This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number 118.

Why are we facing this fascism? The answer is that the fundamental cause of this fascism is the fact that this system of capitalism-imperialism is running up against its limits.

This system, in this country, has proclaimed that it provides equality, liberty and justice for all, but over and over again this is shown to be a lie. During the 80 years since the end of World War 2, the ruling class of this country has been forced to make certain partial concessions when confronted with massive struggle against inequality and oppression—but this system has once again shown that it cannot put an end to this inequality and oppression, for the basic reason that this inequality and oppression is built into this system.

So, when people rise up against the continuing inequality and oppression, this provokes and outrages those who do not want to see an end to this inequality and oppression—who insist that the struggle against this injustice has “gone too far” and represents an existential threat to them. 

This has gone along with big changes in the world—including the way that capitalist-imperialist plunder of poorer countries, and its accelerating destruction of the environment, has forced huge numbers of people to migrate across the globe. Large numbers of people from “non-white” countries, documented and un-documented, have entered the U.S., and the increasing number of “non-white” people is also seen as a serious threat to those drawn to fascism.

This rise of fascism has also been strengthened by the fact that, over the decades since the 1970s, the capitalist-imperialist system has become even more a system of globalized exploitation—with especially intense, cruel exploitation of masses of people, including more than 150 million children, in the poorer countries of the world, while many formerly high-paying factory jobs have been eliminated within this country.

This has been accompanied by other major changes within this country, notably the increased role of women in many different sectors of the economy, including the professions—radically altering the “traditional” situation where a family was headed by a sole “male earner” and women were confined within a “dependent” position. Reinforced by the demented rantings of woman-hating, demagogic “bros,” this has given rise to an irrational orgy of “revenge” on the part of some men against the relative independence many women have gained and the demands for an end to the continuing, often brutal, oppression of women.

All this has driven those threatened by these changes to embrace lunatic conspiracy theories and other blatant distortions of reality, in supporting Trump’s fascism, with his vicious insistence that if vulnerable people are not blamed and persecuted, his followers “won’t have a country anymore.” All this is aimed at a return to “how things are supposed to be,” where whole groups of people—women, LGBT people, Black people and other people of color, non-European immigrants, and others—are openly regarded and treated as inferior, not deserving the same rights as “regular people,” or even not having a right to exist at all.

At the same time, in place of the more large-minded revolutionary aspirations among masses of people fighting against the whole oppressive system in the 1960s (and into the early 1970s), in the years since then too many have retreated into more narrow “woke identity politics” and related trends, often targeting those with more “privilege,” instead of the system that is the fundamental cause of oppression. “Woke identity politics” treats opposition to oppression as the property (or capital) of this or that “identity”—which objectively pits different “identities” against each other, and promotes unnecessary and harmful divisions in the ranks of those opposed to injustice. The fascists seize on these and other “woke” distortions (including the abuses associated with woke “cancel culture”) in order to mock and discredit the very necessary struggle against very real oppression: the fascists insist that this oppression does not exist and the struggle against it is illegitimate and should be forcefully put down.

Along with “woke identity politics,” certain supposedly “leftist” tendencies, including some strains of “anarchists,” have given up on changing the world in any fundamental way and instead are seeking, at most, to re-arrange things within the confines of this system, with too many concerned with carving out and protecting a narrow “niche” for themselves within this system. This has too often been accompanied by petty and petulant sectarianism—part of the retreat from taking on the system as a whole and working for really meaningful change. This kind of sectarianism is always harmful and is especially so now when there is a great and urgent need to unite all who can be united in the fight to bring about an end to the Trump fascist regime. To act in a contrary way—to wage unprincipled attacks on those with whom unity should be built in the fight against Trump/MAGA fascism—not only does great harm in general but also concretely aids the fascist regime and its terrible juggernaut of atrocity. I may have more to say about this another time, but here and now the critical point is this: Going forward, it is crucially important and necessary for all those who say they are opposed to this Trump/MAGA fascism to engage in principled relations with each other, working tirelessly to unite all who can and must be united in order to defeat this fascism, and approaching differences in that context and with that orientation.

The longer this Trump regime remains in power, the greater the horrors it will perpetrate—all the more so if it is allowed to fully consolidate its fascist rule. This regime must be removed from power—NOW—before it is too late, through a process driven forward by the massive, non-violent but determined and sustained mobilization of millions of people, uniting all who can be united, who refuse to accept a fascist America—making it impossible for this regime to govern the country and remain in power.

And, as this is carried forward: There can be, and there needs to be, principled discussion and debate about what is represented by this Trump regime and what it means that it is fascism, what is the fundamental source of this fascism and the fundamental solution to the terrible situation in this country and the world as a whole—including the growing dangers to the very existence of humanity, through environmental destruction and the heightening threat of nuclear war. This principled process needs to proceed at the same time as, and in a way that strengthens, rather than weakening and sabotaging, the broad unity that is necessary to defeat this fascism, as an immediate and urgent goal and profound need.