By John Catalinotto and Workers World Party 
October 29, 2024

In editorials and commentaries during the presidential election year marked by an attempted assassination of the Republican Party candidate, former President Donald Trump, and a last-ditch switch in the Democratic Party presidential candidate from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris, Workers World has made its position clear:

Neither of the two major imperialist parties offers a solution to the problems of the working class in the United States, let alone to the rest of humanity.

Up to now, with U.S. Election Day less than a week away, nothing has happened to change WW’s position. Both parties serve the interests of the U.S. imperialist ruling class. Both are parties of capitalism, of imperialism and of war.

Both parties prepare for war to stall the decay of U.S. world domination — and since 1999 alone, these parties have overseen wars of aggression in Europe, Africa and Asia and imposed coups and sanctions worldwide. Both parties support NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Both support and arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. Both back surrounding China with U.S. air and sea power as well as economic war against China.

The challenge workers in the U.S. face is that one of the two parties will provide the new chief executive officer of U.S. imperialism. What working-class organizations must analyze and prepare for is how to confront the post-election period. Since the two parties have real differences in composition and tactics, the working class must prepare to fight them in different ways.

Trump/Vance epitomize white supremacy

Nearly all regular WW readers despise Trump for being the epitome of white male supremacy among national politicians. He scapegoats immigrants of color, demeans women and castigates anyone who even questions gender roles. He shows contempt for anyone who fights for a union and for laboring people in general. He is an ultrarightist with contempt for democratic rights, even for his capitalist rivals.

The Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City illustrated Trump’s vileness. A so-called comedian even insulted the entire island of Puerto Rico. Trump had done the same in 2017 when he threw paper towels to a crowd in Puerto Rico after a disastrous hurricane. And Trump slandered Haitian migrants at his Sept. 10 debate with Harris.

The driving theme of the Trump campaign is to blame everything bad in the U.S. on migrants. Trump has pledged to expel 13 million people residing in the U.S. without legal papers, even though in reality these are mostly people in hard jobs, keeping agriculture, construction, hospitality, food, home care and hospital industries functioning.

It’s telling that the Trump campaign allowed the “comedian” to play to the most reactionary side of his MAGA base even though his campaign is supposedly striving to win a close election in Pennsylvania, home to 450,000 people of Puerto Rican origin. Regarding racism and xenophobia, nothing is so low as to be beneath Trump and Senator JD Vance, a vice-presidential candidate who will plumb cesspools to find it.

Harris coddles and arms genocide

What puts the Harris campaign beyond the “choose the lesser evil” category is the role of the Biden/Harris administration arming the genocide in Gaza this past year. In every speech and at every news conference, Harris restates the Democratic Party’s support for Israel. And Harris must know that not only those in the population in the U.S. who identify as Palestinian, not only many Muslims, but a broad section of now activist youth. are outraged by a genocide that they witness on social media.

The Democratic Party leadership, including Harris, chose to prevent any representative of the Palestinian community, even a loyal Democrat, from addressing the Democratic National Convention. Usually, the DNC gives a platform to all factions. They squelched the Palestinian grouping, even knowing that doing so might cost her a tight election in Michigan and lose the election for the Democrats.

Harris insists on proving that she will never hesitate to back Israel — and the administration has provided over $22 billion to arm Israeli genocide in Gaza and Lebanon since Oct. 8, 2023. Trump has an even worse anti-Palestine record. He now cheers on Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s government whatever crimes it commits. Trump affectionately refers to his friend Netanyahu as “Bibi” (ad nauseum).

Whoever is the next president, the movement that began last year to support Palestine must grow and confront the new administration.

Both campaigns reach out – to the right

In their campaign propaganda — and the two parties have spent over $16 billion on it so far — both parties have reached out to the right. The Trump/Vance campaign has focused on anti-immigrant rhetoric, making migrants the main scapegoats in an appeal to the many U.S. workers and small business people who have been overwhelmed by a loss of real wages or a collapse of their businesses. To this main theme the Republican campaign adds attacks on women, on African Americans, on people with disabilities — and pointedly on the transgender community.

One would think that the Harris campaign could have promised or even delivered benefits like a higher minimum wage, support for union organizing, forgiving college loans, a cut in credit card interest rates, and more effective and less costly medical care. This could have reached out to unhappy, disgruntled workers of all nationalities and genders. It would be much more effective than denying there was an economic problem.

No. The Democrats failed to reach out to the workers on a class basis. With the exception of one issue, they hardly reached out to ordinary people. Their main popular issue was and is fear of Trump. Harris has not even walked the picket line with the Boeing strikers who are fighting for their pensions.

Instead, the campaign reached out to Republicans who broke with Trump and said so, because they saw him as a potential loose cannon in the White House, one who might disrupt alliances with other imperialist countries that U.S. imperialism had built up following World War II, one who, to defend his narrow personal interests, might disrupt stable, ruling-class control of the U.S. government.

Now Harris campaigns with expelled Republican politician Liz Cheney and gets endorsed by her father, former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, a driving force behind the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And John Bolton, architect of illegal U.S. interventions around Latin America. Marine General John Kelly, a former Trump chief-of-staff, even declared that Trump fit the definition of fascism.

Many of these Republican Trump opponents are U.S. politicians, military officers or government officials who Workers World considers guilty of war crimes. Some worked with the first Trump presidency. Now they support the Democratic candidates or oppose Trump — whose political stance has changed little since they served him.

The one popular issue that the Harris campaign pushed was on reproductive rights. The Democrats had avoided aggressively adopting policies to reverse the overturn of Roe v. Wade on a federal level precisely to keep this issue part of the 2024 election.

For anyone who votes who lives in the 10 states where a defense of the right to abortion and/or other reproductive rights is up for referendum on the ballot, WW urges a vote in favor. Read the ballot carefully, especially in Nebraska, where there is also an anti-abortion referendum on the ballot.

Day of, day after, fight!

The reaction in the anti-Trump wing of the corporate media to the Madison Square Garden rally was scorn tinged with fear. In an Oct. 28 headline, The New York Times called it “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” The Times’ general message was to vote for the Democrats.

But for revolutionaries, whatever else they feel, the reaction should be anger and a drive to figure out how to battle the threat of fascism, of militarism, of repression — from whomever is in the White House on the day after, or if the presidency is still in play.

As WWP’s first secretary Larry Holmes wrote last month — and the article is worth rereading — “If a struggle breaks out after the elections that threatens the workers and oppressed, the working-class movement must be prepared to respond. This would have to include the readiness to organize workers’ anti-fascist defense committees. There are already calls for a united front against fascism. Depending on events, it’s possible that such a united front could be a stepping stone towards a mass workers’ formation.” (workers.org/2024/09/80888/)