2024 US Presidential Election: Only Capitalism Wins

As the United States approaches the 2024 presidential election, we find ourselves repeating the same thing we’ve echoed for over a century: “The oppressed are allowed to decide, once every few years, which among the representatives of the ruling class will represent and oppress them in Parliament.” (State and Revolution, 1917) 

Although the election is set for a Tuesday, the following Wednesday will fundamentally be the same for workers as last week. Regardless of who wins, the bourgeoisie will tighten its grip and strangle the proletariat.

Not just in America, but across the whole world, new and old candidates alike prattle on with bloated platitudes and inane ramblings. These asinine comments have the sole purpose of addling the proletariats’ minds, in the hope they’ll endure greater and greater sacrifices.

Across the world, hacks and mouthpieces in the media have already re-animated the battle between “democracy” and “fascism.” In this supposed duel, the state is portrayed as this sacred force, somehow standing above society, which both sides claim they must save from the other.

Once more, crocodile tears are shed over the supposed “revival of fascism.” But whether bourgeois rule is “conservative” or “liberal” (whatever that means today), communists know that fascism is really the dictatorship of monopoly capital. Fascism has actually ruled the entire world for at least a century. No matter what those pretty words on the campaign posters might say, capital always tries to prevent any reorganization of the working class as a class for itself. One of the ways it does this is by strengthening the state, which is a tool for one class to repress the others.

While the proletariat is deafened by the cacophony of electoralism, the media conveniently prattles on about nothing, something, anything but the living conditions of the working class. If we look beyond decades of empty promises, “reforms,” and so-called “incremental change”—if we cut through the politician’s crap—we see bourgeois society for what it truly is: exploitation, alienation, and misery.

Whenever American workers try to claim their “fair share,” they’re met with chemical weapons, armored vehicles, and an increasingly militarized police force. It’s these so-called “friends” and “representatives” of the working class who call these forces upon us. And how does the working class respond to the oppressor? By casting ballots and medallions, registering record voter turnouts. This only serves as another stark reminder of how deeply the illusion of electoral change is ingrained in the working class.

This summer, the Democratic Party had to acknowledge that Joe Biden was better suited for an antique store than the White House. So, they hoisted this “responsibility” on Kamala Harris. She prides herself on representing everything that Republicans, and her “opponent,” are not: she says she stands for democracy, that she is anti-racist, pro-LGBT, and pro-worker (as if!). Simply put, she casts herself as the anti-fascist option to the billionaire tyrant Donald Trump. Yet, her nomination does not signal a break from the past but rather a total continuation (and we don’t just mean in terms of campaign strategy).

Trump easily won the Republican primaries. The “scandalous events” of January 6th, the subsequent courtroom farce, and his exoneration—given not by judge or jury, but by the ruling class—are all just filler in the long-running joke that is bourgeois democracy. Its increasing erraticness is yet another testament to the fact that the bourgeois regime actually relies on “divisive” and grotesque figures in order to reinforce democratic mystification.

We readily confess that a certain amount of conflict exists between the various factions of the haute-bourgeoisie. This conflict arises from their opposing interests—both immediate and long-term, calm and erratic—and manifests itself in the political parties that serve them.

But in this phase of capitalism, it is precisely finance capital—not elections—that determines how states are run. In the modern world, this is the reality everywhere.

So it isn’t a matter of being “blind” to Trump’s tough guy shtick, nor to his sincere disgust at anything resembling organized labor. It’s about recognizing that Kamala’s cheap talk on abortion, democracy, and LGBT rights is, at the most fundamental level, merely the flipside to Trump’s bigoted pandering. But this is mostly a game of charades, full of gimmicks designed to stir up outrage. When the time comes, we are certain that any topic of discussion will easily be brushed aside in favor of the supreme good of American capitalism.

America, like its competitors, relies on the continuous flow of cheap labor and must ramp up its exploitation of labor-power. Exploitation, the tendrils of imperialism, and the anarchy of the market are all features of capitalism, not defects. They will never disappear until capitalism disappears, and this will never happen through voting.

But as we’ve always said, the state apparatus only serves the interests of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie alone. Political theatrics is just one of the many ways in which the exploiters dominate the exploited. 

As it stands, all the different parties need each other. The third parties are either ballot spoilers, or the miserable cry of the radical liberal.

While US bourgeois interests remain unchallenged at home, they are being increasingly contested abroad. Kamala, as Biden’s Vice President, has been tasked with maintaining their stronghold overseas. Her “boss,” Biden, once held her job. Back then, the US boasted about its ability to “build” states in Iraq and Afghanistan. America exported “democracy” bomb by bomb, and raided precious resources to further imperialist interests.

These imperialist adventures were branded as pacifist missions, and were called “humanitarian successes.” This is as ridiculous as it is irrelevant. One must only look at what is left after this “liberation.” In Palestine, atrocities committed against the Palestinian and Israeli proletariat are met with empty platitudes (if not downright indifference) by the leaders of the world.

While it’s true that American workers have yet to confront the direct consequences of war on their doorstep, they are nevertheless subjected to an exacerbation of their conditions as proletarians. Rents are skyrocketing. Wages are falling while unemployment is rising. Food costs more and more every day. Childcare is unaffordable, and for that matter, healthcare is too. Simply making ends meet is now a challenge for more and more workers—even the ones with jobs. It’s no longer surprising to hear of people forced to work two, or even three, jobs to keep from starving.

Trump’s “solution” oscillates between straight-up dismissiveness and nostalgia. He sprinkles his calls for a tighter border with delusional rants based on conspiracy theory, chauvinism, and racism. This can’t be totally chalked up to senility—he’s rallying his base: the “more reactionary” layers of the rural middle class, the middle class in general, as well as the most fanatical and bigoted white evangelical proletariat. 

Harris’s campaign is basically a mimic of Biden’s, and is just as anti-proletarian as Trump’s. In the 2020 election, Biden, the self-declared “most pro-union president in U.S. history,” had won 57% of the unionized workers’ vote, surpassing Hillary’s 51% four years earlier. Biden and Harris have both intervened in the (unfortunately) timid struggles of the working class: first with the railroad workers, then with the UPS strike, and finally with the UAW. Biden cleverly offered mere morsels, spread out over the years, all in order to contain the strike. But where a strike would have done excessive damage to profits, they slammed their fist on the table—like with the railroad workers.

Collaborationist unions, for their part, chose to endorse a candidate, thereby securing themselves a place at the (bourgeois) table. All the while, working class energy is redirected towards the spectacle of electoral politics. The UAW, the largest union in the US auto-industry, and one of the largest unions in all of North America, had already supported Joe Biden and now supports Harris. Why? Their reasoning is fundamentally bourgeois: “Trump isn’t capable of running the government,” “Trump’s incompetence will hurt the economy,” “Trump is a threat to American democracy.”

Not only is engaging in electoralism useless from a working class perspective, it is actively detrimental to our movement. It stifles the communist impulse before it can even take its first steps. 

In Democratic Cretinism, published in Il Partito Comunista #1, we said that “[t]he proletariat is already defeated the moment it submits to the farce that is the ballot, whatever the objective, be it even an improvement in the living conditions of the workers.” 

So while it is obvious that the US presidential election won’t lead to any improvement in the living conditions of the workers—not even short term—we would still oppose the use of the democratic platform even in (the remote) instances where this could be the case. This is because “behind that pro-worker appearance, a new golden chain grips the proletariat, making it submit to capital, to capital’s ideology, and to the engorgement of capital.” 

Terms like “right and wrong” or “democratic and authoritarian” don’t really mean anything from a Marxist perspective. Above all else, in this phase of putrid capitalism, the proletariat has nothing to defend or gain through counting heads; no matter the case, it does not engage in the fight for a “lesser evil.” After all, there cannot possibly be any lesser evils among the various factions of the bourgeoisie—all united in their anti-proletarian fury—represented at the voting booth.