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Workers’ Voice newspaper: March-April edition
The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is a major escalation in the Middle East that has dangerous implications for working people everywhere. The brutality of the imperialist assault internationally is paired with the attack on civil liberties by the Trump regime inside the U.S. This includes the continued operations of ICE and Border Patrol, the threats to the 2026 mid-term elections, environmental rollbacks that deeply impact the Black community, and unchecked police brutality.
Our editorial in this issue warns us: “There is a great danger of underestimating the determination of the U.S. corporate elite to drive through this effort. We cannot rely on court rulings or upcoming elections to save us. We must organize now, not only for mass demonstrations and community networks against ICE violence, but to find our way to building a new working-class party through which we can organize our political defense on every plane and on every day.”
In this issue we also have articles on the Epstein files and the ruling class, the San Francisco teachers’ strike, and a review of the new album by U2.
The March–April 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy:
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Detained immigrant strikers protest inhumane conditions
By N. IRAZU
“It is important we uplift the voices of the compañeros. We want all detention centers to be shut down.” —Juana, immigrant activist with Papeles Para Todos
Dozens of detained immigrant workers have been carrying out labor and hunger strikes In Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex in California[1] and at the Buffalo Service Processing Center in New York. The workers are fighting against the inhuman conditions in which they are kept locked up. Their valiant struggle against exploitation and oppression in these detention centers takes place in the midst of a presidential campaign where both candidates attempt to outcompete each other in who can be more anti-immigrant. While Trump issues the call for “Mass Deportations Now,” Harris vows to be even harsher on immigration than Trump.
With no allies in either of the capitalist parties, with immigration in the crosshairs, immigrant workers in detention centers in California and New York are leading the way in fighting back against the system of incarceration, super-exploitation, and torture that is the U.S. immigration system.
This is not the first time in recent years when detained immigrant workers have withheld their labor and sacrificed their health through hunger strikes to protest conditions in detention centers. In 2022, detainees in Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex in California went on labor and hunger strikes to protest the conditions they were subjected to by the GEO Group, the owners and profiteers of those detention centers. At that time, the strikes were carried out to protest the slavery wages of $1 a day, inadequate food, and the high prices for the commissary and to make phone calls. They wanted the detention centers closed down and their cases to be reviewed fairly, granting them freedom.
In order to break the strikes, GEO subjected immigrants to solitary confinement and even flew hunger strikers out to Texas in order to have them force-fed. Both of these practices amount to torture and can have long-lasting detrimental effects, as was the case with a number of the strikers subjected to these punishments.
The second round of strikes in these detention centers in California maintains many of the same demands, since these were not met by the time the last strike was broken by force. They want an end to solitary confinement, for GEO to meet the standards the federal authorities have set regarding treatment of detainees, and free phone calls in order to contact their family, community, and lawyers. In retaliation, in the middle of the summer heat, the administration of the detention center cut off air conditioning and refused to provide cold water, taking advantage of the climate-change-induced heat wave to break the will of the strikers.
GEO Group is a private, for-profit corporation, which administers detention centers around the country. It turns a profit through contracts it gets from ICE. It comes as no surprise that capitalist market incentives have produced horrific conditions in the camps.
GEO Group lobbies politicians, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to primarily Republican (but also Democratic!) political campaigns[4] in the hopes of receiving juicy contracts in the future. But these carceral corporations do not have anything to fear from Democrats, since there has been “a boom in private prison revenues from ICE contracts during the Biden administration and an increase in the percentage of detainees being held in private facilities.”[5] GEO Group has received over $700 million in contracts since 2008[6], under Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Detained immigrant workers also carried out a hunger strike in Buffalo, N.Y., during the summer. On June 7, 40 detainees launched a hunger strike demanding the reinstatement of free phone calls and an end to the center’s “lock-in” policy, which kept detainees locked in their cells up to 18 hours a day. In retaliation, the authorities of the detention center threatened to use force, impose solitary confinement, ending access to jobs and recreational activities. [2] This was all laid out In a federal civil rights complaint made by a group of community organizations defending the strikers. Noted in this filing is that the only way to not be subjected to the lock-in is for the detainee to agree to labor for $1 a day, just as in California. Corporate jailers thus offer detained immigrants two choices—slavery or solitary confinement. Under such conditions, how could they not fight back?
The detention center in Buffalo is administered by Akima Global Services LLC, another for-profit corporation that earns its keep by obtaining contracts from the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2011, they have received over $168 million in contracts from the federal government[3], profiting from keeping immigrant workers locked up.
There are no allies of immigrant workers, detained or free, in either of the capitalist political parties. The Republicans and the Democrats target immigrant workers with racist rhetoric, incarcerate them, torture, and deport them. They seek to keep immigrant workers oppressed in order to super-exploit them and use them as a scapegoat for the inherent problems of the capitalist system. It is these same parties that destroy the countries that immigrant workers come from through their imperialist policies of pillage, which force workers to emigrate to the United States in the first place.
Striking detained workers lead the way in the struggle for liberation; they are demonstrating that even under the most adverse, brutal conditions of incarceration and torture it is possible to fight back in order to secure a better world. Their struggle has to be taken up, in solidarity, by the labor and social movements of this country. We must amplify their voices and create a movement that fights for the closure of all detention centers, an end to deportations, and citizenship for all.
Citations:
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/26/immigration-customs-enforcement-ice-hunger-strike-california#img-1
[3]https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/566dbc48-1f9d-f4fe-4b82-d44ed548c602-C/latest
[4]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/geo-group/recipients?id=D000022003
[6]https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/9b308edb-a62c-659b-704b-ef4e5cf3f795-C/latest
Photo: Protest against the GEO Group. (Gosia Wozniacka / AP)
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Can the ‘Axis of Resistance’ ensure Palestinian liberation?
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By FLORENCE OPPEN
The U.S. has seen a growing mass movement, led by the Palestinian diaspora and the youth, to stop Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people. One of the major achievements of this movement is to articulate the need to stand in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, opposing the U.S. and other Western imperialist states’ measures to criminalize the movement. We continue to refuse to “condemn” the actions of the resistance and we defend the right of Palestinians to obtain military aid and support from wherever they can get it—including Iran, Yemen, or Russia.
Within the Palestine solidarity movement, however, a debate is emerging on how to build a broad international movement that can defeat Israel, stop the unbearable genocide, and ensure the realization of a “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea.”
In “The Hundred Years War on Palestine” (2020), Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi stated that the new wave of the liberation movement must learn some lessons from the past decades of struggle: “Neither dependence on U.S. mediation in fruitless negotiations of the Abbas era nor a nominal strategy of armed resistance has advanced Palestinian national aims over the past few decades. Nor is there much for Palestinians to expect from Arab regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan, which today have no shame in signing massive deals with Israel, or Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have purchased Israeli weapons and security systems through American cut-outs that only thinly disguise their origins.”
Despite the abandonment of real solidarity with the Palestinians by these regional bourgeois regimes, the Palestinian masses often invoke the “Axis of Resistance” as a strategic ally. This formula refers to the constellation of several political forces—the Shiite theocratic dictatorship in Iran, the Hezbollah forces based in Southern Lebanon, the Zaydi-Shiite Houthi forces in Yemen, and to a lesser extent, the Iran-backed forces operating in Iraq and Syria.
Western imperialist powers want to decentralize and delegitimize the Palestinian resistance forces by reducing them in their statements to being mere puppets of Iran. They do so to better frame their involvement in the ongoing genocide as a conflict between liberal democratic regimes (including Israel) and autocratic ones (targeting Iran), thus covering up their own geopolitical interests in backing the Zionist state.
In a similar way, a sector of the U.S. left celebrates Iran as a center of selfless anti-Zionist resistance and as the leading force controlling the constellation of forces of the Axis. This view hides the regional interests of Iran and its imperialist backers in the region, which in the last instance explain its inaction. It also hides the fact that the active militias (Lebanon, Yemen) come out of indigenous and autonomous processes of popular organizing and are not following Iran’s directions.
So far, all military engagements have been indirect and sideways by Hezbollah and the Houthis. While these actions have raised the need for regional military solidarity, none have really managed to deter Israel’s escalation and genocidal actions. Despite the many declarations from the Iranian regime of its desire to crush Israel and avenge the Palestinian people, there has been little to nothing in terms of a direct military confrontation.
Several factors are pulling Iran away from any direct confrontation with Israel and the U.S.—its growing relations with imperialist powers such as Russia and China, its hopes to eventually achieve some sort of detente with the U.S., and Iran’s own attempts to achieve an area of influence in the region.
Russian imperialism currently balances its stance in the conflict by verbally advocating a two-state solution while indirectly supporting Israel through oil sales and backing the normalization of the Zionist entity in the region. The Ukraine War has solidified the partnership of Iran and Russia, with Iran supplying military support to Russia in return for advanced military technology. Thus, Putin aims to prevent Iran from engaging in a resource-draining war in the Middle East that will hamper its own war efforts.
China’s primary goal in the Middle East is to secure its economic interests, particularly in energy and trade. To achieve this, it seeks to maintain good relations with all parties in the region, including Iran, Israel, and the Arab states. China’s growing economic ties with Iran and Israel discourage direct military confrontation between the two nations.
While China has expressed support for a “two-state solution” in Palestine, its primary focus remains on economic stability and preventing any escalation that could disrupt its business interests. It bets on the diplomatic weapon to show ambiguous support for the Palestinian resistance while actively pressuring Iran, with which it signed an economic cooperation agreement in 2021, not to enter into direct war with Israel. The objective of Chinese imperialism is not Palestinian liberation but, above all, to expand its influence in the region and challenge U.S. dominance.
Any hope for full-blown support for the Palestinian resistance does not lie in appealing to reactionary regimes, despite their occasional “progressive” rhetoric, but in the development of a mass popular insurrection in the region that can link up with and expand the ongoing resistance efforts.
The successive waves of the “Arab Spring”—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen in 2011, and later in Algeria, Sudan, and Iran—showed the power that mass movements can have, and also the pressing need to have a political leadership to align demands and strategy. These are the combined forces that can better confront the capitulatory policy of the current regional governments toward Israel and take to the streets to fight for their cause.
The Palestinian liberation movement has a lot to win by refusing to subordinate support for the mass struggles of the region to maintaining political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes. These regimes starve and oppress their own people as well as Palestinians within their borders. As Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, explains, “Those workers and peasants [who participated in the Arab Spring] remember their forbearers’ fight against colonialism, confront imperialist powers’ that support the regimes that oppress them, identify with the struggle of the Palestinians, and therefore see their own battle for democracy and equality as bound up with its victory. That’s why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when Palestinians fight it triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.”
The emergence in the Middle East of a multi-ethnic mass movement, of a majority proletarian and poor peasant composition, would set the conditions for the liberation of Palestine. Next to the struggle of the Palestinian people, combined with an uprising by the masses of the region, U.S. workers and youth are a third component of the strategy for a Free Palestine. The widespread protests against U.S. complicity in the genocide should coalesce into coordinated mass anti-imperialist mobilizations with clear demands and a strategy to win. Those in the U.S. who stand in solidarity with Palestine must fight to immediately end all U.S. aid to Israel, while rigorously opposing the growing criminalization of the Palestinian resistance and also the calls for the U.S. to back any Israeli attack on Iran.
End Israeli genocide in Gaza! For a free, democratic, and secular Palestine! Hands off Iran! For a socialist federation of the Middle East!
Photo: Hezbollah, the Lebanese group, holds training exercises in May 2023 to demonstrate its readiness to confront Israel. (Hassan Ammar / AP)
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10,000 hotel workers strike across the U.S.!
By ERNIE GOTTA
More than 10,000 union hotel workers are on strike in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, San Jose, San Diego, Greenwich, Conn., and in Hawaii, disrupting the profits for the hotels on a busy Labor Day weekend. These members of UNITE HERE in the service sector are setting an important example for all workers; withholding their labor is the major weapon that working people have to force the bosses to meet their demands. More picket lines may follow in the coming days.
According to UNITE HERE: “The U.S. hotel industry made over $100 billion in gross operating profit in 2022, and hotel executives at Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott took home $596 million in total pay between 2020 and 2023. Meanwhile, U.S. hotel staffing per occupied room was down 13% from 2019 to 2022 as many hotels nationwide have kept COVID-era service cuts in place, including understaffing, ending automatic daily housekeeping, removing food and beverage options, and more.”
Prior to the pandemic UNITE HERE hotel workers were winning important concessions, defending women workers from sexual assault, and organizing non-union hotels. The 2018 UNITE HERE strike at Marriott hotels saw some 8000 room attendants, bar tenders, front desk agents, bell staff, and banquet workers walk off the job with the slogan “One job should be enough.” In San Francisco, for example, hotel workers won $4 an hour raises.
In Stamford, Conn., between 2017 and 2018, an organizing drive saw two hotels in New England’s second largest hotel market join UNITE HERE based on the strength of worker-to-worker organizing. In fact, it was the unionized workers now on strike at the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich that helped lead the organizing drive that fought bitter anti-union campaigns by the hotel bosses and in the end won serious increases in pay and improvement in health benefits. The COVID pandemic gave the hotel bosses a boost in trying to undue many of the hard fought gains. Ninety-eight percent of UNITE HERE’s 300,000 members were laid off due to the pandemic, and the bosses used that as a wedge to increase profits while worsening the working conditions.
Hotel workers have had enough and are raising new demands, backed by the willingness to withhold their labor in order to win. Daniela Campusano, a housekeeper at Hilton’s Hampton Inn & Homewood Suites Boston Seaport for 12 years, said, “I’m on strike because I need higher wages. I currently have two jobs, and I work about 65 hours a week. Everything is so expensive now—all my monthly bills have increased, and I need to earn more money so I can help my daughter pay for her university studies. One job should be enough.”
Similarly, Rebeca Laroque, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich for 12 years stated, “I’m on strike because I need more wages, I need health insurance, and I need less rooms. I work so hard and come home exhausted at the end of the day, but I still don’t make enough money to pay my bills. Going on strike is a huge sacrifice, but it’s something I have to do because I need a better life for me and my two kids.”
“My job was always painful, but now it’s even worse,” said Consuelo Escorcia, a lobby attendant at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, where workers voted to authorize a strike by 94% of voting members. “They used to staff six of us to clean the lobby and public bathrooms on each shift, but since COVID, we have only two or three. I’ve sacrificed so much for this job over the years. I had to have four surgeries in my hand and shoulder. But in return, the hotel has only made my job harder.”
Don’t cross UNITE HERE’s picket lines at: Fairmont Copley, Hilton Boston Park Plaza, Hilton Boston Logan, Hampton Inn/ Homewood Suites Seaport, Westin Seattle, Seattle Airport Hilton & Conference Center, Doubletree Seattle Airport, SeaTac Hilton, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich, Conn., and anywhere you see a picket line!
Workers’ Voice stands in solidarity with these union hotel workers and their strike. We encourage all to turn out to the picket lines with coworkers, friends, and family. We also extend our solidarity to all hotel workers in negotiations and should more workers across the country go out on strike we’ll be there in solidarity too!
An earlier version of this article reported that only 4000 workers were on strike. This has been updated to 10,000, reflecting additional locals whose participation has now been reported.
Image from UNITE HERE Local 217’s Facebook page.
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Interview with Indian doctor about their strike
By SOCIALIST VOICE
Socialist Voice interviewed Doctor Sourov Misra, a member of the core committee of the Resident Doctors Association, which is leading the doctors’ strike. He is a junior doctor at the School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata. He is a postgraduate in MD Tropical Medicine and is a third year resident.
Justice for R.G. Kar is the slogan of the protesting doctors. It is the name of the college. In India there is a rule that the rape victim should not be named. Instead of naming the victim, they have named the institution as a reference to the victim.
SV: On August 9, a junior resident was raped and murdered at R.G. Kar Hospital in Calcutta, can you tell me who did it and the context of the crime?
The civilian volunteer (police/hospital security) was seen on CCTV footage by the police, which was verified. He was the only one to leave the building at 4 am. The murder took place in the doctor’s room or seminar room, where the doctor usually took her break.
This tragedy has shaken the doctors of West Bengal and India. The murder took place in her hospital where she was a resident, which is supposed to be a safe place. She was working a 36-hour shift – there are no guidelines on how long shifts should be – and she was on a break. Junior residents work the shifts they are told to work.
We saw that the autopsy report showed multiple injuries and that the injuries could not have been caused by one person, so there may be more than one person involved. This complicates the situation of the crime and there are many unanswered questions in this case.
There is a history of massive corruption involving the principal (director) of the hospital, Sandip Ghosh. He was selling medical degrees for money in the hospital. There was a massive corruption racket going on in the hospital and the junior doctor had come to know about this racket and threatened to expose him. The rape and brutal murder was meant to send a message to anyone who would dare to investigate the principal.
Two years ago, another doctor filed a complaint against the corruption, but the principal was not investigated. The accused doctor was transferred and harassed by the West Bengal health department.
SV: It seems that the doctors’ protest has created solidarity in West Bengal and India?
When we started the protests, we used social media to highlight the issues we were concerned about, especially the way the state was handling the situation because the Calcutta police was trying to cover it up.
The Calcutta High Court handed over the investigation to the CBI (like the FBI in the US) and took it out of the hands of the Calcutta police. The CBI investigated and found that evidence had been tampered with, so both the hospital and the state are thought to be responsible.
The investigation is a botched job, and even the family has been harassed. When we protested on Independence Day, the ruling party thugs attacked us with a mob of 1,000 people. The police took the opportunity to crack down on the protests using a provision of the law that prevents unlawful assembly.
We did not expect such a massive response, but the widespread anger was catapulted into action by these events and there were huge gatherings in many places. They brought together men and women and many different castes. I have never seen anything like it in my 30 years. The protests started in West Bengal but spread all over India, and doctors have gone on strike all over India. There have been solidarity strikes and protests in many countries around the world. The international medical community is supporting us. We have a large number of medical colleges and doctors in India where strikes have taken place.
There was also a strike in public and private hospitals and clinics, except for emergency services. There was also a massive response from the non-medical community, even massive protests in the major financial centers. People are angry and involved. Massive numbers of youth, but also all sectors, and many are organized through Facebook, calling on people to join them in the streets.
This movement could bring down the state government.
SV: What are the main demands?
There are many, but these are some of them:
• Justice for the victims and their families.
• A proper and fair investigation.
• More security in hospitals and clinics
• Proper and safe toilets
• Proper washrooms and restaurants in hospitals
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Stop the repression! Down with Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela!
By LEONARDO ARANTES
Unidad Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Unity), Venezuela
The popular rebellion on Monday, July 29, 2024, was answered by the dictatorial government of Maduro with brutal repression, which so far has not ceased.
Maduro and his government have unleashed a brutal repression in response to the massive mobilizations of working people, the popular sectors, and youth, who did not wait for the any call from the political leadership of the bourgeois opposition before manifesting in the streets their indignation and rejection of the fraud committed by the pro-government National Electoral Council (CNE). Maduro’s repressive escalation, according to figures put out by the organization Foro Penal, has put than 1400 people in jail for protesting and left more than 25 dead. Meanwhile, the same government boasts of more than 2400 detainees, with the clear purpose of sowing terror among the working class and the poor.
Who is the repression targeting, and what are its objectives?
A striking characteristic of this repressive offensive is the fact that it is directed mainly against the popular sectors; more than 95% of the detainees come from the poor neighborhoods and popular sectors of the country, who spontaneously mobilized during Monday, July 29, and part of Tuesday, July 30, 2024. This is also where the government is making use of the so-called Bolivarian National Guard (GNB), the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) and its para-police apparatus known as “colectivos,” who have burst on the scene with unusual cruelty, killing, wounding, shooting left and right, detaining people, and even raiding homes without any kind of warrant.
First, this makes the class character of the government and its repression clear, but also shows that one of their objectives is to sow panic and terror among the working class and the poor. This is in order to avoid any hint of protest coming from these sectors, whether it is against the blatant electoral fraud, or for wages, other labor conditions, public services, and social living conditions.
From the Unidad Socialista de los Trabajadores (UST), defenders as we are of the right to protest and of democratic freedoms as a whole, we denounce this repressive escalation of the government, its attempts to criminalize popular protest, as well as the thousands of arbitrary arrests that have been carried out. We categorically point out that the injuries and assassinations perpetrated by the National Guard, the National Police, and the para-police forces, are the absolute responsibility of the dictatorial government of Maduro.
We demand the immediate cessation of repression and of the criminalization of popular, labor and social protest. We also demand the freedom of the thousands of demonstrators imprisoned for protesting, as well as the cessation of abuses, outrages and terror against the communities by the military (GNB), police and para-police forces.
The repressive raids have not ceased
A little more than two weeks after the popular protests of June 29, the government’s repressive raids have not ceased; instead they have taken on a more selective strategy. While the police and para-police forces have continued to sow terror in the streets of the main cities of the country and in the popular neighborhoods; they have also resorted to annulling and/or cancellation of the passports of human rights defenders, journalists and activists, both inside and outside Venezuela, as well as detaining or “disappearing” them.
Likewise, there have been arrests, kidnappings, and disappearances of the political opposition, trade-union and social leaders. It should be noted that subsequently judicial proceedings have been opened and carried out, in which those that have been detained are prevented from having the right to defense, and where relatives are deprived of the right to see them, or even know where the detainees are being held. In addition, there have been threats and intimidation against civilians who are forced to take refuge or to consider forced exile to preserve their life and freedom.
Similarly, there have been violations of the freedom of expression and the right to information for users of social networks (RRSS) and the independent press. There have also been measures to block social media such as X (in the first instance for 10 days), digital messaging systems such as Signal, coupled with announcements and calls by Maduro to boycott Whatsapp, as a possible preliminary step to blocking its use, among others. In addition, the odious and macabre “operation tun tun” has been implemented, consisting in the practice of informing on and subsequently capturing people who express their opposition to the government, under the argument of “incitement to hatred.”
In addition to all this, there have been announcements from the government about the approval of new repressive laws to “regulate,” limit, and/or directly restrict the use of certain web applications and social media networks. These laws would be added to the already existing authoritarian and repressive legislation, such as the so-called “Law against hate,” “Anti-blocking Law,” and “Law against fascism, neo-fascism and other similar expressions.”
Another announcement from the government, in this repressive drift, has been the reinstatement of the old practice of forced labor, mainly for the rushed construction of prisons, more precisely of new facilities, in the well-known prisons of Tocuyito and Tocorón (in the states of Carabobo and Aragua respectively). For this purpose, they are also transferring workers (under the offer of remunerations of up to $500), with the purpose of imprisoning demonstrators, those who have been arrested for protesting, and opposition activists, under the accusations of terrorism, conspiracy, incitement to hatred and other crimes (including common crimes) that the government may wish to charge them with.
In addition, we must add the coercion, blackmail, threats of dismissals, and firings that have been perpetrated by state companies and public agencies against workers for “disloyalty.” In this sense, “disloyalty” is understood as the action of not having voted for the government, having voted against it, or receiving, disseminating, and maintaining in their cell phones or other electronic devices content not favorable to the government.
More than one hundred workers are known to have been dismissed in the state-owned television channel Venezolana de Televisión (VTV), and at least 32 workers (of which we are aware) in the different areas of the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). These dismissals have been ordered after abusive searches of workers’ computers, tablets, and cell phones, their statuses and groups on Whatsapp, Telegram, and publications in any social media network.
The UST repudiates the implementation of all these arbitrary, authoritarian practices, which violate the most elementary democratic, political, and human rights.
The inconsistency of the bourgeois opposition in the face of repression
Here we consider it necessary to denounce the inconsistency of the bourgeois opposition, headed by María Corina Machado (MCM) and Edmundo González Urrutia (EGU), in their denunciations of the repression that has been unleashed against the popular sectors by the Maduro dictatorship. While the latter is carrying out a wave of abuses and outrages with unusual violence against the popular sectors, the youth, and the working population, the opposition leadership has limited itself to making general calls to “not always be in the streets,” to “take care of each other,” and to “act with intelligence.” They also speak of “having trust” and of “operational pauses.” There has been no call to mobilize as a whole to confront the repression against the popular sectors.
At the same time, they have only made denunciations and statements when some of their leaders have been arrested, while they limit the mention of repression against the popular sectors only when they are urged to do so, or demagogically during the mobilizations, like that of Aug. 17, when they tried to stir up support for their preferred tactics of negotiation and international pressure.
In one of his statements, MCM made a lukewarm call to the Armed Forces not to repress, without any forceful denunciation against the repressive actions of this body, whose privileged leadership—turned into Bolibourgeoisie due to its links with legal and illegal businesses protected by the State—constitutes the strongest point of support for Maduro. This is explained by the interest of the opposition leadership in avoiding entering into conflict with an institution that, at the end of the day, constitutes the fundamental support of the State, and that an eventual government of the opposition plans to lead with the same logic as the Maduro government does today.
Worker and popular, democratic organization and unity of action to defend ourselves and defeat repression!
This is why we at the UST consider it necessary and urgent that the unions and independent organizations—including neighborhood organizations, popular, democratic, student, political, and others—get together and organize in a broad, unitary, autonomous, and democratic way to prepare the defense against repression and defeat it.
We believe it is pertinent to build the broadest unity of action of all the democratic, fighting, popular, student and workers sectors to discuss and undertake actions from the neighborhoods, mainly to defend ourselves from repression, to protect ourselves and confront police and para-police abuses, as well as to build broad mobilizations that are capable of defeating the repression. Finally, we exhort the troops to organize themselves to prevent the abuses of the officers and not to repress the poor and working people who are demonstrating, from which they themselves come. At the same time, we call on those workers, oppressed sectors, and the poor to establish a dialogue with their relatives who are in the Armed Forces and the police, to make them aware of what is occurring, and thus contribute to their organizing against the abuses of the officers (middle and high command mainly) and against the repression.
Photo: Ronald Peña / EFE
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U.S. elections: Presidential candidates try to formulate foreign policy plans
By JOHN LESLIE and CARLOS SAPIR
As the presidential election approaches, Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns are trying to articulate their visions for U.S. policy abroad. Their appeals are not just directed at the general public; to a great degree, their plans for the future of U.S. imperialism are constructed for the benefit of the monied capitalists who stand to benefit directly from the U.S. policy outside of its borders. It is for this reason that the two capitalist parties’ visions have more in common than they have differences.
Foreign policy a la Trump
As president, Trump’s foreign policy was marked by his chaotic and unpredictable management style. He was, at times, at odds with allies of the U.S. and heaped praise on authoritarian heads of state. But now, listening to the former president as a campaigner, it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Trump successfully articulates anything. His campaign discourse resembles a badly written radio Western, a world full of “bad guys,” “real bad guys,” and racial caricatures—and facing them all down is an American with a gun.
The “official” 2024 platform of the Republican Party is only slightly more coherent. It primarily subordinates foreign policy to the priority of “securing the border” (itself a fabricated, xenophobic scandal): “Before we defend the Borders of Foreign Countries, we must first secure the Border of our Country.” Elsewhere, however, it makes various vague commitments to “rebuilding our Military and Alliances, countering China, defeating terrorism” without specifics as to how any of these goals will be pursued.
Project 2025 provides additional details of the potential policies of a Trump presidency. Most of the Project’s “Mandate” manifesto is focused on domestic matters, and its foreign policy is summarized in meaningless blathering such as the claim that it rejects both “interventionism” and “isolationism” but instead strives to protect the national interest (read: the interests of U.S. capitalists). Its approach to foreign trade and economic policy is similarly self-contradictory, with some of its authors advocating protectionism and others calling for more free trade policies. It does, however, propose one clear and significant foreign policy detail—the massive expansion and renovation of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
There is little new here. Policies of rearmament, anti-immigrant fearmongering, and an overtly hostile stance towards China are consistent with Trump’s track record in office. They are also consistent with Biden’s track record.
Has Biden been any different?
As president, Biden sought to return to the old postwar alignments in his rhetoric, but his actual policies continued a path that was similar to Trump’s. The hallmark foreign policy initiative of his presidency was supposed to be a “pivot to Asia.” Unlike in the Obama years, however, when the U.S. government sought to increase trade with China, Biden now mirrored Trump in naming China as the country’s primary rival. Economic policies tailored to pressure China were seen by the imperialist allies of the U.S. in Europe as an attempt to subordinate the European economy to that of the United States. Biden’s attempts to carry out this supposed pivot, however, were stymied by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli genocide against Palestinians.
In Ukraine, Biden’s words have often been at odds with his actions. Rhetorically, he has repeatedly praised the Ukrainian resistance and called for it to defeat Russia. In practice, however, while the U.S. has given some military support to Ukraine, its support has been measured, consisting primarily of the offloading of outdated surplus onto Ukraine in order to provide a pretext for U.S. rearmament with new next-generation weaponry. Biden’s administration and the EU have saddled Ukraine with debt, and taken over a significant amount of military production in Ukraine itself. Rather than producing arms as needed around the clock to defeat the invasion, these factories are operating for a lucrative profit, all while Ukrainian workers are forced to deal with attacks against their working conditions that Zelensky’s government has put into place.
The Biden administration’s response to Ukraine has particularly displayed its hypocrisy when contrasted with its response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In Gaza, suddenly, the U.S. military flung open its arsenal, and Israel has received a deluge of munitions (as well as critical logistical support) to carry out a genocide. Weapons that could have defended Ukraine are now being used to slaughter Palestinians. Biden’s claims to support a ceasefire are belied by Washington’s ongoing logistical support to Israel; if the U.S. were to stop providing this support, Israel would be unable to continue its assault. Every death in Gaza is cosigned by U.S. weaponry. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has at every turn used its diplomatic clout to impede UN institutions and other international bodies from intervening.
Finally, there’s Biden’s immigration policy. Challenged by Republicans blathering about a border crisis throughout his presidency, Biden ended up running to the right of them, acknowledging rather than refuting the xenophobic lies about chaos along the border, discontinuing U.S. compliance with international asylum law, and repeatedly threatening to close the border outright. Structurally tied as they are to the Democratic Party apparatus, the non-profit organizations that currently lead the immigrant rights movement have been unable to respond effectively.
Will Harris be any different?
Throughout the Biden presidency, Kamala Harris has stood by the president’s policies and helped articulate and implement them as the second-in-command. It is entirely likely that her policies will continue in the same mold as those of her two predecessors.
For example, while Harris has spoken about abuses of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state, she has fully committed herself to Israel’s “right to self-defense,” and her campaign has stated that an arms embargo is already “off the table.”
Although the Democratic National Convention (DNC) hosted the party’s first ever panel on Palestinian rights, the issue of Israel’s genocide in Gaza remained out of sight excepts for protests in the street outside and a few disruptions by pro-Palestine advocates inside the convention hall.
The DNC rebuffed the Uncommitted Campaign’s requests to participate in the Democratic National Convention. It would have been a trivial gesture to allow a vetted representative of Uncommitted to speak, and thus maintain the thin pretense that Harris cares about Palestinians. Instead, Palestinian speakers were rejected, while the family of an Israeli hostage and anti-abortion (but anti-Trump) Republicans were given the floor. Harris rejects the slightest association of her campaign with a defense of Palestinians.
While the Democratic Party’s platform waxes poetic about nuclear nonproliferation, the party’s actual policy, as analyzed by and for the bourgeoisie, is the continuation of longstanding policies of “deterrence.” As we have written previously, nuclear deterrence is not a peacekeeping tool but rather an imperialist threat and a never-ending menace to human life on Earth. With regard to non-nuclear weaponry, Harris is straightforward: the U.S. is to have the “strongest military in the world,” securing its place as military hegemon once more.
Ultimately, both Trump and Harris promise to increase the footprint of U.S. imperialism to the detriment of workers everywhere. While they may not react identically to every situation, their priorities are clear—to use military might and economic pressure to subordinate the world for the benefit of the U.S. ruling class. We cannot pretend that Harris is somehow protecting us by presenting an alternative to Trump. At the end of the day, her program is just as lethal, and it is equally committed to asserting U.S. supremacy in an era of increasing inter-imperial competition with China, Russia, and Europe.
To defeat U.S. imperialism, militarism, and war, workers and the oppressed need to decisively break with the Democrats, the Republicans, and the entire two-party political charade. This means rejecting the entreaties of “left” charlatans who would lead us back into the arms of the class enemy’s party. We need to build our own party, a fighting working-class party that doesn’t just contest elections but fights every day of the year for the oppressed and exploited.
Photo: U.S. has ramped up its military presence in the Pacific. (U.S. Navy)
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Extreme heat causes deaths in Spain: An example of injustice in the system
By L. R.
La Corriente Roja, Spain
While the planet is on its way to recording 2024 as the hottest year that humans have ever experienced, the Iberian Peninsula has already experienced four heat waves this summer, without even having finished the month of August.
In recent days, a study by IS Global, published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, has revealed that in 2023 there were at least 47,690 premature deaths throughout Europe due to extreme heat. The country with the most deaths was Italy, with 12,743, followed by Spain with 8352. What does this data hide?
Heat waves and extreme weather events hit the poorest of the poorest
The study shows that this figure was lower than in 2022, when at least 61,000 people died in Europe. According to the experts, the anti-heat plans put in place, as well as a relative adaptation of the population to excess heat in these years, have served to reduce mortality by up to 80%.
Even so, mortality linked to excess heat has increased by about 30% in the last 20 years in Europe. July 22 was the hottest day in history since temperature records have been kept, with an average of 17.16ºC [62.9F] across the planet, smashing previous records. Europe is the fastest warming continent, experiencing around twice the average global rate. The three warmest years recorded on the continent have occurred since 2020 and the 10 warmest since 2007.
It is a fact that the measures put in place by administrations are still clearly insufficient and lag far behind what is needed to prevent this large-scale disaster. A disaster in which victims are skewed by factors such as gender (55% higher in women than in men across Europe), age (especially high among people over 80 years old), place of residence (inhabitants of urban areas where so-called “heat islands” are formed are six times more vulnerable than those in rural areas), but, above all, by their socio-economic status. This is how poverty quadruples the risk.
According to researcher Cristina Linares, from the Carlos III Health Institute, “Poverty is the decisive factor in explaining the higher mortality associated with extreme temperatures. Income level has the strongest association with the impact of heat on daily mortality. This pattern of inequality within Spanish cities is repeated on a global scale. Exposure to heat waves over the last 40 years has been 40% higher in low-income countries.
The increase in global temperature and the successive heat waves are only one of the effects of climate change, which in turn is only one of the consequences of the environmental crisis we are experiencing. 2023 was one of the worst years in environmental terms. In addition to extreme heat, there were forest fires, droughts, severe marine heat waves and widespread devastating floods.
The countries where all these extreme weather events took place to the greatest extent were those in southern Europe, where the comparatively poorest and most socially vulnerable populations live and were doubly affected.
The EU’s ninth social cohesion report notes “that climate change exacerbates regional inequalities, affecting the coastal, Mediterranean and the southeastern regions of the EU most severely. These regions, which are already poorer than the EU average, are more vulnerable and may be disproportionately affected. The costs of this phenomenon may amount to more than 1% of GDP annually, according to the same document.”
Climate change has thus become one of the greatest challenges of this century, the impact of which translates not only into loss of human lives but also into very high social and economic costs. But, above all, it forces us to reconsider a model of production and consumption in crisis and decay that inevitably deepens all inequalities.
Capitalism is leading the climate to collapse
Although there are still those who try to deny or minimize the results, there is ample scientific evidence that climate change is only one of the consequences of the environmental crisis produced by the growing emissions of CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. C02 emissions are the result of the energy matrix of the current mode of production in which we live. Fossil fuels are not just any commodity. They are the energy base of all production and distribution of goods in global capitalism, and represent 80% of the energy used by society. At the same time, this energy source is the cause of global warming. This energy source fueled the period called “the great acceleration” in the current phase of imperialist monopoly capitalism.
The climatic catastrophe, therefore, is the result of capitalist industry and the colossal consumption of fossil fuels, the blood flowing through the arteries of capital accumulation. The main culprits are the imperialist countries and their bourgeoisies, whose industries are responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions.
This is fatally combined with decades of social cuts, fiscal austerity, and the privatization of public services, carried out by all governments that continue to under-invest in preventing and combating the consequences of climate change. Nor have they invested in providing assistance to those most in need when natural disasters strike.
An Oxfam report in 2009, before the climate summit held in Copenhagen that year (COP 15), warned that although the money needed to help the poorest countries combat the effects of climate change was small change compared to the financial bailout received by multinationals during the 2008 crisis, “most scientists believe that we are unlikely to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius. Not because we lack the technical and social means to do so, but because they do not believe that politicians are really willing to agree to the necessary reductions in carbon emissions.”3.
Governments are complicit in this situation, not part of the solution
These pessimistic words proved to be the starkest reality. All the climate summits held (the last one in 2023 in Dubai, which was a real business showcase for big oil, mining, and other companies that destroy the environment) and all the promises made by governments since then did not serve to reduce CO2 emissions and the millionaire subsidies from governments to fossil fuel industries.
In recent years, fossil fuel subsidies have continued to increase. Despite the EU’s commitment to eliminate them, environmental activists from the Stop fossils platform denounce the fact that “every year at least 405.1 billion euros are allocated in subsidies to the fossil industry in the EU. Ten times more than the amount spent on climate policies.”
“These subsidies artificially drive down fossil fuel prices, making us believe that we are benefiting from them. But the real beneficiaries are the big corporations that every year, pocket billions of euros in profits, thanks to these tax breaks.
“The Spanish government also paid 229 million euros with public money in 2023 for excess emissions of Spanish companies. These payments are justified with the aim of curbing what is known as carbon leakage, as the transfer of the most polluting companies to countries with more lax ecological standards is called, in order to avoid paying greenhouse gas emission rights in the European carbon market.”
And not only this. In their role as managers of the business of the bourgeoisie, they are increasingly willing to repress those who oppose their plans, using laws such as the gag law in the Spanish state, which the Sanchez government refuses to repeal.
An example of this is the fines of up to 150,000 euros and prison sentences faced by five young women from Asturias, for carrying out a protest action on the access road to the Arcelor Mittal plant in Gijón, (responsible for 4% of CO2 emissions in Spain). Their objective: to warn about the incongruity of subsidizing large greenhouse gas emitters in a world where the climate crisis is accelerating. As the young women stated to the press, Arcelor Mittal has still not come up with a serious plan for the decarbonization of its plants, despite having received a subsidy of 450 million euros, mostly from European Next Generation funds.
Much of these funds also went to electricity oligopolies such as Endesa, Naturgy, and Iberdrola (the second, third, and seventh most polluting companies) to build huge, unsustainable wind farms and photovoltaic plants with a huge environmental impact. One example is H2Med, which is a project to build the first green hydrogen corridor in the EU, financed with European funds, which would serve not the energy needs of the Spanish State, but the needs of German industry, something completely irrational. Another relevant part goes to the big automobile companies, with SEAT-Volkswagen at the head, destined for the electric car, which is not sustainable either.
The fraud of the green transition in the EU and in Spain is becoming increasingly clear. This leads us to the conclusion that capitalism itself, the institutions and governments at its service, are the biggest obstacle to prevent and tackle climate change, some of whose effects are already and will be increasingly irreversible, if we do not remedy.
The climate crisis is the very manifestation of the historic crisis of capital.
According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), what we do in this decade will be decisive in preventing certain key thresholds from being exceeded. The global average temperature has risen by 1.1°C since the industrial era. In 2023, the highest temperatures in 125,000 years were recorded, but the latest emission reduction commitments made by the states are totally insufficient and we are heading towards a catastrophic 3ºC. As a consequence, the Earth’s natural systems could reach a point of no return, generating an unstoppable cascade effect that will lead to climate collapse and threaten humanity.
Jefferson Choma, militant of the PSTU-B [Unified Socialist Workers Party-Brazil] and the IWL in his YouTube channel Ecology and Marxist politics, which we encourage our readers to check out and subscribe to, explains that “the irrationality of capitalist accumulation destroys the very natural conditions on which it is based. An IMF report estimated that the fossil fuel industry benefited worldwide from subsidies of $11 million every minute, totaling $5.9 trillion in 2020 and rising ever since. Projected investments for new oil and gas fields through 2030 are $570 billion per year. All this mountain of money could fully fund the wind and solar power needed to meet the goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as agreed in the Paris Agreement.
As long as the extraction of fossil fuels, especially oil, remains more profitable to capital, it will continue the race to explore new oil frontiers around the world. That is why, in the United States, the government is trying to implement the largest oil exploitation in history in Alaska. Russia also has plans to exploit oil in the Arctic, in Brazil the Lula government wants to exploit oil at the mouth of the Amazon River on the equatorial margin, while China opened two coal-fired power plants per week between 2022 and 2023. The logic of capitalist accumulation prevents the full and urgent development of renewable energies. The need to obtain maximum profit and competition between imperialist countries are obstacles to the so-called energy transition.
Of course, the great imperialist powers also invest in the development of new energy sources, but this is absolutely insufficient to stop climate change and is only serving for a handful of corporations to obtain some kind of monopoly income with this technology. The climate crisis is the very manifestation of the historical crisis of capital. There is a famous saying: It is easier to believe in the end of the world than in the end of capitalism. But this order must be reversed. To confront the climate catastrophe, we have to overcome the capitalist mode of production that has created it.”
We need to put the working class in the driver’s seat
The Corriente Roja program that we invite you to request and discuss with us says, “The working class is the one that produces the world’s livelihoods and wealth, and therefore the only one that can reorganize the economy to serve human needs and the sustainability of nature. But under capitalism, the working class does not decide what it produces, when, how much or for what purpose. For this it needs, together with its allies, to take power into its own hands.
“Our proposal starts from the concrete struggles of the working class and against environmental destruction and points towards a socialist economy, under workers’ control with democracy, which has as its premise the seizure of power by the working class and its allies. (…)
“We know that, if we triumph, we will have to manage the capitalist ecological disaster for a long time. But once we destroy the economic and social bases of capitalism, we will be able to advance in the construction of a new socialist system, with a new way of life in which, material needs covered, we will be richer in free time, in social relations, in quality of life, in sports, science, nature, art, culture. A system where ‘being’ will take precedence over ‘having.’”
Photo: A hot day in Madrid. (Manu Fernandez / AP)
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Pittsburgh divestment ballot measure blocked by local government
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By CARLOS SAPIR
This summer, Palestine solidarity activists in Pittsburgh, Pa., rallying behind the slogan “No War Crimes On Our Dime!” organized to propose a ballot measure that would force the city to divest from companies complicit in war crimes relating to Israel’s ongoing invasion and genocide in Gaza. The petition was met with overwhelmingly positive support from the public, and was able to cross the minimum number of signatures needed for ballot access.
Democrats in city government were terrified of the prospect of the measure reaching the ballot in November. The politicians, as well as local Zionist organizations, took rapid legal action to intimidate organizers and force it off the ballot.
Despite the fact that people in Pittsburgh will not be able to vote on the city’s (intimate and profitable) relationship with the Israeli state this November, campaign organizers refuse to give up. What’s more, they’re encouraged by the staggeringly positive public response that they witnessed while campaigning, and see the relative success of the campaign both as a step forward in unmasking the undemocratic nature of U.S. politics and as a segue to organizing protests and building a mass movement for Palestinian liberation.
Against all odds
The ballot measure faced long odds from the start, and ignored much of the conventional wisdom associated with ballot measures and other electoral organizing. Rather than being planned months in advance with full-time staffers and a fund to finance to the campaign, No War Crimes On Our Dime got started two weeks late into the petitioning season and was initially started by a group of local activists who had come together to support the student encampments at the University of Pittsburgh in April. What the campaign lacked in resources, it made up for with enthusiasm, shared not only by the starting coalition but also by the public it reached out to, which flocked to further support the campaign through volunteering and donations.
Throughout the campaign, organizers were very clear that they viewed the campaign not just as an end in itself, but primarily as a way to talk to people about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and to push them into political action around it. Even if the ballot measure had made it to the election and been approved, its implementation would require extensive, prolonged legal battles on a time scale that is totally insensitive to the ongoing suffering of Palestinians.
The full text of the petition statement read as follows: “Shall the Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter be amended and supplemented by a new article prohibiting investment or allocation of public funds, including tax exemptions, to entities that conduct business operations with or in the state of Israel unless and until Israel ends its military action in Gaza, fully allows humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Gaza, and grants equal rights to every person living in the territories under Israeli control?”
Democrats and Zionists against democracy
The challenges against the petition came in various forms, and displayed a general contempt for democracy and working people’s political views. On behalf of the Democratic-controlled city government, city controller Rachel Heisler challenged that the measure was unenforceable and should be dismissed on procedural grounds. Heisler contended that, despite ballot measure descriptions having a strict, low word count, the measure needed to have a fully articulated legal implementation drafted in advance. This kind of objection all but precludes that a working-class person (or anyone else without a well-funded legal team) could meaningfully impact city policy.
Ironically, in further arguments Heisler essentially made the case that the referendum is incompatible with capitalism, saying that a core obstacle for the ballot measure’s implementation is that “we live in a global economy,” proceeding to list the myriad companies that the city has contracts with that also do business with Israel. While campaign organizers specified in response that they had a narrower definition of “investment or allocation of funds” in relation to the businesses affected and that they believe that the measure would ultimately be enforceable, it is nevertheless a stunning admission of the moral failures of capitalism that it is apparently “impossible” to economically disentangle a North American city from complicity in a genocide occurring on another continent.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, part of the Jewish Federations of North America, a network of well-funded non-profit organizations, launched its own attacks. On legal grounds, it contended that 10,000 of the 15,000 signatures gathered were illegitimate for one reason or another. This takes advantage of the antidemocratic fine print of the ballot measure process. Not only is there an incredibly high bar of signatures needed to get access to the ballot, signatures collected can be discarded for any of a number of reasons. For example, signees listing “Pitt” or “PGH” instead of “Pittsburgh” in the City box are invalid according to the official rules. Signatures were also challenged for allegedly being illegible, an assertion which could be contested by the campaign, but only by cross-referencing the signature with a voter database, an expensive and time-consuming process.
At the same time, the Jewish Federation made extensive, slanderous comments to the media, denouncing the campaign as antisemitic. This is despite the fact that the campaign’s organizers were themselves disproportionately Jewish, with many of them expressing the fact that Israel’s misappropriation of Jewish identity was a motivating factor in their Palestine solidarity organizing. These attacks were accompanied by the doxxing of petition signatures on social media. In particular, social media pressure was directed against city government employees signing the petition, and a communications manager from Democratic Mayor Ed Gainey’s office was pressured into resigning. This doxxing, of course, is yet another antidemocratic feature of the ballot measure system, making anyone who organizes or participates in a ballot measure campaign a potential target of harassment.
What comes next for Palestine organizing?
Ultimately, despite having abundantly demonstrated that their campaign represents popular opinion, the ballot measure system is set up such that the side with the best legal team wins. Recognizing that they would not be able to win against this process, the campaign withdrew the ballot measure and committed to regathering its forces.
Ballot measures often provide an excellent vehicle to agitate for political demands in an immediate, unavoidable fashion. At every step of their implementation, they press upon a core contradiction of bourgeois democracy, between the illusion that popular votes mean that our government is “ruled by the people” and the reality that bourgeois law puts countless obstacles in the way of working-class participation politics, and that the Democratic and Republican parties expend every effort to block and derail political activity outside the margins of voting for their candidates.
First there is the inhuman struggle to collect tens of thousands of signatures in only a few weeks’ time. Then there is the legal challenge to the signatures and unfair bourgeois media campaigns against the measure. Then there is actual campaigning, followed by the virtually inevitable bourgeois refusal to meaningfully implement the measures even once approved. In this way, ballot measures provide an opportunity to engage people in political discussion in a way that naturally pushes them towards political action, while demonstrating the limitations of our existing political system without conceding a single principle in the process. If, as Rosa Luxembug wrote, “Those who do not move do not notice their chains,” organizing ballot measure campaigns pushes people to move.
Coupled together with street protests, public education events, and union solidarity organizing, the ballot measure campaign can be an effective engine in helping build a mass movement. Organizers in Pittsburgh hope that Palestine solidarity organizers around the country can use their efforts as a model.
A second ballot measure campaign, this time with more pre-planning and all of the contacts that came from the first campaign, is also a viable prospect. At the same time, the momentum towards solidarity organizing created by the campaign now coincides with students returning to campus, providing an exciting opportunity for students and workers to unite their Palestine organizing efforts.
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Yes, we need a labor party! A response to Hamilton Nolan
By ERNIE GOTTA
What is the Democratic Party? Is it a political arena with an open competition for ideas? Can the working class influence and remake the Democratic Party in its own image? What about third parties? Do we need a labor party in the U.S.? These types of questions are posed by labor and political journalist Hamilton Nolan in a recent article titled, “Do we need a Labor Party, published on the author’s website, “How Things Work.”
While expressing a certain level of disgust for the “shitheads” in the Democratic Party, Nolan presents us with a number of arguments as to why he believes labor and socialist activists should dig even deeper into the political “arena” of the Democratic Party and wage a fight for control over the party. These arguments are further framed by the need to first fix the structure of a rigged electoral system if we are to even think about forming a third party.
Is the effort to fight for working-class independence in 2024 a waste of time and resources, as Nolan suggests? As we reach the last weeks of the election campaign season, the questions raised by Nolan can help us reflect on how we define political parties, the class nature of a party (which shapes its character), the electoral system, the role of elections in the working-class movement, and the consequences for a working-class leadership that attempts to entrench itself inside the Democratic Party.
We can also reflect on what could happen if the working class goes in an independent direction by creating a workers’ or labor party.
This article will attempt to unpack some of the misconceptions, contradictions, cynicism, and downright incorrect notions presented in Nolan’s article—which lead him to conclude that the place for organized labor and the working class is the Democratic Party. This article will conclude with a brief outline as to why building a labor party is an essential and indispensable step today toward the independence and liberation of the working class from the capitalist oppressors.
The nature of the Democratic Party
Hamilton Nolan writes, “Part of the impulse to flee that party comes from the tendency to see political parties like brands, like sports teams to support. The Democrats have done so much bad shit and contain so many bad people that their brand is polluted and therefore the only reasonable move is to start a new party that is unpolluted. I get the sentiment. But that is not an accurate or even useful way to think about what a political party is. It’s better to think of the Democratic Party as an arena, where politics takes place. All of the special interests and all of the members of the party, including the shitheads, are in the arena, pushing and pulling for control of the party. It is just a place where politics is done.”
Is the Democratic Party a political “brand”? Or is the party an arena with an open competition for ideas? Neither one! The Democratic Party is made by and for the capitalist class. The party, in a way, is an unequal coalition that includes billionaires and small business owners, as well as working-class organizations.
This fact was on full display as Harris accepted the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Aug. 22. It was very apparent that the party leadership had pushed for a “rebranding” of the party. Overnight, the party went from the “Sleepy Joe” Biden aesthetic to a younger, more diverse, and more energetic vibe. The full support of the labor movement was on display as one union leader after another pledged their support for Harris.
However, while the Democratic Party was “rebranded,” the political program of the party remained and did not shift to include demands like “End all U.S. Aid to Israel” to address the thousands of Palestinian solidarity protesters outside the DNC. Similarly, the Democrats removed opposition to the death penalty from their platform. And Harris has no real plan to address climate change, mass incarceration, trans youth, etc.
That reflects the fact that the Democratic Party is not an arena where there’s a fair political competition. It is a machine that helps manage an imperialist government that passes laws to help aid billionaires and their corporations in the extraction of wealth from working and oppressed people at home and abroad. Due to the uneven nature of this political coalition, it is necessary for the labor movement to separate itself politically.
Nolan deeply misunderstands the drive behind building a third party when he writes, “Would it feel better to wear a t-shirt that says ‘Labor Party’ with a picture of Eugene Debs on it than to wear a t-shirt that says ‘Democratic Party’ with a picture of Bill Clinton on it? Yes. Would it be more fun to hang out in a party where the other people there where [sic] Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson and Dolores Huerta than to hang out in a party with a bunch of guys who left their Obama administration jobs and went straight to work for Uber and bought a $3 million house in an exclusive neighborhood and then stuck a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in the expansive lawn? Sure.”
The question for the working class regarding a labor party isn’t about the aesthetics of whose image is on our t-shirts or the people we have to “hang out” with in the party. The consequence for the working class of remaining in a capitalist party is far more serious. The reason we need a labor party that is independent of the capitalists is the same reason we don’t let our bosses participate in our union meetings. Think about how absurd it would be if your boss had the same voting and speaking rights in your union meeting as you do. In the Democratic Party, it is far more serious because the capitalists have the money and the power in a very uneven coalition.
When, on occasion, a law in support of working people is passed, one of two things generally happens: (1) The new law has been codified because the mass movements have made it politically impossible to ignore the rights won through struggle. (2) Or the law is rendered toothless because of loopholes and a staggered schedule of implementation.
A political party—whether Democrat, Republican, Green, or Labor—has a class character. The Democratic Party is an old formation that at one time was represented by presidential figures and slaveholders like Andrew Jackson. The Democrats masterfully shifted from being the leading defenders of chattel slavery to today acting as the leading proponents of wage slavery. They went from implementing Jim Crow laws to overseeing the New Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the school-to-prison pipeline.
The relatively liberal political perspective embraced by the Democratic Party since the FDR presidency allowed the party to absorb the allegiance of the labor movement and many other movements for social change. Today, of course, leading Democratic figures from the Black community like former President Barack Obama and current Vice President Kamala Harris claim to be proponents of civil rights and enhanced social programs. Yet the primary goal of the Democratic Party remains the maintenance of U.S. capital’s hegemony in the world.
What happens when the labor movement and its leaders participate in the Democratic Party?
One of the most common outcomes historically has included union leaders or labor politicians who allow themselves to become co-opted into the service of the capitalist class. These leaders help suppress strikes, make sweetheart deals with the bosses, make “no strike” pledges during wartime, and encourage workers to go to war against workers in other countries. Why do they do this? The perks and kickbacks are incredible! Just look at the salary of the top union leaders, and then look at all the extra goodies they get as they maintain those positions.
A good historical example took place during World War II when then Teamster President Daniel Tobin enthusiastically supported a no-strike pledge by organized labor and helped to instigate a witch hunt against militants and socialists in his own union. He was subsequently appointed by FDR to the Labor War Board and assigned as a special labor liaison to England.
What would happen if a mass upsurge of rank-and-file workers pushing an anti-capitalist agenda formed within the Democratic Party? It wouldn’t even get off the ground. Even today, union leaders or labor-friendly politicians are routinely silenced, sidelined, or removed from the party. The Democratic Party can’t even tolerate the more left-leaning liberals of the party like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. Rep. Rashida Tlaib was censured in the House—one step below expulsion—by 22 Democrats as well as Republicans for remarks that were critical of Israel.
The Democratic Socialists of American thinks that it is influencing the Democratic Party through the “Uncommitted Campaign” and its support to selected Democratic candidates. But in reality, the relationship is inverted. DSA is providing left and labor cover for Democrats, who are selling their imperialist agenda to the masses.
The Democratic Party is more than capable of manipulating demands like “ceasefire” to fit their own agenda. After shutting down Palestine solidarity activists at a recent campaign rally, Kamala Harris adeptly managed to address protesters’ concerns at her next stop in Phoenix, Ariz., by incorporating the ceasefire demand. “Let me say, I have been clear,” the vice president declared. “Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.”
What does Harris mean by ceasefire? What if the Palestinians break the ceasefire? Do Palestinians have a right to resist? None of these questions are ever addressed by the Democrats directly. Instead, we have their response in the form of the Biden/Harris policy—including a recent $20 billion weapons package to arm Israel’s genocide.
Unions and their relationship with the Democratic Party
Nolan writes, “Keep in mind also that by exiting the Democratic Party, you leave it, and its infrastructure and resources, to the shitheads that made you dislike it in the first place. They are now more powerful. They now have less opposition.”
Is this true? Would the Democratic Party become stronger if unions leave the coalition? No. The Democratic Party would become far weaker should the unions exit to form a Labor Party; it would lose the funding, advertising, and the legion of canvassers and lobbyists that the unions provide. Every year, the labor bureaucracy dutifully guides union members to go into the voting booth to elect the current roster of Democratic politicians.
The trade-union officials often play a supporting role in the exploitation of the working class by privileging their own interests over those of the membership. They are so entwined with the Democratic Party politicians that from a distance it can be hard to tell who is who. Trade-union leaders sit on Democratic Town Committees, run for office as party candidates, and send a wealth of resources such as union member dues and armies of volunteer organizers to help campaign for Democrats in so-called “battleground states.” In a 2021 article about the Georgia Senate race, I wrote, “UNITE HERE alone mobilized over 1700 workers and staffers to knock on 3 million doors and dialed 10 million phone numbers for Joe Biden. The union mobilized in key electoral battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, where it claimed to have knocked on 575,000 doors.”
For more than a decade, UNITE HERE has had a strategy of using their new organizing drives in hotels, cafeterias, and casinos to drive forward a political program aimed at turning Republican voting states into Democratic Party majority states. In Nevada, UNITE HERE casino and hotel workers were the foot soldiers that helped flip the entire state in favor of the Democratic Party. In 2020, they played a pivotal role in Biden’s election. UNITE HERE writes, “UNITE HERE hospitality workers union led the country’s largest union door-to-door canvassing operation. With 1,700+ hotel housekeepers, cooks and casino workers canvassing, we reached the doors of 3 million voters in the key battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Florida.”
Similarly, the UAW and Shawn Fain, who are seen as the vanguard of union reform, did not think twice when Biden dropped out of the presidential race. They immediately endorsed the nomination of Kamala Harris. Fain had this to say at a UAW Local 900 rally in Wayne, Mich., “On one side, we’ve got a billionaire who serves himself and his billionaire buddies. He lies, cheats, and steals his way to the top. He is the lapdog of the billionaire class. On the other side, we’ve got a badass woman who has stood on the picket line with working-class people. Kamala Harris is a champion of the working class.”
The union then released a commercial calling out Trump as a scab and representative of the billionaire class. Although that observation is not incorrect, the commercial conveniently leaves out the truth that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are also representatives of the billionaire class. The Obama administration oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from working and poor people to the wealthy elite in history, and this ushered in an era of the greatest disparity in wealth since 1917.
While the union officials may pay lip service to the rank and file, in many cases they like to think that their union local, region, council, or even international is their own fiefdom or kingdom to lord over.
On one side of the coin, there are many privileges gained by union officials after taking office. These privileges in one form or another begin to separate the officials from the rank and file. Even if officials started with the best intentions of being a positive force for the membership, they may move to protect their position from criticism—and in doing so, fight to maintain their privileges against the interests of the workers they’re supposed to represent.
On the other side of the coin, union officers may find themselves under pressure from the capitalists, politicians, and top union officials. Even the best of the union officials today take a pragmatic approach to their labor “leadership.” For example, they may denounce the genocide in Gaza and then in the same breath explain to workers why it is crucial for them to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have supported genocide in Gaza, for president and vice president.
We can have a coalition of unions including APWU, UAW, UE, AFA, and so on, representing 9 million workers who feel the pressure from the rank and file to speak out in favor of a ceasefire. But we can also watch how they work with the Democratic Party to further moderate the milquetoast ceasefire demand, which puts the onus on the colonized Palestinians to stop the genocide against their own people. The union officials are adept at maneuvering to corral movements and bring them back to the legislative and electoral arena, where workers have no power.
Why do we have no power? Because the working class has no independent vehicle to wage a political struggle against the capitalist class. The working class in the U.S. has never had a mass party of its own. The majority of workers have been trapped in a vicious cycle of supporting one capitalist party or another.
Does this mean that the trade unions are at a dead end? Do we separate ourselves and form more radical or independent unions? No, of course not. We need to build a class-struggle left wing inside the existing labor movement and meet the workers who are looking for answers to the difficult questions that confront our movement today.
What does building a class-struggle left wing mean? It means organizing and politicizing our unions around important demands for the working class. For example, trade-union militants need to lead the effort to get their unions to take the political offensive nationally on reproductive justice and the defense of abortion. The National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice (NMRJ) press conference in Washington on June 24 is one example of an action that drew together those in the labor and social justice movements who are ready to fight.
What about political divisions in the working class?
Nolan raises an interesting point about the political differences that exist within the working class and the labor movement. He writes, “Another helpful way to think about this for union people is to think about your own union. It is also full of people who disagree with you! It’s not like unions, which would make up the backbone of a new Labor Party, are totally ideologically unified. Maybe you are a Teamster and real labor radical and then you look up and the president of your union is speaking on stage at the Republican National Convention. Dang. Maybe you are in UFCW and you’re ready to organize a million new workers and then the international president is lazy and doesn’t feel like doing it. Dang. Unions are their own arenas of internal political actions.”
It is true that there are many political divisions. Those divisions have increased exponentially not because of some inherent flaw in the working class or a lack of capacity for today’s Trump supporter to become tomorrow’s rank-and-file left labor militant. The lack of political unity in the organized working class has more to do with, on the one hand, the lack of opportunities for democratic debate, discussion, and education in the unions and, on the other hand, the fact that union members have been told to vote for Democrats for years—only to be betrayed. From Truman signing the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act to Clinton signing NAFTA, to Biden forcing a concessionary contract on railroad workers, generations of workers have become fed up!
Unions are the basic units of defense for the rights of workers. Union members would really have full control over their unions if they were able to get together and decide to exercise that control. When workers participate in the Democratic Party, however, they are entering hostile terrain alongside the same bosses who are trying to break their strikes, lower their wages, and smash their unions!
We don’t imagine a labor party coming about in a top-down way from the hands of union leaders like Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson. The success of the labor party will be rooted in taking up the fight for self-determination of the Black community in their fight for liberation from the racist capitalist system. A labor party must also fight against the conditions that put a double burden on women while the Democrats turn a blind eye to the real need for 24/7 child and elder care and universal health care.
A labor party today cannot only be a vehicle that fights for a tiny portion of those organized into unions. The unions are one of the few arenas that working people have to anchor and begin the organizing of such an initiative. The potential of youth who are interested in joining unions, and the thousands of young workers across the country who are organizing unions at Starbucks or on college campuses, are a hopeful sign for the future.
There is a direct correlation between the class struggle and the development of working-class consciousness. Through workplace actions and strikes in a struggle against the bosses, workers begin to open up to new political ideas because the contradictions are right in front of their faces. What could be more demoralizing than forcing these workers with a newly developed consciousness away from their struggle and into the Democratic Party and the arms of their bosses?
A labor party is more likely to become a reality when there is a real resurgence of trade-union activity even greater than what the world saw starting in 1934 with the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the San Francisco longshore strike, and the Minneapolis Teamster strike. The labor movement of that era was revitalized through a militant class struggle, which ushered in the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the model of industrial unionism, and stirred greater participation by rank-and-file workers.
Electoral reform?
Nolan’s article identifies the U.S. electoral system as a serious problem. He writes, “First—and this applies to all third parties in the US—it is impossible to escape the trap of third parties in our current system, which is that third parties tend to sap votes from the major party closest to their own politics and thereby benefit the major party that is farthest from their own politics. This is a familiar quandary resulting from our two party, winner take all system of elections. There is also a familiar and well understood solution to this quandary: Proportional representation.”
He continues, “Rather than storming out of the Democratic Party and forming a new party and then toiling on the margins of the power, it makes infinitely more sense to first reform our system so that a third party could actually have power, and then go make your new party. Instead of rushing off to form the Labor Party, make ‘passing the Fair Representation Act’ a pillar of organized labor’s political agenda. It would be a healthy step towards getting unions to focus their political capital not just on bread and butter issues for their own membership, but on improving our democracy.”
To these quotes we should ask a series of questions. For all the effort and money unions have put into electing Democrats, what has the labor movement been able to accomplish with its “political capital”? Has the PRO-Act been passed? Do workers have single-payer health care? Is abortion easily accessible and affordable across the U.S.? Do immigrant workers have full rights when they cross the border? Have police stopped terrorizing Black and Brown communities? Does the LGBTQIA+ community, especially trans individuals, have full rights? Has the genocide in Gaza been stopped?
There have been numerous times in the history of the U.S. when Democrats have controlled all three branches of government. What has changed now? Why would the Democrats do anything different? It is simply not true that unions only campaign around “bread and butter” issues. Every union has a political director and a political program. The main problem is that the entirety of their effort goes to fund Democratic politicians who make empty promises. The system works exactly as the Democratic and Republican parties intended; it functions in the interests of the wealthy elite.
The reality is that the Fair Representation Act would more likely come about if a labor party existed to organize millions in the street to demand it. It’s also true that elections are just one way of doing politics, and not even the most effective method of making change. The real power of the working class is demonstrated at the point of production and in the streets. That power can grow even stronger when it is linked together with the social movements on a national and international level. The working class is international, and a labor party could make as one of its tasks building solidarity with working-class movements across the globe. Imagine how easy it would be for the maquiladoras in Mexico to win better wages and working conditions if they had the full support of workers and a labor party in the U.S.! The Democratic Party could never make that a reality.
We need a labor party!
The working class and oppressed need a labor party. They need class independence from the “billionaire class” or capitalist class. This means complete and total independence from the Democratic and Republican parties.
Hamilton Nolan asks in his article, “Would it be best to withdraw the union money and membership from the Democratic Party and use our time to start a new party and do all of the logistical work to try to get ballot access and build offices and conduct enormous communication campaigns to get name recognition in order to get our new party off the ground?”
To this question we should answer “yes” emphatically, with both hands raised. A labor party is not just a vehicle to win votes in an election. It would be the political vehicle to mobilize the class on a daily basis to win not only economic demands like better wages and working conditions but also to lead the social struggles for abortion rights/reproductive justice, immigrant rights, Indigenous land back, single-payer health care, an end to the genocide in Gaza, and so on. The candidates of the labor party would be responsible to the workers they represent and subject to immediate recall if they step out of line. When the wealthy come with bags of money to try and buy their way into the party, we’d tell them to get lost.
A labor party worth anything will be crafted in the renewed democratic and fighting labor movement—a movement that connects with the social movements and brings every decision before the rank-and-file members for debate and discussion. It will be built on the basis of a union leadership that doesn’t conceal contract negotiations behind non-disclosure clauses. The labor party will be built on rank-and-file workers who lead their unions through militant strikes, in which all of the major decisions are made at mass meetings of the members. In this way, reform of the electoral system is a secondary question.
The perspective of building a labor party is one of building a mass movement in the streets. In fact, election reform is more likely with the building of a mass labor party.
Imagine what would have been possible if the Labor Party coming out of the 1996 convention under the leadership of Tony Mazzocchi had actually made a decisive break from the Democrats and didn’t waver on the questions of running in elections. The inability of the labor officials leading this endeavor to fully break with the Democratic Party hamstrung the effort and put the question off until a later day—when it was too late and the moment had passed.
A labor party could organize and coalesce the attempt outlined by Shawn Fain to align union contracts across the U.S. in 2028 in order to organize the possibility of a general strike. The Democratic Party has never done anything like this in its nearly 200-year history because the action would be antithetical to the reason for the party’s existence.
The Democrats, however, are adept at demobilizing the mass movement in the streets. The Iraq antiwar movement was demobilized under Obama, and the George Floyd/BLM protests were demobilized under Biden. Another important example includes the events of May 1, 2006, when millions of immigrant workers took to the streets for “a day without an immigrant” to oppose racist and anti-immigrant legislation. The general strike was a success in defeating a piece of legislation but fell short of providing a real amnesty for immigrant workers. Then the Democratic Party politicians, unions, and NGOs helped to carry the movement off the streets and into the voting booths by pushing for immigrant workers to wave American flags while advancing the slogan, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”
In contrast, the process of building a labor party today means explicitly fighting for the demands of oppressed communities by mobilizing millions in the streets for reparations for Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican people. It means exposing the plans cooked up by local politicians, landlords, and land developers to gentrify historically Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian communities. And it requires creating a real economic plan that would be paid for by putting the major corporations, railroads, factories, and banks under public ownership and democratic workers’ control, while at the same time dismantling the racist police and criminal justice system.
As the 2024 elections approach, there are going to be many different arguments made for why working people, oppressed communities, and students should support Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party instead of Trump and the Republican Party. There will be a lot of social pressure to keep quiet about a vast array of political issues, including the genocide of Palestinians, so that Harris can defeat Trump.
Those who see the possibility and necessity of the fight for working-class independence should stand firm in their convictions. Today, Teamsters, for example, have an opportunity to tell their leadership whom to endorse in the upcoming elections. This is a great opportunity to make the comment that you want a labor party, but it’s an even better opportunity to have a discussion with your coworkers on the shop floor about the coming fight for class independence and the labor party.
If you’re interested in joining the fight for working-class independence, join Workers’ Voice today!
Illustration: “Fight Reaction, Build a Labor Party,” pamphlet by the Trotskyist-led Chevrolet Local 659 UAW-CIO, Flint, Mich., 1947.
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Despite the convention pageantry, Democratic Party politics hit a dead end
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By JOHN PRIETO
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) is over. What we saw was a commitment to the same old politics that are a dead end for working people and the oppressed.
Despite the best efforts of the “Uncommitted Campaign,” the question of Palestinian human rights and the ongoing genocide in Gaza was never going to be given a speaking spot, and their efforts certainly weren’t going to change the Democratic Party’s long-standing support for Zionism and the U.S. imperialist project. As we said at the start of the campaign, “The efforts of the movement could be far better spent organizing mass action for Palestine in ways that break with the Democratic Party.”
Ultimately, the uncommitted campaign served the same purpose as the rest of the performances and pageantry at the DNC, to build illusions in the Democratic Party amongst activists and organizers and have them circle the wagons around Kamala Harris.
A campaign for freedom?
In her speech on Thursday night, Aug. 22, Kamala Harris set the tone for her campaign, stating that it was about “the freedom to live safe from gun violence, in our schools, communities, and places of worship; the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride; the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis; and the freedom that unlocks all the others—the freedom to vote.”
While the rhetoric is new in that it seeks to use the traditionally conservative framing of government interference to defend progressive issues, it is not fundamentally different from what we are told every election—this is the most important election in our lifetimes and if we don’t support the Democrats we will lose our rights.
But this has always been an empty threat—not because the Republicans and their far-right allies don’t pose an actual risk to our rights, but because the Democratic Party is not committed to defending them. Just look beneath the surface of the rhetoric at the actions and policies they carry out!
Freedom from gun violence is the first freedom she mentions. But research consistently shows that gun violence is highly correlated with poverty, even after addressing the possible roles of sex, race, density, and firearm ownership. In fact, there is evidence that workforce development programs in the local community help to alleviate gun violence by increasing employment and helping to alleviate poverty.
Despite this, however, Democrats have consistently supported the slow but steady erosion of even minor social programs meant to help the poor and the working class. In fact, they can’t and won’t support actions that actually undermine the causes of gun violence since they support the very capitalist system that causes the poverty, immiseration, and exploitation of oppressed people and the working class as a whole.
Perhaps they are better on LGBTQ+ rights? “The freedom to love whom you love,” she says. Yet, less than two months ago, the Biden-Harris administration announced its opposition to gender-affirming surgery for minors, stoking the trans panic campaign of the Republicans and far right. As we said at the time, “What [drives] the Biden administration’s choice to step away from supporting transgender rights has nothing to do with what’s important to working-class people and everything to do with a deeper historic pattern of the Democratic Party, and ultimately any political party that is bankrolled by the capitalist class. At the end of every campaign, both Democrats and Republicans rely on and answer to the same masters—big banks and corporations of every kind.”
We see this most starkly when we turn to the third freedom mentioned by Harris in her speech, “the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” While the rhetoric might be slightly different, Biden claimed to support this freedom when he campaigned in 2020 on “no more drilling.” Despite this promise, we learned in 2023 that the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration had seen more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands than during the first two years of Trump. In fact, the United States is currently experiencing an oil boom!
And then there is the last freedom she mentions, the freedom to vote. Here she refers to the wave of laws passed at the state level that are attempting to restrict access to the voting booth. And, while the laws she refers to are often seen as the exclusive actions of Republicans, the reality is that Democrats too, have no principled position on democratic rights. In Atlanta, the city’s majority-black Democratic city council passed a change to the process for citizens to get referendums on the ballot in response to a mass campaign that had collected 116,000 signatures from voters to let citizens vote on the infamous “Cop City” project. The change would require that all signatures on the petition for a referendum be matched against signatures from the voter registration database, a process that voting rights advocates condemn for disproportionately impacting people of color. Who is the mayor of Atlanta leading the fight against democracy? It’s Democrat Andre Dickens, an advisor to the Democratic campaign for president.
We witnessed a glaring and horrific example of where the lesser-evil logic of the Democratic Party gets us in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The Democratic Party had 49 years to enshrine the protections granted by Roe v. Wade in federal law.
Instead, we saw the repeated support of Democrats for things like the Hyde Amendment, which was used starting in 1980 to deny the use of federal funds to access abortion care. Bill Clinton supported it, Joe Biden supported it, Obama issued an executive order expanding it to cover the Affordable Care Act, and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey even introduced a bill to codify the Hyde Amendment and make it federal law covering all federal funding. Our assessment of the role of the Democratic Party in the fight for abortion rights could be generalized to all popular movements for justice: Democratic Party politicians have been the most unreliable allies, using party discipline to thwart mass mobilization in favor of an electoral approach that has failed over and over since 1973.
Dobbs is not an aberration; it is the result of Democratic Party policy. It is an example of what will ultimately come from following the Democratic Party’s lead.
As a rule, and especially at election time, both capitalist parties maneuver to mis-lead voters and co-opt the movements for social change with vague promises. But after grabbing our vote, the Democratic and Republican politicians rarely hesitate in their assigned job of promoting big-money interests while spurning the aspirations and needs of working people and the oppressed. For this reason, we must redouble our efforts to build mass protest movements in the streets and in our workplaces, and strive to ensure that our movements remain fully independent of the Democrats and the Republicans. It is more and more urgent that working people in the United States undertake the task of building their own independent party, which would consistently fight for their interests.
Photo: Cheney Orr / Reuters