Your Bosses’ Parties are having an election! We’re Not!
50,000 anti-fascist workers confronted the mounted NYPD defending the German American Bund, 1939. Smash fascism in the egg!
Introduction
The ideologues of capital want you to believe the elections give working people a choice over their future, but in reality the 2024 U.S. election is the ruling class choosing who will administer the decline of the empire. They pulled Biden out because they don’t trust the erratic Trump to keep funding the war in Ukraine and sustain NATO.
The world situation is defined by the terminal crisis of capitalism and the inter-imperialist struggle to re-divide the world markets. The destruction of nature itself makes it impossible for the capitalist class to resolve the declining rate of profits and the rise of social reaction is one of their cost cutting strategies to control the masses who have nothing to lose but our chains. Climate catastrophe, economic collapse, genocide and inter-imperialist wars are inescapable except through socialist revolution.
Trump signals that the only legitimate outcome of the election is his coronation. MAGA and Quanon are mobilizing for their next insurrection. The workers’ task is self defense, not as a gift to one bourgeois party but as a first indispensable act of class-political independence. We need a Workers’ United Front for a Labor Party to build this self-defense force now!
Workers need to arm programmatically, organizationally and physically against fascist barbarism. This is at least as true in the U.S. as in any place you care to name and more urgent. We propose the Proletarian Military Policy made concrete (and explained below.) Not to defend the Democrats at all, but to lead the working class to power!
The current situation of heightened inter-imperialist collisions and the fact that capitalism has no way out of the economic crisis is akin to the period leading up to WWII. This is in fact the worst crisis in Capitalism’s 700+ year history as it devours nature condemning millions around the globe. Decades of negative balance of payments followed by an increasingly unfavorable balance of trade, the U.S. deindustrialized, leading to a service economy with little value production. Inevitably this meant resorting to greater deficits financed by debt the world market is now little inclined to buy!
Though the BRICS banks still do not count for a great force in the first world, de-dollarization is a real trend. Recognizing as more countries do that the worth of the dollar is determined by the trade in oil, the Yuan, based upon production of useful goods, looks more stable, even as it penetrates markets across the global south.
The cost of empire now has to be maintained by military means and this is now U.S. imperialism’s exclusive way of holding on to it. The U.S. ruling class asserts world dominance through proxy and regional wars. The workers’ movement needs to inspire the troops to revolt, to unionize and leave all the overseas bases! Publish all the secret treaties!
Only Labor can defeat the fascist threat!
The defeat fascism suffered in the 1940s was not ideological. For Capitalists, it turned out not to be to their tastes, and they made a bundle while the masses did the necessary dying by the millions. Capital never renounced fascism forever; now we see it gaining traction in Europe, West and South Asia. It’s an option again, with a program of ‘disaster capitalism,’ i.e., deletion of democratic rights, especially workers’ rights. The Trump right embraces these movements and Project 2025 is the U.S. ‘disaster capitalism’ program..
With a fascistic putsch staring us in the face, a putsch more in service of Project 2025 and secondarily the Trump-above-all-law cause, we see how the seizure promises a post- constitutional U.S. and will destroy your bourgeois democratic rights. All worker organizations will be crushed to dismantle all the gains won in class struggle over the last 150 years. Trotsky wondered out loud in 1938 whether even U.S. capitalism could afford democracy. Now the threat is back, more explicit this time and magnified many times!
Trump promises the evangelicals & kluxers this is the last time you’ll have to vote (for him) and after that he will “fix it.” Democrats and social democrats will tell you Trumpism is fascism and that you must depend on your vote alone to stop it. They expect you to have no more recollection of recent history than the last news cycle, indicating to the class conscious that the fate of the workers organizations is of slight importance to them!
Fascism and authoritarianism is capitalism fending off the workers and oppressed, whose daily struggles challenge the capitalist order. Strike waves that followed COVID threaten to get out of hand. In order for Capital to pull itself out of the crisis the workers and oppressed must be crushed and Trump touts Musk’s mass firing as exemplary. Charlottesville and January 6th were only his opening acts. To stop fascism workers must build class independent organs of struggle, beginning with Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards to face down the coming putsch!
Occupy, BLM, Red For Ed, the Palestine Solidarity movement and the post COVID strike wave and organizing drives do not yet threaten capitalist rule but the ruling class uses all opportunities to create division and stoke mass hysteria to accept authoritarian solutions because their system is close to paralysis. The courts are used to walk back decades of social reforms (workers rights, women’s rights, voting rights, LGBTQI rights), even as the Esquires continue to tell you to leave combating Trumpism to them!. Administrative agencies, EPA, OSHA etc are gutted by the Chevron decision, realizing some of the Project 2025 dreams THIS YEAR!
Without decisive working class leadership and an organized class-wide self-defense workers movement, fascism fills the vacuum, largely due to despair of the petty bourgeoisie who have surrendered wholesale to one of the neocon war parties, the favorite one of the labor bureaucracy. When their illusions in Harris burst, expect them to swing to the right. And the bureaucracy has yet to so much as mention the Nazis parading openly in the streets! Decisive worker leadership is required to acquaint the fascists’ heads with the pavement!
Republicans/Democrats: Enemies of the Working Class
Both the Republicans and the Democrats are enemies of the working class. They conduct the class war against labor and the oppressed by their own varied yet often intersecting means. The Republicans are unabashedly anti-labor union busters who for decades bashed any use of the term “working class”, resurrecting it today for their own demagogic advantage during the 2015 Trump campaign. Yet now the Republican thug Trump fawns over Musk’s penchant for mass firing to crush resistance. Yet even as anti-union Musk’s Tesla brazenly violated OSHA safety regulations at the former UAW Fremont plant the California Democratic establishment and Governor Newsom coddled him, only to have their affections rejected.
Musk’s AI comes back to kiss him on the ass
The Democrats wage class war against workers by more deceptive means. Presenting as a big tent party that unites big Wall Street capitalists, organized labor and oppressed people in FDR’s historic cross class popular front, they strive to maintain a posture as labor’s friend and champions of progress. When exposed for anti-worker policies that victimize the poor, smash unions, block civil rights, degrade the environment, and conduct inter-imperialist and neo-colonial wars and conduct covert wars they blame the base, chiding them as deplorables for drifting to the right and not voting blue in sufficient numbers. They unabashedly saddled generations to come with trillions of dollars of debt to profit the military industrial complex to sustain the empire to the detriment of all.
The Democrats are a corporate party just as the GOP. All one has to do is look at the capitalist donor list:
Who are the Biggest Organization Donors?
Which Party Receives More Corporate Donations?
The Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the 1947 anti-labor Taft-Hartley act which prohibits “jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns.”
During JFK’s “New Frontier” and LBJ’s “Great Society” from 1961-1969 the Democrats controlled all three branches of government yet did nothing to overturn Taft Hartley. Furthermore they controlled both houses of congress and the executive during the years 1949-51, 1977-81, 1993-95, 2009-11 and 2021-23 and avoided using their power to overturn Taft Hartley, codify a woman’s right to choose, pass the EFCA or the PRO act. The Equal Rights Amendment went down to defeat in 1975 when Democrat –controlled New York failed to ratify it, and this scant months after Labor saved N.Y. from bankruptcy! Governor Carey and Mayor Beame taking the credit, of course.
Every social gain benefiting labor, civil and human rights for minorities, women and LGBTQI people has been won by the mass movements in pitched battles for liberation fought out in the streets. Unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, workers safety, environmental protection, social security, voting rights and reproductive rights were all gains of escalating class struggles which exposed the twin capitalist parties as exploiters and oppressors. To rein in the masses reformers were floated as champions of the oppressed and limited, often toothless reforms were enacted to turn back the tide of radicalization. Thus the Democratic Party is known as the place mass movements go to die as exemplified over the last decades as Occupy folded up for Obama’s second campaign, the Sanders movement bent its knee before HRC, and BLM sent everyone home folding up shop for the Biden Campaign, etc.
Cementing the FDR popular front with limited reforms has been the stuff social-imperialism is made of. The Democrats started the Civil War, got us into WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, and sustained all the other wars both overt and covert rallying round the flag. The union movement, particularly its leadership has been stateified with any internationalist sentiment of the workers crushed by flag-waving leaders.This has been the characteristic of the Popular Front domestically since it was introduced by Stalinism internationally after Hitler rose to power unexpectedly. This cross-class alliance policy was supposed to be explicitly anti-fascist:its results were fascist victories, trading in the workers revolution for capitalist promises, giving Capital an unnecessary breather, inevitably leaving it free to opt for fascist rule, or for world war, or both.
Crumbs from the imperialist plunder and profit come home in the form of better living conditions for American workers (relative to workers of the global south). A labor aristocracy was trained to discard working class consciousness and internationalism, rewarding especially the highly skilled industrial, intellectual, technical workers and the labor bureaucracy themselves. The working class, we were admonished,, does not exist; we are all middle class–the happy consumer class. That is until the Republicans used linguistic Jiu Jitsu to reclaim working class terminology as their own during the Trump campaigns.
Despite the linguistic resurrection of the working class, the Harris/Walz campaign and the union leaders are dutifully reasserting the middle class mambo-jumbo to put a radicalizing working class back in line. Terminology has power and the “middle class” as a term erases class struggle and the exploitation of labor which is the foundation of and primary contradiction of capitalism.
Popular Front Path to Defeat
Trumpism has not once ever been and will not be defeated by electoralism! No electoralism will stop the decline of the American standard of living which is linked to the decline of US imperialism: neither does electoralism even propose to end America’s wars.
The vacuum of leadership means the working class does not attract allies or the unorganized. All petty-bourgeois politics plumps for electoralism despite their consistent failure to defeat or discourage Trumpism, even while we face his fascist putsch if he loses and Project 2025 whether he wins or not. Project 2025 will present itself and land hammer blows on us, whether Trump wins or not at some pace, with various two-party “horse trade” support. The Chevron decision foreshadows the policy THIS year.
You can take the bet this will happen because no revolutionary leadership galvanized the working class in self defense, though the class-collaborationists will have bogus explanations that will defy your disbelief.
Electoral orientation to the Democratic Popular front does nothing to reverse the decline in standard of living or reverse the slide from proxy wars toward WWIII, instead giving the entire political initiative to false “friends of labor.”
Fake socialists abandon internationalism in the lead up to the elections and expose themselves as social-imperialists. They consistently align with the war hawk wing, the most ‘rational’ imperialist wing, the wing most committed to expanding NATO and projecting US/EU power globally. That wing of the capitalist class prefers the Democratic Party (corporations and ultra rich also hedge, funding both sides) which is committed first and foremost to collecting return on the outbound Foreign Direct Investments. Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza were all in the main Democratic Party approved and run wars
Karl Marx said the working class must liberate itself. It cannot liberate itself tied to popular front politics where political initiative is by and for the bourgeoisie and its political parties. The popular front is an obstacle to building a socialist movement. The working class must be organized independently, under its own banner, with its own politics and methods of struggle, with its own political party. This is the only way social reaction and fascism can be overcome and social progress made.
The Way Forward
Let’s unite class-conscious workers and oppressed people to convene mass assemblies regionally and nationwide to discuss and decide how to fight the social reaction of the MAGA movement and fascist bands. It is not enough to know our enemies’ foot soldiers. We need and call for a Workers’ United Front for A Labor Party to build a class-wide labor-initiated, organized self defense militia, a nationwide formation of Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards, superior in training and discipline and equal to the task of smashing the fascist putsch, their political option and Capital’s lurid fascist dream.
The Proletarian Military Policy program requires workers defense guards action in the streets to break the rank and file military from the brass. This means fraternization with and organizing a workers’ antiwar movement among the troops of all the imperialist nations and for international strikes to stop the war with a general revolt. Revolutionary workers agitate for the troops to refuse orders to attack the masses and instead advocate they arm and train the mass pickets, leading to Labor-led, Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards to fight the class war against our own capitalist class here at home!
To tolerate no fascist violence or its mushrooming into their civil war dream of reaction we say ORGANIZE ENLISTED Service Members’ Unions! Bring the troops home and Union Sisters and Brothers in uniform will refuse to fight Capital’s racketeering wars!
The ruling class and their fascist bands are organized for class war. Workers! Wage the class war through the building of a fighting Workers/Labor Party providing the necessary leadership that can mobilize and organize united struggle against capitalism in terminal crisis. Fight for socialist revolution!
“The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader (ed: emphasis added). If the communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat …”
– Leon Trotsky (The Turn in the Communist International and the German Situation, 1930)
