The people reclaim the republic
A true-Marxist analysis of the MAGA movement
When I listen to how words like Marxist and socialism are used in U.S. public discourse, I have the impression that virtually no one in the United States understands what these words mean, as formulated by Marx, Marxist thinkers, and leaders and intellectuals of countries that are constructing socialism. A certain amount of creativity in the use of words is good, especially in the context of changing times. But the way these words are used in public discussion in the United States is really off the charts.
So, when I announce my intention to write in this commentary a true-Marxist analysis of the MAGA movement, I feel that I ought to add a caveat: what I mean by Marxist is most likely not what you mean by the term.
I also feel that I ought to say a little about how I arrived to my current understanding of these terms. And so I note that my understanding is based on readings that I have undertaken during the course of the last forty-five years, including: every book that Marx wrote; key books and essays by Lenin; books written by Western Marxists and neo-Marxists of various stripes; books and articles on the history of nations that have undertaken the construction of socialism, including the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Most importantly, this reading has been supplemented by twenty-five years of extensive personal encounter and critical listening in Cuba, giving careful attention to the discourse of its leaders and intellectuals, especially Fidel and Díaz-Canel, as well as numerous conversations with comrades at the University of Havana. Of course, I give this reading and experience my own interpretation and application on the basis of other readings and my own objectives and commitments as an American patriot with religious beliefs.
I submit that a true-Marxist analysis is rooted in a concept of a Hegelian dialectic unfolding in the real, material world. Said concept is based in observation of the history and development of the modern world-system, through which there can be observed an evolution from European colonial domination of the world, establishing the foundations of the modern world-system (thesis) to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements by and for the colonized, driving a transition to partial independence, resulting in a neocolonial world-system (antithesis) to mutual and cooperative construction of a post-colonial world order that respects the sovereignty of all nations (synthesis).
Economic productivity is central to the unfolding Hegelian dialectic of the material world. The European colonizers were driven by a quest for gold and riches, and the transformations that they imposed on the conquered territories were integral to the establishment of a world-system that integrated and enormously elevated human productivity. During the phase of antithesis, the anti-colonial movements drove for the creation of independent and sovereign nations in an advanced modern world-system, seeking to construct norms and structures guaranteeing that each sovereign nation can pursue policies that increase its productivity, thereby ensuring a more equal distribution of the benefits of the increasing productivity of humanity.
A state governed by Marxist thought, therefore, in the first place, gives the highest priority to the economic productivity of the nation, seeking to elevate real national wages as well as the productivity of humanity as a whole. Further, a state governed by Marxist thought should stress ecologically sustainable forms of production in the long term, always analyzed scientifically, and not driven by ideology.
It is relevant to note here that the second Trump administration in its first weeks has ordered the giving of highest priority to the American national economy, restoring American manufacturing and expanding American commerce through the elimination of restrictions on the production of energy and the elimination of trade agreements that have terms detrimental to the American economy, replacing them with mutually beneficial trade relations. Although these measures of the Trump administration are often interpreted in the Latin world as a form of imperialist bullying, it should be recalled that the protection of national economies was put forward by the leading nations of the Third World as central to their sovereign economic development, and that said protection was eliminated by imperialist bullying in the form of neoliberalism. Trump is insisting the USA has the right to act in defense of its sovereignty.
Prior to the rise of the MAGA movement and its taking of political power in 2025 (the first Trump administration being merely a situation of partial control of the government), the American political establishment, since the stagflation of the 1970s, has been indifferent to the health of the American national economy. It gave priority to corporate short-term profits and financial speculation, provoking a gradual but definitive deindustrialization, reducing the socioeconomic wellbeing of the working and middle classes. The MAGA movement, convoked by Donald Trump beginning in 2016 by means of an economic and cultural populist nationalist discourse, emerged as an anti-establishment people’s movement that seeks to rectify this historic betrayal of the nation by the corporate elite and the political establishment.
In the second place, a Marxist analysis stresses the need for the taking of political power by the people, so that delegates and deputies of the people are able to implement policies in defense of the national interests and the needs of the people. In countries constructing socialism, like Cuba and China, systems of people’s democracy are developed as alternatives to representative democracy, with the intention of checking the power of the bourgeoisie and foreign interests. The alternative political system includes direct and indirect elections of assemblies of people’s power, which have final authority over state administration and legislation; the development of mass organizations that are integrated with the system of people’s power; and a vanguard political party that educates and guides. The alternative system has made possible political stability in the nations constructing socialism, at the same time that representative democracies are experiencing legitimation crises. The powerful nations of the West portray the alternative system of people’s democracy as authoritarian, as part of their multidimensional plan to stop the advance of socialism in the world.
With respect to the second Trump administration, it should be noted that its attack on the bureaucratic state assumes implicitly the concept of the power of the people. It maintains that the state bureaucracy has become a self-sustaining fourth branch of government, unaccountable to the people; and that the president, elected by the people, has the right and the duty to control the agencies and departments of the executive branch, and not permit it to continue to function as a self-sustaining and unaccountable fourth branch of government. At the same time, it also should be noted that the MAGA movement possesses, by and large, a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the nations that have decided for the construction of socialism, as a result of decades of propaganda disseminated by the Western powers and the think tanks and academics funded by Western corporate elites.
In the third place, in accordance with recent theoretical and empirical tendencies, a Marxist today makes a distinction between the people and the elite, also known as the corporate elite, the power elite, and the 1%. In the case of the United States, this distinction is necessary, because the elite in the United States has a long history of taking control of political, educational, religious, and mediatic institutions, shaping them to its own particular interests, often at the expense of the wellbeing of the nation and the people. The people must confront this elite usurpation of institutional power. And they must do so through open and respectful debate among themselves, seeking to arrive to a consensus with respect to the common interests of the people, and defending the interests of the people before the impositions of the elite.
Here too, the MAGA movement stands for tendencies that are viewed as positive developments from the vantage point of the Hegelian dialectic unfolding in the material world. The MAGA movement is an anti-establishment movement that proposes taking in the name of the people institutional power that has been usurped by the elite.
A Marxist analysis, therefore, based on empirical observation of modern worldwide dynamics, discerns the progressive transition in the real world, occurring step-by-step, toward a world of sovereign nation-states that are governed by delegates of the people, which are able to hold the interests of the elites at bay, and which act to promote economic productivity and to distribute its benefits in a just manner to the people. A Marxist analysis discerns, in the real world today, a transition toward states that defend the interest of their nations and their peoples, which is particularly strong in the Global East and South. A Marxist analysis sees in the MAGA movement proposals and policies that imply possible participation in this worldwide transition.
But who are the people?
The social classes and social sectors that form the American people
The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, written in 1787, begins, “We the people of the United States. . ..” In 1848, Karl Marx concluded the Communist Manifesto with the declaration, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite.” In 1953, in the speech known as “History Will Absolve Me,” which was at once a manifesto and a platform, Fidel called “the people” to a new stage of revolution, specifying the people as including agricultural workers, factory workers, tenant farmers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, and young professionals in health, education, engineering, law, and journalism.
So, when we advocate for a process of social change, whom are we convoking? The people? Workers? Workers, blacks and women? The 99%? Workers and oppressed groups? Who, in other words, are the people of the United States?
Historical consciousness is necessary for discerning the unfolding dynamics of the nation and the world-system, so I think it useful to understand the composition of the people of the United States in historical context.
Farmers and craftsmen constituted the great majority of the people of the United States at the time of the American Revolution. Jefferson constructed a progressive vision of the future of the nation on this foundation, believing that the American agricultural society could be preserved, based in commercial agriculture and widely distributed property, with smallholders exercising popular democracy. By 1830, the nation was still a nation of farms and small towns. In industry, the factory system had not yet taken hold; much production was carried out in small enterprises in which the employer was like a master craftsman supervising his apprentices.
Workers. During the course of the nineteenth century, craftsmen were replaced by industrial workers, and many farmers were replaced by agricultural workers, ending forever Jefferson’s vision of a democratic agricultural society with widely distributed property and many small landholders. American workers became the foundation of the American economy as it expanded its productivity and continued its road of economic ascent, culminating in the arrival of the United States to a position of hegemonic power by the end of the Second World War.
Our understanding of social change and political issues is shaped by our social class position. The working class tends in its proposals to stress better wages and benefits for workers, with limited comprehensive analysis with respect to the strengthening of the national economy in the context of the evolving world-economy. However, gradually attaining gains through the establishment of unions, the working class tends to grasp the role of power in the political process. It therefore possesses an orientation toward mobilization of the state in defense of its interests. It sees the state as an instrument of power.
Working-class movements can become fascist, with a tendency to blame marginal groups for the economic problems of workers. But at the same time, workers can become the most progressive force for social change, when working-class leaders emerge who are able to unify all sectors of the people in capturing control of the state and directing it decisively toward the dismantlement of corporate control of the state, the elimination of privileges granted to middle class sectors that are allied with the corporate elite, the strengthening of the productive forces of the economy, and the defense of the cultural values of the people. In this situation, there can emerge a vibrant movement for democracy, based in the working class. When this happens, the political establishment seeks to discredit the movement, portraying it as fascist. In key aspects, these dynamics have driven the MAGA movement since 2016, called into being by Donald Trump in 2016, through an economic and cultural nationalist populist discourse.
The middle class. The emergence of corporate concentration during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries combined with the continuous economic ascent of the United States in the world-system led to a significant expansion of the middle class.
The members of the middle class in the core nations of the capitalist world-economy live in a privileged position, relative to the great majority of humanity. They cannot avoid awareness of this relative privilege, which they recognize as unearned. They therefore do not think of politics as a process that facilitates their empowerment; rather, they think of politics as a debate of ideas. The middle class, accordingly, favors social change, but in an idealistic sense that is not connected to questions of political power. It speaks truth to power, rather than seeking to reform the structures of distribution of power. It favors an end to racism, poverty, and war, but has no realistic strategy for attaining these goals. It is satisfied with mere expression, rather than seeking to attain political power to affect social change.
The limitations of middle-class reformism in the United States are evident in the failure of the student anti-war movement in the USA to sustain itself once the war in Vietnam ended. The student anti-war movement was provoked by the failure of the U.S. intervention to attain its declared goals, and it was further stimulated by the military conscription of young men, including middle-class men. Opposition to the war naturally stimulated anti-imperialist reflection, inasmuch as the failing war was an imperialist war against a sustained anti-colonial struggle in Indochina. But after arriving to an incipient anti-imperialist consciousness during the period 1965-1972, the student anti-war movements was not able to mature to a mass movement with anti-imperialist consciousness as a permanent presence in U.S. political culture. Former youthful radicals adapted to middle class expectations, and they tended to embrace the ideologies of middle-class reformism.
The limitations of middle-class reformism pertain more to the urban upper middle class than to the lower middle class or the middle class of rural and small-town America. The urban upper middle class, especially in the blue states, tends much more to wokeness, whereas the lower middle and the middle class of rural and small-town America are more inclined to the MAGA movement.
Small entrepreneurs constitute a sector of the middle class. They naturally resist any restraints place on their business enterprises by the government. They are promoters of free enterprise and economic liberty, often looking at the whole world through this conservative lens. They tend to support libertarianism. In the current political climate, they tend to support the MAGA movement, for its anti-establishment distrust of government.
Thus, the middle class is sharply divided between conservatism and “radical” reformism.
Blacks. In colonial America at the time of the American Revolution, slavery in a systemic form existed only in Virginia and Charleston, and slaves were not a large percentage of the population of the thirteen colonies. But African slavery in the U.S. South expanded greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it played a central role in the development of industry in the North, as a result of a core-peripheral economic relation between the regions. By that time, slavery was an outdated form of labor exploitation, and it would have died a natural economic death, had civil war not occurred. The process of abolition and black inclusion as citizens of the Republic was characterized by numerous errors and contradictions, such that the process did not reach fulfillment until 1965.
For this reason, African-American society became a significant distinct social force, and race in the United States became intertwined with class dynamics. The African-American movement, unfolding from 1919 to 1972, emerged as the most significant movement for social change in the history of the United States. The movement had two tendencies. (1) A primary tendency (from 1930 to 1968), seeking to expand and deepen the democratic principles formulated at the founding of the nation. As such, it was a movement intimately tied to the American promise of democracy, capable of resolving the question of race without fracturing the nation. (2) A second tendency, which included Pan-Africanism (in the 1920s) and black nationalism (from 1964 to 1972), called for internationalist solidarity with the colonized peoples of the world, and it stressed black control of the institutions of the black community as the path to black socioeconomic development. The African-American movement attained its goals with respect to political and civil rights by 1965, but it was not able to progress significantly with respect to the socioeconomic development of the black community.
Thus, during the period 1919 to 1972, blacks became an integral part of the people of the United States, through sustained participation in a great movement for civil and political rights and equality of opportunity, which triumphed with the support of both popular and elite sectors of white society. From the 1970s through the 1990s, black participation in public life increased, and various studies showed that white prejudice toward blacks was steadily and significantly declining during the period. By the end of the twentieth century, black Americans were included in the designation of “We the people.”
However, the great reform of the 1960s did not attend to socioeconomic issues. During the 1970s and 1980s, the black middle class migrated out of the traditional urban black neighborhoods to which all blacks had previously been confined by segregationist customs, creating separate black middle-class neighborhoods, and resulting in the social deterioration of the traditional areas, now converted into lower-class zones. African-American society did not attend to the question of the socioeconomic development of African-American neighborhoods, in accordance with the black nationalist proposals of the period 1964-1972. Instead, African-American society stressed social programs that did not empower the poor or lift them out of poverty, but they did provide employment for black middle-class professionals. In addition, affirmative action was stressed, which primarily was of benefit to the black middle class. This failure to address the issue of the empowerment of poor blacks was accompanied by a national and worldwide tendency toward the disengagement of states from socioeconomic issues.
The presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 revitalized the civil rights movement in the context of the triumph of Reaganism, drawing upon the major historic tendencies of the African-American movement. The comprehensive platform of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition sought the empowerment of all sectors of the American people, thereby pointing to the overcoming of the bifurcation between the lower and middle classes in black society. However, the Jackson movement did not attain political power, nor was it able to sustain itself as a permanent presence in the national political culture.
The setbacks and lack of progress in the 1980s set the stage for the emergence of identity politics in the 1990s, which represented the interests of the black middle class, and which culminated in the twenty-first century in critical race theory and anti-racist ideology, with empirically false concepts, such as systemic racism. With these developments, African-American society ceased being a progressive force for social change.
European immigrants of 1830-1925. The great wave of migration from Europe was a legal migration, with migrants processed as they entered the country, and only those with observable health problems were denied entrance. The open border policy was rooted in the need for manual and domestic labor in an expanding American economy. The migrants fulfilled the economic roles expected of them, thereby taking the first steps in what would become intergenerational upward mobility. They accepted the policy of assimilation, learning English and abandoning their own languages during the second and third generations; and embracing the American promise of democracy, becoming among the most patriotic of all Americans. However, they demanded in practice (not in protest) their right to practice their religions, which was conceded by the Ango-Saxon Protestant establishment, thus reconceptualizing the United States as a nation with a Judeo-Christian tradition that included Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
Today’s radical Left views the European immigrants of 1830-1925 as not among the oppressed of the earth. But in fact, the Irish were colonized and peripheralized by the English; and Eastern Europeans peasants were subjected to forced cash-crop labor by a landholding class that was allied with Western European colonialism. The modern superexploitation of these peoples was the principal factor pushing their migration to America.
Post-1965 legal immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Middle East. By 1965, the great territorial expansion and extraordinary economic ascent of the United States was over. Since 1965, there have been substantive legal restrictions on who can enter the United States, which is consistent with the right and duty of nations to regulate migratory flows in conjunction with planning for the development of their national economies, taking into account employment needs and the availability of resources.
The legal post-1965 migrants and their descendants from various lands and regions of the world—like the descendants of the farmers and craftsmen of the early American Republic, the descendants of American black slaves, and the descendants of European migrants from 1830 to 1925—are an integral part of the people of the United States. Like the European immigrants who came before them, they are expected to embrace the fundamental principles and concepts of American political culture. However, taking into account advances in political theory, their model of assimilation could include a concept of cultural pluralism, in which many might decide to develop a form of biculturalism, pertaining to the dominant political culture in some aspects of life, but exercising in their own associations the practice of their particular languages and cultures. The approach of cultural pluralism could generate proposals for local community control of education, criminal justice, and local community affairs. The misguided, idealistic attention to the rights of illegal immigrants has directed attention away from a necessary national public discussion on the principles of a viable cultural pluralism as a dimension of immigrant assimilation.
Inasmuch as the post-1965 legal immigrants entered the country after the great civil rights reforms of the 1960s, the color of their skin is entirely irrelevant for qualifications for U.S. citizenship and for their assimilation into the people of the United States. They entered the country in a time in which skin color is no longer a legal consideration, and race was declining in significance in the culture.
Significant numbers of the legal post-1965 migrants are Muslims. Inasmuch as the revelations received by the Prophet Muhammad reaffirm the revelations to the earlier prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the nation can now, with significant numbers of Muslim citizens, reconceptualize its self-understanding as a nation with a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, just as it previously did when significant numbers of immigrants were Catholics and Jews. This possibility has not been adequately addressed in public discussion, distracted as the nation has been by division over the issue of illegal immigration.
The founding fathers established the separation of Church and State. But they developed a political culture that was based in a Christian worldview as well as Enlightenment principles. The USA grants full citizenship rights to all, without requiring any religious beliefs or faith commitments. But it is not a secular nation. The United States has been forging a Judeo-Christian-Islamic political culture, which is in general terms a spiritual political culture that seeks to express the truth, standing against personal and social sin; and standing against all tendencies toward post-modernism and post-truth. It rejects all narratives that ignore standards of truth and Enlightenment reasoning, especially such narratives with respect to the nation itself. All individuals have the legal and constitutional right to speak their personal “truths” and to formulate post-modern narratives of the nation, ignoring and ideologically manipulating empirical evidence, but in doing so, they place themselves outside the margins of the American political culture and American cultural values.
With respect to undocumented immigrants who entered the country illegally, it can reasonably be said, as the former president of Honduras once said, that all persons have rights, regardless of their migratory status. But such rights do not include a supposed right of exemption from immigration laws. Undocumented migrants discovered in U.S. territory have no legal basis for exemption from repatriation programs that the U.S. government may develop in cooperation with other governments. They are not citizens of the United States, and they do not pertain to the people of the United States. They are citizens of other lands, and it is in their native lands that they should strive for the realization of their personal aspirations and dreams; if they seek to migrate to the United States, and they have the requisite qualifications for doing so by virtue of family relationships or needed employment skills, they should do so through legal means. The U.S. government should contribute to the fulfillment of the dreams of citizens of other lands not by opening U.S. borders but by cooperating with other governments in the development of the national economies of their nations, principally through respect for the sovereignty of all nations and the development of mutually beneficial trade with other nations.
Middle America. Vice-President J.D. Vance has identified an important sector of the American people, in which he himself has roots, namely, middle America. Here we refer to the people of small-town and rural America, which of course includes middle-class farmers who have managed to persist in spite of the emergence of corporate concentration. They are the spiritual descendants of the farmers and craftsmen of Thomas Jefferson’s time, who were central to his vision of American democracy. Middle America is a sector that strongly supports the MAGA movement.
In summary, the American people consist of workers, entrepreneurs, blacks, middle America, legal immigrants and their descendants of all ethnic groups and colors, and the lower middle class, who share an American political culture that is evolving in the context of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition and Enlightenment principles.
As noted above, the MAGA movement was called into being in 2016 by Donald Trump by means of an economic and cultural nationalist discourse that improvised on the headlines and connected to the sentiments and common-sense insight of the people. The MAGA movement has expanded and matured since 2016, and it now has significant support from the sectors of the people, with the exception of blacks, who have been led astray by race-hustling activists and politicians. However, the presence of strong, clear-thinking conservatives in the black community bodes well for the future.
Conclusion
Taking into account the above considerations, we can suggest the following conclusions from a Marxist perspective.
There has emerged in recent years in the United States an idealist middle-class reformism/radicalism, based in the black middle class and the multiethnic urban upper middle class. Although perceived as expressions of Marxism and socialism, their proposals are disconnected from the real needs of the working class and other social sectors of the people, and thus ought not to be considered true Marxism.
On the other hand, the MAGA movement, grounded in ample support and participation by the working class and other sectors of the people, has taken control of key state structures, and is moving decisively against the political establishment and the corporate elite to implement an announced program in defense of the nation and the interests of the people, focusing on attaining world peace, restoring American productivity, and restoring order to the national borders. These dynamics are consistent with what Marxist theory projects in a process of revolutionary change.
In accordance with our observation of current dynamics, it can be reasonably said that the people of the United States, led by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, are reclaiming the American republic, seeking to reverse the seizing of the nation’s institutions and the distortion of the nation’s cultural values by the corporate elite and its urban upper-middle-class and black middle-class allies. If the Trump administration can be successful in creating world peace and enhancing American economic productivity, the MAGA paradigm could become the prevailing approach of the next decades.
The unity of the people is necessary. We forge unity among the different sectors of the people by constructing a nation together, seeking to improve the productivity of the national economy and seeking to build safe local communities, in accordance with the values of the national political culture.
A final note. As I have maintained in previous commentaries, (see, for example, “A critique of MAGA from real socialism: Economic nationalism as constructive cooperation with the world,” December 27, 2024), the lack of persistent anti-imperialist consciousness is the Achilles heel of the MAGA movement. In the current post-colonial world-system under construction, imperialist ideology undermines American productivity. The MAGA movement must move beyond opposition to imperialist overreach to opposition to imperialism itself.1
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Footnote dated 2/27/2025. Taking into account recent actions by the U.S. Department of State with respect to Cuba and Venezuela, it now appears that the Trump administration is moving toward a policy of continuation of unconventional war against recalcitrant states in Latin America, which has been undertaken since 2014, with some temporary interruptions at the end of the Obama and Biden administrations. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to be implementing a foreign policy based in an implicit concept of peaceful coexistence with rival powers in other regions of the world, combined with a maintenance and renewal of U.S. hegemony in the region of the Americas.