Editorial
Both of the parties of the big business capitalist class are fiending for working class votes—the diminishing trend of workers voting has put the parasites into a state of withdrawal. Now it is time for them to lie and swindle and guilt trip you straight to the ballot box.
The big money parties historically pander to the well educated and rich, but once they had beat back the influence of Communists and socialists on the working class they have seen us more and more as a prize to win come voting time—they need this prize to put a dressing on their rule, to make it seem like they represent the will of the people.
The Democrats
The Democratic Party had a hard time after the civil war; it took them years get over the stain of slavery, that their party was the biggest advocates for it, that they split the country in two and waged an unjust war just to keep men and women in chains, working for free. Now they have the nerve to pretend they are not a pack of racists. The Democrats in the period of the 1960s remade themselves; they used their money and connections to the media to get this makeover—they called their southern counterparts “Dixiecrats” and pretended to care about labor.
Today they are feeling real pressure. The shrinking pool of working class voters have been seeing the abuse and lies of this party for too long, we have wised up to the fact that they are not about us. The reverse side to this coin is that some of our class brothers and sisters have gone over to Republican populism. The Democrats know this; they are scared of both trends and they are plotting to overcome this condition.
The pressure felt by the Democrats has everything to do with the economy and their own hypocrisy. Working people have been clear that things are not getting better for us financially. The Democrats are scratching their heads, insisting that the economy is “good.” It might be good for them, but we have money worth less than it was and food that costs more than it did. We know our wages are not adding up and everywhere we say the same thing; we need more money. Many jobs forget that there is even such a thing as an 8 hour work day, and we are missing our kids growing up. Meanwhile, the Democratic party has only two things going to it: its pandering to the ruling class intellectuals and all their pet causes, and the fact that they are not the Republicans. Those are not appealing prospects for any honest working person.
The working class is justified in what the Democrats only see as pessimism when it comes to the state, the unions, and infrastructure, as these have done nothing but betray us. The vultures can only see as ignorance and backwardness us coming more and more to our senses about what is in our actual interests.
Working people already understand the limited utility of college degrees, as those of us who can go broke sending our kids to college then see them go on to the drudgery of low paying jobs. The ruling class cannot offer us a way out of the crisis they have caused.
To save themselves from the increasing abandonment of their historical base among the relatively few workers who still vote, the Democrats are sure to increase their “pragmatic” approach to swindling, without losing their support among the educated strata of intellectuals and professionals. They will appeal to the more backward and jingoistic tendencies among our class. Nonetheless, the trend of workers who do vote leaving the stables of the Democratic party is one that is set to continue.
The Republicans
The Republican Party has long been seen by the working class as the party of the country club class. A not insignificant section of workers who still vote has gone over to support this party. This is not without reason—workers who have been taught by experience that the state is an apparatus of the exploiting class can be convinced that all the talk of “small government” and “free markets” is a reasonable alternative to the large governmental spending the Democrats have come to represent. The Republicans have been able to make use of the contradiction between the people and the old-state. This also has to do with the illusions and particularities of the country’s history.
The mythology surrounding the country works in two main ways: the first is through racist and nationalistic ideology which goes back to the founding documents of the US, and the second is represented by the same documents which refute class privilege.
Sections of the working class still want to become bosses and stop being workers; they have been convinced that working hard will allow them to buy themselves out of the bondage of work. So they favor ideas of a “middle class” and a market based on small proprietors with stronger local control and less influence of the federal government. In the radical expression of libertarianism there is no state at all, but most are smart enough to see through this and end up being pulled to the right-wing forms of libertarianism—which is the domination of the owning class in another disguise. The class conscious workers can already see through these distortions. Libertarian promises put all the controls in the hands of the boss; there is no way to force accountability or oversight. We know that “doing right by the workers” is something that has to be forced, otherwise profits will be the only consideration when it comes to safety and living conditions.
The most backward—and often the most vocal—workers have for a long time been convinced that the threat to their jobs does not come from the bosses and owners but from fellow workers. They experience the loss of jobs when a factory or plant is moved to another country, when cheap labor is used to replace a workforce, and through this some have swallowed the poisoned pill of jingoism. Some workers are drawn into the swindle of the Republican party on the question of “illegal immigration.” It must be made clear by all real defenders of our class that the workers of Mexico are not “taking our jobs.” They are forced to work for cheap by the very same scoundrels that lay us off. The fight for wages has to extend to all so that undercutting cannot be used against workers so easily.
The entire apparatus of racism exists to maintain basic stratification, to create sections of the class who face so much poverty and discrimination that they will take the dregs of labor and always be ready to take a better job even if it means less pay. This kind of competition means that there is a limit on wages for all workers; it keeps all of us from making enough money. To combat this competition, racial chauvinism must be combated with solidarity at every turn. We must keep saying it: the US government, on behalf of the owners of banks and monopolies, has acted parasitically on the world, ruining economies and propping up the worst kind of submissive puppets in governments of other countries—this is the main reason the poor of other countries are forced to become a cheap labor force in this one. We workers cannot go in for the rich man’s swindle and blame the poor and disinherited; we cannot go siding with the rich here and taking on their racist fantasies. We have to fight this trend among ourselves and challenge the backward workers at every turn. If they will turn on the immigrants for the boss, then they will turn on you too, because they believe in getting to the top—no matter how unrealistic and no matter who they have to abuse.
We have all heard it: hard work pays off. Why is it then that the most difficult and back breaking jobs pay the least? Why is it that we destroy our bodies meeting ungodly paces with insane quotas? In fact, the opposite is true. To be good in business you have to be first connected to the propertied classes, trusted by the bankers, and have some kind of safety net for when the whole thing might come apart; and, most importantly, you have to have more money to invest than most workers will ever be able to save up. We live in a time where owning even a small home is a pipe dream to the vast majority of workers, and hanging on to what little we have requires killing ourselves every day to go to hell at the same factory.
While the Republican swindle is more tantalizing to some workers, and while most workers are sick to death of the Democrats, the Republicans are no better and no less subservient to the ultra-rich. They use the same hysterics and scandals as their counterparts, though sometimes inverted. If we hate the unions for betraying us, they will tell us we need better bosses and not better unions. If we hate the government for draining us of too much tax money, they will tell us we need more roads run by private corporations, and we still have to pay for them one way or another. If we are sick of low wage jobs, they will insist that undocumented workers have taken all the good ones, when in fact they have only accepted the worst ones and for even less pay.
The Republicans are riding high on their war-horse; they are happy to present themselves as not only the party of the country clubs, but the party of the local bar as well, the party of the every-man, and the party of common sense and American values. At every turn they will insist that it is not the fault of the rich that we are so poor, that it is our own fault, and the fault of the educated elites, regardless of how they earn their money or how little they earn. They will jump on every backward idea our class has about itself and run with it, bringing everything to a state where local tyrants pass decision executively, where we have to pay our stretched-out dollars and cents to private profiteers for all of life’s necessities.
Boycott the 2024 Elections
Both parties represent the state and work within it. The state is the armed administrative wing of the class that is in power, and in the US this has always been the capitalist class. They formed the monopolies and financial cartels, they plunder the world, they equate their excessive wealth with national prosperity, and we who cannot live without servitude know just the limits of national prosperity. The entire system is set up for those who make their livings off our hard work, it is not set up for us.
The most dangerous con to be tricked by is that the state is a neutral force for mitigation, it is not neutral and it cannot be neutral—as long as money dominates everything those who have it will have power over those who do not. When presidential elections are costing upward of $14 billion, we know damn well these clowns are bought and paid for by the rich, and no talk about ideals can erase that knowledge.
It should come as no surprise that most working class people do not vote. We workers do not vote because we know better. We do not vote because we are not willing to be tricked by this or that stuffed shirt. Because, once the elections are through and either way they go, we will continue having to work and things will continue getting worse for us, as it has been for more than 50 years. We workers do not vote, not because we hate the idea of deciding or because we do not care about what happens in politics, but because we have no options, and this government which is a government of the rich cannot possibly offer us any.
Working men and women, those of us who still vote, stop! Stop endorsing these people; they are only going to use your endorsement against your own class. The decision not to vote is a political decision to withhold support from that which directly harms us. It is a rational decision, and it is the first step in the long conversation we need to have about what to replace this rotten system with.
