My thoughts on the “coup” attempt on the Capitol building — and where to go from here
I am giving my thoughts on the failed “coup” attempt that occurred yesterday. Firstly, the Trump rally was not a coup whatsoever, as there were no coordinated efforts of attack that concomitantly occurred at precise political centers of power — those terrorists should have read Trotsky or learned about Pinochet's and Kissinger's military dictatorship if they wanted to actually succeed. Additionally, this reactionary violence towards the election results and protesting Biden’s victory clearly indicates 2 vital political occurrences. Firstly, the parliamentary form of democracy that we currently have in the west is impotent and no longer as effective as it once was during the 20th century, which Noam Chomsky and Alain Badiou have pointed out in the past. Let’s first look at what Badiou had to say.
Badiou: (paraphrased)
Parliamentary democracy is inherently corrupt since it reduces politics to the arrangements/transactions/negotiations of private interests. Moreover, electoral democracy is only representative to the degree that it is the mutually consented representation of capitalism- and this is the fundamental corruption of electoral democracy.
Noam Chomsky:
“it is only when the threat/fear of popular participation is defeated or overcome (what the electoral college is to the popular vote in the US), that democratic versions can be safely considered”.
- What this means is at the heart of parliamentary democracy is a passivity which renders it unsuitable with the direct political self-organization of the population.
Moving on, The 2nd political occurrence the reactionary violence indicates is the complete destruction of working class solidarity. How so you may ask? Well given Trump runs on fake right-wing populism, we see where his supporters’ dissatisfactions and plights ultimately stem from, which manifested in yesterday’s breach of the Capitol. They represent blue-collar workers, farmers and so on vs what Biden represents at the center of the establishment left: corporate managers, lawyers, technocrats and so on. These class antagonisms are relocated unto the opposition of working class Christians against the immoral liberal elite, who want to undermine “genuine” American ideals via public policy. The devastating consequence of this is that there is no longer the classic class antagonisms between the capitalists and workers, since class struggle between exploiters and the exploited is transposed between those who are just exploited themselves. Correlatively, The immensely strong working class power of all those proletarians in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s marked the greatest anti-capital moments in our modern history, especially the year of 1968 wherein these labor uprisings sparked global worker disturbances, embodying Kant’s conception of shared Enthusiasm. This is akin to the French revolution inspiring the Haitian revolution. Unfortunately though, this class unity and power is completely gone, with one of the outcomes being the intense political polarization we currently have in the US where one supporter blindly condemns those who belong to the other side of the political spectrum.
Given all this, how should one proceed?
We must turn to my country of Chile as our new Master-Signifier — indicated by its recent APRUEBO constitutional referendum in late October. It exemplifies a tendency towards a new form of communism that has been occurring in recent years. One should interpret this idea by referring to the actual series of social antagonisms under capitalism which necessitated the need for communism. By looking at Marx’s belief of communism, we see that his conception was not an ideal utopian one, but rather a reactionary movement against those social antagonisms. It is important to note that communism should not be viewed as an eternal ideal/conception, because it implies that the social antagonisms which create the need and resistance of communism are themselves eternal, hence will always continue to exist. This ideological trap will preclude the necessary change needed for the new form of communism, one that can also be correctly labeled as a disaster form of communism as Zizek terms it.
