History Is on the Side of the People

— Kathleen Chandler —

The U.S. presidential election provides evidence that the rulers cannot control the contention and conflict within their ranks. Predicting the outcome is out of their control. This increases the likelihood of open violent civil war in the United States and more imperialist wars abroad, no matter which candidate, Harris or Trump, is said to win in November. The situation also brings to the fore the decisive role of the peoples and their resistance to resolve the situation in their favor.

While elections are being used to try to line people up behind Harris or Trump, the peoples are persisting with their independent organizing, unflinchingly speaking out in their own name for their rights. Opposing U.S./Zionist genocide and supporting Palestine remains front and center.

As the presidential campaign enters its last days, there is an increasing effort to derail the striving of the peoples for their own empowerment as the solution to the current U.S./Zionist genocide -– that both presidential candidates are guilty of -– and to the dysfunction of the existing institutions. The candidates and their agendas are plastered across all forms of media. The peoples are to abandon their red line of no support for genocide and their firm stand that U.S. crimes and wars are Not in Our Name! They are instead to rely on the candidates for change, something which has repeatedly meant that change favoring the people is a casualty.

However, all the ruling factions are ignoring the current level of collective consciousness of the working class and people in the U.S. based on their experience of speaking in their own name and fighting for their rights and the rights of all. The U.S. people's sense of internationalism, in support of the struggles of the peoples against U.S. imperialism and its wars of destruction and genocide, imbues their struggles. The spirit reflected in the determination of the Palestinians, where resistance is honor and duty, is being embraced. It is the names of those massacred in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries that are on the banners the people carry in the streets and today those of Palestinians and Lebanese are front and centre. It is their struggles for self-determination that are upheld. The united demand against U.S./Zionist genocide remains central.

To counter the widespread anger with the current dysfunctional institutions, with many people, especially youth, increasingly seeking alternatives, and to rally the divided rulers, both Harris and Trump promote U.S. chauvinism. They use talk of "making America great," or that it is the "greatest country on earth" and "country before party." They try to divide workers in the U.S. from those abroad, including with attacks on immigrants and refugees.

What stands at the center of their campaigns is that it is the U.S. that must be indispensable leader and its president the one to decide what is best for all, who is and is not a terrorist, or un-American or a "threat to national security," to be punished and faced with forms of extreme violence.

Harris, especially, is being brought forward in the hopes she can quell the resistance and anger with the existing dysfunctional and undemocratic set up and forestall open civil war. She is said to be "new," because she is a minority woman from a "middle class background," and "for the people." Her role as a prosecutor, where in court cases she introduced herself as "Kamala Harris, for the people," is brought to the fore.

This is done in part to promote the idea that the state stands for the people when in fact the justice system itself, which Kamala Harris represented as a prosecutor, is known for promoting mass incarceration and letting killers off scot-free when it comes to crimes committed against the people. The fact that this system hands out class justice which serves the ruling class is a given.

People on an organized basis are looking into alternatives, at the need for a new constitution with new institutions of their own making. They are speaking out against upholding a rule of law that is pro-war, anti-people and unable to solve problems at home and abroad. To ensure that change is not a casualty, the peoples are fighting for a way forward that serves their interests and meets their striving to govern and decide.

Having Harris, Obama, Clinton, military generals and many others put forward the need to uphold the U.S. Constitution as key to finding a way forward is an effort to block this striving for new institutions. But the consciousness of the people is such that the Constitution is increasingly recognized for its compromise with slavery and with oligopoly, with rich men of property, against the empowerment of the people. There is growing consciousness that it is the state and its institutions that are the problem. They are undemocratic, unrepresentative, and beyond repair.

The governing arrangements impose a ruling elite governing above and against the majority. It includes prerogative powers for the president to "execute" his office, powers which today are greatly increasing and used with impunity. Harris, Trump and the ruling oligopolies they represent have their allegiance to ensuring the state organized against the people is what persists and is sustained.

The peoples are saying NO! and continuing to speak out, proclaiming U.S. genocide, racism and wars are Not in Our Name! This is strengthening their work for political empowerment.

Among the peoples there is growing consciousness that it is the state and its institutions that are the problem. They are undemocratic, unrepresentative, and far beyond repair. The peoples are looking into alternatives, at the need for a new constitution with new institutions of their own making -– not upholding one that is outdated and unable to solve the problems it helps create. To ensure change is not a casualty, the peoples are fighting for a way forward that serves their interests and meets their striving to govern and decide.

Failure of "Lesser of Two Evils" Argument

— Pauline Easton —

As the U.S. presidential election goes into its final sprint, efforts to portray one candidate or the other in a good or bad light are increasingly evident. In this vein, we see Donald Trump called a fascist, including by Kamala Harris and John Kelly, former Trump chief of staff. Meanwhile, Harris is doing her utmost to disassociate herself from the Biden presidency. This is so even though what she stands for is essentially the same as what both Biden and Trump stand for. Namely, to strengthen the police powers at the disposal of the president to provide U.S. control of unfolding events both at home and abroad. As we see in Palestine, Lebanon, on the U.S. southern border and even in the crude assaults on civil rights -- all in the name of national security and maintaining the kind of order the U.S. stands for -- this is giving rise to the use of extreme violence. Both within the U.S. and across the entire world, the peoples reject not only the use of violence to solve problems but, most definitively, the use of extreme violence which is abhorrent.

Due to the people's rising consciousness about all of this, a consciousness which exists independent of their individual wills, a feature of this election is the failure of the "Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils" argument. This is the argument routinely used to promote the view that the only choice citizens have is one despicable candidate over the other. For some time, the argument has been an integral part of state-organized disinformation to stop the people from setting their own agenda and plan.

It is interesting how in this election there is no attempt to even present these candidates as representatives of the people, though they claim to be "for the people." Instead, they are presented as the agents of change. It is even said that this one or that one provides "more space for resistance."

Everything is done to avert any discussion on what kind of change the people need and what kind of change these candidates stand for. To be debated is what either one may or may not do and say but not what they are already doing and what this tells of where the rulers as a class and the country are headed.

Everyone is to be diverted from thinking and action, analyzing how best to advance and unify the movements of the peoples for change which favours their interests. It shows that establishing the starting point for discussion among the people is key if change is not to be a casualty in this election once again.

In this regard, the idea that the role the U.S. working class and people can play is to choose the "lesser of two evils" is not catching fire as it did in the 2016 election where one candidate, Trump, was painted as a "fascist" and the other, Hillary Clinton, was painted as a "progressive," her use of extreme violence abroad completely silenced. Those pushing this campaign were clearly shocked when Clinton lost the election to Trump following which they declared the "uneducated white working class" to be racist, fascist, homophobic and many other slanders. It was an attempt to further divide working people from coast to coast.

The more the peoples' movements tackled the blatant injustices on all fronts, the more attempts to divide the people by those claiming to be progressive and "politically correct" were left behind. All of this is now to be dismissed. The advances and increased unity of the peoples' movements are to be ignored. Kamala Harris is to be the people's champion now, a champion promoted and backed by the same ruling factions which supported Hillary Clinton against Trump in the 2016 election and Biden against Trump in the 2020 election.

Unfolding events and unity in action of the peoples from all walks of life exposed these various efforts of the rulers as false and disinforming, designed by those with state-backing to split the peoples' ranks. Instead of stopping their attempts to label people on a racist and false basis, now the notion of "voting blocs" is promoted night and day. The claim is individual votes can somehow be aggregated into blocs -- the Black vote, the Latinx vote, the youth vote, the women's vote, the racist voters, the homophobic voters, the LGBTQ2S+ votes, the progressive voters and so on.

The promotion of "voting blocs" and how they will line up, and organizing on this basis continues but is such a fraud that it does not hold sway. The promotion of the fraudulent idea of "voting blocs" is linked to the promotion of "issues" the rulers declare the people of the United States care about. The existence of these "voting blocs" has been proven to be a figment of the imagination of the rulers and their candidates and elections time and time again but, nonetheless, they persist in declaring what the "issues" are and linking these "issues" to "voting blocs." They do not permit the people to play any role in deciding anything.

Workers, women and youth and the forces fighting against racial discrimination and for justice over the past decades especially are fed up with these efforts to divide the people on a racist and fabricated basis and secure support for aggression and wars abroad and repression at home.

To deal with this, in this election a diversion is to present "extremes" as a problem and measures are consistently taken to criminalize those seen to be extremist when they uphold the rights of the peoples. According to Trump, the extreme "left" is a menace while the Harris forces say the danger comes from Trump and his right-wing "extremists." And Trump himself is again called a fascist while Harris, who supports genocide in Palestine in the name of Israel's right to self-defence is not.

Harris is presented as a "new way forward" even though she espouses what is essentially the worn out neo-liberal "third way" as originally presented by Tony Blair and his New Labour in Britain, and taken up by the Clintons and others who have caused disasters both at home and abroad. So too Barack Obama, the Liberals in Canada headed by Justin Trudeau, and liberal think-tanks and pundits desperately try to block change by claiming they stand for change, women's rights, human rights, a green environment and more.

A key part of this "third way" is the promotion of the view that the executive power knows what is and is not good for the country and the entire world. Under its aegis, political parties have been destroyed and everyone must fend for themselves. In the name of defending human rights, free speech and democracy, "colour revolutions" for regime change are organized when countries uphold their sovereign right to determine their own affairs. This "third way" is the same old way of preserving the existing state structures which keep the people out of power.

The peoples are demanding and fighting for change in their favour and striving to ensure the election does not divert and disrupt this striving and their growing unity. Campaigns like "No Votes for Genocide" and "Abandon Killer Kamala" are evidence of this, as are continuing actions on campuses, in cities and towns, large and small, in support of Palestine and for an arms embargo and ceasefire now. The issue of U.S./Zionist genocide remains front and center.

Workers from all sectors of the economy are bringing forward answers, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic, as strikes by health care workers, Boeing workers and East Coast longshoremen indicate. Working people can better govern the country but political power is kept out of their hands. Elections are designed to hide this while ensuring power and institutions of government remain in the hands of the private oligopolies with their pro-war, anti-social agendas.

It is the U.S. working class and people continuing their battles for the rights of all, at home and abroad that represent the modern democracy needed today. Refusing to be drawn into the pro and con debates of the election campaigns and advancing the fight for empowerment by persisting in defiantly speaking in our own name and refusing to allow the rich and their candidates to speak for us -- will carry forward the fight for change that favours the people.

Boeing workers strike rally, October 15, 2024, day 33 of their strike.

(To access articles individually click on the black headline.)

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