With one of the most divisive elections in U.S. history fast approaching, workers need to be clear on one point above all: Regardless of who gets elected, our class loses. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have built their careers on racist attacks on the working class. We know they have tactical and strategic differences; they front for different wings of the blood-sucking capitalist bosses. But no matter which candidate wriggles out on top of the rulers’ manure pile on November 3, workers will face a life-and-death struggle ahead. Rising fascism and racist terror by kkkops and other vigilantes will continue to be the order of the day. Imperialist slaughter will still be around the corner. Democrat or Republican, there are no good bosses. Voting for a “lesser” evil can’t bring us the future we need. Just as capitalism and racism were grown together, in the atrocities of the slave trade in Africa, only with communist revolution will they die together!  
Vile, racist Trump: Fascist #45
Trump is vile and despicable, a racist, sexist monster. The roll call of U.S. presidents is a rogue’s gallery, from slave-trading rapists (aka the Founding Fathers) to “progressive” racists (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson) to mass-murdering war criminals (FDR, JFK, LBJ, the Bushes, and Obama, to name a few). Even so, Trump stands out as the ugly face of U.S. capitalist decline and decay. Without a doubt, millions of our working-class sisters and brothers are terrified of another four years of Fascist #45 and are flocking to vote him out. But they’re also cynical about electoral politics, as Thomas Edsall noted in the New York Times: “Neither party has been able to command enduring trust from American voters since 1980. In that sense, both parties are fundamentally minority parties” (10/21).
Make no mistake. As foul as he is, Trump and the small-time, Fortress America bosses he serves are not the biggest danger to our class!
Voting has never protected workers’ “rights”
Elections are a tool the capitalists use to settle their differences while diverting workers’ rage from the source of all our problems—the profit system. Voting has never resulted in substantial or long-lasting change. The Democratic Party misleaders are working overtime to scare workers into turning out for Jim Crow Joe and Top Cop Kamala Harris to preserve the Affordable Care Act (which leaves tens of millions uninsured) and women’s abortion rights (already dismantled in much of the country). In reality, the health care of our class has been gutted over decades by the likes of cutbacks king Andrew Cuomo as well as by Republicans. Last year, just before the pandemic, cities run mostly by Democrats were closing hospitals at a rate of nearly 30 per month! The impact was especially lethal for poor Black and Latin communities (US News, July 10, 2019).
The debate around a woman’s right to “choose” is inextricably tied to racism.  While abortion rates have broadly declined over the last 15 years, it’s the racist inequalities of capitalism that lead Black women to choose abortions at higher rates.  Indeed, “from mass incarceration to maternal and infant mortality...The best way to reduce abortions is to address the difficult circumstances that lead so many black women to end their pregnancies” (New York Times, 7/6/2019). We know that racism and sexism are inherent to capitalism and class society. No capitalist sell-out or stooge will ever care about our wellbeing or our children’s future!  
The liberals’ panic over Black workers’ loss of the “right” to vote obscures more racist history. In 1865, the 13th Amendment ended chattel slavery while sanctioning the enslavement of Black workers in prisons and jails and ignoring the racist terror of the Black Codes and Jim Crow. Exactly 100  years later, the U.S. Congress passed both the Voting Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Act, the first giant step toward militarized local police and mass incarceration. In the upcoming election, more than 5 million workers will be prohibited from voting because of a felony conviction in the criminal injustice system. Black workers are four times more likely to be barred from choosing their next exploiter (sentencingproject.org).
Joe Biden—class enemy #1
For nearly half a century, Biden has played a lead role in building racism, sexism, and war while serving the interests of finance capital. Jim Crow Joe’s career took off in the 1970s in the U.S. Senate, where he opposed busing for school integration.  By the early 1980s, Biden was busy legislating racist police terror and mass incarceration, partnering with gutter segregationist Strom Thurmond to legalize the seizure of property from poor workers and use it to buy military-style weapons for cops.
In 1988, Biden co-authored the infamous “100-to-1” law that targeted Black and Latin workers with mandatory 10-year sentences for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.  In 1994, he decried “predators on our streets” and led the charge for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill, which doubled the U.S. prison population and caged generations of Black and Latin workers. Biden’s slogan sounded a lot like Trump: “Lock the SOB’s up!” (NYT, 6/25/19). To this day, after another year of mostly unpunished lynchings by the Klan-in-Blue, the Democratic candidate supports even more funding for mad dog cops (The Hill, 8/5).
A loyal imperialist front man, Biden cheered on NATO’s bombing of Kosovo, the better to secure an oil pipeline for U.S. refineries. He supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. As vice president, he backed the Barack Obama drone wars that murdered uncounted helpless families and children.
Kamala Harris—class enemy #2
As district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s state attorney general, Top Cop Harris  “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” (theguardian.com, 1/31/19). The cops’ racial profiling of Black workers flourished on her watch. At a time when murders-by-cop were at historic highs, Harris’s office backed useless reforms like body cameras and police force “diversity” while refusing to prosecute even the most notorious cases (New York Times, 8/9).  
In her inaugural as attorney general, Harris threatened parents of truant children with “the full force and consequences of the law”—and then laughed at the backlash (theguardian.com, 1/30/19). Instead of creating programs to support working parents, she criminalized them.
 When and if she becomes the first Black and Asian woman to be vice president,Harris’s shameful history as a servant of the racist, sexist ruling class exposes the dead end of identity politics.
Biden and Harris say they’ll restore “progressive” income and corporate tax hikes to squeeze the wealthy to finance the next inter-imperialist conflict, most likely with China. But while the finance capital bosses know they need to discipline their own degenerate class, it is ultimately our class who will pay the ultimate sacrifice for U.S. imperialism. These Big Fascist rulers know they need a committed, patriotic military composed of working-class Black, white, Latin and Asian workers, all united behind the bosses’ bloody wars for profit. That’s a big reason why the liberals are so desperate to get the isolationist, white nationalist Trump out of office. For ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, Trump’s worst offense is his refusal to invest blood and treasure in the defense of their failing empire.
We need revolution for workers’ power
Even as much of the summer’s militant antiracist fightback has been diverted into futile voting, Progressive Labor Party must continue to lead our coworkers and friends into the class struggle. We must immerse ourselves in mass movements and reform battles while turning them into schools for communism. No matter who occupies the White House in January, the bosses will keep moving toward fascism and war; the crisis of their system demands it. Now is the time to plant the seeds for communist revolution. Now is the time to overcome workers’ fear and cynicism—to prepare our class to move from the ballot box to the streets . Join Progressive Labor Party! Fight for communism!