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.

As with so many of the crises in our movement, this issue of inconstancy, of failure to advance a truly revolutionary strategy, is at heart a failure to forge an organization with the basic revolutionary commitments necessary to see the task through. Because the flaccid “parties” intermingle both revolutionary Marxists and reformist counter-revolutionaries, they are incapable of acting except in vacillation. Indeed, these very tacking maneuvers reveal to us the truth of these “parties” — they are not only inconstant, but they have made inconstancy their overriding nature. As the fascists in power have expanded their suppression of the working  classes, the “Communist” parties in the U.S. capitalist empire have filled up their undisciplined ranks with “red” liberals.

What is the task of the Communist? It is to stand out at the forefront of the progressive movement wherever it manifests, and to ensure that movement remains firmly oriented to true north, to revolution. “But,” I hear you cry, “that kind of purity of vision requires unity, militancy, and organization that we lack!” And that is, in a sense, true. But which must come first? Which is primary? Organization or firmness of purpose? Only once the lodestone of revolution has been sighted and a core of committed revolutionists begins to plot a course (no matter how much they may mistake the road) is such a revolutionary organization possible. Before revolution, must have a mass movement; before a mass movement, a militant revolutionary organization; before a militant revolutionary organization, a revolutionary theory and firmness of purpose.

So we say to you; Do not waver! Now is the time for real Communists to show their mettle. Demonstrate the firmness of purpose and unity of conviction across the U.S. capitalist empire, in every conversation. Why now? Because the ruling class is engaged in naked infighting that it barely attempts to disguise, because the future of the capitalist empire’s dominion of blood, terror, and looted treasure is in doubt. The time is critical. We must make hay out of the indecision of the U.S. ruling class. It is now divided and its partisans are lobbying for support from us workers in the hope of overthrowing their opponents. Yet, today more than ever before in our lifetimes, the ruling class stands exposed, their differences held up as relatively minor deviations from a general plan they all share. The working classes have seen that unified plan of Trump and Harris, and it is genocide in Palestine, extermination of gay and trans life (by neglect under Harris as the GOP runs rampant, by design under Trump), the destruction of all vestiges of labor organizing, even their pet unions, the annihilation of the environment in the pursuit of wealth, and the installation of a country-wide police state in which surveillance, arrest, and extrajudicial murder are no longer reserved for Black and Indigenous populations, but are extended to all.

In light of this increasing disillusionment of the working classes and the unfiltered bloodlust of the ruling class, it is more important than ever that all Communists who lay claim to that title spend their energy exposing the bourgeois state for what it is. We cannot make exceptions. We cannot equivocate. We cannot waver.

The United States is a bourgeois republic. It is a class dictatorship. It can only be overthrown, not reformed. As John Brown said, the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.

For every five minutes we spend speaking of reform, of strategic and critical support, of mitigating the fascist onslaught at the federal level, twenty-five minutes must be spent pointing not to tomorrow but the tomorrow after that — to the coming revolution. The ruling class elections are not a time to compromise or moderate, but a time to demonstrate our principles, and to help the rest of our fellow workers see the puppet show for what it is.Do not step back. Do not waver. Confront the enemy wherever it lies, and accept no treasonous, temporary, class peace!

You are now expected to sit down and shut up about real issues and wait patiently for another five months so Harris can get into office and “start making changes.” Never mind that she’s already in office as the Vice President, never mind that this means at minimum another five months of unrelenting horrors. If you dare to demand an end to the new Holocaust you’re “helping Trump” who will surely be even worse, somehow. Speaking out against the genocide is now, incredibly, considered counterproductive for the cause of ending it. Harris might end the genocide, you see, and Trump surely will not, so getting her into office is our top priority now! You simply must stop protesting the ongoing genocide, or you’re helping Trump commit theoretical genocide! It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so deeply sick. 

With Tim Walz as her pick for Vice President, Harris has catapulted herself from a miserable failure of a former presidential candidate to the darling of the so-called “progressive left” movement. The genius of the imperial propaganda machine can’t be denied. Feeling the pressure of mounting discontent towards the savagery of the Palestinian genocide, the empire has reinvigorated mass support for its campaign of inhuman butchery by dangling the carrot of “progressive” legislation in front of our noses yet again, with the ever present stick of Trump threatening us if we fail to obey. 

Walz’s speeches to voters play off his history of supporting the rights of the empire’s workers. Before a cheering crowd of UAW workers, Walz declares that Harris will stand up for collectivized labor and stick it to the “transnational gangs” and the “billionaires and corporate greed.” Harris smiles behind him. The irony of this declaration being made on behalf of a multimillionaire who is presently committing the most heinous crimes against humanity at the behest of those very same billionaires appears entirely lost on the crowd.

Who is Tim Walz? It should hardly matter at this point which lackey of empire is placed at the helm of the extermination machine, but this man in particular deserves a closer investigation, which may reveal some insights into what the hell is actually going on here. As governor of Minnesota, Walz has made a name for himself as one of the last holdouts of the bygone age of American “social democracy.” A proponent of raising the minimum wage, police accountability, workplace safety, welfare expansion, gun control, and cannabis legalization; and an opponent to corporate bailouts, the war on Iraq, and conversion therapy, Walz truly is the squeaky clean “progressive” that the Democratic voter base have been begging for since time immemorial. He’s stood on picket lines, started a Gay Straight Alliance when he was a school sports coach, and even wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust education. What else is there to even say? He’s a “progressive” dream come true!

Except…

Walz is of course an ardent zionist. This should hardly come as a surprise at this point, with the Biden regime’s uncompromising commitment to assisting the zionist entity’s campaign of slaughter in every way it possibly can, including purging the Democratic Party of all anti-zionist speech. Somehow however the promise of a potential taste of “progressive” legislation at long last has led much of the so-called “progressive left” movement to simply ignore this uncomfortable and inconvenient fact. And make no mistake, Walz is as deeply and enthusiastically committed to his zionism as the next murderous imperialist ghoul. He has personally met with Netanyahu in the past, repeatedly voted in favor of the zionist entity during his stint in the House, and went as far as to vote against a U.N. resolution affirming that zionist settlements in the West Bank are illegal. But what’s a little “international law” and “settler-colonial ethnic cleansing” anyway? Look at everything he’s done for Minnesota! 

He has of course made excuses for his zionism: “You can hold competing things: That Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this… has got to end.” This empty genocide denial and apologism is apparently sufficient to brush the issue under the rug for most so-called “progressives.” For anyone taking the matter seriously however, the problems should be quite clear already. 

Remember that master’s thesis on Holocaust education? Titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom,” it argues that the Holocaust inflicted on the Jewish people by Nazi Germany was not unique in the grand scheme of history, and should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote. This all sounds very good. It is in fact, an essential perspective for properly understanding how and why genocides happen. It appears difficult to square this with his history of Zionism. Or is it?

On June 2, just shy of eight months into the ongoing genocide against Palestine, Walz spoke at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC). In addition to his typical laundering of the genocide, the unambiguous condemnation of the “terrorism” of the Resistance, and the crocodile tears about how “unsafe” Jewish students supposedly felt at the campus protests against the genocide, he had the following to say:

“We need to do better on Holocaust education. We need to do better on ethnic studies. And I tell you this as a teacher and as governor, too. We don’t need test scores or anything to tell that we’re failing. People’s misunderstanding of what’s happening or what has happened in the Middle East is just stunning in many cases. And I think that lack of information, that lack of knowledge and the way people throw around certain terms or seem to try and rewrite history, it’s apparent to me that… we have got to educate, especially our young people, about the true story. We have to make sure they know.  

And as so many of you know, this is a really interesting study in this, especially at this time, we passed the law — but who writes the curriculum is gonna be really, really important. So to make sure — and JCRC being there — making sure we’re held accountable, that this curriculum is correct and how it’s being delivered is done right.”

Here is a man who studied genocide and wrote a master’s thesis on how it happens and how to teach this to people. He knows what “israel” is doing, and he knows what he is doing. By this point on June 2 he had watched eight months of babies starving to death, eight months of innocent children shredded by bombs, and then went on stage to spout this horrific rhetoric. He is weaponizing his education and his position as an educator and legislator to whitewash the genocidal crimes of the zionist entity and make pro-zionist genocide propaganda a feature of Minnesota’s educational system. This is grotesque and inhuman on what should be an almost inconceivable level, if only we hadn’t witnessed nearly a year straight of this kind of bald-faced arrogant hypocrisy from every imperial media outlet.

One thing is clear from this. Walz is not a friend to the working class. And he is not even trying to hide this fact. It’s no coincidence that after ten months of daily atrocities the empire is, for the first time in decades, putting a “social democratic progressive” on the campaign trail. Walz is offering everything the “progressive” movement has ever dreamed of (or at least a vague gesture towards such, which appears to be more than sufficient), if only they will agree to one little compromise. Open complicity.

Harris and Walz are not going to put an end to this genocide. Nobody in the imperial administration is. Anyone who believes this after ten straight months of lies about Resistance “terrorism,” lies about October 7th “mass rapes,” lies about ceasefires, lies about the “aid pier” (which was used once to commit a massacre and then quickly dismantled and forgotten about), lies about stopping weapons shipments, and lies about the upstanding morality of the IOF, is quite plainly living in a fantasy. 

They’re hardly pretending to care anymore. Biden just signed off on another $20 billion weapons shipment, and Harris has openly rejected issuing an arms embargo against “israel.” Both Harris and Walz have been clear on their commitment to the zionist entity’s “right to defend itself” and they will continue to support that “right” to torture, rape, and butcher Palestinian men, women, children, and babies, on an indefinite basis. They know that you know what’s really going on, and that’s the point. The cruelty is the point. 

The empire is building more than 90 “cop city” counterinsurgency training camps domestically while its people grow ever more discontent, its global power slips, and its finance system and the world climate both teeter on the brink of catastrophic collapse. The empire wants the whole world watching in stunned horror as it commits unspeakable atrocity after unspeakable atrocity, because then the whole world knows exactly what fate awaits them if they dare step out of line. Every dismembered child and starved skeletal infant is a brutal message to you and me and everyone else on this Earth what the empire is willing to do to those who assert their humanity and attempt to break free of its near universal enslavement of our world. 

Walz offers you a way out: Just accept that this is normal and everything will be okay for you. Like everything else, it’s a lie, one which will likely be fatal for those who buy it. But the empire doesn’t have the final say in the matter, and its depraved cruelty belies a deeper reality. 

The true underlying message of all of this is that the empire is afraid of us.