[Party Interventions, USA] Ignore the Elections; Unleash the Class War

The Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO want workers to think that this coming election is a special one, one that, if Kerry’s elected, will mark a big shift in US policy, saving health care, creating jobs, and generally favoring the working class. It’s bullshit; all that’s special about this election is how much the “opposition” candidate resembles the incumbent from the get-go. All overblown rhetoric aside, the only real debates going on between Kerry and Bush are about who can do the same shit better, whether it’s depriving workers of health care, bombing so-called terrorists, or just maintaining the rule of the rich in general.

Of course, when Kerry’s trolling for votes at a union rally, you might hear him babble about how he’s going to save health care or punish corporations who give “American” jobs to workers in other countries. Never mind that Kerry backed the Clinton-era “welfare reform” which put millions of poor workers in an even worse situation, or that Kerry’s leading campaign contributors include corporations like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and AOL Time Warner, leaders in “outsourcing” jobs. And does anyone believe for a moment that Kerry has any substantial opposition to Bush on the issue of the Iraq war? The problem for Kerry isn’t that hundreds of US workers (both in military and civilian capacities) and thousands of Iraqi workers are being massacred, but that at the end of the day the aims of the ruling class in launching the war might not be fulfilled. What it comes down to is that we’ve got two rich Yale graduates with nearly identical programs battling it out for the White House.

The qualities of candidates aside, what workers must recognize above all is that the economy drives the policies of the state and not the other way around. The economy didn’t grow because of Clinton’s efforts nor collapse because of Bush’s failings – what we have is an irrational economic system, capitalism, which accumulates profits made from the labor power of the proletariat, and then breaks in the face of inevitable crises. The government responds to these changes with appropriate measures, but it’s the servant of capital and not its master. Throughout all of this, the working class is always exploited and deprived, and when the crises come they’re the first to suffer the consequences. That’s happening now, and, despite the bourgeois media’s obsession with the personalities and claims of various politicians, the privations forced on workers everywhere are the result of economic forces that act regardless of which party’s in power. In fact the two parties are just different wings of the same anti-worker party that has always controlled “our” government. Not even so-called independent candidates, with apparently pro-worker programs, can alter the fact that the bourgeois state is a tool of capital.

Health care can’t be saved when the ruling class which conceded it as an appeasement (when the economy was in better shape) is now committed to end it. The bourgeois giveth and taketh away – regardless of the populist piety espoused by charming “public servants”. The real mission of workers isn’t to “save” the rotting social infrastructure provided for some workers by the ruling class; nor is it to keep “American” jobs from going to workers of poorer nations. Rather, it’s to unite workers everywhere, of every trade and nationality, into fighting class unions, to fire up the class struggle, and to attack capitalism – the root of all their grievances – at its core, internationally.

The mainstream unions today are completely unsuited to this task. Their rare gestures of militancy turn out chronically lame, and, while top union bureaucrats pull in six-figure salaries, the workers they supposedly represent continue to be fucked over and divided during ineffective strikes. The defeat of the massive Southern California grocery strike is one recent example of how incapable the AFL-CIO unions are of defending workers’ interests. These unions really exist just to tie workers to the regime that oppresses them, and now, even as they betray their members at the workplace, they want you to vote for John Kerry.

You can’t reform these regime unions, or make them real representative organs for the working class, because they’re intimately tied to the bourgeois regime. What proletarians need to do today, whether they’re in the current unions or outside of them, is to start coming together, across divisions of industry or locale, and begin to work seriously towards the formation of a new class union, a union that really represents workers, that’s run by workers, that isn’t afraid to make the bosses piss their pants, and that doesn’t sit around waiting for living conditions to get worse, but which puts up an unrelenting fight to raise workers’ living standards, and more importantly, to unite workers everywhere into a class force capable of smashing this system.

The electoral façade of the government only serves to mask a vast police state ready to bring out the guns whenever workers threaten the power of the rich. The working class can only emancipate itself by smashing this state structure and erecting a revolutionary proletarian dictatorship, and throughout all of this the working class must be led by their own International Communist Party.

The bourgeoisie have no problem securing their class domination and keeping workers in their place. The bosses are serious about class struggle. It’s about time that workers have a union and a party that are serious about it too.

Ignore the elections, unleash the class war!