On February 5, after three years of breathless anticipation from the Democrats, President Donald Trump was acquitted by the U.S. Senate in his impeachment trial. The acquittal on the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress allows him to remain in office until at least the end of his current term. The Republicans could hardly contain their excitement. At the same time the Democratic Party primary election process began with the catastrophic failure of the election system in Iowa. Senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, has emerged as the leader in the Democratic field, having come in second in Iowa and South Carolina, and first in New Hampshire and Nevada. For his followers, Sanders is the face of “resistance” to the Trump presidency, the savior of democracy in the United States. In truth, the democratic system can only reinforce the rule of the bourgeoisie, whether a  false reformist or a open reactionary holds office.

Impeachment: Democracy is Not Justice

The impeachment of Donald Trump was a show trial in reverse. The defendant’s acquittal was certain from the beginning, and the rest only existed to keep up the act. The Republicans pretended to stand for due process; the Democrats pretended to prosecute. In their own ways, both parties acted as propagandists for the bourgeois State and its system of justice. For the Democrats, impeachment would be the triumph of the separation of powers, of civic duty separated from personal interest, of the sovereignty of the people in the abstract. The Republicans, for their part, would show their dedication to a patronizing form of order, one predicated on a single untouchable personality. Trump’s sovereignty depends on him being untouchable (this is the man who declared in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”). The defenders of the bourgeois State are always innocent, while workers who defend themselves are always guilty. The financial burden of going to trial causes most criminal defendants to plead guilty, while the billionaire head of State does not even have to argue his innocence. Such is bourgeois justice!

The charges against the president provide further evidence of the reactionary nature of the whole impeachment act. Trump’s crime was to modify the United States’ existing imperialist strategy in Ukraine. The “abuse of power” that offended the Democrats was to put military aid to the Ukrainian government on hold until the country would announce a criminal investigation into business dealings by Joe Biden’s son, which Trump presumably hoped would hurt Biden in the 2020 election. The crime was not aiding the rightist government of Ukraine, which the Democrats fully and enthusiastically support, but using that aid for personal ends.

The Sanders Movement Offers No Alternative

Bernie Sanders and his supporters believe that they are bringing about a “political revolution” in the United States. Very well. When will this revolution occur, and what will change? What will they due to ensure that it happens in the face of massive opposition?

Every revolution has faced questions like these. The uprising in Russia succeeded in 1917 because the Communist Party had the right answers, a party prepared and hardened for many years, on the basis of the intransigent program of revolutionary Marxism. The insurrection would occur around the Second All‑Russian Congress of Soviets, when the political base of support for the party would be gathered together. It would establish a dictatorship of the proletariat based on the soviet system of representation. The Military-Revolutionary Committees and the Red Guards would support the revolution by force of arms.

So what of Sanders and the democratic socialists in the United States? Their supposed revolution is either coming soon or already occurring, depending on the campaign speech one listens to. First and foremost it will make Bernie president, and then perhaps install the kind of welfare State that is disintegrating before our eyes in other countries. And what will support these very moderate demands? The military and the police hate them bitterly, and will not hesitate to do the bidding of the bourgeoisie. Civilian reactionaries despise them and are heavily armed. So do they form militias of their own? Quite the opposite, they demand that all arms should be in the hands of the bourgeois State!

There are only two options for this political revolution. It will fail completely against opposition that its own forces cannot match, or it will restrict itself so severely that it will become a liberal civic movement, no different from the Democratic Party we have long been familiar with. In either case, its petty-bourgeois idealist character will be readily apparent.

A revolution is a fight for the real liberation of an oppressed class, the proletariat these days. When capitalism is becoming economically impossible, than the proletariat can free itself. This is what Marx and Engels meant when they called communism “the real movement which abolishes the present State of things”, that is, which completely uproots capitalism and free the society which is ripe inside it.

Political Revolutions are not made through the will of politicians and activists. Only classes, directed by a revolutionary class party, make revolutions. Marx and Engels wrote that “every class struggle is a political struggle”.

Sanders, the Democrats, and U.S. brand of democratic socialism cannot abolish the present society, and so they will never open the way to the next one, even if they wished to. Only the communist party, as the most aware and militant representative of the international proletariat, can accomplish those tasks.

 
 
 

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