If we add up the voices of opponents of the mainstream in many countries, their number is quite significant at the global level. But do they all constitute a global base for Trump’s world revolution?
A couple of months ago, I published an article on the website of the Valdai Discussion Club, titled “Donald Trump as a Global Revolutionary”. In response to this text, my colleagues asked me two questions. First, can an ultra-right politician be considered a revolutionary? After all, according to the classical Leninist theory of revolution, it inevitably and exclusively grows out of class struggle. Therefore, only left-wing forces can truly be called revolutionaries; the actions of non-systemic right-wingers are nothing more than a top-level coup, explained by the growing contradictions between various groups of the ruling class (elite) in the conditions of imperialism. In this logic, the reproach was understandable: how dare you call this Trump a revolutionary?! And slander the great idea with him. The second question, according to the same classical theory of Lenin, for a revolution to happen, an objectively formed revolutionary situation is necessary. But does it exist in the modern world, if we are talking about Trump as a protagonist of not only an intra-American, but also a global revolution? In a word, is Trump ahead of his time?
I partly touched on both of these questions in the article mentioned above. But the discussions later showed their importance. In addition, in the time that has passed since that publication, a tragicomic discord has occurred between Trump and Elon Musk. The farcical nature of the current situation makes it quite reasonable to exclaim: well, what kind of revolutionaries are they? Two freak billionaires, and nothing more. Although this split can also, in principle, be looked at through the prism of historical comparisons. Recall, for example, the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, Stalin and Trotsky, Mao Zedong and Li Lifan, and later between Mao and Liu Shaoqi, etc. In the end, every revolutionary policy has been characterised by an extremely sharp factional struggle. Sometimes, they take on a completely grotesque character. Initially, it was not too different from the current discord between Trump and Musk.
If we’re still deciding whether Trump has the moral right to be called a revolutionary, then we must proceed from our understanding of revolution as a social phenomenon. If by revolution we mean not only the victory of the proletariat in the class struggle, but any violent breakdown of one social system or order and its replacement with something different and new, and if we still admit that the left-wing forces do not have a “monopoly” on the use of the term “revolution”, then there is no doubt that Trump is a revolutionary. This, however, does not relieve us of a certain moral discomfort in recognising an ultra-right politician as a revolutionary. This discomfort is quite noticeable and understandable. Should we consider, for example, Hitler a revolutionary? Or Mussolini?
The second question, in our opinion, is more difficult. Is there a revolutionary situation in the modern world? Does Trump objectively express urgent interests? Or is he just lobbying forcibly for one faction of the elite against another, and nothing more?
In the aforementioned article, we have already examined this problem, but primarily in the domestic aspect, from the point of view of social discontent with the established order of things, both in the United States itself and in other countries. However, if we are talking about Trump as the protagonist of a world revolution, is there a global revolutionary situation?
Here we are faced with a rather tangible difficulty. Despite all the expert discourse since the early 1990s about the erosion of state sovereignty and about the formation of a global governance system, there is still no organised structure to the world in either political or social sense. The world is still fragmented into separate states. And sovereignty of the state, no matter how much they talk about its erosion, continues to remain a fairly rigid barrier on the path to global peace.
In this context, it would be quite logical to say that a global revolutionary situation is impossible in itself in principle. It can only be perceived as a sum of revolutionary situations in individual countries, in the USA, for example, in Hungary or somewhere else. We have written earlier that such signs are present in many countries. This is manifested in a consistently significant percentage of votes that non-systemic parties and candidates, both on the left and right, receive in elections. Moreover, we have seen, for example, in the example of Germany, that the electorate of the non-mainstream left can switch en masse to the non-systemic right. That is, those strata of society that want serious changes and a rejection of the established neoliberal mainstream are, in principle, not fixated strictly on the left or strictly on the right version of such a revolution. This is important in the modern context, when the vagueness and amorphousness of public opinion no longer puts up rigid insurmountable barriers between different ideologies. At least, in their perception by the masses of society.
In the end, if we add up the voices of opponents of the mainstream in many countries, their number is quite significant at the global level. But do they all constitute a global base for Trump’s world revolution? From the point of view of passive perception, we can say that they do. In any case, what Trump declares (in the end, he does an order of magnitude less), in our opinion, finds a fairly positive response among opponents of the established mainstream.
But this passive dissatisfaction with the mainstream and equally passive approval of Trump do not yet make this social stratum active participants in the Trumpist revolution. In Russia, the term “armchair criticism” has taken hold in relation to this style. In Europe and the States, of course, the situation is different, but even there the potential for active social mobilisation on the part of the ultra-right has its limits. In any case, the transformation of the “standard” ultra-right protest into a mass street movement “for Trump” is not happening at the moment, either in the United States itself or in other countries.
The next aspect, if we consider the global revolutionary situation as a sum of domestic ones, is connected with Trump-style leaders. Who are Trump’s allies now among the leaders of other countries? Apart from Orban and perhaps a couple more people, it is difficult to name anyone. Some of the leaders of international organisations for whom the United States is extremely important do this by virtue of their official position. Here the most illustrative example is Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, who became Secretary General of NATO. What Rutte says now (with an obvious desire to please Trump) is sometimes absolutely the opposite of what the same Rutte said a year ago. This in itself is extremely grotesque and sometimes makes one recall the saying that a dog barks where it is tied. But at least that’s it. There are no more allies of Trump in sight. At the same time, Russia, which, in our opinion, is an obvious beneficiary of the Trumpist world revolution, takes a detached and reserved position in relation to Trump’s global initiatives. This, however, is also understandable.
Furthermore, if there are no active leaders-allies, then the theory of revolution tells us that they need to be formed. Here Lenin places the key emphasis on the revolutionary party, and on the international aspect – the union of such parties – on the “International”. We have already written about the problems in forming the Trumpist International in the aforementioned article. This is not even the beginning of the path.
Let’s return to the social base. In the classical revolutionary theory of Marx and Lenin, the main driving force of the revolution was the proletariat, since it had nothing to lose except its own chains. In the rethinking of Marxism by Mao Zedong and a number of African leaders, a similar role was assigned to the poor peasantry – for the same reasons. It is obvious that the modern “armchair critic” of the mainstream is not suitable for this role. He already has a lot to lose. A couch, a home, access to bank loans, and a salary. As a rule, this is a stratum of the middle class, maybe its lower classes, but by no means the classical proletariat. The middle class, despite having accumulated justified dissatisfaction with the mainstream, according to theory, is hardly able to become the driver of the revolution, at least according to its classical leftist interpretation.
But who is there instead? And is there such a force? In the expert space of international leftist forces, we have already seen well-reasoned judgments that only migrant workers meet the criteria of the proletariat, according to its original Marxist interpretation. Only they, in fact, have nothing to lose except their own chains. At the same time, the pronounced anti-migrant rhetoric of Trump (and all the ultra-right in general) makes this social stratum by no means his ally. The left, however, by and large does not work with migrants, with the exception of the simulacra of election campaigns. But one way or another, perhaps the only real driving force of the world revolution is not in the niche of Trumpism.
Does this mean that Trump is doomed as a revolutionary? Lenin once wrote a famous phrase about the evolution of revolutionary sentiments in Russia during the 19th century: “The Decembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen launched revolutionary agitation. It was picked up, expanded, strengthened, tempered by the revolutionary commoners, starting with Chernyshevsky and ending with the heroes of the ‘People’s Will’”. According to this logic, maybe Trump will wake someone up? Maybe he is only a forerunner of the one who will come after him. And then the ultra-right (or other) world revolution will receive a more powerful social base and global political representation. We'll see; time will tell.
