The weakness of the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class was on full display as Donald Trump’s terror militia invaded the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and temporarily blocked the U.S. Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. As armed pro-Trump racists trashed offices and congressional leaders cowered under their seats, the entire world witnessed the decay and disarray of U.S. finance capital, the ruthless imperialist gang that not so long ago sat atop the globe.
As anyone who has marched in D.C. knows first-hand, anti-racist protesters would have been gassed, bludgeoned, and shot long before getting inside the heart of the bosses’ law-making apparatus. But in this case, the Capitol Police, a federal agency, passively watched the chaos unfold. The Trumpers had openly planned their violence for weeks on domestic terrorist websites; Trump himself incited them at a nearby rally before the attack. Yet the police presence at what the rulers call “a sacred civic space” was nearly invisible. The vicious split between finance capital and the Fortress America capitalists (the ones fronted by Trump) has disrupted and exposed the rulers’ most cherished institutions, from their killer kkkops to their dead-end electoral circus.
For the liberal bosses, the debacle is a case of chickens coming home to roost. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the finance capitalists used racist dog whistles to mislead white workers while blaming Black workers for the profit system’s racist inequalities. The resulting white grievance movement was seized upon by small fascists like the Koch and DeVos families, and subsequently mobilized by Trump into his personal base.
While no one knows how this will play out, what’s clear is that we are entering volatile, unchartered territory. Will the institutional collapse spiral? Will the main wing bosses enact fascist measures to regain their grip? Will they accelerate their drive toward global war against arch-rival capitalists in China? As a class and a communist party, we must understand both the danger and opportunity of this period. The danger is that a fear of these small-time terrorists will drive some workers into the arms of the biggest terrorists of all, the state terrorist gang to be led by Biden. The opportunity is to build a mass revolutionary communist movement to destroy capitalism once and for all. Join Progressive Labor Party!