Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Left Voice & The Election, 2024

 

(Source)

Sybil Davis and Jimena Vergara co-authored an article on Left Voice entitled Neither Harris nor Trump: Only the Working Class Can Fight the Rightward Shift. It's an analysis of the election as of a few days ago, Oct. 25th, that begins this way:

As the election roller coaster barrels on, the Harris campaign has lost some steam. Popular enthusiasm once drove the campaign to new heights and helped raise over $1 billion. Now Harris is struggling to win over undecided votes and is losing support among sectors that have previously strongly backed Democrats — such as Black and Latino men. After riding high on “vibes” after she replaced Biden and generated a huge wave of enthusiasm, Harris has failed to put forward a compelling vision for a country that is contending with inflation, natural disasters, and an increasingly unstable international situation that includes foreign conflicts that many Americans don’t want to be involved in.

In this context, Trump has repositioned himself to potentially win the election. Every poll shows an incredibly tight race in which either candidate can emerge as the winner. It will all come down to a handful of swing states. In this context, we must have as precise an analysis as possible of the situation and think towards what might happen after the election and what our response to the situation needs to be. 

This is remarkably boilerplate. The mainstream media couldn't have phrased it any better. It's surprising that leaders of the Trotskyist Faction (publishers of Left Voice) can't come up with anything different, given the amazing Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist/Vanguard/Dialectical tools at their disposal. Only the last quoted sentence suggests something unexpected is forthcoming.

Yet there are a few places where our comrades distinguish themselves. The first concerns "Palestine," where they ludicrously claim that Israel is committing "genocide." Without belittling the number of civilian casualties, and even acknowledging the possibility (unlikely, in my view) of war crimes, whatever the Israelis are doing does not rise anywhere near the level of genocide. Even if you take the Hamas figures at face value, under 45,000 people have been killed. This is about 2% of Gaza's population--nowhere close to "genocide." I've covered this before, most recently here

Then Comrades Davis and Vergara insist that today's Trump Republicans are "far" right. I guess the adjective depends on where you sit--if you're way off on the far-left Trotskyist fringe, then the Trumpians must seem as if they come from another planet. But no movement that earns roughly half the vote can be "far" anything. Almost by definition, Trump is a mainstream candidate. He has some supporters that might be classed as "far" right--Steve Bannon comes to mind--but Trump himself is not, and neither are most of his supporters.

Of course our authors are here repeating a Kamala talking point--that Trump is the second coming of "Hitler," no less. Whatever else Trump is, he's not a fascist. He has no army of storm troopers. He's not antisemitic. He doesn't hate Black people or Hispanic people ("Latinx" is how the comrades call them). The speaker list at Madison Square Garden included Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Hindus and women. The event was as American as apple pie.

Most recently, Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, has accused Trump of being a "fascist." To which our comrades respond:

Now, whether Trump meets the more precise political-economic definition of a fascist is a complex question that is too big to discuss here. What we can say, though, is that Kelly is correct that Trump is far-right and wants to take more authoritarian measures. But let’s not forget that the people who sent the cops to break up encampments and brutalize students were usually Democrats. The Democrats, too, are moving toward an increased authoritarianism (though not as blatantly and quickly as Trump is).

So even if he's not a "fascist," he's at least an "authoritarian." I'm not sure what that word means--if it means he's gonna use the powers of the office of the president, then he's like all other presidents. There was nothing that happened during his first term that in any way established him as particularly authoritarian. Mss. Davis and Vergara are right to point out that Democrats are equally authoritarian, though the example they give is not a good one. Encampments, blocking traffic and vandalizing property are not protected speech and any government has an obligation to enforce civic order.

Our friends write,

All this is to say: if Kamala Harris wins the election, the election will likely be challenged in court, along with street demonstrations whose character we cannot predict. On Election Day, MAGA supporters might try to intimidate minority voters and prevent them from voting. If Trump wins, the Democratic Party will likely concede. If this is the case, the party of the donkeys will suffer a profound defeat that it will blame on its progressive wing, the movement for Palestine, or Jill Stein. But the blame for any defeat will rest on the Democrats’ shoulders alone: the party is the graveyard of progressive social demands, and broad sectors of the working class, the middle classes, and the oppressed now understand this.

There are many problems with this paragraph.

  1. The Trump campaign is MUCH better run today than in 2020, and their campaign has been almost error-free. In particular they have competent lawyers who are filing the lawsuits before the election (and winning some of them) which will make the election much fairer than in 2020. Accordingly, I think any argument that the election was stolen will be much weaker this time around.
  2. The Trump campaign is trying very hard to recruit minority voters to their side. Far from trying to "intimidate" them, they're working to get them out to vote--especially Black and Hispanic men.
  3. The so-called "movement for Palestine" is a disgrace. It's really a movement for Hamas--if there ever was a fascist movement, Hamas is it. 
  4. Obviously if the Democrats lose, the fault will fall on the Democrats--though Republicans will surely take some credit for that outcome. 
  5. How our comrades can claim that the Democrats are the "graveyard of progressive social demands" is beyond me. After all, Left Voice's program is 100% identical to that of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party--antisemitism included. So if one is a graveyard, then so is the other.
Comrades Davis and Vergara include these remarks in their final paragraph.
Whoever wins, we will need to fight to protect our rights and win our demands. Hopefully from this united front, a new political party can emerge. A party of workers and the oppressed that fights for socialism. The need to build a political alternative to the current parties is paramount, but so is the fight in the here and now. ... The vanguard and the socialist Left must embrace a revolutionary program and join together to lay the foundation for a new political party of the working class — one that raises high the banner of socialism.

Big words, that. I think Trump will likely win the election, including the popular vote. Which means he'll get at least 75 million votes, and the Democrats only slightly less. Approximately 50 people attended the most recent Left Voice congress. Trotskyists of all denominations have been calling for a labor party since the 1930's, always to no avail. No reason to think our comrade's call today will have a different outcome.

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