Violence has no place in America.
—Kamala Harris, after the latest attempt to assassinate Donald Trump.

“I believe in…ensuring we have the most lethal fighting force in the world.”
—Kamala Harris five days earlier, in her debate with Trump.

A funny thing happened on September 10, when tens of millions of workers watched a spectacle of shameless evasions, racist fabrications, and baldfaced lies. At the TV debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the “lesser evil” never showed up.

On one side, the gutter racist Trump promised mass deportations and gibbered his despicable blood libel about workers from Haiti eating household pets in Ohio. On the other, Harris mourned a failed bill that would have unleashed an additional 1,500 Gestapo agents at the U.S. border with Mexico—“to help those folks who are working there right now…to do their job.” And she repeated her pledge that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

In short, Harris doubled down on U.S. policies to criminalize desperate migrating workers and to underwrite the Israeli rulers’ genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. As Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu keeps carpet-bombing schools and defenseless tent camps, the debate was a reminder that Harris follows in the footsteps of Genocide Joe Biden, Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, and mass incarcerator Bill KKKlinton. And that regardless of which side wins in November, it will not stem the rise of fascism in the U.S. or the growing momentum toward World War III. The billionaire bosses who back Harris will ultimately need the discipline of fascism as much as those who back Trump, and Harris has assured them that she’s ready and willing to do whatever it takes. She is the safer choice for finance capital—the Big Fascists, the main wing of U.S. imperialism—in part because she’ll keep funding two bloodbaths in their interests: the Ukraine bosses’ brutal clash with Russian imperialism, and the Zionist rulers’ savage onslaught against workers and children in Palestine.

As rival Chinese and Russian bosses flex their muscles from the South China Sea to Europe, the election is exposing the weakness of the U.S. ruling class—and the hard fact that workers are under attack from both sides. The crisis of capitalism is straining the limits of the bosses’ liberal democracy and the capacity of elections to sort out their differences with a “peaceful” transfer of power. Less than four years after inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Trump has made it clear that he won’t accept a loss this time around —and that he’ll jail any donors, “operatives,” “illegal voters,” lawyers, or election officials who try to “cheat” (Washington Post, 9/8). While the Democrats and their finance capital masters are more tied to liberal democracy, a valuable tool to mislead and pacify the working class, they’re planting their own seeds for a possible election challenge. They’re using their big media bullhorns for tales of Russian interference (New York Times, 9/4), of Trump loyalist “infiltration” of swing state election boards (Rollingstone.com, 8/14), and of Republican efforts to throw hundreds of thousands of potential Democratic voters off the rolls (NYT, 9/15).

In Israel, meanwhile, liberal democracy is struggling to sustain the apartheid oppression of workers in Palestine. Although Netanyahu and his Likud cronies narrowly lost their move to strip Israel’s judges of much of their power, they may not be done trying. The Israeli bosses urgently need more centralized, fascist control to keep their racist “Jewish state” afloat.

With the world’s capitalists both deeply divided and more dangerous than ever, workers must take the class struggle into our own hands. In our reform work, we must make election issues out of the struggle against atrocities in Gaza and the fight against police murders. We must declare our solidarity with migrating workers everywhere. Most of all, we must use these struggles to build Progressive Labor Party and a mass movement to fight for communist revolution—the only lasting solution.

U.S. bosses can’t afford liberal democracy

Liberal democracy has always been a cover for the rulers’ dictatorship. When the ruling class is relatively united, as it was in the U.S. for more than a century after the Civil War, elections gave workers the illusion of choice. Meanwhile, the big bosses backed both sides—heads they won, tails we lost. But over the last thirty years, U.S. imperialism has steadily lost ground to China, now the world’s leading industrial power. With global war on the horizon and their empire at risk, the U.S. bosses’ splits have grown much sharper. 

Today we have two vicious factions of racist murderers competing for power in the U.S. The Small Fascists, fronted by Trump, are focused on their profits in the U.S. and have no appetite for more taxes. The Big Fascists, who control the Democratic Party, are backed by the multinational banks and oil companies; they need a massive military to help them dominate world markets and call the shots on trade. Both sides are viciously anti-working class. Both use racism to divide us. And both will stop at nothing—including nuclear war--to keep their side on top.

In this fast-deteriorating situation, liberal democracy is a luxury the bosses—including the finance capital bosses—may soon be unable to afford. They can’t allow the working class to decide which faction will consolidate control, or where and when the U.S. is going to war. The stakes are too high. The electoral system simply does not work for the bosses when they’re in a crisis of this magnitude.

Don’t vote—revolt!

The working class is facing a critical choice, but it’s not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between the bosses’ blueprint for war and fascism and our fight for liberation through communist revolution. The working class can’t be liberated by elections because our power lies outside the electoral system. We give up that power when we fall into the trap of choosing one rising fascist or another. In this case, we know them by what they’ve already done. We’ve witnessed Trump’s embrace of open nazis. We’ve seen Top Cop Harris eagerly help fill the jails with Black workers while protecting crooked prosecutors. We should have no illusions that she’d be any better as president than Biden or Trump.

When do workers win? When we march in the streets. When we fight back against racism. When we unite against whichever mass murderer winds up in the White House. It’s in the class struggle where we are strongest and the bosses are weakest.

So far, the most significant moments of this election campaign have come when small groups of protestors bravely stood up to Harris in Detroit and Las Vegas to demand that she end her complicity with genocide. The victory is in the fight. When the working class fights back, it gains the confidence to smash the bosses and their nightmare system. When the working class fights back, it opens the door to building a movement to ditch the rotten profit system once and for all--with communist revolution.