By Panagiotis Papadomanolakis
The following interview was published on the Greek website Kommon on Feb. 1.
Interview with Greg Butterfield, a contributor to Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and member of the Socialist Unity Party in the U.S. He is a longtime communist activist who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“Trump’s main base of support in the ruling class is among the relatively new group that became billionaires during the energy boom after the war in Iraq, especially those involved in the fracking industry in North America. When the boom ended, and their profits collapsed, they latched onto Trump as their figurehead. Although this group is relatively small, it is desperate and most importantly, has a program to deal with the capitalist crisis — fascism. This gives them power and influence beyond their numbers, because the capitalist mainstream symbolized by Biden has no solution to the crisis. Their only answer is to turn the clock back to 2016, to the conditions that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
“Biden would like to project an image of himself as a modern incarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who will come in and save the capitalist system with reforms. But U.S. capitalism is not expanding like it was in the 1930s. Then it was on the verge of becoming the dominant world power. Now it is well past its peak, and there is no will among the capitalists to sacrifice their profits to make life more bearable for the masses.
“What we expect is that the workers, the most oppressed, will be disappointed by the new administration. What we must strive to do is mobilize this anger and dissatisfaction in the fight for socialism, and not allow the fascists to take advantage of it.”