Slightly edited text from the report given by Roberto Sáenz at the opening of the International Conference of our movement, with the presence of delegates from France, Brazil, Costa Rica, the United States, and Argentina, in the lead-up to the V International Camp of our movement. Translated by Sofia Pacheco y Frank Baldioli from La geopolítica del trumpismo.
1
There are two major international political events, of different dimensions but both significant. The first is Trump’s arrival to the presidency of the United States; what we have now is a Trump with a more defined profile than in his previous term and, regardless of his typically bullying style, much more assertive. He is the symbolic representation of a set of changes that have been occurring in the international political and geopolitical sphere; Trump is not only a driving force but also a representation of the arrival of a ‘new world.’
In parallel, at a different level, logically, but also as an extreme embodiment of the new world we are entering, there occurs the Gaza phenomenon, which has impacted ‘symbolically’ on the global public opinion, not only due to the threats from Trump and Netanyahu but also due to the staging of the civil war, the bloody laws of civil war, which Hamas is expressing. And we defend that even though we do not politically support Hamas, because that is what civil war is.[1]
There are several wars going on, such as the ones in Ukraine and Congo, but from a symbolic point of view, the – very real – ‘staging’ of the civil war that Hamas is carrying out is also very contemporary, characteristic of the world we are entering, and marks a break with the previous era of consensus, bourgeois democracy, and the dominance of the political center; that is why it appears as extremely disruptive.[2] These are not our methods in terms of their ideology, nor our program, of course, but when it comes to taking hostages, for example, we are in favor: these are the laws of civil war.
So there is, as it is being said now, a global drive in the international landscape, which is closely linked to Trump and Netanyahu and what will happen in Gaza in the coming days. Even more than in Ukraine, because this drive in Palestine is a fierce one.[3]
This carries a different, specific weight; Trump is not the same as Hamas, but the world of ‘Trump 2025’ is a world that confirms the characterization that we are entering a new international stage, a stage of disruption. In the search for a new political, geopolitical, and economic order and for the balance of power, it is a more brutal world, where the balance of power between States – and the relations between classes – are starting to manifest themselves more fiercely, more directly.
We have provided this descriptive definition of a stage of crises, wars, reaction, barbarism, and revolutions, and we should add colonization and civil war, and what is transpiring before our eyes is the second era of extremes in our contemporaneity. The first era of extremes ranged from 1914-1945; then there was the capitalist boom in the West, anti-capitalist revolutions, decolonization; after that, we lived through the period of ‘appeasement,’ mediation, bourgeois democracy, and the golden decade of the U.S. in the 90s. Then came fractures with the 2008 crisis, the rise of China, the pandemic. And now there is a new reality, and it is important to consider what label we should give it.
Everyone in Marxism can see that there is a new reality. What name is given to it is not coincidental, and there are several controversies. There are Marxist comrades of high standing, like Alex Callinicos, who has published a book called The New Age of Catastrophe, and indeed there are a series of catastrophes on several fronts, including the environment. But in the first era of extremes, barbarism and revolution, revolution and counterrevolution, faced each other head-on. And it is very likely that in the era we are living in, at a corrected and augmented scale, revolution and counterrevolution will also face each other.
The definition is not unbiased or purely disinterested: an era of catastrophes, per se, can simply crush you; it is enough to make you cry. Callinicos’ book talks about what everyone talks about, and the issue is how to talk about what is not being talked about. In Argentina, as well, a young ‘intellectual,’ Martín Mosquera, has published an article in Jacobin magazine where he asks ‘What name shall we give to defeat in Argentina?’ (sic): What’s the point of that? Isn’t it better to think about how to prevent defeat in Argentina? [4] Another example is Mosquera’s political father, Valerio Arcary from Brazil: he titles one of his articles ‘We’ve Never Been Worse’… Thanks, Valerio, it is of great help to build a militant Marxism. All of his titles are like that, and something similar happens with Mandelism, though with some nuances.[5] These are definitions that, methodologically, have nothing to do with revolutionary Marxism. The method of revolutionary Marxism is obviously partial, and even in the worst of circumstances, it will seek footholds for action (in this regard, the discussions between Trotsky and C.R.L. James in 1939 may be of interest, on why the movement of the new Fourth International struggled so much to grow at the time).
Arcary has stated that ‘we are worse off than in the 1930s’… Hold on! Do you even know what the 1930s were like? Civil war in Spain, revolution and defeat in Germany, forced collectivization, concentration and extermination camps… Hold on a bit! [6] In this way, nothing is put into perspective. The new era of extremes that we are approaching does not yet entail the same degree of barbarism nor, unfortunately, the same degree of revolutionary drive (in addition, it has no clear resulting outcome either; it has just begun, which is why speaking of being ‘worse off’ than in that period as a fait accompli is flawed and defeatist.
It is obvious that the new political wing that has taken charge in U.S. imperialism, and which has also seen political expressions in the rise of the extreme right in other countries, is seeking a redesign of the international capitalist order and of class, political, etc., relations that will hardly happen without bloodshed. For example, the massacre they are planning for Gaza, where they will have to murder two million people in order to turn it into a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, as Trump has arrogantly put it: is that really going to happen just like that?
In this new period, subjective factors are lagging behind, that is true. But objective factors carry such weight that they bring us back to Lenin’s definition from 1915, when in the midst of World War I, he said that a revolutionary situation was opening up, the famed dialectical reversibility.[7] Today there are no revolutions yet, the current situation is categorically adverse; no popular uprisings or revolutions are at the moment balancing the field. But the first era of extremes also began with a defeat, because World War I was an historic defeat for the European labor movement, which was later reversed with the Russian Revolution.
I think times are different (slower-paced, a priori); this new stage has launched with the far-right having the initiative. It is a more preventive stage because there exist no mass forces of the left; it is like a fierce reaffirmation of capitalism.
2
Second definition: Trump’s arrival is a declaration of war against the exploited and oppressed of the world: workers, women and LGBT rights movement, colonized peoples, immigrants, environmental movements, everyone. It is also a challenge to the international order that has been in place since Yalta and Potsdam (the final stretch of WWII). It is a kind of international Bonapartism that makes up an attempt to redesign the world and its class relations to the liking of the imperialist sector that Trump represents; it also expresses other far-right political forces that have grown stronger, what Macron calls the ‘new reactionary international’ – fascism and Nazism were internationalist in their own way, there were combat brigades from fascist forces from Spain and France on the Eastern Front, fighting ‘communism’ –. So, Trump has made his declaration of war, and we need to see how far it will go, telling his bullying discourse apart from its reality.
3
The third, very structural and important definition, is that there is a change in lanes as to the type of imperialism that is dominating the world. The type of imperialism that had been dominating until recently, the neoliberal order, which has been in crisis since 2008, is now on the defensive.
The classical liberal order, from 1870 to 1914, was led by England, which at the time was a free-trade power because it had the comparative advantage. After the Franco-Prussian war, there were no more wars, capitalism grew and imperialism emerged as an economic-political formation; a relatively stable world order, a Pax Britannica, if you will.
The more globalized (neo)liberal order came forth at the end of the 70s and somewhat reproduced the liberal order; the free market struck again. It reached its heyday in the 90s, giving rise to works by intellectuals such as Toni Negri, typical postmodern impressionist, who claimed this to be a “decentralized order”, without any States. Europe has stopped investing in armaments, for example. It’s an imperialism that throws temper tantrums but has no means to defend itself; a ‘postmodern imperialism.’ When the war in Ukraine broke out, the media in Germany complained that army soldiers didn’t even have laces to tie their boots.
This democratic-bourgeois imperialist stream went into crisis mode, and shifted, which has become much more visible now than during Trump’s first presidency, when he seemed more isolationist. Now he is not isolationist: he says ‘You want Ukraine and you want Taiwan? Great: what do I get in return?’ There are analysts who claim that it is all about containing China, which might seem logical, but we don’t know for sure if that is the case; rather, it seems like the big ‘tough guys’ are sitting down and partitioning the world: opening up a ‘new game.’ [8]
This also implies a different logic, with some deep conceptual aspects. From a Marxist perspective, we say that there is a globalized world market (more globalized than ever under neoliberalism), but capitalism cannot overcome national borders, the contradiction between productive forces and relations between States. Well, territorialization means the return of the State, the supremacy of politics over economy. It is the return to the Empire in the traditional sense. The imperialism we’ve known in recent decades was deterritorialized, with capital exports, industrial relocation, global supply chains, etc. – this is something else.
When the U.S. saw that it was arriving late to the world’s distribution at the end of the 19th century, it snatched what was left of the Spanish Empire. After losing Latin America, Spain still had Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and McKinley, the U.S. president at the time (1897/1901), conquered them. The Philippines became an American protectorate, and Cuba as well. Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded him, joined the territorial logic. This same logic was also characteristic of Nazism and Japan: since we are isolated and lack natural resources, we seek ‘living space’ (Lebensraum); in the Nazis’ case, it was eastward, towards the USSR, and in Japan’s, towards the Pacific.
This is a type of territorialized, protectionist, Bonapartist, colonial, reactionary antimodern imperialism. There is a ‘woke’-type exploitative neoliberalism, such as Zapatero in Spain: neoliberal reforms and recognition of same-sex marriage; all of this is now being called into question, and all the related political currents are baffled, they don’t understand what is happening. It’s like the “musical chairs” game: Trump has sat down, Putin has sat down, Xi Jinping has sat down, and just when they are about to sit down, there are no more chairs left.
4
Therefore, a much more radicalized Trump has returned, who of course is running into mediating factors. But what I believe they are preparing in the first place is a brutal massacre in Gaza, because they were not able to defeat Hamas; Netanyahu delivers speeches of revenge every day. He has the relatives who want all the hostages freed as counterweight, and Hamas knows that if they do release them all, they will be massacred. Today the first phase is ending, and no one knows when the second phase will be debated, it is likely that there will be none. A new disgusting, reactionary Zionist offensive internationally arose these days.
Struggles have broken out. What does this mean? It means that something similar to what happened with Milei in Argentina has started, but in a much more dramatic manner, a clash between will and material facts.
A pulse has started in the political arena with the immigrants, where there have been vanguard manifestations, with teachers saying ‘ICE will not enter this school,’ a whole pulse where the Justice system is more involved than the Democratic Party. But there was also fear in the immigrant community.
A pulse has started with Ukraine. Today, the media is claiming that Trump does not want Zelensky to be at the table. It seems that in Ukraine, there is indeed demoralization and weariness, its population is not like the Palestinians, it is not radicalized.
A pulse has started in Gaza, but there is radicalization there.
A pulse has started in Panama. It does seem like a joke, but it will depend on the outcome of any negotiations that might take place. There is also Greenland.
It is pulsing at three levels: political, geopolitical, and economic. The geopolitical one is quite clear: you can keep the piece of Ukraine you have, but what do you get in exchange? What Trump has said on Ukraine is savage: ‘We want 50% of its natural resources,’ an even worse looting than that of the colonies. Next he’ll say, ‘We want the return of slavery.’ But that’s not the trade-off; one of the ‘changes’ is that neither China nor Russia can enter Gaza, and the U.S. will be in charge of the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’; it is madness.
But that is not enough. In exchange for what else? To me, it is a game that involves Xi Jinping; Pierre Rouset says that Musk has declared himself in favor of giving Taiwan to China; in exchange for what? It is a total collapse of the old order: I can give you Taiwan, but I’d like to have Greenland…
In Europe, they say ‘this is Munich,’ referring to the Munich Agreement of 1938 where Chamberlain and Daladier conceded all of Hitler’s territorial conquests in the German area of former Czechoslovakia (the so-called Sudetenland). This perspective is very much European, but it would seem that potential agreements would be at Europe’s expense: you don’t have weapons, so screw you.
‘In exchange for what?’ is the discussion at the core of Ukraine’s pulse. Munich in ’38 was pure capitulation, but Chamberlain and Daladier cannot compare to Trump; they wanted to avoid war because the trauma of World War I was still fresh. This is something else: there are secret negotiations for a new element, where Putin could say to Trump, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t interfere with your Hinterland,’ so we wake up one day and the U.S. troops have arrived in Panama, and Putin and Xi Jinping will keep quiet.
So, what’s the strategy? Is it shifting to Southeast Asia, to the Pacific? We do not know, it could be something else, “let’s split the world differently”. What I’m saying is intuition because we know nothing about the other half of the negotiation; it’s a secret negotiation, and they have already confirmed that Ukraine will not be invited; it’s scandalous.
5
There’s a pulse between Trump and the far-right at class struggle level as well. Today, Musk once again supported the AfD, ‘the only alternative for Germany is the AfD.’ Milei’s main support is Trump. Yesterday, Banon did the Nazi salute again, and Le Pen’s second-in-command stepped down: Le Pen and Meloni have become very normalized now. Rallies have started in the U.S. against Musk’s state layoff measures, which have not gone through yet because they are being dealt with in court, like the Necessity and Urgency Decree (DNU) in Argentina.
If there’s a pulse, it means there’s life, and this is a pulse of social and class polarization. I also doubt Hamas cannot see that they will want to crush them, and that they aren’t taking advantage of the ceasefire to stock up, rebuild the tunnels, etc.; moreover, Hamas has nowhere to go, because they have already stated they want to destroy them, and they have no choice but to buy some time and prepare for the clash.
The situation in Gaza is that of civil war; which can only be solved with more blood (there are already 70,000 dead and 110,000 severely injured). In Ukraine, I’m not sure; I don’t think so, because the conflict has turned over-militarized and people are fed up. I don’t really see the Ukrainians rising up against surrendering the country.
6
There are theoretical discussions that are being updated. First, history has returned, in the sense that comparisons with what is happening today are coming back. For example, the debate on imperialism was boring, dated; what was imperialism?: the IMF. Today, imperialism is the boot that means to stomp you, countries are being divided and partitioned, the world is being remilitarized, the debate is becoming current again, so let’s see what Lenin said, what Rosa said; it is current, it is not Greek calendas.[9]
For example, the Munich Agreement of 1938, who here in the meeting remembers what it was? The story of the partition of Eastern Europe between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow at the end of 1944, does everyone know it? They divided up Greece, Yugoslavia, the rest of the Balkans, and Marshal Tito rose up against that and broke with the USSR. Comparisons with a different period than the one we used to live in are returning, when things were decided by raw force relations. Well, now it will be the same, but reloaded.
Another discussion returns, which is the dialectic between war, revolution, and civil war. In Gaza, there are elements of civil war, it is not just war because it is completely asymmetrical. Hamas’ actions have things we condemn, but also elements of legitimate self-defense civil war. Civil war is like that, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; where is the school of civil war today in the world? In Gaza. These are the laws of civil war, like those of the Code of Hammurabi of 1756 B.C., the principle of reciprocity. With modernity, its codification changed, and justice is not retributive, but – supposedly – restorative; but in civil war, that does not apply. You can read on the debate between Trotsky and Serge (Their morals and ours); Serge was a good soul, but he was completely wrong: “Above all, human life,” and that is not how it is, above all is the class struggle, otherwise, you will get killed (Sussi Weisman has authored a good biography on Serge where he is “exposed” as to this stance and others from the late 1930s).»[10]
If Panama gets militarily occupied, it will not be easy. Panama has a strong anti-imperialist tradition. Yankees have already been in Central America with William Walker and his filibustering, attempting a military expedition, and they were executed.
There is also a theoretical debate on how to measure force relations. Shall we measure them only from the superstructural-electoral point of view, or is there a more complex thickness between what’s visible and what’s not, between the objective and the subjective? When we say there are reserves, we are also facing the ‘apologists of defeat’; there isn’t the same effort to work out barbarism as there is to work out revolution. We still hold on to the idea of a restart in the historical experience, and while things may seem very difficult from above, from below there are footholds for action under every ‘rock.’
To what extent, if the far-right formations win, will antifascist formations start emerging in Europe? Here, antifascism is a sham, it is the Peronist bloc, ‘antifascism’ is voting for Cristina [Fernández de Kirchner]. Fascism, first and foremost, is an extra-parliamentary mass movement. Now anything is being called fascism. How many extra-parliamentary fascist forces are there in the world? Kevin Anderson has stated that Trump leads a fascist movement which is “in hiding”… The fascist assault troops were not clandestine, they were made up of hundreds of thousands of people, where would they hide them?
You can denounce the far-right as fascist or fascist-like, but you need to know what you are talking about because force relations must be minutely measured, without being oblivious to the dangers, but also without overestimating them, as that would be ceding ground to the enemy (we recall Tanuro warning about this).
Of course, there are super-authoritarian and reactionary regimes, but they are actually more state-run forces, even though they can challenge the political regime, be careful. Some forces do have an explicit mass base, such as Bolsonaro’s in Brazil, which mobilizes a lot of people, while Milei cannot manage to gather a thousand.
7
There is another element that is less talked about. There is a very serious leadership problem, since what we could call “social democracy” is going deeply bankrupt; that is, bankruptcy/demoralization. While the right-wing forces are parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, even if they do not have fascist formations, the international socialdemocracy, the PT (Partido de los Trabajadores – Brazilian Workers’ Party), and Kirchnerism are not calling anyone to mobilize, they only move within institutional bounds.
They also lack direction: which order do they back? Because there is no way to return to the previous order; the world has been imposed on them. The three world powers are the U.S., Russia, and China, and Europe has no weapons. They are forces adapted to the previous order, they won’t turn to bourgeois nationalism, much less to anti-capitalism.
We are still facing a difficulty: vanguardist, progressive masses are opportunistic, not anti-capitalist (there is a faint anti-capitalism among U.S. youth, for example, but it lacks maturity). While the far-right is radicalizing, social-democratic forces are becoming increasingly thinner.
8
There are pulses that speak of the forces we know: the mass movement, the women’s movement, Gaza. There are marches against the AfD in Germany, but peaceful marches aren’t enough to face the AfD, which isn’t as normalized as Le Pen. Blood needs to be drawn. We can’t draw blood on our own, but for example, in Argentina, where the GBA (Greater Buenos Aires) is the Wild West, there’s a terrible decomposition accumulated by Kirchnerism, worsened by Mileism. They steal motorcycles from delivery workers and take them to the villas (the slums). There was a group of delivery workers who gathered courage, organized themselves, went into the villa without weapons, and started shouting “give back the bike.” After a while, the bike appeared at a corner. That, although it may seem small, is an independent action, and they’ve done it twice already. They invited Sitrarepa to the TV, and we’re going to defend those actions, with the necessary precautions: the solution is not individual, it is collective, and the comrades organized to recover their work tool. This goes against the political regime because it’s taking things into our own hands. The state is complicit with the thieves, the police told them that the bike “would never appear,” that it had already been dismantled. They had the experience with the police and then went into the villa.
In this pulse, forces will emerge; it’s materialist. What the apologists for defeat say is not materialist. Forces will emerge, even by the kingdom of necessity; you lose out on a motorcycle, you run out of life, you have to support your children.
9
Lines in the sand: we are for class independence, not class reconciliation. Workers’ united front, yes; antifascist front, no.
No submission to the political regime, yes to independent action. No trust in parliaments.
Antifascist self-defense groups, yes.
Routine marches with candles and silence, no. Blocking the road, yes.
The current must be to the extreme left of real developments.
10
There is a double game, which is the weight of the event. An event is considered ‘secondary’ in the framework of long duration. But there are other intellectuals who tell you that long duration is a dialectic marked by breaks, a definition that can be found in Lenin and Stephen Jay Gould, who practically copies it from him: punctuated development. Lenin says that there is an old theory of evolution and a new one, marked by breaks, wars, catastrophes, revolutions (the text on Marx for the Gramar dictionary, 1914).[11]
Trump reflects that the structure of the world has already changed—not the material world, but the political and geopolitical structure of the world. It marks a break, it has already changed, we are in a different world now. It expresses in the superstructural realm the weight of the event, it is already a new crystallization.
First, it is the weight, the volume of the event, because an event has its volume if it is the drop that overflows the glass (a change in quality). Trump is the personification of the emergence of a new world stage; the old world is no more, and it is a reactionary utopia to imagine returning to the old world. That is why the social democratic currents are in such a bad state, because you can’t return to the old world.
11
Who creates whom? Did the new world create Trump or did Trump create the new world? First, the world created Trump, and then Trump tries to create the ‘new world.’ It’s not that Russia or China defeated the U.S.; no one says that, nor that China is stronger militarily than the U.S.; China experts like Pierre Rousset assert the opposite, that the U.S. is still first in the military race.
Pierre Rousset also says it’s false that the U.S. has lost the technological war, although there is indeed a reaction from Trump to China’s qualitative advancements.
The aggregated trends of the world suggest a different game; Trump says that the way to solve the problem of capitalist accumulation, of mediocre growth, is to directly appropriate the rent, direct appropriation of territories, of portions of the globe (we need to re-study the theory of ‘geographical rent’ in Marx to understand this).[12] So, war breaks out over the division of the world, over natural resources, over mining, agricultural, hydrocarbon, cyber, aerospace rents, etc.
Trump seems to want a negotiation, but the imperialist rivalry is not settled. In the old logic of imperialism, Ukraine was essential; in the new logic, it is non-essential. In the new logic of imperialism, the important thing is the hinterland (the nearby space). That’s why he wants to divide the world with Putin and Xi Jinping without war, he wants the Nobel Peace Prize… To Putin, he says “I’ll give you Ukraine,” and what does Putin give back? What he wants is territory and to be left fucking alone. To China, he says to leave the Arab countries and gives Taiwan in exchange, but this is not enough. What else does Trump want?
Circumstances found the perfect character, a transactional character who opens a new game. And that explodes the world’s politics, because this new game hadn’t been seen in a long time (since the postwar period). Borders were unquestionable in the old world, the one from the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Now the dude comes and says, ‘There are no more borders, let’s discuss everything again.’
Logically, there’s a ‘small’ factor missing in the equation, and that’s millions of people in the middle. It’s what Churchill says to Stalin when they divide Europe on a napkin. Churchill asks Stalin if he wants him to tear the napkin so there’s no evidence of this dirty deal: “Don’t you think it’s cynical that we divide millions of people on a napkin?” And Stalin says, “No, keep the napkin…”
In the middle, there are the masses, so there is like a double pulse. One is how the world will be divided. The other is Gaza, which is a mass movement. So, when a pulse just begins, even if it starts down in a reactionary path, giving a defeatist definition is ridiculous—it’s like throwing in the towel in the first round (imagine how bad boxers the Arcary or the Mosquera would be in the world! People who don’t know the mud, who haven’t put their feet in it!). The Palestinians wouldn’t have achieved the victory they did with the ceasefire, which although “ephemeral” still carries significant moral weight, if they had thrown in the towel.[13]
The third problem, in this new world, is that Europe seems stupid; it wasn’t prepared for this world, just like social democracy.
It’s such a new world that guerrillas or more terrorism could emerge; there have been many events of individual terrorism in several European countries recently. There is a tendency to brutalize political life, and we must be prepared for that.
There is a tendency that Trump expresses, which is exploitation through plundering, the exploitation of precarious labor, of natural resources, and there is also a pulse for the conquest of space by plundering. Because there’re no more regulations, there is a trend towards privatizing endeavors.
Skepticism lies in not seeing the masses in the middle of all this. Invading Panama is a delusion; it’s feasible that all of Latin America could rise up. If they land in the Panama Canal, mass mobilizations will take place throughout Latin America.
Greenland is easier because it has very little population. And since it’s close to the Arctic, which is melting, there are many natural resources. It could be part of a transaction and perhaps Denmark will have to bend.
12
The mess we have with the mass movement is, first, that it’s led by traditional leaderships; second, they are completely out of touch with the world, they’re on the old track, and the world has changed tracks; third, Trotskyism is in bad shape because the conditions are tough. Although there are many possibilities for development, the conditions are not ideal. That’s why you see all these cults, from the defeatists to groups like the PTS, in whose analysis there are no breaks—it’s all the same, “the same old world.”
The situation is adverse because there’s still no response that matches the level of the attacks. But there is a social depth, there is life, there’s an abundance of organizations and an abundance of power relations. That’s why Arcary is wrong, only seeing Lula and Bolsonaro and crying. There’s a microphysics of power (Foucault) that is still unresolved; these are geological layers of relations of force: civil society, judicial resources, kids who finish school and go to mobilize in LA to defend migrants, and so on. But to see this, you have to be a militant, get your feet in the mud, not just be an intellectual looking at things from an ivory tower (it’s ugly to say, but there’s a class problem here).
Geopolitics are crap, because it only makes you see the “macrophysics of power,” the relations between States, which that appear as replacing class struggle, politics, and at the level of macrophysics, you don’t see the masses, you don’t see the link between war, revolution, and civil war; but there’s a microphysics that’s present (seems like no one remembers Lenin’s definition of transforming world war into civil war).[14]
Now, elements of civil war are coming in the class struggle. It’s not the same as popular rebellion; it’s something different. It’s still very incipient, and we’re talking about being the “extreme left” of the struggle processes, not just anything—be careful; not ultra-left, but “extreme left” in the French sense, being placed on the far left wing.
We’re also not saying no to a united front; but to fight, not to capitulate. There’s Trotsky’s model of a united front against fascism from the 1930s, and Rosa’s model of mass strikes, which emerge more spontaneously from below. Which model do we apply? In the 1930s, social democracy was a mass force that the Communist Party could compete with for its base; now the relations of force are much worse. In Argentina, we do better when there’s a populace that wants to fight, listens to you, and goes out. When we go for the united front, it’s harder because it’s not for fighting. Unfortunately, the united front isn’t working because they don’t want to fight, and we don’t have the strength to force them.
13
We have to know where to find the places where the vanguard is concentrated, because in decentralized spaces we screw up, the masses are too big for us. We’re still suffering from the downward current, which is still stronger than the upward one. We position ourselves from a generational, political, theoretical point of view, etc., in the upward current, but that current is still weak due to the crisis of alternatives.
In Argentina there’s also a pulse. Milei is a dumbass, but he is the flagbearer of an extractivist country of the bourgeoisie, they want to fuck over the country, and if they defeat the working class we are going to suffer. In the world too, if Trump succeeds in redesigning the world to his linking and prevails, there will be a regression in class struggle.
We are entering a new era of barbarism and revolution, which is better to “shorten its time,” because the planet can’t keep up; there’s also a race of speeds. There’s a catastrophic element at play, that’s real. Trump said “drill, drill, drill,” and suggested that he could reform the Constitution to stay. Rio de Janeiro is already at 60 degrees, how much more can the temperature rise?
We are entering a new era of extremes with a current that is politically sound but still numerically limited, evidently; the growth is not easy, but with a clear head, we can make history.
[1] Hamas is one of the few leaders of a mass movement, like the Palestinian one, that today is stepping «out of bounds» and is already influencing currents such as the Maoist centers that are beginning to appear here or there, among others.
[2] The representation of the delivery of the bodies of the Bibas family is, if you please, under jihadist forms, the very expression of civil war.
[3] There is no mass vanguard movement that supports the Ukrainian cause from the left, and this is understood by its alignment with NATO. However, the “Ukrainian pulse” is fully impacting European politics.
[4] The reactionary phase under Javier Milei is difficult, but talking about defeat already is an insult to Marxist intelligence. The year has just begun, and we’ve already had two political crises of mileidism: the situation post-Davos speech and the 1F march, and now the crypto scandal.
[5] We were struck by a recent article by Daniel Tanuro that places certain mediations on the more impressionistic analyses of the arrival of Trump 2.0.
[6]We invite you to read our recent article “Auschwitz: Marxism and the Holocaust” on Izquierda Web.
[7] We talked about this in our intervention at the last edition of Historical Materialism in London last November: «On Lenin, Hegel, and the Dialectic of the 21st Century.»
[8] The new “three big powers” are at the table, only now China replaces Great Britain.
[9] The concept of actuality in Hegel, if we remember correctly, was something like this: something that has presence, that is present.
[10] Naked to us because Weisman defends Serge against Trotsky.
[11] A disruptive text by Lenin with the tradition of the II International because it starts its analysis with dialectics.
[12] We refer to our «The Rebellion of the 4×4» although our field of application was the Argentine countryside.
[13] The Jacobin article on the truce in Gaza is repugnant.
[14] Currents like the PTS also move too much in the realm of «macrophysics» (it is assumed, in the analyses; their masses are always mute, there is no concern for subjectivity, there is no balance of Stalinism, they are anti-capitalist but not socialist).