by the Editorial Board
The Worker conducted a political study among workers in the lower strata of manual labor in relation to the upcoming electoral farce. The majority of workers interviewed are Black; we could not find a single one who issued any support for Biden or the Biden administration, in fact all of the workers either expressed support for Donald Trump or varying degrees of cynicism toward voting. Both categories were supported by correct and incorrect ideas. None of the interview subjects exhibited condemnation for electoral politics outright and instead conveyed highly personal reasons. The purpose of this study is to promote election boycott tactics among our class conscious readers.
The main current for opposing Biden was invariably linked to the economy. This manifests sometimes in associating Covid stimulus checks with the Trump administration and going so far as to attribute this pittance to Trump personally, as several workers recalled his signature on the check. Distrust for the government and experience with the failing bureaucratic welfare system, mainly represented by the Democrats, has increased certain tendencies toward hope for a benevolent private sector. Most workers interviewed do not vote and have never voted, but express their support for Trump and hope that he replaces Biden in the November presidential elections. A minority of interviewees expressed that they plan to vote for Trump a second time.
Support among the unprivileged sections of the working class for Trump relies on mainly two things; economic reality expressed in severe and growing capitalist crisis and Trump’s populist rhetoric. The first is evident in the fact that the Democrats boast of economic recovery, denying the severity of economic crisis while the workers feel the brunt of the crisis in their daily lives. They experience racially motivated firings, as (mostly white) skilled workers migrate down due to layoffs, costing lower strata jobs previously worked by a Black majority of unskilled laborers and those who have suffered at the hands of the legal system. Combined with this is the fact that workers who receive a higher rate of pay are let go in favor of new hires who work at a lower rate, forcing the downward job hunt to deepen. The rising cost of food and rent are among the principal grievances of the workers interviewed, and instead of associating all the above trends of the economic crisis with the decomposition of the capitalist system and its society, the workers often find superficial embodiment of the crisis in the personage of Biden.
Covid-19 is considered by the workers interviewed as either a natural disaster or the end result of some horrible conspiracy, and in both cases Trump is absolved and even praised for his handling of it. On the other hand, the post-Covid economic decline is considered as a mere matter of policy. A few workers who participated in the interview expressed that they support Trump not on the basis of his policies, but on his personality and the hope that he will bring chaos and turmoil and shake things up.
The dangers of the increased moral or political support for the ultra-reactionary populists among such sections of workers cannot be understated. While based at least tangentially in real grievances with capitalism, the rhetoric that “Trump is for the people” drags large sections of potentially revolutionary workers (and arguably the masses who should be the most revolutionary) into a decisively reactionary stance. Like their white counterparts, the workers interviewed support populist political violence like the January 6 riot, as well as the mythology created by the Republican Party and will likely deny any election losses. Across the board, support and trust for the bosses of the ruling class in the workplace—despite the exploitation and harsh conditions the bosses subject them to—has also increased alongside an individualism and rejection of collective workplace struggles.
Sections of the US working class who have been historically favorable to left-wing political movements have shifted more and more toward ultra-right populism. In this crisis the so-called left is oblivious and by and large—by way of intellectuals and revisionists—taken in for its own type of false radicalism in the form of identity politics, the rejection of class analysis and of the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism. This is one of many ways in which the economic crisis of the decomposition of capitalism is expressed in a growing political crisis. The masses, and specifically the broader and deeper sections of them, are without even an inkling of revolutionary leadership and are highly susceptible to the false prophets of reaction. Liberal and revisionist (including social-democratic) approaches to the problem only make it worse by pretending to support the working class while in reality providing cover for the continued crises. This veneer has been worn through after decades of playing the same game, and explains the shift in support of Black people and workers from the Democrats to the Republicans over the last half century as well as the general disillusionment in electoral politics.
The tendency among liberal, social democratic and revisionist elements to cry out that Trump supporters are all a pack of racists, or even worse, that they are fascists, has a repelling effect on workers, and not just those who support Trump. The tendency of the false left to focus mainly on traits of victimization is a further repellent to the hardened and struggling working class.
Real fascism is not represented in reality as a major player in either side of the contemporary situation; like communism it cannot currently represent a real, viable option in the class struggle at this stage in US society. The weaknesses of the two are intrinsically linked: without a concrete and practical threat of real communists seizing power, or at least belief in this, the upper echelons of the ruling class are unwilling and unable to go in for fascism, preferring instead to maintain their ability to compete and select who best represents them in the interests of administrating their class dictatorship.
The threat of fascism in the US is therefore no more or less realistic than the threat of communism, when our forces—those aligned with the strategic perspective of working-class interests in the revolutionary seizure of political power—are in shambles, or in a posturing and preposterous farce. Fascism strikes the same pose, and moves about within the broader Trump movement trying to grow its forces, and this is the real threat of fascism which is given cover by the specter of fascism reflexively raised by the so-called left. Hysterics, scare tactics, and playing victim do nothing to salvage the workers from the clutches of deception, and instead draw them further into the gravitational pull of reactionary populism, of the rural bandit wielding the cudgel in the name of fatherland.
Likewise, the incessant appeals to “democracy,” that is to say, bourgeois democracy which has undergone utter decomposition, has absolutely no positive effect on those who we spoke to, those who have been marginalized by US “democracy” for their entire lives. It has reached a point in which the workers so marginalized by “democracy” have begun to find appeals in that which seems the most anti-democratic.
The masses themselves, and the honest and hard workers we have interviewed are not to blame for their situation, nor their views. On the contrary we blame the left, which includes our own organizations. The main culprit in the growth of right-wing ideology among the lower classes is our own amateurishness, our own backwardness when it comes to enhancing class consciousness that unites workers instead of accepting ideologies that disperse them. Politically this manifests in the so-called “left’s” failures to combat both the Democrats and nationalism in mainstream politics. Instead of these valid and necessary fights, the modern, that is, the postmodern left, has instead created a mosaic of individualist causes focusing on every manner of micro interpersonal issues, and at the expense of a broad class-based perspective.
Socialists can and must provide the answers starting now. This cannot be thought of without conscious, outright rejection of bourgeois politics, something the left has not accomplished. On top of this, deep and serious integration must get on the agenda, starting with explanations of the differences between real socialism and social-democratic capitulation, cutting through the base level anti-communism and especially the popular association of communism with the most wretched liberals and postmodernists. Right-wing rhetoric relies heavily on this association to divert the workers in the struggle for class consciousness, and it is far more effective than the conventional hysterics about Stalin etc.
There is no basis for a revival of the antifascist popular front, and especially not one which reduces the decomposition of bourgeois democracy to a comparison with fascism. Such misunderstandings of historic process only end up carrying water for the Democrats; they appeal to the small-propertied class and alienate the working class. The conscious development of the Election Boycott is the only tactic providing a way forward for revolutionaries in mass work. They must convert the fact that workers do not vote into the politically conscious act of boycotting the elections, not only by exposing the reactionary trickery of Trump’s populism, but also attacking the reactionary role of the Democrats that drive workers into the swamp of Trumpism.
