Electoral Circuses, No Bread

For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Democrats, Republicans: Partner Parties of War and Racism

While workers suffer the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with unemployment and foreclosures threatening the livelihoods and lives of millions, including those with no “safety net” whatsoever, the 2010 midterm elections are a circus, and a sick one at that. The capitalists’ ideologues and editorialists tell you to take your pick: the Wall Street Democrats or the billionaires’ club of the Republicans, with their racist and socially retrograde Tea Party wing. Parading as rebels against “big government,” the Tea Party movement, composed mainly of enraged elements of the petty bourgeoisie, is funded by big bourgeois interests for electoral purposes. It’s the usual shell game, the bosses’ con, with the labor misleaders and black bourgeois politicians mobilizing working people and minorities to “fight the right”—i.e., vote Democrat.

In this game, the racist capitalist rulers always win, as the working people once again are lined up, against their own class interests, behind the supposedly more benign face of this system of exploitation, oppression and war. A recent memo from AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman obtained by the New York Times documents a massive campaign to get out the union vote. The memo complains that corporations and right-wing groups “are spending record amounts of undisclosed money to lie to voters about which candidates will fight for the middle class” and raises a call to fight for “economic patriots who will stand with working people.” Here in capsule form is the class collaborationism that defines the outlook of the labor misleaders. For them, wage workers are a part of a great “middle class” of Americans who share common national interests with the capitalist exploiters.

This myth is ingrained in the dominant bourgeois ideology, which obscures the class line dividing the tiny class of capitalists—the owners of industry and the banks, whose driving interest is profit—from the working class—i.e., those who sell their labor power to the capitalists. As the bosses’ labor lieutenants, the union bureaucracy has increasingly sacrificed the class-struggle weapons that built the unions in the first place—strikes, plant occupations, mass labor protest. As a result, the union movement is at a historic low point, at a time when the capitalists are trying to make the working people pay for the economic crisis.

All over the capitalist world, the working class is facing austerity measures and union-busting. In response, Europe has seen an outbreak of defensive labor struggles, sometimes massive. These have been directed against capitalist governments of both the right, such as Sarkozy’s in France, and the left, such as Zapatero’s Socialist party regime in Spain. As we go to press, a national day of action is taking place in France, where strikes and protests mainly against attacks on pensions have recently drawn in public employees, oil refinery workers and truck drivers as well as working-class and minority high school youth. But the workers’ reformist misleaders are simultaneously pushing virulent economic protectionism, which binds the workers and their unions to “their own” ruling classes, whipping up racist reaction against immigrants and dividing workers along national lines. That program disarms the workers, blocking the road to the only way out of capitalism’s ruinous boom-bust cycles: proletarian revolution, leading to a Socialist United States of Europe. (read on)