by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, October 28, 2024
With the polls deadlocked at 48-48 less than two weeks before the US presidential elections, the billionaire ruling rich frantically maneuver to capture a few more votes to swing the result in favor of their chosen warmongering, capitalist, anti-working class, environmentally catastrophic corporate-kept candidates. The electoral choice presented to an increasingly wary and disillusioned public is between the Democrat’s Palestinian Gaza and now Lebanon genocide perpetrator, Kamala Harris, and the Republican’s “fascist” candidate, Donald Trump. The “fascist” label was affixed to Trump by the Harris team just a few weeks ago.
The panicked Democrats assigned Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his eleventh Middle East visit to broker something resembling a ceasefire deal to shore up some hesitant Arab-Muslim voters in Michigan and elsewhere in the Democrat’s faltering coalition. Meanwhile, Harris’s peace seeking includes ever-intensified US-abetted Zionist bombing of Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and now Iran.
That Palestine has been physically obliterated and its people slaughtered with colonial Zionist Israel’s US-supplied jets and 2,000 pound bunker-busting weapons of mass destruction, according to the Harris team’s twisted logic, can be discounted, perhaps a bit, if Blinken returns with a just in time “peace deal.”
Meanwhile, Harris’s supporters still insist, regardless of the any peace deal, that a vote for Genocide Harris is critically necessary to stop the “fascist” Trump, again, a term just officially coined last week by the Democrats to eke out a few more votes. “Lesser evilism” in today’s degenerate capitalist election scenario, poses “genocide” against “fascism.”! My heart cries out with grief and pain when I read the words of good people justifying their preference for Harris.
Democrats and Republicans back Casino Capitalism
That no Democrat employed the fascist term when Trump was president was no mistake. Trump, and Obama before him, presided over presidencies that saw the government’s Federal Reserve virtually gifting unprecedented $billions to the US elite at near zero interest rates that they instantly “invested” in their “casino capitalism” [“The house always wins.] stock exchanges to become near-instant billionaires. Need we add that Democrats and Republicans equally presided over massive tax cuts for the superrich, Biden’s campaign rhetoric that “The rich don’t pay taxes,” notwithstanding?
Corporate media billionaires sense a Trump win
Some of these same billionaires, including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angles Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, have just announced that their previous critical editorials on Trump notwithstanding, they would make no presidential endorsement this time around, a break with their previous decades of endorsements. This major corporate media decision to refrain from joining with the Democrat’s “fascist” label of Trump, was indeed motivated by self-interest. Better a government-abetted billionaire beholden to one’s benefactor than a petty multi-millionaire largely excluded from critical decision making!!! And Elon Musk, the near trillionaire richest person on earth, today lavishes some petty $billions on Trump’s campaign while sharing the stage and his limelight!
That Donald Trump, a former liberal crooked New York Democrat entrepreneur, is a “moron,” a serial liar, a sociopathic demagogue, a degenerate racist, sexist, imperialist US politician, not to mention his more recent multiple felony convictions for lying, cheating and stealing, is certainly beyond dispute among people serious about radical and socialist politics, not to mention his previous close government and military associates.
Trump’s former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, [photo with Trump above] ex-CEO of Exxon Mobile and among the richest capitalists on earth, described his boss as a “f*****g moron” after Trump had left a National Security Council meeting, where he offhandedly proposed increasing the number of US tactical nuclear weapon one hundred fold.
But morons are quite acceptable in ruling class circles. When George W. Bush, was briefly informed by a delegation representing the richest men in the country on their way to a critical congressional hearing, that unless their multi-trillion dollar corporate bailout proposal from the largest US banks was instantly approved, the US economy would instantly collapse, Bush responded, according to a NYT reporter, “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Today, the moron Trump demagogically denounces the Democrats for offshoring top paying US union jobs to China, the then official policy of the Obama administration, indeed, the bi-partisan policy of a declining US ruling class.
US deal to include China in WTO
Obama partnered with China’s capitalist-imperialist elite in a deal that included China’s 2001 admission to the US-dominated World Trade Organization in return for which China essentially eliminated all Chinese government restrictions on US corporate investments. This included US capitalism’s massive tax free exploitation of China’s labor force employed in US-owned near slave labor factories at the lowest wage rates in the world, a boon to crisis ridden US corporations that were increasingly failing on world markets. Why pay union wages to US workers, or even less to immigrant workers, or even less to prison labor when US capitalists could employ countless numbers of teenage women sequestered in dormitory factors working 80 hour weeks at six cents per hour?
Less than two decades later Chinese capitalism emerged among the top capitalist nations on earth, with its own now highly modernized productive economic infrastructure increasingly capable of competing on world markets. That Chinese billionaires, at 1,000, today exceed the US, at some 800, was no accident. The new US billionaires were created at the price of the ongoing de-industrialization of the US productive system… and their Chinese billionaire equivalents, by the super-exploitation of their own Chinese workers.
Thus, the same US capitalists who previously championed the massive exploitation of cheap non-union Chinese labor today, denounce super competitive Chinese imports and demand, along with Trump, increasing high tariffs to protect US corporate profits.
Trump today stands first among them in the guise of defending US labor against foreign, especially Chinese, imports and demanding strict tariff protections, which the Democrats, having previously opposed in order to protect their own Chinese manufactured-US-owned imports, have been compelled to politically accede to.
A faint echo of the Nazis era
Here we find a faint echo of Hitler’s populist demagogy, including his naming his own party as Nazis, that is, National Socialist, and his appeal to German workers against foreign capitalists, especially Jews.
But the fascist-populist Hitler came to power in the context of a WWI devastated and defeated imperialist Germany, on whom its US and European imperialist victors imposed massive reparations that reduced German capitalism to a second or third rate status in the world economy.
Hitler came to power in 1933 as the crisis-ridden government’s appointed head of state. But he ruled in the context of an assumed legitimacy of his armed and tolerated paramilitary force and in the context of a gravely disoriented and Stalinist-misled mass Communist Party and trade union movement that were oblivious to the fascist threat.
“First Hitler, then our turn,” was the official Stalinist line, as they assumed that Hitler-led fascism was no more than a passing threat. [See Leon Trotsky’s pioneering rebuttal of this thesis, “Fascism, what it is and how to fight it.”]
Today’s US is a far cry from Germany’s Nazi era.
US capitalism, its deepening economic crisis notwithstanding, stands first in the world. It largely dominates world markets. Its military power far exceeds most of the rest of world combined. Its 1100 military bases in 110 countries qualitatively exceeds the rest of the world combined.
While Trump’s demagogy matches similar rightwing reactionary populist movements around the world, neither his nor any other, poses a threat to US imperialist domination. None employ armed paramilitary forces to crush working class mobilizations, of which there are relatively few at this moment, in their own countries.
The US ruling class in its vast majority, in this writer’s view, has no need for fascist repression to rule effectively, even if Trump should win the 2024 election!
In sharp contrast to Germany in 1933, with Germany’s working class majority organized in massive majority-supported trade unions, capable of posing a serious threat to capitalist rule, today’s US trade unions stand at perhaps their lowest point in US history. Indeed, its ranks are increasingly divided between the various Democratic and Republican Party class collaborationist reactionary trade union mis-leaderships. US capitalist has no need today for fascist repression to rule effectively. Indeed, it prefers a compliant working class that voluntarily accepts its rule rather than an angry working class that challenges ruling class prerogatives. Tragically, with few exceptions, this is the situation today; no serious class struggle leadership currents are presently on the scene to pose a democratic independent united front oriented fightback strategy. While this eventuality is certainly to be expected as capitalist profit rates are on a steady decline and angry workers seek fighting solutions to defend against ever more brutal ruling class austerity measures. But, with few noteworthy exceptions, this is not the case today.
Yet, the ruling class elite is not indifferent to the “moron” Trump’s election prospects, nor to Kamala Harris’s. The super rich know full well that whomever is elected, the critical decisions that determine capitalist policy operate always within the closely guarded purview of the capitalist state apparatus and not with their often buffoon but always-compliant candidates. Trump’s past presidency gave proof to this elementary proposition!
A brief history of past US presidencies
Joseph Biden served capitalism well for a half century, initially as the Democrats’ liaison between its “liberal” Northern capitalists and its Southern racist segregationists, the latter, the heirs to the post-Civil War slavocracy.
The same with southerners Jimmy Carter and William Clinton, [photos above] selected by the ruling elite when the Republicans under Nixon integrated the Democrats’ openly racist southern segregationists into their party. Carter and Clinton were instantly transformed to liberals when the Democrats needed some southern states’ electoral college votes to win the presidency. Carter was a Nixon supporter to the end, the last to agree that the Watergate Nixon crook must resign. He was a former segregationist-turned-human rights activist, to boot. A member of a segregated church, he was first elected to a local school board where he implemented bussing white students past largely Black school districts to circumvent national civil rights desegregation legislation.
There are few, if any, exceptions to the manufactured myth that US presidents are endowed with humane and egalitarian characteristics.
When the early primary results indicated in 2019 that Biden might lose the Democrat’s presidential nomination to liberal Bernie Sanders in the context of massive Black Lives Matter protests of 5 million that condemned US “systemic racism,” the competitive primary season was instantly abandoned. The multiple billionaire Democratic Party candidates withdrew and a failing Joseph Biden, who was a keynoter at racist segregationist Strom Thurmond’s memorial, [Photo of Thurmond and Biden below] was ordained as the historic champion of civil rights!
The billionaire Democrats threw their support and money behind Biden. The largely NGO corporate funded BLM movement was instantly disappeared, with its appointed leaders assigned to channel mass anti-racist, anti-police brutality sentiments into Biden’s campaign via the corporate funded, “Black mis-leadership class” and its huge faith-based organizations. [Editor’s note: Former Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford, used the term “Black mis-leadership class.” He detailed the role of corporate funded Black leaders in channeling promising Black fightback currents into the Democratic Party.]
Again, there are no exceptions. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), retroactively decreed as the darling of US liberalism and a civil rights supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was exposed just last month in the new Paramount documentary film, Mafia Spies – based on new FBI files – as collaborating with the Cuban Mafia in planning and preparing multiple assassination attempts against Cuban President Fidel Castro. The documentary also reports in great detail Kennedy’s and his CIA’s collaboration with the Chicago-based Mafia to rig the presidential vote counting in the 1960 election in Kennedy’s favor, providing Kennedy’s victory margin. That Kennedy also shared a Mafia prostitute was similarly documented in detail.
JFK’s father: a Hitler supporter [photo below]
Omitted from the Paramount Mafia Spies documentary, perhaps because the FBI files were incomplete, was an accounting of JFK’s family history. JFK’s father was heavily engaged in various Massachusetts gambling operations. He was appointed by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration to be the US ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of WWII but was withdrawn by Roosevelt because of Kennedy’s Nazis sympathies, including his cordial; meetings with Hitler officials, perhaps with Hitler himself.
There are virtually no limits to manufacturing myths in ruling class politics. Trump claims to be an anti-NATO, if not antiwar candidate, bragging that under his presidency the US was engaged in no new wars while the Barak Obama [See photo below] administration was engaged in seven, a half truth indeed, but not far from the reality, leaving out that with regard to all US wars bi-partisanship has always been the norm.
Some necessary conclusions and an apology
We conclude here with an apology to our readers and supporters. We have declined to prepare a list of those of the “left” who have rejected reactionary lesser evil politics in all its manifestations; the list is too short and the groups that today champion working class independence barely exist, admittedly a tragic, but accurate assessment of the difficulties of our times.
The vast majority of the “broad left” in all social movements today call for a vote for Genocide Kamala Harris to “stop the fascist Donald Trump.”
In our view, however the difficulties, the starting point for all revolutionaries who seek to build a qualitatively new and better world, a socialist world, begins with a clear break from capitalist politics in all its manifestations. It begins with the conscious formation of independent working class based mass action oriented democratically organized united front-type coalitions, including a mass independent fighting Labor Party based on a qualitatively expanded democratically-organized trade union movement in alliance with the oppressed and exploited that mobilizes at the point of production and in the political arena to champion the cause of all working people. The starting point for this critical venture is the construction of a mass revolutionary socialist party deeply rooted in all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, a party that helps to lead and focus every struggle for equality and democratic rights
Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Action. He is a member of the Administrative Committee of UNAC (United National Antiwar); Director, The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal/Northern California; National Steering Committee, Assangedefense.org and founding member, Northern California Climate Mobilization. Join Socialist Action. socialistaction.org Donate to socialist action. Contact us at