We are watching the Democratic Party, that rickety assemblage cobbled together by its ruling class engineers, finally shiver to pieces. The political horizon of the Democratic Party has been totally exhausted. Its infertile soil has put forth the aging, incompetent, imperialist Joseph Robinette Biden to confront his ruling class brother, Donald Trump. We are all witnesses to the decrepitude of the imperial state and its avatar, the corpse-president. The Democratic technicians, working furiously behind the scenes, know this to be true. They’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince their leadership to regenerate the old party alliance between the labor bureaucrats, Black bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, and the other collaborationist “stakeholders” that represented the backstop of the political strata against the advent of real progressive politics.
The historical position of the Democratic Party has been to serve as the brake on the one-way ratchet of U.S. politics. Republicans move the dial to the right, the Democrats stop any backsliding to the left, and little by little the window of the possible lurches into the burning hellscape where we find ourselves today. The Democrats are actually paralyzed by their class position; they cannot take even the most moderate actions in their own self-defense, because to show the capacity to effect change would open the floodgates of demands from their so-called base. In reality, the Democrats don’t represent the interests of the working people of any stripe; they were, are, and remain one wing of the business party. They are the wing that, during the 20th century, sought to consolidate the members of the ruling class with those members of the bourgeoisie subject to any social oppression — all while leaving the economic oppression that underlies those social oppressions in place.
As the party runs down and its supporting coalition collapses, so does the support the Democrats generally garner among the big bourgeoisie. George Clooney, who hosted the single largest fundraiser ever held for a Democrat and raised $28 million for Biden on June 20 of this year, just published an op-ed in the CIA’s paper of choice, the New York Times, calling for Biden to stand down. This level of turmoil at the upper echelons of the party, between donors and the party’s leader, Biden (when a Democrat is in the White House, they control the Democratic National Committee), merely demonstrates a truth that we have all known: the rot of the party is so great, that even its own fiercest exponents smell it.
In practice, this means that Donald Trump is already the victor of the 2024 presidential elections and the entire state apparatus will now pass into the hands of the rabid racists on the far right of the capitalist-imperialist spectrum. This is actually the preferred position of the Democrats and part of the double-game they play while holding the working class hostage with the threat of hostile Republican victories. While the Republicans are ascending, the Democrats can fundraise off of the latest open provocation from the right.
Worst of all, the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the resulting media blitz, the photographs of the bloodied ear and the defiant fists, mean that the party technicians attempting to boot Biden have lost their internal battle. The ruling class has informed the rest of the party and its apparatus that the time has come to “keep your powder dry,” and save the push against the Republicans for after Trump has been elected, for 2028. This means the Democrats will be forced to field a dying octogenarian against the invulnerable anti-politics Trump show and his Nazi support machine. The question of the election has now been made practically unimportant, because it is a foregone conclusion. The ruling class has chosen Trump.
Beyond fundraising, the Democrats generally benefit from being the off-footed party because they are unable to offer anything to the people when they are governing. Thus, while they are out of power, they are free with their promises. They will say anything during their out-of-power hiatus. Cancel medical debt; direct payments to working class people during the pandemic; close Guantanamo Bay and stop the war on terror; codify Roe v. Wade; the list of promises never delivered upon goes on and on. This is a ploy to position themselves as the leaders of a valiant resistance against Republican depredation. They wave the flag of progressivism as soon as their stay in office ends; when it comes time to take up appointments, they fold the flag of progressivism again and put it in a drawer. They then soberly tell their constituents (the dupes they’re trying to pacify) that it wouldn’t be pragmatic to enact any of the reforms they’ve promised. They give grim speeches about sacrifice and the nature of politics in a democracy, and the adult and reasonable thing to do, which is to slaughter the interests of the working class on the altar of Moloch.
For years leading up to this moment — half a century or more — we Communists have been too weak to push the Democrats out of the way and wave the flag that would never be put in the drawer. Now, on the eve of the second triumph of Trump, we are strong enough to stand our ground and lead the resistance to the fascists from the front. The first Trump presidency created the conditions of 2024; the 2020 June Rebellion in the wake of George Floyd sparked more class consciousness. The genocide in Palestine has further fueled the creation of new organizations or galvanized Marxists and spurred them into fresher action. Primary organizations are more solid now than they have been, more prepared to act, and the masses of the working people are at a higher resting state of class consciousness. Dissatisfaction with the state of the empire has never been greater. Now is the time for the red flag to advance.
The Democrats have been doing a marvelous job of discrediting themselves for us, but we must help them into the grave. That is, we must consistently and credibly thoroughly expose them as worse than useless; as hostile to the working classes, as warmongers, as genocidaires, and as racists. Only when their position has been completely debunked among the working people can we raise the red flag and march forward.
Then, we must advocate for the only resistance that can weather the storm of active, crisis fascism: Communism. Communism must become the name of the resistance against Trump and his Nazi cabinet. Resistance must be red.
This doesn’t mean underground terror acts, but rather the establishment of community self-defense networks among the nationally oppressed, copwatch schemes, red aid stations, unemployment councils, tenants councils, and all the other means of the Communist attack on the authority of the enemy state. We must at the same time spark or crystallize primary organizations in the workplaces of the working class that can coordinate actions, disseminate literature, and raise class consciousness. This is our historic task. If we succeed in denouncing the false resistance of the Democrats and in associating the advance of the red flag with the advance of the working class, we will succeed in establishing the preconditions for the emergence of the vanguard party.
Rock on.