A Material Analysis of The Capitol Hill Riot (America's Date With Destiny)
There has been a lot of insufficient analysis of the events at the capitol. The Liberal Media talks too much of Russia and the Righting media is too busy with their balancing act.
During the night of January 5 and the morning of January 6, fascist and Trump cultist roam the streets of D.C and stormed the capitol. The walked past the police and caused all amounts of mischief within the citadel. The heart of the U.S empire has, after more that 100 years, experienced a true insurrection but there is very little concrete analysis of it. The “liberal” media talks about “America values” and Russian Ghost while the right either prepare their propaganda or are trying to strike a delicate balance between condone or condemn. To someone with a material analysis, an event like this could be seen from decades and miles away. There is nothing surprising about Donald Trump and his putsch, we knew he would do this form the start. There is nothing surprising about his base of support, the two-party duopoly has been in a state of decay for the last forty years. America’s overall political instability couldn’t have been more obvious, there have been millions of people globally talking about the death of the U.S empire. It was inevitable that fascism would rise in the U.S, a country built on slavery and genocide. There is no reason why anyone with any education should be surprised at what happened.
Any sort of material analysis shows that what is happening in DC has been an accumulation over decades. With the destruction of organized labor by both the Democratic and Republican party, the shipping of manufacturing jobs to areas of higher exploitation and the ratcheting of the prison state as the sole response to social ills, it makes sense that deeply pathological social phenomenon will start to erupt within the bourgeoisie (“middle class”), and the remainder of the white proletarian (working class). The disillusionment of the white working class and the pressure of proletarianization on the white petite bourgeoisie with the preceding hijacking of the levers of power by the internationalized, oligarchic bourgeoisie (billionaires) is a receipt for political extremism. This built up frustration of these sects of the population have accumulated in the election of a megalomaniacal maniac by the name of Donald Trump, promising a return to a fantasy and to fight the oligarchs in power. He is a charismatic and entertaining figure who will say anything in order to stay in power. This moment was perfectly engineered for a dogmatic, charismatic figure to hijack the decayed political system and centralize their personal power. Trump could have been anyone else, any of the fanatical preachers of the rust belt, preaching their heretical nationalist Christianity or many of the other dogmatic figures on the right. If Trump was not here, it would simply be someone else.
The American political system has failed to effectively respond to domestic crises and effectively to capital crisis. The population received a total of 1800 dollars from the start and end of the pandemic. The unemployment extensions are extensions of an extremely weak system that has been attacked from the 80’s. Louisiana unemployment is capped at around 247 dollars, and the average weakly for most states is near poverty line of 300-500 dollars a week. There has been a failure to respond to the Covid -19 epidemic as the result of the private healthcare system and supply lines along with the linking of healthcare and employment. This can be seen in the declining number of hospital beds before the pandemic because it wasn’t profitable to have excess beds. For example, the number of hospital beds have decreased more than 700,000 since the 1960s, from 1.6 million to .9 million and the number of hospitals has been decreasing as well. Any functioning system would have established a basic universal healthcare system, large supply of hospital bed and universal basic income to prevent political instability and ensure that the buying power of the population is insured. We do not live in a functional system, meaning the bare minimum was not done to ensure that the pandemic and the coming economic collapse would be fought off. This dysfunction is also historical with the selling off many aspects of the federal and state government with the Neo-liberal coup during the 80’s. The primary job of the government has ceased long ago, being to govern and react to disasters but has instead been augmented to a money laundering firm for private corporations. This can be seen in the outsourcing of responsibility of the department of health for vaccine production and medical supplies production to the international healthcare industry. Compare the response to mask production and medical supplies production from China and the United States. There were widespread shortages of these basic medical supplies in the United states due to lack of initiative from the federal and state government to shift production and the continued use of the market to solve for the ever-present PPE shortage. Many communities throughout the country still can’t afford basic PPE due to either demands by companies to buy in bulk or being cash strapped according to NPR. Compare this to China which has token over many factories to produce needed medical supplies and has increased exports as of November.
The objective failure of the American political system to even allow piecemeal reforms in order to adjust to a changing situation is ever evident. “Medicare for all” or the call to detach healthcare from employment and establish a national healthcare system is ever popular. According to a fox new poll 72 percent of people want a government ran healthcare system. This is while both parties continue to demonize and flat out refuse to even provide a vote on this extremely popular policy. This is because the state has been largely seized completely by a small grouping of the bourgeoisie, the upper oligarchs who control the largest share of the media and most industry. A Princeton University study was conducted by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page to study different theories of American politics through a mix of polling and policy issues. There conclusions where that the united states did not resemble a majoritarian democracy. The average citizen showed to posses no influence in policy making, but economic elites and business interest groups. Reform also seems to be very hard to implement due to “the impediments of majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S political system-Federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism-together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias” (Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 573). It would be insane to believe that a system like this can be changes without a popular revolution since the levers of power have been so effectively blocked from the population. Due to the systematic destruction of critics of American capitalism and empire from media and their respective organization, there was very little to be done to channel this popular discontent into organize mass push for basic social democratic policies. This marginalization of this segment of the population, which have never been marginalized before, lays the foundation for dogmatic figures to ride the waves of discontent.
This dysfunction of the political system and its seizure has affected the material conditions of the population. There has been pressure on the petite-bourgeoisie class to proletarianize or lumpen-proletarianize. If we look at conditions before the pandemic, we were faced with an increasing wealth inequality, increasing cost of living and stagnant wages. Before the pandemic, under the Trump and Obama administration the myth of the middle class has been disappearing, now due to the pandemic and monopolization, the petite bourgeoisie are facing death as a class. The poverty rate has increased 8 million from June and sixty percent of all the hundreds of thousands of businesses that have closed permanently. This is all while the stock market skyrockets and Americas oligarchs continue to increase their wealth by more than a trillion. All the contradictions, all the problems pre-pandemic that have given us Trump have multiplied under the pandemic, peaking with the events at the capital.
There is no denying the marginalization of the needs of the population and the alienation of the masses from the political process. There can be no denying the deep decay of the American political system due to the Neo-liberalization of the economy and the resulting conditions. Things will only get worse as needed relief continues to be denied and the permanent damage of austerity politics begins to set in. If we want to make sure that what we are prepared for more Capitol Hills, we need to be energized and able to offer people an alternative. We need to be able to explain to the people why they are in their conditions and what could be done to fix it. This country is destined for the rise of fascism. There is no preventing more Trumps from rising in the future and seizing power. There is only getting enough people on our side in order to resist both the state that brought us the fascist and the fascist themselves.
Sources:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-hospital-beds?tab=table