The following is the English translation of an interview that the Greek newspaper Epohi conducted with William I. Robinson and published on January 25, 2025:

1. In what social and economic conditions in the USA does Trump’s presidency begin?

In large part Trumpism is a far-right, neofascist response to the social and economic crisis of the working class and to the crisis of state legitimacy that this socioeconomic crisis has produced.  The US working class has experienced an ongoing destabilization of its living conditions over this past half-century of capitalist globalization and neoliberalism, with a particularly sharp deterioration since the financial collapse of 2008 and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.  It faces increasing precarity, job instability, widespread and rising un- and underemployment, poverty wages, marginalization and social decomposition, food insecurity, and crises of healthcare, substandard housing and homelessness.

In 2023, over 100,000 people died of opioid overdoses for the third year straight and the numbers continued to grow, a reflection of an exploding crisis of mental health that itself reflects the social and economic crisis.  Since 2021, food insecurity has increased by 40 percent and over the same period poverty has increased by a staggering 67 percent.  Over half of all working-class households live in poverty or just above the poverty line, although government data actually disguises the extent of poverty by establishing a ridiculously low poverty level.  A family of four can make twice the amount of the official poverty level and still live in poverty and insecurity in any major US city.  Nearly four in 10 households, or 38 percent, lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense, according to the federal government, up from 32 percent in 2021.  More than half of U.S. households do not receive a steady income, relying on contingent work opportunities as they become available, while 80 percent report living paycheck to paycheck.

The Democratic Party abandoned the multiethnic working class many years ago.  Since the Clinton years it has been a party of neoliberalism, of Wall Street billionaires, of the military-industrial complex, and of war.  The Republicans, of course, are even worse.  So how did Trump manage to get elected, twice now, with a majority of working-class votes?  Trump put forth a populist discourse that spoke to rising socioeconomic insecurity and mass social anxiety.  He managed to project himself as a political outsider ready to battle the Washington elite in defense of the common man, against the status quo.  He manipulated mass discontent with this populist, racist, nationalist and neo-fascist discourse; with false promises to solve the socioeconomic problems of the masses. He turned immigrants into scapegoats and harvested the massive discontent with the Democrats and the establishment. It should also be recalled that 80 million people eligible to vote chose to abstain – a figure larger than the number of people who voted for Trump or for Biden – which underscores the extent of political demobilization and alienation among the working class.

Trumpism is the US variant of the same phenomenon we have seen in Europe with the rise of a populist and neo-fascist far-right.  The hardships generated by decades of capitalist globalization and transnational class warfare from above against the working classes have made them very susceptible to the message of right-wing populism and neo-fascism, edged on by racist discourse against immigrants intended to channel mass disaffection away from its source in the system and towards scapegoats.  You are no stranger to this in Greece.  You have been living your own version of this in recent years, except in your case you did have a left alternative but it caved into the demands of transnational capital whereas here in the US we have no viable left with any significant presence in the working class.

2. Speaking of Trump’s new presidency, it is obvious that what we are seeing is a raw and barbaric capitalism that is trying by all means and methods to increase its profits. What is your opinion?

Yes, without any doubt!  Let’s be very clear: Trumpism 2.0 represents not a break from what has been happening for the past half century but its logical end point, removing any remaining barriers to the unbridled accumulation of capital and culminating the neoliberal counterrevolution.  Trump’s team has promised to do away with any remaining regulations on capital, to massively cut social spending, including social security (pensions), to reduce taxes on capital and the rich, to expand the state apparatus of repression and surveillance, and to override the few remaining mechanisms of democratic accountability.

The incoming government proposes to achieve this by restructuring state power so as to bring it under the more direct control of capital, that is, to consolidate the dictatorship of transnational capital through new political dispensations, including a vast expansion of the powers of the presidency and the concentration of powers in the executive.  The stock market has soared since Trump was elected, and then spiked even further in the days leading up to his inauguration, which reflects the giddy confidence that transnational capital has placed in his government’s ability to represent its interests and to further discipline and control the working class.

However, there is an enormous gap between the intent of the Trump government and its actual ability to achieve its objectives.  The political crisis of state legitimacy and the social crisis of the working class must be seen, beyond the United States, in the context of the general crisis of global capitalism.  We must focus on the economic or structural dimension, what in political economy we refer to as overaccumulation, which has led to chronic stagnation in the global economy.  Just as you note, the rate of profit has been falling steadily since the turn of the century, the average rate of profit worldwide, not just in the US.  The leading transnational corporations and financial conglomerates have registered record profits at the same time as the rate of profit has fallen and corporate investment has declined.  A sign of capitalist breakdown is precisely this decrease in the rate of profit simultaneous to an increase in the mass of profit.

Surplus capital with nowhere to go has reached extraordinary levels.  Surplus capital produces its alter-ego, surplus labor.  Given unprecedented levels of inequality worldwide, the global market cannot absorb the output of the global economy.  Chronic stagnation places mounting pressure on the political and military agents of transnational capital to crack open new spaces for accumulation.  The TCC and its agents in states must undertake incessant and increasingly desperate searches for new outlets to unload overaccumulated capital.  This leads the system to become every more violent, predatory, and reckless.

3. What does it mean for the political system in the USA that the new government is largely a government of billionaires, and where might this lead?

It is true that the capitalist state has always secured the interests of capital but historically this has been done more indirectly through the mediation of the political system.  It seems now that the US members of the transnational capitalist class have seized a more direct control of the state.  Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration!  The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is acting as the unelected co-president.  Corporations and billionaires, especially from the tech, financial, and energy sectors, funneled unprecedented millions into the Trump Inaugural Committee in order to ensure that their interests would be represented.  The emerging hegemonic bloc of capital brings together tech and finance with the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical or medical-industrial capital, big oil, and real estate represented as well, with transnational finance capital at the apex.  Just days before Trump took office, the banks reported near record profits.  JPMorgan Chase posted a stunning record annual profit of $58.5 billion for 2024.

In his final farewell address to the nation on January 14, outgoing president Joe Biden warned of a “tech industrial complex” and of a new “oligarchy taking shape” through the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people.” The warning may have been a second-rate reenactment of Eisenhower’s famous 1961 final address on the dangers of the “unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex.”  However, Biden’s comments are farcical, as the Democrats have as well been instruments of the power of capital, have cultivated the billionaire corporate and financial oligarchy that dominates the United States.

4. How do you see the current state of the class struggle in the USA in the face of such a threatening personality as Trump΄s? What gives you hope at this moment?

Class struggle is heating up and it will continue to do so.  Whereas the ruling classes are escalating their class struggle from above, strike activity, protests and organizing drives have spread among workers in both old and new sectors of the economy as social and economic conditions deteriorate.  This takes place alongside a rapid political polarization as the center collapses, with the neofascist far-right insurgent and at this time in control of the Republican Party and all three branches of the government. Trump cannot represent the interests of workers and of capital and he has no intention whatsoever of abandoning capital.

Apart from the far-right organized into racist and neofascist organizations and militias such as those that stormed the capital on January 6, 2021, Trump does have a mass base in a significant sector of the working class, especially but not exclusively white.  These workers are expecting Trump will improve their economic situation.  This will not happen.  To the contrary, to the extent that the Trump agenda is successful the lot of workers will deteriorate further, and possibly very quickly if there is a recession.  In fact, I predict a recession in the course of this year or into next year, if not something much bigger, given the structural crisis.  The Trump coalition will unravel.  Disillusion will set in and eventually his mass base will break up.  These are the conditions for a popular left alternative to develop but they are also conditions under which the fascist tendency could consolidate into an openly twenty-first century fascism.

The ruling classes fear mass uprisings and have been preparing for them.  It is virtually inevitable that capital’s party will come crashing down.  When it does, and when mass protest escalates, what I have termed the global police state will be further unleashed.  We will move very quickly into an escalation of social and political conflict.  Trump promised throughout his campaign to crack down on political dissent.  The absolute savagery of global capitalism as it is now exhibited around the world will come home to roost inside the US.

The Greek version of this interview was first published by Epohi on 25 January 2025.

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