Trump, Clinton, Sanders: U.S. Imperialism’s Many Masks

For the U.S. capitalist rulers, this year’s electoral circus has one primary goal: to win back disillusioned workers and keep them loyal to the profit system and the embattled U.S. empire. After decades of vicious racist attacks to divide and weaken the working class, the bosses have upped the ante by using the current presidential campaign to attack immigrants, refugees, and Muslim workers. But the capitalists are also desperate to keep young Black and Latin voters in the patriotic fold, since they’ll need them to fight the next big inter-imperialist war. These contradictory goals explain the polarizing competition between candidates like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party fights to organize all workers—Black and Latin and white, immigrant and Muslim—as an international class. While capitalists in every country build nationalism to justify their wholesale theft and mass murder, PLP fights for the international working class to smash the bosses and the phony elections that mask their bloody capitalist dictatorship.
We say: Don’t vote, organize—for workers’ power and communist revolution!
How the Bosses Use Trump
Front-running Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy is openly sexist, racist and uber-imperialist. He is the favored candidate of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers the world over, from Louisiana’s David Duke to France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Netherland’s Geert Wilders. While Trump also has succeeded in rallying some disaffected white workers, hundreds of millions of others are disgusted and repulsed by his campaign.
The finance capital bosses whom Trump represents—ExxonMobil, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase—are using their media to manipulate this healthy hatred. They are doing all they can to lead workers into the arms of the bosses’ liberal mouthpieces, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—in absolute opposition to our class interests. These so-called “lesser evils” are more dangerous to the working class than Trump. They foster the deadly illusion that the capitalist state can be reformed to meet workers’ needs.
The Clintons: Liberal Racist Terror
The collapse of the old communist movement is the biggest disaster in the history of our class. In World War II, communists worldwide, led by the socialist Soviet Union, smashed Nazi Germany, at the time the ultimate expression of capitalist racism and imperialism. But socialism failed to eliminate dangerous vestiges of capitalism, like the wage system and nationalism. This political weakness gradually eroded workers’ power in the Soviet Union and China. By the early 1970s, with the defeat of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, the old communist movement’s retreat from revolution was complete. This huge defeat gave world capitalism a new lease on life—and a blank check to commit genocide around the globe, from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved in December 1991, one month after the election of Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, as U.S. president.
As new-generation liberal bosses with high popularity among workers, especially Black workers, the Clintons and their allies fronted for the capitalist bosses’ war on the entire working class. They used welfare reform to victimize Black women and children, intensifying poverty for millions of families. They passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, paving the way for mass incarceration and  U.S. prison/jail population that now totals 2.2 million, of whom two-thirds are Black or Latin. (Hillary Clinton justified this atrocity by portraying Black youth as “super-predators” with “no conscience, no empathy….we have to bring them to heel.”)
They approved international trade agreements like NAFTA that destroyed countless jobs and drove down living standards for workers in both the U.S. and Mexico. They slaughtered 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions and indiscriminate bombing. (Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, called this genocide “worth it.” She is now a vocal Hillary Clinton supporter.)
Hillary Clinton’s close and longstanding ties to Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs are no secret. As a U.S. senator, she enthusiastically backed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to shore up U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil—and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she helped engineer the use of military force in Libya and Syria, still-expanding conflicts that have killed hundreds of thousands more and left millions on the run. Her loyalty to finance capital cannot be questioned.
Capitalist Crisis and Racist Scapegoating
Over the last decade, U.S. workers have suffered ever-worsening racist terror and steeply declining living standards. Under Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the U.S. working class—and especially Black workers—paid for the Great Recession, triggered by the bosses’ financial crisis of 2007-8, to the tune of billions of dollars in lost homes and jobs.
Donald Trump’s appeal is primarily to white workers with little or no understanding of capitalist class rule. While much of their anger scapegoats immigrants and Muslims, the true source of their anger is the financial crisis and the death of their hopes for the future—a reflection of the relative decline of U.S. capitalism. The domestic-oriented rivals to the main wing of U.S. capitalism, led by the Koch brothers, are bankrolling groups and politicians to orchestrate this anger into votes for arch-racists like Ted Cruz, Trump’s main rival (at least for now) for the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, Trump figures to gain more finance capitalist support—if only to undermine the Kochs.
One of Trump’s biggest backers is Charles Icahn, a billionaire activist investor closely connected to the Rockefeller family. Icahn holds a major stake in the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, Time Warner, which owns a number of movie studios and television networks, including cable news CNN. Icahn also partially controls Chevron-Texaco, an influential booster (along with ExxonMobil) of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Bernie Sanders: No Working-Class Hero
Many honest workers alarmed by Trump are supporting Clinton or Sanders, in absolute opposition to their own class interests. In reality, Sanders is the liberal equivalent of Trump. His mission is to draw masses of workers into the voting process, a fig leaf of legitimacy for their blood-soaked system.
Sanders’ record as a U.S. congressman and senator reveals which side he is on. As Counterpunch reported on March 4, here are just a few of his crimes against the international working class:

…his open embrace of Obama’s Drone War;…his sickening defense of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian children in Gaza; his vote for the funding of U.S. military forces occupying Iraq;…his equally terrible support (as a fake-independent US Congressman) for Bill Clinton’s unnecessary and criminal bombing of Serbia;…his call for the arch-reactionary and arch-fundamentalist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime…to step up its murderous military role in the Middle East….
The Democratic Party (with which Sanders has been strongly if stealthily affiliated since at least the early 1990s) is the great and longstanding killing floor for radical and grassroots activism…. If Sanders had been remotely serious about getting Black voters, he would have run early and hard against the Clintons’ vicious and deeply racist 1996 welfare “reform” (a measure that Hillary writes about with great admiration in her recent memoir)…[and the] Clintons’ three strikes mass incarceration-ist crime bill.

But Sanders was never serious about beating Hillary Clinton. From the start, he understood his role: to bring younger workers inside the rulers’ electoral tent, and to keep them from rebelling in the streets.
Many sectors of the U.S. working class, Black and white, from Ferguson to Baltimore, have lost faith in voting and shown a willingness to rebel. Unfortunately, the bosses’ racism deeply infects, separates and holds back our class—temporarily—from multiracial unity.
As members of Progressive Labor Party and readers of CHALLENGE, we must understand our role, as well. With our friends and within our mass organizations, we must lead the way in exposing the dead end of the bosses’ electoral politics—and in organizing to smash the deadly capitalism system, once and for all.