United States

The massive wave of defiance against Donald Trump’s election shows that millions of youth and workers will resist his government. Trump cannot resolve the crisis of capitalism and the poverty, bigotry, and instability that come with it. The Democrats and labor leaders have rolled over and offered to work with him. The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) has a different perspective. We are confident that Trump’s anti-worker agenda can be stopped in its tracks. This is our proposal for a program to fight and beat Trump.

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.

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.

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.

On the day after the election, Americans woke to find themselves in a "strange new land." The Washington Post called Trump's victory a "cataclysmic, history-making upset." According to insider reports, the Republican National Committee and even Donald Trump himself did not expect the result.