From Revolution / revcom.us:
Statement on the Inauguration of Joe Biden
January 20, 2021 | revcom.us
Today Joe Biden was inaugurated as president of the United States, and Kamala Harris became vice president. This followed months of lies by Donald Trump claiming that he, Trump, had won. And it followed an armed fascist coup—an attempt by forces called forth and led by Trump to overturn the result at its scheduled final certification of the vote on January 6 in the Congress. Biden now has the reins of office. Trump can no longer wield state power to consolidate fascism.
Had Trump succeeded in this, the consequences could have been incalculable horror—including the elimination of democratic and civil rights.
The fact that people decisively voted Trump out and that Trump could not overturn the vote is important, and very good. The fact that fascism no longer has in its claws the executive branch of the most powerful country in the world is very good. It is a good day for humanity, and it is good day for any struggle for progressive change.
At the same time, 75 million people voted for the fascist, Trump. The fascists continue to dominate other critical branches of the government, federal and state, and continue to infest law enforcement and the military. The Christian fascist network of schools, churches, media and political action funds, as well as the fascist media more generally, remain intact. This is real.
Biden’s inauguration posed a stark contrast to the past four years of Trump and many people felt that. Yet Biden’s calls for unity and his claims that America is essentially “good” cannot cover over the real crimes of this country, under Democrat and Republican alike, nor can those claims overcome the profound divisions that exist in this country… divisions that are inextricably woven into the real historical fabric and actual everyday functioning of this society. They cannot put the forces back in the bottle that have both driven forward and been called forth by this fascism—economic, social and political forces.
Further: Biden’s talk of “systemic racism” cannot forever hide the name of the system that birthed, fed and requires this racism—capitalism-imperialism. His talk of “restoring American leadership” in the world cannot change the bloody, plundering record of the “leadership” of that same imperialist system for centuries.
There is much more to say on the horrors of the normal functioning of this system and the fascism it gave rise to, and especially on what is the solution to all this—an actual revolution on the basis of the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian.
As we said earlier this week, Bob Avakian has
developed a way out of this madness—a strategy for an actual revolution, and on that basis the vision of a new society, concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which BA authored. It is a fact that, nowhere else, in any actual or proposed founding or guiding document of any government, is there anything like not only the protection but the provision for dissent and intellectual and cultural ferment that is embodied in this Constitution, while this has, as its solid core, a grounding in the socialist transformation of the economy, with the goal of abolishing all exploitation, and the corresponding transformation of the social relations and political institutions, to uproot all oppression, and the promotion, through the educational system and in society as a whole, of an approach that will “enable people to pursue the truth wherever it leads, with a spirit of critical thinking and scientific curiosity, and in this way to continually learn about the world and be better able to contribute to changing it in accordance with the fundamental interests of humanity.”
At this crucial time, it will matter to read the accompanying piece, “What Gave Rise to the Fascism of Trump… And Why This Will NOT Go Away,” (below) and dig into and reflect on the work by Bob Avakian it points to. We will be saying more soon. Come to revcom.us on Monday morning.
Then, next Thursday, January 28, @ 5 PM, we will be presenting a special YouTube program on the current situation and what is to be done.
On Sunday, January 31 (note date change from January 24), tune into a special Livestream to raise funds for the Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour at 6 PM EST / 3 PM PST.
Thursday, February 4, the “Second Season” of The RNL—REVOLUTION NOTHING LESS—SHOW premieres. Catch up now on last year’s shows.
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What Gave Rise to the Fascism of Trump… and Why This Will NOT Go Away
What gave rise to the fascism that brought Trump forward? How do we understand the last election and its aftermath, which climaxed in the fascist, Trump-inspired violent storming of the Capitol and the attempted coup, which was defeated? And what will happen now?
It is imperative that everyone who has agonized over the course of these past four years, horrified at each new outrage, search out WHY these happened, and dig to the roots on the deepest possible level. As you do that, the place to begin is with the synthesized understanding brought forward by Bob Avakian (BA). He has been sounding the alarm and analyzing the underlying causes, driving forces, and key dynamics of fascism in this society and the system underlying it since at least the early 1990s. His analysis has been consistent and at the same time constantly deepened as events have unfolded—and he has led in developing different initiatives, involving a whole range of people, in waging struggle against it... even when that was unpopular, and even when that incurred risk of no small degree. (Go here for this analysis by BA.)
In brief—and in essence—one of the major parties has for decades now been moving toward a fascist resolution of the deep and intractable problems facing this country economically, socially, politically, and morally. Fascism is not a curse word, any more than a doctor is cursing when she calls the lump you are feeling a cancerous tumor. Fascism, understood scientifically, describes and analyzes one response available to capitalism-imperialism to those problems. This fascist program is rooted in open and vicious racism, misogyny, and extreme national chauvinism. It is a form of rule in which dictatorship is exercised blatantly with no regard at all for democratic rights. It is a moral and epistemological order where Christian fundamentalist ignorance and repression is exalted while the scientific search for knowledge is butchered when it is not outright suppressed.
Fascism is one form of capitalism-imperialism, one option for the rulers who in normal times exercise this rule—this dictatorship—in a more democratic way. But fascism is not same-old, same-old—it is a different form of capitalist rule. And it marks a leap with grave consequences for masses of people, here and around the world. The acutely high-stakes struggle within the ruling class of capitalist-imperialists over whether or not to make that step got concentrated in this past election.
Fascism often comes to power—and generally prefers to come to power—with the trappings of “democratic consent.” Trump and those around him saw this election as crucial to that—and fearing defeat from the beginning, he spread the lie in advance that the Democrats were somehow rigging this... by applying the actual rules of the system to enable people to vote in the midst of a pandemic! Trump said repeatedly, in advance of any votes being cast, that he was going to win and that the only way he could lose was by fraud. Yet despite the efforts to suppress the vote, despite the efforts to illegally use and control government resources to aid Trump’s re-election, Biden won—definitively and, to any person not locked in the insane fascist fever dream propagated by Trump and his allies, undeniably.
A section of the fascist party and fascist apparatus may have thought it wiser to not contest this particular election. This included McConnell and Pence, as well as others. They judged that they could better push forward this nightmare “project” in other ways—building on the control that they have seized of large sections of the courts (including the majority of the Supreme Court), the legislatures, sections of the armed forces, and various other elements of the state (the army, police, bureaucracy, etc.)—and on that basis both cripple Biden and re-seize the executive at a later date, without too greatly disrupting the legitimacy of the system in the eyes of the world and the general public within the U.S. and perhaps incurring massive resistance.
Trump violently disagreed—he insisted on putting forward as true a nonexistent world in which he won and was somehow denied by this or that outlandish imaginary scheme. He ranted that this was going to bring an end to “our country.” When he could not get his way in the courts and the legislatures for such a blatant act of thievery, he moved to marshal a mob on January 6 to do it by force.
Fortunately, he has been—for now—set back in this.
The disagreements now between Trump and other figures in the Republifascist Party are important—in the sense that it makes it more possible to administer a decisive defeat to Trump’s attempted fascist coup. But the roots of this fascism go far deeper than Trump, and those roots will continue to assert themselves whatever happens to Trump as an individual. Dreams that this will somehow, on its own, evaporate as the driving force in U.S. political life are dreams with no basis in reality.
Biden and the Democrats cannot “bring the country together,” as they falsely claim, because there can be no “reconciliation” with these fascists—whose “grievances” are based on fanatical resentment against any limitation on white supremacy, male supremacy, xenophobia (hatred of foreigners), rabid American chauvinism, and the unrestrained plundering of the environment, and are increasingly expressed in literally lunatic terms. There can be no “reconciliation” with this, other than on the terms of these fascists, with all the terrible implications and consequences of that!
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