Photo: Kamala Harris in Iowa in 2019. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The most common refrain from Democratic Party officials about why you must vote for them is that “democracy is on the ballot.” In other words, the election of Trump will guarantee the United States will become a fascist dictatorship. Many who would consider themselves “progressive,” “radical,” even “revolutionary,” feel the same way and are gearing up to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.
It’s an unimpeachable fact: The influence of the far right is growing, including semi-fascist and fascist groups. However, most of these arguments elide the key question: Is voting for the Democrats the most effective way to challenge the rightward moving direction of the nation’s politics?
The very real threats facing working and poor people are not party-specific. They are rooted in the dynamics of a capitalist system struggling to secure its own reproduction. Capitalists have been waging a vicious war against the working class, facilitated by both parties who are tasked not only with driving the process forward, but also with trying to contain its impact to avoid the system becoming totally destabilized.
Grasping these deeper dynamics illuminates the need for a different approach, one rooted in building a true ideological counterforce to the status quo that can reshape the political terrain in favor of the working class.
The right answer
The impact of the Great Depression on elites, the ruling class, was substantial. It shifted the center of gravity of elite decision-making towards attempting to manage the natural conflict between classes under capitalism through a more “generous” provision of social reforms. This consisted of policies like Social Security etc., broad recognition of unions and their wage/pension demands, and government responsibility — at least in the abstract — for regulating business in the public interest (clean air, affordable housing, etc.).
Such an agenda was underpinned by, first, the possibility of serious destabilization presented by the 1930s, and then, second, the explosion of profitability launched by the Second World War’s war economy, that was carried over into peacetime: the “military industrial complex.” From 1945 to 1965 corporate profit rates ranged between 20-23.2%. This created a strong base for more conciliating policies towards a strategically decisive sector of the working class and oppressed communities. However, since 1969 profit rates have struggled to top 17%. As we’ve said elsewhere, “Relentless focus on profit is core to capitalism. This obsession with profit is the system’s motor engine.” A significant decline in the return on investment for capitalists required a paradigm shift. That shift has become known as “neoliberalism”: expanding production in the developing world (globalization); attacks on public spending and progressive taxation (austerity); and a massive expansion of U.S. military power to subdue those who refuse to comply with the imperial agenda.
This was preceded by the COINTELPRO campaign of disruption and assassination to eliminate, imprison or otherwise neutralize the most effective opponents of the “American free enterprise system, making it easier to impose a neoliberal agenda on the broader population. This four-decade-long ruling class offensive is the root of the shift to the right in American politics. It is not happenstance, but a conscious political choice by the large donors who control politics, to shift the bounds of “acceptable politics” rightward.
Bipartisan repression and the right
The political center will continue to move to the right as the ruling elites attempt to cement their rule amid tectonic global shifts in ecology and geopolitics. An expansion of policing, imprisonment and mass surveillance to contain social discontent, expressed in an organized way or in unorganized uprisings has been a key component of the 40-year rightwing offensive. The growth of social unrest is directly correlated to the policies themselves.
The growth of militant action to stem the climate crisis has been met with a raft of draconian laws to protect “critical infrastructure.” The 2014-2020 uprisings have prompted a wave of “Cop Cities” to bolster state repressive forces. This has been accompanied by a “crime” panic that has promoted significant spikes in police funding and recruitment, in addition to spurring a return of “law and order” politics in even the most “liberal” localities. As the housing crisis increases across the nation, the Supreme Court has declared open season on clearing out the homeless.
This has gone hand-in-hand with fear-mongering around migration prompting more border militarization and an expanded network of immigrant detention. This is all topped off with a combined effort between the mainstream media, tech giants, and agents of the national security state to brand oppositional activity as “foreign-influenced or directed misinformation or disinformation.”
What is important is that these are all completely bipartisan policies, reflecting that both wings of the ruling class political establishment are preparing to not resolve the political crises facing the population, and instead to repress and disorganize opposition to their agenda of, at best, half-measures. This is critical to the relationship of the 2024 election to fascism. Historically and contemporarily, there is an intertwined relationship between the formal agents of repression and the extra-legal networks of fascist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society or the Oathkeepers. These are not just two negative policies among many, but foundational policies facilitating a far more repressive society. An imperial agenda drains resources from productive and socially important goals and predicates national regeneration on racist fear-mongering narratives, making it impossible to mobilize the resources to solve the social crisis being exploited by the far right.
Participating in the growth of the police, border patrol, NSA spying, etc. expands not just the formal levers of repression, but the broader social base of right-wing police state politics pushing for repressive rather than conciliatory responses to the social movements and social fallout from profit-above-all policies. Disrupting these tendencies is the precondition to checking the overall drift to the right and closing down the political space being exploited by the fascists and far-right.
The China factor
The unwillingness of capital to offer solutions that meet the scale of the problem is linked to the principal geopolitical conflict of the era: the Cold War-style confrontation with China. China, as a second economic center of gravity, restricts the ability of imperialism to engage in untrammeled profit-making. As such, knee-capping China’s economic growth through sanctions and tariffs is the key component of the current phase of the 40-year capitalist offensive.
The extension of these New Cold War policies to Russia, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela increasingly fragments the world into competing economic blocs slowing global growth — perhaps as much as 7-12% — increasing poverty, hunger, migration, negative climate impacts and generally deepening the social crisis in which the right wing is thriving.
Further, it directly siphons off resources that could be devoted to social spending and conditions all large government investments on their usefulness for “great power conflict.” These are also “bipartisan policies” and even more than their “domestic” counterparts are censored and demonized.
What is to be done?
A true course correction can only be delivered by a new force that can unsettle the status quo, one that can turn the seething discontent sweeping the nation into a recognizable political force. We’ve seen glimpses of that in the 2020 uprising and the recent upsurge in the Palestinian solidarity movement, where a variety of actions — large and small — cause society to react to radical demands and consolidate majority support for more modest, but still significant progressive ideas.
Sustained progress is inhibited by the lack of a political instrument through which the millions swept up in these events can combine their experiences, energy and resources — that is, a working-class political party in direct contrast to the capitalist parties, demonstrating that socialism is superior to capitalism at proposing solutions that meet the scale of the problems facing the majority of people.
One study in 2022 found that 36% of people had a “positive” view of socialism, 6% very favorable. Among Black Americans those numbers were 52% and 9% respectively. For Latinos 41% and 7%, and Asians 49% and 9%. For those 18-29, 44% had a positive view of socialism, 9% very positive. Among those who were “low income,” 45% had a positive view, 10% very positive.
Numerically this would mean that, overall, there are 15.49 million people who have a “very positive” view of socialism, 3.1 million of them Black, 3 million of them Latino and 1.6 million Asian. And 4.7 million of those with a “very positive view” of socialism are 18-29, with 5 million considered “low income.” These figures represent a wealth of human material by which to build an alternative, now.
Towards a counterforce
What are the basic principles for an alternative that can disrupt the status quo?
No positive change is possible without central planning. There are a certain amount of resources, both human and material, on Earth. There are also a certain amount of needs and “wants.” Just and efficient mobilization of resources is required to secure the basic needs of society first and foremost: food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education and access to information. In addition to managing beyond the basics of what we need, we ought to mobilize resources for the things we want. The market has already proven it is incapable of doing that. The major sectors of the economy need to be democratically owned and centrally directed if we want to move from a profit-centered to a people-centered economy.
The war economy must end. A rapid shift in societal priorities must rest on reorienting the use of gigantic resources for wars and the military-industrial complex towards socially useful investments. In April, Congress passed a $95 billion “aid” package to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a proxy war in Ukraine, and military encirclement of China, while that same “leadership” could only muster $4 billion to keep our dams bursting from disrepair — not even enough “to address even the most dangerous of dams.” The government is also spending $1.7 trillion on the F-35 — equal to 20 years’ worth of federal government spending on all housing programs.
The fight against racism and oppression is essential. The hierarchy of difference in discrimination in the United States is a major obstacle to empowering the working class. Subsets of the population — based on race, gender, national origin, etc. — are disproportionately subject to lower wages, higher poverty, mass incarceration and housing insecurity, among other things. Bringing down the standard of living for all creates fighting over the maintenance of relatively “privileged” access to opportunities and resources. In other words, we fight over crumbs, as opposed to demanding access to the whole meal and the kitchen that made it.
The time is now
Beneath these general principles is a much deeper and detailed discussion of everything we need to change to ensure that everyone has a dignified life. These three points speak to the general direction a working class political project must speak to in order to disrupt the current political arena. Most importantly, these discussions can’t wait until “after the election,” or the other points often made by those trying to shift support to the Democratic Party.
Every two to four years, there are so many who say “next time” — a time which never comes. The challenges facing the working class, and humanity writ large, are too significant to delay. The 2024 election offers us an opportunity to specifically fight for not just the right program, but the right type of organization to put an end to capitalism before it ends us.
