Statement from the Editors: This piece has been republished from The Red Compass. The original article can be found here.
At her nominee’s acceptance speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris declared her intent to chart a path “forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class, because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” This intent shows both an honest understanding of the nature of the U.S., and the crux of why voting for Harris is utterly opposed to any principled, long-term progressive strategy to erect a more democratic state in the bounds of what is now considered the U.S.
For most in the U.S., the middle class means little more than the average level of affluence: the “normal” unit of family defined by a lack of excess opulence or any ever-present risk of destitution. Harris herself evoked this aesthetic through her personal history: “The middle class is where I come from. My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means, yet we wanted for little. And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us and to be grateful for them.” Her professed aim to expand her history to the rest of the U.S. populace via an “opportunity economy” means emphasizing the implications of this view of the middle class: that those in poverty are failing despite the economic system, rather than because of it, and that those in the upper class are exceptional individuals who made exceptional use of the opportunities presented to them, rather than nepo-children who generate wealth through the poverty of others.
Every facet of the U.S.’s existence mirrors this logic of the middle class. We are called “Americans,” absorbing both continents into one spiritual center and making each non-White ethnic group a hyphenated variant of this title. Our corporate and military presence across the world is referred to as “global leadership” rather than empire, and the exceptional privileges derived from our imperial power are naturalized in the same manner that the popular view of the middle class naturalizes the merits of the bourgeoisie. “American exceptionalism” comes to rely on a worldview that makes U.S. dominance a natural consequence of reality, rather than an exception in any real sense of the word.
With the growth of poverty eroding the middle class and the slow destruction of U.S. global dominance heralded by defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the untenable gap between Americanism and reality is rearing its head, therefore prompting promises of state intervention to prop up the middle class from both Trump and Harris. These candidates’ policies have been forced to highlight the truth of the U.S. middle class: that its existence is a result of conscious political policy rather than the natural state of capitalist society. Contrary to the assertions of many leftwing intellectuals, the U.S. middle class is not a fabrication meant to obscure the divide between the U.S. bourgeoisie and proletariat, but a real economic phenomenon stemming back to the origins of the U.S. as a colony of White settlers escaping poverty in Europe via the theft of Indigenous land.
Economic classes are defined by their members’ relations with the means of production, and the arena of Manifest Destiny provided the conditions for a uniquely large petit bourgeoisie based in small land ownership, allowing for the mode of life evoked by Harris’s speech:
“When we speak of the small, land-owning farmer as the largest single element in settler society, it is important to see what this means. An example is Rebecca Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740 with an estate worth £81 (which places her well in the middle of the small-medium farmers). That sum represented the value of 200 acres of farmland, 31 head of cattle, 15 of sheep, 29 pigs, 1,463 lbs. of tobacco stored for market, 5 feather beds, 2 old guns, assorted furniture, tools, and kitchen utensils, and the contract of an 8-year-old indentured child servant. No wealth, no luxury, but a life with some property, food, shelter, and a cash crop for market.”
J. Sakai, Settlers
This condition of comfort without opulence offers an escape from the violence of traditional class conflict between a propertyless proletariat and a tight-knit bourgeoisie with a monopoly on state violence. Thinly-veiled in the picture of this colonist’s wealth is the trifecta of slavery, indentured servitude, and Indigenous genocide which permitted a wide petit bourgeoisie to develop and give the U.S. its unity and popular support for expansion. That we still have a large middle class in the U.S. is not a result of capitalist trends ceasing to apply to a U.S. which has nearly exhausted the loot of Manifest Destiny over more than two centuries, but a result of these forms of exploitation shifting and expanding to encompass the world and operate via modern, financial capitalism.
The threat of the Great Depression prompted state intervention in the capitalist economy, and with it, the U.S. turned towards a strategy of propping up its middle class via their entanglement in its financial institutions:
“Hoover’s administration instead implemented the Home Loan Bank System, which provided liquidity for banks affected by homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. A similar logic — of facilitating homeownership through government support of banks — was continued in the Roosevelt administration, in the form of the New Deal program Home Owners’ Loan Corporation … Promotion of homeownership was a strategic move, anticipating that workers who owned their homes would be more invested in the capitalist system, and less likely to overthrow it. By a similar logic, workers’ retirement plans have been entwined with the success of capitalist ventures. Pension plans, which guaranteed income for workers who put in enough hours, have vanished. In their place, we are left with 401(k)s and RRSPs, which shackle our hopes for a comfortable old age to the moods of the stock market and to the profits of the capitalists.”
Alice Malone, Concessions
This combination of state intervention and financial concessions to workers both kept the U.S. middle class afloat and brought their interests further into alignment with the success of U.S. imperialism, as the retirement plans of U.S. citizens become dependent on Western companies’ ability to remain profitable by keeping the wages of Global South workers low. The small ownership that defines the petit bourgeoisie is replaced by financial mimicry, as U.S. workers achieve middling affluence without actually owning anything:
“For both the example of homeownership policies and education policies, these initial relatively limited governmental forays into social concerns paved the way for bigger interventions. These bills and their successors resulted in real improvements in the lives of workers, but it’s crucial to note that these investments in areas such as education occurred through policy mechanisms like loans and were never cemented as permanent rights, as in socialist constitutions.”
Alice Malone, Concessions
This lack of true ownership allows us to more accurately refer to the U.S. middle class as a class of small shareholders, or petit actionnaires, rather than a petit bourgeoisie. This distinction makes the U.S. middle class more vulnerable to the crises of the capitalist economy, hence the remaining trauma of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it also allows the petit actionnaires to assert a greater obfuscation of class conflict in the U.S. Whereas land or business ownership easily signifies a member of the petit bourgeoisie, the financially-enabled breadth of the petit actionnaire class means that we now have Trump’s strategy for upholding the middle class including protecting the privileges of coal miners. An industry steeped in “blue collar” aesthetics and proletarian property relations became a real part of the U.S. middle class thanks to the breadth of the petit actionnaire class, despite the particularly tangible impacts of capitalist extraction on their communities:
“As everyone knows, the rampant stripmining is rapidly destroying the area’s simple road system, choking the streams with corrosive coal refuse, fouling the underground water supply, and generally causing more physical and ecological destruction than repeated bombings. Harry Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, says: ‘They’ve treated the region as if it were a colony. When they finish taking what they want from it, they’ll just let it go to hell.’
J. Sakai, Settlers
Why don’t the workers in this ripped-off ‘colony’ organize, seeing in a revolutionary change a way to keep the wealth for the community of their children’s generation? … The answer is that the majority of them welcome such exploitation, whatever the future price. Their community may have nothing, may be sliding back into an eventual future of undeveloped desolation, but right now those who have jobs are making ‘good bucks.’ The 5,000 coal miners have been earning around $30,000 per year, while the county’s per capita annual income is up to $7,000. (Written in 1983)”
That coal miners would continue to strive for the protection of their privileges despite the destructive impacts of their industry cannot be solely tied to greed. The inability to work for a holistic solution for their community’s impoverishment is a result of the petit actionnaire class itself. The category’s flexibility provides a boon for capitalists and a poison for its members, as the political combination that proletarian jobs usually encourage is offset by these workers’ dependence on the U.S. state and stock market’s ability to provide a middle class lifestyle. With the proletariat fractured by the dual forces of imperial, financial privilege and the long journey of manufacturing jobs to greater exploitation overseas, the only politically coherent class left — the bourgeoisie — takes the reigns of the petit actionnaires and leads them into marginal involvement in U.S. politics and petty negotiations for economic benefit, a pattern shared with the wider West:
“European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table … In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living.”
Walter Rodney, Fascism at Home and Colonialism Abroad
When Harris describes the strengthening of the U.S. middle class, she is actually describing the mechanism by which both the Republicans and Democrats keep mass politics in the U.S. tethered to their respective factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It is not a strengthening of democracy in North America, but the protracted removal of U.S. citizens from any sustained involvement in the political course of their society. For the majority of the U.S., political involvement has been reduced to bi-annual — if that — elections, where the populace selects leadership, but hardly ever asserts its mandate more than a selection between increasingly unpopular choices. The class conflict which gives proletarians a cohesive identity as an independent political force presents itself as an undesirable state of social failure to petit actionnaires who understand their affluence to rest in the security of U.S. empire. Therefore, Harris and Trump’s shared promise to restore unity appeals especially to the petit actionnaires disempowered by their reliance on bourgeois representation.
Yet the ability of the U.S. to maintain its petit actionnaires continually declines as the Global South’s economic sovereignty rises and wages within the U.S. subsequently stagnate or erode to maintain profitability. With the shrinking U.S. middle class comes increasingly “radical” political ventures, both in new parties like the Democratic Socialists of America and through new styles of politics within the main two bourgeois parties, i.e. Trump and his brand of populism. Neither of these routes offers a real break with the destruction of democratic and social rights in North America, because both are committed to the preservation of the middle class and the state apparatus which doggedly spurn class conflict. The common focus on a strong middle class and a unified, powerful U.S. on the global stage betrays the barren hand of cards available to Harris and Trump, who both struggle to convince the petit actionnaires of the “weirdness” or “radical agenda” of their opponent.
In other words, the logic of the petit actionnaire class means these would-be presidents must compete to present themselves as the inoffensive unifier that U.S. empire needs, but U.S. citizens at risk of poverty understand more and more that their position cannot be improved without drastic change. Hence, the bourgeois leadership embodied now by Trump and Harris moves towards agreement on those areas of policy which leave the capitalist system untouched while consolidating the empire’s White supremacist foundations, competing for a “tougher” image on border policy. With the feigned horror that the Democrats exhibited for Trump’s border rhetoric in 2016 fading into the mist, it’s no radical prediction that they will soon also echo the Republican calls for an invasion of Mexico.
For many leftwing North Americans, even what I’ve just predicted would not be enough to dissuade a vote for Harris. After all, we can already see many rationalizing the tacit support that a vote for Harris offers to her and Biden’s genocidal support for the Israeli war on Gaza. The logic goes that both Harris and Trump support Israel, so why not vote for the candidate who at least supports abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights as well? This logic is superficially valid. I adopted it myself as a vaguely-left liberal in the 2020 election, but the fact of the matter is that Biden’s election in 2020 has given us four years of journey back to the exact same conundrum. This result is not counter to the Democrats’ intentions, but a result of their strategies and the arena created by the dominance of the petit actionnaires in the U.S.
The Democrats know that a necessary slice of their electorate only votes for them due to the fact that they are not Trump on these democratic issues, and they would therefore be fools to actually address the threats to women’s rights and queer rights which give them this slice of support. The plethora of executive actions available to Biden for the protection of abortion largely went unused, and even in her DNC acceptance speech, Harris was careful to voice her support for abortion through the most passive means: “We trust women, and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” Given the impossibility of this outcome in a Congress defined by gridlock and with Republicans expected to gain seats, Harris is setting herself up to preside over another four years of democratic backslide, with the Democrats throwing up their hands and claiming to be bound by the Constitution. The reality is that despite the Constitution’s fundamental opposition to democratic freedoms, it avails the president with executive options that Harris will avoid not out of respect for the sacred law of slavers, but because packing the Supreme Court or establishing abortion clinics on federal land might attenuate fears of Republicans candidates while frightening centrist petit actionnaires into believing that the Democrats are threatening the U.S.’s precious unity.
The emptiness of Democratic support for abortion grew even greater with queer issues at the DNC, with trans people entirely absent from the prime-time speeches of the convention. This is a regression from trans Congress member Sarah McBride’s introduction at the 2016 DNC, a step backwards at a time where the Republican movement for a genocide of trans people is growing more explicit and bold. The same duplicitous rhetoric used by Democrats to excuse their inability to defend abortion will be applied to transgender rights, with the most notable accomplishments of Biden’s presidency on this front merely reaffirming existing legislation rather than pushing for new, desperately needed protections. While utterly unable to expand the fabric of democratic rights in the U.S., Democrats have shown themselves willing to fund the MAGA candidates furthest to the right, using fear to bolster their electoral chances at the long-term cost of legitimizing these candidates and growing their strength in the Republican Party.
At every step since 2020, the Democrats repeatedly show that voting for them for the sake of democratic rights simply does not work, regardless of their constant embroilment in the same genocidal imperialism as Republicans. The petit actionnaire class needs a renewed U.S. imperialism to survive without destroying the unity that gives the empire its lasting strength. The Democrats and Republicans collaborate to meet this goal, with Trump adopting Biden’s rhetoric on unity and Harris following the Republican’s rightward shift on the border and social issues. The DSA and other leftwing forces, in turn, tail the Democrats because the structure of the petit actionnaire class has left them without the independent political will to form a separate party, because the petit actionnaire class is existentially opposed to class conflict.
This is why the correct response to the 2024 election is neither candidate. Not because both are morally irretrievable, and not because refusing to vote will itself deliver the people’s democracy which we need. What we desperately need due to the class structure of the Global North is a proletarian political party which accepts the destruction of U.S. empire as a positive outcome and sees the defense of democratic rights as something which cannot be accomplished by a petit actionnaire class fundamentally dependent on bourgeois rule. When U.S. empire declines, the passivity which U.S. imperialism engenders in its citizens declines with it, and this trend must be the greatest motivator for North Americans to align with an anti-imperial party despite the material security offered by empire. The decline of queer rights and women’s rights is a natural consequence of imperial decay as the empire turns towards militarist escapades and internal regimentation to survive, and each vote for the Democrats saps energy which we must redirect towards building a political party capable of enforcing what they are unwilling to enact. If the Democrats passively accrue left wing support in 2024, the election’s farcical nature will be entirely the U.S. Left’s responsibility for our failure to capitalize on the lessons wrought in the past four years.
