Franco "Bifo" Berardi

National Workerism and Racial Warfare

Let’s try to understand what is happening. As they did in 1933, the workers have revenged against those who have long been duping them: the politicians of the “democratic” reformist left.
A slavist who has never paid taxes, a serial raper, has emerged as the President of the United States. His voters are those workers who have been betrayed by the left in the US and in Europe. This ‘left’ should be thrown in the dustbin: they have opened the way to Fascism by choosing to serve financial capitalism and by implementing neoliberal “reforms”.
Let’s call them by some names: Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Massimo D’Alema and Matteo Renzi, Giorgio Napolitano, François Hollande, Manuel Valls and Sigmar Gabriel. Because of their cynicism and their cowardice they have delivered people into the hands of the corporations and the governments of our lives. Inso doing, they have opened the door to the fascism that is now spreading and to the global civil war that now seems unstoppable.
In the United Kingdom and in Poland, in Hungary and in Russia, and now in the United States, National-Workerism is the winner. The white worker class, humiliated over the last thirty years, deceived by endless reformist promises, impoverished by financial aggression, has now elected the Ku Klux Klan to the White House.
As the left has taken away from the hands of the workers the democratic weapons of self-defence, here comes the racist version of the class warfare.
Wall Street has managed to vanquish Bernie Sanders, and now the Ku Klux Klan has defeated Wall Street.
The next ten years will be difficult and we must be aware of this. The crumble of capitalist globalisation is the beginning of a war which puts much of modern civilisation in danger.
A few days ago ZeroHedge, the online journal of the intellectual supporters of Trump, published an article that perfectly synthesises what is happening and anticipates what is coming.

“The zombie economy is moribund, the productive people have been pillaged, and the bread and circus act is running on fumes. The American welfare/warfare state is crumbling. The ruling elite are desperate. They don’t want their Ponzi scheme to end, but they always fail. It’s a confidence game, and the game is over. The economic crisis is foreseeable to anyone with their eyes open. This empire will crumble and fall, just as others before throughout history….

This is a country truly divided, much along the lines of the first Civil War. The divisions aren’t just along political party lines, but race, education, geography, gender, age, class, religion and ability to think critically.

…The election of either candidate is likely to trigger events leading to Civil War II.

It’s the demoralized, disillusioned, angry working middle class who have been pillaged by the ruling class through taxes, outsourcing their jobs, and Federal Reserve created inflation. With real median household income languishing at 1989 levels, it’s those in the middle who have lost the most. The 0% interest rates have punished senior citizens and middle class savers, while $3 trillion of QE benefited financial industry millionaires. The next financial collapse, which is baked into the cake, initiated by the policies designed to benefit the .1%, will push class warfare into the streets….”

Trump has won because he represents a weapon in the hands of impoverished workers, and because the left has delivered them into the hands of financial capital weaponless. Unfortunately this weapon will soon be turned against the workers themselves, and will lead them towards racial warfare.

“huge disparity in voting preference between white, married, rural, religious households and the urban, black, fatherless households, along with the white single non-religious households. The Black Lives Matter movement represents the first cohort, while the social justice warriors represent the second cohort.” (ZeroHedge).

The threat of racial warfare is totally explicit in Trump’s stance. Socially defeated white workers identify themselves as the race of the winners.

“Whites are also tired of the left wing politically correct phraseology which changes an illegal immigrant into an undocumented immigrant. If you came here illegally, you broke the law, and you’re a criminal. Deportation is the consequence of your crime. Opening our borders to an influx of illegal South American immigrants, potential Syrian terrorists, and others who don’t believe in our values is a recipe for disaster.” (ZeroHedge).

In the wake of the American elections I spent a few days in Moscow, talking with fellow artists. While we were talking in a art gallery, outside, in the streets of Moscow, people were marching and chanting. For the coming anniversary of the Soviet Revolution? No, for the erection of a statue to Vladimir the Wise, the christianiser of the Mother Russia. Women and children dressed as soldiers march and exalt the murderers of the past: Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, the killer of communists and jews.
The white race in arms is preparing a ghastly finish for the ghastly history of modern colonialism. Will we escape this finish that seems to be already written in the books of the Armageddon that financial capitalism has prepared, and to which the reformist left has paved the way?

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