[This article, based on a talk given by Workers Fight on 16 March 2025, was updated on 19 May 2025]
There is a teeshirt on sale in markets in Damascus, with "make America nuts again" written on the front.
Yes, even in Syria, Trump's "Make America Great Again" - or "MAGA-lomania" is treated as a joke. This teeshirt says, in a nutshell(!), what Trump, 2.0, seems to be doing this time round... If, of course, all of his over-the-top show business can be taken seriously!
And it seems as if he is intent on making the rest of the world nuts as well, while Keir Starmer hangs desperately onto his coat-tails...
We should however, start by saying that Trump the "joker" is not at all funny. After all, he sits in the world's number one power seat. And for the Palestinians, Trump Mark2 is turning out to be lethal. The Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump himself boasted of achieving, never held. The Israeli Defence Force is going in for the final kill, bombing tents in safe zones and what's left of the hospitals. The situation has escalated to the point where the Palestinians' aspirations are also being killed. Not only is Netanyahu - backed by Trump - planning to expel them from Gaza, but the occupied West Bank is in the process of being systematically ethnically cleansed as well.
As for the Ukrainians and Russians, since Trump declared he was going to end the war, this has turned into a macabre and ill-boding spectacle, played out in front of the world's audiences with Trump deliberately antagonising the Zelensky leadership and then the whole of the EU's too, bar Hungary's. And then there were the immediate attacks carried out by that delinquent chain-saw-wielding brat, Elon Musk, who has already cut thousands of jobs in the USA's Federal civil service.
As for Syria, it was only a matter of time before the situation there became dangerously unstable once more; precisely what already took place in early March: the sectarian killings of Alawites on a large scale in Latakia for the sole reason that these people belong to the same tribe as the former dictator, Assad. And despite the fact that they were just as relieved as everyone else that this dictator had fled the country.
The underlying problem, however, is that the Israeli army is already treating parts of Lebanon and Syria as its own backyard and behaving as a regional power, with the backing of Donald Trump...
Remembering the 18th Brumaire
So today we have Trump mark 2. As Karl Marx wrote: "if history repeats itself, it is: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce". For sure, we are witnessing farce - but it can be deadly!
What Marx was referring to at the time - in 1852 - was the second coming of Napoleon Bonaparte, but in that case it was actually the nephew, not the real thing - who by then was dead. This nephew, Louis Napoleon the Third was a populist, like Trump, and even carried out a referendum in homage to democracy to get the public to agree to the unconstitutional prolongation of his rule...
To quote the history books: "Having failed to obtain a revision in the constitution that would allow him to be re-elected in 1852, Louis-Napoleon dissolved the Assemblée nationale on 2 December 1851, in direct violation of the constitution".
Like Trump, Napoleon the Third was a true populist, pretending to uphold democracy, and the right to vote, and declaring himself the protector of the common worker - and just like Trump today, paying solemn homage to his holy God and Jesus.
Whether one can call Trump "bonapartist" or not is in question, but he is certainly farcical and a parody, even of himselft He is playing fast and loose with the hallowed US constitution and many suspect him of having visions of empire, given what he has said about taking over Canada, Greenland and Panama - and of course, he's renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America!
In his text on Napoleon the third, Marx added that "men make their own history, but they do not make it as just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past".
So what do we make of the current situation in world politics and the circumstances inherited from the past? What do we make of Starmer 1.0? Is this a repetition of Blair's right wing Labour? Or are both Trump and Starmer mere caricatures - comic book versions of their predecessors as Marx said of Louis Napoleon in 1851?
Actually we can't pretend that we have the answers - but we can certainly raise the questions.
...and Trump's first tariffs
In October 2018, during Trump's first term, Workers' Fight presented a forum entitled "Trade War, Brexit, convulsions of a capitalist world in crisis". We began by imagining how a Martian landing on earth at that time, would have had to come to the conclusion that this planet must be some sort of madhouse.
If that was the case then - it must be allnthe more so, today!
At that time, we made parallels between Trump's protectionist policies and the period of the Great Depression when all the rich powers of the time were implementing tit-for-tat tariffs against each other. This period ended, of course, in World War 2.
In 2017, Trump was imposing his tariffs in the context of the on-going, and chronic, world economic crisis which had suddenly got a lot worse in 2008, because of the banking crash. And in fact 10 years later, the economy had shown little sign of recovery. In that forum of 2018, we recalled the reasons for the rise of fascism in Germany and compared this to the general shift to the political right after the financial crash, which in Britain, had culminated in the Brexit vote. And let's remember too, how at the time there was an incredibly nasty wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the forerunner of the Reform Party today - that is Nigel Farage's pro-Brexit UKIP party. Ironically the context then was the refugee crisis as a result of the war in Syria.
But as we said, history doesn't repeat itself exactly, although we definitely need to take serious heed of the past and try to learn from it.
So we see that today, Trump is announcing tariffs again - in fact he did so almost immediately after his inauguration on 20 January - and much higher tariffs this time, than in 2017/18.
But these 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been imposed and withdrawn twice over already. One gets the impression that Trump is not even serious about his posturing as "Tariff Man".
On the other hand, as part of his "America First" policy, Trump said he would end the Ukraine war, as promised during his election campaign. And this turned into a huge melodrama! Trump first spoke with the Russian side and opened himself to being accused of being too friendly with Putin. And then there was that orchestrated public bust-up with Ukraine's Zelensky with Trump accusing him of "gambling with World War 3".
So there we have it. US protectionism, retaliation against the tariffs, and warnings of world war. What are we to make of this?
Their escalating lies
We can say that we have definitely, in our own lifetimes at least, not seen this level of generalised conscious lying and misrepresentation of reality among the political class which is leading Europe and the USA.
For 20 months, we've been watching what seemed like impossible and escalating slaughter in Gaza, justified by almost all of them, while standing steadfastly with Netanyahu, on the basis of Israel's "right fo defend itself". When it was blatantly obvious to anyone - and would have been to a Martian from outer space - that this was a war of attempted annihilation of Gaza and its people. And in this case Starmer, Macron, Biden and now Trump were united - and, de facto, supporting the self-proclaimed fascists in Netanyahu's war cabinet.
Yet over Ukraine, they are split - at least for appearances.
We cannot say what is really going on behind the scenes, but what we do know is that the centrepiece of the affair is meant to be a deal signed with Trump on Ukraine's rare earth minerals - even if there is little evidence of Ukraine having any - although there are a substantial number of critical mineral deposits and mines in Russian-occupied East Ukraine. This deal was portrayed by Trump as pay-back to the US for its investment in the war. In other words, part of keeping his promises to his electorate. After Zelenky's refusal to sign amid that Oval office hullaballoo, now it seems the deal is actually signed, if neither sealed nor delivered.
On the other hand, Winston Starmer, as the Economist journal has dubbed him, has assembled a so-called "coalition of the willing" to make a stand "shoulder to shoulder" with Zelensky against Putin and he promises boots on the ground in the event of a ceasefire deal. The coalition so far includes everyone except Hungary's president, Victor Orban and next-door neighbour, Slovakia's Robert Fico.
Already, this "Britain First into the breach", policy has meant that Starmer has made a "loan" of £2.26 billion to Zelensky, which is meant to be paid back by "using profits generated on sanctioned Russian sovereign assets" to quote the government website... So, the cost of "defence of the realm" - is literally "trumping" expenditure on anything else. Said Starmer, it's "the first duty of any government". And never mind the unfillable black hole which he previously claimed had been left behind by the Tories - and which resulted in all those "tough choices" like cutting pensioners' fuel allowance and leaving the NHS and elderly social care to carry on collapsing...
Starmer and the European leaders claim that the good reason for them suddenly to find the cash for re- arming - despite black holes in all of their finances - is "the existential threat" posed by Putin to Britain, to Europe and indeed to the whole of the so-called "free world"... Which of course is an obvious lie.
Putin has never made any such threats. Whenever he has gone to war in the past, it has been exclusively in his own backyard - in the former territories of the USSR, that is, Chechnya, Georgia and of course, Ukraine.
Putin on the defensive
This is what Eugene Rumer from the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" wrote in December 2022: "Lately, Putin has been described as unhinged and reckless, traits that presumably led him to blunder into invading Ukraine". But, says Rumer, in fact, "he is calculating and deliberate, and he has pursued a long-term, consistent strategy at home and abroad. ... He has pursued twin overarching goals: to secure the political regime he has built at home and to provide maximum security - as he understands it - for the Russian state, by establishing a sphere of influence around it to shield it from external threats. Putin's pursuit of both goals logically led him to wage war on Ukraine".
Indeed, for Putin this is all about creating a defensive shield around Russia - against perceived - but in fact real threats from NATO missile batteries which have been moving closer and closer, despite the end of the Cold War.
Indeed, no context, nor rationale for the war itself, nor for their own stance is provided by any of the European politicians.
But this is a useful pretext to now proclaim the need to re-arm, and therefore ostensibly funnel their state finances into the weapons industry. They need to play up the huge threat and need for defence - but of course, they aren't even going to build up their armies, because they can't afford it.
No, it will be the best excuse they think, in front of the public since none of the commitments to health welfare and social care could ever have been met anyway.
So we have this repulsive spectacle of all the EU leaders and Starmer standing at attention... and they are all claiming that Putin is threatening the rest of Europe when there has never been a shred of evidence to support this.
When Trump says Putin is ready to agree a ceasefire and make a deal, he is right. By now the NATO Alliance led by Washington has actually achieved the aim it set itself right from the start. Russia's military and its economy is weakened. Putin is struggling to find enough troops to send to the frontline and has had to resort to borrowing troops from North Korea...
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbspIn fact, contrary to Western fairy tales, Russia was never strong - all it was, was large - it is the biggest country in the world by land mass and having a large population it is also able to have a large army. But none of this would have been possible if it had not been for its Soviet past, and having to militarise its economy for the whole of the post-war period until it collapsed in 1991.
Even after 35 years of trying to rebuild itself into a capitalist economy, its GDP per capita is less than that of Romania and its nominal GDP places it 8th in the world, thanks only to its size and behind India, which is 5th - with Britain and France 6th and 7th respectively!
After 3 years of war and huge losses, today Russia is more likely than ever to comply with peace conditions imposed on it by the US-NATO - and especially now that Trump is in the White House, given his claim - true or not - that Putin respects him and that he "knows" something about Putin that he will not share with us!
Back in the USSR...
We should recall that ever since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, western capitalism has been unable to take full advantage of the natural wealth and resources - including human resources - of this huge country and its satellites. Today when capitalism is reaching new lows in terms of the crisis of its economic system, renewed access to untapped resources might allow western capitalist classes, which have already spread themselves all over the rest of the globe, to keep going and also to advance further in computer technology and data and Al, for instance. So yes, western countries were keen to see Putin weakened and this war was seen as an opportunity to force him to do a deal with them from a position of weakness.
What has been striking ever since the overt interference by the USA in Ukraine's politics in 2014, in the so- called Maidan revolution - after which a pro-US and anti-Russian politician was put in place - is the painting of the Russian regime as an aggressor - and not just in its own backyard, but as a threat to the West and its so- called democratic values. It was a revival of the Cold War.
But of course Russia today is nothing like the Soviet Union was then, and even at that time the threat was invented, Putin has never expressed any designs on European countries and has no means to activate any such threats anyway. His problem is specifically a problem with what happens with Ukraine - which is his backyard, thus, for obvious strategic reasons.
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbspWe'd say that Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was provoked by NATO, under president Biden's leadership, after Biden refused at the last minute even to meet Putin, despite Putin's request. This has led to the narrative that Putin invaded Ukraine because he is innately aggressive, and that he really wants to take over Europe.
Taking no side in the Ukraine-Russia war
Starmer claims that "Russia is an existential threat" and then really turning the world on its head, says that Putin's aim in waging war with Ukraine, is "to weaken NATO". A perfect example of "gaslighting"!
But Starmer has no problem about lying and warmongering and scaremongering and portraying Putin and Russians as subhuman. He is good at that sort of twisting of the truth. He happily went along with the dehumanisation of the Palestinians of Gaza, for instance.
No context, nor rationale for the war itself, nor for their own stance is provided by any of the European politicians who are standing full square with Zelensky and promising to put boots on the ground in the event of a ceasefire...
But then again, never answering the question of "why?" a war is really being fought is nothing new. British students are still told in their history lessons that WW2 was a fight against German fascism - they are not told that it was a rerun of the unresolved redivision of the world after WwW1, among the richest imperialist powers in the context of the near-collapse of the world economy - second time round, which allowed the USA to emerge as the main victor.
WW2 Is much better reduced to a simple fight of good versus evil - and today, so is the war being fought in Ukraine. And of course the British are always on the side of "good". Saying otherwise today, is to quote from the so-called "Russian playbook".
For us though, it's not a question of choosing sides. In this war we say a plague on both their houses, that is, the huge NATO house which is using Ukraine as its proxy against Putin's ruling Russian bureaucracy - and, as they say, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. And we add that the working class's main enemy is at home.
But of course, we want to understand what fs really going on because we see it as our duty as revolutionary Marxists to try to identify the interests of the working class - across all countries - in any of the conflicts which break out above workers' heads
And then the Russian tanks got stuck...
The Russian bear was provoked. It was poked and it thus invaded. But it wasn't even very well-prepared Because although European politicians speak about how they never imagined Russian tanks rolling into a European country again, after the end of the Cold War, this was hardly the same thing at all. The tanks which "rofled into Ukraine" in February 2022 actually all immediately got stuck on the road to Kiev; they ran out of petrol and the Russian soldiers inside tried to flee, but most of them got shot or were taken prisoner.
The real facts of the matter have so long been denied by EU and British politicians and their parroting media, that they were apparently astonished when Trump more or less stated these facts at the end of February, when he organised talks to end the war with Russia''s envoy, Sergey Lavrov. And now these politicians and their loyal media tell us that the tectonic plates of world geopolitics have shifted!
In fact nothing has really shifted. We know that reactionary nationalism is the resort of bourgeois politicians in times of crisis - it is a useful tool and it divides populations and certainly can potentially thus weaken and distract the forces opposed to the ruling class! And it was reactionary nationalism which was facilitated in Ukraine by western politicians for their own ends. Ukrainian politicians who were looking to associate themselves with the EU and even be invited to join it - passed laws aimed at the Russian speaking population and against Russian language being taught in school, or even spoken. This is what sparked the initial fighting - a civil war, in fact - in predominantly Russian-speaking East Ukraine. But behind that was another motive - and that was the rich resources in this part of the country and the fear that these would fall into the hands of Russia.
The Russian intervention after 2014, including taking Crimea back was thus intended to defend Ukrainian Russian-speakers who were under attack by Ukrainian nationalists, including by supporters of the Ukrainian far- right.
But that wasn't even the main issue for Putin. His problem was the increasingly aggressive encirclement by NATO of Russia - batteries of missiles pointed at Moscow which had been placed in Poland and the former Soviet bloc, and the possibility of Ukraine's NATO and EU membership bringing this threat far toe close for comfort.
"I just want to be a European...."
The irony of this is that Russia had actually wanted to join NATO, but was constantly rebuffed. Or, if The Guardian's reporting is correct, did not want to stand in the queue with other lesser candidates. This is an extract from The Guardian of 3 November 2021, which is quite revealing:
"George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led NATO between 1999 and 2003, said Putin made it clear at their first meeting that he wanted Russia to be part of western Europe. 'They wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous west that Russia was out of at the time." he said.
The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000. Putin said: 'When are you going to invite us to join NATO?' And [Robertson] said: 'Well, we don't invite people to join NATO, they apply to join NATO.' And he said: 'Well, we're not standing in line with a lot of countries that don't matter.'
The account chimes with what Putin told the late David Frost in a BBC interview shortly before he was first inaugurated as Russian president more than 21 years ago. Putin told Frost he would not rule out joining NATO if and when Russia's views are taken into account as those of an equal partner.
He told Frost it was hard for him to visualise NATO as an enemy. 'Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world.'
We can't say what will happen next in the Ukraine war. Will it end sooner rather than later? Among the protagonists, nobody trusts anyone else and probably rightly so. Zelensky wants security guarantees, but is there any such thing?".
One thing we know for sure and that is that Trump couldn't care less about the killing despite portraying himself as a peacemaker, claiming he is concerned for the "millions of people" who have been killed on both sides in this war - which is another one of his off-the-cuff exaggerations - although of course nobody actually knows how many Ukrainians have been killed. Ukraine's official admission is 46,000 dead. They claim 350,000 Russians have been killed, but there is another figure of 700,000 doing the rounds as well.
The fact that a deal on rare earth minerals has been at the centre of Trump's current "peace" intervention says it all. He's done everyone a favour - by exposing the capitalist system as the nakedly self-interested brute it always was; voracious for "profits first" (and not "America" First!; and withno concern whatsoever for human life.
The rotten rise of nationalism
We want to end the talk today by saying a few things about the policy towards immigrant workers given how the rich countries' politicians, right across the board, are raising the nationalist tone of their rhetoric and at the same time closing borders.
In fact Starmer has just brought in a change in Home Office rules so that all refugees who arrive in Britain via irregular routes are to be automatically barred from claiming citizenship - this is Yvette Cooper's latest contribution to the campaign against immigrants. In the face of the far-right Reform Party's rise in the polls her response is to copy their ideas.
And of course, refugees are already treated like criminals. In fact ever since 2020, they have been routinely tagged with electronic GPS devices as soon as they arrive.
It's worth mentioning too that when Starmer was asked by the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch why a court had granted a Palestinian family from Gaza the right to live in Britain Starmer said his government did not agree with this decision and was going to close that "legal loophole" asap!
At the time, Badenoch has let it be known that her party, if and when it gets into government, would double the period before which any migrant can claim the right to remain in Britain to 10 years. Just this month, Starmer announced that his Labour government was introducing precisely this policy!
We already mentioned Trump's rounding up of undocumented migrants whe are having to hide themselves and live in perpetual fear of deportation. And never mind the fact that their labour provides an indispensable part of US capitalism's profit. Which obviously means that the US economy can't afford to lose them and Trump cannot actually afford to deport them!
That said, the gains of parties like the far-right Alternative for Germany (they got 20% in the election last month) or Reform in Britain (which got 14.3% of the vote in July and "won" the local elections on 1 May) are symptomatic of the chronic and worsening crisis. As we said in that 2018 forum about Trump Mark 1, "populism is a by-product of today's mess, not its cause".
Far-right extremists and populist politicians like Trump, gain a voice at times like this and propose to help this rotten and degenerate capitalism system survive by imposing austerity and creating scapegoats and bogeymen to blame for the inbuilt faults of the system they defend. Above all they absurdly blame migrant workers and/or refugees for causing capitalism's ills when they are in fact its first victims.
There is a conscious and obvious reason for this. Because they are attempting in this way to divide the only force - the working class - which can overthrow the capitalist system and replace it. This is why we say that the only justifiable war today is the class war, which has that precise aim, capitalist overthrow. This is the revolutionary task which our whole class, in all of its diversity, can and will undertake.
It will open a new chapter in history - and one which is not a repetition of the past, but the invention of an entirely new and progressive, internationalist, communist future for humanity - in a world without any borders!
We will give Marx the final word from his Communist Manifesto: "The profetarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
March 2025