March 1, 2025

To All Members and Friends of News and Letters Committees

Dear Friends:

 

The government takeover by Elon Musk is one of the most blatantly illegal assaults in Donald Trump’s “flood the zone” blitzkrieg against both democracy and all freedom movements. The takeover of the payments system and a series of other government information systems gave Musk access to private data on almost every person in the country, and potentially the ability to shut down any federal government action. This was widely recognized and named as a coup by leftists, activists, historians, and politicians. Still, too much of the media treat the ongoing coup as business as usual, while some on the Left repeat the dogma that there is no difference between the two capitalist parties, which blocks comprehension of what is going on.

Trump may not understand or pre-approve everything Musk does, but it is Trump’s war. Trump alone decided that the prosecutors of his Jan. 6, 2021, coup and his other crimes would be fired. Trump’s tsunami of legal and illegal actions—from trying to purge the civil service workforce to pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters and coup plotters as well as anti-abortion criminals—show that his second term is not just a resumption of his first but a continuation of the attempted coup that he began the day after the November 2020 election.

The clear implication of the pardons is the nurturing of non-state vigilantes and militias as a violent extension of his own power that is not subject to the restrictions of the state’s laws, checks and balances. This approach served the Nazis well, even before they took power, and is a feature of other current or recent authoritarian regimes, from the Philippines to Iran, India to Israel. Trump further blurred the lines between the state and fascist militants by appointing Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel as heads of the Pentagon and the FBI. They are eager not only to block any investigation of white supremacist soldiers and hate groups but to actively seed the armed forces and FBI with these modern brownshirts.

The takeover of federal agencies has a dual function. One, it aims to undermine or eliminate activities that Musk and his fellow oligarchs dislike: environmental, health and safety, consumer protection, anti-discrimination, and labor regulations, and investigations such as the 30+ ongoing investigations of Musk-owned companies; as well as to send federal dollars to those same companies. Two, it aims to demoralize or drive out everyone but Trump loyalists.

All this is taking a human toll on women, children, Transgender people, people of color, immigrants, and the working class in the U.S.—and internationally, from Sudanese people starving in refugee camps, to babies being born with HIV, to Ugandans dying of Ebola. Thousands of people have already been killed through this gleefully enacted cruelty. That number will soar.

Trump-Vance’s White House ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky made clear their siding with Russia’s genocidal invasion, abandoning support for Ukraine’s resistance. Trump’s return is part of a global resurgence of the far Right, from Russia to India, Germany to Hungary. It is the excrescence of a social order that is negating itself from within but is desperately trying to stifle the positive in that negative, which is found in the freedom movements and revolts and the ideas that are organically associated with them. Resistance and revolt are brewing, even if they seem muted compared to the outpouring when Trump first took office in 2017. He and his allies are trying to tamp it down with a show of power and impunity.

Trump himself seems to have a delusion of omnipotence. He imagines that he is so powerful that he can just force anyone to do anything: he can force Denmark to sell him Greenland and Panama to cede control of the Canal, expel all the Palestinians from Gaza and take it over, subdue Ukraine, rewrite the Constitution (in fairness, the current Supreme Court may rewrite it for him). Partly that show is meant to overwhelm us. But, as Raya Dunayevskaya pointed out:

“Rulers make headlines because of their power to exploit and destroy; it is that military might that seeks to terrorize people, to make us believe that our fate is in their hands. In truth that is not so, and dialectics will help us see the truth.” (Dec. 1986 News & Letters, p. 10)

There is an undercurrent of questioning why the massive resistance the first time around did not prevent Trump’s return, and why the institutions of this society capitulated, from the courts and Congress that failed to block his run for the presidency—which was unconstitutional for an insurrectionist, as the Supreme Court realized but treacherously neutralized—to the corporations and media that have knelt to lick Trump’s gold high-tops.

The Great Capitulation is a manifestation of capitalism’s tendency toward fascism when it is destabilized by systemic crises. Never fully democratic, the liberal democratic phase of cap⁠i⁠⁠t⁠al⁠ism laid fertile ground for fascism, from the massive prison-industrial complex to the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, from almost free rein given to violent racist police to the explosion of algorithm-fueled propaganda on social media. Above all, the ground was laid by the pervasive sense of precariousness rooted in automation, globalization, and the smashing of labor unions. The 2024 presidential campaign centered on a choice between defense of the institutions that brought us here versus a promise of “radical” change based on scapegoating marginalized groups—which has boiled down to turning over the state to the billionaire oligarchs.

In this situation, there is a growing questioning of the foundations of this decaying society, linked to a search for an alternative, and therefore an opening for a movement toward tearing up the system by its roots and laying the foundations for a new, truly human society. Clarity is crucial: the resistance needs to become clear that, while defense of what democracy remains is urgent, at the same time it is only temporary and the need to abolish capitalism must not be set aside. Revolution may not appear imminent, but putting off the question of what happens after revolution only impedes it and enables its transformation into opposite.

It is not only the history of 20th-century fascism that is being erased. Too much of the Left forgets the catastrophe of state-capitalism that passed itself off as Communism, and the attraction some have to that false alternative must be resisted. Marxist-Humanism was born from the return to the fully dialectical, revolutionary roots of Marx and the search for a philosophical foundation for a total opposite to both private and state-capitalism.

We have a responsibility to help the movement set its direction by working at the concrete projection of a liberatory banner to act as a polarizing force for opponents of the turn toward fascism—at a time when there is a desperate pull for unity based on the lowest common denominator. This points to the need for the philosophy of revolution that can become the unifying force.

For that purpose we issue this Call for a national Convention. The outgoing National Editorial Board will meet online in Executive Session Friday, May 30. Beginning on Saturday morning, May 31, and running through Sunday, June 1, all sessions of the Convention will be open to members and to invited friends, who are given the same privileges to the floor for discussion.

With this Call begins a full 90 days of pre-Convention discussion. A draft Perspectives Thesis will be published so that it can be discussed by members and friends, correspondents and critics, before the Convention. Articles for pre-Convention Discussion Bulletins must be submitted to the Center by Thursday, May 1. Any articles after that date must be distributed online or through the mail by the contributor or their local. Discussion within our local committees and with all those we can reach is vital to preparation for our Convention and all our activities throughout the pre-Convention period.

—The Resident Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees