With the Nov. 5 election just about six weeks away, the capitalist rulers are redoubling their efforts to convince working people we have no choice but to hold our nose and pick the “lesser evil” between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
But millions of workers sense both parties — Democrats and Republicans — are committed to ruling on behalf of the capitalist class, leaving us to pay for the deepening economic, social and moral crisis. Stagnating real wages over much of the last three decades have heightened uncertainty about the future and made it more difficult for workers to climb out of debt and raise a family. Life expectancy has fallen steadily since 2015. The last time such a sustained drop occurred was during the First World War.
Both Harris and Trump make clear they’ll assure the Pentagon has the money it needs to protect U.S. imperialist interests in an increasingly unstable world marked by the threat of more wars.
Sharp clashes between Harris and Trump at their Sept. 10 debate mask the fact that the class outlook they share in common is far more important than their differences. The fundamental division in U.S. politics is not between the Democratic and Republican candidates. It’s between the ruling capitalists — backed by both of their main parties — and the working class.
All union and class-struggle battles are political, but the working class has yet to take steps to build its own political party. Advancing our class interests starts from building solidarity with today’s union struggles, like the strike by 33,000 Boeing workers.
Growing numbers of workers recognize that the kind of changes we need run deep. Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, gets a hearing when she says what’s needed is for workers in their millions to take political power into their own hands.
Need class break with bosses’ parties
Sky-high price hikes from 2021 to mid-2023 devastated working people, and those prices haven’t gone down, especially for essentials like food, housing and child care. At the ABC debate Harris touted her part in the administration’s efforts to cap drug prices for seniors — by placing a $2,000 cap on prescription medication! Trump says depend on me, I’ll increase oil production to bring down prices.
Both candidates hid the truth that bouts of disastrous price hikes and job-destroying downturns are part of the normal operations of capitalist competition and crises. Protection from these capitalist business cycles won’t come from the schemas proposed by Harris or Trump, or interest rate tinkering by the Federal Reserve. It’ll come as a result of workers joining together and using our unions to fight for higher wages and cost-of-living protections in contracts and social programs.
While hailing Harris’ debate performance, voices in the liberal press admitted she didn’t advance any concrete steps to alleviate the capitalist crisis. “When almost 70% of the country feels betrayed by the economy, the party that speaks to this frustration has a built-in advantage,” complained Jedediah Britton-Purdy, a professor at Duke Law School, in an op-ed column in the New York Times. But for the working class, combating the effect of rising prices is more than a “frustration.” It’s a matter of basic survival.
During the debate, both candidates claimed they would strengthen the Washington-led NATO military alliance to advance the imperialist rulers’ preparation for sharpening competition, wars and uprisings they fear working people will carry out. Trump bragged that by playing tough as president he forced up arms spending by capitalist governments in Europe, while Harris claims she’s the only candidate that understands the importance of NATO, calling it “the greatest military alliance the world has ever known.”
In sharp contrast, the SWP’s Rachele Fruit points out the U.S. government’s foreign policy, alliances and massive military serve the country’s ruling class, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Everything Washington does in the Middle East and elsewhere is to advance the interests of the same class that is attacking us at home.
Workers need our own foreign policy, based on defending the common interests of toilers worldwide.
Trump used the debate to try to turn working people against one another, scapegoating immigrants as responsible for the effects of the capitalist crisis and threatening mass deportations. His demagogy aims to pit native-born against foreign-born workers and divert us from uniting to take on the real source of the problems we face — capitalism.
For Harris, all problems are reduced to one — autocratic Trump and his “deplorable” working-class supporters. She says that the Biden Justice Department’s legal offensive against the former president proves he is a criminal. The aim of the Democrats’ use of the courts is to try to break Trump and drive him out of politics. In the debate, she said Trump’s views should be ignored because he’s “been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference,” and “has been found liable for sexual assault.”
The Democrats present no program to advance workers’ interests. Their campaign is entirely based on painting Trump as a semi-fascist so dangerous that all other issues pale in importance.
Anti-Trump hysteria spawns violence
Each of Democrats’ prosecutions against Trump have dealt blows to free speech and other crucial constitutional protections. Harris claimed Trump led “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the Capitol.
As the liberal hysteria against Trump heightens, it’s no surprise that there have been two attempts by backers of the Democrats to assassinate him in the last two months.
On Sept. 15 Ryan Routh laid in wait for hours to shoot Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course in Florida. Armed with an AK-47, Routh came within 500 yards of Trump, before Secret Service agents noticed Routh and opened fire, leading to his arrest.
In 2016 Routh backed Trump for president, then switched to Democrat Bernie Sanders in 2020. He urged the Iranian government to kill Trump. This year Routh again backed the Democrats, repeating phrases used by Biden and Harris. “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose,” he wrote in April.
Moments after Routh’s plan to kill Trump was reported, liberal MSNBC host Alex Witt said the blame lay on the former president for not “toning down the rhetoric.”
Hillary Clinton escalated Democrats’ attacks on free speech, claiming congressional Republicans “parrot Russian talking points” in a Sept. 16 MSNBC interview. “Americans engaged in this kind of propaganda,” she said, “should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”
Defense of constitutional rights is a key issue for working people in 2024. Endorsing and building support for the Socialist Workers Party candidates is the best way to advance that fight today.