It has been a year since thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. It has also been a year since Biden - at the head of the White House - promised to heal the "wounds of a divided country", provide a social solution to the crisis and revive the US's position in the international sphere. None of his promises has been fulfilled.
In mid- December, three retired army generals published a letter in the Washington Post making public their fear of not being able to count on sectors of the armed forces to defend the legitimate government. "We shudder at the thought that a coup might succeed next time (...) there is the possibility of a military collapse reflecting social and political decomposition". A statement of this calibre gives a measure of the deep crisis that the world's leading power is going through.
These military commanders also explicitly recognise that the assault on the Capitol was not an isolated and marginal action by a group of "freaks", but a coup planned by the leadership of the Republican Party, with strong complicity in broad sectors of the state apparatus.
Trump is neither gone nor has he been weakened, but the opposite. He has taken absolute control of the Republican Party, marginalising supposedly moderate elements such as Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. That such "hawks"(1), who defended waterboarding torture at Guantánamo or who come from the reactionary Tea Party, are today the moderates, says a lot about the serious danger posed by the Trumpist reaction.
These two congressmen, the only Republicans on the congressional committee investigating the assault on the Capitol that left 5 dead and more than 150 injured, have now been rebuked by their own party, pointing out that they are participating in "a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens" and defining the assault as "legitimate political speech". It is the first time in history that the Republican Party has reprimanded two congressmen, and it does so to justify the coup attempt!
Trump is neither gone nor has he been weakened, on the contrary. He has taken absolute control of the Republican Party.
Biden's promises to defend "democracy" and make those responsible for the assault on the Capitol pay have come to nothing. Trump, its main instigator, has not even been tried, and the few who have been have received ridiculous sentences.
The facts disprove the arguments of many progressive commentators and others that for some reason call themselves Marxist theorists, who a year ago signed Trump's RIP and dismissed the assault as a riot with no further consequence. Reality has belied this shoddy impressionism.
The disastrous balance of Biden’s administration first year
Not only has the US accumulated more than a million deaths from Covid-19 (although the official figures only show 850,000), but the pandemic continues to rage with 2,000 deaths per day, with the living conditions of the population having suffered a dramatic decline.
In order to facilitate a quick return to work, and to further enrich employers, the Biden administration has approved halving the recommended isolation period for infected people from 10 to 5 days. The bonuses and subsidies that were approved at the beginning of the pandemic (moratoriums on evictions, extra tax benefits for children, etc.) have been abolished. Inflation has greatly eroded purchasing power. The CPI reached a shocking 7.5% last January, but products such as petrol went up by as much as 39%. The cost of living has eaten away at the small wage increases in some companies, and workers are noticeably poorer today than they were a year ago.
This process of impoverishment and social decomposition is being reflected in the "Great Resignation". More than four and a half million workers have left their jobs, causing labour shortages and job vacancies that cannot be filled. Despite the rejoicing among some "progressive" sectors, pointing to this as a turning point for the working class, the reality is much bleaker.
Many women have given up their jobs to look after children in the face of school closures or the impossibility of meeting the cost of childcare (900 euros a month on average). Others cannot afford the fuel it takes to get to work. And then there is the fear of falling ill in a country without public health care, which can lead to financial ruin, and where the average cost of a Covid-19 admission is 20,000 euros.
Any rise in wages or achieving labour rights will be a fruit of struggle, not of phenomena like the "Great Resignation". We are seeing this with the strikes in recent months, such as those at Kellogg's, Frito-Lay, John Deere, Kaiser Health Care, Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, and the Chicago teachers, many of them against the bureaucratized union leaderships of the AFL-CIO. Despite Biden's words about paying better wages or his hypocritical rejection of the firing of the 1,400 striking Kellogg's workers, he has in fact enabled and encouraged the bosses to go on the offensive.
Under the Biden Administration, the pandemic continues to rage with 2,000 deaths per day and the profound decline in the living conditions of the population continues to intensify.
Against this backdrop, we witness Biden's famous Build Back Better social project, which was to combat poverty and the growing social devastation, being revised downwards as a result of pressure from the most conservative sectors of the Democratic Party, going from a budget of 6 trillion dollars to 1.75 trillion dollars over ten years. That is to say 175 billion dollars a year, and it is still not clear that it can be approved, as is already demonstrated by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's opposition to the establishment of four weeks' paid maternity leave (2).
"We're the laughingstock of the world": Trump comes back with a vengeance
Biden is filling the pockets of the plutocracy. According to Forbes magazine, on 1 January 2020 US billionaires accumulated a collective wealth of 3.4 trillion dollars. By the same time in 2022, their wealth will have already reached $5.3 trillion. The same can be said for the obscene profits of the big monopolies on the stock market, which broke records in 2021.
On the foreign policy plane, Biden has reinforced Trump's militarism after the defeat suffered last September in Afghanistan.
His agenda to contain China's advance is 100 per cent imperialist, despite the whitewash given to him by many leaders of the European reformist left, presenting him as a lover of world peace and social justice.
These are the objective conditions that are giving wings to the Führer of New York. In the past year, Trump has wasted no time, and has taken advantage of every inch of terrain conceded by Biden's anti-social and racist policies, to whip up chauvinistic sentiment in the face of the defeats and setbacks of US imperialism. A strategy that is allowing him to rally, arm and prepare his social base.
But it is not just Trump, it is the Republican Party and its governors, involved in a new offensive against women, with bans on abortion rights in numerous states; more restrictions on the voting rights of minorities (3); the persecution and hunting of migrants on the border with Mexico in states like Texas, while Biden continues to use Trump's legislation to expel hundreds of thousands of them.
The midterm elections are the next opportunity for the New York mogul. They could mean the loss of the Democrats' precarious majority in the Senate. Trump is true to his word of 6 January 2021, when he said it was just the beginning: "We need a landslide victory. A victory the Democrats can't steal," he now says.
But let's not be naïve. He has already shown that ballot box or no ballot box, he is willing to mobilize his broad base at a higher level. These harangues to his supporters, these acts of reaffirming and preparing the army of reaction for "whatever it takes" are done in broad daylight.
He is amassing an army of the far right for beyond the election dates. A danger that Biden and the Democrats are incapable of averting.
The other side of the coin and what we need to defeat Trumpism
It would be foolish and completely wrong to deny the advance of Trumpism and the threat it represents.
But it would be just as wrong to draw the conclusion that this is due to the low level of consciousness of the American working class or a negative correlation of forces for the left. The experience of the last decade refutes such arguments. Trump himself was defeated in the election after a formidable mass movement over the assassination of George Floyd, the biggest movement since the 1960s.
Trump targets the blighted middle classes and backward sections of the white working class, presenting himself as an alternative to impending tragedy.
But why is he able to do so?
Because of the impotence of the policies of Biden and the Democratic Party to solve the social catastrophe looming over millions, and because of the misguided follower politics of leaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC (4), the so-called left of the Democratic Party, to this agenda for the benefit of big capital.
Trump is amassing an army of the ultra right "for whatever it takes". A danger that Biden and the Democrats are unable to avert.
Sanders says the Democratic Party is failing, that it has "turned its back on the working class" and calls for a "change of course" to confront "powerful corporate interests". But in recent months he has chaired the Senate Budget Committee charged with approving Biden's economic plans, seeking consensus between Republicans and Democrats. AOC herself has gone so far as to point out that "our agenda is Biden's agenda".
Instead of organizing and promoting the struggle of the working class and youth, and using their public positions to expose Biden and the Democratic Party as an enforcement arm of big capital, they contribute to giving it a left-wing veneer, legitimizing its social lip service and its policies in the interests of the banks and the big US multinationals. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, completely committed to the system. Attempts to transform it have failed completely.
That is why it is necessary now, without further delay, to raise the need to build a real party of the working class and the oppressed. The leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are making a big mistake by insisting on tying themselves to the Democratic Party bandwagon. That in recent years they have grown exponentially and that today they have 4 representatives in Congress, 5 in the Senate, and more than 100 between state Congresses and Senates and City Councils, demonstrates the turn to the left in society, but also that if these positions are not put at the service of a policy and actions that challenge the capitalist order, that serves to raise the level of organization and consciousness of the workers by promoting the struggle for socialism, they are to be finally absorbed by the system like wet powder.
The attempts to transform the Democratic Party have failed completely. It is necessary now, without further delay, to raise the need to build a genuine party of the working class and the oppressed.
There is enormous anger and unrest, and the potential to raise a mass, militant, anti-capitalist left party. This has been seen in the strikes for better wages and working conditions that have swept the country, in the formation of unions at companies like Starbucks despite fierce opposition from management and the union bureaucracy, in the recent mass demonstrations in Minneapolis in the face of yet another racist murder, or in the failed second attempt to recall the militant left councillor Kshama Sawant from the Seattle City Council (5).
Trump may return to the White House, but there is no doubt that the US is preparing for brutal clashes between the classes.
