POST ELECTION BLUES, A SONG OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
Greetings Comrades and Friends,
Today the world waits anxiously for the Trump nightmare to end, for things to get back to “normal.” Normal, a non-existent world, a nostalgia for a politics of bourgeois decorum where an ‘enlightened’ civics, ethics and morality are the idealized norm, not the exception. A world where incremental steps in a progressive direction advance democracy, social justice and peace. If only, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we could click the heels of our ruby slippers (the ballot) and we could wake up to the happy and loving faces of friends and family and all would be right, knowing not only that the wicked witch was dead but that it was all a dream.
Sadly, life is not a dream and the wicked witch is not dead. Trump might be gone, they might still be contesting the vote in a month and he may be back. Regardless, if he is in or out, the causes of social reaction and the reactionary fires he stoked will remain lit. He emboldened the right by 4 years in power and the prospect of an enduring regime by hook or by crook. Yet, today the masses of working and oppressed peoples, here and around the world, do not have a coherent theory, organization or program to defeat Trumpism, its causes, its army of street thugs, lawyers and politicians and judges and the real threat they represent. The last gasp of a dying beast, capitalist patriarchy, wounded and dangerous.
A Biden victory will not undo what has been unleashed as the backlash to the failure of neoliberalism, as administered by Obama/Biden from 2008-2016. Theirs is a bipartisan failure to address wave after wave of deeper and deeper economic crises. They have no solution because they will not attack their class masters. Not one word from Biden about the gutting of Dodd-Frank or the loss of Glass-Steagall! These would not be cure-all panaceas in any event, and Biden’s economics advisors led by Larry Summers accept no blame for 2008 or the hedge funds and megabanks who inflicted that on us. The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is a law, and it produces capitalist crises irrespective of whether we are living and dying in a pandemic.
Trumpism is more than the personae of the Donald and his ilk. Their narcissism, their psychological deficiencies, belligerence, twisted moral compass, disdain for ethics and civility, their racist, misogynistic hatred of specially oppressed and working class people, are just the most blatant presentations of the true face of our class enemy.
Some pundits and politicians hide it better but few are as capable as the real Donald Trump at whipping up racist, chauvinist, nationalist and xenophobic hatred. Few have ever been as blatant in their dog-whistling to racist and nationalist terrorists from the bully pulpit of the presidency. You won’t find another world leader so deranged as to understand the airborne transmission of the CoronaVirus yet ignore, deride and mock the public health implications. Yes, we know Bolsonaro comes close, but he’s not in the same class when it comes to the cynical retailing of what he knows to be a lie.
The Wall Street Elections
For these reasons and more, tens of millions of new, first time and lapsed voters have taken up the ballot in hope that this individual act, their one of many votes cast for the other capitalist party could open a path to undo the damage done in the last four years. Workers and oppressed peoples registered to vote, waited in lines, faced armed MAGA thugs, navigated multiple stumbling blocks designed to limit their right to vote, they marched to the mail boxes, drove miles to the drop boxes, waited in lines for days, hours on end and the best they hoped for was a return to “normalcy.” So we have to consider what is this normalcy?
The normal of Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, or Kennedy? Certainly not the normalcy of the Bushes, Reagan and Nixon. Maybe there is an unfounded nostalgia for those seemingly progressive years from FDR to Kennedy/Johnson with a tolerable eight year interval of the war hero Eisenhower? Under Obama’s normalcy the police were militarized and unleashed against both the Occupy and the early Black Lives Matter #BLM protests; the economic crisis was managed with austerities, wage cuts and wage freezes that were enforced on the workforce while the banksters and corporate vultures gorged themselves. Under Clinton’s normalcy policing was increased while the social safety net was shredded. Each of the previous regimes committed its share of international war crimes both overt and covert, all in the interest of the hegemony of American big capitals’ investments across the world. There is no idyllic past to return to and the youth and working class know this in their gut!
Democrats and Republicans both know that the majority of potential voters have no love for either party; they know it is not because of apathy that they do not regularly vote. And judging from their favored media outlets from FOX to CNN and MSNBC the “two parties” hope to and work to keep the broader population ignorant of the class nature of power and how the capitalist class, the 0.1% and not the populace, control the state and all the governmental institutions.
The non-voting majority looks at the ballot choices and see that no party on the ballot and Nobody anyone can vote for can actually end the economic crisis, that Nobody is going to house the homeless, feed the hungry, provide healthy and safe jobs for all, and not a one of them will ensure healthcare and quality education as a right. Nobody is going to close the 1000 military bases abroad and Nobody is going to dismantle the nuclear arsenal; folks see that Nobody has a real plan to end the climate crisis, restore the environment, protect species habitat on land, in the water or in the air. They all know that Nobody is coming to help!
Because there is no sizable Workers Party (revolutionary socialist or even reformist), the more refined and ‘friendly’ imperialists and capitalists, those who run the Democratic Party, count on the wretchedness of the Republicans to keep the working class and oppressed in their pocket. Via the trade union leadership and labor aristocracy and via a vast network of activist organizations and community leaders, NGO’s, CBO’s and houses of worship the unrepresented workers and oppressed are trapped year over year in the endless cycle of choosing the “lesser evil” for the hope of incremental reforms. Reforms, the Party leaders (the DNC & DLC) and their capitalist sponsors never intended to seriously defend and which they ultimately vacate and/or allow to be chipped away at in legislative bipartisan agreements or judicial and executive rulings and orders.
Yet hope being what it is, and the awareness of alternatives being as limited as they are, we are expecting a popular majority will support the other ruling class capitalist party, – the Democrats.
Yet there exists a creeping awareness that a popular majority does not choose the Presidency. People are looking at the fine print of the Constitution, people are learning that the Senate gives disproportional representation to the ruling capitalist class politicians from small population states, that the Presidency is chosen by electors, a body which is also disproportionately weighted and which is required to vote by inconsistent rules set by the various fifty state legislatures. And posing as the modern paragon of justice adjudicating the true meaning and intent and constitutionality of laws and executive actions is the Supreme Court, itself the spawn of the undemocratically seated Senate and President. This undemocratic complex is sold in civics class as the Checks and Balances system of government, the genius brainchild of our founding fathers. When awakening liberals or radicals note the lack of democracy in the set up the erudite conservatives, originalists, and capitalist pundits point out it was never intended to be a popular democracy, the original intent was a republic with “representative” democracy which excluded those without property, white skin or a penis. This is what all Americans are expected to swear by and defend. Even with all the progressive amendments expanding the franchise and citizenry, today’s amended constitution is the legacy of the 1787 document written to cement the rights of the Slavocracy to continue the enslavement of Black people, to count slaves as 3/5th of a person, bolstering and ensuring the slave states’ over-representation in the government.
This is the foundation of institutional racism that continues today in the United States. The bigotry, prejudice and race hatred that are manifested by individuals and rightist groups today are the consequence of the conjuncture between the economic uncertainty inherent in the age of capitalist decay and the legacy of the institutionalized capitalist power of a small layer of white men. These men rule and replicate racist consciousness with intermittent and qualified largess extended to white underclasses indoctrinated in white supremacy; with racialist theories they promoted uninterruptedly for four centuries. Some of which persists in the collective consciousness of the white population, the mainstream culture, the administrative superstructure of the capitalist class dictatorship called ‘the government,’ and especially in the structural foundations of the capitalist state, its prisons, armed forces and its militarized police, themselves the legacy of slave patrols. It’s the real “normal,” all 233 years of it, and we say not for us!
If Trump wins re-election, it will embolden the white-supremacists and fascists. But social reaction and fascism cannot be fought through bourgeois elections or the Democratic Party. Fascism is a plebian movement of the frenzied, ruined petty-bourgeoisie and even some backward sections of the working class and lumpens driven to reaction through capitalist crises and decay. Only the working class organized independently fighting to resolve the crises of capitalism through socialist revolution can provide the beacon of revolutionary hope to neutralize or win over the petty-bourgeoisie and the backward sections of the workers. The Democratic Party, itself a political party of reaction, offers no solutions to the economic, pandemic or climate crises.
No matter who wins this election, they will find the utility of fascist thugs when Capital feels a more pressing need of them. And we see Trumka and the labor tops saying they will not accept a coup, instead behaving in every way like they fear provoking the rightist gangs. Listening to them you would never guess the truth that fascism is the mortal danger to the existence of the working class. Whoever is President in the coming period, we need the police unions OUT OF our labor federations and we need Labor-Black-Brown Community Self-Defense Guards, the answer to the question ‘what will we do without police?’ Labor needs to mass mobilize to drive the fascists and white-supremacists from the streets, to crush them well before a mass organized fascist movement takes root.
Those Who Will Never Make It Out of the Donkey Stalls to the Winter Palace
Those socialist organizations calling for a vote for Biden and the Democrats try to justify their capitulation and opportunism by claiming it is merely a tactic to stop Trump. They deny this is extending political support to the Democratic Party of imperialism. One of the methods of reformist social democrats is to play all sides of the fence so that they can appeal to whomever their audience is at any given moment, yet still do enough left-talking to leave enough room to deny that they are crossing the class line. Supporting a political party of the enemy capitalist class has no more to do with a dialectical materialist analysis than justifications for crossing a picket line during a strike. In fact, it is the fight against working class independence and the subjective factor of history, a class conscious working class and a revolutionary workers party. Class collaboration, supporting the Democratic Party, is no more a ‘tactic’ in the hands of ostensible socialists than it is a tactic for the left-talking trade union bureaucrats. It is a betrayal of Marxism for the pragmatic “politics of the possible”.
Calling to place Biden and the Democratic Party into office is extending political support to a capitalist party, slick-talking denials aside. It is saying to the working class that there is a qualitative difference between Trump and the Democratic Party under the capitalist system and that a force for fighting social reaction and imperialism is the Democratic Party and elections rather than the independent mobilization of the working class in struggle. Revolutionary socialists recognize that the bourgeoisie has no progressive role to play anymore and that all sections of the capitalist ruling class only offer the descent into barbarism. The bourgeoisie offers no solutions and there are no shortcuts. Either the working class will rise to the fore and fulfill our revolutionary task which is the abolition of capitalism on a world scale or the future will be yet more destructive wars, fascism and climate catastrophe.
Some self proclaimed socialists and anarchists claim “we can walk and chew gum” at the same time. We can continue our Praxis while we spend a few minutes voting. Like Dimitrov argued in his article on the United Front voting for the capitalists now and again is just a tactic. And contrary to Zizek, it is not just like changing your shirt. Our criticism is not the few minutes when one crosses the class line to vote. Of course your articles and postings are more of a pre-occupation than a momentary lapse into class collaboration. The real question is how are workers to understand your supposed staunch commitment to the Marxist understanding that “only the working class can liberate itself” when your tactical retreat from political independence lasts for large portions of the election cycle or for the entire interregnum between elections. And what will the program of these militants be if the Senate is not flipped? Will they once again forestall the fight for the workers party as they campaign for the next round of senatorial elections?
Progressives, anarchists and liberals argue against workers’ independence in the elections using SCOTUS appointments as the last best excuse why we should just “hold our nose” while they vote for the “lesser evil”. Can liberalism pack the Court at all? Roosevelt couldn’t after winning an all-time landslide. Anarchists who forever tell workers they should not fall into the trap of building a workers party because it leads to a state power which in the hands of a workers party they equate to Stalinism, end up casting their votes and telling workers to vote for the Democrats. And presumably on the next day they return to their call to “Smash the State.” Except they don’t say that, nowadays. Neither regicide nor ‘smash the state’, whether out of Gandhian pacifism or fear of association with AntiFa in the mouths of the right. So much for their Praxis!
Furthermore, Trumpism has been cemented into place regardless of the vote. The REAL voting henceforth and for many, many years to come, will be done by Trump’s rightist Supreme Court judges, the law’s own elite “Boogaloo Bois and Girl.’ The Court’s powers thus enhanced, the electeds in “the peoples’ house” of Representatives will be reduced to spinning either the Court’s decisions, future fantasy projections for “after the war” or “after recovery” to take in the rubes, or a ‘resistance’ that is an acquiescence, keeping you off the streets and picket lines. Democrats’ past faith in the Supreme Court has boomeranged on them and they are looking at a helpless November should they need to defend the vote count! In fact, as events in Texas show, they can’t even defend their own campaign events against the rightist mob!
It’s the Economy Stupid!
The global crisis of capitalism leads inevitably toward inter-imperialist war!
Neither Q fantasies nor liberal promises offer you any better life or even any life. Capital will deliver new gadgets and electronic games more or less uninterruptedly for those who can buy them, but what they really have in store for you is depression and world war. The legal (!) requirement for hedge funds to pay staggering sums, even multiples of the price of every man-made object on the planet, when insured commodity or ‘securities’ prices fall means ways have to be found to collect what you thought was yours (depression) and whatever the Chinese and Russians have (war.) This is nation-state 101 in the age of a multipolar world dominated by competing imperialisms.
Two unipolar world views are popular and just as fatal: in South America, national Trotskyism, historic target fixation on U.S. imperialism and adaptation to Bolivarian “socialism” merge to support the view that Chinese capitalism is not imperialist but just a Wall Street plaything. Domestically we have opponents of the “red-brown alliance’ who see only a collision between “anti-imperialist” nations and the U.S.-led imperialist bloc. This means XI and Putin lead international “anti-imperialism” and leads some to defend Trump as a form of antiwar strategy!
What Should Workers and Oppressed People Do?
When Trump challenges the vote to disenfranchise the popular vote count how should socialists, trade unionists and communists respond? We see Labor Councils such as the MLK Labor and San Francisco Labor Council are calling for action to defend democracy, and in the fine print they call out their defense of the bosses Constitution as if it is a supra class document, one which stands above social divisions, a fair set of rules for the game of Monopoly Capitalism! Come on! Our class representatives should do better than that! If they are going to call us out into the streets for strikes and demonstrations it should not be to put the next imperialist in the Slave built White House! We like the idea of a November General Strike for MORE democratic rights, NOT FOR the installation of a bosses’ party candidate. None of the “remedies” proposed for post-January, 2021 will resolve the capitalist multi-crisis! Only a government of the workers and oppressed can, and yet even this concept is alien to the “left Democrats” behind this strike proposal.
The working class and oppressed in America today lack organization and a political program. The daily racist cop terror should be met with trained, disciplined and armed Labor/Black/Brown Self-Defense Guards, mass Labor-centered mobilizations, and Labor political strikes. Drive the cops and fascists from the streets! We fight for revolutionary integration and equality in all social spheres! Only socialist revolution can deliver actual Black power and liberation! To defeat racism comprehensively requires a whole class commitment, not a minimum program that reduces Black oppression to a sectoral or intersectional sidebar. Remember the victims and abolish the police!
Such effective action requires a political fight against the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy for the leadership of the workers movement. Trade union militants need to build class struggle caucuses to fight for the formal and informal leadership of the unions, to remove the labor-fakers who will not fight and replace them with a class struggle leadership. Unite in struggle with the oppressed Black, Brown and immigrant communities! Stand with Black and Brown self-defense organizations and build a United Front for the fighting workers’ labor party!
In the face of the mass unemployment, disappearing unemployment relief and looming evictions, unemployed councils tied to the trade union should be built.
Demand indefinite unemployment at full trade union prevailing rates with full benefits. Fight for jobs for all through spreading around the available work through a sliding scale of hours and wages. For a maximum 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For living wages at prevailing union rates with full employer-paid benefits and a sliding scale of prices and wages!
Housing is a right! No evictions! For rent strikes to stop evictions! For free quality housing for all! Organize the unorganized! We have a world to win, as the old Marxist slogan goes, and this now also means work for all in environmental remediation!
Workers need healthcare and women need reproductive rights! Nationalize the healthcare and insurance industries without compensation under workers control! For free quality healthcare for all through socialized medicine! For free abortion on demand along with full reproductive services! For women’s healthcare clinics in every community! For a Manhattan Project focus and budget to understand, prepare for and defeat infectious disease pandemics!
For equal pay for equal work and an end to all discrimination! Pass the ERA! For free 24-hour child care! Women’s equality will only be achieved through socialism!
End attacks on undocumented workers! Free all detained undocumented workers! Unite the families! End forced sterilizations! End the ICE deportation raids! Full employment and citizenship rights for all workers! End super-exploitation through working class solidarity across borders, we demand: Same work, same contract, same wages and working conditions! Open all the borders.
The Capitalists have no plan for safe reopening! The Republicans and Democrats have failed. For scientific approach to the pandemic that can only be guaranteed by the working class taking the lead.
Only democratic workers control of the socialized means of production and the centralized plan can ensure a safe and healthy opening of the economy, crush the pandemic and the causes of pandemics!
Cancel the Debt! For the Independence of Puerto Rico!
Close SOUTHCOM, AFRICOM and CENTCOM, disband NATO and SEATO. Abolish the National Defense Authorization Act. End military aid to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and all oppressive regimes. US forces and proxies out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Close foreign bases, dismantle the ballistic missile systems, disarm nuclear warheads, about face the Pacific Pivot. For enlisted workers in the military to form Service Persons Unions and a Come Home Now movement. Hands off Assange, Manning and Snowden and all whistleblowers!
NO MORE OF THE SAME! BREAK WITH THE DEMCOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES! BUILD THE FIGHTING WORKERS LABOR PARTY THAT USES CLASS STRUGGLE METHODS TO SECURE CLASS AND PLANET SURVIVAL!
FIGHT FOR WORKERS RULE! FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT BASED ON WORKERS COUNCILS AND A WORKERS MILITIA! EXPROPRIATE THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY! FOR A COLLECTIVIZED CENTRALLY-PLANNED, SOCIALIST ECONOMY UNDER WORKERS CONTROL FOR HUMAN NEEDS!
BUILD A NEW WORKERS INTERNATIONAL BASED ON THE METHOD AND PROGRAM OF THE 1938 TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM! FOR WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!
- Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA), 11/01/2020
