The Only Choice for Workers: Vote PSL!

For those who tuned in to the debate between Harris and Trump, you saw each proclaim that things would only get worse if the other gets into office. On that score, they are both right. No matter if Trump or Harris is president, the situation will be disastrous for us all. The population’s justified fear about their futures found no solace in these two creeps who have absolutely nothing to offer working people. It still remains to be seen who will be the next overseer of Washington, Wall Street and the banks. Just a couple months ago, after Biden’s decrepit state was on full display in the first presidential debate, it looked like Trump was a shoe-in to win the White House.

Since Biden withdrew from the race and Harris stepped in to resuscitate the Democrats, there has been a liberal media frenzy facilitated by black Democratic Party sellouts and the labor traitors who paint her as “one of us.” The aim is to convince all those who are pissed at being screwed by Biden to go for his cop-loving side-chick, who is as responsible as he is for the state of things today—the rising cost of living, the unabated cop terror, the war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. Harris wants to be “unburdened by what has been”—like the overturn of Roe v. Wade under her watch, to better sell herself as a defender of abortion rights. The enthusiasm for Harris has shifted the electoral terrain somewhat and momentarily breathed a little life into the decaying neoliberal order in this country.

But workers’ skepticism about what lies ahead remains unchanged. Their concerns must be met with an independent way forward for the working class or they are bound to bubble over in a rightward direction. If left to the liberals, workers will be sucked into the arms of the Democrats or shoved into the arms of the Republicans—the very parties that created the miserable status quo.

In the presidential elections, there is another option—voting for Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia! These candidates on the presidential ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) are a working-class alternative to the two-party system con game. They are running on a campaign to end capitalism and against Democratic Party lesser-evilism. Despite our political differences, we are giving critical support to the PSL campaign and encourage everyone in the workers movement to do the same. Everybody knows hard times are on the horizon. A vote for PSL would put workers in a stronger position to fight back against the attacks of either a Harris or a Trump presidency.

The Democrats are so nervous about their ability to dupe working-class voters and so threatened by PSL that they want to remove them (and other third parties) from the ballot, especially in swing states. The Democrats want to deny voters the democratic right to even have the option to pull the lever for PSL. Support to the PSL presidential candidacy provides the best starting point for a working-class opposition to the Democrats on the electoral field. They don’t want to see workers united around a campaign to end capitalism, the Democrats want to keep you united around preservation of the capitalist system of exploitation.

Harris: Reagan in Blackface

With a very tight race ahead of November, both Harris and Trump are jockeying for the working-class vote. The main difference between the two is their approach: Harris wants to convince workers that it is better to be slaughtered with a smile than a scowl.

Harris is not even a new face to mask the continuity with the administration that has screwed workers, black people, immigrants and women for the last four years and overseen the Palestinian genocide. She just has been relieved of the “dead weight” of Biden himself. At the DNC, she made no pretense of offering anything new or different from Biden—or fundamentally different from Trump, for that matter. In fact, if you watched the DNC, you may have had to rub your eyes a few times—amid chants of “USA! USA!” and Harris’s proclamations for “country,” “law and order” and getting “tough on border security”—to make sure you weren’t watching the RNC.

What we are seeing is an overall shift to the right in the bourgeois political spectrum. A prime example of this was the competition during the Harris/Trump debate over who could be the nastiest anti-immigrant bigot. Trump’s form of chauvinism is just too excessive for the Democrats. They prefer Harris’s more studied brand. She smiles wide like a good liberal and wags her finger at Trump’s demagoguery, as she lays out her plans to ruin the lives of those who have fled the ravages of U.S. imperialism and dared attempt to eke out an existence here. In this way, she is more effective at dividing native and foreign-born workers and preventing them from joining forces against their common enemy, the U.S. capitalist rulers.

Even some Republicans, like the Cheneys, have joined the mania, endorsing Kamala and rejoicing over how much her economic and “law and order” policies sound like Reagan and Bush. Also lining up behind Harris are yesterday’s “progressive” Democratic darlings, such as Sanders, AOC and Ilhan Omar. Gone are the crocodile tears for detainees. Genocide be damned let’s “save democracy”—which is under threat from the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

Truth is, Trump and Harris agree on most essential questions facing U.S. imperialism—which is the cause of the immiseration of workers—they just disagree about how best to achieve the goal. The big exception right now is Ukraine. Trump wants to pull the plug on military aid, while Biden and Harris are 100 percent for it. But either way, workers and the oppressed will continue to be shafted. In any case, it will be a government for the bourgeois elite, which is a truism understood in a very general way by the working class.

Bribes and Bootlickers

The fact that many workers will hold their nose and vote to maintain the status quo by going with Harris or vote Trump to fight it speaks to the criminal role played by the misleaders of the workers movement. It is clear that neither the RNC and DNC conventions nor the debates after have done much to convince workers that things will change in their favor under either reactionary candidate. It’s no wonder that since then there has been a spike in worker unrest, as seen by the strike of Boeing Machinists, who went on strike because they deserve more—and they do! But workers will never progress toward getting what they deserve with leaders who keep them chained to the same capitalist parties that have squeezed them for decades.

The Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien and the UAW’s Shawn Fain are representative of the new generation of union bureaucrat—and were given prominent speaking slots at the Republican and Democratic conventions, respectively. Fain lauds Harris for once visiting a strike picket line and declares her an honorary member of the working class—which if this were the criteria would make J. D. Vance a working-class hero for having visited a picket line in Toledo during the UAW strike last year. Either way, it is delusional for anyone who recalls the pandemic or the crushing of the rail workers to portray either a Trump or a Biden/Harris administration as pro-worker. O’Brien and Fain are trading on their newfound popularity in (especially liberal) ruling-class circles for having sold their unions short and not caused too much trouble for the bosses and their politicians in last year’s contract battles.

It is no coincidence that less than a week after IAM leaders endorsed Harris and “committed to doing everything” to ensure her election, District 751 head Jon Holden tried to shove a rotten contract down the Boeing Machinists’ throats. With Holden taking a cue from O’Brien and Fain, this was an obvious attempt to try to lowball and bribe the membership to stand down in order to save face for Harris in the lead-up to the elections. For now, the Machinists are quite determined and not taking the bureaucracy’s bribe to settle and wait and see how everything plays out in November.

Whether or not the Boeing strike is a game-changer for labor—and throws a monkey wrench into the elections—depends on the membership’s ability to take matters into their own hands and bend Boeing to its will. Pressure from below forced Holden to reluctantly call a strike. The bigger its impact, the more intense the pressure will be on the IAM bureaucracy to rein the strike in—so the Democrats don’t have to intervene. The union link to Harris can only undermine its struggle and must be rejected.

It’s only two months into the Harris election campaign and a lot can happen between now and November. The Democrats have reason to worry—their engineered enthusiasm is already waning. The likelihood of a recession is fueling a sense of foreboding, bankruptcies and unemployment are up, Ukraine is losing, the situation in the Middle East may erupt into a regional war. It remains to be seen if moving against the Boeing Machinists or invoking Taft-Hartley in the event of an ILA strike will be Harris’s PATCO moment—or if a resurgent labor movement is able to begin to turn the tables on the Establishment.

None of the above crises are going to disappear because there is a media frenzy about Kamala Harris saving the day. The big wave of euphoria will come tumbling down at some point. The working class remembers what happened over the last four years. No matter what the Democrats do, they can’t run away from this and the fact that they will do nothing to fix living and working conditions. Many people know Kamala sucks. But a good portion are caving to liberal pressures and are buying into the mania anyway.

The Hate That Identity Politics Made

The liberals are pounding the “fight the right” drums, insisting that there are only two alternatives, Harris or Trump, so we have to go all in for their candidate. Harris herself plays to this sentiment, including at the rally in Michigan where she denounced Palestinian protesters with all the arrogance that comes from being an imperialist politician, declaring: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

Harris’s main selling points are that she’s not Trump, doesn’t have one foot in the grave like Biden and is a black and Indian woman. She is attempting to delude workers and the oppressed into believing that, because of her gender and racial identity, she represents their interests instead of the racist class enemy’s. If you’re against Kamala, then you’re a racist or against women’s rights and must want to see Trump get elected—which just pushes many workers to the right and polarizes the class. This liberal garbage has been repeatedly shoved down our throats for years. “Fight the right” anti-racist liberalism defines the Democratic Party, was part and parcel of the previous anti-Trump “resistance” and is currently on full blast.

Many workers who were revolted by Biden are going for Harris as some last grasp at hope in a downward-spiraling situation. In particular, many black workers, who hate Harris, are going for her anyway because she is black and they buy into the gimmick that voting for a black face in a high place will bring some alleviation. But the bitter truth is that just like Obama before her, she has nothing to offer black people but more of the same segregation and inequality that puts them last of the last in everything.

The whole reason so many workers flocked to Trump in 2016 was that the liberal Obama years had brought widespread devastation: the economic recession, the bailout of Wall Street, mass evictions and job losses. The Obamas had a lot of gall to stand up at the Democratic convention and lecture black, poor and working people to pull themselves up and “do something” to change their situation by helping to elect Harris. Meanwhile, their black faces sitting in the White House helped nary a black soul in America, let alone black DC. The Obamas did nothing for anybody except the racist capitalist ruling class. That is the side of the class line both they and Harris stand on.

The social misery brought by Biden/Harris has made Trump’s populist rhetoric attractive as an alternative, including among many black and Latino workers. The fact that Trump has appeal to black voters on the basis of anti-immigrant bigotry can also be laid at the feet of the liberal Democrats. In major cities, they have taken away meager resources from black and Latino communities in the name of providing for immigrants (but not doing so) and then denouncing those who protest as backward. The liberal ideology of the anti-Trump “resistance” has fueled the rise of Trumpism.

DSA Left Must Choose: Harris or Working Class

How has the left responded to the change in the Democratic candidate? The DSA and the “uncommitted” are predictably coming over to Harris’s side. Her support for Israel is ironclad; she has also pointedly proclaimed that she will continue to arm the Zionist state. However, she is given credit for being somebody that the “ceasefire” crowd can work with, because she has supposedly expressed more empathy for Palestinians than Biden.

The Democrats gave “uncommitted” leaders a workshop at their convention, and now they are beginning to look rather committed to Harris. Democrats like Clinton and Obama are notorious for “feeling the pain” of their victims before and after clobbering them; it is typical liberal fare to play to sensibilities against suffering as a cover for their pursuit of ruling-class interests.

The DSA has been at the center of generating enthusiasm for the new Democratic ticket. Its National Political Committee (NPC) rejoiced over Biden’s decision to step aside—which got them out of the pickle of having to twist arms to get out the vote for him. Then, they weighed in to attempt to influence Harris’s choice for vice president, declaring her pick of Walz over Shapiro as a victory for the cause of Palestinian liberation on the grounds that Shapiro had been an IDF volunteer in his youth—whereas Walz simply volunteered for the U.S. Army National Guard. Throughout his entire political career, Walz has unfailingly supported the right of Israel to exist and keep the Palestinians under its boot. Some victory for Palestinian liberation!

It is a real comment on the rightward shift in the U.S. over the last four years that Harris/Walz has been greeted with a wave of enthusiasm. In the last election cycle, marked by the George Floyd protests, Harris’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination fell flat in no small part because of her record as a prosecutor—“Sister Lock a Brother Up” as longshoremen in the Bay Area refer to her. Walz, as governor of Minnesota, was the one who called out the National Guard to suppress those protests. Now, four years on, these two are hailed by the liberals as the saviors of the country from the racist Trump.

So, the DSA took a victory lap over the Walz pick. The rise of the Harris/Walz ticket also got the NPC out of the bind of having to put all its eggs in the “save the Squad” basket. Support for AOC is sliding significantly as she becomes more and more indistinguishable from any other Democrat. Her vocal backing of Biden and public equation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not exactly generating enthusiasm for the Squad—and Cori Bush’s primary loss did not create many ripples among liberals either. BLM boosters like Bush are out, BLM bashers like Walz are in.

While the DSA’s NPC is obviously throwing in its lot with Harris/Walz, the DSA left caucuses have barely, if at all, breathed a word of opposition to this course. The Marxist Unity Group, for example, proposes to not endorse Harris “until she secures an arms embargo against Israel” and various other conditions. So, rather than build working-class defense of the Palestinians and opposition to Harris—a driving force in an administration that has sent boatloads of arms to Israel—they fall in line behind the party of genocide in expectation that it can do better. This will never happen because U.S. imperialism’s strategic interests dictate support to Israel. To date, the DSA left, which claims to want to break with the Democrats, has refused to fight for that break or even support the working-class candidate on the ballot, the PSL. The one exception is the Just Break Already caucus.

To the Left: Smash Liberalism or Bust

Left groups reacted to the change at the top of the Democratic ticket by issuing statements against “lesser evilism” and correctly declaring the need for a workers party. Harris is denounced for her track record as a prosecutor and role in pushing Biden’s policies. But these leftists miss the key piece of the puzzle. To mobilize the class in its own interests requires a program based on working-class independence in direct opposition to the dominant liberalism.

So, while the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), Socialist Alternative (SAlt), their defectors in Workers Strike Back (WSB), Left Voice and others all say no vote to Harris and “break with the Democrats,” this is not sufficient to set the stage for building a workers party. The path must be cleared of all major obstacles, beginning with liberalism—that is, the Democratic Party’s politics. Those politics exist outside as well as inside the Democratic Party. Without a political break with the Democrats, any effort to build an independent workers party will be stillborn.

For example, the RCA wrings their hands over the supposed “missed opportunity” of 2016 when, we are told, Sanders could have broken with the Democrats and formed “a mass socialist party”—but fear not, today you can join the RCA and fight for communism! If party-building was simply a matter of bold declarations, everything would be much easier. But in the real world, barriers to the task at hand must be confronted and overcome. Whether closing ranks around Sanders or declaring communism on the order of the day, the RCA completely fails to take on liberalism.

So, how do SAlt, WSB, Left Voice and other purported socialists propose to build a workers party? Their answer is on a foundation of sand—a revival of the liberal movements of the first anti-Trump “resistance” and/or support to pro-capitalist candidates outside the Democratic Party like Jill Stein.

Consider Left Voice. In its July 22 article on the switch from Biden to Harris, Left Voice blames the growth of the far right on “years of neoliberal politics under the Democratic and the Republican party alike.” But it fails to draw the obvious conclusion: the need to break with liberalism across the board. Left Voice declares the way forward to lie in linking up “the new labor movement, the movement in solidarity for Palestine, the new student movement” and so on.

Each and every one of these movements has hit a wall thanks to their liberal leadership. The UAW strike under Fain failed to turn the tide for labor because he only sought to rebalance the scales without going up against fundamental capitalist interests. The Palestine and student movements are at an impasse because their moralist appeals for a ceasefire from Biden/Harris and divestment by the campus administrations cannot possibly convince the imperialists or their campus agents to act against their strategic interests in the Middle East (see "Lessons from the Defeat of the Student Struggle"). Linking up these movements that are separately holding back the struggles of workers and the oppressed is not a launchpad for a workers party.

SAlt and WSB take a slightly different tack—they are Stein’s biggest backers on the left. Any notion of an independent workers party growing out of support to forces that do not share that aim is a nonstarter. Unlike PSL, Stein makes no pretense of wanting to build a workers party to “end capitalism before it ends us.” On the contrary, Stein’s party is the small-time capitalist Greens, whose entire program is geared toward creating a more “eco and climate friendly” capitalism, including by proposing liberal answers to capitalism’s worst excesses.

Every worker knows that the proper tools are needed to build something solid and of lasting value. A power saw—no matter how shiny, viable or sharp its blade—can never substitute for a soldering torch to fuse something together. Using the saw will always leave more divided pieces, not one unified whole.

You can’t build a workers party on the basis of liberalism. In fact, many workers hate the petty-bourgeois Greens and see them as wanting to shut down whole industries and drive them out of their jobs, including by banning logging, mining and fossil fuels. The Green New Deal has not exactly caught on in the working class, which is having a hard enough time as it is figuring out how to feed and house their families.

Stein and the Greens have also gained some support among black leftist organizations claiming the mantle of socialism. The most outspoken of them is the Revolutionary Blackout Network (RBN), which touts Stein as a radical revolutionary and talks up her “Agenda to Facilitate Black Liberation,” which is decidedly not socialist. The Green Party will never be able to facilitate black liberation because they openly extend a hand to a section of the capitalist class—including the green-energy sector—whose power and profits are ensured through the segregation of black people at the bottom. It is impossible to confront fundamental interests of the capitalists while maintaining a working relationship with them. This is the underlying dilemma of liberalism, the gravedigger of black struggle. BLM is a prime example.

The fight for black freedom requires an uncompromising fight against all forms of liberalism—eco-liberalism, feminism, identity politics and anti-racist liberalism, to name a few—which collectively form the ideological underpinnings of the U.S.-dominated world order. In the guise of upholding liberal values, the U.S. ruling class has run roughshod over black people and workers not only in the U.S., but also in Africa, Asia, South and Central America and elsewhere.

It is laughable to think that the liberal Stein is seen as a vessel for uplifting the fight for black liberation. Malcolm X said it best, “The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.” There is no reformist shortcut to black liberation, which requires both revolutionary integrated working-class struggle and a communist program and party to lead the task of liberating all of the oppressed, particularly those at the very bottom of society.

How the PSL Undermines Itself

In contrast to rallying behind Stein, an independent multiracial workers party must be painstakingly forged through active intervention against all obstacles that block the way—first and foremost, the obstacle of liberalism. The way to move forward the fight to forge a workers party in the context of these elections is to build the PSL campaign and vote for its presidential ticket. SAlt and Left Voice will cite all manner of differences with PSL’s politics to dismiss giving their ticket critical support. Of course, what is really going on is that these avowed socialists recoil from drawing a class line in order to curry favor with the liberals.

Our differences with PSL run far deeper than the differences cited by SAlt or Left Voice—above all PSL’s own failure to break with liberalism. This is shown by their attitude toward the “uncommitted” and Jill Stein. In the case of the “uncommitted,” they support this scheme to keep defenders of the Palestinians in the Democratic Party fold; and they refuse to criticize the Greens. PSL’s failure undermines its own campaign and the building of a working-class alternative. We want Claudia and Karina to get as many votes as possible, because these are the seeds, properly tended, from which a workers party can grow. Socialists can keep the ground fertile by pushing back against every attempt to link the campaign and working-class opposition to the liberals.

But if the seeds are never planted and the ground is not tended, a workers party will never grow. This is the problem with the Internationalist Group (IG), sage sectarians who denounce our critical support to Claudia and Karina because, we are told, the PSL consummated “a miniature ‘popular front’ of class collaboration” in the form of a non-aggression pact with Stein and Cornel West. In one bold stroke, the IG has denounced the very purpose of critical support—to further the cause of class independence in practice. The PSL is not running on the same slate as Stein or West but in fact on a separate ballot line against them. The way to break apart the lovefest between the PSL and Stein and West is to expose how it holds back the PSL’s campaign, not to declare “no choice” for workers and abandoning the electoral field to the liberals and Democrats.

The next four years promise many battles ahead. It is imperative that those who want to fight for a socialist future actively give revolutionary direction to the workers movement by intervening as a communist pole against liberal alliances in all the struggles of the oppressed.