Posted on January 6th, 2021

Versión en castellano

While the election’s results of the second round that defined the results of Georgia were confirming the passage of the Senate to a Democratic majority (counting the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris against the tie of forces), the joint session of congress that officiates as the Electoral College was suspended while a mass of pro-Trump protesters occupied multiple public buildings in the North American capital, starting with the Capitol, where parliament operates.

The demonstration of force by the right-wing movements supporting the outgoing president was called by Trump, who was the keynote speaker at a rally before marching into the capitol. There, Trump took note that his allegations of fraud (which make up a story without concrete verifiable elements and that they have not found any legal instance that gives them credit) have not been taken by a large part of his own party. These escalating tensions between Trump and the establishment of his party, which included the support for Biden of many Republican figures in the elections, reached an extreme point in Trump’s speech today. He said that the Republican Party is full of cowards and weak people. That the movement he leads has no historical precedent. That the defection of the republican politicians left him without a rearguard. And that their commitment policy could lead to “the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but not of us.”

One of the targets of Trump’s ire was Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump called on since the march to challenge the votes sent by 6 states so that people can vote again and his formula can be proclaimed the winner. Pence, however, clarified in the time that the Electoral College functioned that it would respect Biden’s triumph. Trump also attacked the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority but which has not led to his allegations on the elections, as well as the nation’s attorney William Barr, another close collaborator who has abandoned him.

Trump had launched as a last resort to try to influence the election of Georgia and gather a larger popular support, a proposal for $2,000 check to face the pandemic. It was the Republican caucus in the Senate led by McConnell that sank this proposal, in the name of defending fiscal austerity. Biden, although he sent the 600 dollars negotiated with the Republican bench to vote, then turned to demand the 2000 and the Democratic candidates in Georgia exploited in his campaign the idea that a majority of theirs in the Senate would allow this measure to be approved. Trump highlighted in his speech that, together with the omnipresent fraud, which would have re-developed in yesterday’s elections, it was this policy of the senators of his party that cost them the local election.

The enormous position that the subsidy issue occupies at this political moment shows the weight of misery and the developing social crisis and, ultimately, the shadow of the popular rebellion that continues to condition the political process. The fascistic proposals (the speech of the march was full of racist winks: “you are the ones who built this country”; “now they are going to open the borders”) of Trump, as well as his disruptive and mobilizing methods and his claim to the status of An outsider of the Washington political system, thrives on the decomposition and collapse of the entire political regime, its institutions and parties that came to maturity in the last.

The suspension of the electoral college session by a crowd, partly armed, does not open a way for Trump to prevent the transfer of power to the Biden-Harris government. Rather, Trump’s political move is aimed at maintaining his leadership over the unfolding movement and conditioning Republican politicians who stampede away from him. With the speech about how they cannot allow the inauguration of Biden as illegitimate, Trump is preparing to catapult himself as the alternative opposition to the Democratic government in the new stage. “In a year,” he declared, “we will be working on representation in congress. We will go to the primaries against those who did not measure up. ” “Your leadership let you down,” he told the protesters. Although he did not renounce to act electorally within the Republican primaries, the action was destined to be the baptism of fire of a new political formation with fascist characteristics of what until now appeared as local militias or local shock groups. Although this “March on Rome” does not lead to a successful capture of power, it wanted to have the spectacularity of a founding event.

The images that traveled the world of a true liberated zone in Washington, where public buildings were at the mercy of the militiamen, show the extent of the political crisis. The incumbent president promoted the takeover, which the media have described as an insurrection or mutiny, and the president-elect and the parliamentary leaders acted without exercising their authority, perhaps not to appear exercising a power that they have not yet been able to formally assume.

On the other hand, the Biden-Harris policy categorically rejects the prospect of a mobilization against Trump and his shock groups. As we have repeatedly pointed out from Prensa Obrera, the demobilization of the mass movement that acted last year in the United States is the priority for these politicians of big capital, even above the replacement of Trump. The North American left, which is mostly within the Democratic Party, systematically adapts to this policy of containment. In this way they give away the initiative all the time to the extreme right, when the class struggle has been at its highest point in many decades.

Far from the political and social normalization that Biden imagines to preside over, the images of this violent crisis show how the decline of the United States as a world power continues to worsen, now aggravated by the entry of the world economy into a new depression and a second wave of the pandemic. A Biden government, prefigured as a co-government with moderate McConnell like Republicans, must preside over a very deep clash with the masses at a time of pandemic, recession and massive unemployment.

The huge collective of workers and oppressed fighters in the US needs to rely on the urgent and pressing demands that derive from the current political, health and social crisis to lead a process of mass organization, with methods of direct action and confrontation with the State. The necessary bases for this are the impulse of a national independent political organization of the workers and the practice of a systematic united front to defeat incipient fascism in the streets and fight for the economic and democratic demands of the masses.