THE re-election of the far-right representative of the corporate elite, Donald Trump, to the presidency of the United States, has sent many into a tailspin.

Some in Britain have told me that if they had the opportunity in November to vote in the US presidential election they would have most certainly voted for the Democrat Kamala Harris as the lesser of two evils.

On one level I do get this but for me, any party that supports the genocide against the Palestinians and promotes the interests of the military-industrial complex does not get my vote — and didn’t in Britain last year.

It is inconceivable to me that the unimaginable sacrifices made by the Palestinians in Gaza should be overlooked on the pretence of political tactics.

If we support the Palestinian cause then we simply cannot get behind anyone who is complicit in or who makes excuses for the genocide that has been committed against them.

Whichever way you cut it, Harris was complicit through her role as US vice-president. If she had nothing to do with the genocide in Palestine and wasn’t in fact around the table for those decisions then — frankly — what was she doing and where was she?

It is essential that we fully understand the nature of both the main political parties in the US. This helps us to provide clarity over why the two main political parties in Britain appear to be competing with each other over which can be the most authoritarian and supportive of the corporate interests that control the planet.

The re-election of Trump to the White House is, in reality, a continuation of the same system that has oppressed the working class in the US for centuries.

More people are beginning to realise that the same can be said of the election of Labour last year.

The victors at elections might sometimes be more brazen. Trump has made clear his imperialist intentions towards Mexico, Panama, Greenland and Canada — a Greater America if you will. At other times capital may try to present itself with a more kindly — or even black — face. But the mask always peels away and their actions always fall well short of the aspirations of the working class.

The winners of the US, and indeed British elections, have always failed to meet the interests of the working class because they do not have the interests of the working class at its heart. Quite the opposite. Their concern is always the interests of monopoly capital.

Presenting Trump as a departure from this is simply false.

There is plenty that we can attach to this misogynistic, racist convicted felon but failing to stand up for the interests of the capitalist ruling class is not one of them.

It is wrong to paint Trump as something spectacularly different to “Genocide Joe” Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton — or any of his predecessors in the role.

Trump made it crystal clear about where his priorities lay. From the array of some of the planet’s richest men occupying front seats at his inauguration ceremony to his first-day flurry of executive orders including a green light for the fossil fuel companies to “drill baby drill,” he is not hiding his loyalties.

Trump’s Republican Party controls every branch of the US government — the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. I am sure that this has already sparked the US left to consider how best to organise for more than just a transfer of seats between the ruling-class parties.

This is no time, whether in the US or Britain, to take our eye off the ball. We must stay focused on the true nature of the capitalist system.

By doing that we can develop real organising and campaigning strategies that are not based on how we would like the world to look but, instead, how it actually is.

Any understanding of history demonstrates that socialists and communists have always been at our most effective when we engage with people on the most local of levels over the matters that they are actually concerned about.

But it must essentially mean continuing to build socialist and communist movements — locally, regionally, nationally and internationally — to confront and reverse the global rise of the far right.

This of course is no mean task. There are many who profess to be progressive and sometimes even socialist who have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that there is a deep ideological difference between the duopolies that control the politics on both sides of the sacred burial ground commonly known as the Atlantic Ocean.

These people come in all shapes and sizes but they generally share a common commitment to a continuation of the capitalist system. They never explain how they can justify the exploitation of working-class people that is essential to the functioning of capitalism.

These people whether they be in the Labour Party or the trade union movement must be swept from power. They are responsible for masking the oppression that working-class people have to endure.

But they cannot simply be replaced by others who share the same commitment to maintaining capitalism or anyone — as I have seen all too often — who at the first challenge exhibits racist or sexist behaviours.

They all too often present themselves as the ones that we have been waiting for when — as the late great activist and poet June Jordan always reminded us — “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Nobody reading this will have any illusions about the size of the task that will be faced by socialists and communists during Trump 2.0 wherever you might be on the globe. Such is the reach of the US empire.

But to confront the challenge posed by this beast requires us to be clear about what we are fighting and why.

Trumpism and its transatlantic cousins can be defeated but only if we are bold, clearly identify the points of weakness and do the graft of building a united front against it.

There will be some on the left who will claim that they are willing to engage in this difficult work but who will, inevitably, find reasons to denounce others for their lack of ideological purity.

We could, as the great Maya Angelou once said, “spend precious hours fearing the inevitable,” or we can get on with the task of doing more than shifting who sits on a particular chair around the table when the feast being eaten by the ruling class — us — continues to be devoured.