Paul Jay is the guest on The Barricade, a news outlet set up by a group of left-oriented activists from around Eastern Europe – Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia, and Serbia. Paul was asked to provide background on the events in D.C. on Jan 6th.

Transcript edited for clarity

Maria Cernat

Welcome, friends. Welcome on "The Barricade." This is Maria tonight, and as usual, we have with us Boyan Stanislavski, the co-host of our show. We also invited a very special guest, renowned journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay. He agreed to come to our show to talk initially about pandemics. However, tonight he'll talk about the events, the extraordinary events taking place in Washington on Jan. 6, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building and made us change our perspective. And the first part of our show will be dedicated to the analysis of what happened on Jan. 6.

I will ask Paul to give us a historical and broader perspective on the events for us to understand what led to the extraordinary things taking place there.

Paul Jay

(ED: there is an audio drop out at this point. What's missing is a few sentences from Paul on the process of financialization.)

You have industrialization and you have a need for enormous amounts of capital to build great, big factories with thousands of workers, thousands of machines.

Banking takes on a different kind of role, a more dominant role, and this reached its peak, you could say its first peak, in the 1920s, when everybody's encouraged to buy stocks. The banks are selling stocks. The banks are loaning money for people to buy stocks. You could buy $100 of stock with $1 down and borrow the other $99. 

So by 1929, 1930, it goes completely out of whack. And you have one of the great triggers of the Great Depression of 1929, 1930.

So this is part of the global crisis of capitalism throughout the 1930s. And capitalism really has two ways to go: towards fascism and/or towards eventually by 1932 you have in the United States what Roosevelt did, the New Deal, and you have a compromise between the elites and the working class. So either a vicious suppression of workers, which is what most of Europe supported, and a big fight in the United States over whether to go the route of fascism, as it was in Europe, or what FDR was pushing, which is that the United States could afford and should have concessions, as is called the New Deal. And that's where the United States went, so that these kinds of pro-fascist forces have been in the U.S. for a long time.

I was just saying before we got on camera, you really in many ways can trace this right back to the American Civil War where the Confederacy fights to defend the system of slavery. One of the critical parts of the Civil War is that white workers, poor white workers, poor white farmers, go and join the army and fight for the Confederacy against the North in defense of slavery. Even though these poor white workers economically benefited very little from slavery, what the white ideology of white supremacy was, was to give these white workers the feeling, well, at least we're not black, you know. At least we're not slaves, which was something not to be a slave, although in truth, they probably, in terms of the real economic interest, had more in common with the slaves than they did with the slave owners.

But this ideology, that of a section of the white working class, feeling at least superior to blacks, gave them something.