A-Infos (en) Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group: THE TRUMP PUTSCH by ablokeimet

The following statement was released by the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group 
on 10 January 2021. ---- It is important to call the events of Tuesday 6 January 
in Washington DC in the US by their proper name. It was an attempted Fascist 
putsch, consciously incited though not directed by Donald Trump. It was an 
attempt to prevent the US Congress taking the final step to authorise the 
inauguration of Joe Biden as President a fortnight later. It failed and we're 
glad it did. ---- Capitalist media organisations are notoriously unreliable at 
estimating numbers at political events, but it's clear that at least tens of 
thousands of Trump supporters attended a demonstration in Washington under 
Fascist leadership. Up to a couple of thousand people, including organised 
Fascist groups and known Fascist identities, stormed the Capitol building (the US 
Parliament House). The mob included not a few off-duty cops who were seen 
flashing their IDs to the Capitol Police on the way in. The rioters disrupted the 
proceedings, which were a certification of the results of the Electoral College, 
and took over the meeting chambers and many other areas of the building. 
Photographs have emerged from inside showing men in combat gear, carrying weapons 
and zip ties for handling prisoners. Eventually, the rioters were forced to 
leave. Congress resumed its session and recognised the result of the Electoral 
College.

Police treatment of the Washington event was remarkably light, especially 
considering that Fascists had been threatening for weeks to storm the Capitol and 
that Black Lives Matter protestors have been met with overwhelming and aggressive 
police violence. Leftist demonstrators would never have been given the 
opportunity to reach the steps, let alone breach the doors and break windows. 
Instead, several cops posed for selfies with members of the mob. At a later 
point, a woman Trump supporter was shot dead by Capitol Police. Three other Trump 
supporters died from "medical emergencies" (only one of which occurred inside the 
Capitol) and a cop died the next day.

Trump incited his Fascist followers to storm the Capitol as a last ditch attempt 
to prevent Biden's inauguration, following the refusal of Mike Pence (Trump's 
Vice President) to prevent it by acting in his role of presiding over the Senate. 
This was after a series of attempts by Trump to frustrate the inauguration of 
Biden. He called rallies of his supporters outside counting centres; launched 
dozens of court cases, losing on all but a handful of minor procedural points; 
and tried to heavy various State governors and officials involved in the election 
process. His phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State was recorded and 
released on the Internet and showed just how desperate Trump was becoming.

The Trump putsch, if it had been successful, would have transformed the United 
States into a Fascist dictatorship. Trump's private army would have swept away 
the legislative branch of government. To make it stick, he would have been 
compelled to sack and/or arrest thousands of public officials - including, 
possibly, judges. But to carry through a putsch in defiance of a democratic 
election, it's necessary to have plenty of friends in high places. Trump found he 
didn't have nearly enough friends. He was beaten by the Deep State.

The failure of the putsch is a major blow to Trump. He has forced many Republican 
politicians, including the Vice President, to break with him. Most of the rest of 
the country is enraged. He has now been forced to promise a peaceful transfer of 
power on 20 January. This is both an admission of defeat and a concession that 
his conduct until now has contained an implicit threat of a coup.

There is no precise analogy from well-known history, but the closest one is Adolf 
Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. A relatively small group of people attempted, 
with daring action, to deliver the government of Germany into the hands of a 
dictator. The failure of the putsch was a setback for the Nazis, but the Weimar 
Republic treated the putschists with kid gloves. Hitler was sentenced to only 
five years prison and was released after nine months. Worse, successive Weimar 
governments eroded democratic rights with frequent states of emergency and left 
Germany's social problems unresolved. Hitler was able to rebuild his political 
credibility and then capitalise on the crisis created by the Depression. And we 
all know what followed that.

The Beer Hall Putsch analogy contains a lesson. Trump has given his enemies an 
opportunity to put him out of business, but the Democrats won't follow through. 
The Fascists who stormed the Capitol building are being denounced by everyone, 
including Trump, and will probably be hung out to dry, but the consequences for 
Trump himself won't be anywhere near hard enough. And the way Biden governs will, 
in due course, rehabilitate Trump. Left to their own devices, the Democrats will 
pave the way for the revival of Trump's political fortunes.

Democrats will make their own assaults on democratic rights. Already, Biden has 
called the people who stormed the Capitol "domestic terrorists" and Democrats 
across the board have picked up on his cue. In using this term, Biden isn't 
referring to the pipe bombs and the truck full of Molotov cocktails found in 
Washington, which have hardly got a mention in the mainstream media. He also 
wasn't speaking about the death of a cop, which occurred after his statement. The 
"terrorism" he was denouncing was what was on everyone's TV screens - a mob 
breaking windows, occupying the Capitol and disrupting a sitting of Congress.

Biden knows what he is doing. By denouncing Trump's foot soldiers as terrorists, 
he is preparing for a broader crackdown on political activity outside accepted 
political channels. Any new laws or police powers will apply as much to the Left 
as to the Right. They will be used by the cops with glee against the Left and not 
at all or hardly ever against the Right. And Democrats denouncing (with equal 
parts ignorance and malice) the rioters in the Capitol as "anarchists" will have 
real consequences for actual Anarchists.

Lessons

The first lesson to be drawn is that the US bourgeoisie have not given up on 
capitalist democracy. It is their preferred form of rule, since there are too 
many capitalists to fit inside a single palace. While the capitalists are 
prepared to abandon democracy if it is necessary to preserve their power, they 
fear that a dictator would rule in the interests of one faction of capital rather 
than the capitalist class as a whole.

Secondly, there is nothing surprising about the events in Washington. Not the 
Fascist mobs. Not Trump's incitement. Not the complicit approach of the cops. Not 
the failure of the putsch. Not the Democrats' turn to "law and order". And not 
the liberals' surprise at all of these things except the last.

The Democrats will handle the aftermath of the putsch in a way that will 
strengthen the Right. They will pass yet more repressive laws. They will wax 
lyrical about the precious institutions of capitalist democracy and vehemently 
denounce the invaders of Congress. But when it comes to prosecuting and 
sentencing, many of these invaders will get kid glove treatment.

Finally, we need to realise that liberals are not our friends. They are not 
quietly on our side while we do the dangerous stuff. When push comes to shove, 
liberals want the heavy hand of the State to suppress Right wing dissent. They do 
not support working class counter-mobilisation. When the workers of the United 
States make a revolution, they will disperse the liberals' precious Congress - 
themselves - not to establish a dictatorship, but to allow the mass organs of 
workers' democracy to take power. And they will need to be prepared to defend 
themselves against a last-ditch violent reaction by the old regime, supported 
whole-heartedly by the liberals.

Next

For the time being, Trump is badly wounded and the Republican Party is deeply 
divided. The Fascists are demoralised because Trump is dumping on them to save 
his own skin. The Democrats are angry and also feel vindicated.

Anarchists in the United States need to ensure that the organisers of the Trump 
Putsch are clearly identified as Fascists for the world to see. Anarchists need 
to seize the opportunity to break the links that have been developing between 
them and the mainstream Right and calling the Fascists by their true name is an 
essential part of that. And Anarchists need to run hard against the Democrats' 
agenda of righteous "law and order" and neo-liberalism. Biden was always going to 
be a bad President. The Trump Putsch means he'll be worse.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
AFTER TRUMP
Posted on 10 January, 2021 by ablokeimet
This article first appeared in The Anvil, Vol 9 No 6, published 31 Dec 2020.

The US Presidential election is over and Donald Trump has lost. While he has 
convinced his hard core supporters than the election has been stolen from him, he 
has failed to get sufficient backing from powerful actors to mount a coup. Joe 
Biden will take office on 20 January.

Biden will have no honeymoon. The previous two Democratic Presidents faced a 
massive Right wing reaction as soon as they took office, although they had no 
opposition worth noting from the Left. The Republicans will try a third time to 
mount a reactionary movement and Trump will probably lead it. Biden campaigned on 
a platform of being a "normal President" - but "normal" politics is precisely 
what led to the election of Trump in 2016. Left to his own devices, Biden will 
bring the Washington establishment even further into disrepute and set the stage 
for Trump to be re-elected in 2024 (health permitting). Biden will rule for Wall 
Street, allow inequality to grow unchecked and confine progressive policies to 
gestures that will infuriate the Right while not satisfying the burning needs of 
the mass of workers in the US.

There is a new factor. Obama took office when the grassroots Left was small, weak 
and inexperienced. As a result, there were massive illusions in him, something 
that demobilised the Left for some years. Under Clinton back in 1992, the 
situation was even worse. The Left was ideologically shattered by the collapse of 
the USSR and its organisations were falling to pieces. The capitalists were 
celebrating the "death of communism" and proclaiming "the end of history". Now 
the grassroots left is confident and growing, having left full or partial 
ideological dependence on the USSR behind. For the first time since LBJ, a 
Democratic President will take office with a grassroots challenge from the Left.

The strategy

The social movement in the United States faces a fundamental strategic choice. 
Either it works through the Democratic Party or against it. Every movement throws 
up a layer of activists who use it to climb into Parliament, but the crucial 
issue is whether the movement will follow them and divert itself into 
Parliamentary channels. The moment the movement tones down its actions or demands 
to suit the fortunes of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it's finished 
as an independent force. It's not for nothing that the Democratic Party is known 
in the US as the graveyard of political movements. It's happened so many times 
before that activists have no excuse for not seeing it coming.

Anarchist communists in the United States need to avoid being distracted by the 
siren call of demands to change the Democratic Party. The priority must be to 
build the grassroots struggle, in whatever sphere it erupts, while engaging 
patiently with those who think there is currently no alternative to the 
Democrats. And the argument has to be that "We - the grassroots movement - are 
the alternative to the Democrats. We're creating facts on the ground to which all 
politicians must respond in some way, while the organisations we are building are 
the new society within the shell of the old."

The struggle

Finally, we must consider the fields of struggle available. The struggle against 
the police and their racist violence, the struggle for immigrants' rights and 
against borders and the struggle to prevent rampant climate change have all 
generated strong grassroots movements in recent years. The first of these 
struggles is the one that has shaken the United States the most, because US 
capitalism is founded on the legacy of slavery. The demand that the State merely 
recognise that Black lives matter is enough to undermine the stability of its 
order and send the cops into a frenzy of violence.

The militant demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd, for 
example, were entirely justified and spread like wildfire. Demonstrators can be 
beaten off the streets, however, as eventually happened in Minneapolis, 
Louisville, Atlanta, Portland and elsewhere. What would give this struggle, and 
all other struggles, the social weight to win would be bringing it into the 
workplace. If grassroots radicals were strong enough in the labour movement in 
Minneapolis to force the staging of a one day general strike there, the 
capitalists would have been hit where it really hurts. Cutting off the flow of 
profits would achieve far more to defund police and change their behaviour than 
any amount of reform pursued electorally.

The workplace is the source of the capitalists' power, so the struggle in that 
location is decisive. It is the vehicle for fighting the economic inequality that 
is driving down living standards for US workers for the first time since the 
Great Depression and fuelling the growth of Fascism. It is, though, much more 
than that. The struggle in the workplace can unite the multi-racial, 
multicultural and gender diverse working class in the fight against all forms of 
social oppression and build the solidarity needed to make the revolution to 
overthrow capitalism as a whole.

After Trump, the fundamental task is the same as before.

BUILD THE CLASS STRUGGLE

https://melbacg.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/the-trump-putsch/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en