The 2024 U.S. presidential election and its outcome reflected the growing dissatisfaction of tens of millions of working people with the economic and social conditions and growing threats of war they and their families have faced for many years.
These conditions worsened under President Joseph Biden. Moreover, his administration and its liberal supporters stepped up assaults on constitutional protections as they went after those who opposed their course, including the Democrats’ major bourgeois political opponent.
As with previous Democratic and Republican White Houses, however, newly elected President Donald Trump proudly promotes capitalist social relations, the dog-eat-dog system responsible for these accelerating crises and wars — a system based on the exploitation of the labor of working people. Neither Republican Trump nor Democrat Kamala Harris offered protection from the crisis the bosses are loading on workers’ backs, let alone any road forward for the working class and oppressed.
In an imperialist world marked by rising instability, Moscow’s war on Ukraine, Jew-hatred and the Tehran-backed Hamas pogrom in Israel, the stakes for working people are enormous. Even more so as a growing number of rival capitalist states are armed with nuclear weapons and armories filled with drones and ballistic missiles.
Trump will use the White House to manage the affairs of the ruling capitalist families, from their profit-driven offensive against working people at home to their imperialist interests abroad.
Republicans took control of the Senate, but the final makeup of the House is yet to be announced.
Under Trump, the Republicans are “growing into a party that draws working-class votes of all races,” Aaron Zitner wrote in the Wall Street Journal the day after the election. “Black and Latino voters,” he pointed out, “tilted more toward Trump” this year than any other Republican candidate in prior U.S. elections for close to a century.
The liberal press acknowledged Trump’s win. The U.S. rulers are keen to put the election campaign behind them.
Nonetheless, the editors of the New York Times were quick to proclaim a renewed drive to target Trump. “Institutions of American civil society will play a crucial role in challenging the Trump administration in the courts, in our communities and in the protests that are sure to return,” they wrote Nov. 6.
End of retreat of labor movement
The election took place in the wake of a yearslong assault by the bosses and their government in Washington. They’ve held down workers’ wages, threatened our safety with speedup and debilitating schedules, slashed health care and pensions and used anti-labor laws to bar strikes, as Biden did to rail workers in 2022. The bosses rely on both their two main political parties to carry out these assaults.
In recent years workers have faced soaring prices and mounting indebtedness. Fertility rates have tumbled as more workers struggle to afford starting and maintaining families. Life expectancy has declined in the richest capitalist country in the world.
Over the past three years, the most important change has been in the working class — an end to a decadeslong retreat of the labor movement. More workers are turning to their unions to fight, like the 33,000 Machinists union workers did at Boeing.
Hundreds of thousands have walked picket lines, gaining greater confidence in themselves and their unions. These struggles underscore the fact that advances can be made when workers join together to fight for what we need, as opposed to depending on whichever capitalist politician sits in the White House.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, the Socialist Workers Party candidates — Rachele Fruit for president and Dennis Richter for vice president — won a hearing among workers. They’ve explained that every class battle is also a political struggle. And they’ve pointed to what the working class is capable of accomplishing, including the necessity of taking political power out of the hands of capitalists and into our own hands.
Both bosses’ parties scorn workers
In sharp contrast, both the Democratic and Republican candidates and their parties denigrate working people. President Joseph Biden tarred Trump supporters as “garbage,” and earlier as “MAGA extremists” and “semi-fascists.” That’s tens of millions of people!
Harris tried to walk back some of Biden’s comments, but the Democrats’ message throughout the campaign has been unmistakable: Trump is a fascist, and, if you vote for him, so are you. Or if you don’t vote at all, or vote for the Socialist Workers Party, you’re enabling the forces of reaction. The upper-middle-class layers who dominate the Democratic Party look down on working people as morally inferior and the source of bigotry and reaction.
The liberal big-business press joined Harris and the Democrats in pushing this smear of Trump and his supporters. “The U.S. republic is in danger” from Trump, the Financial Times shouted, and “a startling share of America is unbothered.”
At a 2008 fundraiser Barack Obama said workers who face losing their jobs “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.” In 2016 Hillary Clinton said the same more succinctly, calling workers attracted to Trump “deplorables.”
This year, Obama told Black men that if they don’t vote for Harris it proves that they’re prejudiced against women.
But workers aren’t attracted to Trump because they’re reactionary, sexist bigots. They’re looking for an alternative to the conditions they and their families face.
Under the rulers’ two-capitalist-parties setup, many workers vote for the candidate they think will do the least harm. Many others don’t see any reason to vote at all. And a growing number are taking interest in the working-class alternative presented by the SWP.
A working-class road forward
Trump seeks to refurbish the image of the Republican Party as a party for workers. But he’s a real-estate-dealing capitalist in search of the highest profits. And his campaign seeks to demonize a section of the working class — immigrant workers with and without papers — in an effort to convince workers this is the cause of their worsening situation, not capitalism. This divides and weakens the working class and labor movement.
Harris also targeted immigrant workers as the problem, though she says she’d be nicer sticking it to them. She called for an increase in criminal penalties to be imposed on undocumented workers.
The SWP candidates say the fight for an amnesty for workers without papers in the U.S. is a life-or-death question — to unite the entire working class and to strengthen our unions.
Trump points to aspects of the crisis conditions workers face that Democrats seek to cover up. Biden bragged, “Our economy has grown more than any presidential term this century” Nov. 1, while the latest employment figures actually showed the slowest jobs growth in four years. Prices for many essentials are 20% higher under his administration. When asked, Harris said she couldn’t think of a thing she’d do differently from Biden.
Both of the major capitalist parties try to hitch workers’ interests to the fortunes of the bosses. Their candidates both talk about “our economy.” But there is no “our” economy. For the bosses, a good economy is when profits are booming, a product of deeper exploitation of the working class. Changing this requires changing which class rules.
Throughout the campaign the Socialist Workers Party has been the only voice charting a road for workers to organize in our millions to defend our class interests and the interest of all those oppressed by capital. (See statement by SWP candidates Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter)
The SWP candidates are unionists, joining strike picket lines and building solidarity wherever they go. They’ve explained why workers need to break from the bosses’ political parties and build a party of our own, a party of labor, that can fight to take political power.
The SWP will continue to present this working-class perspective and will continue to get a hearing.