Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org
As Marxists, we can never give support to outright bourgeois, imperialist parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. This is certainly true in the current US election to take place on November 5th, when the fascist-Republican Donald Trump squares off against the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Both parties represent different factions of the bourgeoisie, both pitch for support from different sections of the working class. The purpose being to chain those sections of the masses to thoroughly bourgeois politics, and in Trump’s case, to try to mobilise the most backward elements to try to bludgeon his way back to power irrespective of the popular vote of the US American people.
We seek to find a way to draw a class line in this election against the imperialist parties, who are up to their necks in support to Israel’s genocidal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people, which is now spreading genocidal Zionist terrorism and massacres of civilians throughout the West Asia/Middle East region. The Biden administration is also up to its neck in the US proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a new Cold War against Russia and China, non-imperialist adversaries that have put themselves at the head of a bloc of ex-colonial countries, workers states and former workers states resisting imperialist hegemony.
We call upon all socialists, anti-racists and class-conscious workers to vote for the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. Though there is much in the campaign of the PSL that represents left-liberal sentiment – in particular their material on Ukraine is weak – nevertheless by counterposing a socialist campaign to the two main bourgeois parties, they are drawing a class line in this election in an elemental manner. In quite a few places, the bourgeois parties, particularly the Democrats, are trying hard to marginalise them by keeping them off the ballot.
Such basic class politics is particularly crucial today, as US bourgeois politics has reached a stage of decay so deep that it seems likely that the outcome of this election could bring about something close to civil war, and the Trump/Republican side openly threatens both bourgeois and left-wing political opponents with imprisonment, violence, and the use of the US military to crush the so-called ‘enemy within’.
Trump can only move forward with this threat of a coup d’état and second American civil war, and this time go beyond his 2021 Beer Hall Putsch if Trumpism manages to divide the national repressive apparatus and the ‘deep state’: Pentagon, National Guard, CIA, FBI, making them bear the cost of war. Without this, Trump does not have the military strength and intelligence to even start a civil war or consistently blackmail the Democrats.
Trump’s rise to office for his first term from 2016 to 2020 was fuelled in large measure by popular disillusionment with neoliberal politics and economics, privatisation, deregulation and attacks on the living standards of the working class. The decline of US manufacturing industry, parallelling what happened in Britain and other places, was part of the neoliberal strategy of engineering the decline of the working class at home through the export of unionised, decent-paying jobs to lower wage countries in the Global Rest, including China. Over time, this undermined support from such unionised workers for the Democrats and produced Trumpism, which mobilised angry sections of increasingly impoverished, under-employed workers behind Trump’s call to ‘Make America Great Again’.
Many of Trump’s working-class supporters in 2016 were under the illusion that he was on their side against such things. His racism and anti-Muslim vitriol and abuses, and rampant support for Zionists (who provided him with many millions of dollars of funding), was used to fuel a nationalist protectionism and the illusion that his anti-immigration brutality and chauvinist hostility to China, his racist contempt for blacks and his hatred of the Black Lives Matter movement went hand-in-hand with a programme to revive US manufacturing, that this was the real concept behind ‘MAGA’ (“Make America Great Again”).
There is also the illusion that Trump was in some way anti-war, even that he was supported by Putin’s Russia, which has fuelled illusions among some anti-imperialist activists. The liberals “Russiagate” delusion was an effort to use the factional split in the US ruling class to further whip up war hysteria against Russia by casting Trump as a tool of the “all powerful Putin”. The Democrats represent the faction of the US ruling class who wanted to crush Russia first before moving onto war with China. It was also an act of projection to divert attention from Trump being fully backed by Zionist forces rather than Russia.
Trump was far from pro-worker: virtually the first thing he did when he took office in January 2017 was to institute a massive tax-cut, mainly for the very rich. His far-right appointments to the Supreme Court did what they were meant to do – they abolished a woman’s right to abortion on a federal level, giving every backward state the right to deny basic rights to women.
And far from being a peacemaker in power, one of his most virulent, warmongering actions was that in 2019 he tore up the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, that resulted in the removal of Cruise and Pershing Missiles from Europe, that in the1980s were a potent threat of nuclear first-strike against the USSR. His anti-Russian warmongering was of such intensity that his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was so outraged and frightened by his intensity, that he notoriously lost his temper and called Trump a ‘fucking moron’. Trump also personally ordered the murder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, a notorious act of war against Iran. The went together with Trump’s tearing up of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which is what he was paid to do by the Likudnik casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. He did much else for the Zionists – he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria. This laid the basis for overt US support to the current genocide – all such capitulations and favours to Israel then put the lobby in a stronger position over the next President to continue them, which Biden duly did.
And while there may be illusions about Trump supposedly being set to stop US support for Ukraine, it should be recalled that it was under Trump’s presidency that Zelensky was groomed as Jewish camouflage for the Nazi-dominated US puppet regime that has waged a proxy war against the people of the Donbass and Crimea on behalf of the US and NATO. In February 2022 this became a proxy war against Russia itself, as Russia intervened in the East of Ukraine to protect the people of the Donbass from a massive US-funded offensive that began 10 days before Putin finally kicked off the Special Military Operation.
Harris appears like a younger copy of Biden. Her early history as a reactionary District Attorney and then Attorney General in California put her on the same wing of the Democratic Party as Bill Clinton and Biden, with their ‘Effective Death Penalty’ Act that tried to out-Reagan the Republican Party themselves. In California she could not be as virulent as that, but she both professed to oppose, and enforced, the Death Penalty as Attorney General. She was notorious for seeking to keep imprisoned men, many of whom were black, in jail even beyond nominal release dates, to engage in prison work, which caused her to be strongly disliked among many black people, even now as she poses a champion of the rights of minorities against Trump’s overt racism. She has slightly distanced herself from Netanyahu’s most bloodthirsty actions during the current genocidal rampage against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, calling sporadically for ceasefires etc, but the murder of Hassan Nasrallah, the Israeli attempt to invade Lebanon, the recent Israeli attack on Iran, etc have had her leaping to attention, seeking the approval of the Lobby.
Harris is not a lesser evil in electoral terms. Judging by the opinion polls, she still has the edge in terms of the likely popular vote, but that is not always what decides US presidential elections. Rather, it is the fate of around 7 swing states that often decide, and if those go the opposite way to the popular vote, they can still provide the second placed candidate overall with enough votes in the state-by-state Electoral College to win the presidency, even against the popular vote. Both Trump in 2016, and George W Bush in 2000, won the presidency against the popular vote.
This is what Trump is hoping will happen again. It happened in 2016, and when it failed to happen again in 2020, he launched his ‘Beer Halll Putsch’ – the 6 Jan attack on the Capitol. It is highly likely that something similar will happen if Harris manages to win the popular vote, and some of the swing states become violently contested – there will likely be an attempt by Trump and his supporters to seize the presidency by forcibly seizing control of the Electoral College, hoping no doubt that his appointed Supreme Court judges will back him up. One factor against that is that the same judges have ruled that the President is effectively above the law, immune from prosecution “In his/Her official capacity”, and being as Trump is not the incumbent, the Biden-Harris administration could use that as a license to act ruthlessly in putting down a renewed Trump putsch. But that could in turn trigger the outbreak of civil war.
Though the workers movement has no interest in supporting either bourgeois candidate in this election, but rather an interest in supporting the independent PSL, nevertheless if there is an attempt to negate formal democracy, we do have a class interest in defeating that. So, there would be a principled ground, and class imperative, for a united front with Harris and the Democrats against such a Trump putsch. A defence of the right of the elected president to take office is in the interest of the working class as a matter of elementary self-defence, particularly as Trump has openly stated his intention to use the US military to suppress and take revenge against liberal and left-wing political opponents.
This is not a minor question – it may loom very large after 5th November. But at the same time, our interest is in the maximum class-based vote for the PSL.
