Working people in the U.S. face the brunt of a deep-going crisis of capitalism today — soaring prices, less jobs, assaults on immigrant workers and the spread of international conflicts and wars. Under these conditions, it’s no surprise that the anger of many workers was directed toward the party in the White House. For decades the U.S. capitalist rulers have sought to trap working people in the dead end of choosing a so-called lesser evil between their two main parties — the Democrats and Republicans — that uphold capitalist exploitation and carry out the rulers’ predatory wars abroad.
Only the Socialist Workers Party candidates offered working people a road forward.
One dangerous feature of the election was the rapidly advancing normalization of Jew-hatred by Democratic Party politicians and the pro-Hamas middle-class left. Threats and assaults against Jews have risen in the U.S. and worldwide since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7. 2023, pogrom in Israel.
This shift in bourgeois politics was highlighted in the campaigns of unapologetic opponents of Israel’s right to exist, like that of Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate from Michigan. The number of members of Congress spreading the dangerous lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state and is carrying out “genocide” has grown. This means attacks on Jews will grow.
Israel is fighting a defensive war to prevent Hamas and its backers in Tehran from carrying out their longstanding goal of organizing more and larger massacres of Jews until they’re all killed or driven from the Middle East. The defeat and disarming of Hamas would protect the lives of Jews in Israel and deal crucial blows to forces worldwide that promote Jew-hatred. And it would eliminate the biggest obstacle Palestinians in Gaza face to advancing their own national interests.
Israel simultaneously fights to prevent the rulers in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in order to wipe Israel — the one country that offers Jews an unconditional refuge — off the face of the earth.
A despicable campaign ad by Rebellion PAC backing Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed claimed U.S. funding for Israel’s military was responsible for today’s higher grocery prices, echoing the age-old blood libel that blames Jews for the financial misery and crises workers face, which are bred by the workings of capitalism.
Washington’s intervention in the Middle East and its wars there have nothing to do with defending Jews in Israel, nor advancing the aspirations of the Palestinians. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations the U.S. rulers have fought to advance their class domination of the region and its peoples, to plunder its oil and other resources. That’s why the Socialist Workers Party calls for all U.S. troops, warships and weaponry out of the Middle East.
El-Sayed tried to disassociate himself from the antisemitic ad, but he refused to condemn it. The fact is he had previously campaigned on the same slander, calling Israel “an affordability issue.” When asked, he declined to give an unqualified defense of Israel’s right to exist.
Jew-hatred is growing on both the left and right of capitalist politics. Its spread has been especially notable among meritocratic middle-class layers who worry that the deepening capitalist crisis will push them into the working class, a class they both scorn and fear. They’re susceptible to calls to scapegoat Jews as responsible.
“Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” is the demand issued by a group called Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza. It’s campaigning to drive several prominent businesses owned by Israeli and U.S. Jews out of Philadelphia.
The normalization of Jew-hatred in capitalist politics demonstrates why the working class and our unions must lead in speaking out against all expressions of antisemitism and join struggles to defend Jews wherever they’re under attack.
In 1939 the Socialist Workers Party led 50,000 unionists and other workers in a labor protest against a fascist German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was part of the SWP’s effort to deepen labor’s participation in the fight against the rise of the Nazi menace.
Jew-hatred is not eternal; it’s rooted in class-divided society. It has become especially virulent in the imperialist epoch. It rose in the 1930s both in Germany when the Nazis came to power and more broadly in capitalist politics worldwide, including in the U.S. Its rise went hand in hand with the march toward the Second World War and the Holocaust.
There are strong similarities with those developments and the period we’re living through today.
Fighting to push back Jew-hatred and answering the scapegoating of Jews is deeply tied to the fight to build the working-class party that’s needed to lead the deeper class-struggle battles to come. That’s what the SWP and its campaigns are out to accomplish, to lead workers in their millions to take political power into our own hands.
Jew-hatred can and will be eradicated, but only in the course of making socialist revolutions, here and around the world.