The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
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2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
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4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
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5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
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6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
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8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
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10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
    ︎

The argument for why one must support the Democratic Party takes various similar forms, one of the most popular being the argument for the “lesser evil.” You may commonly hear proponents of the “lesser evil” argument give the sympathetic appeal of “yes, this guy sucks, but the other guy is much worse.” This argument fails to contend with the question of how meaningfully different are the two major political parties from one another. It fails to understand in what ways the two parties are identical and in what ways every “Democratic” president has furthered if not championed the reactionary political objectives that “lesser evil”-ists claim are the main goals of the GOP.

An extremely popular variant of the “lesser evil” justification among left-liberals is the “vote against fascism” trend. They say we must vote for the Democrats because the Republicans are “literally” fascists who will curtail democratic rights, exact “totalitarian” control over the U.S. political sphere, and bring about a fascist state. In order to avoid this eventuality, we must vote for Gore/Clinton/Obama/Biden to save democracy from the scheming fascists.

This position is championed by left-liberals and so-called “socialist” organizations alike. While it accurately identifies the fascist nature of the Republican Party, it is purely coincidental due to the fact that it betrays a complete misunderstanding of fascism in the most basic sense.

It is merely a consequence of political circumstance and colonial/imperial rivalry that the U.S., the U.K., and the other allies fell on the opposite side of the battle lines from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930’s and 40’s. Look no further than the utter enchantment of the American bourgeoisie by Hitler in the run-up to WWII or the direct collaboration by U.S. firms such as IBM, JPMorgan Chase, the Associated Press, General Motors, or Ford, summed up so eloquently by General George S. Patton when he remarked that “we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy (the Germans)” and that the US should have been fighting the communists all along. As a result of this ideological and political alignment with Nazi Germany, in the wake of WWII and the near global acknowledgement of the inherent evil of fascism, it became necessary for the U.S. to wash its hands of Nazism, make clear its opposition to fascism, and obfuscate its alignment with the fascists by putting forward a rigid, superficial, and non-materialist definition of fascism. What we’ve been taught by our education system and our popular media is that the outward form of Nazism is the definition of fascism, and anything that does not look or sound exactly like Nazism cannot possibly be fascism.

This superficial definition is very convenient for the U.S. ruling class in a few key ways. First, it allows the propagation of the narrative that the U.S. and the Allies “defeated” fascism in 1945, that the good guys won, and that all is well and good in the world. Secondly, it allows the ruling class to conflate fascism and socialism by pointing to political purges or the persecution of counter-revolutionaries in socialist countries as equivalent to the repressive acts of the Nazis. And thirdly, it allows the U.S. to obfuscate its historical connection to fascism and to hide the machinations of global fascism since 1945 from the public eye. This simplistic analysis of fascism states that this one specific form of fascism is the extent of fascism, and it ignores the economic function of fascism and its use as a historical tool of class power to fight against revolutionary change.

When socialists legitimize this definition, they effectively whitewash the history of fascism and its current day expressions.

What is fascism?

Fascists first achieved political power in Italy in 1922 with the appointment of Benito Mussolini to the position of Prime Minister, but it achieved primary historical relevance in the form of the National Socialist German Workers Party, a.k.a. the Nazi Party, which took power in 1933 with the appointment of Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

In both Germany and Italy, the fascist political movement found its roots in the persecution of Communists, as it was utilized as an indispensable tool of the bourgeois state to combat rising class consciousness during post-WWI economic instability. The Nazi Party in particular found its roots in the Freikorps, a collection of paramilitary militias which consisted in a large part of German WWI veterans, that were utilized by the Weimar Republic government to put down the Communist revolutionary movement in 1919, led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht and their KPD.

History demonstrates the role of fascism as a tool to preserve capital in the face of political and economic unrest. Post-WWI Germany and Italy faced extreme economic hardship which naturally saw the formation of a strong socialist movement spurred on by the then-recent victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The fascists were first utilized by the bourgeois state to put down the progressive anti-capitalist forces to protect the existing capitalist order from the calls for revolution. Upon taking power, the fascists in both Germany and Italy continued this trend, not only furthering the persecution of Communists, but utilizing their newfound political power to shore up the broken economies.

As Michael Parenti points out in his book Black Shirts and Reds:

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut…

But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable (sic) occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task, Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

What this reveals is the economic essence of fascism. Fascism is an order of austerity, a plundering of the public sectors by the private, taking away the menial social concessions from the working classes and enforcing the dictatorship of capital.

In early 20th century Europe, this took the form of the Italian National Fascist Party, the German Nazi Party, and the Francoist Nationalist Faction in Spain.

The final paragraph in the above-quoted section describes how the fascists at this time imposed their economic order. Jack-booted thugs, extrajudicial assassinations, secret police, and Heil Hitler’s were the measures necessary to achieve the economic goals of fascism in Western Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. But they do not define fascism in their own right.

The Rise of Neoliberalism

In the 1960’s and 70’s the falling rate of profit and global economic downturn again threatened the rule of international capital. As a result, researchers at the University of Chicago devised a new economic order known today as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism saw its entrance into the global political and economic spheres with the administrations of Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in the U.K. in 1980.

What neoliberalism aimed to do was devise new methods for the generation of profit. To this end, the new neoliberal regimes gutted public funds and social services, smashed organized labor — epitomized by the brutal crushing of the Miners Strike by Thatcher in 1985 — and imposed a ruthless austerity regime.

There is a reason that the outwardly fascist Pinochet government in Chile served as the Chicago Boys’ laboratory for neoliberal economic policy. The economic aims of fascism and neoliberalism are identical. Neoliberalism is merely the perfected form of fascism, capable of disguising its austerity regime behind a veneer of liberal democratic reform.

As Parenti again puts it, neoliberalism was able to “achieve fascism’s class goals within the confines of quasi-democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jack-booted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince the people that the government is the enemy — especially the public service sector — while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.”

Here we can see how the ruling class ingeniously achieved the implementation of fascism without the overt political structure that was necessary for fascist organization in early 20th century Europe. Here we can see how the essence of fascism, the economic arrangement of fascism, has been effectively operating in the U.S. for the last 44 years.

Fascism and Colonialism

If, perhaps, you are not convinced, and you believe that a definition of fascism must include the same overt repressive elements of its superstructure, let us turn to the definition from Aimé Césaire, who, in his essay “Discourse on Colonialism” argues that fascism is merely an extension of colonial policy. In essence, the barbaric and violent rule of European fascism in the form of Nazism is a reflection of the rule of the colonialists over their territories.

It is easy to see the merits of this argument. After all, the dictatorial “totalitarian” rule of the colonizers complete with extrajudicial killings, crushing of organized labor in the form of national rebellion, and the denial of democratic rights to the Indigenous is almost indistinguishable from the violent state practices of European fascism. Indeed, when we analyze the systematic genocide of those deemed “undesirable” during the Holocaust, we can directly trace the origins of those practices to the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in the German colonial territories in South West Africa (present day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908.

In the book Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman shows in great detail how Hitler pulled much of his inspiration for racist, genocidal practices in Germany from colonial practice in America. He argues that Lebensraum was directly inspired by the American settler ideology of Manifest Destiny, and notes that Hitler literally calls out practices of racial segregation in the U.S. in Mein Kampf as admirable practices that he wanted to, and did, impose in Germany.

When we acknowledge the colonial legacy of Nazism and fascist political policy, we can begin to analyze the curious case of settler colonialism. In a settler colonial society, the colonial practices are already turned inward from the outset. Genocide, extrajudicial murder, racial stratification of society, state violence used to curtail the democratic rights of “undesirables”, all of these are things that one may argue are characteristic of fascist political formation, and indeed, all of these things have been true about the United States since it declared independence in 1776. In this way, it can be argued that not only is the U.S. still fascist today, it has been quintessentially fascist since the day it was established, albeit in various stages of development.

Over the past several months, The Red Clarion has published a number of articles detailing the continuation of the colonial legacy and the overt fascist practices of the U.S. government: SCOTUS Vision: Debtors’ Prison, Abbott’s Stormtroopers Beat a Man to Death in Texas, Police Murder Reminds Us of Their True Purpose, Fascist Court Strips Right to Protest, No Free Speech About Palestine, Kansas Police Kill Newspaper Owner, SCOTUS Denies Navajo Nation Water, Haaland V. Brackeen, and many others.

Here we can see that those jack-booted thugs that liberals say must accompany any implementation of actually-existing fascism are already here. The CIA and the FBI have been committing extrajudicial assassinations and murder since their inception. Armed state military forces in the form of DHS round up non-white immigrants at the border and imprison them in concentration camps. Unmarked vans drive around in the middle of the night and disappear protestors off the street. Communist and anarchist actors are labeled domestic terrorists and political dissidents such as Kevin Rashid Johnson and Jalil Muntaqim and Assata Shakur are already prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

And all of this done under the careful direction of the political establishment, regardless of party affiliation. 

A key element of the social expression of fascism is scapegoat-ism and the instigation of racial hostilities. Fascism is able to inspire collaboration of the various classes of capitalist society and orient them away from the state and the economic base by pinning the ills of society upon a “subhuman” class of undesirables, typically described as having some inherent criminal element. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people, the Roma people, and those deemed socially or politically deviant, such as LGBT people and Communists. In the U.S., it is easy to see this very same pattern, fomented by the political and media class, and not just elements of those we would typically consider “right wingers”. Never forget that Hillary Clinton justified the expansion of the prison system with her description of Black teens as “superpredators” in the 90’s or that the immigrant detention centers were largely established under the Obama administration.

Any way you want to spin it, there is no denying that fascism already exists in America, making the drive to fall in behind Joe Biden and vote out fascism in November completely nonsensical. Biden and Trump are both fascists of the same variety, one just has a greater degree of deniability. 

Can You Vote Out Fascism?

Let us, for the sake of argument, ignore everything written in this essay up to this point. Let us say that the Democratic Party are not fascists, that fascism is not already here, and that the GOP does constitute the threat to democracy that “lesser evil”-ists are so concerned with. Can you beat fascism at the ballot?

In 1922, the Italian Blackshirts marched on Rome and occupied various government buildings to demand the resignation of the liberal Prime Minister Luigi Facta. When the king refused to enact martial law to quash the rebellion, Facta resigned and Mussolini was appointed prime minister, bringing the National Fascist Party into power. In 1932, a presidential election was held in Germany with the three front-running candidates consisting of independent Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party, and Ernst Thälman of the Communist Party. The election went overwhelmingly in the favor of Hindenburg, who was elected president with 53% of the vote. In 1933, after the failure of parliament to establish a majority government, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the office of the chancellor, bringing the Nazi Party into power for the first time.

What do these historical examples show us? They show us that traditional fascist dictators do not need to rely on democratic processes to take power. When conditions are right for them to take power, they do so, with no regard to whatever elections established the current political order. In the case of Germany, the German populace literally did vote against fascism, choosing instead to elect Hindenburg as president, however, not only did it fail to stop fascism’s rise, the outcome of the election directly led to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of the German state.

So often accompanying the “lesser evil” discourse is the attempt to guilt trip skeptics into voting for the Democrats through the assertion that not voting or, god forbid, voting third-party is tantamount to siding with the fascists. But this is as nonsensical as claiming that Thälman is in part responsible for the rise of the Nazis because he took votes away from Hindenburg.

What is most lacking from the drive to “vote out fascism” is a historical, class-based perspective. Ultimately, Hitler does not fascism make. Fascism is not a single individual, and preventing an individual from achieving a certain political status will do little to stem the rise of fascist power if such a political movement is truly in motion. Fascism is a historical force, and traditional Nazi-esque fascists are utterly unconcerned with democratic processes. They will take power whether you vote for them, against them, or not at all.

This question is explored further in the Red Clarion article, You Can’t Vote Against Fascism.

Presenting an Alternative

In the months leading up to this election, the Democratic Party has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy due to the failures of the Biden administration to fight against reactionary policy and champion the progressive measures demanded by the people. Between the failure of the Biden administration to address the continued COVID-19 Pandemic, to enact critical environmental policy, to stop the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to stem the revocation of Trans rights nationwide, and most critically, to stop supporting the genocide in Palestine, people all over the country are beginning to see the bankruptcy of bourgeois electoralism. Following the presidential debate on June 27th, even the liberal media class has begun to publicly question the legitimacy of another Joe Biden presidency.

Crises such as this one are the opportunities for revolutionary alternatives to step into the void and make themselves known. Millions and millions of people are right now searching for an alternative to the naked bankruptcy of the U.S. political establishment. Now is the time for the socialist left to come together and present a political formation that clarifies its distinction from corrupt bourgeois electoralism and champions revolutionary change.

Instead, our “comrades” are asking us to support a Democratic presidential candidate that not even the talking heads on CNN are falling in behind, and justifying it with the nonsensical argument that our democracy is under threat and needs saving from fascism. This position betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of class politics. It serves only to hide the realities of existing American fascism and obfuscate to what extent our democratic rights have already been eroded (or were never granted in the first place). It refuses to ask the question of whose interests our “democracy” actually serves and fails to present a coherent strategy for change.

The insidiousness of the neoliberal form of fascism is its ability to disguise itself as bourgeois liberal democracy. When we fail to put forward a comprehensive analysis of fascism and acknowledge to what extent we are already embroiled in it, we aid the ruling class’ attempts to camouflage the machinations of the fascist regime. It is a thin veil and it is slipping. Let us not stand there and offer to fix it for them. We must tear it away and reveal the monstrous face of American fascism once and for all.

We must make clear to other Communists and disenfranchised and disaffected persons that fascism is already here and that participation in bourgeois elections is a distraction from revolutionary organizing. This is not to say that we must roll over for reactionaries or cape for the monsters in the GOP, but it is the starting point for the development and presentation of an alternative. It is the base upon which we can take up true, revolutionary, anti-fascist organizing and practical work. By understanding the connections between settler colonialism and fascism, fascism and neoliberalism, and nazism and Manifest Destiny, we can begin to develop a political position and a political formation capable of challenging each of these axes of oppression and changing the world for the better.

Let us internalize now the immortal words of Communist, Black Panther, and political prisoner George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.

Danielle Smith is also an enemy of the people. As a serving Canadian politician, this status is almost automatic — she shares the gamut of genocidal opinions without which one is politically ostracized and removed from power. For instance, Smith believes that Israel should exist and has a right to defend itself, that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th constituted a “terrible terrorist attack,” etc. What are the full historic depths of her depravity and crimes against the working classes, which are only increasing as she seeks to dismantle Alberta’s social security, healthcare system, and pensions?

Smith lived in subsidized housing growing up. She attributes her interest in politics to her father scolding her about the evils of Communism and the U.S.S.R in the eighth grade after a teacher presented them in a glowing light. One is forced to wonder what her father knows about Communismbeyond the usual misconceptions and propaganda. Indeed, that Smith ever had a teacher in McCarthyite Alberta during the height of the Cold War who portrayed Communism in a remotely positive light beggars belief.

Concerned about “Marxist indoctrination” happening in Alberta’s schools (don’t laugh), Smith’s father scared her back into politically acceptable anti-Communism. He taught her about the non-communist politicians of whom it’s considered appropriate to think highly, such as Ronald Reagan. Smith would become a libertarian who admired all the standard ghouls such as fellow social security recipient Ayn Rand and the queen of the ghouls herself, Margaret Thatcher. While she was in university, Smith was a favored student of disgusting reprobate and conservative thought leader Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is notorious for his affirmative comments about child pornography, his anti-Indigenous political positions and racism, and for once advocating for the assassination of Julian Assange. 

Today, Smith’s politics are a crude synthesis of Thatcherism and the ideas of what’s called the “Calgary School” in order to lend gravitas to its specific blend of Austrian economics and Straussianism; in other words, to validate it as a legitimate political and economic philosophy when it’s actually nonsense. Unfortunately, an elaboration of the many and varied deficiencies in this “school” would be beyond the scope of this article.

Even with no knowledge of Marx or the philosophy underpinning Smith’s actions, the span of her career illustrates the amorality and harm of neoliberalism and conservatism. What she lacks in original ideas, Smith makes up for in a mindless goferism for recapitulating conservative talking points. Even the fact that her own party thinks little of her individuality or autonomy does not discourage her from implementing their platform and pushing it further right. When the party was in danger of losing seats in the most recent Alberta election, they reminded voters that it’s the party’s principles that are important, and the party that makes decisions, not foot-in-her-mouth Danielle Smith. Still, neither the lack of propriety nor knowledge have dissuaded Smith. She’s often spilling out the shit that right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute fill her with — and spew she does. 

As a “Private Property Rights Advocate” in the nineties, she argued that private property rights trump all other rights, so protections for endangered species should be removed. Naturally, she’s vitriolically anti-Indigenous.

After a brief stint on the Calgary Board of Education, on which she operated as a poison pill against progressive interests, she became a journalist. She didn’t have any journalistic credentials, but was hired as a scab during the 1999-2000 Calgary Herald strike, proving that she has the most important journalistic qualification of all — the sycophantic zeal to regurgitate whatever garbage the Fraser Institute or tobacco lobby put on her plate. Her peers at the Herald didn’t call her “Trash Can Dani” for nothing. At the behest of both the Fraser Institute and the tobacco lobby, Smith famously lauded the “special health benefits” of smoking cigarettes — specifically that “smoking half a pack per day reduces the traditional risks of disease by 75% or more.” She also wrote an article entitled “Natives ultimate losers as reserves become ghettoes” in which she repeated Tom Flanagan’s perverse argument that increased constitutional protections and sovereignty for Indigenous nations encourage segregation and apartheid.

We must make abundantly clear what a bastardization and insidious framing of the issue this perspective is. Flanagan has written several historically revisionist texts which are meant to reframe and justify colonialism as beneficial to the colonized. He would have us believe that the problems which beset Indigenous reserves — from crumbling or non-existent infrastructure to the general poverty and social ills —  are all due to Indigenous mismanagement. For him, it’s the Indigenous unwillingness to peacefully integrate into the “superior, European-modeled society” that is the cause of their troubles — not the underlying issues of colonial trauma and apartheid. Of course, which society imposed the reserve system on the other conveniently slips his mind. This is so he can say any increased sovereignty for reserves, or any token acts of reparation by the Canadian state towards its Indigenous people are actually harmful because they incentivize Indigenous peoples to remain in their own inferior civilizations. Smith espoused this opinion as a journalist about the Nisga’a Treaty of 2000, and the same attitude has pervaded her political stances towards Indigenous nations since. For Flanagan, and, by extension, Smith, any money or support rendered by the Canadian state to Indigenous nations is self-defeating; he believes that corrupt Indigenous leadership will squander whatever is given so that they always have the pretense to ask for more.

In her career as a journalist, Smith enthusiastically propagated this nonsense — it’s a very comforting narrative to a certain strata of settlers who would eventually form her political base.

Flanagan also wrote a dubious biography about Louis Riel, which frames Riel as a millenarian in order to delegitimize Metis land claims. This is eerily similar to the zionist obfuscation that the Palestinian struggle is purely religious and existential, not rooted in the ownership and occupation of land. 

Flanagan and his mouthpiece Smith falsely equate the integration of Indigenous Nations into the Canadian state with the desegregation of the United States and the end of South African apartheid. This is a prevarication. An actual end to Canadian apartheid demands the dissolution of the legal fiction that is the Canadian state and the complete reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty by Indigenous nations.

Eventually, Smith turned her latent fascism into gold and became a politician. In this way, she made the leap from speaking and writing toxic waste to dumping it on millions of Albertans. Informed by her faulty understanding of sovereignty (thanks to having read and repeated Flanagan for so many years), her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in December 2022. Though it masquerades as protection for Albertan interests against interference from the federal government, the only interests it truly defends are those of the same corporations and conservative political insiders we’ve been describing. The act was criticized by Indigenous leaders on the grounds that it could supersede their tribal rights. Smith even had the gall to compare the quibbles between Alberta and the federal government as comparable to the struggle between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of course, she apologized for this.  

 The controversies and gaffes of her political career are well-documented and too numerous to get into, and are identical to those of any other fascist politician such as Ron DeSantis, whom she admires. She shares his COVID denialism, has compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler, and called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed.” Again she issued some lackadaisical apology, but the statement’s function as a dogwhistle had done its work. Ultimately, Smith’s apologies always take this insincere form — she says something that appeals to her base and is incendiary to everyone else, then hastily apologizes. But by the time Smith apologizes, whatever she said has already achieved its purpose, and the apology is comparatively meaningless.

If there’s one way Smith is unlike many similar figures, it’s her “live and let live” attitude about 2SLGBTQIA+ people and communities. But even this is not commendable. Although she is not vocally anti-2SLGBTQIA+ or “anti-woke” in the way many of her supporters wish she was, her desire to “depoliticize the issue” is functionally the same as theirs. By giving equal validity to oppressors and the oppressed, she is siding with the oppressor.

But this all pales compared to Smith’s latest neoliberal machinations, though we should stress one final time that these ideas do not belong to her, per se — she is merely the current, spineless functionary who must enact them. Smith wants Alberta to leave the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in order to create an Alberta Pension Plan; she wants to dismantle the Alberta Health Service and cannibalize it into four new bureaucratic entities. Even Margaret Thatcher regarded the National Health Service as sacrosanct — if by “sacrosanct” we mean, “a line that even the bourgeoisie hesitate to cross, lest the masses come for their heads.” Though the details of what these nascent policies would entail are murky, history shows that their enactment can only have disastrous effects for the working class. Similar reforms, like those enacted by Thatcher and Pinochet in the eighties, only ever benefited corporations and the government officials who implemented them. They had deleterious impacts upon the social security of the working classes, and their effects remain apparent today.

Both AHS and the CPP leave much to be desired — they are meant to only benefit people as inexpensively and minimally as possible. But that even these programs risk vivisection by Danielle Smith and her handlers should still raise anyone’s alarm. For these policies, her anti-Indigenous attitudes, and for being the pliable tool of humanity’s most reprehensible elements, Danielle Smith is an enemy of the people.