In Wake of Upsurge Against Racist Cop Terror

Democrats’ Pro-Cop Ticket Vies
with Trump Over “Law and Order”

So this is what “democracy” looks like, USA-style, as election season enters its final stretch: a hellscape for the oppressed, workers and youth. Just being black can get you killed by the racist cops, as we keep seeing day after day. Amid unending fear of catching the coronavirus, the threat of mass evictions looms. If you’re not already one of the millions of workers who have already lost their jobs, there’s the constant worry that you could be next. In Wisconsin, anti-racist protesters are gunned down by a white-supremacist vigilante. And now much of the West Coast has gone up in flames, literally.

It’s not an apocalyptic movie out of Hollywood – it’s what the “death agony of capitalism” looks like in 2020.¹ Forty years ago, when voters were given the “choice” in the 1980 presidential elections between a reactionary, segregationist Democrat and a reactionary, openly racist Republican – both of them virulent anti-labor warmongers – the newspaper then representing revolutionary Marxism headlined: “Reagan, Carter? Oh Shit!”²

Today, after four more decades of capitalist decay, what is the “choice” being presented? On one side is Donald Trump, the vicious bigot, racist inciter and grifter who (as both liberals and old-line conservatives decry) has made the Republican Party his own. On the other is Joe Biden, the segregationist, saber-rattling Democrat who fueled mass incarceration. An example that says it all: when Trump threatened anti-racist protesters by tweeting “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” Biden’s response was that instead of shooting people in the heart, cops should “shoot them in the leg.”

With the choice for Biden’s running mate of Kamala Harris, California’s former “top cop” (her words), the Democrats are putting forward an ostentatiously pro-police ticket. They are vying with Trump for who can best uphold the “law and order” of racist U.S. capitalism. They are going all out to line up with the Pentagon brass dissed by Trump along with U.S. imperialism’s intelligence apparatus. And they pitch themselves as the more consistent warmongers against China, Russia and – of course – North Korea.

Far from a surprise, what we’re witnessing anew is how this Wall Street party “for the people” operates. After millions come out in the streets demanding an end to police terror; after “progressive” Democrats (and their echo chamber on the reformist left) work overtime to channel protest into calls for “defunding” the cops; after these same “progressives” fall in line behind the upcoming nominee – the result is the most ostentatiously pro-cop Democratic ticket in decades.

With this latest round in the Democrats’ endless cycle of deception and demobilization of mass protest, drawing the lessons is a life-and-death question, now more than ever. Facing accumulating dangers, in order to defend their most urgent needs, rights and interests, workers and the oppressed need to unchain their class power. To do this, they need to break free of the bourgeois politics and politicians that subjugate them to this dying system. For labor, African Americans, Latinos and other doubly oppressed groups, as well as youth, the central mechanism that U.S. capitalism uses to divert and bury mass struggles has long been the Democratic Party. The basic principle of Marxist politics is the political independence of the working class from the bourgeois ruling class. In the U.S., this means concretely to break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties and forge a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government. That is the only genuine choice today. But you won’t find it on the ballot.

Trump Runs Against Antifa, Biden Against COVID-19

Breaking from the Democrats means seeing through Donald Trump’s unhinged press conferences and egomaniacal Twitter outbursts to discern the underlying continuity his presidency represents. Virtually every one of the sitting president’s policies has direct antecedents in the Obama administration, which vigorously prosecuted whistleblowers, lavished Wall Street with billions in bailouts, deported over 5 million undocumented immigrants, built immigrant detention cages, and maintained secret kill lists (including names of U.S. citizens), all while delivering more than a billion dollars of military-grade equipment annually to local police departments. Upon leaving office in January 2017, the last Democratic administration bequeathed a legacy of ramped-up repression that the current White House has continued with its trademark ranting, bluster and open incitement of racist violence and vigilantism.

The racist-in-chief’s erratic, polarizing style has ripped the veil of respectability from U.S. bourgeois democracy. In the process he has openly appealed to groupings the bourgeoisie keeps in reserve to supplement its central, official forces of repression, including fascistic and outright fascist elements. His campaign has made overt and explicit a series of racist themes that Democrats themselves have long exploited with a wink and a nod. Whereas Hillary Clinton inveighed against “super-predators,” while Biden opposed desegregation in the 1970s and now lectures audiences on who is really black, Trump has once more made overt racist fear-mongering the centerpiece of his campaign strategy.

As for a platform, on the eve of its bizarre national convention the Republican Party declared that it wouldn’t adopt one – instead it just pledged to “enthusiastically” support Donald Trump. Over the past weeks, Trump has been running against “antifa” and “anarchist jurisdictions” in Democratic cities (where, as we have underlined, the Democrats are in fact the bosses of the racist cops that Trump is praising to the skies). And, oh yes, Trump is also running on not being Joe Biden. For his part, Biden is running against COVID-19, and on not being Donald Trump.

As was the case when Warren Harding promised a “Return to Normalcy” in his 1920 presidential campaign, the Biden campaign is running on thinly veiled nostalgia for pro-business social and political stability. In the Democrats’ bleak vision, the only choice for capitalism’s victims is to knuckle under and “vote blue no matter who,” even if it means strengthening the very institutions – like the police – that keep them at the bottom of society.

Known for his phony “Lunchbox Joe” shtick and hokey, fake-blue-collar, regular guy pose, Biden 2020 barely bothers to pretend to offer the working class anything. He mouths platitudes about “building back better,” even though workers’ discontent with the way things were paved the way for Trump.³ Throw in a pledge to favor a $15 minimum wage, and promises to tinker with the tax code in favor of “Buy American” protectionism – in line with the anti-China drive, and echoing Trump’s poisonous economic nationalism – and that’s pretty much it.

The Democrats’ first-ever virtual convention was a veritable celebration of “moderate” Republican policies and politicians, even showcasing Ohio’s Republican ex-governor John Kasich. When so-called progressives did surface, as Bernie Sanders did on the first evening, it was to grovel for “unity” around the party’s right-wing pitch. The party’s message to its liberal/“progressive” wing is clear: you did your job to rope people in – now you get zero, or more precisely a minute and a half for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the convention show.

Figuring that voters will support Biden simply because he isn’t Trump, the Democrats have refused to give ground to even the most modest demands of anti-racist protesters. “Defund the police”? As more police shootings of black men, like Jacob Blake in Kenosha, ignite fresh waves of protest, Biden and Harris denounce Trump for “calling for cutting half a billion dollars in local law enforcement.” Meanwhile, they claim the protests are really for “accountability and consequence for anyone who breaks the rules or breaks the law” (ABC News, 23 August).

Biden-Harris: Blue Through and Through

Presenting two virulently pro-cop, lock-’em-up politicians who have inflicted untold misery on African American, Latino and poor people in the name of “law and order” is a deliberate choice for the Democrats as they seek to outdo Trump in order to regain the White House. In the Democrats’ 2020 campaign, “voting blue” means going for candidates whose careers have been based on identification with capitalism’s blue-uniformed enforcers. The idea that racist oppression can be fought by backing them is worse than a sick joke – it is a sinister and dangerous deception.

Joe Biden’s selection as the Democratic nominee was due not to his mediocre political skills, but to his staunch support for the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state at a time of accelerating social instability. His decades-long “service” in government is punctuated with paeans of praise to the police, together with demands to “crack down” on the “crime problem.” Numerous articles and videos feature his racist rants in the Senate calling to “lock the S.O.B.s up” as he pushed for the sweeping 300-page crime bill he helped write in 1994.

The infamous 1994 Clinton-Biden law provided billions of dollars to fund new prisons and police officers, expanded the racist death penalty and instituted a new “three-strikes” provision mandating life sentences. Among its blatantly racist provisions was criminalization of “gangs,” leading to “gang data bases” used to indiscriminately repress black and Latino youth, and much stiffer penalties for crack-related offenses than for “regular” cocaine. Writing in 1994 from Pennsylvania’s death row, former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal aptly dubbed Biden’s pet project a “Death Bill,” warning that it constituted a “declaration of war on black men.”⁴

The escalation of that war in the 1990s was not a coincidence. Emboldened by the 1989-92 counterrevolutions in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the triumphal U.S. imperialist rulers launched a major social offensive backed by bloody state repression. Over the next 20 years, Democratic and Republican administrations took turns gutting social welfare programs and trapping millions of African Americans and Latinos in a mass imprisonment system. And for students and large numbers of poor people, Biden promoted the draconian 2005 bankruptcy “reform” bill that ensured that they would remain in perpetual servitude to the banks.⁵

As for “foreign policy,” pitched as Biden’s strong suit, he continued to support the imperialist slaughter in Iraq long after the public soured on it. As Barack Obama’s vice president, he was co-responsible for continuing that war, for the ongoing colonial occupation of Afghanistan, for the U.S. terror-bombing of Syria, and for deadly drone strikes from the sky, from Pakistan to Yemen and Africa. Together with Obama he helped ramp up the military/spy apparatus, internationally and domestically. Now, as the Democrats hail the FBI, CIA and NSA – U.S. imperialism’s blood-soaked Murder Inc. – many military and security bigwigs return the favor. “More Than 70 Republican Ex-National Security Officials Endorse Joe Biden,” reported the Huffington Post (22 August).

Biden’s vaunted friendships with notorious Jim Crow Dixiecrats – he gave a eulogy for arch-racist Strom Thurmond – are well-known.⁶ This was no quirk – Biden went all-out to show that he is himself a segregationist, systematically carving out a profile as “a leading opponent of integrating schools through busing in the 1970s and the 1980s” (New York Times, 28 June 2019), when racist mobs were rampaging against it.⁷ Biden even warned that non-“orderly” integration would lead to his children growing up in “a racial jungle.” Last year, Kamala Harris made headlines when she went after him on his anti-busing record in a primary debate face-off. Reminded of this last month, she cynically laughed it off, saying: “It was a debate!”

Class Collaboration’s Fatal Logic

So while many organizers of Black Lives Matter protests this summer urged people to vote (Democratic) in November, this is what they get: a “shoot ’em in the legs” segregationist for president and a “lock ’em up” top cop for veep. Yet at a time when revolutionary working-class opposition has never been more urgently needed, much of the “left” is pulling in the opposite direction, once again lining up behind the Democrats. It’s what they do, and they do it over and over.

The characteristic “fight the right” pitch of the former Soviet-line Communist Party USA, which has regularly backed Democrats since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, sets the pattern. Echoing it are other open proponents of Stalinist popular-frontism like the Maoists of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (“Trump Must be Defeated,” frso.org, 7 September) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, a/k/a revcom.us, Refuse Fascism, The World Can’t Wait, etc.⁸ Whether it’s sold as antiwar, antifascist, anti-racist or anti-Trump, the political thrust behind these appeals – to build class-collaborationist popular fronts with “progressive” Democrats – is shared by most of the left.

Calling to “drive out” Republican administrations – and install Democratic ones – has for years been a calling card of the RCP. While it is an increasingly odd personality cult around its vacuous leader Bob Avakian, its appeals for “unity” (against Bush-Cheney, against Trump-Pence, etc.) are common ground for reformists and the liberals they yearn to unite with. To maintain a minimal pretense of being “communist,” following CPUSA tradition the RCP used to avoid overtly calling to vote Democrat. But now the RCP has replaced the wink-and-nod approach with an open call by Avakian for “actually voting for the Democratic Party candidate, Biden, in order to effectively vote against Trump” (revcom.us, 1 August, emphasis in original).

To justify backing Democratic architects of imperialist war, racist cop terror and mass imprisonment, they argue that with Trump in office the U.S. is ruled by “a fascist regime.” If this were true – which it is not, otherwise revcom (and the rest of the left) would be behind bars – it would be even more dangerous and absurd to pretend that you can fight fascism by backing a bourgeois “lesser evil.” In 1932, the German social democrats did just that, and the candidate they voted for (General von Hindenburg, army chief in World War I) promptly turned power over to Hitler. Such class collaboration, formalized in “popular fronts” in which social democrats and Stalinists bound the exploited to their exploiters, literally led millions to their death.

Today, the largest forces on what passes for a left in the United States are those that built their brand by backing Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. In doing so, they went all out to channel youth and dissatisfied working people into the Democratic Party. Now, as foretold (not least by Sanders himself), their hero is all in for Joe Biden. Some are still working hard to unsee or deny it all. Yet the plain fact is that boosting Sanders “socialism” fed right into the mechanisms that the Democratic Party has traditionally used to subordinate labor and the oppressed to capitalist rule. Come November, their “political revolution” means aiding their hero “Bernie” in once again handcuffing social movements to the “establishment” pols they railed against last Spring.

Going with the Flow for Joe

Quite a few supposed Marxist groups sought ever-new opportunist pretexts for their yearning to get a piece of the Sanders action, helping him market illusions in reforming U.S. imperialism’s Democratic Party. Putting the small fry aside, the Democratic Socialists of America now claims 70,000 members (up from a nominal 6,500 pre-Trump). Having done the donkey work of knocking on doors and stuffing envelopes for Sanders in the primaries, after he dropped his campaign in April the DSA tweeted: “We are not endorsing Joe Biden.”⁹ But, of course, the absence of a formal endorsement hardly means that the DSA has somehow come to see the light about class independence against bourgeois politicians.

Naturally the DSA’s super-star, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced: “In November, I’m going to be voting for Joe Biden.” So, too, DSA Democratic state senator Julia Salazar said months ago that she will “vote for the Democratic candidate,” adding: “I think a lot of DSA members will too” (Queens Daily Eagle, 20 April). That comes with the territory of being bourgeois politicians. But aside from the media stars in its firmament, how does the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America go with the flow for Joe while kinda-sorta claiming not to? For starters, in the massive BLM marches, it pushed the hype about “defunding the police” in order to join in with and strengthen its ties with liberal Democrats on the local level.

There’s also what this outfit of tens of thousands of activists nationwide is not doing. Ask yourself, where are the mass protests demanding continuation of the $600-a-week supplemental employment insurance, which kept the DSA’s millennial base afloat through the George Floyd protests and whose cutoff threatens to sink them (and innumerable others) with unpayable rent and student loans? There aren’t any. Why? Because the Democratic Party wants things chill for the elections. Instead they want you to e-mail, Facebook message and fill the Twitter feeds of your Congresspeople with appeals to approve the Democrats’ HEROES Act. Meanwhile, they are out canvassing to send DSA Democrats to Congress and to elect “socialist squads” of Dems in city council elections.

Back in 2016, while not formally “endorsing” Hillary Clinton, the DSA said that “in swing states where we have the capacity to make an impact” it expected chapters to focus on “Dump Trump” campaigning (dsausa.org, 16 August 2016). Growing rapidly through the Sanders campaign, the rejuvenated DSA moved ever deeper into Democratic politics. Basking in the 2018 election of AOC, it has run ever more so-called socialists on the Democratic ticket. Now that Bernie is ancient history, some DSAers try to bury themselves in local “base-building” or “mutual aid.” Here and there, some have opted for a bourgeois protest vote for the tiny Green Party, but not in a swing state where they could be accused of being spoilers for Trump.

Despite the qualms and collectively holding their noses, plenty of DSAers are now openly lining up behind Biden, as the DSA’s Jacobin (August 2020) gives helpful hints on how Biden could “win big” and not “screw this up.” DSA apparatchik David Duhalde (a top honcho in Sanders’ Our Revolution operation) noted that while “defeating Trump” in the election “does mean a President Joe Biden,” in fact “Biden likely doesn’t want our public support” (In These Times, 17 June). But as the DSA’s Metro DC chapter wrote: “The DSA Isn’t Endorsing Biden. That Doesn’t Mean Their Members Can’t Work for Him” (Washington Socialist, June 2020). For opportunists, double-talk is the name of the game. But the DSA is and always has been Dems.

The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party

The deepening decay of capitalism in the United States and internationally has brought us to the 2020 triple pandemic of coronavirus, economic crisis and racist police terror. Now bourgeois politicians, along with their leftist enablers and apologists, are trying to shove the “choice” between two virulently pro-cop tickets down our throats: Trump, the embodiment of capitalist rot, or Biden, the same-old, same-old Cold War relic – pick your poison. This horror show was prepared by decades of defeats of a labor movement saddled with a pro-capitalist bureaucracy that chains the unions to the Democrats; by endless imperialist wars abroad and ramped-up state repression “at home”; and by the mechanisms of control and cooptation of any movement that could even potentially pose a challenge to the rulers’ profits and domination.

The crisis of working-class leadership is acute. To face the accumulating crises and fight for a genuine way forward for those whose labor really is essential for society to function, it is vital to unmask and politically defeat all those who call on the working people yet again to back the very forces and parties –the capitalist duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that has governed the United States for a century and a half – whose misrule has created this horrendous situation.

The potential power of the multiracial, multiethnic working class is immense. The task of genuine Marxists is to help it attain the class-consciousness and organization needed to bring that power to bear in defense of all the oppressed, to break from and defeat the parties of racist cop terror, poverty and war. Basing ourselves on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, the Internationalist Group says that the answer to the parties of bankrupt U.S. imperialism is to undertake the difficult job of building the nucleus of a workers party to fight for a workers government and international socialist revolution. For those on the receiving end of bourgeois “law and order,” it’s the only choice. ■