Class Struggles Win, Elections Don’t

Four years ago, we observed that “the election of 2016 represents the true contemporary nature of capitalism” (The Communist Party no. 5). That November night seems much further than four years in the past, after the Muslim ban, the trade war against China, the abduction of migrant children, the threat of war against Iran, the protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor; after Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and Portland. Now, facing the worst months of the worst pandemic in a hundred years, we find that the same thing is true all over again: the election of 2020 represents the true contemporary nature of capitalism.

Every political decision is only a reflection of the prevailing social conditions. At some points in time this becomes especially clear. Now the real magnitude of capitalism’s failure is apparent for all to see in the form of the pandemic, and the techniques of repression developed through imperialist wars are on open display in U.S. cities. The president has publicly mused about a coup. The crisis of capitalism has come home.

Against this backdrop, the political decision itself could not be duller. If only their politics are compared, Donald Trump and Joe Biden might be mistaken for the same person. Both are rightists and imperialists. Both came to political prominence through race-baiting. Both are spineless opportunists, willing to change positions in an instant to promote their own personal interests.

Despite these similarities, the Republican and Democratic parties claim that this election is a matter of life and death. The Republicans say that Trump is the only bulwark against an anarchist cabal, lurking in the shadows behind Biden, who will destroy white America unless the president is re-elected. The Democrats claim that Trump is out to destroy the beauty that is American democracy, and that only voting for Biden will save it.

In truth, there is no decision to be made in this election. The bourgeoisie will win either way – this is true democracy! The real decision in this moment is not between Trump and Biden, but between capitalist exploitation and communist freedom.

The history of the Democrats’ response to the Trump presidency has been one of defeatism and opportunism. The Democrats have latched onto every petty-bourgeois slogan in order to funnel the energies of that threatened faction of the ruling class into that party’s traditional careerist channels. The proletariat has been absent from this particular movement, despite the Democrats’ attempts to use it for their own ends.

Their first promise, immediately after the 2016 election, was to form a “resistance” against Trump. The term referred back to the historical myth of European resistance to fascism. But the resistance of 2016 had less to do with the example of those earlier movements than the sentiment contained in its memory. And sentiment was its only characteristic. The promise to resist meant only through legal and “respectable” means. It dressed the old, oppressive democratic institutions in revolutionary costumes. But the defense of the working class was never really the goal – in fact, what the Democrats’ resistance demanded was a return to “normal,” to an imagined civil past. The resisters’ outrage at the property damage that accompanied early anti-Trump protests (to which they responded with chants of “peaceful protest!”) and their open fraternization with the police were the first indications of their real sympathies.

The emphasis on legal means was a method to channel the energies of the left-leaning part of the petty bourgeoisie, slowly moving further left as its economic status deteriorates, back into institutions controlled by the big bourgeoisie. The Muller investigation and the impeachment were the clearest expressions of this official resistance’s desire to confront Trump only through the bourgeois legal system. These efforts, as we know, amounted to nothing.

The proletariat is the only force that really fought back in the past four years. It is the only force in society that Trump – and Biden – really fear. Now acquitted in his impeachment trial and with the Republican Party completely behind him, he has nothing to fear from any of the bourgeois factions. He understands that their noble speeches mean nothing in practice. By contrast, the uprising in May and June of this year shook the bourgeoisie to its core. The entire ruling class felt the need to respond with a show of force and a crass appeal to religion that embarrassed even the military. The protests compelled it to take a sharp rightward regarding civil liberties, recruiting the Department of Homeland Security as a paramilitary organization. Trump began to publicly muse about postponing the election, and refused, until a few days ago, to acknowledge a future without him in the White House. We can see now that this was all theater from a desperate man and a desperate class, trying without success to rectify disorder of its own creation. The pandemic played a central role in Trump’s calculations: as president, he assumes responsibility for capitalism’s inability to handle the viral threat, so he invented an alternative “anarchist” threat and claimed to have the cure.

The protests that erupted this year are inter-classist, not proletarian. They do, however, have significant proletarian components. We see this in the huge numbers of working-class people, many black but also from other races, who came out to protest despite the pandemic and the real threat of persecution. The rank and file of several trade unions participated, and in some cases they marched as distinct blocs of workers from certain occupations. The proletarian components of the uprising carried out its most effective actions – for example, the Juneteenth walkout of port workers in the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union, and the Transport Workers Union’s refusal to drive arrested protestors to jail.

Covid-related strikes are a related phenomenon. These had been the most effective measures to protect the workers from the pandemic when all levels of government are unwilling to act. Amazon warehouse workers won higher pay, employer-provided protective equipment, and better cleaning procedures. Agricultural workers in Yakima, Washington, most of them immigrants from Latin America, won higher pay and forced employers to recognize their union, Trabajadores Unidos por la Justicia. Teachers in Chicago prevented the city from resuming in-person classes just by voting to strike. These life-saving victories were won by the workers themselves, against a bourgeoisie and a capitalist state who could not care less about workers’ lives.

Covid-19 has made obvious what was already clear: the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a life-and-death struggle, a war all the time, and if the proletariat is to survive we must take action in unity as a class. The well-wishes of the bourgeoisie and their political hacks will not save us. This was true before the pandemic and will still be true after.

This election is no different. Trump and Biden represent the interests of the same bourgeois class. Biden has a record of repression and mass murder to rival Trump. During his first decade in the senate, he made a name for himself through his opposition to busing for school integration, the hallmark of racism in the 1970s. He said in 1977 that busing would send white children into a “racial jungle.” He was an enthusiastic supporter of the War in Iraq, using his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to push through legislation allowing an invasion. At least one million Iraqi people died as a result. During his time as vice president, he was part of an administration that committed a long list of atrocities abroad: the 2013 military coup in Egypt, the violence in Syria and Libya, the partition of Ukraine (while his own son was doing business with Kiev oligarchs), and, most infamous, the murder by violence, disease, and starvation of 250,000 people in Yemen. Joe Biden is personally responsible for conflicts that have killed millions of people. If there were to be a Nuremberg-style trial for American war crimes, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden would stand accused.

Neither has Joe Biden has shown himself to be an enemy of repression within the United States. He supported Patriot Act spying law in 2001, and to establish the Department of Homeland Security (which forms Trump’s secret police) in 2002. We can be sure that the “anti-extremism” initiatives of Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr will continue under a Biden presidency, if for no other reason than to appeal to the right wing of the Democratic Party and to disaffected Republicans. They are already preparing to blame extremists for any electoral difficulties they face on November 3.

So this is the choice democracy presents to the working class, a choice between two killers, two racists, two rich men. For Biden political power led to money; for Trump money led to political power. One is embedded in politics, and the other is embedded in commerce. They represent only one class, the bourgeoisie. They are united in their opposition to workers’ power.

The proletariat cannot come to power democratically. As Marxists, we understand that revolution means an oppressed class becoming the ruling class. This cannot happen without the suppression of the old oppressors, who will inevitably try to regain their lost privileges. In the proletarian revolution, this means the complete exclusion of the bourgeoisie from political activity for as long as they remain a class. To do so is completely undemocratic, because it rejects the abstract equality of all citizens (equality under the law) that forms the basis of democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot give equal status to the members of the bourgeoisie until their old social class ceases to exist.

In addition to suppressing the old powers, a new ruling class must form its own characteristic forms of government, its own state. In the French Revolution of 1789, the bourgeoisie abandoned the feudal Estates General to form the democratic Constituent Assembly. In the Russian Revolutions of 1917, tsarist absolutism gave way first to the bourgeois Provisional Government and then, in the Bolshevik uprising, to the proletarian rule of the soviets. The communist left recognizes that the soviets (workers’ councils) was the real form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the realization of what Lenin called the commune-state.

The International Communist Party supports nothing less than the formation of a world workers republic, and has no interest in political projects that lack this end goal. The parties of democracy reject this aim and reaffirm their commitment to maintaining the bourgeois state. These are the enemies of the communist party! We have nothing to gain from collaboration with them except an easier path to infiltration and repression. The “leftist” groups who chase after bourgeois democracy are only fraternizing with the enemy. The repression against the Communist Party of America in the late 1940s, following its enthusiastic support for the Democrats during the popular front period, is just one of many examples of this failed strategy.

Now is not a revolutionary moment. The working class is not yet organized in its own political party and class unions. Despite this, communists continue to act outside and against the bourgeois state and its political henchmen. We must tell every class-conscious worker that democracy is a system oriented against our class, that the proletariat has the right to rule, and that in unity it holds the power to do so.

Our party is guided by a single body of theory and practice stretching from the present back to the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. All of our activity is in agreement with that long political line. This is what we mean when we call our theses invariant.

No one is sure when the results of the 2020 election will become clear. There are already court challenges in the works, not just for the presidential election but also for congressional, state, and local elections, which may drag on into the winter. But whenever the results become clear, whoever wins, we can be certain of what our party will be doing – still fighting for workers’ power, for revolution, for communism.