By JOHN LESLIE

In a bombshell announcement on Sunday, July 21, Joe Biden dropped out of the U.S. presidential race just weeks before the Democratic convention. With his announcement, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. Within a couple of days, a legion of Democratic Party politicians had endorsed Harris, including older party stalwarts like Bill and Hillary Clinton, although former President Obama held back—at least temporarily. If elected, Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and an Indian-born mother, would be the first woman president.

Harris the prosecutor

From her initial statements, it appears that Harris’ campaign will put at the forefront a call to voters to “save American democracy” by defeating Donald Trump at the polls. Of course, this rallying cry ignores the fact that the Democrats’ inability to seriously deal with the social problems affecting working people—and their outright betrayal on key issues, such as when Obama backtracked on affordable health care—opened the door for Trump and his reactionary movement to gain a hearing.

Harris’ platform directly confronts Trump’s populist posturing with the claim that she is for “People First.” Thus, Harris has promised to restore the livelihood of the “middle class,” and has stressed that she is supportive of the issues of “everyday people”—like reproductive rights, affordable health care, paid family leave, and increased access to child care. At the same time, Harris is putting forward, like Trump, a “law and order” message, making clear that she is pro-police and recalling that she used to be (and still is) a tough prosecutor.

Harris, who won the vacant California U.S. Senate seat once held by Barbara Boxer in 2016, began her career in politics as a so-called “progressive” prosecutor. But when she served as District Attorney of San Francisco, the “felony conviction rate rose from 52 percent to 67 percent in three years.” She later was elected as the attorney general of California.

Law professor Lara Bazelon wrote, “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. … Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

As attorney general, Harris opposed a measure to reform California’s harsh Three Strikes law and she supported a statewide version of an anti-truancy law that she had initiated in San Francisco. The law, introduced by a Democrat and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, penalized the parents of chronically truant children with a maximum $2000 fine and as much as a year in jail.

In her inaugural speech as California’s attorney general, Harris said, “So, we are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.” Of course, this law disproportionately targeted Black and Brown working-class families.

Genocide Joe is out

Biden’s stepping away from the race came after mounting pressure from fellow Democrats and major newspapers, which called on Biden to drop out following his disastrous debate performance against Trump.  Biden’s performance in the debate revealed what many had already suspected—that Biden’s cognitive abilities have worsened. Following the debate, Biden struggled to overcome increasing concerns about his age and fitness for office. Some politicians in both capitalist parties openly discussed removing Biden from the White House by invoking the 25th Amendment.

Biden’s selection as the Democratic standard-bearer in 2020 reflected the inability of the party to risk any association with a candidate like Bernie Sanders, who in his campaign raised the expectations of young voters eager for reform. To be clear, Sanders has been a supporter of U.S. imperialism and Israel, and served the purposes of drawing people with views critical of the system into the arms of one of the two parties of capital. There was no real danger to capitalism in the Sanders campaign, but the idea of a self-described “socialist” getting the Democratic nomination scared the Democratic National Committee and the party’s wealthy backers to death. Similarly, the DNC sabotaged Sanders’ 2016 campaign to crown Hillary Clinton as the party nominee.

Ultimately, Trump was defeated not because Biden was an attractive alternative but because the majority of voters were repulsed by Trump and Trumpism.

Biden in office

Under the Biden administration, deportations have increased exponentially, as has the number of immigrants crossing the border. According to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, over 6 million people have attempted to cross the southern border into the United States since January 2021, with Biden having removed or deported over 4 million of them. Soon after taking office, Biden preserved the Trump-era Title 42 regulations that, amid the pandemic, allowed Trump to severely ramp up deportations. Although the current administration ended Title 42 in May 2023, Biden spent the first two and a half years of his administration using the policy to remove over five times the number of migrants as Trump.

Biden’s record on climate change is disgraceful. Although he has talked about the imminent threat of the climate crisis, the measures taken by his administration are completely insufficient to deal with the crisis— while his efforts to ramp up U.S. oil and gas production will make matters worse. Biden has also sold out the rail workers, proven unable to deal with the inflation eating away at working people’s paychecks, and financed and vocally supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“It was not Biden’s failed debate that showed he is unfit to lead. It was the tens of thousands of bombs he sent to kill Palestinian families,” said the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. “It was his callous, dystopian disregard for Palestinian lives, as he ate an ice cream cone while speaking of a potential ceasefire that he took no action to make Israel agree to. It was his condemnation of thousands of student protesters on college campuses demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

While some might be tempted to identify Biden’s exit as a win for the Palestine solidarity movement, there is little evidence to support this view. The end of Biden’s candidacy only came following pressure from the backbone of the party that is most hostile to Palestine—Nancy Pelosi, James Cargill, and The New York Times, among others. Meanwhile, the politicians who are supposedly most sympathetic to Palestine, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and other Squad members, swore their commitment to Biden right until he stepped down.

Harris, for her part, has always portrayed herself as a strong supporter of Israel. The first resolution she co-sponsored as a U.S. senator was aimed at combating alleged “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations. While addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference in 2017, she said, “I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.”

Following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Harris told reporters that she supported an Israeli armed response: “Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization. Hamas has vowed to repeat Oct. 7 until Israel is annihilated. No nation could possibly live with such danger, which is why we support Israel’s legitimate military objectives to eliminate the threat of Hamas.”

While Harris might be perhaps a bit more sensitive than Biden about understanding Israel’s public image on an international level, fundamentally there is no reason to expect significant policy changes from the person who has stood as second in command of the U.S. for the entirety of the genocide to date.

Ultimately, the State of Israel serves as a bulwark of U.S. imperialism in the region and worldwide. This “special” status overrides humanitarian concerns in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class and the politicians who serve it.

The graveyard of social movements

Socialists understand the not-so-democratic Democratic Party as an obstacle to fundamental social change. As a capitalist party, the Democrats are adept at taming social movements through the co-optation of movement leaderships. This is especially clear when you look at the way the labor union bureaucracy consistently subordinates the interests of the working class to the electoral ambitions of the Democrats. Time and again, the Democrats have failed to enact labor law reforms, a higher minimum wage, or universal health care.

Movement subservience to the Democratic Party is reflected in the way mainstream women’s rights groups, organizations of oppressed nationalities, and LGBTQ+ people act as fundraising and advocacy mechanisms for the election of Democrats—while eschewing mass struggle in the streets. Certainly, following the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, bourgeois feminist groups chose to concentrate on electoralism rather than turning to mass mobilization.

Socialists understand that the Democratic Party is not an arena of struggle for the oppressed and exploited. Instead, it is the graveyard of progressive social movements. We also understand that there is no electoral road to socialism. Overturning capitalism and replacing it with a new social and political system will only come through the mass struggles of millions fighting in their own interests.

Peter Camejo, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party in 1976, put it this way, “There is no real democracy in the sense that we don’t run this country. The elections are totally phony. The ruling class simply gets up and picks two people, or three, and they say: “Okay, everybody, we’re having elections. Now you can vote for Humphrey, or for Wallace, or for Nixon.” (Or Trump or Harris.)

“Then they have their candidates have a debate. But the debate isn’t entirely phony. The debate often represents a real living struggle between different positions within the ruling class. The ruling class resolves many of the smaller tactical differences they have among themselves through means of elections.

“Obviously, such elections do not in any way mean that the people have a voice in ruling this country. At the same time, the masses of people believe in democracy. And this belief in democracy is something that actually weakens the rulers. And it is something that gives us real power.”

Regardless of who wins the election, the road forward will require a fight back against oppression and exploitation, and for a better world. To win this fight will mean waging a combined struggle for a class-struggle leadership in the unions, for mass action by democratic social movements, and for a broad campaign for the defense of democratic rights. Advancing the struggles of the oppressed and working class also means that working people need our own party. Such a party would not be a purely electoral party but one that leads struggles every day of the year in the streets, in the unions, and in every neighborhood for the interests of the oppressed and exploited.