LOS ANGELES — “Given the events over the last couple days, it is necessary to begin this forum by describing the virulent attack on Jews in Amsterdam Nov. 7, and what it portends,” Norton Sandler, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, told a Nov. 10 Militant Labor Forum on the 2024 elections.
“Following a soccer match, supporters of the Israeli team were targeted and chased through the streets by marauding gangs. These attacks were preplanned. Many were injured by these thugs,” said Sandler. Despite advance warning, the cops failed to prevent the violence against Jews. Some of the attacking groups had direct ties to Hamas.
“Amsterdam is a reminder that Jew-hatred and pogroms are an integral part of the imperialist epoch that we are living through,” he said. “The SWP defends Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jews. But the Socialist Workers Party also explains that Jew-hatred and pogroms will only end when the working-class takes political power.”
Looking at The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the SWP in 1938, helps in thinking about the U.S. election, he said. Trotsky explained the two basic afflictions facing the working class under capitalism are unemployment and high prices. “Bourgeois elections give a distorted picture of class struggle, but the conditions and battles workers face today were fundamental to the outcome of the 2024 election.”
High prices, Sandler said, are devastating the working class. Wages for those employed don’t come close to keeping up with rents, groceries, child care and prices for everything workers need. Millions work two jobs to try to survive, and daunting credit card debts are rampant. Work schedules, long hours and forced overtime imposed by the bosses make it difficult for workers to have a life. This especially affects working-class women.
And these conditions come down hardest on African Americans, Sandler said, even as the size of privileged middle-class and professional layers in the Black community have grown. Small wonder more Blacks voted for Trump.
The world crisis of the capitalist system continues to deepen, Sandler said. Politics is and will increasingly be marked by rival capitalist powers implementing trade conflicts and new wars to redivide the world. And they all look to deepen the exploitation of the working class to sharpen their competitive advantage and defend their profits.
These trends were accelerated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, as well as the Tehran-backed Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom against Jews in Israel and developments since across the Middle East.
The bosses’ parties
For decades the Democratic Party campaigned as the party of the working class. This changed with the Barack Obama presidency, an administration that consciously worked to obscure the class nature of politics. Obama was instrumental in anointing Harris as the Democratic Party presidential candidate and pushing Joseph Biden aside this year, Sandler said. In promoting Kamala Harris, Obama was looking for what would have been in effect a third Obama term.
The Republicans succeeded to a substantial degree in convincing workers that they were the lesser evil. And this was true despite the position of many trade union officials, who went all in for Harris, Sandler said. Other union officials, sensing the mood of the ranks, didn’t support either Trump or Harris, including the United Mine Workers, International Longshoremen’s Association, and the Teamsters.
The upper-middle-class meritocratic layers who dominate the Democratic Party — like Obama — view workers as the source of bigotry, racism and reaction. Obama’s condescending admonition to Black men to get on board backing the sister was a prime example.
After the election, David Axelrod, a prominent commentator on CNN and a former top aide in the Obama administration, was one of many Democrats who said the party had become a “smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party” that will keep losing elections, Sandler said. “You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’”
The Trump victory struck a blow to the Obamas and the meritocracy the Obamas are a part of, he said, and it struck a blow to the wokeism promoted broadly in the Democratic Party and in middle-class radical currents.
The Democrats badly misjudged the weight of the abortion issue, putting constitutional amendments on ballots in a number of states in hopes of boosting votes for their party, Sandler added. But while many working-class women support decriminalization of abortion, they see it as just one part of a broader battle — for better wages, conditions that enable them to start and sustain a family, access to child care and health care.
Abortion referenda won in seven states, he said, including Montana, Arizona, Nevada and Missouri. Harris lost all four.
Ever since Trump’s first victory in 2016, the Democrats have carried out a relentless assault on constitutional protections in order to use the FBI and compliant courts to try and drive him out of politics. With his victory Nov. 5, the myriad of legal cases Democratic Party prosecutors at the federal, state and local levels have been pursuing against him began to fall apart. These outrageous prosecutions ran roughshod over rights workers need to defend ourselves from government attacks.
Now we’ll see what a Trump administration, backed by control of both the House and Senate, will do, he said. Any effort to carry out mass deportations will run into resistance from workers around the country seeking to strengthen working-class unity, and also from the employers, who depend on immigrants to fill jobs in factories, construction, hotels, restaurants, farms and more.
We will continue to advance the demand for amnesty for immigrants in the U.S., and the need for the labor movement to recruit all workers to strengthen the unions.
SWP campaign set an example
The Socialist Workers 2024 campaign set an example, Sandler said, advancing the program and road forward the working class needs. Our presidential candidate, Rachele Fruit, and her running mate, Dennis Richter, along with SWP candidates across the country, got known by fighting workers.
“We raise the necessity of establishing a party of labor and organizing workers in their millions to defend our class interests and fight to take political power. This got a serious hearing that will continue going forward.”
What we say — that the low point of labor resistance is behind us and a new breeze is blowing — is true, Sandler said. Petitions from workers seeking to unionize were up 27% over the last year. Workers are more willing to strike.
“We will explain the necessity of fighting for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to prevent layoffs, and for provisions that when prices rise, your pay rises accordingly,” he said. “And we explain the necessity of fighting to establish a floor necessary for working-class families, and a government-paid supplemental income necessary for us to survive.
“We will also explain that these needed steps cannot be accomplished under capitalism, another reason the working class must take political power.
“We won campaign endorsers among working-class fighters, many of whom joined us in campaigning. The SWP is stronger today,” Sandler said.
Party members will help advance solidarity through our unions with our co-workers on the job and with other trade union strikes and struggles.
And the party will continue to fight every manifestation of Jew-hatred, and will continue our decadeslong work in defense of the Cuban Revolution, an example for workers everywhere to emulate.