Fascism isn't a glitch: it's capital's strategy, and Trump is enforcing it
by Isabelino Montes
Revolutionary ideas do not emerge from an idealistic whim for social justice nor from the worn-out faith in class coexistence. They arise from an irreconcilable reality that exposes the contradictions between wage labor and capital. It is from this understanding and from the historical moment we are facing that conscious revolutionary workers begin to analyze the process through which the capitalist political poles and their entire apparatus of action are being defined today.
At Nexo Revolucionario Media, with insistence and rigor, we have sought to understand the background of each advance in the fascist policies that characterize the government of Donald Trump, as well as their complicit echo in the colony of Puerto Rico administered by Jennifer González. We have highlighted that these policies are not isolated anomalies or mere ideological stances but an integral part of the capitalist economic logic. All of them serve a common goal: to reduce the labor force and production costs to enable a new process of automated commodity production.
Mass deportations and arrests, the creation of an immigrant prison in Florida, the tariffs imposed from the White House, each of these elements is a concrete expression of US capital’s desperate race to modernize its means of production. This is an open class war they can no longer disguise, driven by the US’s need to compete with China in large-scale industrial production.
Since February, we have clearly denounced this in our analysis titled “The US Will Not Catch Up to China in the Tech Market.” There, we exposed how even bourgeois economists themselves acknowledge the US's inability to catch up to China. We also documented the capitalists’ interest in continuing to plunder Caribbean lands and the push to relocate industries as a method of lowering production costs. We warned that this scenario represented an immense challenge for the US working class amid the advance of automation.
We affirmed then that the working class in the US is facing a scenario of intensified exploitation. Automation, offshoring, and the elimination of labor rights are all designed for the reproduction of capital, to increase competition among workers, and to weaken them as an organized force. The capitalists, aware that these measures will generate resistance, have spent decades dismantling social benefits and reducing workers' organizational capacity. The state is already preparing its repressive apparatus to contain any worker uprising that opposes this process.
In May, we analyzed how the United States and China were forced to negotiate a tariff truce after an intense period of trade confrontation. While these agreements were being negotiated, capitalist companies acted immediately, reducing their costs by laying off workers and increasing investment in automation. In our article titled “China and the US in a Trade War,” we presented forceful examples of this shift. While capitalists play chess with tariffs and exports, we as workers bear the consequences: mass layoffs, reduction of working hours, and the advance of a new automated production model that threatens to push millions into unemployment. Key companies began implementing this shift in the midst of the conflict. Apple announced an investment of over 500 billion dollars in the coming years for an automated server factory in Houston. Tesla inaugurated a mega battery factory in Shanghai with automated processes. Intel, backed by the CHIPS Act, expanded its automated production capacity in New Mexico, Ohio, Arizona, and Oregon.
This shift involved not only technological transformations but also a reconfiguration of the state’s repressive apparatus. We detailed this on June 12 in our analysis titled “ICE Raids Fascist Terror and Capitalist Strategy in Motion,” where we denounced that these raids are not merely acts of institutional racism. The fear tactics of the raids not only represent an escalation of the white supremacist ultra-conservative and unconstitutional vision currently controlling the White House. That vision is directly tied to the capitalist economic base that supports the interests of the bourgeois minority dominating the economy. The arrests of immigrant workers are no coincidence but specific moves driven by the logic of capitalist accumulation to reduce the labor force and shift toward automated production.
In other words, racism is functional to capital. It is not a moral anomaly or just a historical legacy but a tool to discipline divide and disorganize the working class. We have insisted that this process goes beyond Trump as an individual political figure. He is not the author of the plan, he is its most useful executor. The perfect character for capital to impose an automated production model and restore its profit rate in the face of a prolonged accumulation crisis.
Meanwhile, international capitalist poles simulate conflict but structurally they align. All of them seek to preserve the capitalist order even if they must do so through authoritarian forms. Wars, repression, censorship, persecution of immigrants and dissidents, these are not conspiracy theories. They are clear and material manifestations of the fascist phase of capitalism.
In the face of this, the working class cannot build its struggle on electoral illusions or superficial analyses. If we are led by appearances, by what happens on the surface, we will be dragged along by the ideological forms that capital produces to dominate us. Meanwhile, the liberal petty bourgeoisie will continue selling promises of reform and so-called democratic elections fully controlled by the interests of the ruling class as if that were a solution.
That is why only a permanent political organization of the working class can take on the historical tasks necessary to confront this scenario. That is precisely what we are trying to build at Nexo Revolucionario Media, a space that links class analysis with revolutionary action.
A first step is to strengthen and spread revolutionary ideas that go to the root of the problems we face as a class. And that is why NRM is at the disposal of the working class as a media body of combat to confront the dominant ideology of bourgeois media.
With no major resources but with discipline political education debate clear slogans and the will to organize NRM has been able to highlight key points that are gradually being confirmed by reality.
At times, of course, we lose hope, because we are up against a massive repressive, ideological, and economic apparatus. But we must not forget what is essential: as the working class, we are the majority, and beyond our numerical strength, we have something that capital cannot manufacture or destroy—revolutionary consciousness, which we can materialize in projects like NRM.
