THE political administration of the United States, the most powerful capitalist nation in the world, is publicly tearing itself apart in an open war between its president elect and a capitalist class determined to undermine him before he takes office and even remove him through a judicial coup.
The political crisis in the US administration has reached a level without any precedent, with the bourgeois press publishing completely unsubstantiated dossiers claiming Trump is being blackmailed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. This has followed a campaign by the state security forces – the CIA, FBI and NSA – to ‘prove’ that the Trump victory over Hillary Clinton was all down to a devilish plot by Putin.
All the dossiers produced by these intelligence agencies contain no actual evidence that the Russians hacked Clinton’s emails. Instead, US workers are expected to take on trust the word of the spies who invented the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The source for the blackmail story is a retired M16 agent, Christopher Steele. Steele, a private security consultant, was originally employed by Trump’s opponents to ‘dig the dirt’ on him last year. His dossier has been circulating amongst the US and British press for months but all were reluctant to publish on the well-founded grounds that it was ‘unverified and potentially unverifiable’.
This didn’t stop the internet news channel BuzzFeed from publishing it online on Tuesday, opening the door for all the press to gleefully repeat it. His cover blown, Steele has now gone into hiding.
Behind this massive political crisis in the US political system is the historic crisis of US capitalism which is driving the complete breakdown of a ‘normal relationship’ between the two bourgeois parties and the capitalist state.
At its heart is the split between sections of the US capitalist class over whether to tackle Russia or China first in the drive to restore US capitalist supremacy over the world. Trump, after the Democrats dumped Bernie Sanders and ensured Clinton’s nomination, was able to harness the huge anger of the US working class against the Obama administration.
Under Obama, millions of well-paid US jobs had been lost with workers in the traditional ‘rust belt’ of the country driven into the gutter. At the same time, the bankers and bosses wallowed in huge wealth, courtesy of massive trillion dollar hand-outs through quantitative easing and low interest rates.
Trump, with his populist condemnation of the ‘export’ of US jobs to other countries, particularly China, was able to tap into this tide of anger and offer the appearance of a solution. He pledged to levy a 45% tariff on Chinese goods and impose a 35% penalty tax on any company moving production and jobs abroad.
In pursuit of his trade war with China, Trump is content to seek friendlier relations with the Russian Stalinist Putin-led bureaucracy rather than fight on two fronts at the same time. This position is horrifying the US capitalist class who see China and its Stalinist leadership as the only hope for keeping bankrupt American capitalism going.
China represents a huge resource in terms of cheap labour which it has been able to exploit mercilessly with the willing aid of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Also, China is America’s biggest banker, owning a third of all US government debt, equal to $1.115 trillion.
If China decided to sell its dollars or call in this debt it would collapse the dollar and with it, the entire US and world capitalist economy. A trade war with China would spell catastrophe for US capitalism while Russia has virtually no trade with the US.
What Russia has is enormous natural resources which the American ruling class is desperate to own and control. Hence the growing hysterical attacks on Russia. Keeping China sweet while preparing to attempt to overthrow the workers’ state established by the Russian Revolution is the Wall Street tactic. Meanwhile, the world economic crisis tears the US apart pitting the populist Trump against the Clinton Wall Street puppets.
This acute political crisis that has exploded US politics is proof that worldwide capitalism is in its death agony, and that the only way forward is to put it out of its misery through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
