How Steelworkers Might Shape the Midterm Elections

Trump’s “golden share” in U.S. Steel puts him in a bind.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed earlier this month a resolution that “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.” The vote was 220-192, with eight Democrats voting “aye” and zero Republicans voting “nay.” The resolution said that “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and repressive dictatorships” and “has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide.” 

By equating democratic socialism with communism, the resolution was intended to create voter hysteria over the Democrats’ nomination of about eight democratic socialists in the midterm congressional elections. It was also a stalking horse for the SAVE Act, Trump’s desperate attempt to disenfranchise Democratic voters in advance of the midterms. Voter disenfranchisement has nothing at all to do with opposing socialism, so set that aside. What interests me is that the House’s condemnation of socialism made no mention of the 30 companies in which President Donald Trump has acquired an ownership stake for the federal government during his second term. Trump’s got his tiny fingers on what The Communist Manifesto famously called “the means of production.” The number of companies in which the government acquired a stake during the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden was zero.  

Because the shares in those 30 companies, some purchased and some expropriated, were acquired without input from Congress, and because the legal language for at least one of these acquisitions mentions Trump by name, as if “Donald J. Trump” were synonymous with “United States government,” we might call Trump’s variety undemocratic socialism. I’ve called it fascist corporatism because it seems to take a leaf from Benito Mussolini’s “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”). In its current iteration, though, it’s more like Tutto nello Trump, nienta al di fuori della Trump, nulla contro lo Trump.  

Yet another possible way to describe Trump’s covetous attitude toward the means of production is Soviet-style socialism, which is to say communism. It remains an open question whether that’s fair because we don’t yet know whether Trump will mimic the Soviet practice of spouting pro-worker propaganda while harboring a cynical indifference to the proletariat’s actual welfare. But given Trump’s........

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