NEW MASK, SAME RULING CLASS: Statement on the 2024 Presidential Election

The curtains have again closed on the farce that is the American election cycle. Now, a second Trump regime takes center stage.

Over a week later, as the tallying of the votes draws closer to its conclusion, we are painted the picture not of a landslide Trump victory, but of a resounding loss for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. The 2020 election saw the highest voter turnout in the history of the so-called “united states” when over 81 million people voted for Biden, trouncing Trump’s 74 million. This time around Trump made modest gains, increasing his vote total to about 76 million. But the most impactful shift in voter totals came on the side of the Harris campaign, which only garnered approximately 73 million votes nationwide, under-performing Biden’s 2020 campaign by about 8 million votes. Such a hemorrhaging of support has enabled Donald Trump, despite barely widening his support base since 2020, to win the popular vote for the first time in his political career. And while some liberals cry foul over the so-called 20 million “missing votes,”—a number now invalidated by the ongoing tallying—the truth could not be clearer: the people of this country simply refused to turn out for the Democrats, embarking instead on a passive electoral boycott.

Could anyone blame the people for making such a choice? Biden’s 2020 coalition seized victory by riding a swell of popular masses outraged by Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 and eager for change. But now, in 2024, Joe Biden’s legacy is broken promises to cancel student loan debt, a failure to codify Roe V. Wade to protect legal abortion, massive monetary inflation, increased detention and deportation of immigrants and refugees, and the genocide in Gaza, in which it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by “israeli” forces utilizing American-made weapons and deliberately engineered famines and plagues. Yet when asked what she would have done differently from Biden, Kamala flatly stated “there is not a thing that comes to mind.” Nothing that is, aside from having a Republican in her cabinet. And it was clearly the Republicans whom Kamala’s campaign hoped to attract. Rather than break with the Biden administration to elevate policies which would address the economic concerns of the broad masses and end the genocide in Gaza, she instead took a decided lurch to the right, promising to build the southern border wall even better than Trump, backing down on protections for transgender people, and pledging unconditional support to the Zionist entity while sending bloodthirsty freaks like Bill Clinton, Richie Torres, and Liz Cheney to Dearborn Michigan to gloat over the city’s Arab-American population. Indeed, Kamala and the Democrats refused even the most innocuous symbolic gesture: allowing a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Much more could be said about the many transgressions of the Harris campaign. But suffice to say that the Democrats demonstrated their loathing for the masses of working class people and oppressed national, sexual, and gender minorities, and instead chased after unattainable “moderate” Republican votes, resulting in their abject failure at the polls. To the party of genocidaires, gaslighters, and goons, we say: good riddance!

We are under no illusions about what is to come. As we enter a period of unified Republican control at all levels of the federal government, with a GOP House, a GOP Senate, a conservative Supreme Court, all headed by the second Trump regime, the path forward appears bleak. As depraved and violent as the Democratic Party is, the Republicans by far represent a more unapologetic, more brazen, and more bloodthirsty alternative. It remains to be seen how events will play out, but looking to the explicit goals of the president-elect and to how the years from 2017 to 2021 played out, we see some possibilities: Trump’s proposed exorbitant tariffs drastically raising prices of ordinary goods, putting immense economic pressure on the working class; further attacks on the rights, protections, and healthcare for the LGBT+ people; a resurgence of a widespread and emboldened fascist street movement; escalating violence and killings by police against protesters, unhoused people, and Black and other non-white Americans; further attacks on or an outright nationwide ban on abortion; mass deportations of immigrants which significantly disrupt the American labor force in addition to bringing an immense amount of human suffering to this country’s oppressed national minorities; and an abandonment of the charade of feigned concern for the crimes of the “israeli” occupation forces in favor of a complete uncritical endorsement of the Zionist entity’s genocide against the Palestinian people. We remember well the first Trump regime’s mass repression during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, how the police brutalized the people, how the National Guard were called out to launch military occupations of American cities, and how unidentified federal agents abducted protesters off the streets into unmarked vans for questioning. We doubt that the Republicans would hesitate to utilize such measures again, and are confident the Democrats would reprise their role as willing collaborators in Trump’s campaign of terror against the people. Let us be abundantly clear: the government of the so-called “united states” was slated to lurch to the right no matter which party won the elections. In rhetoric, the Harris campaign had explicitly adopted many of Trump’s political positions. In action, even beyond Kamala’s role in the Biden administration, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, held up as a sort of charming, lovable “midwest dad,” was the one to call in the National Guard to suppress the George Floyd Uprising in Minneapolis back in 2020. Indeed, no matter which party won the election, the American people would be facing down a government far more right wing than the past four years.

It is abundantly clear that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent the interests of the oppressed masses of the so-called "united states," that in reality they are but two masks worn by the same enemy: the American owning class, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie. Every election cycle, we are sold the myth that our votes matter, that progress can be won through the ballot, or that “democracy” is on the line. In reply, we communists raise the question: democracy for who? “Democracy” under capitalism can only ever be democracy for the ruling class, for the capitalist class. Elections under capitalism are but a charade, an immense spectacle wherein the oppressed are invited to choose who shall oppress them for the next few years, to legitimize the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority of the people. It is democracy internal to the ruling class, the means by which it manages its own affairs, and not an avenue for the political expression of the oppressed classes. This truth is readily apparent. While the Democrats and Republicans present the image that they are diametrically opposed political forces, we can see they are united where it counts: building “Cop Cities” across the country to develop an increasingly lethal and militarized police; maintaining American empire overseas to continue the super-exploitation of the oppressed peoples of Palestine, India, the Philippines, and many more nations; and brutalizing or killing anyone who gets in the way, both in the so-called "united states" and abroad. The class interests of the capitalists are bipartisan, while the interests of the workers and oppressed peoples are anathema.

The true path to liberation does not begin or end at the ballot box, but rather proceeds through vigorous and unrelenting struggle against the forces which seek to keep us locked up by the chains of capitalist imperialism. And no genuine movement of the oppressed masses for liberation can prosper while it accepts the political leadership of the oppressing class. Hence the utter foolishness of any revisionist “left” grouping which advocates working within or tailing either of the two political parties, of any “socialist” who upholds the personality cult of arch-sellout Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and of the deranged fringe of “MAGA Communists” who substitute chauvinism and right-populism for revolutionary politics. To expect the political blocs of the ruling class to save us from themselves is folly. It is the oppressed masses alone who can emancipate themselves from capitalist exploitation, and the working class, the proletariat, which shall provide their political leadership. It is the proletariat alone whose interest is the complete abolition of all forms of oppression, who, by virtue of being the last class in history, will lead all oppressed peoples resolutely in their march towards the final victory over capitalism and all class oppression. The working class is equipped to lead with its own scientific method of thought, the ideology of Marxism, founded on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism, and developed through the historical experiences of class struggles at the key revolutionary fulcrums of the Paris Commune in 1871, the October Revolution in 1917, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1967. It is the working class and its ideology which will guide the masses to victory over American capitalist imperialism.

Over the next four years, we will face numerous attempts to roll back hard-earned concessions, to deepen the exploitation of the oppressed masses, and to repress organized opposition to the reactionary Trump regime, both by the state itself and by street fascists. To all who find themselves fearful for what the second Trump regime may hold, to all who are uncertain about what is to be done, and to all who see resistance as a matter of survival, we say: stand up, fight back! Don’t despair, get organized! Build the movement capable not only of resisting the Trump regime, but of defeating capitalism! Become students of revolution, learn the ideology and theory of the working class and apply it in practice! To all our comrades, we say:

IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL AGAINST THE REACTIONARIES!
IF YOU DARE TO STRUGGLE, YOU DARE TO WIN!
REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY!