Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

As the Evictions Loom, the Heroes Act stalls and CORONA spikes, petty-bourgeois politics insists on “progressive” electoral fantasies! We explode them.

In the first Presidential debate Trump disparaged Antifa, which is no surprise, but he also associated the entire ‘left’ with Antifa; with the intention of putting Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden in the same camp as those he claims are terrorizing the streets.  Trump is mobilizing rightist scum and cops to intimidate voters, while he prepares to challenge millions of ballots of non-white populations in “swing” states. We see no truly serious mass anti-fascist organizing to oppose Trump’s strategems. The Democrats never will. Their first definition, we have said and here repeat, is partnering with the “other” party, their friends across the aisle, in managing the dictatorship of the capitalist class. To vote for them is to validate this setup.

Fascism is the mortal enemy of the working class. For the capitalist class it is an option. A matter of tastes said Stalin’s pet boy Molotov in 1939, as the misleadership of the world’s worker masses slid helplessly toward world war. 

Of course, revolutionary workers who identify as Anti-Fascist want nothing to do with Pelosi and Biden  (we want to scrape them from our boots as just another pile of dog droppings accidentally stepped in), but the likes of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), Jacobin, the Communist Party (CPUSA), Oakland Socialist Blog, etc. just keep stepping in it. The real task is to win the vanguard elements away from their incessant excuse making and class collaboration treadmill and to the task of fighting for the political independence of the working class.  Every four years we hear, “this is the most important election of the epoch, we have to make a tactical choice,”  by one or another of the variety of  sects falling prey to petty bourgeois impotence. This year the list is almost all-inclusive!

The CPUSA sleaze their way around their capitulation: 

“…But for that to happen, it’s got to be organized and connected to the election campaign. Trump and the GOP have to be defeated in November because McConnell’s Senate is now blocking everything.” – Joe Sims, Co-Chair of the CPUSA

The CPUSA goes on to try to sell political support for the Democratic Party of imperialism as some type of struggle against fascism:  

“As the Communist Party’s Political Action Commission states, “The 2020 elections aren’t about getting Biden elected as president. This is mainly about defeating a right-wing agenda in the United States.””

This is nothing but a call for class collaboration, which the CPUSA has been engaged in for decades (longer than most of us have been alive.)  For all practical purposes they have been an appendage of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the political arguments of the CPUSA on the 2020 elections are reflected by many other ostensible socialists. 

History teaches us that facism and social reaction will not be defeated through the ballot box, but through the mobilization of the working class and oppressed on the streets in a fight against the capitalist system.

We take them at their word, the CPUSA’s published line, even though Nan Scott on Labor History Facebook page and Alan Maki on SDS and 1960s  page are both calling for a labor party. Are they speaking out of both sides of their mouths?  One for the activists so they do not alienate their liberal friends who they walk to the polls and one for the militants who actually read Lenin. Are there even any CP candidates anywhere? 

What we are witnessing on the left today is a repeat of the Dimitrov line, a zig to the right without a Stalin to tell them to zag to the left. The descent into Menshevism…an amazing alliance in retreat from their former Stalinophobia, as the LRP and other 3rd camp types campaign for Democrats along the same line as the CP, RCP,  and anarcho-Democrats. This is another retreat from the fight for an independent workers party that identifies the true nature of the class forces in play. This is another fabrication of a “progressive” wing of the Capitalist Class which today they find around Biden. Biden whose historic role as a center imperialist is made light of  by his friends on the left in the run up to the elections.  

Dialectics, they tell us, requires a more nuanced response to the election. The workers we are told should make a tactical alliance with a wing of the capitalist class centered around Biden, regardless of their actual program, and engage  in an all out effort to defeat the main threat to democracy, today- i.e. Trump.

This is the re-packaging of the illusion that democracy actually exists in nation states which historical materialists define as bourgeois democratic. Historical materialism shows there is no actual democracy in the capitalist state. There is only democracy for the capitalist class. The legacy of the great compromises of the Northern merchant class and the Slavocracy in the US Constitution are the electoral college, the Senate and the Supreme Court. 

With capitalism reeling from economic and pandemic crises, with hundreds of thousands of workers and youth marching for Black rights and against racist cop terror, with workers strikes breaking out and with workers and youth becoming disillusioned with the Democrats and  interested in socialism, the Democratic Party “socialists” look not to the working class, but to a tactical alliance with a supposedly “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie.  It is the job of actual socialists to address the immediate felt needs of the masses and build a class-independant, comprehensive programmatic expression of the revolutionary historical role of the one productive social class. This will either be the fighting workers’ labor party, or a revolutionary workers’ party on Bolshevik lines. History, the actions of flesh and blood militants will decide which. In either case, this will be formed as a component section of a worldwide revolutionary socialist party, a new International.

NGO fed and Democrat led illusions, in legislative and judicial reforms, are the result we see in the mass movements of the work of the back-steppers running from the communist program and trying to hide in the marsh!

Our role in the present is to break the illusions in the Democrats while the rightward moving “socialists” are reinforcing these illusions, even as the rightward drive is cemented by the Democrats’ nomination of a former DA and Attorney General. As the remaining habitability time of the planet wanes, the petty-bourgeois class opts for wasting it with their illusions OR in last ditch defence of the capitalist order, swelling the ranks of the fascists.  

When you vote for Biden your vote of approval stands for:

1. Continuing role of US imperialist forces in the Middle East. Democrats are the historical war party. More confrontations with the Russia/China bloc.
2. Return to the previous anti-Latinx, anti-Muslim  immigrant policy of mass expulsion in place of the Trump policy of cruelty. Out of sight/out of mind great deporter Obama-ism.
3. Continuation of the isolation of Cuba, the coup attempts in Venezuela, the support of  murderous regime in Honduras and the Media Luna fascists in Bolivia, who murder the miners and indiginous.  
4. Continuing recognition of the right of Israel to occupy historic Palestine from the River to the Sea and to maintain recognition of Jerusalem as its capital city.
5. Continuation of the militarization of local police departments and the use of militarized police to suppress  the masses in the streets as in Oakland, Ferguson, Portland, Chicago, both under the Obama/Biden regimes and the Trump/Pence regime.
6. Keeping the Guantanamo  military prison open.
7. Continuation of the persecution & prosecution of Assange, Manning, Snowden, whistleblowers and journalists.
8. Continuation of favored nation alliance with the bloody Saudi Monarchy and support of its war on Yemen.
9. Support for the for profit health care system and Big Pharma and continued opposition to socialized medicine in any form. 
10. Opposition to even the most reformist Green New Deal, let alone provide an actual solution to the Climate Crisis.
11. Continued faith in the banksters and big capitalists of Wall Street to run the economy, with the big fraud of greater wealth distribution completely at odds with Biden’s hedge fund apologists led by Larry Summers, his economics advisor.
12.  Maintenance of the Taft Hartley Act, long ago denounced even by Truman as  a “slave labor law.” Biden says he wishes to repeal sections of it, but absent pressure from AFL-CIO tops, it’s a pose. We didn’t get Obama to ‘walk in Labor’s shoes’ and we didn’t get the Employee Free Choice Act either, and we won’t get the PRO Act (Protect the Right to Organize Act) without the giant class battles the petty-bourgeoisie abhors.
13. Austerity and the 40 hour workweek. His eleven page pitch to strengthen unions still does NOT support legalizing solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts, so we get no PRO Act. 

The real face of the Democrats was displayed this week in California when “progressive” Governor Newsom vetoed a Domestic workers’ rights bill  passed (SB 1257), thereby pleasing the bluebloods and nouveau riche too. He also vetoed the right of the unemployed to return to their former jobs as “unaffordable,” a gift to the Chamber of Commerce. This is the supposed “progressive” wing of bourgeois politics. Don’t go for it!