The haute bourgeoisie, i.e., the billionaire class, the big finance capitalists, have lately taken a heel turn towards transphobia, racism, and general reaction. Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos are the face of this movement. The corporate powers which make up the flesh and blood of the U.S. empire, threatened by anti-trust breakups of their monopolies, have now (in a transparent effort to kiss Trump’s ass) begun to cast off the friendly DEI mask they used to wear. Transphobia is now specifically and explicitly allowed on Facebook and its subsidiary platforms.

State after state is striking down trans protections, banning our healthcare, banning our public existence, banning speech advocating on our behalf. It is a fervent frenzy of fascistic reaction against our existence. The reactionaries, largely from the privileged middle class, call us child predators for the crime of standing up to protect trans children. They cheer when trans kids are murdered. They intend to push us back into the margins of society, out of employment, out of our apartments, to rot on the streets. They intend to murder us through homelessness, prostitution, suicide, gay bashing, imprisonment, rape. We will call this what it is: a systematic targeted campaign of extermination. This is genocide. Trans liberation activists have been warning us of this for years. 

When I chose to transition in November of 2023, I made that choice with the full conscious knowledge that this was on its way. In fact, I made that choice in part because I knew this was on the way. I have studied Marxist theory for my entire adult life, I’ve internalized its methods of dialectical and historical materialism, the methods of scientific socialism (the study of the development of human society). When I finally worked up the courage to admit to myself that I am a woman, I knew in that moment what this meant for me — transition meant discarding the privileges of the oppressor class and openly siding with the oppressed. I would no longer belong to the class of men and of cisgender people. I would be so much more vulnerable to the violence of society. I would experience hardship, suffering, perhaps death. I accept this eagerly. Trans children suffering under this regime need people like me to look up to and to advocate for them, and our history has shown us over and over that liberation only comes through struggle.

Many of us did not see this wave of transphobic reaction coming. It was unexpected and inexplicable, and so many of us are terrified. We’ve seen what they do to those who resist. We watched 15 months of live-streamed systematic industrial genocide against the Palestinians because they dared to stand up to oppression. 

But Palestinians know the truth of resistance: it is the only path for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity. They chose the path of resistance because the only alternative is deliberate submission to slow extermination. I will not submit!

What did the liberal trans rights movement bring us? Was all that effort wasted? No, it brought us consciousness. More of us are now more conscious of the conditions of our oppression than ever. Trans people are no longer a tiny minority, we are now a distinctive class. We have consciousness. We have community. We can take action.

The age of liberalism is over. The era of “trans rights” is over. The days of “tolerance,” “inclusivity,” corporate “diversity” are gone. And of course this was going to happen! We’ve been hearing all our lives “the middle class is shrinking,” and what did we expect? That cispatriarchy, our oppressors, would allow themselves to be squeezed out of their privilege alongside us? Did we expect we could remain among their ranks so long as we swore obedience to the empire, followed all the rules, obeyed and submitted? That’s exactly what we did when we lived and died in the closet, and that was so much more comfortable for them. Of course they want us to go back. And more will follow. We are only among the first to be subject to their rollback of imperial privileges. 

I refuse to go back! Moreover, I refuse to play by their rules any longer. I refuse to beg and scrape for “rights” ever again, I refuse to “debate” the merits of my existence, I refuse to allow their sense of entitlement to dictate the way I live my life and express my soul. I refuse to justify my body to their regime of death! 

It is clearer than ever that we can never attain liberation by appealing to the morality of our oppressors. The moment their comfort is threatened they’re happy to feed us to the machine of destruction that guards their lifestyle. Our struggle lies only with those who resist this global order of death. Our enemy is not merely one or another particular individual, and our enemy is not overseas! Our enemy is the system that empowers bigotry, reaction, and oppression. The system that devours the environment and humanity to feed its mindless accumulative drive. Our enemy is the international system of imperialist finance capital, with its heart in New York City and what passes for its brain in Washington D.C. Our liberation can only be attained by its overthrow! Our friends are all those who stand against the imperialist system, our enemies are all those who stand with it. 

If our friends don’t yet see us as their friends, it is because we have yet to build that relationship of mutual trust and support. 

The people of Palestine have been fighting and dying for their liberation for a century, and today they stand closer than ever to attaining it. The whole might of the empire and its international vassal states rained down on them for 15 months and they stood and fought and won. And the imperialists tell us “they hate queers” as if they’ve ever had a chance to even think on the question. They hate those who murder them, and they love those who stand with them. They have no time to give a damn about your gender. If any of them believe we’re worthless it’s because we are, because we’ve stood and watched for a hundred years while their land has been stolen and their children murdered. 

If you care about Queer people, you care about people all over the world who are oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Our failure to stand up for their interests has long allowed the left wing of capital to use mistreatment of our siblings overseas to justify regime change operations, sanctions pressure, and other hostile actions to violate national sovereignty. The right wing of capital has used this to claim that “gender ideology” is a tool of imperialism. This is how they divide and conquer us.

Put an end to it! Supporters of U.S. imperialism, american/canadian nationalism, NATO, zionism, and “israel” have no place in the Queer community! Participants in these institutions have no place with us, we stand for all human rights or we stand for none!

Today the heartland of the colonial system that began in Europe and which birthed the monstrosity of “israel” is the United States of America. The U.S. empire’s continuous ongoing genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this continent served as the blueprint not only for the establishment and expansion of “israel,” but for Hitler’s war of annihilation against Jews and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Hitler’s rabid opposition to Communism in turn paved the way for the U.S. empire’s so-called “Cold War” against Communism, in which it butchered millions upon millions of Natives of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, West Asia, the African continent, and everywhere else the human struggle for community, cooperation, and liberation — in a word, Communism — stood up against the inhumanity of Capital. 

Did you know many of the Indigenous peoples of this land did not have gendered pronouns at all in their languages before colonization? They never had a reason to care. Colonists care because they want to enslave half of us to the other half to exploit us for our reproductive labor. It was colonists who imposed “gender ideology” on us, and it is those same colonists who today are tearing down our reproductive healthcare and our gender-affirming care. The end of capitalism requires the end of colonization. 

Trans liberation requires Landback.

You know the 2028 election doesn’t hold anything positive in store for us. The Democrats don’t give a damn if we live or die, and if it gets them more money from their rich donors they’ll happily kill us themselves. The system is against us, so we must be against it! 

The movement is growing: 2024 saw the establishment of the international All-Empire Worker’s League, which aims to build the conditions for international unity among all the oppressed, towards the forging of a revolutionary Party capable of going on the offensive to at last smash this system. The movement for liberation needs you just as urgently as you need it. Our biosphere is collapsing under the weight of the imperialist system. The people in this empire are beginning to rise up to meet this challenge, and standing at the vanguard of the movement are trans and other Queer people following the leadership of the nationally oppressed.

Every empire in history thought it would last forever, until it didn’t. We all feel the collapse of this empire in our bones.

It is with that that we must remember, they set the terms of this conflict: Transition or death!

We say in response: Communism will win!

In protest of the increasingly blatant genocidal and anti-democratic nature of the party, over 700,000 Democratic voters had selected “Uncommitted” during the 2024 DNC primary election. Only around half of states even permit a selection of “Uncommitted;” had every state allowed the option, millions more people would have done so. Before “Uncommitted,” the movement began with a campaign named “Listen to Michigan,” cofounded by Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh. Both are career Democratic strategists. Over a series of weeks, they organized a Get Out the Vote Campaign which won over 100,000 Uncommitted votes. The mass campaign spread across the empire, and on March 18, Listen to Michigan launched the Uncommitted National Movement — founded on the goal of achieving a ceasefire in Palestine. Anyone with experience in electoral politics should have predicted what would happen next. Absolutely nothing was done to quell the zionists’ extermination campaign, but the Democrats in power changed their tone. They would voice their “concern” over a massacre while sending the bombs to carry out the next one. Abbas Alawieh claimed the Party was engaging in serious dialogue with Uncommitted despite none of the group’s demands being met or even taken seriously. Notably, Uncommitted never explicitly threatened to use their leverage against the Democrats. Not only did the party call their bluff, but they pivoted even further rightwards. More so than Biden, Harris’ campaign explicitly courted Republicans, moderates, and subhumans like Dick Cheney. Every night of the Democratic Convention featured Republican speakers. A pre-vetted, no doubt tamed speech from a single Palestinian, however, was too much to ask. While the representatives of Uncommitted were shunned inside the convention, protesters outside the convention hall were mocked as they read the names of murdered babies. The convention was a celebration of “lethal force” against Palestinian children: a spectacle of blood and death. 

No amount of humiliation or open duplicity from Blue Fascists would stop the unelected leaders of Uncommitted from fulfilling their original goal: saving the Democratic Party from defeat in November. On September 19th, they released a slimy statement implicitly endorsing Kamala Harris. Only an experienced Democratic operative could have written this statement. Instead of officially endorsing Harris, they told their members to “vote against Trump.” They also warned against voting for any third parties. If this sounds to you like it is telling you to vote for Harris, you have a keen ear! Everyone should understand by now that her victory would have done nothing to save Palestinian lives. Of course Trump is not going to bring peace to West Asia, but neither would Harris. The only thing her election would have done is lend legitimacy to the continuation of Democrat-led war crimes.

The problem with Uncommitted National is not that they accepted money from a Democrat aligned SuperPac. The problem is that they completely misunderstand how to use their (now dissipated) political leverage. Their “pressure” never extended past begging Democrats to grow a conscience. Those sending the bombs do not — will never — cede their commitment to a genocidal outpost of imperialism. But Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed do not seem to get this; they continue to hold on to the deluded belief that the Democratic Party can be pushed by the voters to do anything that isn’t in full service of the bourgeoisie. In hindsight (or should we say foresight), the material purpose of Uncommitted should have been to prove that Democrats are not subject to proletarian pressure. The party cannot change.  

One also has to question how many “Uncommitted” voters were registered to vote by Uncommitted during the primary season. Their website confirms: “we are registering people who have never voted to participate in politics, collectively, and we’re not done just yet.” For them to register young voters radicalized by the genocide, then tell them to vote for the genocidal Democrat eight months later is a textbook example of counterinsurgency. 

When it comes to mass election campaigns, the general election functions like a bear trap covered in honey. Radicalized people are led into this trap, transfixed by sweet sounding “serious” dialogue. Once you are stuck in the election’s claws, you can enjoy the honey for as long as it lasts. But when it inevitably dries up, you remain stuck in the same place, left to starve or eat through your own foot. This is voting in the empire. Between bleeding out and starving to death, committing yourself to the bourgeois hunting match will do nothing to improve your — and definitely not Palestine’s — condition. 

The correct course of action is to avoid the election trap altogether, and to help your friends and family escape it, too. The people setting these traps are out there. They don’t hide who they are. Your comrades are out there too. Many are still hidden in between the trees, but you can spot them if you look closely enough. Join them, and watch out for traps along the way.

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.’
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)”

J. Sakai, Settlers

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.

Traditionally, a good place to start would be to examine the candidate’s platform and consider its merits, point by point. The Harris campaign, unfortunately, does not appear to have a platform, at least not one posted to the public, and so we will have to rely mostly upon an analysis of her record as a politician, instead.

Political operatives of the Republican and Democratic parties have written much about Harris’ six-year stint as California’s Attorney General, and her own campaign frequently refers to that period when trying to build the case of her competence for office. Harris herself isn’t shy about discussing her work as California’s top cop, but her characterization of her work during that period the years before, when she worked as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, shifts with the political winds. One year, she describes herself as a progressive and a reformer who bravely took on the worst excesses of the Californian carceral state. When it suits her, however, the story changes, and we find instead that she had always been a hard nosed cop who worked tirelessly to protect California’s pristine suburbs. It is therefore difficult to get the measure of her without investigating this record directly.

Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General from 2011 until her election to the United States Senate in 2017, and before that was the head prosecutor for San Francisco from 2004 until 2011. Her record during these years reflects the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990’s and 2000’s — a period which might, arguably, be said to have opened with Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, now famous as the racist “superpredators” legislation which saw incarceration rates across the country soar to barbaric new heights. This was a time which, like today, saw Republican and Democratic politicians, from the Clintons to the Presidents Bush, in open competition to determine who could be the toughest on crime, lay down the longest and most draconian sentences for the most minimal offenses, and take the most racist political positions. During Kamala Harris’ tenure as the top prosecutor in California, Black people were incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than their white counterparts. They were far less likely to have positive outcomes at parole hearings, and far more likely to be subject to police violence.

Then, as today, California state law mandated that prisoners do labor for the state and for private companies who contract with the state for that purpose. Refusing to work can result in write-ups, housing changes, stripping of the inmate’s rights to phone access, visitation, and ordering food or supplies. It can also affect parole considerations.   

Involuntary servitude (the term ‘slavery’ apparently having been too on the nose) is legal in California under Article I Section 6 of the state constitution, and under the 13^th Amendment to the federal one. It has been so since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was written to provide a direct means to reinstate the slave relation that the Civil War had recently abolished. It served the triple purposes of producing a fungible, renewable, and cheap source of labor for the country’s growing economy, codifying a legal avenue for the appropriation of what meager properties Black people were then permitted to own, as well as to shore up a white supremacist hierarchy that had been teetering on the verge of collapse.

Under Attorney General Harris’ oversight, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Californians were shuttled into the carceral system and subject to this “involuntary servitude.” Inmates were paid on average between 8 cents and 32 cents per hour, or between 12 dollars and 56 dollars per month, for their work for the state and the private corporations who contract with it. The jobs they were assigned then as now are menial, physically demanding, and often extremely dangerous. Prisoners are regularly deployed as firefighters during California’s increasingly severe wildfire season, cannon fodder in the capitalist state’s halfhearted fight against climate change.

Not only did Harris fail even to pay lip service to abolishing this abominable practice, she actively defended it from those who worked to curtail its worst excesses. She fought bitterly against a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, filing obstructionist, frivolous motions to delay or derail the order entirely, and flirted with the idea of denying that the Supreme Court even had the authority to order such a thing.

That the Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans in 2011 (and hardly a bastion of progressive or liberatory thought at any time), even ordered such a thing is telling. In the majority opinion written by conservative Justice Kennedy, it was observed that Californian prisons were over 200 percent capacity, that they saw inmate deaths due to inadequate medical facilities and staff on a weekly basis, and that they had an inmate suicide rate nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. Kennedy wrote that “…in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12-by-20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment… A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with ‘constant and extreme’ chest pain died after an 8-hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a ‘failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.’”

Harris’ office acted with such intransigence in defying the order that the Court considered finding the State of California in contempt. Observers noted that her behavior may have fallen afoul of Californian legal and ethical standards against filing motions “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay’” The State Government was eventually defeated and forced to reduce the prison population, but not before her office argued in court that extending the proposed inmate release programs “…to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought”.

Simply put, the State and its Attorney General were reluctant to release any of their cheap, disposable “involuntary servants.” The regime of slavery was simply too profitable to allow it to be undermined without a fight. It is worth noting that the institution of involuntary servitude persists in California to this day. When, in 2024, she stands on stage and portrays herself as a “tough on crime top cop”, this is the record that she is looking back upon so fondly.

Shifting the focus away from Harris’ violent, racist record inside the United States, we now examine her record and position on the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Kamala Harris has sat now for three years as the second-in-command to President Biden, during which time the administration has dispatched at least 25 billion dollars to Israel in military aid, and recently authorized at least 20 billion more. Israel has long been, since its inception in 1948, the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, but the pace of this aid has accelerated dramatically in the wake of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Between October of 2023 and May of 2024 alone, aid to Israel totaled 12.5 billion dollars, though this data is provisional, and the actual amount is almost certainly higher. This tranche of aid accounts for about half of the total amount sent over the course of Biden’s presidency.

As evidence of Israeli atrocities mounted, as the world watched the undeniable ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in real time via live-stream and reacted with indignation and rage at the inhumanity of it, Harris never broke with her President or changed course.

Rhetorically, Harris has tried to play both sides. She’s commented more than once on the need for a ceasefire. When mounting pressure from student protests across the U.S. threatened to destabilize the country and, horror of horrors, her own political prospects, Harris paid lip service to the notion of establishing a ceasefire, or, more often and more tellingly, a “pause” in the Israeli extermination campaign.

Liberals and optimists alike might have been tempted to find some small shred of hope at that, and perhaps by Israel’s apparent willingness to discuss the possibility, but those fantasies were blown away when, on July 31, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas and the negotiator on their behalf, in his private room in Tehran.

Harris was now caught in a difficult position. Her halfhearted calls for a ceasefire suddenly seemed less convincing when her side had just murdered the very man that ceasefire negotiations might be made with, and therefore foreclosed on the possibility of any negotiations in the most spectacular possible way. Indeed, her refusal to denounce Israel in the aftermath of Haniyeh’s assassination, or for that matter the assassination of senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr the day before, reveals the naked cynicism of her words.

She has hardly had a sharp word for Israel since. Not since the clearly terroristic assassination of its negotiating partner, not since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and members of his government on war crime charges, not since the release of reports estimating that over 186,000 Palestinians, fully 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been shot, starved, beaten, and bombed to death. She didn’t even have anything to say on July 29 when, in a fit of sociopathic rage, mobs of Israeli fascists stormed a prison facility to release a soldier who was being held there on charges of brutally gang raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Since then, the most notable thing the Harris campaign has had to say on the matter of the ongoing genocide is that she is categorically opposed to an arms embargo on Israel. Publicly, she shouted down a group of pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan on August 7, admonishing them for mentioning the genocide of the Palestinians and telling them that “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” before security ejected them from the event.

Kamala Harris is guilty of lying about many things, but when she says that her support for the genocidal Zionist project will never waver, she does appear to be speaking the truth. This steadfast and unbreakable support for the blood soaked colonialists occupying Palestine is hardly unique among American politicians, and a particularly generous (or naive) reader might be tempted to point this out. But then, vocal and energetic opposition to racial genocide has rarely been common among politicians who are actively engaged in it. One wonders who among the active politicians in 1940’s Germany might have represented the “lesser of two evils.”

Harris has walked in lockstep with Joe Biden and the right wing of the Democratic party every step of the way. She issued vocal support for Biden when he crushed the nascent rail workers strike in 2022. She’s been actively heading up the administration’s approach to immigration along the U.S. southern border, where ever more draconian tactics dominate. Deportations are on track to be higher under Biden’s administration than they ever were under Trump and, having apparently forgotten that she once pretended to have a problem with “children in cages,” Harris now weaponizes this brutal and racist record to outflank her Republican opponent on the right.

Recently, the Vice President was subject to a substantial amount of pressure from the U.S. working class over her choice of running mate. For a time, there was every indication that Josh Shapiro was her favored candidate, being as how he is the governor of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state. Shapiro hit immediate opposition from the left, who cried out that he is a fanatical zionist who volunteered for and served six months in the Israeli occupation military earlier in life, and who penned racist tirades against the “battle-minded” and “belligerent” Arab people.

This didn’t seem to change Harris’s calculus on the issue though, and for weeks it seemed she would name him as her running mate at any moment. Shortly before a decision had to be made, however, a story broke about how in 2022, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office concluded that Ellen Greenberg, a victim who had been found in 2011 dead with 20 stab wounds on her body, had died by “suicide” rather than been murdered by her fiancé. Shapiro later had to refer the case to a different office after it became public that he had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family, and thus had a conflict of interest.

This, apparently, was too much for the Harris campaign, and shortly thereafter they announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate instead. Walz cuts a public persona as an affable, easy-going, white suburban dad. He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, a position that he’s held since 2019. While he hasn’t, as far as this author is aware, covered up any murder cases for family friends, he isn’t free of the zionist charge that marred Shapiro either. On August 6 of this year, Yinam Cohen, a Consul General of Israel to the U.S., publicly thanked Walz for “deepening the Israel-Minnesota partnership” and “…for standing with Israel during our darkest hour.” The Twitter post was accompanied by a photo of the two, shaking hands in front of the United States and Israeli occupation flags.

Tim Walz is likely more recognizable, though, as the governor who called in the U.S. National Guard without hesitation to put down the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and to occupy the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding areas. Thousands of National Guardsmen stormed the streets and fired indiscriminately into protesters and uninvolved onlookers alike. They demonstrated spectacular brutality, beating and arresting hundreds and abandoning even the pretense of acting within legal or proportional bounds.

A recently viral audio recording of then-President Trump from that period is enlightening. In it, Trump recounts how he had been in regular contact with Walz during the protests, how he’d asked the Governor to send in the National Guard, and how deeply impressed he’d been with the way that Walz had handled the events. He said that Walz is an “excellent guy” and that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.” He goes on to explain that Walz is on the phone and, addressing the Governor, says “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Odd Trumpian language notwithstanding, it is very clear that in that acute moment of crisis for American capitalism and class society, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are much more similar than they are different. At that juncture, when the structure of capital itself was at risk — when the colonial capitalist state’s inherent antagonism towards the working and racialized masses was exposed — the party lines disappeared and Walz, and the rest of the Democrats, joined hand in hand with Trump to put down the threat from below. The Harris-Walz campaign intentionally shared that audio clip to make a hypocrite of Trump on the campaign trail, but all it does is show the complete moral bankruptcy of both campaigns, both parties.

Harris claims to be a progressive, but she has the record of a brutal reactionary. She pretends that her campaign is about smashing glass ceilings and empowering women and people of color, but she has made a career of oppressing women and Black people, and is directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. She begs the workers to believe her when she says that she is the sane alternative to another four years of a fascist Donald Trump, but then she positions to the right of his campaign and criticizes him for being weak.

Like a chameleon who never really got the hang of its trade, Harris shifts her colors but never very convincingly, and hopes her audience has forgotten how she appeared a moment before. Unfortunately for her and her ilk, the working class and the oppressed of the world aren’t that gullible.

Gilbert announced her exit from the State Department by email. She explained that she was leaving because the administration lied and continues to lie in its official findings about whether zionists are deliberately obstructing the flow of food and aid into Gaza. The regime’s control over its personnel and the narrative is slipping drastically. Not only is the public no longer convinced, but even the regime’s own stalwarts have rejected its narrative. Josh Paul, the first official to resign from the government, warned that “[T]here are other resignations pending in the near future from officials with similar concerns in their own areas of work.”

USAID is often used as a cover for the most cynical and depraved U.S. spycraft. The State Department carries the sword and shield of U.S. imperial foreign policy all over the world. For members of these departments and agencies to publicly throw up their hands and depart from their own government over the degree of hypocrisy now being exhibited by the bloodthirsty war planners and politicos in Washington is a high-water mark for the weakness of the current administration.

Biden’s support among fellow Democrats and the public has collapsed. We warned earlier this year that the Democrats were so afraid of public opinion that they would attempt to crown Biden in a fait accomplis ceremony at the DNC Convention. They have lived down to our expectations: the Democrats are not even going to nominate him at the convention. They’ll do it by zoom call, beforehand. The official justification the DNC is giving is that, if they don’t nominate their candidates prior to Ohio’s August 7 ballot deadline, he won’t appear on the Ohio presidential ballot. We can speculate about their real reasons. Perhaps they want to forestall massive protests in Chicago and a potential outbreak of violence when the people, long lied to about the weight their voice carries in politics, make themselves heard.

When the zionist genocide began, the White House was dragged along with it. Today, we can no longer say that is the case. Biden himself is personally culpable, not only as a passive bystander, but as an active architect. As this becomes more and more clear to more and more people, all but the cruelest and most heartless of political hacks must abandon him. This isn’t international political inertia — it’s the forging of a new, even more right-wing Democratic Party. From all evidence, the Biden clique’s plan is to out-fascist the right.

We must do more than sit and wait to watch the fireworks of public opinion when the Biden clique seizes the nomination this summer. We must be prepared for Chicago; the voice of the people, muzzled for so long, must sound in the halls of privilege.

Onward, to revolution!

Nonetheless, liberals are broadly treating the verdict announcement as a holiday — practically christened by the fact that it’s already been used as cover for imperialist war crimes, as the U.S. and U.K. empires bombed the Yemeni capital Sanaa during the same news cycle, hiding in the shadow of the verdict, and killing at least 16 and wounding 30, with more expected to die from critical condition. The capitalist mass media is flooded with inane updates on all things Trump, with virtually all social media sites replacing trending topics of Rafah, Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen (if they were ever even trending) with “TRUMP IS GUILTY” or “TRUMP IS NOT GUILTY.” Both sides have committed to the belief that whether Trump was found guilty or not, whether this represents an overdue triumph of justice, or a cynical sham, the trial and its consequences are very important. 

But we can’t accept this at face value. The question is: is this true? Will this alter the course of life for the millions of working class people within this country, the millions of colonized and imprisoned trapped in this prisonhouse of nations, and the billions more held at gunpoint by the same empire where such absurd soap operas play out? The answer is, of course, no.

What is this trial? It is the spillover of a protracted fight between factions in the ruling class. It is the brawl in the country’s high-end country club that has just happened to spill out onto the street. Yes, they often bicker over the little details of which method to use to maintain their power. What’s different about yesterday’s display? Merely that they’re using the very public machinery of the state, rather than backroom double-dealing. The faction of our enemy that currently holds power is the side that emphasizes decorum and state legitimacy, and is excited to give Trump his slap on the wrist and claim it as a symbolic victory. Extra emphasis on symbolic, as Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of Trump’s sentence, has already admitted he won’t deliver any sentence that could impact the former president’s ability to run a campaign, like travel bans, house arrest, or a prison sentence. It’s more likely that Trump will receive a fine (the maximum amount he could be charged with is $170,000, or $5,000 for each charge) and be barred from voting for himself — though even that remains to be seen. 

The figurehead of the “Democratic” faction, Joe Biden, is likely to hammer the fact that his opponent is a “criminal” in the upcoming election. Yes, one becomes a criminal for embarrassing the “sanctity” of this country by financially silencing a porn star, but the gleeful commission of genocide goes unpunished by bourgeois law. That makes sense, as it is only the latter that is the sworn duty of all true presidents of this country. 

With all this in mind, what do we do? Ignore the pageantry of our enemies. Focus all attention and energy on what really matters. Condemn and organize against the imperialist war machine that such pointless noise exists to distract us from. Fortify the ranks of the student movement this summer, join it to the growing militant labor movement, form organizations of community awareness and education, and know now and forever that our salvation will not be won through an election between two fascists. 

Fight real battles. 

Seize real justice.  

As this paper has recently covered, the Democratic Party — one of two fascist settler-parties that govern the U.S. empire — is dismissive of inner-party democracy. They have rejected the concept that anyone other than the Genocidaire-in-Chief Biden could claim the Democratic nomination. Plans are already in place for a coronation of either the current president of the U.S. Empire or his second-in-command, Kamala Harris.

The people say no.

This sham of democracy is always a problem for the parties in a bourgeois republic where voting has been extended to working people. Of course, the desires of the working class are discounted by the governing class — when was the last time you can remember voting for a plumber, a construction worker, or a coffee-house barista in the general election? — but the political form of the U.S. republic requires a pretense of democracy. It’s one of the ways the U.S. government has been able to suppress capitalism’s inherent class contradictions and prevent class struggle from sharpening domestically over the last century. If you believe you have a say, you’re less likely to reject the whole sordid affair.

The zionist aggression unleashed by the heroic resistance attacks of October 7, 2023, threatens to undermine the already-feeble appearance of democracy in the U.S. Voter participation in U.S. elections has historically waxed at a mere 66% of eligible voters and more regularly tops out at 50% of the electorate. Around 15% of the electorate votes in local elections for mayors and community leaders. Compare that with the 83.6% voter participation in Cuba, a worker-lead socialist country; the working class of the U.S. empire is already skeptical of the political machine that runs things.

Enter the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Uncommitted Movement.

The DSA is a “big-tent” organization which contains both truly revolutionary and counter-revolutionary streams. DSA Marxists tend to gravitate toward one of the Marxist caucuses within the party: the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), Red Star, and the former Trotskyites of Reform & Revolution. MUG alone, to our knowledge, has forwarded a plan that would see the transformation of the DSA into a vanguard party. While the Pressworker’s Organization at USU does not agree with the potential of the DSA to emerge as the vanguard, we believe organizing within it can be useful to the working class movement and, at this stage, is necessary to reach the masses and increase class-consciousness.

The Uncommitted Movement is a required step in that process. The reformist wings of the DSA, which cause it to tail Democrats and engage in wasteful electoral politics that produce controlled-opposition office holders (Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush in the U.S. House of Representatives, alongside a welter of state officials), has made noise in opposition to the Uncommitted Movement. There are also those Marxists who express their disagreement with the movement and desire to focus DSA resources on bread-and-butter worker organizing.

What Is the Uncommitted Movement?

The movement represents the expenditure of organizing power, time, and money to cause Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. The mainstream reasoning behind the movement (and the reason some Democrats have signed on) is to “send a signal” to the Democratic National Committee and party leadership that Biden cannot win a general election and that his administration’s continued support and logistical management of the zionist genocide of Palestine must end.

This is futile. That’s not why the Uncommitted Movement is important.

This is the moment to disillusion the working classes with Democratic party politics. The Democratic Party has captured working-class movements and throttled class struggle by using paid labor aristocrats and bought-off union leadership for a century. As we recently published in The Democrats Have Nothing Left to Offer,

In the face of this [early 20th century] labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But there is no more flex in the old unholy alliance of high-level labor leaders, opportunists within the Communist Party of the USA, the working class, the petit-bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois Democratic party politicians. The Democrats literally have nothing left to offer as a bribe for the working class. The only thing either party has left is the stick.

The Uncommitted Movement is important because it will expose the Democratic party in the eyes of the working people. The DNC won’t respond — it is constitutionally incapable of taking the feedback of angry voters, as we saw with the internal coup against the very mild left-wing social imperialist Bernie Sanders in 2016. The most the DNC will do is gear up its talking heads to chastise voters, call them stupid, or childish, or short-sighted, or self-destructive. That will drive people away from bourgeois politics.

There Is a Movement, but No Party

This is a necessary precursor for breaking up the ice that has paralyzed the working class movement for so long. We have a situation currently prevailing where there is a working class movement but there is not a working class party.

While the Marxists struggle for unity to give the working class a party through which it can voice its grievances and with which it can wield the weapons of revolution, the DSA is preparing the ground for the movement itself to swell and grow ever-riper. We must disillusion the people from electoral politics. We must break the reliance of the working class movement on their captured labor-aristocrat leaders. We must think, and cause our class-siblings to think with us, about non-electoral alternatives.

Therefore, although USU and the Red Clarion are primarily engaged in the project of uniting the advanced elements of the working class and the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie, we endorse the Uncommitted Movement. We urge it to spread. At this time, full commitment to the movement, full commitment to mass-disillusionment with bourgeois politics, is the most revolutionary act that the DSA is capable of taking. Show the Democrats for what they are, and spit in the eye of their heir-apparent, the murderous Biden and his “top-cop” crony. Defy the coronation, for the good of the working classes.

War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn’t have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. “Why should we tell you what our policies are?” they ask, their dead eyes mocking. “You know what our policies are: we’re not Trump.”

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of “progressive” labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what’s become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we’re told one story — the one that we all learn in high school history — but the truth is quite something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We’re told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he “saved” the country from the Great Depression. This isn’t just the story told by the Democrats, it’s also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the ‘30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor — the AFL and other unions, primarily — and the old Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market — and keep funding the social democratic project FDR had promised.

“The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process,” wrote the Marxist-Leninist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the “Third Way” Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It’s easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe — despite Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees… until Carter signaled the Democrats’ willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party’s commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state’s repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it “bailed out” banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this “foot on the gas” position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on “aid” while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO — the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — was a trade union operating from 1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter’s torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden’s assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a “former” lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden’s relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020 — a devaluation that is now almost the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn’t make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party’s ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden’s watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he’s worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd’s death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire’s intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

“We have nothing to offer you. Don’t look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren’t Trump.”

That’s not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

To deny, however, that the candidates are different — to simply and blankly shout at the masses that they should ignore the imperialist elections — is to make a different kind of mistake. We must analyze and consider the positions of each candidate, determine what class-forces they represent, and articulate actual responses to their policy considerations. To stop our argument a stage short, to argue flatly that the political system is worthless without explaining in detail why and how, is to surrender the entire battlefield to the liberals, who will do their best to rehabilitate it in our absence.

There are also those who call themselves Communists who believe that, first and foremost, the duty of a Communist to achieve real reforms, now, for the working classes, the poor, the nationally and sexually oppressed. They are wrong. Winning reforms is not an end in itself. This debate was already fought, many times, in the past two centuries — from Bernstein’s initial betrayal all the way up through the economists blasted by Lenin. We will fight it again now. Winning reforms is a goal only insofar as it assists the organizing of the revolutionary classes and prepares them for the final battle with their intractable enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. So, our question should never be, “how can we win reforms,” but must always be “how does this or that action further the cause of organizing the people for revolution”?

The political crises of the last decade have dealt sledgehammer blows to the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system. Debates over the Electoral College began as angry mutters from the Bernie supporters and took on new life after the 2016 general election when the Clinton dynast, Hilary, won the popular vote but lost the election. This breathed new life into the debate from 2000, in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election through the interference of the U.S. Supreme Court. We must not let up in our criticisms of the U.S. electoral process. Having shed its democratic disguise, we can’t afford to give the ruling class time to craft a new one.

In 2024, there are two “outliers” — candidates who have been thrown up by the “crisis in democracy.” These third-party candidates will run against the big machines, although in this case, like Bernie, one will run from “inside” the Democratic party. On the right flank we see another political dynast from a ruling house, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our own little American Hitler; on the left flank, Bernie Sanders’ one-time vocal supporter, Cornel West.

How should we Communists treat the campaign of Dr. Cornel West? Our guest contributor, P. D. Goselin, wrote that Dr. West’s candidacy may “bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people.”

Dr. West is a bourgeois academic. West enrolled in Harvard in 1970, entering the social ranks of the ruling class, rubbing shoulders with the big, the “haute,” bourgeoisie. From Harvard, West went on to his graduate studies at Princeton. He is firmly ensconced in the world of ruling-class academia, and has worked as a professor at various Ivy-league institutions. That being said, he remains a left-wing public intellectual, and not a genuine progressive force. He was at one time an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has claimed to be a socialist, although it’s not quite clear what trend of socialism he claims to follow. Materially, he appears to be another in a long line of imperial socialists or Revisionists, seeking minor social reforms to the domineering U.S. Empire.

He began his candidacy by a call for a “united front” strategy against fascism. This was a self-conscious reference to the United Front strategy of the 1930s Comintern. It’s not clear exactly what West wants to unite in his united front, since he has publicly recognized the Democrats as “milquetoast neoliberals,” but the sentiment is that all democratic elements, all radical elements, and all progressive elements — those bourgeois and capitalist forces dedicated to democratization, all anti-capitalists, and all socially progressive forces, regardless of class — must combine to stand against the encroachment of the Trumpist clique into mainstream politics.

Even since beginning the draft of this article, West has revised his campaign goals. Those he lists on his campaign website are Dismantling the Empire, Unleashing Democracy, and Saving the Planet, which sound vague and hopeful.

In a previous iteration of his website, he listed a goal to End the Wars, which included disbanding NATO. This version of his anti-imperialist platform was manifestly more politically advanced than the one that is now contained under Dismantling the Empire. Although his call for the dissolution of NATO and the end of the U.S. global military presence remains unchanged, he has added “increasing humanitarian aid to poor and vulnerable peoples,” which all Communists recognize as a neo-colonial stratagem in the U.S. Empire’s strategy of global domination.

Unleashing Democracy reads like a litany of late 1920s social-democratic programs: quality education, housing, a living wage, paid leave; curbing inflation, supporting unions, expanding social security, forgiving all student debt. These are all obviously desirable elements of a program, but on their own, again, do nothing to advance the cause of revolution. Still, they are political goals that Communists can, with some reservations, generally support. For our purposes, the most exciting part is the brief line that he will democratize unaccountable monopolies and oligopolies “with workers’ control.”

Lastly, there is a somewhat meaningless Save the Planet plank, which promises “invest[ment] in clean energy” and ending fossil fuel subsidies. Even if keeping such promises was possible, West’s demands are far too minor in the face of mounting ecological catastrophes.

In only a few days, West has reduced his demands from their previous iteration, which amounted to a meager but passable socialist minimum program, to nearly completely writing out any mention of economic justice. Further, West has no corresponding maximal program, a commitment to Communism, or any kind of socialist construction. This is no surprise, as he is not a Communist, nor, really, any kind of socialist. He has, in the past, made a number of anti-Communist remarks. In these things, Dr. West is not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses — those workers who profess some degree of Marxist education or self-education, such as the membership of the DSA — of workers in the U.S. Empire.

To that end, if his candidacy attracts a widespread following in the intermediate working masses — the not-yet-Marxist but class-conscious — it would not be correct to ignore it. Because his minimal program has some policies with which Communist organizations can present principled, limited agreement; because his positions are not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses who must be educated as to the correct, Marxist positions; because West can bring these issues to the forefront of public discussion, if West’s campaign is at all successful, it would not be incorrect for local and regional Communist organizations to support those initiatives while maintaining their revolutionary commitments. That is to say any truly Communist organization should not endorse him. To do so would be to join forces with our bourgeois class enemies. But we may loudly proclaim those parts of his program with which we agree — and just as loudly denounce those parts with which we disagree.

Of course Dr. West is not “correct” in any of his policies or positions. But if those policies and positions become topics of widespread discussion among the intermediate working masses, this will present an opportunity for Communists to explain the correct positions — so long as we: 1) are not seen as unduly pessimistic, 2) maintain operational and formal integrity apart from any campaign, and 3) maintain, at every turn, a commitment to a maximum program and never stray from explaining the necessity of revolution. It is not, therefore, that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses. Through Dr. West, Communists can teach and help the proletariat and working classes to achieve that basic consciousness which they currently lack in the United States: consciousness of their class-in-itself, of their shared commonalities, of their shared economic, social, and political interests. Were our movement more developed, Dr. West would represent a regressive element that we would otherwise clearly shun, and clearly demarcate ourselves from. As it is, should a genuine connection between Dr. West and the masses manifest, and we have little reason to believe it will not, we should be prepared to make use of that connection and publicly state our agreement such as it is with his program. We should be preparing for the hour that Dr. West betrays the people or is betrayed by the bourgeois political class and be ready to make use of it to further help instruct the people.

Trump, worth some 2.5 billion dollars according to Forbes magazine, was ordered to pay 5 million dollars to Ms. Carroll. A settlement of this kind — undoubtedly soon to be subject to various challenges by his legal team — would reduce his net worth from 2.5 billion USD to 2.495 billion USD, hardly threatening him with destitution. In fact, this judgment is likely to further inflame his already ravenous right-fascist base and energize them in the run-up to the 2024 election. Ms. Carroll, on the other hand, has an estimated net worth of between $1–3 million USD. This would represent a substantial victory for her.

Of course we cannot discount the personal forces at work here: the trauma, disgust, and anger felt by Ms. Carroll and her personal investment in this suit. However, neither can we be willfully ignorant to the political meaning of the suit. Although the suit represents the righteous culmination of a decades-long campaign to hold the misogynist Trump accountable for his actions, it is also the theater in which the latest campaign of the war between the left-fascists and right-fascists is playing out. Although Ms. Carroll’s legal teamtime has made valiant attempts to keep the case from becoming a political dogfight, nevertheless — this is a right-fascist presidential hopeful, and the eyes of the ruling class are on him. Trump, along with the brutal right-fascist governor of Florida, DeSantis, represents the political ascendency of the largest and most reactionary monopoly capitalists: Sheldon Adelson; the ultra-Zionist, Isaac Perlmutter; shipping company Uline; finance capitalists at Blackstone; etc.

Newspapers and television stations have trumpeted the verdict. “A stunning result,” writes Politico’s Ankush Khardori, calling it a “new first – and a new low.” We know, of course, that this is far from a new low. President Clinton was a sexual abuser, and Nixon was a far worse criminal than either man; the sitting president, Biden, was credibly accused of forcing himself on staffers.

For Trump and his supporters, this has been the perfect opportunity to demonstrate his callousness, his “fitness,” to be the strongman that the right-fascists are slavering for. Even as the verdict came in, Trump’s campaign surged over contender DeSantis. What’s brewing on the left-fascist side? The blue-tie-wearing mummy Joseph Robinette Biden is as much of a cipher as Trump — he is merely the empty suit into which the ruling class pours their ambitions. Neither man is anything in-and-of-themselves. Despite the challenge to Trump in the courts, Biden still trails him by six points.

The ruling class is performing its behind-the-scenes calculus. We can see the results of their mathematics: despite the trial, they are swinging in favor of open right reaction. As for Trump, his trial strategy was designed to send a surge of energy through his supporters, through the most violent brand of fascists, and to play along the most reactionary lines in the country. He didn’t even show up to the trial, and his lawyers essentially abandoned any pretense of defense. This is typical strongman positioning, which Trump and his puppeteers must hope the ruling class will find appealing.

So far, they do. We must ask ourselves: how many ruling-class men see themselves in Trump? How many of them abuse the women around them wantonly, openly, and callously? Are Trump, Biden, Clinton, the outliers within the ruling or political classes? Or are they merely the standard, the white patriarchal archetype by which all ruling-class men judge themselves? We should be unmoved by the machinations of the capitalists. They are playing a game in which they alone are the victors. Trump, Biden, DeSantis, whoever they choose, will be the person that benefits their bottom line — and saving the bottom line of the capitalist elite means damning the rest of us.