All-Purpose Bigot Trump or Genocide Joe’s VP Harris?

The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party

By Jacob and Ray

After Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential race and replacement by his vice president Kamala Harris, the mood in U.S. capitalism’s governing Democratic Party turned from gloom to what it’s hyping as an explosion of “joy.” In Gaza, the explosion of bombs provided by the Biden-Harris administration to Israel continued to obliterate schools, hospitals and entire neighborhoods, burying whole families under the rubble.

For the Democrats, though, the big news was Biden bowing out – until then, fears of a landslide victory by all-purpose bigot Donald Trump had kept the party faithful plugging along, but just barely. But once party heavyweights opted for “Top Cop” Kamala Harris to head the ticket, millions of dollars that elite donors had withheld from Biden flowed into the campaign coffers. Liberals were swept with a wave of enthusiasm and at the Democratic National Convention, held August 19-22 in Chicago, 100,000 red-white-and-blue balloons were dropped from the ceiling. Among those getting starring roles were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

And on the DNC’s final day, Harris gave her acceptance speech, vowing: “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” On the same day, in Gaza, the U.S.-armed Israeli military killed at least 47 Palestinians.

As the genocidal war on the people of Gaza rages on, and U.S. imperialism’s bipartisan drive toward World War III accelerates, the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and CUNY Internationalist Clubs say: No to the Democrat/Republican war machine – No to Harris and Trump – For workers action against the U.S./Israel war on Gaza – Build a workers party that fights for socialist revolution!

War Criminals Pander to Youth Vote

With Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz formally nominated by the DNC, a little over 10 weeks remained before the U.S. presidential elections. While Trump hurls racist rants and spews vile misogyny with his sinister sidekick JD Vance, the rebranded Democratic campaign sees pandering to the youth vote as a key component of its political marketing offensive. With Harris highlighting how much she “loves” Gen Z, her social media team tries to blot out the haunting images from Gaza with neon green-colored “Kamala is Brat” memes, imitating Charli XCX’s latest album. Online outlets make much of “Coach” Walz’s debut “TimTok” video with his dog and go on about the wholesome corniness of his jokes.

Do capitalism’s political marketeers think we’re foolish children to be dazzled and distracted by their grotesque gimmickry and antics? Over the past year, what our whole generation has seen unfold in real time is an actual genocide armed and paid for by the Biden-Harris White House and the Democrat/Republican-run Congress, while racist cop terror rages on and deportations are ramped up yet again as a vote-getting strategy. From Washington to the state capitols, city halls and university administrations, they launched vicious slanders and brutal police repression against the Gaza solidarity protests. And now they expect us to turn a blind eye, let their patriotic pageantry stun us into silence and vote war criminals into office once again? The answer is “No.”

Last school year, many youth and students were newly politicized by what they saw and experienced. With mounting pressure on them to fall in line come election day, the next months could mark a real crossroads for the most thoughtful, posing the question of which direction they will go. Towards decisively rejecting the deadly con games of bourgeois politics and joining the fight for socialist revolution? Or continuing the endless cycle of “lesser-evil” subjugation to U.S. imperialism’s ruling parties?

The very real dangers and crises that face us are the product not only of the Democrat/Republican duopoly, in power for well over a century, but most fundamentally, of the terminal decay of the capitalist social system of exploitation, racism and war that they uphold. As The Internationalist (June-August 2024) points out, “in November, U.S. voters will have the ‘choice’ between immigrant-bashing fascistic Republicans preparing to introduce police state measures, and a Democratic ticket that smears pro-Palestinian protesters as ‘antisemitic’ and is careening toward a thermonuclear World War III. ‘Pick your poison’ is no answer. We say no vote to any capitalist party or politicians.” The multiracial working class needs its own party, built on a program of class struggle, that fights for a workers government.

The urgent need for this is underlined by a resolution for a class-struggle workers party being put forward by militant labor unionists on the West Coast. The resolution was initiated by Class Struggle Workers – Portland, whose work has been key to bringing out labor’s power against fascist, white-supremacist and misogynist provocations in the Pacific Northwest. CSWP supporters have won five area unions – mainly in the construction trades – to putting forward the call “for labor everywhere to stop the shipment of arms to this U.S./Israel war” on Gaza.

“Progressives” claim the answer to Trump’s authoritarian threats is to vote Democrat. But breaking with the Democrats is essential to the ability of workers and the oppressed to actually defend ourselves against attacks on our hard-won rights. And as starkly highlighted by the Democrats’ convention, their accelerating drive toward world war is literally an existential threat to us all. The CSWP resolution points out: “History in the U.S. and internationally has repeatedly shown that you can’t fight threats to the basic rights of workers and oppressed people” if their power is “chained to the employers’ parties and politicians.” To continue that subordination today “will only deepen the threats facing the working people,” including “the growing threat of a third world war against China and Russia that either a Democratic or Republican administration would continue to escalate.” It calls to break with the bosses’ parties and build a “class-struggle workers party to lead the struggles of the working people and all those ground down by capitalism.”

We of the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York and the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, which publish Revolution, couldn’t agree more.

Harris for Prosecutor-in-Chief?

Well all right, readers will ask, but wouldn’t the ascendance of an African American and Asian American woman to the presidency represent a notable shift in this racist society? When Barack Obama, the first black president, was elected in 2008, our comrades noted that this was a “considerable social change in this country founded on chattel slavery…. But this has not changed the system of imperialist capitalism one iota.”¹ The political meaning of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential run is not to change but to preserve U.S. capitalism’s oppressive status quo. Her career as a major player in the repressive machinery of the capitalist state, going back to her years as San Francisco DA and California attorney general, is the centerpiece of her campaign. With their pollsters claiming “‘Kamala the Cop’ Doesn’t Sound So Bad in 2024” (Politico, 23 July), “Democrats Want a Prosecutor-in-Chief Now” (Time, 23 August). A profile of their prosecutor presidential candidate was headlined “Kamala Harris and the Return of ‘Tough on Crime’” (New York Times, 17 August).

As was front and center when millions marched against the murder of George Floyd, the police/judicial and prison apparatus of the U.S. injustice system enforces the oppression of black people, which is fundamental to U.S. society. And as with the war on Gaza, here too prosecutor/VP and presidential candidate Harris represents continuity with Biden, who wrote the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 (signed into law by Bill Clinton), which ramped up the mass incarceration system.

Among the speakers at the Chicago DNC were the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, who were railroaded to prison on false charges of rape in 1989. The men spoke powerfully of how Donald Trump took out newspaper ads calling for their execution in 1989. But the Democratic Party’s seeking to use their story to win votes is a bitter irony, given Harris’ history of withholding evidence to keep innocent people incarcerated (see “The Rap Sheet of ‘Top Cop’ Kamala Harris,” on page 14 of this issue) as well as the party’s removal of opposition to the death penalty from its platform this year. As the Democrats’ cam¬paign hails the prosecutors, DAs and cops of America’s racist frame-up system,² the basic truth is shown again: this system cannot be reformed – it must be uprooted through socialist revolution.

“Out-Toughing” Trump on Immigration

Trump’s use of racist, sexist and anti-immigrant themes against Harris has rightly repulsed many (and plenty of viewers would doubtless enjoy seeing him out-debated on TV by a black woman). Harris’ response to Trump’s provocations has been to try to outdo him in anti-immigrant rhetoric. In 2021, she already made headlines by going to Guatemala to tell migrants: “Do not come. Do not come.” Now, with her presidential campaign in full swing, “Kamala Harris is going on the offensive on border security,” proclaimed Business Insider (12 August).

Ahead of an early August trip by Harris and Walz to Arizona, their campaign released a TV ad titled “Tougher,” emphasizing her credentials as a “border-state prosecutor,” featuring footage of the border wall and Harris with Border Patrol agents. It blasts Trump for blocking “the toughest border control bill in decades” and blares that as president, Harris “will hire thousands more border agents.” Doubling down in her August 22 acceptance speech at the DNC, Harris boasted: “Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans” to write the border bill, “the Border Patrol endorsed it,” but Trump “ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.” “As president,” she vowed, “I will bring back the bipartisan border-security bill … and sign it into law.”

Media outlets noted that in championing the bill, Harris is promoting the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to extend “Trump’s border wall,” which she and Biden had speechified against to get into office four years ago. “Since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy,” wrote the Times (26 August), the Democrats’ “message on immigration … has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades.”

In fact, competing with Trump in immigrant-bashing has been a central Biden-Harris theme for some time. “Trump Says He Wants to Deport Millions. He’ll Have a Hard Time Removing More People Than Biden Has,” headlined Politico (28 July). Wielding Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 policy justifying removals for reasons of “public health,” the Democratic administration rapidly accelerated deportations, surpassing Trump’s record. And on June 4, the White House announced: “The Biden-Harris administration will bar migrants who cross the southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum” – a flagrant violation of basic democratic rights that, as the ACLU has noted, “echoes an effort in 2018 by former President Trump to cut off migration.”

Back in 2020, they sought immigrant families’ votes by promising a temporary pause on deportations and Biden said deporting so many people when he was Obama’s VP was a “big mistake.” (Deporting more people than any other president in U.S. history, Obama earned himself the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief” – and it was the Obama-Biden administration that built the notorious cages for kids at the border.) Despite Democrats’ efforts to cash in on outrage at Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of tearing migrant children away from their families, the Democrats’ Biden-Harris administration continues to routinely separate, detain and deport migrant families.³

“But Project 2025…”

At this point, those bombarded with Democratic talking points may reply: “OK, but what about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration? Also, why do you focus so much on denouncing the Democrats?” The answer to the second question is simple: support to the Democratic Party by labor, left and social-movement leaders has long been key to chaining workers and the oppressed to the capitalist state. And readers of a paper like ours scarcely need convincing to oppose the likes of Trump – whereas even youth disgusted by U.S. imperialism’s current governing party often have difficulties rebutting “lesser-evil” appeals to back the Democrats. It is essential to provide revolutionary Marxist answers on these questions.

On Project 2025: this 900-page playbook is indeed a backlash wish-list for reactionary rightists, calling to intensify presidential power and carry out even more attacks on our rights. But as we’ve emphasized, you can’t fight right-wing reaction by tying yourself to a different faction of U.S. capitalism’s racist ruling class. The Democratic Party is today the foremost defender of the powers of the FBI, CIA and other U.S. spy agencies, and has been central to attacks on basic rights, from Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 “Espionage Act” (under which pioneer socialist Eugene Debs was imprisoned and stripped of his citizenship for giving a speech against WWI) to Biden signing into law the extension of a notorious surveillance law this April.

Trumpists’ push to even further increase the power of the “imperial presidency” builds on its massive expansion under one Democratic administration after another. Democratic mayors are the bosses of the racist killer cops in cities across the country and, as we’ve noted, Biden, ex-veep to the former Deporter-in-Chief, is the godfather of mass incarceration. The Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Biden-Harris (& AOC et al.) party relies on the military/intelligence apparatus – U.S. imperialism’s Murder Inc. – to supposedly “defend democracy.” And think about: during the Gaza solidarity encampments last spring, over 3,100 protesters were arrested, overwhelmingly ordered by Democratic authorities. Over the past period they have repeatedly used the forces of repression to attack our rights to speech, assembly and protest against their wars.

Where did Trump come from? After years of hobnobbing with the Clintons and other liberal mainstays of the capitalist elite, even as he stoked racism and xenophobia, Trump perceived that widespread disaffection with the Democrats among sectors hit hard by “neoliberal” policies – despite years of empty “hope and change” promises – gave him a chance to turn media notoriety into political stardom. The Democrats paved the way for Trump. Contrary to their claims to be “the only hope” for safeguarding rights, to be “friends of labor,” etc., the rise of Trump and the sordid characters in his entourage was prepared by the Democrats’ attacks on the working class and “abandonment” of downwardly mobile middle-class sectors. And every four years, the plight of these sectors is cynically exploited on the campaign trail, by both big bourgeois parties.

Take Trump’s running mate JD Vance. A recent video of his visit to a small town in Georgia has gone viral because this supposed “just folks” spokesman proved ridiculously unable to make normal small talk with employees in a local donut shop. But Vance is no joke: who he does channel is the “MAGA movement’s” fascistic wing. Today Vance is notorious for railing against “childless cat ladies” who don’t fulfill what this misogynist creep calls their maternal “purpose,” and for proposing to reduce the electoral power of people without children. But before Trump chose him, he seized on last year’s Ohio train disaster to build a “populist” image.

Initially a “Never Trumper” who even likened his current boss to Hitler, Vance went with Trump in a visit to the site where the massive February 2023 derailment threw 38 railcars off the tracks, dumping 100,000 gallons of toxic waste and causing immense damages. The train wreck came three months after Biden, with bipartisan Congressional backing, used strikebreaking legislation to block a looming rail strike spurred by highly dangerous working conditions. Among those voting for the strike ban were Democratic (Party) Socialists of America star Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA “electeds.”⁴ Despite Trump’s role in scrapping rail safety regulations, he and Vance grabbed the opportunity to parlay the silence of Biden’s Department of Transportation boss Pete Buttigieg into a day of photo ops at the site.

The calamity wrought by the Democratic Party strikebreakers enabled Vance to solidify his MAGA credentials, pose as an enemy of the rail companies and work to block class consciousness with the racist lie that the disaster happened because Midwesterners are “too white” to draw the concern of the “bicoastal elite.” On the campaign trail, Vance continues to invoke the train disaster and project himself as a champion of “the forgotten.”

In numerous other ways, the Democrats have contributed to the rise of reactionary forces that cynically exploit anger among some middle- and working-class sectors, to further their own plans to administer the racist, repressive machinery of the capitalist state and carry out still more brazen attacks on the exploited and oppressed. As heated as debates between the two parties get, on how best to run this system, they’re looking out for the interests of the same ruling class. As Obama explained after Trump’s 2016 election, “We’re all on the same team,” explaining that Democrat vs. Republican conflicts and rivalry for votes are all just an “intramural scrimmage.”

The idea that backing the Democratic Party of genocide in Gaza and the imperialist drive toward WWIII is just the “practical” price you have to pay if you don’t want to lose your rights is not only obscene and dangerous but flat-out false. The stranglehold of bourgeois parties and politicians is what’s pushed U.S. politics more and more to the right – and what holds back the power to actually defend our rights. Breaking that stranglehold is essential to an effective fight.

 A vivid example is the fight for abortion rights. For vote-corralling purposes the Democrats’ convention stressed abortion rights as a campaign theme. But for decades the Democrats have failed to codify abortion rights as law at the national level, or even the limited expression of them in the now-overturned Roe v. Wade decision. The Democratic administration of which Kamala Harris is vice president and political heir claims to champion these rights – seeking to obscure Joe Biden’s instrumental role in pushing the racist Hyde Amendment that barred federal funding for abortions, essentially banning poor African American, Latina and working-class women on Medicaid from getting abortions. This was just one of many ways Democrats helped fuel the anti-abortion crusade. What’s urgently needed is to defend abortion rights through class struggle, fighting for free, unrestricted abortion on demand, which is integral to fight to achieve real and full emancipation of women and all the oppressed. Breaking with the Democrats and all capitalist parties is key to this fight.⁵ Marxists stand for the political independence of the working class. Against all capitalist parties and politicians, we fight for a revolutionary workers party.

“Strongest, Most Lethal” War Makers

While the Democrats’ DNC “joy”-fest in Chicago sought to silence opposition to the U.S./Israel war on Gaza, in reality it shines a spotlight on the fact that aspiring Commander- and Prosecutor-in-Chief Harris is co-responsible with Biden for this genocidal war in which every 2,000-pound bomb and the fighter planes that drop them has been supplied by the U.S. “Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Gaza Any More Than Joe Biden Can,” noted columnist Jamelle Bouie (New York Times, 30 July).

When pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted Harris at a campaign event in Michigan, she shut them down with accusations of supporting Trump, as her supporters applauded. The next day, Harris’ national security advisor announced that the vice president is absolutely opposed to any arms embargo on Israel. At the DNC, her campaign officially rejected the request that a Palestinian American be given a speaking spot, while the Democrats’ 2024 Platform, approved by the convention, reaffirms – twice – their “ironclad” commitment to supporting Israel. (It also makes a special point of calling to “fund the police” and repeatedly demanding “more police.”)

Central to the Chicago convention was broadcasting the brazen U.S. imperialist arrogance typified by Biden’s statement, in his big July 5 ABC TV interview: “Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world…. [W]e are the essential nation of the world.” The patriotic jingoism reached a crescendo with Harris’ August 22 acceptance speech. After telling Biden that she’s “filled with gratitude – your record is extraordinary” (echoing the convention’s endless chants of “Thank you, Joe”), she soon segued into the speech’s central themes: how her “decades in law enforcement” prepared her to preside over the U.S. government and empire, “secure our border,” crack down harder than Trump on immigration, while further bulking up the military and cops.

“As vice president,” she declaimed, “I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances, and engaged with our brave troops overseas,” following this with her pledge to keep U.S. imperialism’s war machine the most massive and deadly in the world. Denouncing Trump for “threaten[ing] to abandon NATO,” she said, “I helped mobilize a global response, over fifty countries,” to back the U.S./NATO imperialist war against Russia, reiterating that “as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.” From the Ukraine front to the South China Sea, the shadow of the U.S./NATO war drive hung over the “joyful” militarists’ proceedings.

On Gaza, Harris shed rhetorical crocodile tears over the scale of suffering and postured vaguely about how she and Biden were supposedly seeking a ceasefire – while restating the bottom line that she will “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself” (sic). As the Zionist garrison state threatened to spark a regional war, she declared: “As president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran.”

Harris’ DNC performance culminated in a fusillade of denunciations against those who “denigrate America” and chauvinist paeans to “the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” “the greatest privilege on Earth – the privilege and pride of being an American,” etc. ad nauseam. Next-day coverage in the Washington Post described it as “a speech a Republican of years gone by could have delivered: heavy on crime-fighting, securing the border … keeping America’s military the ‘most lethal’ in the world,” standing up to Russia, etc. The Times called it a “patriotic speech that was hawkish on foreign policy and border security,” while Middle East Eye observed: “Kamala Harris’s speech killed any hope she would end the Gaza genocide.”

At a conclave filled with vows to even further intensify imperialist militarism, Harris’ promise to see to it that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century” is a sinister sign of the times. Days earlier, the press revealed that President Biden had signed a highly classified “Nuclear Employment Guidance” strategy for confrontation with China as well as Russia and North Korea. “America prepares for a new nuclear arms race,” observed the conservative London Economist (12 August). Under Obama, Trump and Biden-Harris, U.S. provocations against China have rapidly mounted.⁶ The Chicago DNC marked a new step in this escalation.

Only Socialist Revolution Can Defeat U.S. Imperialism’s Drive to WWIII,” headlined our previous issue (Revolution No. 20, September 2023), which went into the war threats broadcast by Biden and other imperialist leaders as they met in Hiroshima, one of the two cities the U.S. A-bombed in 1945. Some of those who got our paper back then thought that maybe we were indulging in “rhetoric” or hyperbole. This August’s Democratic convention should be a wake-up call.

“The risk of nuclear conflict is rising,” warned the New York Times in a detailed article on what a nuclear strike would be like in an urban center today, the first in a series called “The Brink” (7 March). Rather than “saving the world” from Trump, Harris and the Democrats’ saber-rattling brings us closer to the brink of a thermonuclear World War III. As our last issue stated:

“The United States remains the only country to have used atomic bombs in war. In 1945, its cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent the message that the atomic bomb was ready for use against the Soviets and all who might stand in the way of American imperialism’s drive for world domination. In 2023, ‘our’ capitalist rulers are driving toward a thermonuclear Third World War. The only way to prevent this is the revo¬lutionary overthrow of this long outlived and deadly system, by the world’s working class.”

At the Democrats’ Chicago convention, the ritualized chant was “We’re not going back.” But for youth who have been seeing what U.S. imperialism, with its militarism and racist repression, means here and around the world, “going back” to the deadly embrace of its war criminal politicians is no option at all. To open the way for a real future for the world’s working people, joining the fight for socialist revolution is the only real choice. We hope this issue of Revolution will help show why this is so.■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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