Read part one here: Why Socialists Don’t Vote for Our Enemies
Won’t it be easier to organize under a Democrat?
All else being equal, probably not. The variables at work in determining the prospects for working-class organization go beyond which party is in the White House.
Especially important from a Marxist perspective is what we call the balance of class forces — that is, the relative strengths of the working class and its organizations and movements on one side; and the capitalist class and its state, police, and allies on the other.
Often, the election of a Democratic president can be just the change in fortune that the bosses need to defuse and suppress a rising movement. Amid the liberal triumphalism following Barack Obama’s election as president, the antiwar movement — including many left-wing groups involved with it — effectively demobilized.
It can be difficult to remember the extent to which Obama’s election created a sense of final victory among liberals that permeated into social movements. His escalation of the wars and expansion of surveillance and drone terror put the lie to any break with the George W. Bush administration. These actions demonstrated that he would consolidate and expand the very policies that had led liberals to call Bush a fascist — as leftists had maintained all the while. By this time, liberals and many of their allies had so committed themselves to the administration that the illusion wasn’t shattered — it had already been abandoned.
More recently, Joe Biden’s election had a similar effect on organizing against the United States’ concentration camps along the southern border. The very use of the phrase “concentration camp” had been widely adopted during Donald Trump’s reign by virtually all progressives and even by many mainstream liberals. After Biden’s election, you would be hard pressed to find a single use of this phrase from these circles, despite Biden’s continuing of Trump’s border policies. Less known is the ramped-up persecution of Black Lives Matter activists under Biden.
Famously, Richard Nixon’s presidency saw the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, several federal unemployment protections, and the further desegregation of southern schools. This is not because the butcher of Cambodia harbored any well-hidden vestiges of human feeling. Rather, the Nixon administration was forced to try to subdue the social and labor movements that were active and rising at the time by enacting some reforms.
If we can push a mass murderer like Nixon to pass reforms, the lesson should be clear: the person holding the presidency matters far less than the degree to which we make ourselves a threat to the system they have been hired to administer. If we settle for electing a Democrat, all that will happen is that they will help make normal the atrocities of the Republicans, granting the illusion of reasonability to their ostensible opponents’ most recent victories, and opening ground for further atrocities in the future.
Why not vote and then push them left?
It just doesn’t work! If a socialist organization decides that it is a political priority to support a particular candidate, it follows that the candidate would be, if they won, an ally to the movement and worth actively defending. There is no lower minimum condition for the socialist movement to consider endorsing a candidate (though Firebrand would advocate for a higher standard than this, as discussed in the first article in this series). Once an organization makes this decision, it can only follow that they continue to support the candidate up to the point of some decisive future political break. Communists cannot afford to make the same mistake as liberals, supporting the next-to-worst candidate until it becomes clear that they were in fact the enemy all along.
But what about the possibility of pushing a politician to better positions once elected? This is a question of strategy. What would it mean for a communist organization to support a candidate?
Surely it would make no sense to take a position of only endorsing but not materially supporting a candidate, nor the cop-out of “no endorsement but signaling to our members that they can and should vote for them,” a tactic employed by the Democratic Socialists of America during Biden’s 2020 campaign.
The person holding the presidency matters far less than the degree to which we make ourselves a threat to the system they have been hired to administer.
We are members of a political organization. It is our duty to take political stances and work to win as much of the working class to them as possible. We can’t equivocate on political questions, least of all the campaign for the executive of the largest capitalist power on earth.
So, endorsing or supporting a candidate must mean working to elect them. Once an organization makes that decision, publishing criticisms of the candidate’s positions, arguing against their actions, or even organizing against the oppressive policies they support become obstacles to an established position the organization has taken. Supporters and members must then cover for an elected capitalist politician just a little longer, give them just a little more time, negotiate with just a little more willingness to compromise.
Before long, the (formerly) communist organization finds itself in a situation similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she changed her vote on funding for arms to Israel from “no” to “present” after meetings with Democratic National Committee power brokers, no doubt with similar tears in their eyes. The tears then become tools for roping in future voters to the Democrats rather than anything real, because any actual solidarity with the working class and oppressed has long since been surrendered.
The point here is that, for communists, there can be no halfway endorsements. The moment we cave to the overwhelming “common sense” pressure and pick an oppressor to support, we begin a not-so-slow slide into providing cover for the bosses.
This outcome is made all the worse because there is nothing to gain. The Democrats are not willing to negotiate with us. They don’t give a fuck what we think. Support for them is not a cunning realpolitik maneuver but a commitment to their descent into the abyss of capitalist devastation.
But what about the rise of fascism?
Regular bourgeois elections have, thus far, resulted in zero fascist seizures of power. As discussed previously, Hitler was appointed by the so-called lesser evil. We could add that Mussolini was appointed by the king; Franco required a civil war against both republicans and revolutionaries; Pinochet availed himself of US intervention and the CIA’s Operation Condor to back his coup.
None of these regimes seized power by savvy machinations through the machinery of domestic liberal democracy alone. Additionally, in each case the fascists were supported by mass movements primarily drawing from the petty bourgeoisie — or middle classes, particularly small shopkeepers — but also incorporating supporters from the working class and other sectors. At times, fascism in power has seen fit to purge itself of parts of its mass component, as in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 Germany, but they were nonetheless necessary for its ascendency.
Compared to these examples, the US far right is still very far from achieving the kind of transformational power seizure that would mark the implementation of fascism.
Communists cannot afford to make the same mistakes as liberals, supporting the next-to-worst candidate until it becomes clear that they were in fact the enemy all along.
This is not to imply that there are no fascists in the Republican party, nor that US fascists don’t generally support Trump. It is also not to deny that we can see very clear examples of top-down attempts to create the sorts of mass movements that have historically propelled fascism to state power. Among the more disturbing examples are the reporting programs championed by Republican governors — those targeting immigrants, trans people, and people seeking abortions, which effectively deputize civilian bigots to direct the repressive forces of the state against whichever group is targeted next.
But there is a difference between fascists organizing comfortably within US politics, a tradition in this country dating back to the early twentieth century, and the threat of the impending actual implementation of fascism. This is not a moral judgement but a political and strategic one; the horrors of capitalism are quite horrific enough on their own, and should not be considered any less so because they are not carried out by a fascist state.
In fact, if we decide that voting against fascism is the key tactic for defeating it, we are confirming that two quite contradictory things are simultaneously true: that the threat of fascism is so dire that we must set aside our fundamental political beliefs to vote for, in this instance, a genocidal so-called opposition; and that fascism is so fragile it stands to be defeated by voting — for the first time in the history of either voting or fascism.
What about the Supreme Court?
First, we have to separate the reality of the court from civics-class mythology. The official explanation for the court’s lifetime terms is that they create an impartial judiciary set apart from the temptations and pressures of regular life, so that their judgment won’t be swayed. The idea is of a cloistered group of experts in jurisprudence, scouring the Constitution for impartial legal judgments.
In reality, no one is immune from social developments. The flagrant corruption of Clarence Thomas attests to this. In fact, so does the very insistence on this question by liberals — it at least admits that the court is not some kind of extra-societal body.
However, communists must understand that the court is affected not only by money or the politics of their appointers, but also by political developments in the world. It is no coincidence, for example, that the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion was made during the height of the women’s liberation movement, or that the one legalizing same-sex marriage happened during a rising protest movement. As with all other components of the capitalist state, the court’s job is to maintain the stability of capitalism, and it can therefore be forced into reform when faced with the organized disruption of that system.
The moment we cave to the overwhelming “common sense” pressure and pick an oppressor to support, we begin a not-so-slow slide into providing cover for the bosses.
It also bears mentioning that a Democrat’s influence in no way guarantees a better political approach to the court, even by liberal standards. Biden, for instance, was instrumental in the confirmation of the reactionary and corrupt Thomas, through his inexcusable actions in undermining the testimony of Anita Hill. The standing president of the supposedly lesser-evil party therefore secured the very lifetime appointment of one of the justices with whom his party threatens workers. What a wonderfully convenient outcome for the bosses!
Don’t we need to prepare for another Trump presidency?
We absolutely do! But supporting Kamala Harris and her stated commitment to genocide, anti-immigrant terror, and union-busting does nothing to prepare us. Rather than supporting the ruling party of US capitalism, we can only build the strength we will need to fight whichever oppressor wins the election by building up the organization of the working class. If we disarm for the length of an election, why would we ever return to opposing capitalism and its state?
Firebrand is preparing to fight another Trump presidency the same way we are preparing to fight the first Harris presidency, by doing everything we can to build revolutionary organizations and working-class movements.
Aren’t you too small to affect the election?
We certainly are! And toward what conclusions should this lead us? Shall we suppress our politics and betray our principles to support a candidate opposed to everything we stand for in a situation in which our support is not only not wanted, but won’t make a difference? Surely we would be better served in our goal of building a revolutionary working-class party to overthrow capitalism by standing apart from the Harris campaign and organizing based on our opposition to it.
Aren’t you helping Trump get elected?
This is more or less the reverse of the previous question, though it’s usually thrown at us by the same people. What if we were indeed big enough to really damage the Harris campaign? Put simply: we would take the same approach. Whether or not we have enough pull with potential voters to discourage them from voting for Harris, we would still pursue our strategy of opposition to all capitalist candidates and parties.
What use is a strategy if you only follow it when you know you can’t win? When there are no good candidates on the ballot, we advocate voting for no candidates. To paraphrase Eugene Debs, it would be far worse to campaign for someone we don’t want and get them than it would to refuse any support and get them anyway.
At least we will have kept building our forces against our enemies the whole time, instead of taking an election-sanctioned break to support one of those enemies.
Don’t we need to protect the oppressed?
The “right-right-right” movement in US politics described by Hal Draper demonstrates precisely that voting for the less-right-wing candidate does nothing to protect the oppressed. In the absence of mass movements and organized struggle from below, the “lesser evil” will, in the best case, solidify and make normal the new horrors of the “greater evil.” For example, Harris campaigns on what is essentially Trump’s “build the wall” racism, while making wild concessions to the forced-birther status quo of a post-Roe world and the anti-trans frenzy of the most right-wing of her opponents.
The best case for uncontested support for the Democrats leaves us in a situation where we take no pleasure in being proven correct in predicting that pretty soon the Democrats would be running on Trump’s politics, as I and other communists have done since 2016.
If we decide that voting against fascism is the key tactic for defeating it, we are confirming that two quite contradictory things are simultaneously true: that the threat of fascism is so dire we must set aside our fundamental political beliefs to vote for a genocidal opposition; and that fascism is so fragile it stands to be defeated by voting.
In the worst case, though, the “lesser evil” uses its comparative credibility to expand oppression beyond what their opponents could feasibly get away with. There are many shameful examples in recent history: Biden’s persecution of BLM, Obama’s violent suppression of Standing Rock and Occupy, and on and on.
We can only help to defend the oppressed by building our capacity for mounting a defense, not by ceding ground to the oppressors. We need militant, oppositional, working-class movements ready to strike in defense of our class siblings. Effort spent building these movements is far more important than supporting the vague hope that Harris might change her mind.
Won’t the Democrats be better for Palestinians than Trump?
No. Are you fucking kidding?
The genocide against Palestinians began in 1948. It is crucial that we understand this and say at every opportunity that Israel is genocide, in its conception and in every single action it has every taken. Over the years the Zionist state used a number of tactical approaches, but they have all been, without exception, genocidal.
How many Democratic administrations have supported the genocidal project since it began? All of them.
In this new stage of the genocide, begun after the anti-imperialist jailbreak of October 7th of last year, the Zionist state has escalated the mass murder it was always committed to inflicting on the people of Palestine. Its primary sponsor has been the US, ruled by the Democratic Party.
This alone should be reason enough for refusing to support Harris.
In 2020, liberals were very fond of saying that they didn’t think every Trump supporter was a racist, but they were appalled that racism wasn’t a deal-breaker for the Trump voters they knew. We can and should hold them to their same moral standard. If voting for an actively genocidal political party doesn’t give them pause, we must abandon them and build with people of conscience toward a world in which we have abolished genocide, oppression, and exploitation.
It is no coincidence that the cause of Palestine has long been the sole province of the radical left in the US. The US has long been the main sponsor of the horrors inflicted there. There can be no real resistance in the US that does not oppose the genocide. We must stick to our guns and work to smash every political organization that opposes a free Palestine.
We are, after all, committed to international liberation. This is the foundational goal of the Marxist tradition, and it can be compromised under no circumstances. If we were to support the butchers of Palestine, we would be no better than the traitors we read about with horror from the darkest moments of working-class history.
