At a projected 161 million, the 2020 Presidential Election saw the greatest voter turnout in our history. Called at 75 million votes for Biden and 71 million votes for Trump, the outcome reflected a history of this capitalist democracy’s division along ideological lines. Though that subjectively divided working class is, by design, an obstacle to our fight for the future, it is important to recognize this election as the culmination of decades of growing unrest and four years of intensified protest that illustrate a new class of Americans growing aware of its power and potential as a rising social force to transform society.
America is in a place it’s never been before, and every part of our society is scrambling to find the way forward. The ruling class cannot maintain control the way it has in the past, and a subjective struggle over how to maintain that control is being fought out within the ruling class. At the same time, the working class is struggling to survive and desperately searching for a solution.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this struggle as the U.S. had the world’s worst outbreak, with over 10 million infected, nearly a quarter-million deceased, and 22 million people losing jobs. Congress passed only one stimulus package for the working class, granting the amount of one month’s rent to cover eight months of lost work while the wealthiest made over 641 billion dollars from the crisis. Meanwhile, the people fought back against the brutality of the system, as 26 million people hit the streets all across America to stand up against the growing police state’s brutality and systemic racism.
Ruling Class Unfit to Rule
We must understand that the people have begun to fight like never before because the American ruling class has all-but-abdicated responsibility for our well-being. With fundamental changes in the economy increasingly eliminating the use of labor in broader sectors of work, and the refusal of the capitalist system to provide for the people, the ruling class’ turn towards fascism is inevitable. Under today’s new conditions the ruling class, which itself is being transformed, must align society’s institutions, laws, military and police forces with the changing nature of social relations through fascism. The capitalists understand that the old relationships between themselves and a working class that holds jobs and receives wages is over. They have to develop a new system of private property, wherein they keep the new technology and ways of producing goods and services in private hands. And just as important, keep the decision-making and political power in their hands.
Just as our class has to unite around resolving the problems of lack of jobs, poverty, hunger and homelessness, the ruling class has unite themselves and a section of the workers around an openly fascist solution to maintain power.
All of the political turmoil we see is a reflection of this process. The leadership of both parties is struggling to appeal to the American people to unite part of working class behind the aims of the ruling class. Biden’s win offers supposed comfort through promising an end to the division sown by the Trump regime.
With this vote, a majority of Americans rejected the brutal tactics of maintaining ICE raids during the pandemic, clampdowns on peaceful protests, and encouragement to extremist elements of the social base, including a militia group who planned to kidnap Michigan’s governor. Instead, the people elected a person who, at least symbolically, challenged the country’s racism and sexism by choosing a woman of African American and Asian descent as his running mate. No doubt, that choice also was meant to send a message to the entire world that America can transcend its current conflicts over race and gender.
However, Biden and Harris emerged as proponents of a “kinder, gentler” police state, muting the progressive, grassroots movement in the party. Joe Biden led the effort behind 1994’s Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act, characterized by its call for community-oriented policing. Kamala Harris became a Senator after nearly three decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, and Attorney General of California. The Democratic Party clearly wanted to capture and reassure the would-be Trump voter concerned with law and order. The ruling class negotiated a way forward without making any real concessions to Americans fighting for our most basic needs. Both parties are failing us when it comes to financial relief, distribution of PPE, contact tracing, and certainly the threat of the growing police state.
Wall Street versus Our Streets
If there were ever an obvious sign of the difference in the world inhabited by the ruling class and the world the rest of us live in, it would be the way the stock market, after a dip in March, has made record-breaking gains throughout the pandemic. Economics professor Itay Goldstein of the Wharton School of Business told ABC News, “The stock market is not the economy….The stock market is a very selective group of firms that are traded in the market, and those groups of firms are mostly large firms….And then you go on Main Street, and you see all these Mom and Pop shops and these small restaurants, and they are hurting.”
The ruling class profits off of every crisis. Fortune magazine reports that the real unemployment rate in America is around 20 percent, which corresponds directly to the one in five Americans who now face evictions. With a rate of COVID infection only comparable to Brazil, this year’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHAHES) reported one in four Americans suffering depression as a result of the pandemic.
That percentage, one in four, is also how many filed unemployment during the pandemic and how many are facing hunger. One-quarter of all Americans have lost any stake in the system. The New York Times reports 3.8 million Americans now face permanent unemployment; that’s twice as many as were permanently unemployed before the pandemic. This new number of permanently unemployed, roughly equivalent to the population of Los Angeles, are never expected to work again.
Though ruling class leaders and the media championed the essential workers as the heroes of the pandemic, the expansion of laborless production means more motivation than ever to eliminate these jobs. Delivery is permanently replacing restaurants, self-check-out has leaped forward at most retail stores, remote health care is prevalent, and COVID tests are being self-administered. The essential worker job is being cut, breaking the tenuous grasp of about 55 million more workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This is about the same number of people the U.S. hunger organization Civil Eats reports already live in “food deserts.”
The resistance to this growing disparity has expressed itself in the motion around Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, the protests by health care workers fighting for PPE, protests over unsafe conditions by essential workers such as Amazon employees, and the uprisings after the George Floyd murder. The deepened inequality and the reaction to it reflect the polarization both between and within the two major parties, which have dominated American politics for over a century. Those splits are going to increase the viability of new party formations in the near future. While many of those formations will revolve around traditional concepts of Left and Right, true democracy will only come from a vision that unleashes the power of the great masses of the American people to fight for our common needs.
The turnout of the 2020 elections shows the people of a country that has never really had true democracy striving like never before to achieve that goal. Our country began with democracy only for landowners, taking another fifty years for the majority of white men to gain the vote, another century for white women to gain the vote, and forty more years for most Black Americans. However, America will not see a completely realized democracy while the power and influence of the ruling class controls the electoral system, and working class America continues to lose value in the capitalist system.
We fight for our most basic needs not being provided by this system. We must call for continuous and ongoing stimulus programs specifically but more generally demanding that the country ensure our life, liberty, and ability to thrive in the face of a collapsing system. Instead of one political party playing one segment of the working class against another, we have to unite as a class to have the power to achieve these goals.
The election was a strategic battle to stop the most brutal and divisive tactics the ruling class has attempted during the current crisis. But the working class must move forward with an objective understanding of our basis for unity. With a shared understanding of our objective situation, we not only have the numbers to survive this crisis in American history, but that same objectivity can reveal the new world struggling to be born. That clarity regarding our power and potential is necessary to achieve the goals of a true democracy, where every individual has equal rights and equal support to thrive.
We have the technology today so that none of us must risk our lives to work or go without adequate healthcare or struggle for our most basic survival needs. In fact, we have the technology today to re-envision the whole concept of basic needs so that all Americans can live a life we couldn’t imagine before. The fight for basic needs has compelled our efforts throughout this electoral season and will continue to do so in 2021. But, when we come together and recognize our power as a class, that very fight will transform from one of simply survival to one that calls for the control of the means of production and distribution of all that’s needed to live decently, as a means to universal human liberation. RC
November.December 2020 Vol30.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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