP), wrote the article before the establishment of the ACP. He thus was not proposing here a position of the ACP with respect to the MAGA-controlled Republican Party.