For a Class-Struggle Workers Party

Break with the Democrats,
Republicans and All Capitalist Parties

Internationalist contingent in New York City May Day 2024 march calls to Break with the Democrats, “bosses’ party of racist repression, imperialist war and Gaza genocide” and to build a revolutionary workers party. (Internationalist photo)

AUGUST 20 – From the beginning of July, the world’s interest suddenly shifted from the horror show of the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza, and the continuing U.S./NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, to focus on the upcoming elections in the United States. The Gaza solidarity encampments which arose on over 100 campuses across the country were shut down by a wave of police repression, with some 3,100 protesters arrested nationwide. And then the school year ended.

The first presidential candidates’ debate, between Democratic president Joe Biden, now known as “Genocide Joe” because of his “iron-clad” support for Israel in the Gaza slaughter, and Republican ex-president Trump, the all-around bigot and would-be strongman, was held on June 27. The outcome of the face-off sent shock waves around the world. Biden’s faltering, almost paralyzed performance threw Democrats into a panic. Party bigwigs publicly declared it a “disaster” and a “catastrophe.”

Already that weekend, pundits and major liberal media were calling to replace Biden at the head of the Democratic ticket. Major donors and Hollywood celebrities called for the aging president to pull out. Congressional leaders held conclaves as the Biden family hunkered down, hoping to tough it out. Biden gave an arranged ABC NEWS TV interview in which, with unmatched personal hubris and imperialist arrogance, he declared he could do it, after all, “not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.... we are the essential nation of the world.”

But Operation “Dump Biden” kept at it. Interestingly, the reputed progressives – Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – were Biden’s last-ditch defenders while the right-wing “centrists” around Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi did him in. In the end, faced with unbearable pressure from billionaire financiers of what is now called “the donor class” and from Democratic Party grandees, with opinion polls showing that he had no chance of winning, on July 21 Biden withdrew from the race.

A half hour after announcing his capitulation, he issued an endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic candidate for president. Harris, who had a whole operation going behind the scenes, quickly took charge, and within 48 hours nailed down the nomination.

Various liberals, and even would-be leftists in Latin America, complained of a coup, calling for rapid-fire primaries or an open convention. (Donald Trump also chimed in.) Revolutionary Marxists, however, have no stake in how a capitalist party picks its candidates. Primary elections are hardly democratic, as campaign war chests are the decisive factor: money talks, loudly.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump picked a hardline MAGA (Make America Great Again, the slogan of the Trumper Republicans) vice-presidential running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance. Whereas Trump is an egomaniac spewing out racist and misogynist venom, Vance is an actual fascistic ideologue, who at Yale University, according to a roommate, professed admiration for Hitler. In interviews, Vance declared that the key thing is to get (and hold onto) power, at all costs.

Trump declared some months ago that he would be a “dictator” on Day One of a new administration, and that if his power grab to block non-existent “election fraud” is unconstitutional, perhaps it would be necessary to “terminate” all rules against it, “even those found in the Constitution.” Meanwhile he announced plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, whom he labeled “monsters,” and to use military force to put down whatever he decided were “riots.”

The Democratic convention, which started yesterday, is a gushing coronation of Harris, a former prosecutor and California’s “top cop” (state attorney general), whose supporters say she has brought back “joy” to the election. Plus the political marketeers have now picked a high school football coach with Midwest rural credentials, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, as her veep. The Democrats want to ride a wave of enthusiasm, staying vague about their policies. Oh, and she would be the first woman U.S. president in history.

As liberals breathed a sigh of relief that perhaps all is not lost, some young people may be swept up in the election enthusiasm. Yet despite the full-court press of feel-good rhetoric, Harris is co-responsible along with Biden for the funding and arming of the on-going genocide in Gaza (see “Genocide Made in USA”), and for the U.S./NATO war against Russia over Ukraine that is part of the war drive to subjugate and bring about counterrevolution in China, the world’s largest bureaucratically deformed workers state.

The Internationalist Group calls to defend Russia and China against the U.S. imperialist war drive, and to defend the Palestinians and defeat the Israeli mass murderers in Gaza.

So 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.

Meanwhile, various liberals and leftists cobbled together an “Abandon Biden Convention” that met in Chicago on August 18, and has now called to “Abandon Harris” as well. What is their alternative? Basically, the Green Party, a minor capitalist party which is running Jill Stein for president, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and supporters of rad-lib standard-bearer Cornel West have banded together in a mutual-aid alliance, in which they all support each other’s candidates.

This is a miniature “popular front” of class collaboration, tying the left and labor to bourgeois parties. Bringing up the rear is the Spartacist League, which has now openly renounced the revolutionary Trotskyist program it once espoused, and is calling to vote for the PSL, making it an appendage of this mini-pop-front lash-up.

In August 2016, Painters Union (IUPAT) Local 10 in Portland, Oregon, passed a resolution, initiated by Class Struggle Workers – Portland, calling to break with all the bosses’ parties and to build a class-struggle workers party. In June 2017, the CSWP and Local 10 initiated a Portland Labor Against the Fascists mobilization that brought out 300 unionists and supporters to oppose a fascist provocation in downtown Portland.  (Internationalist photo)

We reprint below a resolution presented by Class Struggle Workers – Portland (CSWP), which seeks to have it adopted by unions in the Portland area and beyond. The Internationalist Group politically supports the struggles of the CSWP and joins it in urging labor organizations to seize the opportunity to take a stand for unchaining workers’ power by adopting this resolution.

WHEREAS the Democratic and Republican parties, which have shared and alternated in power for over a century and a half, have led U.S. society into a deep social and political crisis that poses existential threats to workers and oppressed people here and around the world; and

WHEREAS the Democrats and Republicans are both capitalist parties defending and promoting the interests of the employing class; and

WHEREAS it’s high time for the labor movement to ditch the endless parade of billionaire-backed capitalist politicians who keep promising “change” while things keep getting worse for the working class; and

WHEREAS “Genocide Joe” Biden’s VP Kamala Harris fully shares responsibility for his administration’s warmongering from the Middle East and Far East to Ukraine; the strikebreaking legislation against rail workers that they and the Democratic Congress rammed through in 2022 while claiming to be “pro-union”; and competing with the Republicans in targeting immigrants; and

WHEREAS Biden’s replacement as presidential candidate, the former prosecutor and California attorney general Harris, is and always has been part of the same Democratic Party machine that did nothing to prevent the elimination of the constitutional right to abortion; and

WHEREAS Republican demagogue Donald Trump stokes all-sided bigotry and threatens authoritarian measures, feeding off frustration with declining living standards and job losses that Democrats have presided over for decades, and his VP pick JD Vance, a far-right frontman for Silicon Valley plutocrats, insultingly pretends to speak for the working class while seeking to divide and conquer it with poisonous prejudices; and

WHEREAS despite the protests by millions in 2020, racist police terror, repression and mass incarceration have continued under Democrats and Republicans, nationally and locally; and

WHEREAS 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 our power is chained to the employers’ parties and politicians; and

WHEREAS unchaining the power of the working class is more urgent than ever facing the growing threat of a third world war against China and Russia that either a Democratic or Republican administration would continue to escalate; and

WHEREAS the bosses have two big parties to represent their class interests while the millions-strong working class has none; therefore, be it

RESOLVED that since labor’s continued subordination to the bosses’ parties will only deepen the threats facing the working people here and around the world, the [name of union] will not endorse or support the Democrats, Republicans, or any capitalist party in the elections; and be it further

RESOLVED that we call on the labor movement to break from the bosses’ parties and politicians and build a class-struggle workers party to lead the struggles of the working people and all those ground down by capitalism. ■