Dave Stockton
Since Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential election after his catastrophic debate with Trump, Kamala Harris has established a narrow lead in the opinion polls. But these are hardly safe or reliable majorities. Hence, amongst the liberal and reformist socialist left there is anxiety bordering on frenzy about Trump’s re-election. Adding fuel to the fire is the message spread by Biden and the liberal media that this would mean the end of American democracy.
Of course, there is just cause for alarm about a man who urged supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the registration of Biden’s victory, which he still refuses to recognise and threatens to repeat if he loses. Trump has also promised a massive purge of the federal civil service and is drawing up a list of some 50,000 current employees that could be dismissed.
However, the talk of ‘civil war’ from liberal pundits is an attempt to present the Democrats as the only hope for avoiding a Trump armageddon. As a result, the US trade union movement, the social movements and the ‘democratic socialists’ have duly fallen into line behind Harris.
Democratic Socialists
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) with a claimed 90,000 members, plus the prestigious magazine Jacobin, with a paid print circulation of 75,000 and a website with over three million monthly visitors, represent a regrowth of left reformist socialism in the USA, something not seen for decades.
The DSA has long wavered between pledges to build an independent socialist party and the strategy, pursued by the majority of its leadership, of the so-called ‘dirty break’ with the Democrats at some indefinite point in the future. This means that while some of its chapters and members campaign as independent socialists, the DSA nationally still supports Democrats who call themselves socialists in Congressional and Presidential elections.
They are represented at national level by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the so-called ‘Squad’, nine members of the House of Representatives, plus veteran Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. At the Democratic Convention, AOC described Harris as ‘the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life.’
Friends of labor?
US Labor has been a regular part of the Democratic ‘coalition’ since Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This included the National Industrial Recovery Act, National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, plus a huge expansion of federal government projects. Union membership rose from 2.8 million in 1933 to 14 million in 1945, a third of the workforce.
Later, Lyndon B Johnson—for all his Vietnam crimes—also introduced significant social welfare reforms and civil rights. The Democrat-Labor alliance has performed a major service for capital since then, despite fast diminishing returns for workers under Carter, Clinton and Obama. This headed off any moves by the unions to establish at least formal political independence as is the norm in Western Europe.
Union density in the US has steadily declined, from 20.1% in 1983 to 10% in 2023. Despite this the country has seen a wave of wage claims and strikes, driven by a surge in the cost of living which followed the pandemic and of course inflation. As a result, Biden felt obliged to refurbish the Democrats’ role as ‘friends of labor,’ neglected by previous Democrat administrations.
He promised to be ‘most pro-union president ever’. Indeed, his Protecting the Right to Organise Act, passed in March 2021, did remove a few of the more egregious obstacles to unionisation. Posing as ‘Blue Collar Joe’, he joined Autoworkers picket lines last year. Harris has shown less explicit commitment to labor causes and lacks Biden’s folksy image. However, both are multi-millionaires.
Many unions have loyally transferred their support to Harris, including the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) whose two million members make it the nation’s largest private sector union. So too has the 1.7 million member American Federation of Teachers.
The United Auto Workers, with 391,000 active members, is influential in key swing states. Their left-talking president Shawn Fain has said: ‘When GM was on strike for 40 days, Trump was nowhere to be found. Kamala Harris was on the picket line standing with workers. Trump is beholden to billionaires, knows nothing about the auto industry and would send the labour movement into reverse if he’s elected again.’
The Teamsters, with 1.3 million members, are the odd one out. They have declined to support Harris or Trump. Its president Sean O’Brien accepted an invitation to attend the Republican National Convention.
Party of imperialism
In the Democratic primary in Michigan in February, more than 100,000 party supporters voted ‘uncommitted’ to protest Biden’s pro-Israel policies. His support for the Israeli operation was an important factor in his slump in the polls and thus his withdrawal. An increasing number of young people, a major demographic for the Democrats, care deeply about the ongoing genocide, as the Gaza camps movement on campuses has shown. Pew Research found in April that only 16% of adults under 30 favoured the US providing military aid to Israel.
Is Kamala Harris any more attractive on this score than Biden? Certainly, he is a long and frequently expressed ‘friend of Israel’ and its bogus ‘right to defend itself’. He has done nothing to rein it in beyond words, despite the repeated slaps in the face he has received from Netanyahu. True, Vice President Harris called for a ceasefire a few weeks before her boss but there is no reason to think she would act any differently in office.
The ‘uncommitted’ campaign tried to get Harris to pledge an arms blockade to Israel or at least to ensuring and upholding current international and human rights laws on Gaza, but this has failed miserably. The campaign now emphasises the importance of stopping Trump and warns of the danger of supporting minority candidates like Jill Stein of the Green Party. In short it will support Harris.
On the Ukraine war, there is some blue water between Harris and Trump. Harris has stated that she will continue to back Ukraine, whereas Trump has expressed open hostility toward the US and NATO’s financial and logistical support for Zelensky, indicating that he would pressure Kyiv to concede territory for peace. He even hinted at his ‘close relationship’ with Putin, another ‘strong leader’.
On immigration, Harris has attacked Trump—from the right—for opposing Biden’s anti-immigrant bill, which would have spent $20 billion to hire 1,500 more border guards, 100 more immigration judges, and expanded detention facilities. Harris has also boasted of her tough record as a ‘border state attorney general’ and repeatedly pledged to ‘hire thousands more border agents’.
Why not vote Democrat
The Democratic Party has long been called the ‘graveyard of social movements’ of which America has had no shortage. This was true of the anti-war, civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a process repeated with the social movements of the 2000s: the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the Green New Deal. In election periods these movements are tamed and turned into a support apparatus for the liberal section of the imperialist ruling class.
What is lost in this process is firstly the independent critical momentum and radical edge of these movements and secondly the opportunity to create a political instrument committed to their goals. It obscures the recognition among workers that it is capitalism itself that is the root of racial and gender oppression and the exploitation both of humanity and nature, and that it needs to be overthrown and replaced by socialism. Instead at election time the leaders of these movements, the union bureaucracy and the lefts within and around the Democrats all turn to their activists with the slogan that it is necessary to support the lesser evil.
Voting for the Democrats blocks the road to the political representation of the working class, which needs to liberate itself from exploitation by the billionaires, from anti-union laws, from decaying health, education and social services. This struggle for liberation cannot even start without a fight for a working class party. Voting for a capitalist and imperialist party and presidency blocks the road to liberation for those suffering racial or gender based oppression, to ending the nightmare of imperialist warmongering, to effectively combating climate change.
The task facing the US working class and the movements of the socially oppressed is to break their organisations, centrally the trade unions, finally and irrevocably from the Democrats and go forwards to create a party of socialist revolution. All these forces need to unite to fight whoever is inaugurated as the USA’s president on 20 January 2025.