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Core Argument

Against The Stream · 2025-02-14

The central thesis of this episode is that the world capitalist system is entering a period of acute geopolitical reconfiguration, driven by the relative decline of US imperialism and the emergence of a multipolar balance of forces. Trump's abrupt shift on Ukraine — effectively conceding to Russian demands — is not merely the erratic behaviour of a maverick figure, but the expression of a deeper necessity: the US can no longer police the entire globe. The episode argues that the Ukraine war represents a strategic defeat for the Western liberal order, that the European ruling classes are being left exposed and weakened, and that the class struggle inside the United States — expressed in the collapse of working-class support for the Democrats — is a key driver of these convulsions. On Gaza, Trump's fantastical proposal to clear and redevelop the Strip is dismissed as unworkable, but the episode uses it to argue that the Palestinian question is insoluble within capitalism, and that the only genuine force capable of transforming the region is the Arab working class.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on a classical Marxist understanding of imperialism as a system of competing capitalist states, where the balance of forces is determined by material economic and military power, not by liberal rhetoric or institutional arrangements. The episode deploys a Leninist conception of interimperialist rivalry, but with an important nuance: it recognises that the US remains the single most powerful capitalist state, yet is no longer able to impose its will unilaterally. This is not a theory of US "decline" in the simplistic sense, but of overstretch and the emergence of rival power centres — Russia and China — that cannot be subdued.

The discussion of the European situation draws on the Marxist theory of combined and uneven development: Europe, the historic heartland of imperialism, is now being squeezed between a retreating US and a resurgent Russia, its ruling classes unable to match the military spending or industrial capacity of either. The episode also deploys a class analysis of the liberal order, arguing that the post-war settlement — the "counterrevolution in democratic form" — was stabilised only by the material basis of the post-war boom. Once that boom ended in the early 1970s, the liberal ruling classes presided over a 50-year assault on working-class living standards, and the political consequences are now breaking through.

The episode's treatment of Trump is theoretically sophisticated. He is presented as an "accidental" figure — a vehicle through which necessity expresses itself — not a saviour or a simple reactionary. The analysis draws on Trotsky's observation that while workers must generally oppose what capitalists propose, there are moments when the working class can take up the same slogans as a section of the bourgeoisie, but with its own content. The episode argues that the task of Marxists is not to defend the liberal state apparatus against Trump's attacks, but to recognise that the workers have their own reasons for hating that apparatus, and to offer a revolutionary alternative.

Conjunctural Relevance

The episode is recorded in mid-February 2025, and its analysis is tightly tied to very recent events:

Ukraine: Trump's phone call with Putin and the leaked terms of a prospective peace deal — territorial concessions, no NATO membership, no US troops as peacekeepers — represent a complete reversal of the Biden administration's position. The episode notes that Russia is now outspending the whole of Europe on defence and outproducing NATO in military equipment (citing a figure of three months' Russian production equalling one year of NATO's). The European ruling classes are described as "desperate", facing economic stagnation, massive debts, and the demand from Washington that they raise defence spending to 5% of GDP.

Gaza: Trump's proposal to clear Gaza and redevelop it as a US-owned "Riviera" is analysed as both fantastical and revealing. The episode notes that it has been rejected by Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, not out of solidarity with the Palestinians but because mass forced displacement would destabilise their own regimes. The episode also discusses the internal Israeli crisis — soldiers refusing call-ups, economic strain, and Netanyahu's desperate attempt to restart the war to avoid his own political collapse.

US class struggle: The episode cites polling showing Joe Biden as the least popular living US president (39% favourable, 57% unfavourable), and that 57% of Americans now view the Democrats unfavourably — the highest figure since polling began in 2008. It argues that workers have lost all confidence in the Democrats, who are perceived as caring more about identity politics than the cost of living. The episode connects this to a 50-year divergence between productivity and wages in the US, and the collapse of employer-provided healthcare as a benefit.

Where the Argument Continues

The episode deliberately leaves open several threads that are developed elsewhere in the Against the Stream and Spectre of Communism corpus:

  • The analysis of Trump as an "accidental" figure expressing deeper contradictions is a recurring theme. Earlier episodes on the 2024 US election and the nature of Trumpism develop this more fully, particularly the argument that Trump represents a section of the US bourgeoisie that recognises the need for retrenchment but cannot solve the system's fundamental problems.

  • The discussion of Europe's decline and the fragility of NATO connects to episodes on the European debt crisis, the rise of the far right, and the strategic position of Germany. The episode's claim that Europe is "no longer the force it was" is a thread that runs through many analyses of the EU's internal contradictions.

  • The analysis of the Palestinian question as insoluble within capitalism, and the argument that the only solution is a socialist federation of the whole region, is developed in dedicated episodes on the history of Zionism, the 7 October attacks, and the Arab revolutions.

  • The episode's treatment of the "liberal order" as a counterrevolutionary force with a smiling face is a theme that appears in theoretical discussions of the post-war settlement, the role of NGOs, and the nature of bourgeois democracy.

Connections

The episode should be read alongside:

  • Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism — for the theoretical framework of interimperialist rivalry and the export of capital.

  • Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed — for the analysis of Stalinism and the degeneration of the Soviet Union, which provides the background to Russia's post-1991 recovery.

  • Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? — for the method of analysing the decline of a once-dominant imperialist power and the political consequences for the working class.

  • Earlier Against the Stream episodes on the Ukraine war (particularly those from April 2022 and February 2023) — which predicted that the West could not win and that Russia would emerge strengthened.

  • The Spectre of Communism episode on the Arab revolutions — which develops the argument that the Arab working class is the only force capable of resolving the Palestinian question.

  • The Against the Stream episode on the 2024 US election — which analyses the collapse of the Democrats and the nature of Trump's victory.

Key Quotes

  1. "Trump himself is like the accidental figure, he's the maverick, he's the outsider, but he's come in and in effect he is confirming that US imperialism, although still number one, still by far the strongest power on the planet, is a lot weaker than it used to be. It cannot police the whole world."

  2. "The only real allies of the Palestinian people are the oppressed and exploited masses of those countries, not the rulers. The reason why Trump's proposal cannot be acted on is because of the Arab masses in the region. The masses of Jordan are actually forcing the king to say 'I can't go down this road'."

  3. "What we have here is the bourgeois liberal establishment that have dominated and controlled the system for decades. They hark back to a period when America was a power, the European Union had a strength of its own. But the support for this establishment has been practically destroyed amongst the mass of ordinary working people. If you listen to ordinary working people, they're sick of these people."

  4. "The Democrats have always been presented as the progressive party that the unions are connected to, that the workers vote for. No longer the case. Workers have lost all confidence in the Democrats. They are being asked to sacrifice their livelihood so that the Democrats can get on with all this — but they don't actually do anything for the oppressed either."

  5. "When Trump says 'the whole state apparatus is an unelected body, they have more power than the president, they run the country with no mandate, and they're corrupt as hell' — that's true. Our task is not to come and say 'yes but Elon this and that'. No. We should also say we want to take those people down. In fact, we shouldn't just fire them — we have to arrest them and build a new state on the basis of workers' power."