JANUARY 7 – Yesterday’s mob rampage at the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of Donald Trump’s campaign of frenzied claims that the November 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” The assault on Congress was instigated by Trump and his top lieutenants, led by outright fascists, spearheaded by white supremacists brandishing the Confederate battle flag of the slavocracy, and it was facilitated by the police. Similar riots targeting government centers are nothing new in East Europe, where they have typically been organized by the U.S. (Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2014), and Yankee imperialism has unleashed them innumerable times in Latin America. But they are seen as novel in the United States since the post-Civil War period’s racist rampages against Reconstruction. After all, Republicans and Democrats alike claim this is “the world’s greatest democracy,” a “shining city on a hill” as union-busting racist and warmonger Ronald Reagan called the U.S. That was hardly the scene on Capitol Hill on January 6. What the world witnessed was a chilling acceleration, the latest bizarre and dangerous episode, in the spectacular unravelling of “democratic” bourgeois rule in the strongest imperialist power. What it dramatically underscores is that this capitalist society is falling apart. The bankruptcy of this decaying system of exploitation, imperialism and racist oppression highlights the urgent need to fight for socialist revolution.
In the media and by numerous politicians the Capitol attack is described as an “insurrection,” “coup d’état” or failed “coup attempt.” Yet this grotesque rampage by a would-be lynch mob was not an actual attempt to seize power (for which they obviously didn’t have the forces), nor was it the military trying to disperse and shut down the U.S.’ highest legislative body. English doesn’t have very descriptive terms for such actions. In Spanish it would be an amotinamiento, in French a coup de main. It was a mob assault aimed at intimidating Congress into not confirming Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, and failing that, to galvanize hard-core Trumpers into an authoritarian movement for future action. It was not a last paroxysm of Trumpism, but a harbinger of dangerous times to come. The several hundred fascists who turned out, together with tens of thousands of enraged racists and reactionaries, are plenty dangerous, but the most powerful and central dangers come from the organs of state power of the capitalist ruling class – police, military, National Guard – which brutally repress protests for black rights and protect the fascist terrorists. Democrat Joe Biden is their new boss, and he backs them to the hilt.
That the assault was directly instigated by Trump is obvious. It’s also recognized by key sectors of the bourgeois establishment in the U.S., which is genuinely shaken up by yesterday’s events. The white supremacist in the White House, defeated in the November elections, set the date for the riot, calling on his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” time. Some 30,000 did. At a morning rally Trump whipped them up, railing against “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and urging the crowd to “walk down to Congress” in order to “fight.” His lawyer, the ubergrifter Rudy Giuliani who instigated the 1992 police riot against New York City’s black Democratic mayor David Dinkins, called for “trial by combat.” Donald Jr. warned Democrats and Republicans who didn’t support the plot to annul the votes of tens of millions of voters, “We’re coming for you.” This led even right-wing Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to declare: “The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”
Scripted Mayhem, Police Connivance
The mayhem was scripted by the president himself, though of course the cowardly macho-man reneged on his vow to march with his followers to the capitol. “A senior White House aide said Trump wanted his supporters to swarm the Capitol and protest loudly all day,” the Washington Post (7 January) reported. But, the aide was quoted as claiming, “There was no plan for them to go inside.” In fact, the mob was milling around outside on the balcony and steps for an hour before managing to get in the building. Once they were inside, Trump watched on television for over two hours until people were starting to leave, when he posted a (pre-recorded) video saying it was time to go home. In that video he proclaimed his “love” for the “very special” rioters, insisted that the election was stolen and told them to “Remember this day forever!” Which they will, of course. The fact that they stormed the U.S. Capitol and got away with it will embolden racists and fascists for years – and not just to vote for Trump or his surrogates, but also to attack black people, immigrants and all who would block their drive to “take back” what they proclaim is their country.
That the assault was facilitated by the police is also beyond doubt. The cops and military were obviously monitoring the social media where the fascists were openly talking of plans for the armed assault. Moreover, ultra-rightists’ armed takeover of the Michigan legislature last May had already set the pattern. From the outset in Washington, rioters surged past barriers and up the steps with scarcely any serious opposition from the Capitol Police. Subsequently videos have surfaced showing police opening barriers and standing back to let the mob in. A livestream video by the fascists shows an invader taking a selfie with a police officer. There are a few photos of scuffles over barriers and a brief standoff in the basement, but once the crowd was in, the very few police outside disappeared. Inside, the cops let the rioters have the run of building, invading and rifling offices, taking over the Senate, and then let them leave unhindered.1 “Law enforcement experts said they were mystified by the tactics that police used once the mob was already inside the Capitol,” the Washington Post reported. That the police weren’t just “overwhelmed,” that police collaborated with the mob, that this was policy, is clear. The only “mystery” – so far – is who decided it.
You couldn’t miss the stunning contrast between this “kid glove” treatment on January 6 of the white supremacist mob and the wanton brutality unleashed against Black Lives Matter demonstrators peacefully protesting on June 3 in Lafayette Park, a public space, against racist police murder. It immediately struck us, along with countless other activists (and even the bourgeois media and politicians) – if black and other anti-racist demonstrators had sought to redress their grievances by converging on Congress, much less storming the building, they would have been shot down. It’s all one more confirmation that the police at every level are a white supremacist institution, and have been since their inception as slave patrols in the early 19th century. Nor was this equivalent to the workers’ occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 (which we enthusiastically participated in) to protest a vicious anti-labor bill. This was a racist mob bent on destruction and seeking to halt one of the functions of Congress with the most far-reaching consequences, which the mob did with impunity.
When the New York Times (7 January) writes of “violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement,” those few incidents cannot obscure police connivance with the rioters. When the D.C. National Guard arrived at the end – after Trump and his Army and Defense secretaries had earlier blocked a request by the city to mobilize it – there were very few arrests, mostly for curfew violation. But now that Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has issued a public emergency order until after Inauguration Day (January 20), it will surely be used against any anti-fascist protesters. Meanwhile, as Twitter and Facebook temporarily blocked Trump’s accounts, various pundits and legal beagles are flirting with curtailing First Amendment rights (“Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” New York Times, 6 January). Again, you can bet that any bans on “extremists” will be used against leftists and anti-racists far more than against the fascists who openly organized their Capitol bash on Parler and other right-wing social media.
That the attack on the U.S. Capitol was led by fascists is also undeniable, although barely mentioned in the bourgeois media. They had to notice that the first rioters who stormed into the Capitol were brandishing the Confederate battle flag, though they left unsaid that this banner of slavery is also that of the racist terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan. There were also numerous QAnon flags, and the green “Kekistan” flag (based on the WWII German battle flag) used by fascists. There were gallows with a hangman’s noose – a threat of lynching – set up outside. Nazi provocateur Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) was livestreaming from inside the building. Inside the Capitol, one of the fascists wore a sweatshirt hailing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. And prominent among those at the front of the rioters were III Percenters (who brag about their connections to police and military), Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, wearing a different uniform than usual, with orange caps. Orange armbands and tags were also noted in similar pro-Trump mobs in state capitals in Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Oregon and elsewhere.
There was a surreal quality to aspects of the fascist-led assault, including a QAnon “shaman” with a horned helmet made of fur pelts, stars-and-stripes face paint and Norse tattoos. Another rioter with a fur pelt and a fox skin on his head stood out among the camouflage jackets and MAGA caps. But it was no joke: the invaders were armed and dangerous. During the storming, two pipe bombs and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) were found on Capitol grounds. One of the camo-clad rioters had a handful of zip ties, indicating intentions of taking hostages, again echoing the events in Michigan last May. Had they gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or one of the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib) vilified by Trump, or others, these fascist and racist terrorists could well have carried out their murderous fantasies to “hang traitors.”
After the rioters left, the assembled senators and representatives resumed “debate” on certifying the electors’ votes for president state by state. While a few dropped their plans to challenge electors reflecting the popular vote (like Georgia, where the Democrats just won a by-election, replacing two Republican senators with two Democrats, giving the incoming Biden administration control of the Senate as well as the House), most did not. As the night wore on, there was one pious, nauseating speech after another praising the “bipartisan” rejection of “violence,” “insurrection” and “sedition,” instead endorsing “civility,” “decency” and, of course, “our democracy.” Of course, the rioters were foot soldiers for the blatantly anti-democratic ploy by the Republican defeat deniers to throw out tens of millions of votes – disenfranchising the voters of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the end, Biden’s victory was confirmed, but more than half of House Republicans voted not to recognize its legitimacy.
Repeatedly over the past weeks, media pundits have waxed lyrical about how the only thing holding the line for democracy has been the “good will” of a handful of officials, both Democratic and Republican. This despite all the civics lessons about checks and balances, the power and majesty of the Constitution, and the rest. What this underscores in reality is the crucial Marxist point that the state is fundamentally armed force in the service of the socially dominant (ruling) class. In capitalist society, that is the class of owners of the wealth and means of production. It is their (bourgeois) “democracy,” and when their interests demand it, they can dispense with these forms and resort to untrammeled naked force. Counteracting the patriotic fairy tales of bourgeois ideology is an important part of unshackling the working-class power so urgently needed in defense of the rights of all.
As for bourgeois politicians’ cloying appeals for bipartisan harmony and the rest of it as the pro-police duo of Biden and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, prepares to take charge of administering U.S. imperialism – the biggest and most dangerous enemy of the oppressed worldwide – Marxists stand in irreconcilable opposition to this and all administrations of the capitalist state. To unchain the power of the working class from capitalism’s parties, politicians and institutions is the urgent task in order to defend the rights and interests of all the exploited and downtrodden, and to put an end to the depredations of U.S. imperialism once and for all.
What Next for U.S. Capitalism?
In the aftermath of the January 6 riot in the Capitol, key sectors of the U.S. ruling class are worried about Donald Trump remaining in office, even for the 13 days left of his term. An alarmed National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the U.S.’ premier business lobby and longtime Trump ally, denounced “mob rule,” declaring that “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” The NAM called on Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment, which would allow removal of Trump as president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unsurprisingly, Pence refused. Today the two top Congressional Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called for the impeachment of Trump for inciting armed insurrection. MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough called for Trump, Giuliani and Donald Jr. to be arrested on the same charges. Several Trump administration officials have resigned, rats leaving a sinking ship.
Yet Trump is not the only one responsible for inciting the mob. There are quite a few Trump sycophants and enablers in Congress, some of whom have now opportunistically turned on him (like the execrable neo-Confederate senator Lindsay Graham), but who are all accomplices and co-conspirators. Ultimately, they – together with their Democratic rivals and colleagues – are all bourgeois politicians, representing the same class interests. Recall Barack Obama’s words following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election: “We have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage.” Obama said then that what he heard from Trump was “Respect for our institutions. Our way of life. Rule of law.” Really? So was January 6, an “intramural scrimmage,” marked by respect for the “rule of law”? Leading spokesmen for capital have concluded that Trump is an unhinged adventurer, prepared to sacrifice the interests of their “team” for his own, and that he must be stopped before he does more damage to “our institutions.” At this point, they’re just not sure how to do it.
The capitalist establishment has some problems in that respect: 74 million people voted for Trump, three-quarters of all Republicans say he was robbed of victory by (non-existent) massive voter fraud, and he now has a potential party fighting force of some tens of thousands, many of them heavily armed, fanatically devoted to him. While bourgeois detractors often portray him as just a crazy person, in denial about the election, he has created an organizing myth, the “stolen election,” akin to Hitler’s use of the myth of the “Dolchstoss,” the supposed stab in the back by Jews and communists, to explain Germany’s loss in World War I. Trump does not head up a mass fascist movement such as arose in Italy and Germany after WWI, and the motley crew that stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t disciplined shock troops like Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. They more closely resemble the rabble that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then president of the French Second Republic, gathered around him as he sought to become emperor in 1851.2 Like the little Napoléon, Trump would like to use the January 6 mob as his private army for his next adventure.
Many liberals think Trump wants to be like Putin in Russia or Erdoğan in Turkey, an authoritarian elected president. But being an emperor would be more fitting for his grandiose self-image. As if. Over the weekend, Trump begged Republican officials in Georgia to fix the votes for him so he could steal the election (while accusing the Democrats of doing so). But he had no quid for the quo, and was publicly humiliated as the tape of his wheedling, threatening call was released. So Trump turned to his last-ditch ploy, whipping up a mob, but he failed once again. That the powers that be knew it was coming was shown by the extraordinary January 4 letter by ten former secretaries of defense reminding the military that any effort to “involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes” would be “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional” and any officials involved would face “criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The Pentagon snapped to attention.
When Louis-Napoléon staged his December 1851 self-coup proclaiming himself French emperor, he had the backing of top generals. In the U.S. today, Trump only had the convicted ex-general Michael Flynn to conspire with about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to impose martial law. The Pentagon generals fight for Wall Street. They got their tax cuts and are done with Trump. They have no appetite to stick their necks out for President Bonespurs (Trump got a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft by claiming bone spurs on his feet).
Biden wants to form a bipartisan Party of Order. But his lame calls for “decency” and unity, for “reaching across the aisle,” fly in the face of the everyone-for-himself, “sauve-qui-peut” (save yourself if you can) mentality of today’s bourgeois rulers. Capitalists flip from one bubble to the next, looking for speculative profits before they burst, as the capitalist system is putrefying before our eyes. They are cashing out of many companies and with their “golden parachutes” buying retreats in New Zealand and Patagonia, as far from Wall Street as they can get. Likewise, the “take no prisoners” style of Republican politics goes hand in hand with the outlook of many lawyers, epitomized by Giuliani but far more widespread, whose attitude toward the “rule of law” is to grab anything they can get away with, and the stability of the system be damned. They all fit well with a would-be authoritarian megalomaniac who holds that the truth is whatever he says it is, and that as president he could do anything he wants. But if he no longer can, many jump ship.
U.S. rulers are deeply split, reflecting the declining fortunes of American capitalism. The “American century” that began when the U.S. walked away with the victor’s spoils in World War II was to be followed by a “New World Order” of unchallenged U.S. imperialist hegemony after the counterrevolution that swept the Soviet bloc in 1989-92. Instead, there was world disorder, of “wars without end,” and the devastating consequences of the 2007-08 financial crash that unleashed a decade-long worldwide capitalist depression. That led to deepening social decay, reflected politically in the Tea Party movement and socially by the ravages of the opioid crisis, both fed by despair of ruined petty bourgeois and permanently unemployed workers. That is also a major factor in lower-middle-class and working-class votes for Trump. And now the coronavirus pandemic, the worst plague in a century that has killed 363,000 in the U.S. and 1.8 million+ worldwide, has set off an even deeper economic crisis, whose effects are only beginning to be felt.
While denouncing Trump, the Democrats avidly uphold the extraordinary, and deeply anti-democratic, powers of the presidency, built up even further during the Obama years. So how can Biden “unite the nation”? We have warned that war with China is a prime option: trade war, economic war against Chinese companies, and possibly provoking some military skirmishes in the South China Sea. It would cement ties with the Pentagon, which has been planning for this since Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” which never got off the ground because the U.S. was bogged down in the Middle East. Senate Republicans, who have promised to grill Biden cabinet choices on their position on China, would quickly jump on board. So would the misleaders of labor, who have long pushed poisonous anti-China protectionism. The opportunist left, which falsely calls China capitalist and even imperialist (and hailed the U.S.-backed “democracy” riots in Hong Kong), would barely object. Public opinion is primed with war propaganda blaming China for COVID-19, although it contained the plague while the response of the capitalist West has been a deadly disaster. But Biden would be playing with fire.
In the face of this wall-to-wall anti-China front, the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International call to defend China – a bureaucratically deformed workers state – against imperialist attacks and threats, and against the danger of internal counterrevolution.
Capitalist “Democracy” Is Bankrupt – For a Workers Government!
Marxists could clearly see yesterday’s fascist/racist mob attack coming. A year and a half ago, as campaigning for the 2020 election got underway, we warned, “The intensity of political clashes in the ruling class recalls the period leading up to the U.S. Civil War…. Today, the intensity of the political clashes in Washington and the provocations of violent racist and outright fascist groups raise the spectre of civil war. Certainly, sectors of Trump’s most rabid base yearn to avenge the defeat of the vile Confederacy. Yet there are fundamental differences from the U.S. of a century and a half ago” (“Dangerous Racist Provocations in Pre-Election Maneuvering,” The Internationalist No. 57, September-October 2019). “The frenzy of bigotry from the highest levels of government underlines again the connection between anti-black racism and anti-immigrant racism,” we wrote, underscoring that “Would-be leftists who sow illusions in Democratic ‘resistance’ can only help disarm real struggle against racist reaction.”
There have been a lot of comparisons between the present crisis and what followed the presidential elections of 1876. Yesterday, the New York Times (6 January) ran an article with the headline, “You Think This Is Chaos? The Election of 1876 Was Worse.” That contested election led to the rotten “Compromise of 1877” which gave the presidency to the Republican in exchange for abandoning Reconstruction and pulling U.S. troops out of the occupied former Confederacy. That signal betrayal of the former slaves, on top of the failure to expropriate the slaveowners’ lands after the abolition of slavery, led to the rise of the KKK terrorists and then the Jim Crow segregation that institutionalized white supremacy and black subjugation in the South for another 90 years. Those are the “good old days” that the mob of fascist-led racists who stormed the U.S. Capitol yearn for. African Americans and all working people are still paying the price for the failure to rip out the slave system by the roots following the Civil War.
Today the legacy of slavery is still with us, particularly in the racist death penalty, mass incarceration and wanton police murder of black people. It is also enshrined in the institutions of what pious liberals and labor officials praise as “our democracy.” Among the most flagrant examples are the Electoral College and the Senate, along with the Supreme Court. (See “Slavery and the Constitution,” Revolution No. 17, August 2020.) Even consistent bourgeois democracy (“one person, one vote”) would demand the abolition of these reactionary bodies. Yet capitalist “democracy” is so corroded and hollowed-out by the gangrenous rot of capitalist society that the only real defense of democratic rights for the masses lies in the fight for the proletarian democracy of a workers government. This would not be based on the cynical charades of the puppets of capital – whose campaigns depend on billions from Wall Street (over $500 million in the Georgia runoffs) – but on workers councils chosen directly by the working people.
Labor bureaucrats or reformist leftists may call to “fight the far right” in the name of “defense of democracy.” Against fascist and racist marauders, and against the constant murderous violence of the bourgeois state, Marxists are the most intransigent defenders of democratic rights. In fact, all the democratic liberties of the mass of the population were won by bitter struggle against the ruling class. But to defend those rights, it is crucial to state clearly that this is not “our democracy.” The owners of wealth, of land, of the means of production, transport and communications can sweep away all constitutions and legal guarantees if they decide their interests demand it – as has happened so many times in history, from Italy (Mussolini’s fascists) and Germany (Hitler’s Nazis) to Chile (Pinochet’s military junta) and elsewhere. In fact, bourgeois democracy is a cloak for the dictatorship of the exploiting class against all the workers and oppressed.
In the lead-up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Lenin stressed, citing Friedrich Engels, that the core of the capitalist state consists of “special bodies of armed men” protecting the power and property of the ruling class. It cannot be reformed away or pressured into becoming an instrument of “the people” – mass struggle by the workers and oppressed, culminating in socialist revolution, must sweep it away to make way for a workers government, the proletarian democracy of workers councils (soviets). Right-wingers ludicrously condemn the Democrats – the oldest capitalist party in the world – as “socialists” and even “communists.” To defend the lives, most basic interests and hard-won rights of the workers and oppressed requires above all a struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party based on the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the program of international socialist revolution. In these times of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, racist attacks by the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and its fascist auxiliaries, and another capitalist depression, forging that party is key to winning a real future for workers and youth, here and around the world. ■

1. One of the rioters was shot and killed as they sought to break into the House chambers. A Capitol police officer has reportedly died of injuries.
   
2. Louis Napoléon was the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself emperor in 1804 after putting an end to the ten years of turmoil following the French Revolution of 1789 with his Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799, according to the French revolutionary calendar). Karl Marx, in his famous pamphlet, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), described the lesser Napoléon’s ragtag crew (the Society of December 10) as made up of “vagabonds, cashiered soldiers, ex-convicts, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, idle riffraff, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.” This lumpenproletariat, or proletariat in rags, Marx wrote, was called upon “to play the part of the people” in Louis Napoléon’s various schemes.
   

http://www.internationalist.org/capitalist-democracy-falling-apart-2101.html

JANUARY 7 – Yesterday’s mob rampage at the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of Donald Trump’s campaign of frenzied claims that the November 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” The assault on Congress was instigated by Trump and his top lieutenants, led by outright fascists, spearheaded by white supremacists brandishing the Confederate battle flag of the slavocracy, and it was facilitated by the police. Similar riots targeting government centers are nothing new in East Europe, where they have typically been organized by the U.S. (Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2014), and Yankee imperialism has unleashed them innumerable times in Latin America. But they are seen as novel in the United States since the post-Civil War period’s racist rampages against Reconstruction. After all, Republicans and Democrats alike claim this is “the world’s greatest democracy,” a “shining city on a hill” as union-busting racist and warmonger Ronald Reagan called the U.S. That was hardly the scene on Capitol Hill on January 6. What the world witnessed was a chilling acceleration, the latest bizarre and dangerous episode, in the spectacular unravelling of “democratic” bourgeois rule in the strongest imperialist power. What it dramatically underscores is that this capitalist society is falling apart. The bankruptcy of this decaying system of exploitation, imperialism and racist oppression highlights the urgent need to fight for socialist revolution.
In the media and by numerous politicians the Capitol attack is described as an “insurrection,” “coup d’état” or failed “coup attempt.” Yet this grotesque rampage by a would-be lynch mob was not an actual attempt to seize power (for which they obviously didn’t have the forces), nor was it the military trying to disperse and shut down the U.S.’ highest legislative body. English doesn’t have very descriptive terms for such actions. In Spanish it would be an amotinamiento, in French a coup de main. It was a mob assault aimed at intimidating Congress into not confirming Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, and failing that, to galvanize hard-core Trumpers into an authoritarian movement for future action. It was not a last paroxysm of Trumpism, but a harbinger of dangerous times to come. The several hundred fascists who turned out, together with tens of thousands of enraged racists and reactionaries, are plenty dangerous, but the most powerful and central dangers come from the organs of state power of the capitalist ruling class – police, military, National Guard – which brutally repress protests for black rights and protect the fascist terrorists. Democrat Joe Biden is their new boss, and he backs them to the hilt.
That the assault was directly instigated by Trump is obvious. It’s also recognized by key sectors of the bourgeois establishment in the U.S., which is genuinely shaken up by yesterday’s events. The white supremacist in the White House, defeated in the November elections, set the date for the riot, calling on his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” time. Some 30,000 did. At a morning rally Trump whipped them up, railing against “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and urging the crowd to “walk down to Congress” in order to “fight.” His lawyer, the ubergrifter Rudy Giuliani who instigated the 1992 police riot against New York City’s black Democratic mayor David Dinkins, called for “trial by combat.” Donald Jr. warned Democrats and Republicans who didn’t support the plot to annul the votes of tens of millions of voters, “We’re coming for you.” This led even right-wing Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to declare: “The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”
Scripted Mayhem, Police Connivance
The mayhem was scripted by the president himself, though of course the cowardly macho-man reneged on his vow to march with his followers to the capitol. “A senior White House aide said Trump wanted his supporters to swarm the Capitol and protest loudly all day,” the Washington Post (7 January) reported. But, the aide was quoted as claiming, “There was no plan for them to go inside.” In fact, the mob was milling around outside on the balcony and steps for an hour before managing to get in the building. Once they were inside, Trump watched on television for over two hours until people were starting to leave, when he posted a (pre-recorded) video saying it was time to go home. In that video he proclaimed his “love” for the “very special” rioters, insisted that the election was stolen and told them to “Remember this day forever!” Which they will, of course. The fact that they stormed the U.S. Capitol and got away with it will embolden racists and fascists for years – and not just to vote for Trump or his surrogates, but also to attack black people, immigrants and all who would block their drive to “take back” what they proclaim is their country.
That the assault was facilitated by the police is also beyond doubt. The cops and military were obviously monitoring the social media where the fascists were openly talking of plans for the armed assault. Moreover, ultra-rightists’ armed takeover of the Michigan legislature last May had already set the pattern. From the outset in Washington, rioters surged past barriers and up the steps with scarcely any serious opposition from the Capitol Police. Subsequently videos have surfaced showing police opening barriers and standing back to let the mob in. A livestream video by the fascists shows an invader taking a selfie with a police officer. There are a few photos of scuffles over barriers and a brief standoff in the basement, but once the crowd was in, the very few police outside disappeared. Inside, the cops let the rioters have the run of building, invading and rifling offices, taking over the Senate, and then let them leave unhindered.1 “Law enforcement experts said they were mystified by the tactics that police used once the mob was already inside the Capitol,” the Washington Post reported. That the police weren’t just “overwhelmed,” that police collaborated with the mob, that this was policy, is clear. The only “mystery” – so far – is who decided it.
You couldn’t miss the stunning contrast between this “kid glove” treatment on January 6 of the white supremacist mob and the wanton brutality unleashed against Black Lives Matter demonstrators peacefully protesting on June 3 in Lafayette Park, a public space, against racist police murder. It immediately struck us, along with countless other activists (and even the bourgeois media and politicians) – if black and other anti-racist demonstrators had sought to redress their grievances by converging on Congress, much less storming the building, they would have been shot down. It’s all one more confirmation that the police at every level are a white supremacist institution, and have been since their inception as slave patrols in the early 19th century. Nor was this equivalent to the workers’ occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 (which we enthusiastically participated in) to protest a vicious anti-labor bill. This was a racist mob bent on destruction and seeking to halt one of the functions of Congress with the most far-reaching consequences, which the mob did with impunity.
When the New York Times (7 January) writes of “violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement,” those few incidents cannot obscure police connivance with the rioters. When the D.C. National Guard arrived at the end – after Trump and his Army and Defense secretaries had earlier blocked a request by the city to mobilize it – there were very few arrests, mostly for curfew violation. But now that Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has issued a public emergency order until after Inauguration Day (January 20), it will surely be used against any anti-fascist protesters. Meanwhile, as Twitter and Facebook temporarily blocked Trump’s accounts, various pundits and legal beagles are flirting with curtailing First Amendment rights (“Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” New York Times, 6 January). Again, you can bet that any bans on “extremists” will be used against leftists and anti-racists far more than against the fascists who openly organized their Capitol bash on Parler and other right-wing social media.
That the attack on the U.S. Capitol was led by fascists is also undeniable, although barely mentioned in the bourgeois media. They had to notice that the first rioters who stormed into the Capitol were brandishing the Confederate battle flag, though they left unsaid that this banner of slavery is also that of the racist terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan. There were also numerous QAnon flags, and the green “Kekistan” flag (based on the WWII German battle flag) used by fascists. There were gallows with a hangman’s noose – a threat of lynching – set up outside. Nazi provocateur Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) was livestreaming from inside the building. Inside the Capitol, one of the fascists wore a sweatshirt hailing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. And prominent among those at the front of the rioters were III Percenters (who brag about their connections to police and military), Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, wearing a different uniform than usual, with orange caps. Orange armbands and tags were also noted in similar pro-Trump mobs in state capitals in Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Oregon and elsewhere.
There was a surreal quality to aspects of the fascist-led assault, including a QAnon “shaman” with a horned helmet made of fur pelts, stars-and-stripes face paint and Norse tattoos. Another rioter with a fur pelt and a fox skin on his head stood out among the camouflage jackets and MAGA caps. But it was no joke: the invaders were armed and dangerous. During the storming, two pipe bombs and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) were found on Capitol grounds. One of the camo-clad rioters had a handful of zip ties, indicating intentions of taking hostages, again echoing the events in Michigan last May. Had they gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or one of the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib) vilified by Trump, or others, these fascist and racist terrorists could well have carried out their murderous fantasies to “hang traitors.”
After the rioters left, the assembled senators and representatives resumed “debate” on certifying the electors’ votes for president state by state. While a few dropped their plans to challenge electors reflecting the popular vote (like Georgia, where the Democrats just won a by-election, replacing two Republican senators with two Democrats, giving the incoming Biden administration control of the Senate as well as the House), most did not. As the night wore on, there was one pious, nauseating speech after another praising the “bipartisan” rejection of “violence,” “insurrection” and “sedition,” instead endorsing “civility,” “decency” and, of course, “our democracy.” Of course, the rioters were foot soldiers for the blatantly anti-democratic ploy by the Republican defeat deniers to throw out tens of millions of votes – disenfranchising the voters of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the end, Biden’s victory was confirmed, but more than half of House Republicans voted not to recognize its legitimacy.
Repeatedly over the past weeks, media pundits have waxed lyrical about how the only thing holding the line for democracy has been the “good will” of a handful of officials, both Democratic and Republican. This despite all the civics lessons about checks and balances, the power and majesty of the Constitution, and the rest. What this underscores in reality is the crucial Marxist point that the state is fundamentally armed force in the service of the socially dominant (ruling) class. In capitalist society, that is the class of owners of the wealth and means of production. It is their (bourgeois) “democracy,” and when their interests demand it, they can dispense with these forms and resort to untrammeled naked force. Counteracting the patriotic fairy tales of bourgeois ideology is an important part of unshackling the working-class power so urgently needed in defense of the rights of all.
As for bourgeois politicians’ cloying appeals for bipartisan harmony and the rest of it as the pro-police duo of Biden and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, prepares to take charge of administering U.S. imperialism – the biggest and most dangerous enemy of the oppressed worldwide – Marxists stand in irreconcilable opposition to this and all administrations of the capitalist state. To unchain the power of the working class from capitalism’s parties, politicians and institutions is the urgent task in order to defend the rights and interests of all the exploited and downtrodden, and to put an end to the depredations of U.S. imperialism once and for all.
What Next for U.S. Capitalism?
In the aftermath of the January 6 riot in the Capitol, key sectors of the U.S. ruling class are worried about Donald Trump remaining in office, even for the 13 days left of his term. An alarmed National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the U.S.’ premier business lobby and longtime Trump ally, denounced “mob rule,” declaring that “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” The NAM called on Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment, which would allow removal of Trump as president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unsurprisingly, Pence refused. Today the two top Congressional Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called for the impeachment of Trump for inciting armed insurrection. MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough called for Trump, Giuliani and Donald Jr. to be arrested on the same charges. Several Trump administration officials have resigned, rats leaving a sinking ship.
Yet Trump is not the only one responsible for inciting the mob. There are quite a few Trump sycophants and enablers in Congress, some of whom have now opportunistically turned on him (like the execrable neo-Confederate senator Lindsay Graham), but who are all accomplices and co-conspirators. Ultimately, they – together with their Democratic rivals and colleagues – are all bourgeois politicians, representing the same class interests. Recall Barack Obama’s words following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election: “We have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage.” Obama said then that what he heard from Trump was “Respect for our institutions. Our way of life. Rule of law.” Really? So was January 6, an “intramural scrimmage,” marked by respect for the “rule of law”? Leading spokesmen for capital have concluded that Trump is an unhinged adventurer, prepared to sacrifice the interests of their “team” for his own, and that he must be stopped before he does more damage to “our institutions.” At this point, they’re just not sure how to do it.
The capitalist establishment has some problems in that respect: 74 million people voted for Trump, three-quarters of all Republicans say he was robbed of victory by (non-existent) massive voter fraud, and he now has a potential party fighting force of some tens of thousands, many of them heavily armed, fanatically devoted to him. While bourgeois detractors often portray him as just a crazy person, in denial about the election, he has created an organizing myth, the “stolen election,” akin to Hitler’s use of the myth of the “Dolchstoss,” the supposed stab in the back by Jews and communists, to explain Germany’s loss in World War I. Trump does not head up a mass fascist movement such as arose in Italy and Germany after WWI, and the motley crew that stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t disciplined shock troops like Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. They more closely resemble the rabble that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then president of the French Second Republic, gathered around him as he sought to become emperor in 1851.2 Like the little Napoléon, Trump would like to use the January 6 mob as his private army for his next adventure.
Many liberals think Trump wants to be like Putin in Russia or Erdoğan in Turkey, an authoritarian elected president. But being an emperor would be more fitting for his grandiose self-image. As if. Over the weekend, Trump begged Republican officials in Georgia to fix the votes for him so he could steal the election (while accusing the Democrats of doing so). But he had no quid for the quo, and was publicly humiliated as the tape of his wheedling, threatening call was released. So Trump turned to his last-ditch ploy, whipping up a mob, but he failed once again. That the powers that be knew it was coming was shown by the extraordinary January 4 letter by ten former secretaries of defense reminding the military that any effort to “involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes” would be “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional” and any officials involved would face “criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The Pentagon snapped to attention.
When Louis-Napoléon staged his December 1851 self-coup proclaiming himself French emperor, he had the backing of top generals. In the U.S. today, Trump only had the convicted ex-general Michael Flynn to conspire with about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to impose martial law. The Pentagon generals fight for Wall Street. They got their tax cuts and are done with Trump. They have no appetite to stick their necks out for President Bonespurs (Trump got a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft by claiming bone spurs on his feet).
Biden wants to form a bipartisan Party of Order. But his lame calls for “decency” and unity, for “reaching across the aisle,” fly in the face of the everyone-for-himself, “sauve-qui-peut” (save yourself if you can) mentality of today’s bourgeois rulers. Capitalists flip from one bubble to the next, looking for speculative profits before they burst, as the capitalist system is putrefying before our eyes. They are cashing out of many companies and with their “golden parachutes” buying retreats in New Zealand and Patagonia, as far from Wall Street as they can get. Likewise, the “take no prisoners” style of Republican politics goes hand in hand with the outlook of many lawyers, epitomized by Giuliani but far more widespread, whose attitude toward the “rule of law” is to grab anything they can get away with, and the stability of the system be damned. They all fit well with a would-be authoritarian megalomaniac who holds that the truth is whatever he says it is, and that as president he could do anything he wants. But if he no longer can, many jump ship.
U.S. rulers are deeply split, reflecting the declining fortunes of American capitalism. The “American century” that began when the U.S. walked away with the victor’s spoils in World War II was to be followed by a “New World Order” of unchallenged U.S. imperialist hegemony after the counterrevolution that swept the Soviet bloc in 1989-92. Instead, there was world disorder, of “wars without end,” and the devastating consequences of the 2007-08 financial crash that unleashed a decade-long worldwide capitalist depression. That led to deepening social decay, reflected politically in the Tea Party movement and socially by the ravages of the opioid crisis, both fed by despair of ruined petty bourgeois and permanently unemployed workers. That is also a major factor in lower-middle-class and working-class votes for Trump. And now the coronavirus pandemic, the worst plague in a century that has killed 363,000 in the U.S. and 1.8 million+ worldwide, has set off an even deeper economic crisis, whose effects are only beginning to be felt.
While denouncing Trump, the Democrats avidly uphold the extraordinary, and deeply anti-democratic, powers of the presidency, built up even further during the Obama years. So how can Biden “unite the nation”? We have warned that war with China is a prime option: trade war, economic war against Chinese companies, and possibly provoking some military skirmishes in the South China Sea. It would cement ties with the Pentagon, which has been planning for this since Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” which never got off the ground because the U.S. was bogged down in the Middle East. Senate Republicans, who have promised to grill Biden cabinet choices on their position on China, would quickly jump on board. So would the misleaders of labor, who have long pushed poisonous anti-China protectionism. The opportunist left, which falsely calls China capitalist and even imperialist (and hailed the U.S.-backed “democracy” riots in Hong Kong), would barely object. Public opinion is primed with war propaganda blaming China for COVID-19, although it contained the plague while the response of the capitalist West has been a deadly disaster. But Biden would be playing with fire.
In the face of this wall-to-wall anti-China front, the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International call to defend China – a bureaucratically deformed workers state – against imperialist attacks and threats, and against the danger of internal counterrevolution.
Capitalist “Democracy” Is Bankrupt – For a Workers Government!
Marxists could clearly see yesterday’s fascist/racist mob attack coming. A year and a half ago, as campaigning for the 2020 election got underway, we warned, “The intensity of political clashes in the ruling class recalls the period leading up to the U.S. Civil War…. Today, the intensity of the political clashes in Washington and the provocations of violent racist and outright fascist groups raise the spectre of civil war. Certainly, sectors of Trump’s most rabid base yearn to avenge the defeat of the vile Confederacy. Yet there are fundamental differences from the U.S. of a century and a half ago” (“Dangerous Racist Provocations in Pre-Election Maneuvering,” The Internationalist No. 57, September-October 2019). “The frenzy of bigotry from the highest levels of government underlines again the connection between anti-black racism and anti-immigrant racism,” we wrote, underscoring that “Would-be leftists who sow illusions in Democratic ‘resistance’ can only help disarm real struggle against racist reaction.”
There have been a lot of comparisons between the present crisis and what followed the presidential elections of 1876. Yesterday, the New York Times (6 January) ran an article with the headline, “You Think This Is Chaos? The Election of 1876 Was Worse.” That contested election led to the rotten “Compromise of 1877” which gave the presidency to the Republican in exchange for abandoning Reconstruction and pulling U.S. troops out of the occupied former Confederacy. That signal betrayal of the former slaves, on top of the failure to expropriate the slaveowners’ lands after the abolition of slavery, led to the rise of the KKK terrorists and then the Jim Crow segregation that institutionalized white supremacy and black subjugation in the South for another 90 years. Those are the “good old days” that the mob of fascist-led racists who stormed the U.S. Capitol yearn for. African Americans and all working people are still paying the price for the failure to rip out the slave system by the roots following the Civil War.
Today the legacy of slavery is still with us, particularly in the racist death penalty, mass incarceration and wanton police murder of black people. It is also enshrined in the institutions of what pious liberals and labor officials praise as “our democracy.” Among the most flagrant examples are the Electoral College and the Senate, along with the Supreme Court. (See “Slavery and the Constitution,” Revolution No. 17, August 2020.) Even consistent bourgeois democracy (“one person, one vote”) would demand the abolition of these reactionary bodies. Yet capitalist “democracy” is so corroded and hollowed-out by the gangrenous rot of capitalist society that the only real defense of democratic rights for the masses lies in the fight for the proletarian democracy of a workers government. This would not be based on the cynical charades of the puppets of capital – whose campaigns depend on billions from Wall Street (over $500 million in the Georgia runoffs) – but on workers councils chosen directly by the working people.
Labor bureaucrats or reformist leftists may call to “fight the far right” in the name of “defense of democracy.” Against fascist and racist marauders, and against the constant murderous violence of the bourgeois state, Marxists are the most intransigent defenders of democratic rights. In fact, all the democratic liberties of the mass of the population were won by bitter struggle against the ruling class. But to defend those rights, it is crucial to state clearly that this is not “our democracy.” The owners of wealth, of land, of the means of production, transport and communications can sweep away all constitutions and legal guarantees if they decide their interests demand it – as has happened so many times in history, from Italy (Mussolini’s fascists) and Germany (Hitler’s Nazis) to Chile (Pinochet’s military junta) and elsewhere. In fact, bourgeois democracy is a cloak for the dictatorship of the exploiting class against all the workers and oppressed.
In the lead-up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Lenin stressed, citing Friedrich Engels, that the core of the capitalist state consists of “special bodies of armed men” protecting the power and property of the ruling class. It cannot be reformed away or pressured into becoming an instrument of “the people” – mass struggle by the workers and oppressed, culminating in socialist revolution, must sweep it away to make way for a workers government, the proletarian democracy of workers councils (soviets). Right-wingers ludicrously condemn the Democrats – the oldest capitalist party in the world – as “socialists” and even “communists.” To defend the lives, most basic interests and hard-won rights of the workers and oppressed requires above all a struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party based on the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the program of international socialist revolution. In these times of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, racist attacks by the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and its fascist auxiliaries, and another capitalist depression, forging that party is key to winning a real future for workers and youth, here and around the world. ■
*One of the rioters was shot and killed as they sought to break into the House chambers. A Capitol police officer has reportedly died of injuries.
*Louis Napoléon was the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself emperor in 1804 after putting an end to the ten years of turmoil following the French Revolution of 1789 with his Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799, according to the French revolutionary calendar). Karl Marx, in his famous pamphlet, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), described the lesser Napoléon’s ragtag crew (the Society of December 10) as made up of “vagabonds, cashiered soldiers, ex-convicts, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, idle riffraff, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.” This lumpenproletariat, or proletariat in rags, Marx wrote, was called upon “to play the part of the people” in Louis Napoléon’s various schemes.
http://www.internationalist.org/capitalist-democracy-falling-apart-2101.html

JANUARY 7 – Yesterday’s mob rampage at the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of Donald Trump’s campaign of frenzied claims that the November 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” The assault on Congress was instigated by Trump and his top lieutenants, led by outright fascists, spearheaded by white supremacists brandishing the Confederate battle flag of the slavocracy, and it was facilitated by the police. Similar riots targeting government centers are nothing new in East Europe, where they have typically been organized by the U.S. (Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2014), and Yankee imperialism has unleashed them innumerable times in Latin America. But they are seen as novel in the United States since the post-Civil War period’s racist rampages against Reconstruction. After all, Republicans and Democrats alike claim this is “the world’s greatest democracy,” a “shining city on a hill” as union-busting racist and warmonger Ronald Reagan called the U.S. That was hardly the scene on Capitol Hill on January 6. What the world witnessed was a chilling acceleration, the latest bizarre and dangerous episode, in the spectacular unravelling of “democratic” bourgeois rule in the strongest imperialist power. What it dramatically underscores is that this capitalist society is falling apart. The bankruptcy of this decaying system of exploitation, imperialism and racist oppression highlights the urgent need to fight for socialist revolution.
In the media and by numerous politicians the Capitol attack is described as an “insurrection,” “coup d’état” or failed “coup attempt.” Yet this grotesque rampage by a would-be lynch mob was not an actual attempt to seize power (for which they obviously didn’t have the forces), nor was it the military trying to disperse and shut down the U.S.’ highest legislative body. English doesn’t have very descriptive terms for such actions. In Spanish it would be an amotinamiento, in French a coup de main. It was a mob assault aimed at intimidating Congress into not confirming Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, and failing that, to galvanize hard-core Trumpers into an authoritarian movement for future action. It was not a last paroxysm of Trumpism, but a harbinger of dangerous times to come. The several hundred fascists who turned out, together with tens of thousands of enraged racists and reactionaries, are plenty dangerous, but the most powerful and central dangers come from the organs of state power of the capitalist ruling class – police, military, National Guard – which brutally repress protests for black rights and protect the fascist terrorists. Democrat Joe Biden is their new boss, and he backs them to the hilt.
That the assault was directly instigated by Trump is obvious. It’s also recognized by key sectors of the bourgeois establishment in the U.S., which is genuinely shaken up by yesterday’s events. The white supremacist in the White House, defeated in the November elections, set the date for the riot, calling on his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” time. Some 30,000 did. At a morning rally Trump whipped them up, railing against “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and urging the crowd to “walk down to Congress” in order to “fight.” His lawyer, the ubergrifter Rudy Giuliani who instigated the 1992 police riot against New York City’s black Democratic mayor David Dinkins, called for “trial by combat.” Donald Jr. warned Democrats and Republicans who didn’t support the plot to annul the votes of tens of millions of voters, “We’re coming for you.” This led even right-wing Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to declare: “The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”
Scripted Mayhem, Police Connivance
The mayhem was scripted by the president himself, though of course the cowardly macho-man reneged on his vow to march with his followers to the capitol. “A senior White House aide said Trump wanted his supporters to swarm the Capitol and protest loudly all day,” the Washington Post (7 January) reported. But, the aide was quoted as claiming, “There was no plan for them to go inside.” In fact, the mob was milling around outside on the balcony and steps for an hour before managing to get in the building. Once they were inside, Trump watched on television for over two hours until people were starting to leave, when he posted a (pre-recorded) video saying it was time to go home. In that video he proclaimed his “love” for the “very special” rioters, insisted that the election was stolen and told them to “Remember this day forever!” Which they will, of course. The fact that they stormed the U.S. Capitol and got away with it will embolden racists and fascists for years – and not just to vote for Trump or his surrogates, but also to attack black people, immigrants and all who would block their drive to “take back” what they proclaim is their country.
That the assault was facilitated by the police is also beyond doubt. The cops and military were obviously monitoring the social media where the fascists were openly talking of plans for the armed assault. Moreover, ultra-rightists’ armed takeover of the Michigan legislature last May had already set the pattern. From the outset in Washington, rioters surged past barriers and up the steps with scarcely any serious opposition from the Capitol Police. Subsequently videos have surfaced showing police opening barriers and standing back to let the mob in. A livestream video by the fascists shows an invader taking a selfie with a police officer. There are a few photos of scuffles over barriers and a brief standoff in the basement, but once the crowd was in, the very few police outside disappeared. Inside, the cops let the rioters have the run of building, invading and rifling offices, taking over the Senate, and then let them leave unhindered.1 “Law enforcement experts said they were mystified by the tactics that police used once the mob was already inside the Capitol,” the Washington Post reported. That the police weren’t just “overwhelmed,” that police collaborated with the mob, that this was policy, is clear. The only “mystery” – so far – is who decided it.
You couldn’t miss the stunning contrast between this “kid glove” treatment on January 6 of the white supremacist mob and the wanton brutality unleashed against Black Lives Matter demonstrators peacefully protesting on June 3 in Lafayette Park, a public space, against racist police murder. It immediately struck us, along with countless other activists (and even the bourgeois media and politicians) – if black and other anti-racist demonstrators had sought to redress their grievances by converging on Congress, much less storming the building, they would have been shot down. It’s all one more confirmation that the police at every level are a white supremacist institution, and have been since their inception as slave patrols in the early 19th century. Nor was this equivalent to the workers’ occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 (which we enthusiastically participated in) to protest a vicious anti-labor bill. This was a racist mob bent on destruction and seeking to halt one of the functions of Congress with the most far-reaching consequences, which the mob did with impunity.
When the New York Times (7 January) writes of “violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement,” those few incidents cannot obscure police connivance with the rioters. When the D.C. National Guard arrived at the end – after Trump and his Army and Defense secretaries had earlier blocked a request by the city to mobilize it – there were very few arrests, mostly for curfew violation. But now that Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has issued a public emergency order until after Inauguration Day (January 20), it will surely be used against any anti-fascist protesters. Meanwhile, as Twitter and Facebook temporarily blocked Trump’s accounts, various pundits and legal beagles are flirting with curtailing First Amendment rights (“Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” New York Times, 6 January). Again, you can bet that any bans on “extremists” will be used against leftists and anti-racists far more than against the fascists who openly organized their Capitol bash on Parler and other right-wing social media.
That the attack on the U.S. Capitol was led by fascists is also undeniable, although barely mentioned in the bourgeois media. They had to notice that the first rioters who stormed into the Capitol were brandishing the Confederate battle flag, though they left unsaid that this banner of slavery is also that of the racist terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan. There were also numerous QAnon flags, and the green “Kekistan” flag (based on the WWII German battle flag) used by fascists. There were gallows with a hangman’s noose – a threat of lynching – set up outside. Nazi provocateur Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) was livestreaming from inside the building. Inside the Capitol, one of the fascists wore a sweatshirt hailing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. And prominent among those at the front of the rioters were III Percenters (who brag about their connections to police and military), Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, wearing a different uniform than usual, with orange caps. Orange armbands and tags were also noted in similar pro-Trump mobs in state capitals in Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Oregon and elsewhere.
There was a surreal quality to aspects of the fascist-led assault, including a QAnon “shaman” with a horned helmet made of fur pelts, stars-and-stripes face paint and Norse tattoos. Another rioter with a fur pelt and a fox skin on his head stood out among the camouflage jackets and MAGA caps. But it was no joke: the invaders were armed and dangerous. During the storming, two pipe bombs and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails (gasoline bombs) were found on Capitol grounds. One of the camo-clad rioters had a handful of zip ties, indicating intentions of taking hostages, again echoing the events in Michigan last May. Had they gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or one of the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib) vilified by Trump, or others, these fascist and racist terrorists could well have carried out their murderous fantasies to “hang traitors.”
After the rioters left, the assembled senators and representatives resumed “debate” on certifying the electors’ votes for president state by state. While a few dropped their plans to challenge electors reflecting the popular vote (like Georgia, where the Democrats just won a by-election, replacing two Republican senators with two Democrats, giving the incoming Biden administration control of the Senate as well as the House), most did not. As the night wore on, there was one pious, nauseating speech after another praising the “bipartisan” rejection of “violence,” “insurrection” and “sedition,” instead endorsing “civility,” “decency” and, of course, “our democracy.” Of course, the rioters were foot soldiers for the blatantly anti-democratic ploy by the Republican defeat deniers to throw out tens of millions of votes – disenfranchising the voters of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the end, Biden’s victory was confirmed, but more than half of House Republicans voted not to recognize its legitimacy.
Repeatedly over the past weeks, media pundits have waxed lyrical about how the only thing holding the line for democracy has been the “good will” of a handful of officials, both Democratic and Republican. This despite all the civics lessons about checks and balances, the power and majesty of the Constitution, and the rest. What this underscores in reality is the crucial Marxist point that the state is fundamentally armed force in the service of the socially dominant (ruling) class. In capitalist society, that is the class of owners of the wealth and means of production. It is their (bourgeois) “democracy,” and when their interests demand it, they can dispense with these forms and resort to untrammeled naked force. Counteracting the patriotic fairy tales of bourgeois ideology is an important part of unshackling the working-class power so urgently needed in defense of the rights of all.
As for bourgeois politicians’ cloying appeals for bipartisan harmony and the rest of it as the pro-police duo of Biden and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, prepares to take charge of administering U.S. imperialism – the biggest and most dangerous enemy of the oppressed worldwide – Marxists stand in irreconcilable opposition to this and all administrations of the capitalist state. To unchain the power of the working class from capitalism’s parties, politicians and institutions is the urgent task in order to defend the rights and interests of all the exploited and downtrodden, and to put an end to the depredations of U.S. imperialism once and for all.
What Next for U.S. Capitalism?
In the aftermath of the January 6 riot in the Capitol, key sectors of the U.S. ruling class are worried about Donald Trump remaining in office, even for the 13 days left of his term. An alarmed National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the U.S.’ premier business lobby and longtime Trump ally, denounced “mob rule,” declaring that “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” The NAM called on Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment, which would allow removal of Trump as president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unsurprisingly, Pence refused. Today the two top Congressional Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called for the impeachment of Trump for inciting armed insurrection. MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough called for Trump, Giuliani and Donald Jr. to be arrested on the same charges. Several Trump administration officials have resigned, rats leaving a sinking ship.
Yet Trump is not the only one responsible for inciting the mob. There are quite a few Trump sycophants and enablers in Congress, some of whom have now opportunistically turned on him (like the execrable neo-Confederate senator Lindsay Graham), but who are all accomplices and co-conspirators. Ultimately, they – together with their Democratic rivals and colleagues – are all bourgeois politicians, representing the same class interests. Recall Barack Obama’s words following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election: “We have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage.” Obama said then that what he heard from Trump was “Respect for our institutions. Our way of life. Rule of law.” Really? So was January 6, an “intramural scrimmage,” marked by respect for the “rule of law”? Leading spokesmen for capital have concluded that Trump is an unhinged adventurer, prepared to sacrifice the interests of their “team” for his own, and that he must be stopped before he does more damage to “our institutions.” At this point, they’re just not sure how to do it.
The capitalist establishment has some problems in that respect: 74 million people voted for Trump, three-quarters of all Republicans say he was robbed of victory by (non-existent) massive voter fraud, and he now has a potential party fighting force of some tens of thousands, many of them heavily armed, fanatically devoted to him. While bourgeois detractors often portray him as just a crazy person, in denial about the election, he has created an organizing myth, the “stolen election,” akin to Hitler’s use of the myth of the “Dolchstoss,” the supposed stab in the back by Jews and communists, to explain Germany’s loss in World War I. Trump does not head up a mass fascist movement such as arose in Italy and Germany after WWI, and the motley crew that stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t disciplined shock troops like Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. They more closely resemble the rabble that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then president of the French Second Republic, gathered around him as he sought to become emperor in 1851.2 Like the little Napoléon, Trump would like to use the January 6 mob as his private army for his next adventure.
Many liberals think Trump wants to be like Putin in Russia or Erdoğan in Turkey, an authoritarian elected president. But being an emperor would be more fitting for his grandiose self-image. As if. Over the weekend, Trump begged Republican officials in Georgia to fix the votes for him so he could steal the election (while accusing the Democrats of doing so). But he had no quid for the quo, and was publicly humiliated as the tape of his wheedling, threatening call was released. So Trump turned to his last-ditch ploy, whipping up a mob, but he failed once again. That the powers that be knew it was coming was shown by the extraordinary January 4 letter by ten former secretaries of defense reminding the military that any effort to “involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes” would be “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional” and any officials involved would face “criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The Pentagon snapped to attention.
When Louis-Napoléon staged his December 1851 self-coup proclaiming himself French emperor, he had the backing of top generals. In the U.S. today, Trump only had the convicted ex-general Michael Flynn to conspire with about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to impose martial law. The Pentagon generals fight for Wall Street. They got their tax cuts and are done with Trump. They have no appetite to stick their necks out for President Bonespurs (Trump got a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft by claiming bone spurs on his feet).
Biden wants to form a bipartisan Party of Order. But his lame calls for “decency” and unity, for “reaching across the aisle,” fly in the face of the everyone-for-himself, “sauve-qui-peut” (save yourself if you can) mentality of today’s bourgeois rulers. Capitalists flip from one bubble to the next, looking for speculative profits before they burst, as the capitalist system is putrefying before our eyes. They are cashing out of many companies and with their “golden parachutes” buying retreats in New Zealand and Patagonia, as far from Wall Street as they can get. Likewise, the “take no prisoners” style of Republican politics goes hand in hand with the outlook of many lawyers, epitomized by Giuliani but far more widespread, whose attitude toward the “rule of law” is to grab anything they can get away with, and the stability of the system be damned. They all fit well with a would-be authoritarian megalomaniac who holds that the truth is whatever he says it is, and that as president he could do anything he wants. But if he no longer can, many jump ship.
U.S. rulers are deeply split, reflecting the declining fortunes of American capitalism. The “American century” that began when the U.S. walked away with the victor’s spoils in World War II was to be followed by a “New World Order” of unchallenged U.S. imperialist hegemony after the counterrevolution that swept the Soviet bloc in 1989-92. Instead, there was world disorder, of “wars without end,” and the devastating consequences of the 2007-08 financial crash that unleashed a decade-long worldwide capitalist depression. That led to deepening social decay, reflected politically in the Tea Party movement and socially by the ravages of the opioid crisis, both fed by despair of ruined petty bourgeois and permanently unemployed workers. That is also a major factor in lower-middle-class and working-class votes for Trump. And now the coronavirus pandemic, the worst plague in a century that has killed 363,000 in the U.S. and 1.8 million+ worldwide, has set off an even deeper economic crisis, whose effects are only beginning to be felt.
While denouncing Trump, the Democrats avidly uphold the extraordinary, and deeply anti-democratic, powers of the presidency, built up even further during the Obama years. So how can Biden “unite the nation”? We have warned that war with China is a prime option: trade war, economic war against Chinese companies, and possibly provoking some military skirmishes in the South China Sea. It would cement ties with the Pentagon, which has been planning for this since Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” which never got off the ground because the U.S. was bogged down in the Middle East. Senate Republicans, who have promised to grill Biden cabinet choices on their position on China, would quickly jump on board. So would the misleaders of labor, who have long pushed poisonous anti-China protectionism. The opportunist left, which falsely calls China capitalist and even imperialist (and hailed the U.S.-backed “democracy” riots in Hong Kong), would barely object. Public opinion is primed with war propaganda blaming China for COVID-19, although it contained the plague while the response of the capitalist West has been a deadly disaster. But Biden would be playing with fire.
In the face of this wall-to-wall anti-China front, the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International call to defend China – a bureaucratically deformed workers state – against imperialist attacks and threats, and against the danger of internal counterrevolution.
Capitalist “Democracy” Is Bankrupt – For a Workers Government!
Marxists could clearly see yesterday’s fascist/racist mob attack coming. A year and a half ago, as campaigning for the 2020 election got underway, we warned, “The intensity of political clashes in the ruling class recalls the period leading up to the U.S. Civil War…. Today, the intensity of the political clashes in Washington and the provocations of violent racist and outright fascist groups raise the spectre of civil war. Certainly, sectors of Trump’s most rabid base yearn to avenge the defeat of the vile Confederacy. Yet there are fundamental differences from the U.S. of a century and a half ago” (“Dangerous Racist Provocations in Pre-Election Maneuvering,” The Internationalist No. 57, September-October 2019). “The frenzy of bigotry from the highest levels of government underlines again the connection between anti-black racism and anti-immigrant racism,” we wrote, underscoring that “Would-be leftists who sow illusions in Democratic ‘resistance’ can only help disarm real struggle against racist reaction.”
There have been a lot of comparisons between the present crisis and what followed the presidential elections of 1876. Yesterday, the New York Times (6 January) ran an article with the headline, “You Think This Is Chaos? The Election of 1876 Was Worse.” That contested election led to the rotten “Compromise of 1877” which gave the presidency to the Republican in exchange for abandoning Reconstruction and pulling U.S. troops out of the occupied former Confederacy. That signal betrayal of the former slaves, on top of the failure to expropriate the slaveowners’ lands after the abolition of slavery, led to the rise of the KKK terrorists and then the Jim Crow segregation that institutionalized white supremacy and black subjugation in the South for another 90 years. Those are the “good old days” that the mob of fascist-led racists who stormed the U.S. Capitol yearn for. African Americans and all working people are still paying the price for the failure to rip out the slave system by the roots following the Civil War.
Today the legacy of slavery is still with us, particularly in the racist death penalty, mass incarceration and wanton police murder of black people. It is also enshrined in the institutions of what pious liberals and labor officials praise as “our democracy.” Among the most flagrant examples are the Electoral College and the Senate, along with the Supreme Court. (See “Slavery and the Constitution,” Revolution No. 17, August 2020.) Even consistent bourgeois democracy (“one person, one vote”) would demand the abolition of these reactionary bodies. Yet capitalist “democracy” is so corroded and hollowed-out by the gangrenous rot of capitalist society that the only real defense of democratic rights for the masses lies in the fight for the proletarian democracy of a workers government. This would not be based on the cynical charades of the puppets of capital – whose campaigns depend on billions from Wall Street (over $500 million in the Georgia runoffs) – but on workers councils chosen directly by the working people.
Labor bureaucrats or reformist leftists may call to “fight the far right” in the name of “defense of democracy.” Against fascist and racist marauders, and against the constant murderous violence of the bourgeois state, Marxists are the most intransigent defenders of democratic rights. In fact, all the democratic liberties of the mass of the population were won by bitter struggle against the ruling class. But to defend those rights, it is crucial to state clearly that this is not “our democracy.” The owners of wealth, of land, of the means of production, transport and communications can sweep away all constitutions and legal guarantees if they decide their interests demand it – as has happened so many times in history, from Italy (Mussolini’s fascists) and Germany (Hitler’s Nazis) to Chile (Pinochet’s military junta) and elsewhere. In fact, bourgeois democracy is a cloak for the dictatorship of the exploiting class against all the workers and oppressed.
In the lead-up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Lenin stressed, citing Friedrich Engels, that the core of the capitalist state consists of “special bodies of armed men” protecting the power and property of the ruling class. It cannot be reformed away or pressured into becoming an instrument of “the people” – mass struggle by the workers and oppressed, culminating in socialist revolution, must sweep it away to make way for a workers government, the proletarian democracy of workers councils (soviets). Right-wingers ludicrously condemn the Democrats – the oldest capitalist party in the world – as “socialists” and even “communists.” To defend the lives, most basic interests and hard-won rights of the workers and oppressed requires above all a struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party based on the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the program of international socialist revolution. In these times of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, racist attacks by the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and its fascist auxiliaries, and another capitalist depression, forging that party is key to winning a real future for workers and youth, here and around the world. ■
*One of the rioters was shot and killed as they sought to break into the House chambers. A Capitol police officer has reportedly died of injuries.
*Louis Napoléon was the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself emperor in 1804 after putting an end to the ten years of turmoil following the French Revolution of 1789 with his Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799, according to the French revolutionary calendar). Karl Marx, in his famous pamphlet, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), described the lesser Napoléon’s ragtag crew (the Society of December 10) as made up of “vagabonds, cashiered soldiers, ex-convicts, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, idle riffraff, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.” This lumpenproletariat, or proletariat in rags, Marx wrote, was called upon “to play the part of the people” in Louis Napoléon’s various schemes.
http://www.internationalist.org/capitalist-democracy-falling-apart-2101.html

PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nRK1Y4uLPwdXer5ITF1PxwKkl4kVrIr6
Original Post (without descriptions): https://www.reddit.com/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/bjkejj/i_made_a_list_of_every_profession_i_could_think/
I made a list of every profession I could think of in Dungeons & Dragons and you guys helped me to double that list. Now I give you the second step of my plan to create a compendium of every NPC or Player background imaginable within a medieval context (the third step being stats).
Suggestions and feedback moving forward are, as always, very welcome. Thanks to everyone who helped contribute so far. I'll be updating this list as we go along.
​
. . .

I. AGRICULTURE, ANIMAL HUSBANDRY, & FORESTRY

1. Animal/Monster Handler – responsible for the safe keeping, dietary care, and exercise of animals or monsters.
2. Arborist – maintains and cares for trees, often by surgically removing dying limbs.
3. Baler – bales hay, or in the mills, wool and cotton goods.
4. Beekeeper – owns and breeds bees, especially for their honey.
5. Breeder – breeds livestock, animals, or monsters.
6. Cowherd – supervises grazing cattle.
7. Dairyboy/Dairymaid – milks cows and makes cheese and butter.
8. Falconer – keeps, trains, and hunts with falcons, hawks, or other birds of prey.
9. Farmer – operates a farm or cultivates land.
10. Fisher – catches fish.
11. Florist – grows and arranges plants and cut flowers.
12. Forager – searches for food in the wild.
13. Forester – supervises the wellbeing of a forest.
14. Fowler – catches or ensnares birds.
15. Gamekeeper – breeds and protects game, typically for a large estate.
16. Groom – cleans and brushes the coats horses, dogs, or other animals.
17. Herder – supervises a herd of livestock or makes a living from keeping livestock, especially in open country.
18. Horse Trainer – tends to horses and teaches them different disciplines.
19. Hunter – hunts game or other wild animals.
20. Lumberjack – fells trees, cuts them into logs, and transports them to a sawmill.
21. Master-of-Horses – supervises and commands all horses under a jurisdiction.
22. Master-of-Hounds – maintains a pack of hounds and their associated staff, equipment, and hunting arrangements.
23. Miller – owns or works in a grain mill.
24. Miner – works underground in mines in order to obtain minerals such as coal, diamonds, or gold.
25. Pathfinder – scouts ahead and discovers a path or way for others.
26. Plumer – hunts birds for their plumes.
27. Prospector – searches for mineral deposits, especially by drilling and excavation.
28. Ranger – wanders or ranges over a particular area or domain.
29. Renderer – converts waste animal tissue into usable materials.
30. Shepherd – herds, tends, and guards sheep.
31. Stablehand – works in a stable.
32. Thresher – separates grain from the plants by beating.
33. Trapper – traps wild animals, especially for their fur.
34. Vintner – engages in winemaking, especially with monitoring and harvesting the grapes.
35. Zookeeper – maintains and cares for animals or monsters in a zoo.

II. ARCHITECTURE & CONSTRUCTION

1. Architect – designs buildings or landscapes and in many cases supervises their construction.
   
2. Brickmaker – crafts bricks from clay, stone, or other materials.
   
3. Brickmason – builds with mineral products such as stones, bricks, cinder blocks, or tiles, usually with the use of mortar as a bonding agent.
   
4. Carpenter – makes and repairs wooden objects and structures.
   
5. Construction Worker – a laborer in the physical construction of a built environment and its infrastructure.
   
6. General Contractor – supervises a construction site, manages its vendors and trades, and communicates information to all involved parties.
   
7. Glazier – fits glass into windows and doors.
   
8. Plasterer – applies plaster to walls, ceilings, or other surfaces.
   
9. RoadlayeStreetlayer – paves roads or streets.
   
10. RoofeThatcher – builds and repairs roofs.
    
11. Stonemason – cuts and prepares stone for use in construction.
    

III. ARTS, the

1. Acrobat – performs spectacular gymnastic feats.
   
2. Actor – impersonates characters, typically on stage in a theatrical production.
   
3. Aerialist/Trapezist – performs acrobatics high above the ground on a tightrope or trapeze.
   
4. Arranger – adapts a musical composition for performance.
   
5. Athlete – proficient in sports and other forms of physical exercise.
   
6. BuskeStreet Musician – performs in a public place, often for money.
   
7. Celebrity – a famous person.
   
8. Chef – a professional cook trained in the culinary arts.
   
9. Choirmaster – trains a choir and orchestrates their singing when they perform.
   
10. Clown – comic entertainer who wears a traditional costume and exaggerated makeup.
    
11. Comedian – entertainer whose act is designed to make an audience laugh.
    
12. Conductor – directs the performance of an orchestra.
    
13. Contortionist – twists and bends their body into strange and unnatural positions.
    
14. Curator – keeper and custodian of a museum or other collections of precious items.
    
15. Costumer – makes theatrical costumes.
    
16. Dancer – moves their body rhythmically with or without musical accompaniment.
    
17. Equilibrist – performs balancing feats.
    
18. Fashion Designer – applies design, aesthetics and natural beauty to garments and their accessories.
    
19. Gladiator – fights against other people, wild animals, or monsters in an arena.
    
20. Glasspainter – produces colorful designs on or in glass.
    
21. Jester – professional joker or “fool” at court, typically wearing a cap with bells on it and carrying a mock scepter.
    
22. Juggler – keeps several objects in motion in the air at the same time by alternately tossing and catching them.
    
23. Illuminator – paints and calligraphs to adorn or enlighten scrolls and manuscripts.
    
24. Limner – paints portraits or miniatures.
    
25. Makeup Artist – applies cosmetics to models, actors, nobles, etc.
    
26. Minstrel – recites lyric or heroic poetry for nobility.
    
27. Model – poses as a subject for an artist, fashion designer, or sculptor.
    
28. Musician – plays a musical instrument.
    
29. Painter – paints pictures.
    
30. Playwright – writes plays or musicals.
    
31. Poet – writes ballads, epics, sonnets, or other forms of poetry.
    
32. RingmasteRingmistress – master of ceremony who introduces the circus acts to the audience.
    
33. Ropewalker – walks along a tightrope to entertain others.
    
34. Sculptor – crafts art by carving or casting blocks of marble, stones, or other hardened minerals.
    
35. SingeSoprano – sings with or without instrumental accompaniment.
    
36. Skald – composes and recites poems honoring heroes and their deeds.
    
37. Stage Magician – deceives their audience with seemingly impossible feats while using only natural means.
    
38. Stuntman/Stuntwoman – performs dangerous stunts for their audience.
    
39. Tattooist – illustrates the skin with indelible patterns, pictures, legends, etc.
    
40. Theater Director – supervises and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production by unifying various endeavors and aspects of production.
    
41. Wrestler – performs in matches involving grappling and grappling-type techniques.
    
42. Writer – commits his or her thoughts, ideas, etc., into written language.
    

IV. BUSINESS & TRADE

1. Accountant – keeps and inspects financial accounts.
   
2. Actuary – compiles and analyzes statistics and uses them to calculate risk.
   
3. Animal CollectoMonster Collector – collects and deals in rare and exotic animals and monsters.
   
4. Business Owner – owns a business entity in an attempt to profit from its successful operations.
   
5. Debt Collector – recovers money owed on delinquent accounts.
   
6. Draper – an alcohol merchant.
   
7. Appraiser – assesses the monetary value of something.
   
8. Auctioneer – conducts auctions by accepting bids and declaring goods sold.
   
9. Banker – an officer or owner of a bank or group of banks.
   
10. Bagniokeeper – owner of a bath house or brothel.
    
11. Bookkeeper – keeps records of financial affairs.
    
12. Chandler – deals in provisions and supplies.
    
13. Collector – collects things of a specified type, professionally or as a hobby.
    
14. Entrepreneur – organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
    
15. Grocer – a food merchant.
    
16. Guild Master – leads an economically independent producer (a “guild,” an association of craftsmen or merchants that often holds considerable bureaucratic power).
    
17. Innkeeper – owns and runs an inn.
    
18. Land Surveyor – establishes maps and boundaries for ownership or other purposes required by government or civil law.
    
19. Merchant – sells and trades goods.
    
20. Moneychanger – exchanges one currency for another.
    
21. Moneylender – lends money to others who pay interest.
    
22. Peddler – travels from place to place selling assorted items.
    
23. Pimp/Madame – controls prostitutes and arranges clients for them, taking part of their earnings in return.
    
24. Plantation Owner – an owner of an estate on which crops are cultivated by resident labor, typically slave labor.
    
25. Speculator – invests in stocks, property, or other ventures in the hope of making a profit.
    
26. Thriftdealer – deals in secondhand items.
    
27. Tradesman – deals exclusively in bartering.
    
28. Vendor – deals items in the street.
    

V. COMMUNICATIONS

1. Billboardposter – a person who puts up notices, signs and advertisements.
   
2. Courier – transports packages and documents.
   
3. Herald: a messenger who carries important news.
   
4. Interpreter: interprets language and its meaning, especially within ancient manuscripts.
   
5. Linguist: studies the essence of communication, including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language.
   
6. Messenger: carries messages between recipients.
   
7. Town Crier: makes public announcements in the streets or marketplace.
   
8. Translator: translates between languages.
   

VI. CRAFTSMANSHIP

1. AccoutrementeCoinsmith – makes currency for the government.
   
2. Armorer – specializes in making and repairing armor.
   
3. Blacksmith – forges and repairs things in metal, including weapons, armor, utensils, etc.
   
4. Bladesmith – specializes in making and repairing bladed weapons, especially swords and daggers.
   
5. Bookbinder – binds books and wraps scrolls.
   
6. Bottler – bottles drinks and other liquids.
   
7. Bowyer – makes bows and crossbows.
   
8. Brewer – brews ale.
   
9. Broom Maker – makes brooms and brushes.
   
10. Candlemaker – makes candles and wax from honey and tallow.
    
11. Cartwright – makes and repairs carts and wagons.
    
12. Cobbler – makes and repairs footwear.
    
13. CoopeHooper – makes and repairs casks and barrels.
    
14. Cutler – makes cutlery.
    
15. Dyer – dyes cloth and other materials.
    
16. Embroiderer – ornaments with needlework.
    
17. Engraver – incises a design onto a hard surface by cutting grooves into it.
    
18. Farrier – trims and shoes horses' hooves.
    
19. Fletcher – makes and repairs arrows.
    
20. Furniture Artisan – makes and repairs furniture.
    
21. Furrier – prepares furs for adornment.
    
22. Glassworker – blows glass planes and items.
    
23. Glovemaker – makes and repairs gloves.
    
24. Goldsmith/Silversmith – a smith who specializes in precious metals.
    
25. HatteMilliner – makes and repairs headwear.
    
26. Instrument Maker – makes and repairs musical instruments.
    
27. Lapidary – turns stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems, and faceted designs.
    
28. Leatherworker – makes items from leather such as pouches, scabbards, straps, etc.
    
29. Jeweler – designs, makes, and repairs necklaces, bracelets, watches, etc., often containing jewels.
    
30. Locksmith – makes and repairs locks.
    
31. Luthier – makes and repairs stringed instruments.
    
32. Mercer – weaves textile fabrics, especially silks, velvets, and other fine materials.
    
33. Optician – makes and repairs eyeglasses.
    
34. Potter – makes pots, bowls, plates, etc., out of clay.
    
35. Printer – a person who applies pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink to manufacture a text.
    
36. Restorer – repairs or renovates a work of art so as to return it to its original condition.
    
37. Ropemaker – braids rope.
    
38. Rugmaker – makes and repairs rugs by braiding, hooking, weaving, etc.
    
39. Saddler – makes and repairs saddlery.
    
40. Seamstress/Tailor – makes, alters, repairs, as well as occasionally designing garments.
    
41. Soaper – makes soap from accumulated mutton fat, wood ash, and natural soda.
    
42. Tanner – treats the skins and hides of animals to produce leather.
    
43. Taxidermist – prepares, stuffs, and mounts the skins of animals.
    
44. Tinker – travels from place to place mending utensils.
    
45. Toymaker – makes and repairs toys.
    
46. Watchmaker – makes and repairs watches and clocks.
    
47. Weaponsmith – specializes in making and repairing weapons.
    
48. Weaver – makes fabric by weaving fiber together.
    
49. Wheelwright – makes and repairs wooden wheels.
    
50. WhittleWoodcarver – fashions wood into various shapes.
    

VII. CRIME

1. Assassin – murders through stealth for reasons pertaining to money, politics, or religion.
   
2. Bandit – a robber or outlaw belonging to a gang and typically operating in an isolated or lawless area.
   
3. Burglar – illegally enters buildings and steals things.
   
4. Charlatan/Conman – tricks people by gaining their trust and persuading them to believe something that is not true in order to benefit from the encounter.
   
5. CockfighteGamefighter – engages in arena matches in which animals or monsters are pitted against one another, typically to the death.
   
6. Crime Boss – controls and supervises a criminal organization.
   
7. Cutpurse – a pickpocket or thief.
   
8. Drug Dealer – dealer of illegal substances.
   
9. Drug Lord – controls a network of persons involved in the illegal drugs trade and transactions.
   
10. Extortioner – extorts money from someone by threatening to expose embarrassing information about them.
    
11. Fence – deals in stolen goods.
    
12. Forger – produces fraudulent copies or imitations.
    
13. Fugitive – a person who has escaped from a place or is in hiding, especially to avoid arrest or persecution.
    
14. Highwayman – robs travelers on a road.
    
15. Kidnapper – abducts people and holds them captive, typically to obtain a ransom.
    
16. Loan Shark – charges extremely high rates of interest for moneylending, typically under illegal conditions.
    
17. Pirate – attacks and robs ships at sea.
    
18. Poacher – hunts illegal game.
    
19. Poisoner – makes poisons to harm or kill.
    
20. RaideMarauder – makes sudden, unprompted attacks against defenseless or near-defenseless settlements.
    
21. Smuggler – manages the import or export of goods secretly, in violation of the law, especially without payment of legal duty.
    
22. Thief – steals people’s property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence.
    

VIII. GOVERNMENT & LAW

1. Affeeror – determines the values of fines and amercements.
   
2. Agister – affords pasture to the livestock of others for a price.
   
3. Alderman – a civic dignitary in the local council ranked below the mayor.
   
4. Alienist – assesses the competence of a defendant in a court of law.
   
5. Assay Master – oversees the testing of currency.
   
6. Baron/Baroness – a member of the lowest order of the British nobility.
   
7. Chancellor – a senior state or legal official.
   
8. Chief – leads or rules a people or clan.
   
9. Conservationist – advocates for the protection and preservation of the environment and wildlife.
   
10. Count/Earl/Countess – a nobleperson ranking above a viscount and below a marquess.
    
11. Courtier – attends court as a companion or adviser to the king or queen.
    
12. Diplomat – an official representing a country abroad.
    
13. Duke/Duchess – rules over a duchy and is of the highest rank below the monarch.
    
14. EmperoEmpress – the supreme sovereign ruler of an extensive group of states or countries under a single authority.
    
15. Judge – decides cases in a court of law.
    
16. King/Queen – the ruler of an independent state and its people.
    
17. Knight – serves his or her sovereign after being bestowed a rank of royal honor.
    
18. Lady-in-Waiting – attends a queen, princess, or other high-ranking feminine nobleperson.
    
19. LawyeAdvocate – practices or studies law, typically an attorney or a counselor.
    
20. Marquess/Marchioness – a nobleperson ranking above a count and below a duke.
    
21. Master-of-Coin – supervises the royal treasury, advises the monarch on financial matters, and is responsible for raising money through taxation.
    
22. Master-of-the-Revels – responsible for overseeing royal festivities.
    
23. Minister – assists with the administration of business.
    
24. Noble/Aristocrat – a person belonging to a class with high social or political status.
    
25. Notary – performs certain legal formalities, especially to draw up or certify contracts, deeds, and other documents for use in other jurisdictions.
    
26. OratoSpokesman – makes statements on behalf of a group or individual nobleperson.
    
27. Page – a young attendant to a person of noble rank.
    
28. Prince/Princess – the direct descendant of a monarch.
    
29. Senator – partakes in governmental decision-making after being elected.
    
30. Sheriff – the chief executive officer in a county, having various administrative and judicial functions.
    
31. Spymaster – directs a network of subordinate espionage agents for a state, kingdom, or empire.
    
32. Steward – supervises both the estate and household of his lord or lady while they are away.
    
33. Squire – acts as an attendant to a knight before attempting to become a knight themselves.
    
34. Tax Collector – collects unpaid taxes from people, guilds, or businesses.
    
35. Viscount/Viscountess – a nobleperson ranking above a baron and below a count.
    
36. Ward – a member of a noble house who has been taken in by another noble family to be raised for a time.
    

IX. HOSPITALITY & COMMON LABOR

1. Acater – provides and prepares foodstuffs or delicacies for events such as festivals.
   
2. Tunner – fills casks in a brewery or winery.
   
3. Baker – bakes bread and cakes.
   
4. Barber – cuts hair and shaves or trims beards.
   
5. Barkeep – works and serves drinks in a bar.
   
6. Barmaid/Barboy – serves drinks and food in a bar as well as engaging with customers.
   
7. Butcher – cuts up and sells meat.
   
8. Butler – the chief servant of a household.
   
9. Caregiver – looks after a sick, elderly, or disabled person.
   
10. Charcoal Maker – manufactures charcoal by carbonizing wood in a kiln.
    
11. Chatelaine/Majordomo – a person in charge of a large household.
    
12. Chimney Sweeper – a small person, typically a child, who ascends chimneys to clean them.
    
13. Clerk – undertakes routine administrative duties in a business or bank.
    
14. Cook – prepares food for eating.
    
15. Copyist – makes copies of handwritten documents or music.
    
16. Croupier – runs a gaming table by gathering in and paying out money or tokens.
    
17. Exterminator – exterminates unwanted rodents and insects.
    
18. Food & Drink Taster – ingests food that was prepared for someone else to confirm it is safe to eat.
    
19. GardeneLandscaper – tends and cultivates a garden.
    
20. Gongfarmer – digs out and removes excrement from privies and cesspits.
    
21. Gravedigger – digs graves for the purposes of a funeral ceremony.
    
22. Groundskeeper – maintains an athletic field, a park, or the grounds of a graveyard or other institution.
    
23. Kitchen Drudge – performs menial work in a kitchen.
    
24. Knacker – disposes of dead or unwanted animals.
    
25. Lamplighter – lights street or road lights at dusk.
    
26. Laundry Worker – a laborer who takes part in the washing, drying, and ironing of clothes and other fabric items.
    
27. Lector – reads to others while they work for entertainment.
    
28. Longshoreman – loads and unloads ships in a port.
    
29. Maid – a domestic servant of a household.
    
30. Nanny/Nursemaid – a servant employed to look after a young child or children.
    
31. Operator – a laborer who operates equipment, typically in construction.
    
32. Pastry Chef – makes desserts, especially cakes and pastries.
    
33. Plumber – installs and repairs the fittings of water supply and sanitation.
    
34. Porter – carries luggage and other loads.
    
35. Prostitute – engages in sexual activity for payment.
    
36. Quarryman/Quarrywoman – quarries stone.
    
37. Servant – performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house or as a personal attendant.
    
38. Stagehand – moves scenery or props before or during the performance of a theatrical production.
    
39. Street Cleaner – cleans streets and alleyways after dark.
    
40. Talent Scout – searches for talented individuals who can be employed or promoted.
    
41. Trainer – trains someone in a particular skill, usually physical, for money.
    
42. Water Bearer – brings water from rivers, wells, and lakes back to their settlement.
    
43. Wet Nurse – a woman employed to suckle another woman's child.
    

X. MAGICAL ARTS, the

1. Abjurer – a mage focused in protective spells.
   
2. Alchemist – transforms or creates something within nature through (usually) ritualist magic.
   
3. Archmage – an extremely powerful mage.
   
4. Artificer – unlocks magic in everyday objects as well as being an inventor.
   
5. Bard – uses their artistic talents to induce magical effects.
   
6. Conjuror – conjures spirits or familiars.
   
7. Druid – a mage attuned to the magical forces of nature, able to shapeshift, call on the elements, communicate with flora and fauna, etc.
   
8. Elementalist – manipulates nature’s elements to their will.
   
9. EnchanteEnchantress – uses sorcery to put someone or something under a spell.
   
10. Evoker – manipulates energy or taps into an unseen source of power in order to produce a desired kinetic end.
    
11. Healer – able to cure a disease or injury using magic.
    
12. Hearth Witch/Hearth Wizard – incorporates spells and enchantments in cooking.
    
13. Illusionist – performs tricks and spells that deceive the senses.
    
14. Mage – a magic-user.
    
15. Medium – uses extrasensory perception, magic, or divine powers to identify information hidden from the normal senses.
    
16. Meteorologist – forecasts and manipulates weather.
    
17. Necromancer – communicates with and conjures the spirits of the dead.
    
18. Ritualist – practices or advocates the observance of ritual (formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects).
    
19. Runecaster – uses special alphabets to create runes (symbols possessing magical effects capable of being used multiple times).
    
20. Sage – a wise and experienced magic-user.
    
21. SeeOracle – able to see what the future holds through supernatural insight.
    
22. Shaman – accesses and influences the world of good and evil spirits.
    
23. Shapeshifter – a person with the ability to change their physical form.
    
24. SorcereSorceress – derives their magical abilities innately rather than through study.
    
25. Summoner – a mage able to summon forth magical beasts, creatures, and monsters.
    
26. Transmuter – alters matter in form, appearance, or nature.
    
27. Warlock – a mage who has gained their abilities by forming a pact with an otherworldly being.
    
28. Witchdoctor – a tribal mage with powers of healing, divination, and protection against the magic of others.
    
29. Witch – a woman who has supernatural powers and practices sorcery, typically in solitude.
    
30. Wizard – derives their magical abilities through study.
    
31. Wordsmith – draws their power from language and casts by dictation.
    

XI. MILITARY & SECURITY

1. Admiral – commands a fleet or naval squadron.
   
2. Bailiff – looks after prisoners.
   
3. Bodyguard – escorts and protects another person, especially a dignitary.
   
4. Bouncer – prevents troublemakers from entering or to eject them from the premises of an establishment.
   
5. Captain – an army officer of high rank in charge of commanding squadrons of soldiers.
   
6. Castellan – the governor of a castle.
   
7. Cavalryman/Cavalier – a skilled horseback rider.
   
8. City Watch – an officer of law enforcement who resides in larger towns or cities.
   
9. Commissar – teaches principles and policies to military units.
   
10. Constable – an officer with limited policing authority, typically in a small town.
    
11. Detective/Investigator – investigates and solves crimes.
    
12. DrummeFifer – a non-combatant foot soldier who sounds signals for changes in formation in combat.
    
13. Duelist – skilled in one-on-one combat.
    
14. Executioner – carries out a sentence of death on a legally condemned person.
    
15. Firefighter – extinguishes fires.
    
16. Guard/Sentinel – a person who keeps watch, especially a soldier or other person formally assigned to protect a person or to control access to a place.
    
17. General – the chief commander of an army.
    
18. Inspection Officer – responsible for the inspection of military units to ensure they meet appropriate standards of training and efficiency.
    
19. Intelligence Officer – collects, compiles and organizes information about the enemy.
    
20. Jailer – supervises a jail and the prisoners in it.
    
21. Lieutenant – an officer of middle rank in the armed forces.
    
22. Marksman/Archer – in long-range weapons, such as the bow, crossbow, sling, etc. to inflict damage from afar.
    
23. Marshall – has the charge of the cavalry in the household of a monarch.
    
24. Medic – a medical practitioner equipped for the battlefield.
    
25. Mercenary – a soldier without allegiance who works for money, typically a member of a company or guild.
    
26. Privateer – engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war.
    
27. Quartermaster – responsible for providing quarters, rations, clothing, and other supplies.
    
28. Royal Guard – responsible for the protection of a royal person.
    
29. Runner – carries information between lines in wartime.
    
30. Sapper – a soldier responsible for tasks such as building and repairing roads and bridges, laying and clearing mines, etc.
    
31. Sergeant – an officer instructed with a protective duty, typically worth “half a knight” in regard.
    
32. Sergeant-at-Arms – charged with keeping order during meetings and, if necessary, participates in battle.
    
33. Scout – sent ahead of a main force so as to gather information about the enemy's position, strength, or movements.
    
34. Siege Artillerist – works the artillery machines of an army.
    
35. Slave Driver – oversees and urges on slaves at work.
    
36. SoldieMan-at-Arms – serves in an army.
    
37. Special Force Soldier – carries out special operations.
    
38. Spy – secretly collects and reports information on the activities, movements, and plans of an enemy or competitor.
    
39. Tactician – uses a carefully planned military strategy to achieve a specific end.
    
40. Tollkeeper – collects tolls at a bridge, road etc. where a charge is made.
    
41. Torturer – inflicts severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.
    
42. Warden – responsible for the supervision of a particular place or thing or for ensuring that regulations associated with it are obeyed.
    
43. Warmage – a soldier skilled in destructive battle magic.
    

XII. RELIGION

1. Abbot/Abbess – the head of an abbey of monks.
   
2. Acolyte – assists the celebrant in a religious service or procession.
   
3. Almoner – distributes money and food to poor people.
   
4. Archbishop – responsible for an archdiocese, their surrounding district.
   
5. Bishop – a senior member of the clergy, usually in charge of a diocese and empowered to confer holy orders.
   
6. Cantor – sings liturgical music and leads prayer in a synagogue.
   
7. Cardinal – a leading dignitary of a church, nominated by the highest official.
   
8. Chaplain – a member of the clergy attached to a private chapel, institution, ship, branch of the armed forces, etc.
   
9. Cleric – has devoted their entire being to the will of their god, thus gaining magical powers.
   
10. Confessor – hears confessions and gives absolution and spiritual counsel.
    
11. Cultist – a member of a cult who generally lives outside of conventional society and worships an unorthodox patron.
    
12. Cult Leader – the organizational leader of a cult who is occasionally also the founder.
    
13. Deacon – an ordained minister of an order ranking below that of priest.
    
14. Diviner – seeks ultimate divination in order to further understand or meet godly substance.
    
15. Exorcist – expels or attempts to expel evil spirits from a person or place.
    
16. High Priest/Pope – the chief priest of a religion.
    
17. Inquisitor – seeks to eliminate heresy and other things contrary to the doctrine or teachings of their faith.
    
18. Missionary – goes on a religious mission to promote their faith in a foreign place.
    
19. Monk – able to manifest their spirituality through a calm, centered being and thus gain abilities which function similarly to magic.
    
20. Nun – a member of a religious community of women, especially a cloistered one, living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
    
21. Paladin – a holy knight and divine spellcaster crusading in the name of good and order.
    
22. Pardoner – raises money for religious works by soliciting offerings and granting indulgences.
    
23. Priest – has the authority to perform certain rites and administer certain sacraments.
    
24. Prophet – regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God.
    
25. Sexton – looks after a church and churchyard, sometimes acting as bell-ringer and formerly as a gravedigger.
    
26. Templar – fights in a religious military order.
    

XIII. SCIENCE, MATH, & EDUCATION

1. Abecedarian – teaches the illiterate.
   
2. AccoucheuObstetrician/Midwife – assists in childbirth and the care of women giving birth.
   
3. Anthropologist – studies the customs, beliefs, and relationships of humanoids and intellectually and culturally advanced creatures.
   
4. Apothecary – prepares and sells medicines, drugs, and potions.
   
5. Apprentice – studies a trade under a skilled employer.
   
6. Archaeologist – studies humanoid history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.
   
7. Archivist – maintains and is in charge of archives.
   
8. Assayer – determiner of the proportions of metal in ore and the amount of copper, silver, gold, or platinum in coins.
   
9. Astrologer – uses astrology to tell others about their character or to predict their future.
   
10. Astronomer – makes observations of celestial and scientific phenomena within the material plane.
    
11. Bloodletter – surgically removes some of a patient's blood for therapeutic purposes.
    
12. Botanist – an expert in or student of the scientific study of plants.
    
13. Cartographer – a scholar and illustrator of maps.
    
14. Chemist – engaged in chemical research or experiments.
    
15. Dean – the head of a college or university.
    
16. DoctoPhysician – a qualified practitioner of medicine.
    
17. Drakologist – studies or is an expert in the branch of zoology concerned with dragons.
    
18. Engineer – designer of a machine or structure.
    
19. Entomologist – studies or is an expert in the branch of zoology concerned with insects.
    
20. Herbalist – practices healing by the use of herbs.
    
21. Historian – an expert in or student of history, especially that of a particular period, geographical region, or social phenomenon.
    
22. Horologist – a scholar of time and entropy.
    
23. Librarian – administers or assists in a library.
    
24. Mathematician – a scholar of the abstract science of number, quantity, and space.
    
25. Mortician – prepares dead bodies for burial or cremation and makes arrangements for funerals.
    
26. Nurse – cares for the sick or infirm, especially in a hospital.
    
27. Optometrist – examines the eyes for visual defects and prescribes eyeglasses.
    
28. Philosopher – a scholar of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
    
29. Professor – a teacher of the highest rank in a college or university.
    
30. ScholaResearcher – a specialist in a particular branch of study who pursues the acquisition of knowledge.
    
31. Scribe – copies out manuscripts.
    
32. Student – attends school or learns under other to enter and pursue a particular subject.
    
33. Surgeon/Chirurgeon – practices surgery.
    
34. Taxonomist – groups organisms into categories.
    
35. Teacher – instructs on a particular skill or subject.
    
36. Theologian – engages in the study of the nature of God and religious belief.
    
37. Tutor – charged with the instruction and guidance of another.
    
38. Veterinarian – treats diseased or injured animals.
    
39. Zoologist – an expert in or a student of the behavior, physiology, classification, and distribution of animals.
    

XIV. TRANSPORTATION

1. Boatman – mans a small seacraft.
   
2. Bosun – in charge of organizing the equipment and crew of a ship.
   
3. Cabbie/Wagoner – drives a horse-drawn wagon.
   
4. Cabin Boy/Cabin Girl – waits on the orders of a ship's officers and passengers.
   
5. Caravaneer – travels or lives in a caravan.
   
6. Charioteer – drives a chariot.
   
7. Carter – transports goods by cart.
   
8. Ferryman – operates a ferry.
   
9. First Mate – the deck officer second in command to the master of a ship.
   
10. Helmsman – steers a ship or boat.
    
11. Navigator – directs the route or course of a ship or other form of transportation, especially by using instruments and maps.
    
12. Purser – keeps the accounts of a ship, especially as the head steward on a passenger vessel.
    
13. Sailor – works as a member of the crew of a commercial or naval ship or boat.
    
14. Sea Captain – commands a ship.
    
15. Shipwright – a carpenter skilled in ship construction and repair.
    

XV. UNEMPLOYED, SELF-EMPLOYED, & OUTCAST

1. Adventurer – wanders the world in search of knowledge, treasure, fame, glory or a multitude of additional wants and desires.
   
2. BeggaPauper – lives by asking for money or food.
   
3. Blood HunteMonster Hunter – takes on jobs to hunt down and kill or capture dangerous creatures.
   
4. Bounty Hunter – pursues a criminal or fugitive for whom a reward is offered.
   
5. Crossing Sweeper – sweeps a path ahead of people crossing dirty urban streets in exchange for a gratuity.
   
6. Deserter – a member of the armed forces who has deserted.
   
7. Disgraced Noble – a person of high birth who has since loss their respect, honor, or esteem in some or all noble circles.
   
8. Drunkard – a person who is habitually drunk and considers themselves a professional in the task.
   
9. Dungeon Delver – navigates underground labyrinths in search of any treasure they may find.
   
10. Elder – a person of a greater age, especially one with a respected position in society.
    
11. Exile – lives away from their native country, either from choice or compulsion.
    
12. Explorer – explores unfamiliar areas in search of geographical or scientific information.
    
13. Ex-Criminal – a person who has been convicted of a crime and has since served their sentence, or who has preemptively given up their life of crime.
    
14. Folk Hero – a celebrity who is greatly admired by many people of a particular kind or in a particular place.
    
15. Gambler – bets money on sports, card games, or games of chance in the hope of a profit.
    
16. Grave RobbeTomb Raider – steals valuables from graves and tombs.
    
17. Heretic – differs in opinion from established religious dogma.
    
18. Hermit – lives in solitude, typically as a religious or spiritual discipline.
    
19. Housewife/Househusband – cares for his or her family by managing household affairs and completing housework.
    
20. Pilgrim – journeys to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion, occasionally to settle there.
    
21. Prisoner – held in confinement as a punishment for crimes they have been convicted of.
    
22. Rag-and-Bone Man – collects unwanted household items and sells them to merchants.
    
23. Rebel/Political Dissident – rises in opposition or armed resistance against an established government or ruler.
    
24. Refugee – leaves their home in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
    
25. Runaway Slave – a slave who has left their master and traveled without authorization.
    
26. ScavengeMudlark/Tosher – searches for and collects discarded items.
    
27. Slave – a person who is the legal property of another and forced to obey them.
    
28. Squatter – unlawfully occupies an uninhabited building or unused land.
    
29. TraveleWandereVagabond – wanders from place to place without a permanent home or job.
    
30. Urchin – a child who lives or spends most of their time in the streets, occasionally working as a thief or pickpocket.
    

In the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077, you will become well versed with street slang. Essentially a universal polyglot of English, French, German, Japanese and a half dozen other languages. The addition of Kiroshi Optics cyberware, assists V with this process. In terms of lore, covering Street Slang can be slightly contentious, as there are many words or phrases used in the Cyberpunk genre that are not necessarily found or perhaps have a different meaning in CD Projekt Red’s World of Cyberpunk 2077 or Mike Pondsmith’s cyberpunk universe.
In addition, some of the slang found in official sourcebooks, was not directly part of the lore that Mike Pondsmithand R. Talsorian games created. Rather reference lists were provided to give players guidance on how to add flavour to their gaming sessions, in a similar vein, books and movie lists acted as a reference to enable players to immerse themselves in the genre. This gives those new to tabletop gaming a feel for the style of speech, the urban texture, and the hard-edged realities of a Cyberpunk world.
Afterall, this is what roleplaying is all about. However, this means there is a lot of homebrew content going around the net, both in terms of lore and vocabulary. For example, you can find Street Samurai in Cyberpunk 2020, and while there are similarities, these are not the same Street Samurai found in Shadowrun, but some use them interchangeably.
Based upon my experience, this is the current street slang list you should be familiar with.
Air Hypo: Bones McCoy, a compressed air hypodermic or Air hypo, a reference to Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy from Star Trek. is used on Sandra Dorsett, when she began to flatline during the quest “Breaking Through”
ACPAs: Assisted Combat Power Armor or simply Power Armor.
Agriplex: An agglomeration of farms with one central management complex. A modern-day capitalist collective farm.
Amped-Out: Fatigue after being under the influence of amphetamines and certain combat drugs.
Angel: Refers to a secret group of European solos. It is said that the Angels live in glittering towers in the Euro Crystal Palace at L-5, low Earth orbit. Their assignments are as elusive as their names. No company has yet to admit to hiring one of the Angels, or to having been one of their targets.
Apogee: The best. The greatest
Ay–Vee: Common slang for an aerodyne, an automobile–like flying car powered by ducted jet fans.
Afterlife is a bar that was converted from a mortuary. Separated into three parts the Antechamber, Crypt and Hades with Hades being for the most dangerous patrons.
Aliens: Derogatory grounder term for someone who lives in space aka the highriders.
Badge: Police or corporate security.
Bakuto: Gambler.
Benji: A robohound.
Black Ice: Countermeasure software which causes physical harm or death to an intruder.
Biomonitor: Considered essential by Solos, the Biomon, is mounted just below the skin of the forearm, and can provide information on variables such as pulse, respiration, brainwaves, blood sugar, temperature, and cholesterol levels. V uses her Biomon to check the status of Sandra Dorsett during the quest “Breaking Through”. V’s Biomon data panel showed the user’s name, ID, Age, Gender, Blood Type, Trauma Team Membership, GPS and lists the user’s medications.
Bhikkhu Monks: Bhikkhu literally means “beggar” or “one who lives by alms.
Borg or Cyborg: An individual who has underwent a full body replacement. Afterall metal is better than meat according to Adam Smasher.
Bonebrain Buffalo: derogatory term used for a member of the Animal gang.
Body Sculpting: The process of having the body totally re-moulded by vat-grown tissue and advanced plastic surgery
Body Bank: A storage facility for transplant organs. Many are illegal and actively recruit new merchandise
Bosozuki: a street samurai.
Bioware: Any biological enhancement or replacement
Booster: Any member of a gang that heavily uses cyberware, leather clothing and engages in random violence.
Boost is a nootropic, that increases intelligence, but users may develop full tolerance resulting in the drug no longer having an effect. Addicts will begin suffering screaming fits and hallucinations unless they get their fix.
Boryokudan: Literally, violence groups. Used by Japanese police to refer to Yakuza.
Braindance: Psycho-neural stimulator that creates a full sensory hallucination. Used for entertainment or to control violent prisoners.
Brain Potato: sometimes used to describe someone who is a braindance addict
Buttonhead: A person addicted to stimulating the pleasure centres through interface sockets or a braindance addict.
Blackwall: Netwatch, have done their best to ban Netrunners from large sections of the NET to keep the DataKrash from spreading, and one of these methods appears to be the Blackwall. Netwatch literally destroyed key NET nodes in the system and took others offline to protect everyone from AI anarchy.
Black Hole: the most expensive bar on Crystal Palace
Black Lace, an upgraded version of Dorph, imparts euphoria, adrenal rush and invulnerability to pain. Black Lace users become fearless, cold-blooded killing machines. Black Lace will significantly augment a user’s strength and cool, but it may cause someone to go cyberpsycho.
Cannibalism: Yes, some street punks eat each other.
Call girl: A female escort worker.
Char: Mood dampener which installs an inhuman sense of calm.
Chippin’ In: To buy cyberware for the first time. To cast your lot with a group. To connect with a machine. Also the name of a Samurai song.
Choomba also known as Chombatta, is Neo-Afro American slang for friend or family member.
CHOOH2: alcohol, as used in vehicle power plants. Most vehicles in Night City are fuelled by an advanced form of alcohol with a higher burning temperature than normal methanol.
CHOOH-head wild or undisciplined personnel or civilians
Chrome: Material used to spice up the appearance of something. Sexy features on a program, not needed for functionality but radiating style or a generic reference to cyberware.
Chromer is a heavy metal rock fan. Chromer gangs base their activities around their favourite rock bands, interpreting song lyrics as orders from their heroes. Most Chromatic rock gangs are into totally senseless, random acts of violence as a means of expression, such as the Steel Slaughter Slammers.
Chrome-Bangers: Derogatory term for the C-SWAT team or psychosquad.
Chromatic Rock: A type of heavy metal Characterized by heavy electronics, simple rhythms, and violent lyrics.
Collarboy is a white-collar worker or corporate employee.
Combat Zones are areas of urban decay in major cities, characterized by high crime rates, unmaintained streets and buildings, poor police coverage, high concentrations of homeless people, and frequent outbreaks of gang-related violence.
Collapse: tens of millions of United States citizens were displaced due to ruined infrastructure, environmental disaster, economic problems, plague, government neglect, criminal and terrorist activity.
Combat Drugs: Designer drugs used by militaries and corporations to enhance the capabilities of their forces. Examples include Prime, which narrows the subject’s focus and imbues a sense of ultimate calm, increasing battlefield awareness and reducing incidents of panic, and Timewarp, sharpens reflexes but at the cost of real damage as muscles are overextended.
CorpScrip: Megacorps often pay their employees in corpscrip, which can only be used in corp stores to ensure loyalty and control.
Cyberdeck: Hardware used to access cyberspace through a DNI link
Cybered Up: To get as much cyberware implanted as possible before going over the Edge.
Cyberpsychosis: form of serious mental illness characterized by homicidal acts, random violence and sociopathic behaviour. Brought on by acquiring too much implanted cyberware.
Crystal Jockey is a computer user, a netrunner.
CredChips use liquid crystal matrixes to store personal information, thumbprint, voice print, retina scan, SIN and bank account information.
Clap refers to a virus.
Cybersquads are police detachments specialized to handle cybernetically enhanced criminals. Often armed with vehicle-stopping weapons and armor. These groups have a variety of names, with the most commonly known one being C-SWAT an acronym for cybernetic special weapons and tactical squad and MAX-TAC (Maximum Force Tactical Division).
Cultists: Gangs organized along religious lines, often following one leader’s spiritual guidance. Many cult gangs are nihilist in nature, believing the world is beyond redemption.
Data Term: The Data Term is a street corner computer terminal, built into a heavily armoured concrete post. Data Terms have a direct link to a central Data Pool in their home city, and can provide hard copy “flimsy” maps of the area, information, news updates, phone numbers, current event listings, entertainment information, and shopping services.
Data Pool: Data Pools are information servers and exchange systems designed for open use within the limits of a city. Data Pools produce free, open content created through the collaborative efforts of a community of users.
DataKrash a pervasive, computer virus that created links between different bits of data stored on millions of computers.
Data Fortress is a computer that has been protected by digital encryptions and powerful antipersonnel programs such as I.C.E. to keep out hackers. I.C.E. is an acronym for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics.
Deckjockey an expert cyberdeck user, usually a specialist and covertly accessing and stealing from corporate databases
Dirt Girl or Dirt Boy used by the spaceborne to describe earth-born humans. Dirtsider is also used as a term for someone who rarely or never is in space.
Dock: To meet someone or to have intercourse
Dorphs are synthetic endorphins, a designer drug that increases healing powers, limits fatigue, and produces a rush like a second wind. They increase the user’s strength but reduce reflexes.
Dream Time: Jail time in braindance.
Edgerunner: Another term used to describe Cyberpunks. An Edgerunner is adept at using technology for his or her own ends, surfing the interface of anarchy and danger to survive.
Eddies are Eurodollars the most commonly accepted standard currency in the modern world. The Eurodollar originates from the Treaty of 1992 which established the European Economic Community. The common currency unit, the Eurodollar, was established, based on average value in gold of all currencies combined. Trapped in paranoid isolationism, the U.S. declined to enter and subsequently suffered an economic crash.
Exotics are bio sculpted humans with non-human elements. Almost anything is available if you have enough Eddies. With sophisticated Nano surgery, cloning, gene matching and grafting, specialist companies such as Biotechnica, could change a person’s appearance to almost any specification, cat woman, elf or your number one anime waifu.
Flatline: To kill. A dead person or thing.
Fixer: An arranger of deals or transactions. Usually illegal.
Frag: To kill, usually with explosives.
Forlorn Hope: founded by John “The Professor” Freeman and his wife Marianne, it’s a Night City bar for soldiers and solos.
Gang of Four: the FBI, CIA, NSA and DEA
Geisha: Japan’s professional female entertainers.
Going LEO means to make a trip to the Low Earth Orbit or one of the space stations such as Crystal Palace. This usually involves dealing with Orbital Air. The Orbital Air Space centre is a location that featured on a subway map, alongside several advertisements for “Sky is no Limit”.
Gonk is an idiot or fool.
Guardians: Often Cops cannot be trusted to do their job, so some citizens band together to guard their homes, thus creating a gang.
Handle: A nickname; a working name you are known by on the Street.
Hell of the Death of a Thousand Cuts: an infamous combat zone in Hong Kong
Highrider: Someone who lives or works in space, usually at Low Earth Orbit.
Hydro: Hydrogen fuel, used to power a sizable number of vehicles in the 2000s.
Hosho Kaisha: “Security Companies”. Hired muscle and rent-a-cops.
Hotdogger: A novice netrunner
Input: Girlfriend. Output: Boyfriend.
Jazz: developed under contract by the United States Air Force for combat pilots to increase reflexes. It failed miserably due to the permanent nerve damage it caused. Jazz hit the streets in a corporate play and ever since has been a mainstay of street gangs and desperate solos.
JAM: To hurt. To mess up. To have intercourse.
Jaina: roughly translates to “sweetheart.” It’s a term of endearment sometimes used for a person’s girlfriend, but Jackie uses it more like a diminutive phrase such as “babe”.
Joyboy and Joygirls are prostitutes
Juice: potent strength and speed enhancer
Juvies: Also known as Youth Gangs or YoGangs, have many themes, but all have one thing in common, most members are early teens or preteens.
Kereznikov: boosterware that increases reaction speed.
Keyboard: Street slang for a computer interface deck with manual keys or a terminal.
Kibble: Originally designed by Purina Foods for the South American relief effort. Kibble provides a full day’s supply of all the essential vitamin and mineral compounds, along with a minimal amount of complete proteins containing the nine amino acids necessary in the human diet. In other words, it’s the equivalent of dog food.
Kurumaku: denotes a behind-the-scenes fixer.
LeSade: used by sadomasochistic vampire gangs on their victims through their injector fangs. While a potent aphrodisiac, it scrambles pleasure-pain signals to the brain. A victim under the influence of LeSade becomes sexually aroused when receiving pain.
Linefoot: Nomad slang for anyone who isn’t a nomad.
LiveMetal: A form of highly advanced Borg technology.
Meatball: someone augmented with grafted muscle.
MegaCorp: A corporation whose reach extends around the globe. Most Megacorps have facilities and manpower equal to many small nations.
Metalhead: Term used to describe a denizen of the megacity who uses cyberware.
Mizu Shobai: “Water Business” or “Water Trades”, meaning nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and related businesses.
Mr. Ex a powerful stimulant which increases metabolic processes to such a level that the person may stay awake for almost a week. It is used primarily by busy Corporates and Netrunners.
Monkey: someone using ACPA who is not well trained to do so.
Nations: born from alliances of Tribes and can represent up to one million Nomads. Nations were born from necessity to help groups of Nomad tribes work together to bid for large construction projects.
NCPD: Night City Police Department
NCART: Night City Area Rapid Transit
Neuralware: Tiny coprocessing chips and nerve amplifiers that increase existing abilities.
Netrun: To interface with a cyberspace system and hack its programs and controls. Used also to refer to running the global Network until the advent of the Fourth Corporate War.
Netwatch: began in Europe as a private organization. Now they monitor and provide security on a global basis.
Netpig: a derogatory term referring to Netwatch. Netrunners have a variety of names for Netwatch including the Bogeymen, Chairjocks and Ice-weasels.
Ninjo Compassion or empathy. Often used with “giri” obligation to describe Japanese conflict between one’s duty and one’s feelings; a central theme in Japanese literature. Both are favourite terms of traditional Yakuza.
Nudie: A target without ACPA or exoskeletons
Ortillery: Space-based artillery, usually in the form of laser or kinetic slug-firing satellites.
PanzerFaust a martial art that Borgs can specialize in.
Pineapple: A grenade.
Playbeings are erotic exotics, described as turning a person into the master or mistress of the art of physical pleasure. This special package included top of the range Mr Studd or Midnight Lady implants, special chipware to overclock one’s libido, and tactile boosts for sensory overload. Biotechnia would force the person to sign a waiver indicating that the applicant wanting to become a Play Being absolves Biotechnica of all legal responsibility for any psychological aberrations or problems arising from the Play Being package.
Pranksters are gangs dedicated to practical jokes that have a dark side.
Prepack: meals that can be microwaved or self–heated for consumption. They still tend to be largely soy and grain–based “faux food”, but they are usually flavoured more effectively and may even have a few bits of real meat or veggies inside.
Puppets: Corporations, organized crime groups and even governments have been known to sponsor or form gangs, using them as weapons to point at enemies while maintaining plausible deniability.
Poser gangs are any group whose members all adopt a specific look, style or body sculpt, and usually emulate someone famous. It could be a movie star, a historical figure, or even fictional characters. Posers adopt the clone look for protection, identification and impact. Imagine being in a room with clones of your favourite anime character. Poser gangs include the Willow Sisterhood, a group of young women who are as deadly as they are beautiful. Their members sculpt themselves to resemble the most beautiful women from the past and present, fictional and real. Many Sisters are also mistresses or bodyguards to powerful Corporates and Fixers.
Punknaught: generic term for ugly jury-rigged urban combat vehicles welded together by gangs using any scrap they can find.
RABIDS: Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones, are AI “killer” programs designed to resemble the late Rache Bartmoss, created as his last proverbial middle finger to his Corporate enemies. Powerful, homicidal and ubiquitous, they began to infest the besieged Net during the Fourth Corporate War. At first, they attacked only known Bartmoss targets like Arasaka and EBM. But as time went on, the RABIDs evolved a murderous hatred of anyone they encountered in the Net. They also reproduced like sociopathic grasshoppers, creating a deadly pack of killer programs numbering in the hundreds of thousands, roving the Net looking for something to annihilate.
Ranyon: something old and overused
REO Meatwagon: Considered by some as the main Night City rival of Trauma Team International. REO apparently offer an implant that functions in a similar way to their trauma team counterparts and unsurprisingly their price plans are significantly cheaper but also less reliable.
Ripperdocs, such as Doctor Victor Vector, are specialists in engineering and medicine. They perform many off-licence and illegal procedures such as installing black market cyberware.
Rin Tin Tin: A robohound, perhaps a police K9.
Rockerboy: A musician or public figure who uses his or her content to make political or social statements. Rockerboys are not the same as “Rock Stars”, who are usually “owned” by recording mediacorps and are apolitical. The names origin comes from James “Rockerboy” Manson after he was killed in front of a live audience in 1997.
Ronin: A freelance assassin or mercenary.
Roller: Term used to describe a road nomad or other travelling indigent
Sandevistan: speedware which kicks in only when desired.
Samurai: A Corporate assassin or mercenary, hired to protect Corporation property or make strikes against other Corporate holdings. Also, the name of the most famous Rockerboy band in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, starring Johnny Silverhand and Kerry Eurodyne.
Sarakin: Salary man financiers, or more appropriately, loan sharks.
Screamsheets: One page of a newspaper or blog, custom populated with stories specifically chosen to fit a person’s inputted interests. Screamsheets keep advertising to a minimum.
SCOP: Single Cell Organic Proteins are tailored to fit into almost any food niche. There is hamburger and pineapple pizza SCOP for instance. It can, and does, look like any other food product.
SIN Single Identification Number. An ID number unique to each citizen. Many street people (nomads, derelicts) are said to be “SINless”, i.e. without a SIN. This makes them unknown (non-existent) to the system. It allows them to move about in society more freely than a “recorded” citizen, but also allows the enforcers of society (police and corp. security) to punish them without due process since, technically, they “do not exist”.
Shaikujin an “Honest Citizen”. A corporate employee.
Slammit On: To get violent; to attack someone without reason.
Slice n’ dice: A mono-filament cyberweapon, usually mounted in the tip of a finger, which is used as a garrotte or whip. It will cut through almost all organic material and most plastics.
Smash is a euphoric, providing a strength increase and is an alternative form of alcohol sold in cans. Its side effects include psychological addiction and the user may sink into catatonia or feel suicidal, making them a ripe target for some Booster looking for spare change.
Solo A mercenary who works the streets. A “for-hire” combat specialist. Used as bodyguards, assassins, and soldiers, individually or in groups.
Sonic Terrorist: Underground musicians that fight the status quo.
Speakeasy: designed as a truth serum, but has aphrodisiac side-effects. Speakeasy is now used in certain brothels of Night City to gain access to valued information carried by corporates and other individuals of interest. A powerful truth serum, it tends to function best when the subject is engaged in copulation, as it reacts to the hormonal imbalances found during orgasms.
Sucratine: as far as I am aware something sweet or sugary, but subject to change.
Static: Something that Nomads call those who live in cities.
Stuffit: To have intercourse or to forget about something.
SythCoke: or Snapcoke are synthetic versions of cocaine. Its side effects include paranoia and psychological addiction, while providing the user a minor increase in strength.
Threep: Slang term used to describe an obvious full-body cyborg. Derived from an effeminate robot character in a late 1990’s flat film.
Trauma Team: Hired, heavily-armed ambulance drivers who use aerodyne vehicles to rescue wounded patients who have signed up for the team’s medical services.
Trip 6: another way of saying triple six, the devil.
Wetwork: Assassination
Weefle: An inexperienced netrunner.
Wilson: Netrunner slang for someone considered stupid or crazy.
Yubitsume: The Yakuza ritual of slicing the joint off the little finger to atone for a mistake.
Zonedance: Dancing turned into a dominance game. The dancer tries to persuade, by charisma, talent, or violence, other dancers within their zone to conform to their movements. Challenging because other dancers are often listening to other music via cyber-audio. For more Cyberpunk 2077 Lore check out Kazuliski.