Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
With the resurgence of the Democratic Party through the Harris-Walz campaign, the lesser of two evils argument has been injected with a new force. Some argue that to condemn those who oppose genocide-backing politicians as immature and privileged. They claim to take on the burden of sanitizing the Harris-Walz campaign because she is “easier to work with” than Trump, even if she isn’t “perfect”.
However lofty and mature such pragmatism may be, there is nothing more radical than the truth. Such pro-voting arguments are meant to restore confidence in the US government with vague and unfounded claims that Harris and Walz can change their minds, ultimately portraying the US imperialist system as the will of individuals.
In the US, as in all class societies, politicians represent the ruling class because the ruling class wields state power to protect and enact its interests. Under imperialism, money is proportional to political power; simply put, those who control the economy control the distribution of its resources and the means of force to protect and carry out their interests. The imperialists have their political interests organized into parties that utilize the state bureaucracy to manage their affairs. Because the imperialist class is safely in power for the time being, the question of the day for them is not which class will rule, but how to rule. While on the former question the imperialists are wholly united, in the latter question they have disagreements owing to their differing interests as imperialists, and from here we get the two parties that represent these different interests within the unity of imperialism: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
As we have shown elsewhere in The Worker, both parties are beholden to billionaires. Concretely, this looks like shaping policies and the direction of society to benefit the interests of imperialist “donors” (read: bribes), which the politicians require to win their races given the almost 1:1 correlation of spending and winning. This is how money concretely manifests in politics, or in other words, how the economic domination of imperialists correlates to their political rule.
Imperialism itself is characterized by its own decaying trends. Monopolization intensifies over time, meaning increasing concentration of money and power in the hands of fewer people, stifling competition toward increasing domination. These are independent of any individual’s will because they are governed by the economic laws inherent to their mode of production. These trends manifest in the political and social sphere, translating to increased repression, wars, poverty, exploitation, oppression, and all the various crises we find ourselves in today.
Because these trends are inherent to the system, they will continue regardless of who is in office. This means that elections are essentially personality contests of who is more likable, or who is less hated.
The very things Trump was opposed for, Biden-Harris continued and intensified—not because of any particular malice unique to these individuals, but because they are trends. Everyone is “not perfect”, and in the same vein that one can claim that Harris is “not perfect”, someone else can say the same about Trump. To say that Harris is “not perfect” is not only meaningless, but it hides her crimes and sanitizes her image. Being “not perfect” is one thing, actively funding and arming a genocide is another. It also individualizes the problem, as if the economic system and its political and social expressions are up to the whims of individuals in office. Individualizing the problem means also individualizing the solution, ultimately leading to philanthropy. In other words, the imperialist worldview: Get rich and powerful so you can save the world.
The Democratic-aligned NGOs will tell you that it is better to have a sympathetic genocidaire in office than an unsympathetic one so that we can “hold her to account”. The facts already prove the imperialists and their representatives will not and cannot budge on genocide because genocide is a fundamental feature of imperialism, it is not simply a policy of this or that politician. What they can change—and even then, ever so slightly so as to retain support from the Zionist lobby—is their rhetoric and tone, enough to give an impetus to Democrat-aligned organizations operating among the mass movement to pull the masses backwards into the talons of imperialism.
Those who claim they can work more easily with (or to put it more precisely, for) Harris-Walz than Trump are those who are already rubbing elbows with the politicians and are hoping for a bigger seat at their table. And for them it may be entirely true. But for the rest of us who cannot “work with” the imperialists and their representatives, our only option is to demand what we want and take it.
Everything is won by force of the masses, particularly by threats of mass violence. The greater the magnitude of the demands, the greater numbers, greater militancy, far-sighted leadership, organization, and endurance are needed to meet the task. It is not a question of which individual is in power in the government, but a question of the quality and quantity of the mass movement and its leadership. For example, Roe v Wade was passed by conservative supreme court justices appointed by Republican presidents and during the term of a Republican president. It was overturned under a Democratic president. If we want to win demands—a necessary aspect of constructing a revolutionary movement for the seizure of power—it is through the force of organized masses of people.
The danger to mass movements is not who is in power, but the suffocating low-intensity counter-insurgency that the imperialist class deploys to suppress the movement by swaying leaders and turning away the wavering masses. The Democrats deploy this most acutely: their 2020 electoral campaign was able to funnel the movement against police terror to back a “top cop” and now again in 2024, to bring the movement against genocide into the open arms of its top enabler.
It does not require privilege or immaturity to understand this, that we have to fight for demands instead of hoping for bribes. When the anti-imperialist resistance organization Ansarallah in Yemen stated that US elections is the contest between two Zionists, did they say this from a place of privilege and political immaturity? This is a people who, despite being in the midst of their own humanitarian crisis facing starvation and utter destitution from years of US-backed war against them, are militantly acting in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. It seems to then be the privilege and political immaturity—or even cunning—of those activists trying to rally anti-genocide masses behind the Vice Genocidaire.
There is no lesser of two evils; there is just one evil system that all candidates represent. The choice is to endorse it or oppose it. Perpetuating the very basis of oppression by legitimizing it is not harm reduction, it is harm intensification, because it amounts to the continuation and intensification of imperialism’s trends. It trades the promise of bribes—or, in the case of the suffering of the people of Palestine, the promise of being “open to changing”—for legitimizing four more years of imperialist domination, genocide, exploitation, and oppression. To keep endorsing evil is to keep the world on an evil trajectory; let’s not forget that the last “lesser of two evils” is actively funding and arming a genocide, and the current one is too. There is no hope in elections because there is no hope in imperialism; there is only hope in fighting against it and building something new.
