Another election season has arrived in the US’ sick and crisis-ridden political system. With the exit of Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party has gotten a break in what was shaping up to be a defeat. Nevertheless, both ruling parties represent nothing less than full on political reaction. At the root of the political chaos is the crisis of capitalism and the undeniable decline in the American empire. The rivalry between factions of the capitalists in power is of no concern to workers, who desperately need to take up our own self-organized class struggle against economic crisis and imperialist war preparations.

The propaganda surrounding the elections would have you believe that each election is a choice between good and evil incarnate. When the election is settled, one finds the same foreign and domestic policies in force. This is a process in US political history that goes back to the fossilization of the duopoly as it came to be established during the nineteenth century. During the present century this has been more bitterly contested and decided with the narrowest margins of victory. The exception to this was Obama's first election to the presidency with its hollow slogans of "hope" and "change".

2024’s election throws the crisis within US capitalism into sharp relief. With the replacement of Biden and the appointment of Harris on top of the assassination attempt on Trump, the struggle for the Oval Office has heated up. The usual homeless sweeps and mass arrests for the Republican and Democratic Conventions, that is Trump and Harris’ coronations by a bunch of drunk capitalists, set the tone for what the two tickets promise the working class. Trump picks JD Vance for the same reason that Harris picks Walz. Vance supports “worker-management committees”, aka roping a few workers from off the shop-floor into meetings with the bosses to more smoothly implement work speed-ups and the fragmentation of real worker self-organization. Walz gave workers in Minnesota a few crumbs in the form of free school lunches, but this only disguises the eradication of our class’ purchasing power through inflation and the wider capitalist crisis. Really both parties are ideologically conditioning the working class to accept a cataclysmic war with US imperialism’s main competitor, China. Vance calls for dialing back US weapons to Ukraine only to save artillery for a war with China, while Harris calls for US imperialism to maintain “the most lethal fighting force in the world”. The two capitalist parties get giddy thinking about a vicious war which will put workers in the US against workers in China, massacring each other in the service of our respective ruling classes.

For this election some Democratic Party functionaries have openly declared political warfare to keep any electoral third parties off the ballot by making sure the signatures on any petition for ballot access get tossed out as invalid. This is normal behavior for both ruling parties but this election leaves even less room for protest votes. But even these protest parties pose no real political solution for workers. The Libertarians are the GOP for the politically inept, the Greens tail-end the latest trends in the US capitalist left scene, the ‘uncommitted’ movement is toothless and represents total enthrallment to the Democratic Party which will never cease funding the imperialist massacres of proletarians in Gaza, the PSL promises a program of reformed state-capitalism in the Stalinist variety… the list of petty-bourgeois rackets goes on, who see workers at best as de-classed voters to get them into political office, or as meal-tickets to continue playing in their ‘activist’ careers.

The US has suffered a series of defeats and setbacks that came to characterize the entire Biden administration, with Biden in his dementia personifying an American empire in crisis. Although the administration began with the defeat of US forces in Afghanistan, it did not hesitate to start up other profitable imperialist debacles. The most expensive state military machine in history is powerless to stop Houthi fighters from choking off the Red Sea at the Bab el-Mandeb straights. It is currently the largest campaign the US Navy has undertaken since the last World War. While another US-armed and trained army in Ukraine is being slowly ground into the dust. The US has lost its edge with an astronomically expensive defense sector that has trouble producing anything that works in any needed quantity.

There is little in the way of any attempt by American capitalists to rebuild enough industry to sustain industrial scale warfare. For decades the only enemies the US military faced have been guerrilla fighters. Without industry and a working class involved in direct production, it is impossible to wage a major conflict between imperialist powers. America as a post-industrial society now finds itself in the situation of not having the workforce to work in factories that don't exist, full of machinery they no longer know how to build and an army that can't fill enough uniforms to carry out the bloody work of imperialism.

US imperialism entered its latest expansion phase with the collapse of the USSR. The 9/11 attacks marked a decisively aggressive turn that opened the subsequent decades of ongoing wars. This is reflected domestically in the decadent bourgeois rot of the US political process. First, there is the ritual of the political primary election period culminating in the coronation rituals of the ruling parties’ political conventions. Second comes the final election, hotly contested in the dominant media, a battle of bourgeois titans. Finally there is the demeaning ritual of voting that drags workers into the rivalries and crimes of the ruling class.

Marx once entertained the idea that peaceful change via the ballot box might work in certain countries, like Britain, but even this he acknowledged would be met with a "slave holders rebellion". In Lenin's time the Bolsheviks were able to take advantage of their seats in the Tsar's Duma to put forward propaganda against the government. At that point the only purpose for any sort of parliamentarism was for propaganda towards the working class. This too was conditioned on the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie and their corrupt anemic regime. Today, no such possibilities exist. The ruling Democrats need their "Democratic Socialists of America" to isolate and police the left on behalf of their masters. Every unpopular policy the Democrats carry out can then be blamed on "socialists".

One primary basis for continuing the voting ritual is political blackmail (vote or you will lose your right to have an abortion), a cynical bourgeois ploy to blackmail working women into voting. Being political timeservers, there is nothing more they need from the atomized citizen once they are elected. In real terms the Democrat Party's politicians have never defended anything other than capital. But the locus of decision-making power isn't in the hands of elected officials, rather in those of unelected bureaucrats. One example is Victoria Nuland of the US State Department, who over the years served under six presidents and guided the foreign affairs of US imperialism. Nobody gets to vote against imperialism and war.

Every election is a crisis and becomes a referendum on the very idea of freedom itself. The bourgeoisie proclaims that "we're losing our democracy" and tells us that we must vote. Those who refuse to vote are then told that they have no right to complain since they didn't bother to vote. There is an alternate route, not simply abandoning a politically empty reactionary activity (voting in capitalist elections) but taking up the class struggle and not using the election as a substitute for collective action.

America's decline and descent into open crisis has become painfully obvious. The US is a deindustrialized post-modern ruin. The very processes by which American capitalists maintain their power are the very processes that are destroying it. The political fight between the two factions has convinced many in the US that they must vote or perish in the deluge. Yet neither Harris nor Trump will fundamentally alter the course that US and global capitalism are on. Instead of voting and thereby legitimizing their class rule, our class needs to self-organize and combat the economic attacks and generalized war preparations that will occur under either candidate if elected. We should take a page out of the heroic struggle waged by oil workers in Iran in recent years who have called for the formation of workers’ councils, or workers in China who mobilized against factory dormitories in 2022, and keep control of our own struggles for our own class demands. We should get political, and signal that our exit from pre-WW3 capitalist crisis lies in the construction of our own international communist party to guide our self-organized struggle, and not in the electoral circus which chains our consciousness within the ballot box prison.

The above article is taken from the latest issue of Internationalist Notes (#9 Fall 2024), broadsheet of the Internationalist Workers’ Group.