“We Stand Up to the Marxists”

The Trump Indictment, Fascist Threats, and the Meaning of Two Widely Abused Words

This might be an opportune time to define some terms. I’ll get to that at the end of this commentary. 

First some reporting on recent events and the fascist menace facing the nation.

(I will define fascism along with Marxism below.)

“The Marxist Left” Running the DOJ and FBI

Campaigning in Columbus, Georgia the day after he was indicted on 37 federal felony counts in connection with his transparently criminal theft, retention, and mishandling of hundreds of classified national security documents, and his efforts to obstruct federal efforts to retrieve those documents, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump said that  “We stand up to the globalists. We stand up to the Marxists….The Marxist Left is using the corrupt FBI and DOJ."

“This vicious prosecution,” Trump said in Atlanta, reflected  Joe Biden’s attempt to “jail his leading political opponent and opponent that’s beating him by a lot in the polls, just like they do in Stalinist Russia or communist China.”

On his “social media” site Truth Social, Trump wrote that “it’s a Soviet-style plot to silence and imprison political opposition. The radical Left and the Deep State believe if they bury us in enough witch hunts, they can eliminate our campaign altogether.”

Does this malignant narci-fascist, the clear presidential frontrunner of the Reichmost Party, honestly believe that the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations – longtime and  legendary enemies of the “radical Left” – are under the control of radical Marxists like me and many of my friends and readers?  Seriously?

Later in his hour-plus hate rant in Columbus, Trump referred to his prosecutors and the Democrats as “fascists.”  That was darkly amusing in a George Orwell kind of way given his own status as the nation’s foremost fascist leader and the provocative fascist nature of his comments since (as before) his latest indictment (which is likely to be followed by further indictments in Georgia and Washington DC).  In post-indictment hate/campaign rallies in Georgia and North Carolina and on his truth-inverting Truth Social network, Trump has been inciting his base to rise up against the elementary rule of law, telling it to show up en masse against Marxist “thugs” at the federal courthouse where he will be indicted tomorrow in Miami.  His rhetoric sounds hauntingly like his language in the days leading up to January 6, replete with claims that real Americans need to fight or they won’t have a country anymore.  Trump has even called out special federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s wife by name, putting her life at risk.

“We Have Reached a War Phase”…“Retribution is Coming”

He is not acting alone in purveying this paranoid-style neo-fascist response to indictment, of course. Almost all the other declared Reichpublikan presidential candidates have lined up behind Trump’s claims of “radical Left” persecution in a statement of what the neoliberal imperialist MSNBC morning host Mika Brzezinski today rightly called “fealty to their fascist leader.”  The Reichmost party’s US House delegation and numerous Senate “conservatives” (fascists) have played along with Trump toady and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy leading the charge.

Some Republi-fascists are not content to whine about victimization.  They openly promote bloodshed. After it became public news that Trump would be indicted, the Reichpublikan Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote this on Twitter: “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.”

Donald Trump Jr.’s Nazi fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, went on Instagram to post a photo of the former president with the words, “Retribution Is Coming,” in all capital letters.

Then there’s Republi-fascist Kari Lake, who has refused to concede the Arizona gubernatorial election she lost last fall. Here’s what she said to the Georgia Republi-fascist state convention after the indictment came down:

“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you. If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.  That’s not a threat, it’s a public service announcement.” 

It was totally a threat – a classic fascist threat of political violence directed against those who would dare apply to the elementary rule of merely bourgeois law to the Reichmost party’s Dear Leader.

“We Need to Start Killing”

Not that such lethal incitement from recognized party leaders is required to set the armed and frothing Trumpist-fascist base abuzz with bloody threats. “We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains. ” So wrote one of Herr Trump’s backers on The Donald, an online message board that played a central role in planning the January 6^th Capitol Riot, immediately after the first reports of Trump’s coming indictment came down.  According to another The Donald commenter, “It's not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore, and they'll come for us next. Some of us, they already have” --- a reference to the large number of fascist thugs convicted for their role in trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law on January 6.

Trump’s Amerikaner terrorists have made specific threats in response to the latest indictment of a man who is arguably the single biggest asshole in the history of the human race. One The Donald user shared a link about US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s wife and daughters, leading another use to comment that “His children are fair game.”  Another user called for Jack Smith’s arrest once he sets foot in Florida. “Perhaps it’s time for that Civil War that the damn DemoKKKrats have been trying to start for years now,” another Donald user wrote, leading another user to ejaculate that  “OUR FOREFATHERS WOULD HAVE HUNG” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “FOR TREASON…”

All of this is as expected.  Nobody should be remotely surprised  if and when a right-wing terrorist attack takes places in coming days or weeks.

We are in well into a “long slow civil war” that could very well  heat up and take off this summer.

What’s a Marxist?

Neither side in this drift toward civil war is remotely “Marxist” but one side – the Trump side – is definitely fascist.  What is a Marxist (I’m one)? It’s someone first of all who understands  a society and its politics (and more) in terms of how its underlying mode of production is organized and ruled and how that society’s mode and class/social relations of production are reflected in and related to its cultural and political superstructure.  A Marxist is also someone who applies that scientific, historical-materialist knowledge to inform dedicated and many-sided struggle to liberate humanity from capitalist and imperialist rule and indeed from all forms of oppression and exploitation. 

It is of course totally absurd to apply the label “Marxist” to the militantly bourgeois and imperialist Democratic Party, whose leaders are abjectly servile to those who own and run the capitalist economic system.  It’s curious that top Democrats rarely if ever defend themselves against the at once neo-McCarthyite and classically fascist charge that they are “radical Left” “Marxists.”  Perhaps this is because making the case that they are not would mean being more candid than they wish to be about who they really serve, something that would undermine their claims to represent the nation’s popular and working-class majority.

The Reichmost Party- Fascist

By contrast, it is not at all absurd to call the “Republicans” Amerikaner-Fascist today. Here are the key ingredients of the moral and political pathology that is fascism, as discussed in a previous Paul Street Report:

·       The arch reactionary “blood and soil” narrative of the United States of America as a once great white supremacist and patriarchal nation that was supposedly ruined (“stabbed in the back” in classic fascist parlance) by liberals and leftists and that needs to be made “great again” by any and all means necessary.  

·       A ridiculous inverted sense of victimization on the part of revanchist white males who accuse cosmopolitan and “globalist” liberal and left elites – strongly suggested to be Jewish – of nefariously acting to “replace” supposedly virtuous and hard-working native white men and their families – the true source of national “greatness” and “strength” in the fascist world view – with supposedly unworthy, lazy, criminal, dissolute, inferior,  and degenerate nonwhites, immigrants from “shithole” (nonwhite) countries, and women.

·       The rejection and overturning of (bourgeois) democracy, or what’s left of it under capitalism-imperialism. The embrace of political violence and the rule of men and force over the rule of law – this even as the fascists talk incessantly of “law and order.”

·       Cults of personality around a maximalist male leader.

·       A desire and readiness to eliminate, even exterminate political opposition.

·       A pathological fear, loathing, and repression of press freedom – of media not under their full propagandistic control.

·       A hate-filled, genocidal “us” versus “them” Othering of racial minorities, feminists, leftists, liberals, gay people, transgendered folks, journalists, and intellectuals,  all of whom are identified in the fascist world view with scary, dark, multi-cultural, multi-racial, big cities and metropolitan areas – evil urban zones of radical sloth, crime, and transgression that are juxtaposed against the supposed purity and virtue of the white rural and small town “heartland” or Fatherland.  

·       Wild racist conspiracy “theories” combined with virulent anti-intellectualism and a rejection of modern science.

·        An obsessive hatred of socialism and Marxism, combined with the preposterous painting of bourgeois liberal and moderate political opponents as “left radicals,” socialists, and even Marxists and communists.

·       A passionate desire to restore and impose traditional social hierarchies of class, race, nationality, religion, and gender.

One of our two reigning capitalist parties – the Republicans – checks all these and more neofascist boxes these days. This is a remarkable historical devleopment I did not expect to see in my lifetime. It is ready, willing, and very possibly able to cancel previously normative and merely bourgeois democracy and rule of law whatever the outcome of Trump’s multiple legal dramas.  If those dramas do end up costing him the 2024 Reichpublikan nomination – not impossible – then the next Reichmost party Dear Leader to step up to the Electoral College coin flip is an arguably more dangerous and dedicated fascist named Ron DeSantis, known with good reason to many Floridians as “Ron DeFascist.”

For Repolarization

We drastically need a new and different polarization, a “repolarization for revolution” (Bob Avakian in 2005) of US society and politics, one that pits the broad multi-class and multicultural majority-proletarian populace against both of the nation’s capitalist parties – both the “reality-based” one seeking to retain what’s left of bourgeois democracy and the “faith-based” one that is prepared to cancel bourgeois democracy and proceed to one party authoritarian Christian white nationalist rule – and indeed against the entire capitalist-imperialist order that has brought us to the precipice of fascist consolidation in the world’s most dangerous and powerful country while tipping humanity ever closer to nuclear war and Ecocide.

Postscript: “In Between Come all the Hundreds of Little Steps”

Special thanks to Lisa Sarinelli for sending me this:  

“This has always stuck with me after reading:

From They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45, by Milton Sanford Mayer:

‘But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D…And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.’ "