On Wednesday 9th November the “free world” woke up to find it had a new leader. Donald J Trump had been elected the 45th president of the United States of America. The shock waves immediately spread across the world at this news, which contradicted all the confident expectations of the polls.

We find ourselves today surrounded by a plethora of new technology, automated processes, and time-saving devices. And yet, at the same time, productivity growth is slowing, the economy is stagnating, and inequality is rising. It is clear that the system has broken.

In the aftermath of Donald trump's selection as President of the United States of America, cries of “fascism!” again fill the air. However, as we shall see, although Donald Trump is a crass, bigoted, billionaire businessman, he is not a fascist. The secret to his win is not that he rode a mass fascist movement to power, but that the lesser-evil policy of the labor leaders and the “left” ran out of steam. With no class-independent alternative provided by the unions or Bernie Sanders, uninspired Americans stayed home in droves and the balance of victory was handed to Trump by rust-belt workers sick and tired of the decades of betrayals by the Democrats.

John Peterson, editor of Socialist Appeal magazine, provides a Marxist analysis of the Trump election during the Northeast Regional Marxist School in New York.

Nearly seventy comrades and contacts converged on the National Center of the US Section of the IMT in Brooklyn, New York for the 2016 Northeast Regional Marxist School. Held just days after Donald Trump’s stunning election victory over Hillary Clinton, it was a standing-room-only crowd as comrades from New York, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville, KY, Toronto, Montreal, and London assembled for what proved to be a weekend of passionate political discussion. In addition, over 3,700 people from around the world tuned into the four sessions via live stream on Facebook.

In this recording from a recent meeting of Socialist Appeal supporters, Alan Woods - editor of In Defence of Marxism - discusses the sharp turning point in the world situation marked by the election of Donald Trump in the US elections.