The New Dark Age

When Donald Trump stood before Mount Rushmore to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, he used the occasion not to celebrate the republic’s endurance, but to denounce communism as “the greatest threat to America.”

It is worth dwelling on the absurdity of this.

Thirty-five years have passed since the counter-revolution destroyed the Soviet Union. Thirty-eight years since the Eastern bloc dissolved. Eighty-three years since the Communist International was wound up. And nearly half a century since China began its adoption of capitalist methods via the “reform and opening up” process. The communist movement, such as it was by 1991, has been in retreat everywhere.

In Europe, the parties that once commanded millions of votes have either vanished or become irrelevant. The French Communist Party, once the largest in Western Europe, is a shadow of its former self. The Italian Communist Party destroyed itself through liquidation, its successor organisations lacking even a fraction of the influence of their illustrious — if deeply flawed — predecessor. The Portuguese Communist Party continues to do relatively well, but it is an exception that proves the rule.

Outside Europe, the communist parties of Latin America are diminished, often split between orthodox Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and Trotskyists — in many cases, as many communist parties as there are tendencies, given the well-documented propensity of Marxist organisations to fracture.

There is no unified international communist movement. The largest surviving state with a Communist Party in power — China — has no interest in exporting revolution, no interest in an international communist movement, and no common theoretical framework with anyone else. The communist parties of the imperialist countries are either marginalised or have long since converted themselves into social democratic formations.

And within the United States itself? The number of people who call themselves communists may have ticked up in recent years, but in terms of organised communist parties capable of threatening the existing order, the American ruling class faces something close to a complete absence.

So what, exactly, is Donald Trump talking about?

To answer this, we must break the question down into several levels.

Level One: The Electoral Manoeuvre

At the most superficial level, Trump is deploying a very old mobilisation method. Anti-communism has been the American right’s most reliable rallying cry for over a century, and Trump — who did not invent this tactic but certainly takes it further than anyone else — has been calling the Democrats communists for years.

This is not new. The trope predates Trump by decades. But it has been given fresh fuel by the relative successes of the Democratic Socialists of America and the candidates they have backed. Some of these candidates have, in the past, identified with Marxism. Most would qualify as fairly mild social democrats. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, is a very mild American social democrat who is, above all else, a loyal member of the Democratic Party. The same is true of the other candidates who have done well recently.

So part of this is simply rallying the Republican and right-wing base, preparing them for an anti-communist crusade come the midterms. It is, in this sense, the same old American right-wing garbage in an election year.

But there are other things in play here.

Level Two: The Permanent Anxiety of the Ruling Class

Why, decades after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and even further after the embrace of certain aspects of capitalism by the Chinese leadership, does the American ruling class still lose sleep about communists? Why do they still get nervous about mild social democrats?

There is, on some level, a degree of anxiety that permanently grips the more politically tuned-in sections of the American bourgeoisie. They are always nervous, always looking over their shoulder, always frightened that their ill-gotten gains are going to be taken away — or even, perhaps, just taxed slightly more than they are at the moment.

Part of this is simply the perpetual fear of any ruling class of losing its privileges. But there is something bigger at work.

The American ruling class has become more oligarchic as time has gone on. The American Dream has been revealed as an absolute mirage. Most American billionaires start off wealthy and get wealthier. They inherit gigantic amounts of money. They know, fundamentally, that the American proletariat’s toleration for them will reach a breaking point.

They know that if the American working class ever overcomes the legacy of anti-communist suppression and the structural barriers to working-class organisation, it could be over for them in very short order. This is why they keep returning to anti-communism. It is not just an electoral manoeuvre — though, of course, there is that element. Part of it is nervousness. Part of it is an awareness that the system is decaying. Part of it is an awareness that they are perhaps not too long for this world, that the best of their days are long gone.

Level Three: The Death Spiral

They are waiting now. Waiting for the moment that the American proletariat essentially gets its political act together.

They know that the system is exhausted. They know that the legitimacy of state institutions is draining away. The only manoeuvre they have left is suppression, fear-mongering, and pogroms. And that is the mark of a system in a death spiral: when all it has left to offer is repression and fear-mongering.

The ever-growing powers of the American security state testify to this. For all that the American ruling class has successfully suppressed its internal enemies over the years, it is growing increasingly nervous as the system staggers into ever greater crises. And they face, finally, the thing they have feared more than anything else: that ultimately, it will be the American proletariat itself which drives a stake through the heart of the monster.

What It Means

Trump may be an agitator for the most reactionary and belligerent section of the American ruling class, cynically manoeuvring to mobilise a right-wing petty-bourgeois vote with a good old anti-communist scare. But the fact that this keeps coming up — the fact that they pass anti-communist resolutions in Congress, the fact that the American right cannot stop ranting about communists — betrays something deeper.

It betrays the very real fear that exists in the hearts of the most reactionary, but also some of the most politically aware, American bourgeois: that the party may be over for them very soon.

The ghost at Mount Rushmore is not communism. It is the ruling class’s own fear of the future doom that awaits them.