By the League Basic Needs Electoral Committee
Photo: Shutterstock
Something is happening here. What is the significance of the rise of the Kamala Harris campaign? For the workers, it is a dramatic opportunity not only to resist fascism, but to advance the movements for the basic necessities they need to survive. Revolutionaries join with the working class in assessing the electoral landscape and picking and choosing its battles based on what will best advance its interests. Workers are fighting for real unity, especially unity with the migrant communities under immediate attack; unity with movements like Black Lives Matter and Palestinian freedom; unity with low-income and unhoused workers; unity with women fighting for reproductive freedom and unity with communities fighting to save the planet’s environment. The many critiques of Harris’s shortcomings are accurate, but they miss the point. The point is how workers can best take advantage of this political moment to unite, politicize and broaden the battle for their housing, health care and other basic needs.
Since the 2008 recession, the working class in the United States has been on the offensive through a dramatic immigrant rights upsurge (which had already begun in 2006); Black Lives Matter; Occupy Wall Street; the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. The offensive has been a step forward for the working class’s unity and at least temporarily put the ruling class back on its heels. The ruling class has responded with plans to protect its private property either by crushing or corralling this motion up to and including establishing a fascist dictatorship if necessary. That is the program of Project 2025.
But with the stakes so high, the rulers are tactically divided around exactly when and how to crack down. The Project 2025 section of the ruling class plan openly intends to start cracking down in January 2025 by reorganizing the state and drowning any opposition in blood. The other section – including everyone from Republican Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney to Democratic corporate shills like Nancy Pelosi – prefers a more cautious approach of escalating reaction and postponing the risky Project 2025 measures. This grouping recently took the dramatic step of replacing Joe Biden, who was headed to certain electoral defeat, with Kamala Harris. Their intention is to stabilize the status quo and disarm the workers, by appearing to support democracy and some of their demands, while still holding onto complete corporate control of the state.
WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE
The most advanced workers on the fronts of struggle were already organizing to try to stop Project 2025, and secure their positions in the event that it won, for example, by preparing raid defenses, by doubling down on organizing drives and by protecting unhoused encampments. The emergence of the Harris campaign and the real possibility that it could defeat Project 2025 in November caused a sudden surge of hope, voter registration and attention to the electoral arena, especially among young people.
The ruling class always works to ensure its control regardless of which party wins the election. The Republicans and their Project 2025 relentlessly promote hatred of migrants, women, the environment, people of color, LGBTQ people and low-wealth workers in order to block any form of working-class unity. The pro-corporate Democrats oppose the most extreme forms of this hatred, but their corporate agenda prevents them from defending real working-class unity. The Biden-Harris attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters and on migrants at the border and California governor Gavin Newsom’s attack on the unhoused are clear examples.
Pro-corporate Democrats also fight to tie the workers to corporate capitalism by repeatedly insisting that the private property economy is working and that Democrats represent the best interests of workers. The Harris economic agenda announced on August 16 contains important incremental improvements, especially the child tax credit and medical debt relief, but does not propose the structural reforms necessary to actually meet the needs of the people. The role of revolutionaries is to always expose the corporate agenda wherever it appears.
THE POLITICAL MOMENT
The vast majority of working-class organizations – unions, tenant associations, community organizations, etc. – have already decided to support the Harris campaign. Most are motivated by the urgency of defeating the mass deportations, internment camps, and absolute impoverishment in Project 2025. Revolutionaries dare not ignore this motion, because it offers the opportunity to meet and influence tens of millions of the most advanced basic needs fighters.
The Harris campaign is supported by the Working Families Party, Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice), Seed the Vote, and Movement for Black Lives. They organized a “Progressives for Harris” Zoom call on August 5 attended by 150,000 participants. Whether they openly advocate it or not, many of these organizations are part of the objective, long-term anti-corporate third party movement that is coalescing both inside and outside the Democratic Party. They are not tied to the Democratic corporate leadership. As WFP national director Maurice Mitchell wrote, “We must block MAGA extremists from seizing governing power and we must build the most viable, durable political vehicle that is beholden and accountable to the people and not the wealthy and corporations.”
Elections offer broader opportunities for revolutionary messaging than any other social motion, aside from general strikes and insurrections. They are an arena for raising all the workers’ basic needs demands – and explaining that the private property system as it exists will never be able to meet them. But we also explain that when we fight for them, we begin the process of political revolution that will lead to economic and social transformation. When we struggle for decommodification of basic human needs, we begin to point the way toward the cooperative society that will treat these needs as human rights. We build the political power necessary to abolish the corporations and eliminate the danger of fascism altogether. Voting is about tactically casting a ballot with a strategic political purpose: fighting for the most favorable conditions for advancing the revolutionary movement. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to use those favorable conditions to disseminate their vision and strategy for building the sustainable and peaceful society that is possible when workers control the means of creating wealth and distribute the product according to need.
Published on August 29, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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