For the first time in years, the capitalist rulers in the U.S. are making progress in reestablishing a measure of stability in the decades-old two-party political system. This doesn’t mean they have any answers to the economic and social crisis working people face today, from persistently high prices to the threat of more wars. In fact, it is their dog-eat-dog profit system that is responsible.
That is why the Socialist Workers Party presidential campaign of Rachele Fruit for president and Dennis Richter for vice president gets a serious response when they say workers need to break from the bosses’ parties and build their own party, a party of labor.
The gains made by the rulers in steadying the Republican Party were clear at the July 15-18 Republican National Convention, where the overwhelming majority of the party — including all those who had challenged Trump in earlier primaries — came together around the Donald Trump-J.D. Vance ticket.
Their convention platform presented the GOP as a party for workers. It’s dedicated “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America,” and aims to reverse the “crushing tax” of inflation “and build a brighter future for American workers and their families.”
Just a few days later, President Joseph Biden was bludgeoned into withdrawing as the Democratic presidential candidate, tossing his support and campaign bank account to Vice President Kamala Harris. Leaders from the overwhelming majority of the clashing wings in the party — from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the socialist left to Nancy Pelosi and party old-guard leaders like Bill and Hillary Clinton — spoke out to support her. By July 23 Harris said she had the support of the majority of delegates to the party’s national convention next month, and took off on the road campaigning.
For well over a century, the U.S. imperialists have governed through these two parties, asking workers to choose which is the “lesser evil.” But they had become increasingly faction ridden and less effective. The rulers need them to be stable and confident to defend capitalist rule and deal with rivals abroad.
In recent years Washington has faced rising competition and military threats from Beijing seeking to expand its sway in the Pacific. Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the Tehran-backed Hamas pogrom Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people in Israel, most of them Jews, the challenges the U.S. rulers face have intensified.
Built into this unstable world is the explosive consequences of record-high government debt, pressing the bosses and government officials to increase pressure on workers to sacrifice. This has sharpened class inequalities worldwide and led to anti-government protests, from Bangladesh to Kenya, and strike battles across North America and elsewhere.
Irrespective of who wins the election, the U.S. capitalists seek some political stability to better defend their class interests in this volatile world. Former Republican Vice President Michael Pence came forward July 22 to thank Biden for stepping down. Pence’s comments reflect the consciousness of a growing number of political figures of the need for more stability. Pence said, “Now is a time for leaders in both parties to … send a message of strength and resolve to America’s friends and enemies alike.”
The cornerstone of the Democrats’ reelection campaign — the demonization of Trump and his supporters as a “threat to democracy” — is still front and center. Harris says the 2024 election is now a race between a former California prosecutor and a felon.
But this approach gets less and less traction, especially among workers. Tens of millions oppose the Democrats’ assault on constitutional freedoms. Their court cases against Trump, intended to imprison their main rival or damage him irreparably, are increasingly stalled indefinitely or coming apart.
Over the last couple of years the most significant development for working people has been the growing numbers organizing and using unions to resist the bosses’ efforts to dump the capitalist crisis on our backs. The employers have launched attacks on our wages, work schedules and conditions, alongside the lack of child care, health care and affordable housing. Strikers are walking picket lines and winning solidarity. This uptick in union struggles has also spurred growing receptivity to the Socialist Workers Party campaign.
Republicans: We’re ‘workers party’
For the first time in several decades a union leader addressed the Republican convention, invited by Trump. Sean O’Brien, general president of the Teamsters, told delegates the former president was “one tough S.O.B,” pointing to how he raised his fist in the air and asked supporters to “fight” after the attempt to assassinate him at his rally in Pennsylvania.
“I’m here today because I refuse to do the same things my predecessors did,” O’Brien told cheering delegates. For decades top union officials have subordinated labor’s interests to getting Democrats elected. O’Brien didn’t endorse Trump, but he saw the Republicans as potential allies.
Trump’s vice presidential pick, James David Vance, who likes to be called J.D., grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and in Kentucky. He built a career in bourgeois politics by writing about his rise out of the working class, his family’s difficulties and depicting the people he grew up with as hopeless in his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy.
He joined the Marines and went to Ohio State and Yale Law School. “Biden’s inflation crisis,” Vance said, “is really an affordability crisis.” He described people he grew up with who can’t afford groceries, or to pay the rent and sustain families. “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.”
Before becoming a senator, Vance was a venture capitalist.
Like Trump, Vance seeks working-class support by pitting the interests of native-born against foreign-born workers, scapegoating immigrants for the problems of capitalist rule. The 2024 GOP platform calls for the “largest deportation program in American history.”
Like others at the convention, Vance had earlier been a critic of Trump. But his selection on Trump’s ticket and agreement to serve is a further attempt to put forward an image of the Republican Party as a champion of the working class.
During the convention, Vance’s office touted his initiatives in response to the Norfolk Southern derailment and toxic chemical fire that devastated the lives of working people in East Palestine, Ohio, last year. “Senator Vance will never stop fighting for the people of East Palestine,” his office said.
These moves by the bosses’ two main parties will give the U.S. rulers more stable political instruments.
But the depth of the crisis of capitalism and the continuing resistance by working people create more opportunities for the SWP’s presidential campaign to get a hearing and win support. Workers need to organize independently of the bosses in the political arena and to break with the bosses’ parties and chart a course to replace capitalist rule with a government of our own.