Yesterday’s mob rampage at the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of Donald Trump’s campaign of frenzied claims that the November 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” The assault on Congress was instigated by Trump and his top lieutenants, led by outright fascists, spearheaded by white supremacists brandishing the Confederate battle flag of the slavocracy, and it was facilitated by the police. Similar riots targeting government centers are nothing new in East Europe, where they have typically been organized by the U.S. (Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2014), and Yankee imperialism has unleashed them innumerable times in Latin America. But they are seen as novel in the United States since the post-Civil War period’s racist rampages against Reconstruction. After all, Republicans and Democrats alike claim this is “the world’s greatest democracy,” a “shining city on a hill” as union-busting racist and warmonger Ronald Reagan called the U.S. That was hardly the scene on Capitol Hill on January 6. What the world witnessed was a chilling acceleration, the latest bizarre and dangerous episode, in the spectacular unravelling of “democratic” bourgeois rule in the strongest imperialist power. What it dramatically underscores is that this capitalist society is falling apart. The bankruptcy of this decaying system of exploitation, imperialism and racist oppression highlights the urgent need to fight for socialist revolution.

In the media and by numerous politicians the Capitol attack is described as an “insurrection,” “coup d’état” or failed “coup attempt.” Yet this grotesque rampage by a would-be lynch mob was not an actual attempt to seize power (for which they obviously didn’t have the forces), nor was it the military trying to disperse and shut down the U.S.’ highest legislative body. English doesn’t have very descriptive terms for such actions. In Spanish it would be an amotinamiento, in French a coup de main. It was a mob assault aimed at intimidating Congress into not confirming Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, and failing that, to galvanize hard-core Trumpers into an authoritarian movement for future action. It was not a last paroxysm of Trumpism, but a harbinger of dangerous times to come. The several hundred fascists who turned out, together with tens of thousands of enraged racists and reactionaries, are plenty dangerous, but the most powerful and central dangers come from the organs of state power of the capitalist ruling class – police, military, National Guard – which brutally repress protests for black rights and protect the fascist terrorists. Democrat Joe Biden is their new boss, and he backs them to the hilt.
(cont. ) https://currentevents0000.blogspot.com/2021/01/capitalist-democracy-falling-apart.html