When you were young, you were taught to believe in the truth and goodness of the American way. Like many things we were told as children, that turned out to be a fairy tale. You care about people — about the people who are out of a job, the people who live day to day and hand to mouth, about the Black people who have been mistreated for so long in this country, about Indigenous people who are still being exterminated, about gay people and trans people who are being forced to hide who they are and face daily violence, about people with student debt, with medical debt, about the little children forced to mine Coltan to make our phones. You care. And you’re upset! You’re confused. Things have stopped making sense.

That’s because the story you were told was a lie. When our understanding of the world no longer lines up with the things we see, we have to rethink that understanding. When our internal narratives no longer match objective facts, we have to acknowledge they were wrong. We were wrong. It’s hard to be wrong, but only when we bravely confront our errors can we try to correct them.

What did we believe that was wrong?

That we were the good guys.

What? But surely we are! We care! We want to help. We’ve done everything we can! We’ve been shocked at the way our country has shifted ever rightward. We’ve supported peace, we’ve been against bloodshed, and for justice… haven’t we?

No.

No, because there is no truth, no justice, no American way. There’s no such thing.

The fact of the matter is, to the great masses of people all around the world, we are the bad guys. That hurts to hear — that people see the United States not as a beacon of freedom, but as the Angel of Death. But we can’t afford to lie to ourselves anymore. We have to wake up. We have to understand.

To make sense of the twin nightmares of Biden and Trump, of the ludicrous pageant of the Harris “campaign,” we have to go back and actually grapple with the truth — the truth that the United States and its ruling class have been enriching themselves at the expense of the other nations and peoples of the world since the day the country was born. To understand today, we need to understand yesterday. To predict tomorrow, we have to have a clear comprehension of our trajectory. History isn’t static. It isn’t a single moment in time. It is the weight of every yesterday carrying it inexorably forward into tomorrow.

So, how do we make sense of this?

First, we have to discard one of our most cherished illusions: the illusion of democracy. It is of great importance to the people who own the vast majority of this country (the top 10 largest individual landowners in the U.S. own 15.5 million acres of land, roughly the size of West Virginia, more than the land owned by all racial minorities combined) that we believe that we have an investment in its government. The truth is, we do not. This country is now and always has been a democracy for the rich. In the 18th century the U.S. was founded as a democracy for southern aristocrats and northern lawyers and merchants. Today, it is a democracy for property-owning capitalists. And they own a lot more than you.

If it’s all a sham, why do they bother keeping it up? For one thing, our ruling class isn’t always on the same page about what policies to pursue. They have legitimate disputes between themselves, and they resolve these disputes by throwing money at them and mobilizing “votes” in support of their preferred policies. As a result we, the regular, non-owning, working people in this country, are lobbied and pleaded to. We are treated as a passive, inactive mass to be cajoled, guilted, and outright tricked into putting our support behind a certain candidate, one preselected by our ruling class. Because of this, we develop a psychological attachment not only to that candidate, but to the whole system. It’s like watching a TV show that you talk about at work. We, the audience, feel a sense of involvement and connection. We discuss it, we theorize about it, we engage. However, we’re just the audience. We have no say in how the story unfolds — the bourgeois electoral system is no different. Our participation is strictly limited. At best, we are background actors, playing the part the scriptwriters and stage managers permit — but despite what we may do or say in those roles, the show will always go on.

There are certain things those stage managers will never allow. It is, after all, their show. We’re invited to come on from time to time, but we all know who owns the studio.

Among the things we cannot contest are the following: we aren’t allowed to object to all the wars our country has engaged in; we aren’t allowed to demand the forgiveness of debts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the decisions of the courts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the choice of candidates we are presented with; we aren’t allowed to contest the omnipresent armies of the police on our streets or the theft of land by huge corporations like Mandy Realty or Blackrock. We aren’t allowed to object to the burning of the planet for profit, or to argue for equality between the sexes, for freedom of choice and conscience, against racism, against transphobia. But why? Why aren’t we allowed to challenge these things? Because of a more basic assumption that’s key to the existence of the United States. We cannot challenge these things, we cannot be allowed to begin down the road to liberation from any of these assumptions, because that road ultimately threatens the very existence of the United States and its underlying system. It threatens the U.S. “way of life.” This system, this basic assumption, this underlying bedrock, is capitalist property.

What is capitalist property? It is the dividing of the world (of land, of productive machinery, of resources) into the individual hands of a select few. It is the source of the capitalist relation, the rule that says one man owns while another person works. It is the source of all social oppression – racism, sexism, anti-trans and anti-gay bigotry — and it arises from the property relation of capital.

What would happen if we challenged this property relation? If we could, by vote, abolish this root evil, if we could help every one of the people we said we cared about, what would happen to the wealthy? The wealthy capitalists, who own everything, would be at the same moment and by the same vote, disinherited of all the wealth of the world. Through their bankers and colonial agents, they command almost every source of wealth there is. This is what they stand to lose. Why, then, would they design a costume ball where the rules permit them to be disenfranchised? They wouldn’t. They haven’t.

Above everything, this is the one outcome they will not allow. Nothing that might open the door to begin that process can be permitted. War, from which all the wealthy profit, is a universal policy.

What we must understand is that the politics of Washington are the politics of wealthy white men. They have spent the last two hundred and fifty years ensuring they remain in control, and they inherited a social system of rules from Europe that were designed to keep European men in command. Through the import of Black African slave and marginalized European wage labor, these white, mostly English, men built the United States.

It is theirs. Root and branch.

Oh, they may have let some of those European immigrants into the club — after all, it’s hard to tell an Italian from a southern German at a distance — but they strengthened the barriers they could and clung to whatever rules they were able. Make no mistake — the United States still belongs to a handful of wealthy families. It isn’t yours, and it isn’t mine.

So we have the two wings of the owning class, the “left” and the right. Since the late 1930s, these two branches of one single American “business party” have taken contrary positions on certain issues, but when the chips are down, the Democratic Party has not actually, institutionally, protected or advocated for any marginalized group since 1950. The achievements of subject nations, sexes, and sexualities — the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation — have been forced on the ruling class by concerted struggle.

It has been the working people of this country that have won every meaningful reform. As soon as we relax, snap! The ruling class takes it away!

No more. We are done with the bait and switch. We are done with the ruling class. Now it is time to take matters into our own hands.

We must have a militant party of the working classes! Our enemies are not only the Trump bloc, but all the capitalists behind them. We oppose not only the Trump government, but any Democratic Party government. Our enemy is the capitalist state, which is nothing more than a machine to mediate the disputes of the ruling class and to keep the workers from taking the rightful fruits of their labors.

But where to begin?

We must each study the question for ourselves. We recommend you find some like-minded friends who are equally disgusted at the trajectory of this country. We suggest you form a study  circle. Read articles from the Clarion. Debate them. Decide if you agree. Write counter-articles. Study your own workplaces. Write reports about them. Share them. Debate them again.

Read radical literature together.

Learn.

Organize.

Prepare.

Suggested Reading

• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels
• Liberalism, a Counter History, Domenico Losurdo
• Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
• Dawning of the Apocalypse, Gerald Horne
• State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin

Likely not. Objectively speaking, the Trump regime promises to be at least as tyrannical and destructive as it was before. The electoral contest of the past year was undeniably a contest between which faction of the ruling elite was willing to promise the most violence, the most bloodshed, and the most destruction. The fear felt by the vulnerable and marginalized members of our communities is real. The threat to immigrants, ethnic minorities, queer people, the disabled, and so on is more imminent and urgent than ever. Not to mention of course the ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocides in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Myanmar, and Ukraine. Every life lost is a tragedy in its own right. Whether or not the Harris regime would have been any better, any kinder, any less vicious, is irrelevant at this point. The question now on everyone’s minds is “what do I do now?”

The answer we’re seeing many settle on is placing blame. Everyone has a different answer (or answers) as to who is at fault for the election results. Non-voters are to blame for staying home. Stein voters are to blame for taking away votes from Harris. The anti-genocide left is to blame for campaigning against the Biden regime’s genocidal actions. Arab and Muslim voters are to blame for refusing to back Harris. Mexican and Latino voters are to blame for backing Trump. Trump voters are to blame for their selfishness and bigotry. Women are to blame for failing to sufficiently back Harris. Men are to blame for disproportionately backing Trump. And of course the Democrats are to blame for running a terrible campaign, for refusing to waver even slightly on their commitment to genocide, and so on, and so on.

Who then is truly to blame? Seasoned socialists will see clearly what’s really going on here. These “elections,” rollercoasters of drama and intrigue that they are, are full of stories of plots and treason, endless debates, felony charges, assassination attempts, hateful violent rhetoric, and never-ending fearmongering of the “end of democracy” by the corporate news media. The ruling capitalist class has their “electoral” system refined down to a science to sow division, fear, paranoia, and hatred. 24-hour news cycles diligently maintain the frenetic atmosphere with constant updates. Every slight lull in the cycle is immediately disrupted by new coverage of “Project 2025” or breaking news about something Trump said or did, etcetera ad nauseum. 

This is not a democracy of course, and at this point it barely resembles one. It is a vast system of social engineering designed to sort the masses into mutually hostile camps, to keep us at one-another’s throats, to make us fear and hate each other, to blame one-another for the brutalities and crimes committed by the ruling elite. This is the keystone of the empire’s global regime of terror. Terrorism has always been the beating heart of the settler empire. Genocidal terrorism in Palestine tells the oppressed masses of the world what happens to those who dare defy the U.S. empire’s control. Settler-garrison police terrorize the empire’s own citizens, beating down, arresting, and disappearing dissidents, and lynching minorities from “problem” communities in so-called “officer-involved shootings.” Innocent people are executed by the so-called “justice system,” or imprisoned for years, decades, lifetimes, comprising the world’s largest prison population, a system of legal terror where your “right” to a fair trial, or any trial at all, is done away with by 90%+ conviction rates. 

And of course the corporate news media and political system engage in stochastic terrorism directed at the masses at large. They tell us to fall in line and vote for the perpetuation of this grotesque system, vote for empire, vote for destruction, terrorism, bloodshed, death. Sign your name to affirm your loyalty to the regime and your continued support for genocide, or your rights will be stripped from you. Every woman dying of sepsis because she can no longer access abortion is an act of terror by the ruling class, every dead trans child, every homeless person frozen to death on the sidewalk, every Black person lynched by cops, every mother worked to death just to feed her children, every individual who succumbs to the raging COVID pandemic. They want you to live every waking moment in fear that you’ll be next to suffer and die, and to blame and hate your neighbor for it. After all, they voted for the candidate you hate and fear, they voted for your rights to be taken away, they voted for genocide, they voted for more suffering.

Every progressive-minded person in your life is feeling this fear acutely. Do not allow the capitalist ghouls the satisfaction of taking out your fears on your fellow workers and community members. Now more than ever is the time for strategic action and unity. The people in your life are desperate for a way out. Forget the election! Forget who voted for whom! The only people truly at fault for the hellish mire we’re immersed in are the ruling class! The fault lies with the capitalist elites, every vile genocidaire and billionaire oligarch and investment tycoon. We are all in this together, we are all the victims of their petty arrogance and callous disregard for the sanctity of life and disdain for the dignity of their fellow humanity. 

The empire relies most heavily on terror in times of crisis. The crisis is here. The decline and fall of this system is inevitable. A revolutionary moment is fast-approaching us, as the world reaches the brink of global war and financial meltdown looms. It is your task to educate yourself and build consciousness and organization among the members of your community. There is no time to spare, and there is nothing the ruling class would prefer you be doing right now than petty squabbling over the results of their electoral circus. Now more than ever it should be clear how critically important it is to divest all action and energy from the U.S.’s federal political system and direct our efforts to the construction of local organizations and the linking-up of these organizations into a coalescing revolutionary movement.

The historical position of the Democratic Party has been to serve as the brake on the one-way ratchet of U.S. politics. Republicans move the dial to the right, the Democrats stop any backsliding to the left, and little by little the window of the possible lurches into the burning hellscape where we find ourselves today. The Democrats are actually paralyzed by their class position; they cannot take even the most moderate actions in their own self-defense, because to show the capacity to effect change would open the floodgates of demands from their so-called base. In reality, the Democrats don’t represent the interests of the working people of any stripe; they were, are, and remain one wing of the business party. They are the wing that, during the 20th century, sought to consolidate the members of the ruling class with those members of the bourgeoisie subject to any social oppression — all while leaving the economic oppression that underlies those social oppressions in place.

As the party runs down and its supporting coalition collapses, so does the support the Democrats generally garner among the big bourgeoisie. George Clooney, who hosted the single largest fundraiser ever held for a Democrat and raised $28 million for Biden on June 20 of this year, just published an op-ed in the CIA’s paper of choice, the New York Times, calling for Biden to stand down. This level of turmoil at the upper echelons of the party, between donors and the party’s leader, Biden (when a Democrat is in the White House, they control the Democratic National Committee), merely demonstrates a truth that we have all known: the rot of the party is so great, that even its own fiercest exponents smell it.

In practice, this means that Donald Trump is already the victor of the 2024 presidential elections and the entire state apparatus will now pass into the hands of the rabid racists on the far right of the capitalist-imperialist spectrum. This is actually the preferred position of the Democrats and part of the double-game they play while holding the working class hostage with the threat of hostile Republican victories. While the Republicans are ascending, the Democrats can fundraise off of the latest open provocation from the right.

Worst of all, the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the resulting media blitz, the photographs of the bloodied ear and the defiant fists, mean that the party technicians attempting to boot Biden have lost their internal battle. The ruling class has informed the rest of the party and its apparatus that the time has come to “keep your powder dry,” and save the push against the Republicans for after Trump has been elected, for 2028. This means the Democrats will be forced to field a dying octogenarian against the invulnerable anti-politics Trump show and his Nazi support machine. The question of the election has now been made practically unimportant, because it is a foregone conclusion. The ruling class has chosen Trump.

Beyond fundraising, the Democrats generally benefit from being the off-footed party because they are unable to offer anything to the people when they are governing. Thus, while they are out of power, they are free with their promises. They will say anything during their out-of-power hiatus. Cancel medical debt; direct payments to working class people during the pandemic; close Guantanamo Bay and stop the war on terror; codify Roe v. Wade; the list of promises never delivered upon goes on and on. This is a ploy to position themselves as the leaders of a valiant resistance against Republican depredation. They wave the flag of progressivism as soon as their stay in office ends; when it comes time to take up appointments, they fold the flag of progressivism again and put it in a drawer. They then soberly tell their constituents (the dupes they’re trying to pacify) that it wouldn’t be pragmatic to enact any of the reforms they’ve promised. They give grim speeches about sacrifice and the nature of politics in a democracy, and the adult and reasonable thing to do, which is to slaughter the interests of the working class on the altar of Moloch.

For years leading up to this moment — half a century or more — we Communists have been too weak to push the Democrats out of the way and wave the flag that would never be put in the drawer. Now, on the eve of the second triumph of Trump, we are strong enough to stand our ground and lead the resistance to the fascists from the front. The first Trump presidency created the conditions of 2024; the 2020 June Rebellion in the wake of George Floyd sparked more class consciousness. The genocide in Palestine has further fueled the creation of new organizations or galvanized Marxists and spurred them into fresher action. Primary organizations are more solid now than they have been, more prepared to act, and the masses of the working people are at a higher resting state of class consciousness. Dissatisfaction with the state of the empire has never been greater. Now is the time for the red flag to advance.

The Democrats have been doing a marvelous job of discrediting themselves for us, but we must help them into the grave. That is, we must consistently and credibly thoroughly expose them as worse than useless; as hostile to the working classes, as warmongers, as genocidaires, and as racists. Only when their position has been completely debunked among the working people can we raise the red flag and march forward.

Then, we must advocate for the only resistance that can weather the storm of active, crisis fascism: Communism. Communism must become the name of the resistance against Trump and his Nazi cabinet. Resistance must be red.

This doesn’t mean underground terror acts, but rather the establishment of community self-defense networks among the nationally oppressed, copwatch schemes, red aid stations, unemployment councils, tenants councils, and all the other means of the Communist attack on the authority of the enemy state. We must at the same time spark or crystallize primary organizations in the workplaces of the working class that can coordinate actions, disseminate literature, and raise class consciousness. This is our historic task. If we succeed in denouncing the false resistance of the Democrats and in associating the advance of the red flag with the advance of the working class, we will succeed in establishing the preconditions for the emergence of the vanguard party.

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.  

No one can see into the minds of the Democratic party functionaries or the Democratic party’s political agents — Senators, Congresspeople, mayors, appointees, etc. — but we need no special powers of mental acuity to examine their actions and gauge their effects or to comprehend how they work and the role they’ve played in shaping the political landscape. Since approximately 1945, the two political vehicles of the ruling class, the Democratic and Republican parties, have worked out, by experiment, their respective roles in a repressive anti-Communist machine. This machine’s primary function is first to mediate conflicts among ruling class interests, but second, and of much more interest to us (and the direct subject of the present article), to suppress proletarian class consciousness and avert a revolution.

Are there self-conscious agents at work within this atmosphere, building this machine of repression? Almost certainly. Is the entire thing built up this way? Absolutely not. This is the result of an emergent process of habituation, of individual elements of the ruling class following their own narrow interests and coming to accommodation with one another. However, in each of these interactions, the ruling class shares a common and underlying interest: the repression of the working classes. To the extent that this machine has a “soul,” a ghost guiding its processes, that soul is in the U.S. intelligence agencies, which were crafted to be the self-conscious element of the entire apparatus. The purpose of the FBI and CIA is to fight Communism. The ultimate effect created by this apparatus can be termed the “Hostage Syndrome,” and it has successfully defused the revolutionary potential of proletarian organizations claiming to lead the working classes in the struggle for Communism more than once. Of course, this syndrome is the result of the political strategies pursued by these two parties. It is an effect achieved in the minds of the so-called Communists who fall prey to it — most commonly and predominantly those Communists from the settler population of the empire and the labor-aristocratic or petit-bourgeois classes.

It is this Hostage Syndrome that a revolutionary in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian settler empire must counter. Any revolutionary strategy must defeat this tendency. This cannot be done by will alone. The Hostage Syndrome cannot be overcome by sheer “moral character” of those involved in the struggle. The solution must be at once theoretical and organizational. The solution must be arrived at by theory and then made manifest by organizational form.

The answer of course is a specific manifestation of the general principle of proletarian internationalism. The bedrock guarantee of national self-determination for the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, the Puerto Rican nation, and all other oppressed nations within the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire. This theoretical commitment must manifest in armed wings of a party dedicated firstly to the class war, and secondly to the war for national self-determination. Only armed, working people of each of the oppressed nations can form the anchor through which to hold a working-class party in the U.S.-Canadian empire accountable to its ultimate aim of class liberation.

To correctly identify and do battle with this Hostage Syndrome, we must ask two questions: “What is the appearance of this Hostage Syndrome?” (How do we recognize it?) and “How does this Hostage Syndrome function?” (How can we fight it?).

What is Hostage Syndrome?

The logic of Hostage Syndrome goes like this: “We cannot afford to risk revolution now, because we stand to lose the gains we’ve already made if we don’t support the left-most of the bourgeois political parties.” This formulation can be altered in various ways, but it always boils down to this same thesis. For instance, the claim that “revolution would endanger the already endangered communities” is another incarnation of this hostage syndrome. To act radically and challenge the system that exists, our hostage-taking logic says, we would put the people who are still receiving a benefit from that system at risk.

There are two exceedingly common manifestations of this syndrome. The first is focused around elections where the contest is between a Democrat (or other “left Progressive”) and any Republican or right reactionary. This is what we may call the naive Hostage Syndrome, which is a result of the unconscious operation of the system of bourgeois government. In this case, the left wing of the ruling class, in its guise as the “Democrat,” announces that it will preserve the present distribution of power. They promise to safeguard the advances of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements and women’s rights movement. Often, they do this by broadcasting a kind of revisionist history in which it was the Democrats’ battle in the political arena, not the blood of the working classes physically fighting the state and corporations, that won the victories of the mid-century movements. The lackluster social safety net, like employer-covered health insurance, which barely qualifies as a nod to social democracy, is waved around as proof that there is something to lose. The same is done with basic rights like the right to abortion or to organize labor unions. “This is the most important election of your lifetime,” is the slogan, despite the logical flaw that it is trumpeted at every single election.

The Syndrome, the attitude this produces in so-called radicals, is the mental construction of defensive barricades. “We don’t have time for revolution, we have to forestall fascism.” This is the breathless battle cry of many a pseudo-Communist. Regardless of the evidence that electing the Democratic candidates invariably produces a rightward shift in the policies of the U.S. empire — because the material conditions dictate a continuous rightward march as being in the basic interests of the class both Republicans and Democrats serve — they fall prey to the threat.

We may metaphorically phrase it thusly: the Democratic candidate, in order to maintain the ever-weakening ties that bind the coalition of nationally oppressed groups, labor, and petit-bourgeois graspers that gave it power in 1932, acts as a hostage taker. The hostage is the status quo. Partnering in this game is the Republican party, acting as a bad cop in a good cop/bad cop duo. The Democrat warns our pseudo-revolutionary that he is trying to de-escalate. “Listen to me and I can convince the Republican not to shoot the hostage!” he warns.

What these pseudo-Communists have forgotten is that we, too, are against the status quo. We must be willing to pursue change, even change that will harm the working class in the short run. If we are unwilling to change, we are not Communists, we are reactionaries. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Those who are not willing to see blood and take risks are not revolutionaries. They are rearguards of the bourgeois state.

The second form of the Hostage Syndrome comes through the integration of someone with characteristics of an oppressed group into the machinery of oppression. We have seen this form cynically deployed throughout the U.S. empire over the last few decades. This is the election of Black mayors and police chiefs, women on the boards of corporations, and so forth. A pertinent example is Minouche Shafik, a Muslim woman who serves as the current imperial administrator of Columbia University. In this incarnation of the system, the very existence of this person is meant to demonstrate that progress has been made, no matter if they act to repress the vast majority on behalf of the colonizing ruling class. “Don’t attack the system,” they say — and not necessarily with their mouths, but by their very conscription into it — “because it has clearly been reformed, and more reform is possible.” Again, the underlying logic is that we cannot afford to throw away the meager crumbs we have won in order to seize the whole feast.

How Does It Work?

One of the pernicious tricks of this strategy is that the candidates for political office who perform the dance that produces the Hostage Syndrome in their viewers can be entirely sincere. It is not required that the actors in this drama cynically manipulate their audience. They may have every intention, once they are elected “this time,” to pursue an agenda of social and economic progress. But the system protects itself. Therefore, the outcome of even the warmest-hearted reformer, the most earnest opponent of corporate greed and reactionary overreach, finds themselves confronted with intractable opposition once they actually take office.

In order to achieve anything within the bourgeois government, they are forced to adopt bourgeois methods. Politicians in the U.S.-Canadian system, as in all the bourgeois republics, are required to cultivate powerful backers and wealthy donors. Only with the assistance of these allies can they ensure even a fraction of their political plans come to pass. They must continually appease and placate big businesses and elder statesmen. This is how big businesses and elder statesmen exert control over the entire system. In fact, it was those same capitalists and lawyers who designed the system. They are the ruling class, and their machine serves their interests.

The effect itself is dependent on the working class of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire receiving benefits from their position in relation to the exploited and colonized world. Superprofits extracted from the colonized world (the neocolonies like Ukraine, full colonies like Puerto Rico, and the semi-colonies such as the Black Belt within the domestic U.S.) are used to drive down the cost of commodities inside the empire and keep the imperial worker flush with out-of-season fruit, cheap gas, and freely flowing credit. These superprofits are also used to support a hugely inflated petit-bourgeois “middle class” of managers and professionals that far outstrips the number of professionals necessary to manage the productive domestic economy. Hordes of lawyers, doctors, and accountants are kept high on the hog by these superprofits.

As a result, all of these people — petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats alike — have institutional buy-in to the system of government within the U.S. empire, even if they can’t actively change it. It works for them, so they work for it. Essentially, for this group of people, other than the fact that they cannot control their own economic destiny, nothing is fundamentally wrong. Why would they risk their spoils? From their point of view, it doesn’t make sense to shoot the hostage.

But the status quo is changing. The average worker in the U.S. empire is seeing less and less of those superprofits. Inflation is rising. The adventures of the U.S. armed forces are more and more ending in disgrace, ignominy, and terror abroad. As this continues and accelerates, the Hostage Syndrome will begin to lose its hold. The status quo, the hostage, no longer looks quite as appealing.

National Liberation: Killing the Hostage

There is another cure for the chauvinism common to this labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois class, who are poisoned by imperial bribery: that cure is a commitment to the national liberation movements. National liberation of the Black Belt, of the Indigenous nations, and of all subject nations in the U.S.-Canadian empire has a special place in the revolution. Each of these national liberation movements represents a special front in the class war; each must be treated with as much gravity as the war between the owning and working classes.

This means that the party-to-be (for no such party yet exists) must have a structural component grounded in national liberation. Only with national liberation sections, each of which with its own armed wing, each of which must have authority to veto the direction of the party-to-be, can the workers movement be purged of the chauvinism that now infects it.

In the past decade, every labor struggle has ended with a meek acquiescence on behalf of labor. The railworker’s unions were broken by Biden. The UAW and UPS unions accepted crumbs when they could have demanded the bakery. The great upheavals within the U.S.-Canadian empire have been, in our lifetimes, upheavals, revolts, and proto-revolutions focused around national liberation. Whether this is the Black nation in its expression of Black Power, Indigenous nations like AIM’s rebellion at Wounded Knee or Alcatraz, or the current wave of student revolts that aims to see the Palestinian nation free from interference, national liberation is the heart of the movement within the empire.

Only by adhering to a national liberation line can the movement regain its lost soul, which was bartered away so many years ago at some sordid party conference. Only through a national liberation line will it become clear that we can no longer abide by the Hostage Syndrome. Because national liberation cannot be achieved without shooting the hostage — the status quo — it can be our polestar.Enough is enough. We are done with good cops and bad cops, done with bourgeois courts and police, done with bourgeois politicians, and done with social democrats who are nothing more than lap dogs for the bourgeoisie. We are done with the Hostage Syndrome, and we now look to the future, when the hostage can no longer be used to control us.

It’s election season in the USA, and once again, we are being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils. On one hand, we have Donald J. Trump with his dangerous racist rhetoric, his misogyny, his open bribery and crimes. On the other hand we have Joseph R. Biden with his uncritical support for genocide, his repetition of zionist lies, and his continuation of Trump’s fascist border policies. How is one to choose and proudly cast a vote for either of two obvious evils? 

Comrade George Jackson in 1969 expressed this conundrum succinctly, “The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them. An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.”

As communists, we should analyze this election scientifically. We can look at present and historical conditions to reach our answer of what is to be done.  

Rajani Palme Dutt in 1935 spoke on the dangers of lesser evil voting, “the continued hesitation and retreat of the reformist working class leadership at each point (policy of the ‘lesser evil’) encourages the growth of fascism. On this basis, fascism is able finally to step in and seize the reins, not through its own strength, but through the failure of working class leadership. The collapse of bourgeois democracy is succeeded, not by the advance to proletarian democracy, but by the regression to fascist dictatorship.”

We understand that, throughout history, liberals have always sided with fascists. [Editors: Liberals here mean not only the left “aisle” of the U.S. state, but the entire tradition behind liberalism; these liberals — private property owners opposed to absolute monarchy and systems of privilege — definitely turned on the movement for liberation when it attempted to extend its work to property in the middle of the 19th century and have been implacable enemies of anti-propertarian ideologies ever since.] Liberals vote and govern in ways that protect their private property and bourgeois interests. While working class liberal-minded folks can be reached with a message of class solidarity, the professional managerial class will always protect their interests. 

Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds. 

Tailing the Democratic Party is out of the question. This major party is fully beholden to the corporate interests that finance it. The DNC is the party of Silicon Valley, of defense contractors, and is now the party of war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. We, not only as communists, but as humans, cannot back Joe Biden for president in 2024. 

It should go without saying, but we also cannot back the Republican Party. They are the party of Christian Nationalism, of right to work laws, of abortion bans and homophobia. No, we will not support the GOP nor Donald Trump. 

Section Four of the CPUSA Party Program states:

Both Democrats and Republicans have collaborated over many decades to restrict ballot access for ’minor’ parties, massively increasing signature requirements to get on the ballot and increasing the percentage of votes needed to remain on the ballot over several election cycles. Many media outlets also restrict democracy by focusing on the horserace and personality aspects of elections, reporting endlessly on polls and perceptions rather than on coverage of the issues of importance to voters.

We, as the Communist Party, are considered a minor party. We are running several candidates in local and state races, but we are not running a POTUS candidate in 2024. While we recognize that electing socialists and communists into the bourgeois system will not change it (only revolution can accomplish that goal) we understand that electoral struggle is one method to spread our message of working class solidarity, and to show the masses that the system under which we live is the cause of our pain. We can and should utilize bourgeois electoralism to advance our cause. 

There are many minor parties running candidates with platforms that align more closely to our goals than those of the major bourgeois parties. So the question now is: “Shall we form a United Front against fascism with one or more of these minor parties?”

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is running a presidential campaign in 2024, and standing with them could be a great opportunity to form a United Front against the fascism of the neoliberal Democrats and the MAGA Republicans. 

The PSL candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, have seven major policy goals stated on their website: 1. Seize the Biggest 100 Corporations, Create A New Economy for the People, 2. Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Rich — Build a Democracy That Serves the Working Class, 3. End the Rule of Money and Lock Up the Corrupt Elite, 4. Cut the Military Budget by 90% — Peace, Not War with China & Russia, 5. End the War on Black America, 6. Defend Women’s Rights, Full Equality for LGBTQ People, and 7. Save the Planet from Capitalism. 

These seven simple goals are not wholly different from the CPUSA party program goals. Claudia and Karina are also under no delusion that they might win the election or if they were to, that their victory would fundamentally change the United States. It couldn’t, but, as Lenin explained, running socialist candidates at all levels is one way to spread our message of socialism, and this is their goal in 2024. 

Many CPUSA members have a lot of experience working with Party for Socialism and Liberation comrades on the ground in our communities. We understand that they are good, principled comrades. PSL has been incredibly active in the FREE PALESTINE movement, they rallied with us against the Dobbs decision, and have worked with us on lobbying city councils regarding issues of policing. 

Dr. Cornel West, while not a Marxist, is running a progressive campaign for president as an independent candidate. His platform contains the following pillars: 1. Economic Justice, including a $27/hour minimum wage and breaking up monopolies, 2. Worker Justice — establishing a workers bill of rights and ending “right to work,” 3. Environmental Justice, 4. Health Justice by nationalizing the entire healthcare industry and protecting women’s and LGBTQ healthcare, 5. Racial Justice, including reparations to Black Americans, 6. Transformative Justice — ending mass incarceration and investing in alternatives to policing, 7. Voter Justice — instituting ranked choice voting, 8. Education Justice — canceling all student debt and making community and state colleges tuition free, 9. LGBTQIA Justice, 10. Gun Violence Justice, 11. Immigration Justice, and 12. Global Justice. 

The Communist Party has worked with Dr. Cornel West in the past through the Poor People’s Campaign. He has never claimed to be a Marxist, but he is an anti-imperialist. Take a closer look at his twelfth campaign pillar, Global Justice. This plan includes the goal of an expeditious closure of global U.S. military bases, disbanding NATO, and ending all weapons shipments to Ukraine to instead invest in peacemaking; ending military aid to Israel, ending zionist apartheid of the Palestinian people, and pressuring the U.N. to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation; ending the embargo on Cuba and normalizing relations by removing the nation from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list; and no intervention, military or otherwise, in Haiti. 

Dr. West’s platform of anti-imperialism is well thought out, and stands in stark contrast to the stances held by either leading bourgeois party in the United States. Working through an independent grassroots campaign like his is one way we can spread our message of working class solidarity and anti-imperialism. He is a candidate who has aligned with us in the past, and would likely welcome our alliance in this election cycle. 

If we want to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, we need to work together with other progressive forces, and this election season is an opportune time to reach out. We have built-in allies in the PSL, the Dr. West campaign, Palestinian liberation and anti-war groups, labor unions, and workers all over the country disillusioned with the two corporate-aligned imperialist parties. We can use our collective power to show people that we don’t have to settle for an “evil” candidate, but that we can demand a different way of life. We can disrupt this election cycle, and use it to bring working class Americans into the struggle. 

So, let’s form a true United Front against fascism in 2024. Let us join forces with other socialist and communist parties, unions, and unaffiliated comrades. Let us work together to defeat all the faces of fascism, including both major political parties in the USA and their corporate overlords. Let us stand firmly against zionism, and all aspects of settler colonialism. Let us collectively say “No!” to militarization of the southern border, “No!” to the oppression of women and trans people, and “No!” to the over-policing of Black and Brown neighborhoods. 

Let us say “Yes!” to solidarity, “Yes!” to working class power, and “Yes!” to socialism. Let us say “Yes!” to a United Front against the fascist threat. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

The liberal process-worshippers immediately deployed their spin doctors to explain why their so-called liberal justices on the court, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom this paper has already explained was appointed as a sop from Biden to the left wing of his party, also voted to keep Trump on the ballot. Despite the fact that the pro-Biden chorus has consistently made the claim that Trump and his ilk are a “threat to democracy” (they mean bourgeois democracy!) their appointed justices closed their eyes, held their noses, and voted to leave this “threat to (bourgeois!) democracy” on the ballot in Colorado.

Factions at Play

The ruling class is divided into groups, factions, and cliques. It has never been homogeneous, and the geographical layout of the U.S. Empire has played into the division of interests. As crises grow more acute and the contradictions sharpen — that is, as the divisions become more and more pronounced and the system of U.S. imperial capitalism decays — the ruling, capitalist class will be riven apart by its own internal contradictions and then, as the threat of losing power becomes real, will suddenly be welded together again into a single fighting force.

What are the factions currently on the stage? Obviously, we have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which at one time represented functionally different interests and ideologies within the ruling class. However, as we have seen, these names — Democrat, Republican — no longer correspond in any meaningful way to policy positions by the ruling elite. They are, more and more, losing their attachment to the real world.

So, then, we have 1) the Democratic-centrist faction, embodied in President Biden and the DNC and 2) the Republican Old Guard centrist faction. Biden is the president of compromise between these two groups. Each party then has its flanks — on the left, weakening and atrophying within the Democratic Party, are the so-called “progressives” and on the right of the GOP are the growing and strengthening MAGAcrats. The Democratic-centrist faction dominates the Democratic Party, while the MAGAcratic faction dominates the GOP.

Colorado Takes Action

Last September in the lead-up to the Colorado primary election, Republican voters in Colorado filed a petition against Trump to the effect that the 2021 January 6 putsch made him constitutionally ineligible to serve as the president of the U.S. Empire for another term. The legal theory, which is less important than the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with them, relies on Section 3 of one of the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. imperial constitution. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and designed to prevent treasonous Confederates from holding office, states that “No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

The Colorado Supreme Court agreed by a 4 to 3 vote. All seven of those justices were appointed by Democratic governors of the state, and only two are registered Republicans. However, the Colorado Supreme Court is, by and large, a club of former Assistant Attorneys General and District Attorneys. The four judges that voted to strike Trump from the ballot were Richard Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Marquez, and William Hood. The three who disagreed were chief justice Brian Boatright, Maria Berkenkotter, and Carlos Samour.

Richard Gabriel was a private business lawyer in Colorado; his wife is a Federal public defender in Denver, Colorado.

Melissa Hart is a Harvard law graduate, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney, and Associate Professor Law at University of Colorado Law School.

Monica Marquez is a Yale graduate who clerked for federal judges and then worked as an attorney in Colorado’s Attorney General’s office for eight years. She was president of the Colorado LGBT Bar Association and board member of the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association before she was elevated to judgehood in 2010.

William Hood is a former prosecutor who worked for the D.A. in Colorado for ten years before becoming a District Court judge in Denver.

Maria Berkenkotter was a member of the Colorado Attorney General’s office before becoming a judge.

Carlos Samour is another former prosecutor, who worked for the district attorney’s office in Denver for a decade before becoming a judge.

Brian Boatright. The chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and a registered Republican, he worked as a prosecutor for nearly a decade, and then was appointed to be a judge.

We can see the intraclass battle being waged here amongst representatives of the ruling bourgeois elite. On the one hand, the centrist Democrat-aligned justices have every reason to want to exclude Trump from the ballot and, even more, those who have significant vectors of social oppression have an added incentive to see Republicans broadly disempowered. Keep in mind how the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, because this is how a party must and should act to retain power.

On the other hand, the Republicans of Colorado are divided into two groups. Overall, Republican politicians are generally weak in Colorado, and have been in a sharp decline. Indeed, after the 2022 midterm elections, a Republican state representative said “Colorado Republicans need to take this and learn the lesson that the party is dead. This is an extinction-level event.” The majority of the rump Republican party is very far to the right in Colorado, and has embraced MAGA-Republican far-right positions.

However, just as there exists a federal-level “left” wing of the Republican party — the old guard who want a return to the vaguely bipartisan system of suppressing the workers together with the Democrats in a friendly sparring match over policy and the distribution of money — there exists a much smaller “left” wing of the Colorado GOP. Norma Anderson — the Anderson of Trump v. Anderson — is a former state lawmaker and a “diehard Republican,” which should give you an idea of the animosity on the Republican right between MAGAcrats and the old guard.

The Supremes Say No

Every “progressive” “left-wing” justice (!) on the Supreme Court of the United States had less courage than their Colorado counterparts Gabriel, Hart, Marquez, and Hood. The Democratic party spin machine is repeating SCOTUS’ own tortured logic: that the decision to enforce the 14th Amendment is one that has to come from a federal body, not a state one.

The majority, excluding Republican Barrett and Democrats Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, went on to decide that only the U.S. Congress can disbar someone for seeking office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — that no court, no agency, and no other authority has that power. This makes Section 3 a dead letter as there will never be an alignment of political forces that permits both chambers of the Congress to act together to ban a candidate for office, short of a single-party coup of the government.

These “progressive” justices did not act to preserve party power the way the justices in Colorado did. Why not? Because at the federal level the Democratic Party is unable to give to the left in any meaningful way. The potential of the party to act to smooth harsh conditions created by the decay of the U.S. imperial order has been totally exhausted. In essence, had the Democratic justices been successful in keeping Trump off the ballot the federal party would be forced to use further effective political tactics to give working people, students, immigrants, and the increasingly-exposed groups of the socially oppressed, who are all in peril, some kind of relief. It would prove that they, the federal-level Democrats, are capable of acting outside the barriers of propriety, and then they would be asked to do that for the benefit of their supposed constituents.

They know they can’t.

Fault Lines

We are seeing a division opening up between the state-level Democratic parties and the federal Democrats. The Colorado party is substantially more progressive and sits to the left of the federal party; it embodies the local interests of local bourgeoisie within Colorado, of which the elite financial/imperialist bourgeoisie play a very small part. With this smaller strata of imperialist bourgeoisie, the needs of the upper and middle ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are much more strongly expressed, and thus we can see that state party politics in Colorado trend toward petit-bourgeois vacillation rather than open bourgeois reaction, which is the current trend in the federal party. 

The petit-bourgeoisie are business owners and professionals. Anyone who both owns the means of production (shops, specialized technical skills, small capital) and also works to support themselves are members of this class between classes. They have interests in common both with workers and with owners, which explains why their political consciousness tends to be confused. These include middle and small-time lawyers, accountants, etc. The big bourgeoisie are those who own big capital — major firms, investments, etc. — and who do not work. Petit-bourgeois political consciousness trends toward that brand of liberalism that demands equality for women by calling for “more women prison guards!”

The lower bourgeois/petit-bourgeois makeup and ideology of the state Democratic parties means these parties trend toward faux-progressive stances. They are now progressive, now regressive in turns, because the petit-bourgeoisie is caught between the truly progressive interests of the working class and the reactionary interests of property. Open bourgeois reaction is embodied by the Biden-”left” GOP alliance, and outright counter-revolution is embodied in the MAGAcrats.

At the state level, there is still some flexibility for the dying Democratic machine. There are funds to redistribute, there are enemies to expropriate from, and there are bases of power that don’t rely directly on the imperialist ruling class of the U.S. Empire to draw from. The glacial fracturing and break-up of the Democratic Party will see increased tension between state-level Democrats and their federal counterparts as their interests diverge.

Nevertheless, the federal party is still in the driver’s seat, as the outcome of Trump v. Anderson demonstrates. There may yet be a benefit in showing state-level Democrats that they do not have to align themselves with the corpse of their federal-level party. This is something that the masses of working people in the U.S. are more and more coming to realize: that the Democrats themselves must be rejected if the working people are ever to see relief.

At present, partly due to the “big tent” the DSA harbors, there are many streams of “support” for the Uncommitted Movement — some revolutionary, and others less so. USU encourages the Marxist tendencies to come together and exert their collective power within the organization to support the most radical version of the Uncommitted Movement; that is, the direct confrontation against the Democratic Party machine. We urge you, also, to purify the DSA’s position and make it clear: the position is not to vote uncommitted in order to change the Democratic Party — it is to vote uncommitted to prove that the Democratic Party is not subject to proletarian pressure, that it cannot change.

We point here to our recent sister-piece, Defy the Democratic Party Coronation, for our analysis of the difference.

The difference may seem slight, but we believe that the distinction is critical. Even if the ultimate material consequence of the Uncommitted Movement is to expose the lies of the bourgeois politicians, if the guidance of the DSA is confused or muddled — if there are messages of reform intermixed with the revolutionary message — the ultimate outcome will result in a petit-bourgeois deviation from the true proletarian line: that we must abandon the electoral machine en masse, in an organized form, and prepare for direct confrontation with the genocidal enemy state.

Our Press Organization stands prepared to aid you in any way we can.

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.