Biden/Harris inauguration will not solve problems
Unprecedented is perhaps the most over-used word in the English language today, but the events in Washington DC cannot be described any other way. The depth of the political crisis in American capitalism – because that is what it is – is signified by the insurrectionary attempt to prevent Congress ratifying the November 3 presidential election.
With what appears to have been minimal security offered by the police and state National Guard, thousands of pro-Trump rioters broke through cordons and crashed their way into the Congress building. As the joint session of the two congressional houses, chaired by Vice-President Pence, were suspended, Senators and House Representatives were escorted to safety, many wearing gas masks. Offices were trashed, furniture broken up and in the chaos one woman was shot dead. Pipe bombs were discovered and neutralized in the vicinity of the Capitol building.
TV pictures beam across the globe
All of these scenes were played out on television pictures beamed around the world. The riot was instigated by Trump himself, whipping up the crowd at the rally beforehand. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudi Giuliani, talked at the same rally about settling the election dispute with “trial by combat”. Even as the riot was unfolding, Trump repeated on Twitter the lies about the election being ‘rigged’.
Commentators even on US TV channels immediately drew conclusions about the initial reactions of the police and national guard and contrasted their preparedness for previous demonstrations in the US seat of government. In preparation for a Black Lives Matter demonstration earlier this year – despite it being entirely peaceful – thousands of heavily-armed police and troopers were deployed across Washington DC. Had the rioters breaking into the Congressional building been black, there is not the slightest doubt that hundreds of them would have been shot dead by the police.
Gently helping down the stairs
Even after the outnumbered Washington police were eventually reinforced, just prior to a 6pm curfew, rioters were allowed to swagger away, as if they had been tourists looking around the building. Police could be seen gently helping the invaders as they descended the stairs of the Capitol building, lest they accidentally fell. Had they been left-wing intruders or black youth they would have been battered down the stairs with clubs.
What happens in the coming days, weeks and months is difficult to anticipate. The reaction of many workers, particularly youth and black workers will be one of outrage. There will be demands, even at this late stage in his administration, for Trump to be removed from office using the 25th amendment and indeed, as this is being written, discussions are being held about that option.
Towards the end of the rioting, the Secretary of Defence met with the head of the FBI and other officials in the presence of Vice-President Pence and it was this group that took decisions about calling in reinforcements from the National Guard and a military from a nearby base. Trump was not involved in those crisis discussions.
Side-lined for next two weeks
Having been effectively silenced by the suspension of his Twitter account, Trump is likely to be side-lined for the next two weeks, one way or another. The more his team is denuded by resignations – rats deserting a doomed ship – the less he will be able to govern. What is for sure is that he will not be allowed to cause mayhem in the two weeks leading up to inauguration of Biden on January 20. On that day, Washington DC will be in lockdown, with tens of thousands of police and troopers on the streets.
After Biden’s inauguration, it is possible that the establishment will wreak its revenge on the rioters and possibly on Trump himself. All those who put their faces on social media and took selfies in the Congress building will be hunted down and many will find themselves in jail in the coming months. It is not ruled out that the establishment might go after Trump and his family, having for years tolerated his industrial-scale fraud, sexual assaults and tax-dodging.
Republicans irrevocably split
The Republican Party is now irrevocably split between its old-school conservatives and the ‘Retrumplican’ Party. At the rally before the riot, Donald Trump Junior announced to the crowd that it was “Donald Trump’s Republican Party.” It remains to be seen how the split in that party will pan out. Even after mayhem and occupation of the Capitol building, well over a hundred Republican members of Congress still continued the farce of opposing the ratification of Biden and Harris. They are all jockeying for support among Trump’s base, some with an eye to the 2024 presidential election, and they too, are implicated in the mayhem that took place.
It was well after 3 o’clock in the morning, thanks to the riot and the obstruction of most Republican members of Congress, that the ratification process ended. A ‘formality’ that normally takes thirty minutes had taken more than ten hours.
Biden and Harris will be inaugurated President and Vice-President. But there are profound divisions in US society that will not be eliminated by their policies or their programme. The mechanism of choice for the American capitalist class, used to keep all workers in check for three hundred years, has been the racist oppression of Black people. White supremacy has underpinned US capitalism that whole time and continues to do so.
Brutalization of Black community for centuries
Black communities have been terrorized, brutalized, disenfranchised, economically oppressed and humiliated for generations. The recent killings of black people by police, appalling as it is, is no more than a continuation of a policy that has been operating for centuries.
For white workers, the modest advantage of their race and the badge of white supremacy has utterly distorted and atrophied their class consciousness, so that they, too, are effectively victims of a system that is based on racism. White workers have been gulled into believing that the Black Lives Matter movement is somehow a ‘threat’ to them and when Trump calls for only ‘legal’ votes to be counted, the unspoken words are ‘only white votes’. The fears, anxieties and uncertainties of white workers have not been answered by the official Democratic Party and their concerns have been heightened further by a Covid pandemic out of control.
But the contradiction that the labour movement needs to resolve is that while all the white bigots are Trump supporters, not all Trump supporters are white bigots. It is capitalism that is the threat to white workers, not working class black and brown workers. Among young workers, that realisation is dawning and it was notable how much the BLM demonstrations were supported by white and black youth together. But that message has clearly not yet hit home to older white workers and that is a challenge the organised workers’ movement needs to take up.
The US labour movement has the resources and the authority to take up that challenge, but the trade union bureaucracies are tied hand and foot to the capitalist system and the bosses of big business, so whether they will do it is another matter. For the first time ever, the USA has a black woman Vice-President, but we will wait a long time before Kamala Harris makes the connections between Trump, race and the capitalist system.
Profound underlying contradictions
So whatever the short-term reaction, and it might be very sweeping, the fundamental, underlying contradiction of US society will not be going away. The establishment of US capitalism has been rocked by the events in Washington DC this week, but they are not the end of a process so much as the beginning. It signals the beginning of a protracted period of economic, social and political convulsions in the Unites States; a period in which this outrage will be matched by other, perhaps worse events. It signals the death agony, playing out over years, of an economic system that offers nothing but hardship, insecurity and suffering to the majority of its population.
Whether the death agony leads to a different form of society, a socialist society that offers hope, or whether it ushers in a darker period of even worse reaction, depends entirely on the ability of the workers movement, and especially its youth, to map a way out of the crisis in which it is mired.
January 7, 2021
