As the U.S. election circus lurches toward its conclusion, it’s clear that a vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is a vote for more genocide in Gaza, more anti-immigrant racism, climate catastrophe, rising fascism, and world war. We’re told that we need to choose—and it’s true. But for workers worldwide, our only choice is to join and build the international communist Progressive Labor Party. We can’t vote our way out of fascism or war. There are no good bosses. We must crush all of the capitalist parasites, once and for all.
The move toward fascism isn’t a “choice” by any one politician or party. Fascism is a form of capitalism in acute crisis and decay, when the bosses are forced to peel off their mask of liberal democracy and expose the rotting core of their class dictatorship. Fascism relies on hyper-nationalism, open violence and state terror, and extreme racist scapegoating—both to control the working class and to keep the rulers’ own ranks in line.
Two faces of a deadly system: Klansman Trump and Holocaust Harris
Though they represent different groups of bosses with different wells of profit, either Harris or Trump will be compelled to defend a once-dominant U.S. empire now in steep decline. The U.S. is drowning in debt; the future of the U.S. dollar as the globe’s reserve currency is in jeopardy. No matter who wins the election, the next U.S. president will face fierce challenges from their nation’s imperialist rivals in China and Russia—in the Middle East, in Africa and Latin America, in Ukraine, in the South China Sea. No matter who wins, workers everywhere will face even more vicious attacks.
A second Trump presidency is a scary thing—for his divisive gutter racism and attacks on women’s health, for his threat to deport millions of migrating workers, for his open disdain for the climate crisis, for his plan to force Medicaid recipients to work or die. Even so, we believe that Kamala Harris represents a greater danger to our class. If anything, she is a more reliable agent than Trump for the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. She has shown her true colors in her unflagging support for the Zionist baby-killers and the bloodbath in Ukraine, in her embrace of concentration camps at the Mexican border, in her stated pride that the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before. Like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Joe Biden before her, Harris is a bought-and-paid-for agent of finance capital, of the multinational oil companies and the huge banks that keep them in business. She is ready and willing to sign on the dotted line for World War Three. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, she vowed to ensure that “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” As we’ve witnessed from Southeast Asia to Afghanistan and Iraq, the targets of that force will be millions of our class sisters and brothers.
What makes Harris even more dangerous is her capacity to deceive honest anti-racist, anti-sexist workers. If she wins, her role will be to pacify working-class fighters with the poison of identity politics and liberal lip service to “rights” and “freedoms.” Her campaign is built upon deadly, impossible tradeoffs—for workers to look the other way at the mass slaughter in Palestine, for example, in return for a limited and temporary guarantee of reproductive rights. But communists know that an assault on workers anywhere is an assault on workers everywhere. Harris isn’t a “lesser evil.” Like the billionaires who back her, she’s simply evil.
Communism is an egalitarian society based on science, collectivity, and the needs of the international working class. There is just one way to end the nightmare of capitalism. Don’t vote – revolt! Organize for communist revolution with PLP!
How to fight fascism
Fascism has yet to be defeated at the ballot box. Historically, it has only been smashed by millions committed to class struggle and led by communists. The Soviet communists annihilated Hitler’s Nazi forces; the Chinese communists did the same to the fascists in Japan.
But as the bosses do their worst to mislead and divide us, what is to be done now? Our task is to build a fighting alternative to the bosses’ state in every place we can, from workplaces to neighborhoods to schools and universities. We must rebuild mass multiracial movements led by workers and students to fight exploitation, homelessness, racist police murder, and imperialist war. We must support the ongoing strikes by industrial and service workers. We must elevate the class consciousness of soldiers and sailors to turn the guns around against the imperialist warmakers.
The task before us is tall and carries many risks. But the future is bright if we are willing to fight for it! All over the world, working people perform selfless acts of solidarity each and every day. They embody the principles of a communist world, where society is organized around our commitment to one another. One class, one world, one Party! Fight for this communist future today with PLP!
