Dave Stockton
With one candidate already on the ropes, a breath of wind prevented the second making an early exit. The proliferation of political violence under Trump’s presidency is a reminder that those who live by the sword often die by the sword. The question for Marxists—who wields the sword?
The failed assassination of Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania has increased the already febrile state of the 2024 US presidential election campaign, in which what the media has focused on is in inverse proportion to the seriousness of the social and economic issues raised by the two main parties. Instead the personalities of two reactionary old men have reigned supreme.
The Pennsylvania shooting comes on the heels of Joe Biden’s train wreck debate with Trump in June and his embarrassing gaffes at the Nato summit, which together have unleashed attempts by Democratic politicians and billionaire donors to force the incumbent president step down before the Party Convention in August. Not because of his support for Israel’s crimes in Gaza, but because his supposed inability to beat Trump.
Against individual terrorism
Marxists have always rejected individual terrorism. The attempted assassination does not strengthen the working class or its allies in their collective struggle not to prevent Trump regaining the presidency.
During his tenure union organisers, the racially oppressed, women and trans people received nothing but murderous handling from the police and injustice from the courts. Now the shooting has gifted Trump a major propaganda victory with pictures of him bloodied but unbowed, fist-pumping the air under the Stars and Stripes, urging his supporters to, ‘Fight! Fight!’
He appeared the very picture of strength, compared with the enfeebled Biden. Of such stuff is modern ‘democratic’ politics made, where domestic programmes (inflation) and foreign policy (the Gaza genocide) take a back seat to personalities.
But it is not just the bizarre character of the politicians representing the two big parties, nor their nature as representatives of the self-same class, millionaires, billionaires and bankers, nor even the grossly undemocratic character of the US Constitution that drives isolated individual people to desperate acts.
It is that there is no sign on the horizon of a mass party representing the working class and the racially and gender oppressed. This despite a decade or so of social movements—MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Democratic Socialists of America, the recent the wave of strikes and the student Gaza encampments—still US progressives have no alternative on offer beyond Genocide Joe.
Huge number of people fighting for these progressive causes in the USA deserve better. The Democratic Socialists of America and the Squad have offered them only a party that has lain cold in the graveyard of progressive movements, past and present.
Whether Trump or Biden wins in November these militants need to come together at local, state and national level to pose the question of an independent working class party struggling against US capitalism at home and US imperialism, including its disgraceful support for Israel’s genocide, abroad.