Trump and Making American Capitalism Great Again?
Marx: once wrote:
“…….history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”’ (1852).
Well, capitalism is a tragedy for the working class who have to live under its brutal system of class exploitation and general poverty and brutality. And capitalism is a farce in the shape of the political monsters who become Presidents, Prime Ministers, Duces and Fuhrers.
We also have the farce of the new President of the United States, Donald Trump, announcing a “golden age of the United States”. Trump tells us he is going to make “America Great Again”, he is going to forge a new Golden Age of Capitalism through Hi-Tech, tax cuts for the rich and the decimation of the Federal bureaucracy. Trump believes he has absolute power to do what he wants, even to turn the Gaza region into profitable “real estate” so his property developer friends can turn it into an oasis for the rich and it goes without saying, give the US exclusive access to the vast quantities of oil and gas in the Mediterranean Sea off the Gaza Strip. He signs Executive orders like confetti but cannot sign anything which interferes with the economic laws of the profit system.
We have been here before. After the First World War there was the roaring 20s. This too was described at the time as “the golden age” of capitalism where even workers gambled on the stock exchange and the boom appeared to be going on forever.
Irving Berlin wrote a song about the rich in 1927 a few years before the crash. It was called “Puttin’ on the Ritz.
Have you seen the well to do
Up on Lenox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air?
High hats and colored collars,
White spats and fifteen dollars
Spending every dime
For a wonderful time
The “wonderful time” was not to last. Nor will the booming US economy in the second decade of the twenty first century. Trump’s supporters from the Bible belt to the trailer poor in their mobile homes may dance to YMCA at his rallies but the MAGA faithfully will remain dirt poor and exploited. Only the billionaires who sat in the front row of Trump’s inauguration as President are set to gain. Trump serves his own interests and those of his class while the working-class majority are imprisoned within the wages system.
The 1920s was a period of boom-time in the US economy.
What of the “Golden Age” of the 1920s? The US emerged from the First World War in a strong position. While other nations took time to recover from the war the US had a huge domestic market and its factories and infrastructure had been untouched by bombs and artillery. The government shielded this market from overseas competition by imposing tariffs just as Trump has threatened tariffs on its main competitors, the European Union, Canada, Mexico and China. The profits of industrial firms increased rapidly just as the hi-tech companies in the United States make record profits from the development of artificial intelligence. Sales of consumer goods in the 1920s such as cars, cookers, vacuum-cleaners and radios were readily available often bought on credit terms via hire-purchase agreements or loans.
Prices during the late 1920s on the Wall Street stock exchange rose to such a high value that they bore no relation to the actual value of the shares. Panic set in when it was realised that the high prices were artificial. Confidence drained away and the crash occurred. Banks called in their loans and people found they had no money to pay these loans back
Much of the speculation was based on “on the margin” buying whereby it was possible to put a deposit on the purchase of shares with a promise to pay off the remainder in the future – the whole system was vulnerable should confidence begin to decline.
Hoover was so confident in capitalism delivering, he promised the US electorate “a chicken for every pot”. All the US workers got was unemployment and long queues for the soup kitchens (but without the chicken).
Here is the Socialist Party of Great Britain reflecting on the Great Depression some forty years later:
“The American government, following the customary policy of treating symptoms rather than deal with causes, tried to force prices up by cutting back production and restricting competition. In many cases this policy was superfluous; producers who were faced with a glutted market needed no official prompting to destroy food, and industrialists who found that they could not sell their goods had no alternative to closing their works. From the point of view of capitalism, it was all very logical but it meant that the world was presented, in what was supposed to be a great age of freedom and prosperity, with the spectacle of millions of underfed people while wheat was being burned; of men searching desperately for employment while factories were shut, while the winding wheels stayed still at the pit shafts and the great cranes hung silent and motionless in the almost tangible gloom of the shipyard”(Socialist Standard September 1969)
Like Hoover, Trump inherits a booming economy and Trump wants to surf on its waves believing, like Hoover, it will go on forever. Politicians have all rushed to praise Trump. They are all prepared to humiliate and denigrate themselves to curry favour and to do business. Take, for example, Lord (‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ Financial Times 21/1/18) Mandelson the new Ambassador to the US. In the past he said that Donald Trump was a danger to the world, little short of a white nationalist and racist. Now he thinks the President is a “nice person”, he is “a fair-minded person” (The Independent 29/1/25). To survive in capitalist politics, you have got to eat a lot of humble pie.
Capitalism calls the shots
The economic and social problems facing the working class do not derive from politicians like Trump Starmer and all the others. Trump can only make America great again for the capitalist class, and only then if they do not lose out to its global competitors. China has already stolen a march on the US in artificial intelligence technology with its DeepSeek technology built at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals. US dominance in AI does not look as so secure to investors when Trump became President a few months back.
In an article “DeepSeek has ripped away AI’s veil of mystique: That’s the real reason the tech bros fear it” (The Observer 2nd Feb. 2025), the journalist Kenan Malik wrote:
“The true impact of DeepSeek is not on the technology but on the economics of AI…built at a fraction of the cost and from inferior technology. The US ban on the sale to China of the most advanced chips and chip-making equipment…may have spurred Chinses researchers into becoming more innovative”
As for the working class, millions of whom voted for Trump during the election, Trump can offer them nothing accept poverty and exploitation. He even admitted that on the day he invoked tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico; that there will be “pain”. However, it will not be pain for the billionaire club who underwrote Trump’s bid for the Presidency. The working class are always told by politicians that it is pain today and pleasure tomorrow but tomorrow never comes. And as for economic booms they do not last. Boom periods give way to economic crises, depression and high unemployment. A future crisis and depression might not be as deep as the 1930s or as long last the depression from the 1880s when Randolph Churchill said in a speech at Blackpool in 1884:
“We are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as 1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a revival. Your iron industry is dead, dead as mutton; your coal industries, which depend greatly on the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, grasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, has come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease” (Lord Randolph Churchill by Winston Churchill, M. P., pub. Macmillan & Co Ltd, London, 1906, Vol 1, page 291 quoted in “Why Capitalism will not Collapse: Our View of the Crisis”, The Socialist Party of Great Britain, February 1932).).
There might not be a 1929 Wall Street crash under Trump but maybe one similar to the 2007 and 2008 economic crisis and depression. Alternatively, it might be a prick of the bit coin or AI bubble which is the trigger for the next crisis. When a crisis hits US capitalism under Trump’s presidency, he will go the same way as Herbert Hoover who was President in 1929, Hoover too looked for scape goats during the depression of the 1930s by blaming Mexicans. He too could do nothing about the depression and rising unemployment despite numerous reforms.
Politicians always fail
Politicians always fail. President Trump will be no different. He is a brutal, cruel vindictive and a bombastic bully, a congenital liar. misogynist, and racist. These are skills needed to survive in capitalist politics but not to run the economy.
It is not in Trump’s political power to run capitalism even for the capitalist class and the “tech bros billionaires”. He can impose tariffs on goods coming into the US but cannot do anything about the retaliatory moves of governments who go on to impose tariffs on US commodities coming into their country. He has political power and with that power he can demand world leaders kiss his ring in order to get an audience with him in the White House. He can invade the Panama Canal, take Greenland by force and rename the Gulf of Mexico. He can do most things except one, that is, mould capitalism to his will. He cannot do it. It is not in his power. Capitalism forces politicians to bend to its anarchic trajectory from one economic cycle to the next. Trump’s relation to capitalism is hubris before the fall. He will go the same way as previous presidents like Hoover before him.
Instead of giving their votes to capitalist politicians, workers should think and act in their own class interests. Workers should be organising politically and democratically to establish socialism; the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
