This statement has been adopted by the USU Editorial Board as its official position on the 2024 U.S. capitalist-imperialist election.

Yet another utterly foreseeable tragedy has come to the conclusion of its opening chapter. Capital, that monstrous creature of reaction, has blocked all forward progress, and the center cannot hold. For the next two months, the liberal establishment will be pointing fingers everywhere except at their own policies or lack thereof. The time has come to abandon the well-trod road of opportunism and economism, to shuck off the liberal chains that still bind you and blind you to the need for revolutionary action, to come together, and to build the movement that will destroy our common enemy once and for all.

Yes! It is time to come together on revolutionary lines. That means an actual assessment of the fallout, the wreckage, the ruin of the past century of political maneuvering and failed class struggle in the heart of the U.S. capitalist empire. The pretenses are gone, the veils rent asunder, and we must evaluate our position in the cold light of day. It will be unforgiving to the actual movement for progress and justice, which, at every turn, has betrayed its principles to fawn at the seat of power.

First, you will hear the liberals howling that democracy is dead because the American people are too stupid for democracy. “You’re voting against your interests!” they scream. But they haven’t taken even a moment to assess who actually did the voting and what those interests are. That’s the problem with vampires: they can’t look at themselves in the mirror.

No matter who won the election, we would be in a similar place today. We are watching the U.S. capitalist empire unravel before our very eyes. There is a huge swath of the imperial working class that sees the benefits of that empire as a right to which they are entitled, and there is no outlet for their economic fears to manifest. Why? The ruling class refuses to offer such an outlet. In other countries, it has always been the existence of a traitorous social-democratic party that provides the escape valve for this anxiety. When social-democratic capitalistic policies are unavailable, the desperate will turn to whichever option is open. That is, of course, the revanchist (that is, fighting for the recovery of lost territory or status) nativist drug of demagoguery.

Liberalism is dying, capitalism is contracting, and the capitalist empire is tottering. This is a scary time. But it is also our time. The only movement capable of progress is the Communist movement. The capitalist dreams of empire restored will only produce the utter exhaustion and destruction of the planet and organized society as we know it. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto: Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stand in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time has ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Who are the People?

Committed liberals make up only a small portion of the working people. Liberalism, particularly the milquetoast liberalism of this latter age of the capitalist empires, has a general tendency to attract the petit-bourgeois professional workers: lawyers, doctors, higher academics, etc. These are people firmly attached to the lifestyle made possible only through the worldwide exploitation of the international working classes and subject nations by the U.S. capitalist empire — by the existence of U.S. colonies and neo-colonies, debt traps, the IMF, etc. The great mass of liberal voters are less attached to these mechanisms, or attached through more attenuated means: cheap phones and cars, low-interest home loans, etc., and would be easier to peel off from the interests of the empire.

But a great number of people in the United States simply do not vote. Voter turnout information is still being collected, but the Washington Post is estimating that voter turnout is roughly 65% of the voting-eligible population. The total is estimated at 231 million people; this means that roughly 150 million people voted and 80.8 million did not. That is a massively disenfranchised population. This is less than the 67% turnout to “defeat Trumpism” in 2020, and far less than, for instance, the 81.8% turnout in Indonesia and 79.4% turnout in Sri Lanka this year.

The working class is divided between its settler components (the imperial proletariat and imperial petit-bourgeoisie), its comprador components, and its subject-national components. The settlers are those segments of the U.S. population that benefit from land-, goods-, and labor-theft. The subject-national segments are those from whom the land, goods, and labor are stolen, often under the color of “law.” Compradors are sections of the subject-national population that serve the interests of the big ruling bourgeoisie instead of their own nation. The victory of Trump represents the will of finance capital and its co-opting of the disenfranchised ranks of the settler, imperial working class. This should not be cause for despair on our part. The people mobilized by the big capitalists to re-elect Trump are either our enemies (labor aristocrats, compradors, etc.) or are people that our movement has failed to reach, but who will turn against the ruling class when they understand their true position.

The problem is, the liberal establishment is inevitably going to cast this as a failure of democracy. Never mind the fact that bourgeois democracy is a sham, that true democracy is not possible within our warped system. Put aside the warning given by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French socialist (“The USA could not choose the left: there wasn’t one. When there’s no more Left, there’s no limit on the Right. When there’s no fight over a program, the election becomes a casting call. The victory of Trump is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.”) Never mind all of that! The questions we must ask are these: who are the people? Can we trust the people?

We are Communists. The answer to our second question is emphatically yes. The working people did not create Trump. Certainly there are those sections of the U.S. imperial working class that gleefully voted for him. There are reactionary segments that will never be won to the side of progress and justice, of internationalism and tolerance, segments of the imperial working class that must be isolated and destroyed. However, they do not make up the entire U.S. working class. The election of Trump isn’t a failing of the people; it is a failing of the bourgeois state.

What Happened?

As we warned in March, the Democratic party has exhausted any progressive potential it may have had from its historic alliance with the imperial working class. The ruling class has successfully shut out any semblance of the Left from imperial politics. That has, in fact, been the purpose of the Democratic “coalition” (machine) since it was dreamed into existence during the Great Depression.

Every election year, progressives trapped in the Democratic Party or its wake ask themselves why they are told to “hold their noses and vote” while the Republican base is given everything they ask for. Why do the Democrats and Republicans invariably tack rightward? It’s not because the working class is inherently reactionary! It is because the property relations of this country are inherently reactionary. What do we mean by this?

The United States is a settler-garrison. The country is occupied territory, held by the presence of armed bands of police and paramilitaries. Oppressed nations are incorporated into the U.S. territory in the form of New Afrika, Puerto Rico, and the Indigenous nations, and their oppression is realized through extractive economics. Land is routinely and continuously stolen from the oppressed nations; money is taken from them; they are jailed and exploited; their property is stolen by the state, by banks, and by private citizens; they are subject to predatory lending practices. For instance, since 1950, 98% of Black-owned farmland has been appropriated by banks, agricorporations, and state governments. This isn’t idle academic chatter. This means that the basic relations of land and property ownership continuously reinforce the dominance of a single segment of society — the white ruling class.
The Democrats are left without room to maneuver in every election. The ruling class must see its profits preserved; they fund the Democratic and Republican parties. This means the Democrats are forbidden from offering meaningful economic concessions to the working class. They cannot support strong unions (remember, it was the current Democratic regime that broke the rail strike and supported treasonous labor agreements of the imperialist unions). They cannot offer anything except mealy-mouthed promises to, for instance, codify Roe (which they failed to do when they had the chance).

They cannot take meaningful steps to counteract the extreme fascist Supreme Court because if they took some kind of action outside of Washington norms, the people might expect them to provide some other kind of relief. The Democrats are tied to procedure, they are forced to shrug guilelessly and smile dumbly, as the warmonger Harris did at her concession speech. “Aw shucks, we lost. We gotta keep using the proper channels to challenge the Republicans, and just put our shoulders to the grindstone.” Had she said anything else, the people might have learned to expect aid from their politicians. The truth is, the Democrats have never been interested in helping the working people. They simply want their votes.

For the political class, for the Harrises and Cheneys, the elections feel like everything. This is the life and death game for them, when they’re in it. But it’s just that: a sport. U.S. politicians are primarily sports stars, performing in a controlled match against an opposing team. Ultimately, their pay doesn’t depend on winning the game, but rather on simply showing up and putting on a good show. When the game is over and the election is concluded, the owners of both teams get together for a drink. When the season ends, the players go off and have their own future.

Bourgeois politics is a show for our sake. It is a circus.

That’s what happened here. The electoral strategy of the Democratic Party — to chastise and cajole, to promise nothing else besides not being Trump, to demand loyalty in exchange for some vague hope of cheaper gas and grocery prices — failed. The game is over. The season is ending. The owners of both teams are toasting to each other and we, the sports fans, bemoan or celebrate the victory or loss of “our side.” Nothing was ever at stake. Harris would have allowed the eradication of trans and gay life in the South. Trump will do the same.

What Do We Do?

Class consciousness will rise in the hours and days to come. The wave will grow higher and higher as the reality of the election washes over the working classes. Every time they play this game, the ruling class tips a bit more of their hand. As the footing of the empire stumbles and its wealth depletes, the ruling class must be more and more obvious with their schemes. People can see what happened. They are ready to fight.

But we’ve left them nothing to fight with. As Communists, it is our job to provide weapons to our class, to fuse it together in a concerted effort against our true enemies. It is the Communist movement that has failed, not the people of the United States. But now we have the opportunity to build, and this election has provided us with the raw material to do it.

We must go into our communities and explain what happened to the shell-shocked people around us. We must make it clear who our enemies are. Now is the time that all the vampires will come out to feast, but in revealing themselves to us, they make themselves known. We must gather and prepare for them.

We recommend connecting with other Marxists and Marxist-Leninists in your immediate locality. All of the major Marxist organizations in the U.S. and Canada are hopelessly compromised in one way or another. Form a local study group. Prepare it to act. If you’re not sure how to start, take a look at our handbooks or reach out to us directly. Affiliate with Unity–Struggle–Unity Press and bring your local organization into the All-Empire Workers’ League.

Now is the time to build.

Soon it will be the time to fight.