(C) Common Dreams
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Unions as a 21st Century Anti-Fascist Force [1]
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Date: 2025-04
One of the principal difficulties facing the Democratic Party establishment and most leaders of organized labor is a failure to accept a fundamental reality: there is no normality. The failure to grasp this state of affairs has led to strategic paralysis and a tendency to believe that by being the “adults in the room,” the Democrats — or the trade union leadership — can embarrass the Republicans and force them to engage in good faith behavior. That is not the case.
The rise of President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has represented the morphing of a broad, rightwing populist movement into a fascist movement that seeks to destroy constitutional democracy. The current purging of the federal government, through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), aims at both opening the doors to a kleptocracy as well as ensuring loyalty to the MAGA vision and its retrograde goals.
Yet while MAGA can be defined as fascist (or postfascist), what we do not yet see is full fascism in power. Rather what we are now witnessing appears to be something along the lines of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary and, ultimately, a Putinesque regime, i.e., increased rightwing authoritarianism. Still, the aim of the Trump regime remains to destabilize all real and potential opposition.
MAGA, as a movement, has converged with the objectives of that segment of the capitalist class often referenced as “oligarchs.” Particularly situated in high tech, this group of capitalists has become very influential through their control over critical online and communications systems. Initially aligned, for the most part, with Democrats, the oligarchs appear to have decided that they are nothing short of superior beings that must seize the reins of government in order to operate it much like a business, and for their own ends. This includes expanding their wealth, but also for those, such as Musk, who have a quasi-science fiction vision of a future where the elite abandon Earth and settle Mars or some artificial satellite, there is the need for direct governmental involvement in such projects. Along with the oligarchs are those in the business class who simply wish to ravage the federal kitty, leading to the emergence of kleptocracy.
In earlier eras the expression “offensive of capital” would be used for moments when the capitalist class would move to reverse the victories that working people had won. We are now experiencing something more dramatic than that. This is a ‘blitzkrieg’ of segments of capital in alignment with a mass rightwing movement, making the current attack especially dangerous. To put it another way, the millions of diehard MAGA supporters are not just observers but have become the foot-soldiers for Trump even when they may have an ambivalence about the objectives of the oligarchs.
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[1] Url:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-labor-trump-oligarchy-fascism
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