Heart of Democracy – The Riot at the U.S. Capitol

The riot at the United States Capitol on January 6 was the convulsion of a dying social system. The deep crisis of capitalism became a political crisis in the leading power of the bourgeois world. The U.S. has not seen an emergency like this one since the outbreak of its civil war in 1861, before it rose to become the leading capitalist power. The extent of its fall – from the triumph of the Union in 1865 over the slaveholders’ insurrection to the seizure of the Capitol by the MAGA mob – seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago. But as Marx and Engels observed, under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

Let’s sober up, then.

What happened on January 6 has been described as an attempted coup d’état. This is certainly an exaggeration, but it is proof that democracy is now only a papier-mâché figure, ready to be trampled underfoot by anyone, and that no one is really interested in defending it.

The United States has the most sophisticated security apparatus in the world, but that didn’t stop a largely unarmed mob from storming the Capitol during a joint session of Congress. How could that police state have allowed this to happen?

The answer is obvious from the videos of officers opening the gates to allow the rioters to enter and posing for photos with them. This was a very different police presence than that which has always been seen at demonstrations against racism, for example.

For the bourgeois state to defend itself it is useful to draw on the ideologies of racism, sexism, imperialism, and anti-communism. For the January 6 skit it has therefore mobilized some well-known fascist barkers, who advocate armed actions on the internet but cower in front of the police in real life.

Anti-communism was a strong influence on the rioters. One person at the vanguard of the push into the Capitol held a sign that read “Communism Is the Real Invisible Enemy.” There were other banners depicting Trump beheading Karl Marx, and communists being thrown out of helicopters in Pinochet’s Chile (with the slogan “Anti-Communist Action”). These statements and symbols are evidence of the contemporary U.S. far-right’s lineage from the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s. Their real enemy has always been freedom for the working class!

But it is possible, and historically verified, that the fascism of the bourgeois state – always anti-communist and anti-proletarian – sometimes presents itself as “leftist”, and even “proletarian” and “communist”: Stalinism has given us numerous bleak examples of this “real socialism”.

Meanwhile – just because the ghost of democracy is useful to delude the working class and the ruined petty bourgeoisie – the representatives of the bourgeoisie feign outrage at the riot. As with any parent, the big bourgeoisie sometimes needs to discipline its unruly children. So they condemn the rioters and claim that Trump, in his final days in office, represents a threat to democratic values and bourgeois political civilization (some civilization!). The right and “left” deprecate this farce as “an attack on our democracy”. The worst demagogues prostrate themselves before the wounded nationalist pride of an “uncontaminated citadel of democracy”.

All of this is an effort to depoliticize the whole affair, to reduce it to an issue of “extremism”, against which the “good” state, supported by all parties of the right and left, should fight. The electoral left, the democratic socialists, is the first to appeal to the bourgeois state to crush the fascist threat, which it will never do!

Even supposed “Marxists”, who recognize that the revolt arose from the founding characteristics of the United States, particularly racism, remain subservient to it, although they recognize it as reactionary.

We revolutionary communists will certainly be compared to the rioters of January 6 by our opponents, because we dare to fight back against the bourgeois state. We are not the “opposite extremism” to the fascists who rallied on January 6: all of them want to be part of this state; we will abolish it!