Trump-Instigated, Fascist-Led, Police-Aided
Racist Mob Assault on Congress

Capitalist “Democracy” Falling Apart –
Socialist Revolution the Only Solution

For Workers Defense Guards Against Fascist Threats
and to Defend the Rights of All the Oppressed

JANUARY 7 – 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.

That the assault was directly instigated by Trump is obvious. It’s also recognized by key sectors of the bourgeois establishment in the U.S., which is genuinely shaken up by yesterday’s events. The white supremacist in the White House, defeated in the November elections, set the date for the riot, calling on his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” time. Some 30,000 did. At a morning rally Trump whipped them up, railing against “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and urging the crowd to “walk down to Congress” in order to “fight.” His lawyer, the ubergrifter Rudy Giuliani who instigated the 1992 police riot against New York City’s black Democratic mayor David Dinkins, called for “trial by combat.” Donald Jr. warned Democrats and Republicans who didn’t support the plot to annul the votes of tens of millions of voters, “We’re coming for you.” This led even right-wing Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to declare: “The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”

Scripted Mayhem, Police Connivance

The mayhem was scripted by the president himself, though of course the cowardly macho-man reneged on his vow to march with his followers to the capitol. “A senior White House aide said Trump wanted his supporters to swarm the Capitol and protest loudly all day,” the Washington Post (7 January) reported. But, the aide was quoted as claiming, “There was no plan for them to go inside.” In fact, the mob was milling around outside on the balcony and steps for an hour before managing to get in the building. Once they were inside, Trump watched on television for over two hours until people were starting to leave, when he posted a (pre-recorded) video saying it was time to go home. In that video he proclaimed his “love” for the “very special” rioters, insisted that the election was stolen and told them to “Remember this day forever!” Which they will, of course. The fact that they stormed the U.S. Capitol and got away with it will embolden racists and fascists for years – and not just to vote for Trump or his surrogates, but also to attack black people, immigrants and all who would block their drive to “take back” what they proclaim is their country.

That the assault was facilitated by the police is also beyond doubt. The cops and military were obviously monitoring the social media where the fascists were openly talking of plans for the armed assault. Moreover, ultra-rightists’ armed takeover of the Michigan legislature last May had already set the pattern. From the outset in Washington, rioters surged past barriers and up the steps with scarcely any serious opposition from the Capitol Police. Subsequently videos have surfaced showing police opening barriers and standing back to let the mob in. A livestream video by the fascists shows an invader taking a selfie with a police officer. There are a few photos of scuffles over barriers and a brief standoff in the basement, but once the crowd was in, the very few police outside disappeared. Inside, the cops let the rioters have the run of building, invading and rifling offices, taking over the Senate, and then let them leave unhindered.¹ “Law enforcement experts said they were mystified by the tactics that police used once the mob was already inside the Capitol,” the Washington Post reported. That the police weren’t just “overwhelmed,” that police collaborated with the mob, that this was policy, is clear. The only “mystery” – so far – is who decided it.

You couldn’t miss the stunning contrast between this “kid glove” treatment on January 6 of the white supremacist mob and the wanton brutality unleashed against Black Lives Matter demonstrators peacefully protesting on June 3 in Lafayette Park, a public space, against racist police murder. It immediately struck us, along with countless other activists (and even the bourgeois media and politicians) – if black and other anti-racist demonstrators had sought to redress their grievances by converging on Congress, much less storming the building, they would have been shot down. It’s all one more confirmation that the police at every level are a white supremacist institution, and have been since their inception as slave patrols in the early 19th century. Nor was this equivalent to the workers’ occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 (which we enthusiastically participated in) to protest a vicious anti-labor bill. This was a racist mob bent on destruction and seeking to halt one of the functions of Congress with the most far-reaching consequences, which the mob did with impunity.

When the New York Times (7 January) writes of “violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement,” those few incidents cannot obscure police connivance with the rioters. When the D.C. National Guard arrived at the end – after Trump and his Army and Defense secretaries had earlier blocked a request by the city to mobilize it – there were very few arrests, mostly for curfew violation. But now that Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has issued a public emergency order until after Inauguration Day (January 20), it will surely be used against any anti-fascist protesters. Meanwhile, as Twitter and Facebook temporarily blocked Trump’s accounts, various pundits and legal beagles are flirting with curtailing First Amendment rights (“Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” New York Times, 6 January). Again, you can bet that any bans on “extremists” will be used against leftists and anti-racists far more than against the fascists who openly organized their Capitol bash on Parler and other right-wing social media.

That the attack on the U.S. Capitol was led by fascists is also undeniable, although barely mentioned in the bourgeois media. They had to notice that the first rioters who stormed into the Capitol were brandishing the Confederate battle flag, though they left unsaid that this banner of slavery is also that of the racist terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan. There were also numerous QAnon flags, and the green “Kekistan” flag (based on the WWII German battle flag) used by fascists. There were gallows with a hangman’s noose – a threat of lynching – set up outside. Nazi provocateur Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) was livestreaming from inside the building. Inside the Capitol, one of the fascists wore a sweatshirt hailing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. And prominent among those at the front of the rioters were III Percenters (who brag about their connections to police and military), Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, wearing a different uniform than usual, with orange caps. Orange armbands and tags were also noted in similar pro-Trump mobs in state capitals in Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Oregon and elsewhere.

There was a surreal quality to aspects of the fascist-led assault, including a QAnon “shaman” with a horned helmet made of fur pelts, stars-and-stripes face paint and Norse tattoos. Another rioter with a fur pelt and a fox skin on his head stood out among the camouflage jackets and MAGA caps. But it was no joke: the invaders were armed and dangerous. During the storming, two pipe bombs and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) were found on Capitol grounds. One of the camo-clad rioters had a handful of zip ties, indicating intentions of taking hostages, again echoing the events in Michigan last May. Had they gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or one of the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib) vilified by Trump, or others, these fascist and racist terrorists could well have carried out their murderous fantasies to “hang traitors.”

After the rioters left, the assembled senators and representatives resumed “debate” on certifying the electors’ votes for president state by state. While a few dropped their plans to challenge electors reflecting the popular vote (like Georgia, where the Democrats just won a by-election, replacing two Republican senators with two Democrats, giving the incoming Biden administration control of the Senate as well as the House), most did not. As the night wore on, there was one pious, nauseating speech after another praising the “bipartisan” rejection of “violence,” “insurrection” and “sedition,” instead endorsing “civility,” “decency” and, of course, “our democracy.” Of course, the rioters were foot soldiers for the blatantly anti-democratic ploy by the Republican defeat deniers to throw out tens of millions of votes – disenfranchising the voters of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the end, Biden’s victory was confirmed, but more than half of House Republicans voted not to recognize its legitimacy.

Repeatedly over the past weeks, media pundits have waxed lyrical about how the only thing holding the line for democracy has been the “good will” of a handful of officials, both Democratic and Republican. This despite all the civics lessons about checks and balances, the power and majesty of the Constitution, and the rest. What this underscores in reality is the crucial Marxist point that the state is fundamentally armed force in the service of the socially dominant (ruling) class. In capitalist society, that is the class of owners of the wealth and means of production. It is their (bourgeois) “democracy,” and when their interests demand it, they can dispense with these forms and resort to untrammeled naked force. Counteracting the patriotic fairy tales of bourgeois ideology is an important part of unshackling the working-class power so urgently needed in defense of the rights of all.

As for bourgeois politicians’ cloying appeals for bipartisan harmony and the rest of it as the pro-police duo of Biden and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, prepares to take charge of administering U.S. imperialism – the biggest and most dangerous enemy of the oppressed worldwide – Marxists stand in irreconcilable opposition to this and all administrations of the capitalist state. To unchain the power of the working class from capitalism’s parties, politicians and institutions is the urgent task in order to defend the rights and interests of all the exploited and downtrodden, and to put an end to the depredations of U.S. imperialism once and for all.

What Next for U.S. Capitalism?

In the aftermath of the January 6 riot in the Capitol, key sectors of the U.S. ruling class are worried about Donald Trump remaining in office, even for the 13 days left of his term. An alarmed National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the U.S.’ premier business lobby and longtime Trump ally, denounced “mob rule,” declaring that “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” The NAM called on Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment, which would allow removal of Trump as president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unsurprisingly, Pence refused. Today the two top Congressional Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called for the impeachment of Trump for inciting armed insurrection. MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough called for Trump, Giuliani and Donald Jr. to be arrested on the same charges. Several Trump administration officials have resigned, rats leaving a sinking ship.

Yet Trump is not the only one responsible for inciting the mob. There are quite a few Trump sycophants and enablers in Congress, some of whom have now opportunistically turned on him (like the execrable neo-Confederate senator Lindsay Graham), but who are all accomplices and co-conspirators. Ultimately, they – together with their Democratic rivals and colleagues – are all bourgeois politicians, representing the same class interests. Recall Barack Obama’s words following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election: “We have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage.” Obama said then that what he heard from Trump was “Respect for our institutions. Our way of life. Rule of law.” Really? So was January 6, an “intramural scrimmage,” marked by respect for the “rule of law”? Leading spokesmen for capital have concluded that Trump is an unhinged adventurer, prepared to sacrifice the interests of their “team” for his own, and that he must be stopped before he does more damage to “our institutions.” At this point, they’re just not sure how to do it.

The capitalist establishment has some problems in that respect: 74 million people voted for Trump, three-quarters of all Republicans say he was robbed of victory by (non-existent) massive voter fraud, and he now has a potential party fighting force of some tens of thousands, many of them heavily armed, fanatically devoted to him. While bourgeois detractors often portray him as just a crazy person, in denial about the election, he has created an organizing myth, the “stolen election,” akin to Hitler’s use of the myth of the “Dolchstoss,” the supposed stab in the back by Jews and communists, to explain Germany’s loss in World War I. Trump does not head up a mass fascist movement such as arose in Italy and Germany after WWI, and the motley crew that stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t disciplined shock troops like Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. They more closely resemble the rabble that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then president of the French Second Republic, gathered around him as he sought to become emperor in 1851.² Like the little Napoléon, Trump would like to use the January 6 mob as his private army for his next adventure.

Many liberals think Trump wants to be like Putin in Russia or Erdoğan in Turkey, an authoritarian elected president. But being an emperor would be more fitting for his grandiose self-image. As if. Over the weekend, Trump begged Republican officials in Georgia to fix the votes for him so he could steal the election (while accusing the Democrats of doing so). But he had no quid for the quo, and was publicly humiliated as the tape of his wheedling, threatening call was released. So Trump turned to his last-ditch ploy, whipping up a mob, but he failed once again. That the powers that be knew it was coming was shown by the extraordinary January 4 letter by ten former secretaries of defense reminding the military that any effort to “involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes” would be “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional” and any officials involved would face “criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The Pentagon snapped to attention.

When Louis-Napoléon staged his December 1851 self-coup proclaiming himself French emperor, he had the backing of top generals. In the U.S. today, Trump only had the convicted ex-general Michael Flynn to conspire with about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to impose martial law. The Pentagon generals fight for Wall Street. They got their tax cuts and are done with Trump. They have no appetite to stick their necks out for President Bonespurs (Trump got a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft by claiming bone spurs on his feet).

Biden wants to form a bipartisan Party of Order. But his lame calls for “decency” and unity, for “reaching across the aisle,” fly in the face of the everyone-for-himself, “sauve-qui-peut” (save yourself if you can) mentality of today’s bourgeois rulers. Capitalists flip from one bubble to the next, looking for speculative profits before they burst, as the capitalist system is putrefying before our eyes. They are cashing out of many companies and with their “golden parachutes” buying retreats in New Zealand and Patagonia, as far from Wall Street as they can get. Likewise, the “take no prisoners” style of Republican politics goes hand in hand with the outlook of many lawyers, epitomized by Giuliani but far more widespread, whose attitude toward the “rule of law” is to grab anything they can get away with, and the stability of the system be damned. They all fit well with a would-be authoritarian megalomaniac who holds that the truth is whatever he says it is, and that as president he could do anything he wants. But if he no longer can, many jump ship.

U.S. rulers are deeply split, reflecting the declining fortunes of American capitalism. The “American century” that began when the U.S. walked away with the victor’s spoils in World War II was to be followed by a “New World Order” of unchallenged U.S. imperialist hegemony after the counterrevolution that swept the Soviet bloc in 1989-92. Instead, there was world disorder, of “wars without end,” and the devastating consequences of the 2007-08 financial crash that unleashed a decade-long worldwide capitalist depression. That led to deepening social decay, reflected politically in the Tea Party movement and socially by the ravages of the opioid crisis, both fed by despair of ruined petty bourgeois and permanently unemployed workers. That is also a major factor in lower-middle-class and working-class votes for Trump. And now the coronavirus pandemic, the worst plague in a century that has killed 363,000 in the U.S. and 1.8 million+ worldwide, has set off an even deeper economic crisis, whose effects are only beginning to be felt.

While denouncing Trump, the Democrats avidly uphold the extraordinary, and deeply anti-democratic, powers of the presidency, built up even further during the Obama years. So how can Biden “unite the nation”? We have warned that war with China is a prime option: trade war, economic war against Chinese companies, and possibly provoking some military skirmishes in the South China Sea. It would cement ties with the Pentagon, which has been planning for this since Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” which never got off the ground because the U.S. was bogged down in the Middle East. Senate Republicans, who have promised to grill Biden cabinet choices on their position on China, would quickly jump on board. So would the misleaders of labor, who have long pushed poisonous anti-China protectionism. The opportunist left, which falsely calls China capitalist and even imperialist (and hailed the U.S.-backed “democracy” riots in Hong Kong), would barely object. Public opinion is primed with war propaganda blaming China for COVID-19, although it contained the plague while the response of the capitalist West has been a deadly disaster. But Biden would be playing with fire.

In the face of this wall-to-wall anti-China front, the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International call to defend China – a bureaucratically deformed workers state – against imperialist attacks and threats, and against the danger of internal counterrevolution.

Capitalist “Democracy” Is Bankrupt – For a Workers Government!

Marxists could clearly see yesterday’s fascist/racist mob attack coming. A year and a half ago, as campaigning for the 2020 election got underway, we warned, “The intensity of political clashes in the ruling class recalls the period leading up to the U.S. Civil War…. Today, the intensity of the political clashes in Washington and the provocations of violent racist and outright fascist groups raise the spectre of civil war. Certainly, sectors of Trump’s most rabid base yearn to avenge the defeat of the vile Confederacy. Yet there are fundamental differences from the U.S. of a century and a half ago” (“Dangerous Racist Provocations in Pre-Election Maneuvering,” The Internationalist No. 57, September-October 2019). “The frenzy of bigotry from the highest levels of government underlines again the connection between anti-black racism and anti-immigrant racism,” we wrote, underscoring that “Would-be leftists who sow illusions in Democratic ‘resistance’ can only help disarm real struggle against racist reaction.”

There have been a lot of comparisons between the present crisis and what followed the presidential elections of 1876. Yesterday, the New York Times (6 January) ran an article with the headline, “You Think This Is Chaos? The Election of 1876 Was Worse.” That contested election led to the rotten “Compromise of 1877” which gave the presidency to the Republican in exchange for abandoning Reconstruction and pulling U.S. troops out of the occupied former Confederacy. That signal betrayal of the former slaves, on top of the failure to expropriate the slaveowners’ lands after the abolition of slavery, led to the rise of the KKK terrorists and then the Jim Crow segregation that institutionalized white supremacy and black subjugation in the South for another 90 years. Those are the “good old days” that the mob of fascist-led racists who stormed the U.S. Capitol yearn for. African Americans and all working people are still paying the price for the failure to rip out the slave system by the roots following the Civil War.

Today the legacy of slavery is still with us, particularly in the racist death penalty, mass incarceration and wanton police murder of black people. It is also enshrined in the institutions of what pious liberals and labor officials praise as “our democracy.” Among the most flagrant examples are the Electoral College and the Senate, along with the Supreme Court. (See “Slavery and the Constitution,” Revolution No. 17, August 2020.) Even consistent bourgeois democracy (“one person, one vote”) would demand the abolition of these reactionary bodies. Yet capitalist “democracy” is so corroded and hollowed-out by the gangrenous rot of capitalist society that the only real defense of democratic rights for the masses lies in the fight for the proletarian democracy of a workers government. This would not be based on the cynical charades of the puppets of capital – whose campaigns depend on billions from Wall Street (over $500 million in the Georgia runoffs) – but on workers councils chosen directly by the working people.

Labor bureaucrats or reformist leftists may call to “fight the far right” in the name of “defense of democracy.” Against fascist and racist marauders, and against the constant murderous violence of the bourgeois state, Marxists are the most intransigent defenders of democratic rights. In fact, all the democratic liberties of the mass of the population were won by bitter struggle against the ruling class. But to defend those rights, it is crucial to state clearly that this is not “our democracy.” The owners of wealth, of land, of the means of production, transport and communications can sweep away all constitutions and legal guarantees if they decide their interests demand it – as has happened so many times in history, from Italy (Mussolini’s fascists) and Germany (Hitler’s Nazis) to Chile (Pinochet’s military junta) and elsewhere. In fact, bourgeois democracy is a cloak for the dictatorship of the exploiting class against all the workers and oppressed.

In the lead-up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Lenin stressed, citing Friedrich Engels, that the core of the capitalist state consists of “special bodies of armed men” protecting the power and property of the ruling class. It cannot be reformed away or pressured into becoming an instrument of “the people” – mass struggle by the workers and oppressed, culminating in socialist revolution, must sweep it away to make way for a workers government, the proletarian democracy of workers councils (soviets). Right-wingers ludicrously condemn the Democrats – the oldest capitalist party in the world – as “socialists” and even “communists.” To defend the lives, most basic interests and hard-won rights of the workers and oppressed requires above all a struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party based on the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the program of international socialist revolution. In these times of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, racist attacks by the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and its fascist auxiliaries, and another capitalist depression, forging that party is key to winning a real future for workers and youth, here and around the world. ■