Biden’s victory buys time for bosses—workers still lose!

The results are in. The victory for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is a step toward more racism and global war. In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of the liberal finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Biden stated, “As president, I will take immediate steps to renew U.S. democracy and alliances, protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world” (Foreign Affairs, 1/23). Now that Biden and running mate Kamala Harris have won the election, their first task is to strengthen the U.S. in its life-and-death competition with the Chinese and Russian capitalist bosses.
Historically, the ruling class has used elections to sort out their differences and redefine their strategies for inter-imperialist rivalry and the best way to attack the U.S. working class. But with U.S. capitalism in a state of growing weakness and volatility, this fall’s election resolved very little.  If anything, the gutter-racist Trump has become even more dangerous as he refuses to concede (New York Times, 11/16).
Communists must cut through the noise
A shared hatred of Trump temporarily united the Democratic Party bosses and the workers in their base. But now that the bogeyman is on his way out the door, the differences seem sharper than ever between finance capital’s status quo “moderate” wing and the new wave that wants more aggressive reforms of the bosses’ failing system. Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger chastised “progressive” party mates like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for embracing “defund the police” sloganeering and not pushing back against Republican charges of socialism (NYT, 11/5).
Now led by Biden, the Big Fascist finance capital bosses will need to find a way to close ranks to compete with China’s growing economic power (Reuters, 11/16). To promote patriotism among skeptical workers, the cannon fodder they’ll need for their next war, the rulers may offer student loan forgiveness, climate change deals, or expanded health care coverage. The international working class must cut through the noise of politics and understand that any reforms offered under capitalism will be racist and sexist at their core.
The liberal rulers will also have to deal with 73 million Trump voters (10 million more than in 2016), a raging pandemic [see page 8], and an economy in crisis. As communists, Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) role is to help workers understand that no matter who is president, our class will be exploited and brutalized until we commit to fighting for communist revolution. Only by smashing capitalism can we run society on our own terms, in a new, egalitarian way.
Workers’ identity crisis
Over his disgraceful 40-year-plus career in Washington, Biden proved to the liberal bosses that he was one of the most reliably racist, anti-worker warmongers in town (see CHALLENGE editorial, 11/4). As California’s attorney general, Harris supported the jailing and police abuse of Black, Latin and women workers (NYT, 8/9). A week before the election, Biden announced that workers in Philadelphia, one of the poorest cities in the country, had no excuse for “looting and violence” in response to the racist kkkop murder of Walter Wallace Jr. (The Hill, 10/28). Even so, many Black, Latin, and women workers believed that voting for this ticket from hell would improve their own lives.
From their life experience, workers know the facts of life under capitalist “democracy,” the mask for the bosses’ dictatorship. They know we can’t vote for more jobs or to end poverty or unemployment or racist police terror. We can’t vote to end sexist inequalities or domestic violence. We can’t vote against drone bombings or climate change or capitalist wars that kill or displace millions. We cannot simply vote to create a different world. Even so, a higher proportion of workers voted in this U.S. presidential election than in any other in more than 100 years (Washington Post, 11/5). But if revolution wasn’t on the ballot, why was there a record turnout for the toxic Biden-Harris ticket? In short, most workers don’t yet understand that their essential identity is their membership in the international working class. Many voted for the same reason that so many people pray. They hold to the illusion that the true power to change their lives lies in a force outside the working class itself.
Our long-term fight
The shameful administration of Deporter in Chief Barack Obama confirmed our Party’s understanding that there are no good managers--i.e., politicians--of the bosses’ nightmare system. The failed strategy of the old communist movement to work as the “left opposition” within the Democratic Party led to reformism and irrelevancy. PLP has always been clear that liberal misleaders like Obama, Biden, and Harris are in fact the greatest dangers, even more so than the outright racist Republicans. Why? Because they’re more effective in preventing our class from seeing the catastrophic reality of capitalism.
PLP remains active in teachers’ unions, student movements, immigrants’ rights campaigns, police brutality protests, and strikes from the U.S. to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. In the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak, we called out pseudo “radical” mayors like Ras Baraka of Newark and Bill de Blasio of New York for their racist curfews and violent policing of demonstrations against murder by cops. At high schools and colleges around the world, we have joined in challenging sellout union bosses who betray education workers’ struggles in the face of relentless cutbacks.
But here is the key: Instead of fighting only for reforms, as ends in themselves, we treat these struggles as schools for communism. While standing shoulder to shoulder with our class sisters and brothers, we take every opportunity to share more advanced political ideas, to teach and to learn from them as well. Our task is to build a mass revolutionary communist organization, and to sweep the Bidens and Harris’s of the world into the dustbin of history. PLP is taking the lead by showing that our class and our class alone can lead the world into a future where the pandemic of capitalism is eradicated for all time.