Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Violence, corruption, barbarism, shamelessness: don’t these terms describe the era of Trump, Elon Musk, and the Epstein files? Torture from the Middle Ages? Think of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the policy of “rendering” prisoners to states where they would be tortured, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (prior to Trump), or the super prison of Bukele in El Salvador, Trump’s associate jailer. Inquisition? Think of the removal of references to slavery or colonialism in museums or textbooks, the blackmailing of universities to eliminate diversity and inclusion programs or the critical study of racism, and the persecution of the independent press and the censorship of even television comedians who make the occupant of the White House uncomfortable. Think of the criminalization of protest, to the point of justifying the murder of anti-ICE activists. Barbarism? Suffice it to mention the genocide in Gaza. Racism? There are too many examples to mention. Let’s remember how Trump calls immigrants from Somalia “trash,” which also serves as an example of the shamelessness of the bourgeoisie of our time. Let us also remember that Musk, the richest man in the world, is also a white supremacist who approvingly quotes tweets such as this: “The race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into a
Global Favela.”

Progressive dehumanization? Let us recall how Musk himself considers that the great weakness of Western civilization is “empathy,” or how Javier Milei, the neoliberal president of Argentina (wielding a chainsaw threateningly), asserts that social justice is a despicable ideal.

According to Césaire, this reality is the product of a historical reversal: the decline of the bourgeoisie is evident to the extent to which it has become the enemy of what it had defended during its rise. What did it defend then? Precisely the criticism of existing privileges and institutions; the criticism of censorship and the Inquisition. It had questioned the political power of the nobility and the worldly power of the church. It had defended the subjection of rulers to the will of the ruled, the rights of man and of the citizen, equality before the law, and the eradication of torture. Ideas that were summed up in the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, equality, and fraternity! That was the bourgeoisie, or at least the vanguard of the bourgeoisie, when it was a class “on the attack,” as Césaire put it, when “it embodied human progress.”

But how can this reversal be explained? Its main cause is the divergence between the ideals of the bourgeois revolution and the realities of capitalist society. What freedom does the dispossessed worker have, forced to sell himself for a wage and subordinate to the will of his employer while he works? What equality can there be between the haves and the have-nots, between employers and employees? What fraternity can exist in a society based on competition between all individuals, companies, and countries? And as it soon became possible to criticize capitalist society in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the bourgeoisie began to distance itself from its own ideals, both in theory and in practice. Now it justified dictatorship to repress the labor movement. It embraced theories about inequality of intelligence or abilities to justify class division. It considered competition inherent to human beings, naturalizing the capitalist market.
The extreme case of this reversal is fascism, with the suppression of all freedoms and the shifting of blame for the evils generated by capitalism to historically discriminated sectors and groups, such as Jews in the case of Nazism, or immigrants today. Césaire warns that fascism was facilitated by colonialism, which involved denying its victims the ability to govern themselves; therefore, this denial also implied a rejection of their humanity, as the ability to govern is a defining characteristic of adult human beings. The Nazis implemented the inhuman practices that had been developed in the colonies throughout Europe.

But this is not only true of the past; the same racism and xenophobia are reborn today. Trump claims that immigrants from Somalia are trash. This is genocidal language: after all, what do you do with trash? Let’s recall part of the Homeland Security tweet we discussed elsewhere:

Rent is too high!

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

Groceries cost too much!

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

There aren’t enough jobs!

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country....

…

Many problems. A simple answer.”

In 1950, Césaire already described this reasoning: "No more social crises!

No more economic crises! All that is left are racial crises!” To those who, at that time, five years after the defeat of Nazism, spoke of the need to protect French culture from the threat posed by waves of immigrants, Césaire relentlessly proclaimed that the French bourgeoisie was “condemned to ruminate, returning to it as though driven by a vice, to chew over Hitler’s vomit." A strikingly harsh image, yet it raises the question: are not Trump, Musk, and their right-wing allies engaging in similar actions today?

Césaire’s text is full of striking images that seem designed to describe the current state of our ruling classes. For example, the idea suggests that a ruling class must “completely disgrace itself” before it can disappear. Isn’t that the role Trump is playing regarding his class? Let us quote Césaire once again: “There is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which all the dirty waters of history flow; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must disgrace itself completely, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.” A convergence of all the dirty waters represents a voice speaking from beneath the dunghill... Césaire’s images dazzle us because they describe a nightmare that has evolved but has not disappeared. A nightmare whose most visible head need not be mentioned.

Césaire, however, was confident that the decadent bourgeoisie was singing its swan song, that is, that it would soon disappear, yielding, in his words, to “the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its own flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat.” But that preponderance of the working class has not materialized. Seventy-five years later, we are still governed by an increasingly corrupt class. This episode reminds us that this class will not fall under its own weight. It must be overthrown. And that depends on us.