Editorial Board
The popular vote in the United States is nothing but a pageant. It exists as an illusion to trick the people into believing that their vote is their main tool for improving life. It is designed to beautify the decrepit and decomposing electoral system. It does nothing in terms of determining the presidency, this comes down to the votes of the electors who are selected by the ruling class imperialist political parties.
While the fantasy of participation in the process allows the imperialist parties to maintain a facade of popular support, the popular vote in the vast majority of states has no authority over the decisions of the electors making up the Electoral College. Each presidential election comes down to the decision of those who are already paid members of the Democratic or Republican parties. These electors end up selecting the candidate who they consider can best serve the interests of their imperialist masters—the finance capitalist class—and there is nothing your vote can do to change this.
US democracy was born seriously deformed, trailing behind the accomplishments of the nascent revolutionary bourgeois democracies around the world, even preserving the practice of slavery. From the beginning, US democracy granted greater control to the executive branch, lending itself toward the individualist rule of the president, awarding this office more power than was enjoyed by the King of Britain at the time. As US capitalism developed into imperialism and the US became the world’s sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, this authority has only increased. In 2020, the Supreme Court held that “the entire executive power belongs to the president alone” and that the president cannot be prosecuted for criminal acts. The most powerful individual in the government is selected by political agents who no one voted for.
With every election cycle, presidents belonging to both ruling parties expand their powers further, while the other party cries foul. Obama, Trump, and Biden have each expanded their powers effectively, assuring whoever is the next president selected by the imperialist ruling class to control the state bureaucracy will continue this trend of reactionization against bourgeois democracy even further.
For all of these reasons, a class conscious boycott of the electoral farce is the only just and correct political and moral decision that can be made by revolutionaries and class-conscious workers. Such a campaign takes the existing reality and confronts it with a new path, that of opposition to the legitimacy of what is materially illegitimate. The boycott is also then the only actually democratic approach to the elections, which today fundamentally act against democratic rights.
What do the revolutionaries propose in opposition to the nauseating pageantry of ruling class illusions? The struggle to unite under the only revolutionary ideology of the international proletariat, to create the organizational forms inside of the class struggle which on every level can increase class consciousness, guiding and fighting for the true interests of the people. In this way, the election boycott is a tactic serving the reconstitution of the Communist Party.
Organization is the best weapon of the working class, which is the class that can secure the interests of all oppressed people. These interests include the more modest day-to-day battles, the things the masses of people require in order to survive: decent wages, decent houses, proper healthcare and education, the preservation and expansion of democratic rights, and the right to fight back against police terror and state oppression. Surviving under capitalist exploitation is not enough, however. These fights remain ongoing, facing constant threat from the ruling class. It is not enough to conquer victories in any combination of these, the fundamental thing is political power, safeguarding all conquests and continuing the revolution until all classes have been obliterated, when imperialism and reaction are swept from the face of the earth. For the real and lasting improvement to life, political power for the working class is necessary, and from the rule of the workers, resting on the weapons seized from our current rulers, a new life will flourish.
What to Expect Once the Popular Vote has Concluded?
In the final hours leading up to election day, a day in which the masses are allowed and encouraged to grant their approval to the genocidal officials and their official policies, but not allowed to make the final decision on who they are to be, the two representatives of imperialism were bracing themselves to cry that their election was stolen.
The same “stop the steal” slogans and tactics from four years ago were unpacked, large scale, and fabricated stories flourished on social media. Claims abound of undocumented Haitian immigrants casting votes and Canadians crossing the border to vote for Harris in the wake of Trump’s claims that the state of Pennsylvania is primed to falsify votes. He accused the state of “cheating” and called on law enforcement to “act now.”
The Democrat-endorsing monopoly media, knowing the Democrats will be unable to secure a considerable lead, issued their own version of a stolen election claim, with The Atlantic expressing that “the possibility we should fear the most is the one we still have a chance to prevent: the United States Congress overturning the election,” expressing that this failed last time because of the clear majority of electoral votes awarded to Biden and the concern that Harris will not come out so far ahead. Rolling Stone writes of a “myriad scenarios for congressional Republicans to try to steal the election for Trump on Jan. 6, 2025.”
As both parties primed their supporters for claims of a stolen election just days before November 5th, they show the true character of the bankrupt elections and how desperate they are to seize control of the state bureaucracy from their colleagues, while further presenting them as enemies before the people, when in reality they represent the same class interests and preserve very similar policies on all major issues. In short, the whole scene was one of serious degeneration, which sets the tone for the days to come.
On November 5th, as polls in several states open early, all figures coming in are too close to count. Al Jazeera reports that the latest polls show a tie between Harris and Trump. As The Worker has indicated for some time, this is connected to the way in which the farce develops and rots, creating the inflated importance attributed to it, and allowing both parties to contest its results.
The elections unfold amid the global economic crisis of imperialism, a crisis of overproduction which has entered the cycle of rising costs of living combined with lay-offs, firings and less job availability. Much of the monopoly media downplays the crisis, following the same playbook as the Democratic Party, boasting of the best economy in the world. And while profits are up (and this is what they are bragging about), the spending power of the masses’ paychecks are not. This condition has been used and distorted by the electoral farce. Related to this, the strikes and attempts at strikes among the proletariat have been stifled and sidelined by the union bureaucracy, who have come out in support of the Democrats as predicted. Both the conditions responsible for the strikes and the things done to reduce their impact on the capitalists get bound up with the elections.
Nothing in the bag of tricks of the professional swindlers, clowns and con-artists passing for politics in the US is capable of much more than a tied race between two genocidal characters, culminating in contesting the invalid results of an illegitimate process.
Consistent with their opportunism and revisionism, organizations like the “Revolutionary Communist Party” and “Party for Socialism and Liberation” are attempting to ride the mass discontent with the Democrats while burying their endorsements for the Democrats 4 years ago. The court fool of revisionism and leader of the RCP, Bob Avakian, this year has pivoted to his call: “Why I am not running for President” while decrying the same “bourgeois electoral bullshit” he endorsed the last election cycle under the specter of fascism, all the while arguing that he is the only one “really talking about revolution”. While he is certainly not the only bourgeois politician not running for president, he is the only bourgeois politician talking about not running for president.
The PSL has been “running” their presidential candidate—who cannot even get on most ballots—to the finish this election, whereas normally they generate campaigns only to give them up and call on the people they have contacted to vote Democrat. The genocide in Palestine and the fact that the Democrats are the main ones behind it have disrupted the PSL approach to the electoral farce, they have moved to denouncing both candidates as genocidal while still trying to legitimize the illegitimate electoral circus, unwilling to call it what it is and boycott it.
Others among the false “Communists” and the social-fascists maintain their support for Kamala Harris no matter how thoroughly drenched in the blood of Palestinians she is. The ossified revisionists of “People’s World”, an organ of the revisionist so-called “Communist Party”, go so far in tailing the Democrats that they wrote, one day before the election: “The 2024 election is a major battle in the class struggle in our country,” adding that, “our side has its own power: unity. Our votes, when we cast them collectively and strategically to block the road to fascism, can beat the billionaires.”
“Jacobin”, the misnamed rag of social democracy in the US, laments that Harris just might lose because her rhetoric in the election was not populist enough and unable to target the “elites”, almost self-aware that the imperialist politicians must say one thing while doing another. Evident among the two revisionist organs is the specter of fascism and the idea that genocide is a simple “policy” of US imperialism and not a necessary ingredient to its global hegemony.
All evidence concludes that the economic, political, social, and moral crises gripping the country are only going to degenerate further. The task is clear: cast aside illusions and prepare for struggle. The revolutionaries have the specific task of uniting under the only all-powerful and scientific ideology of the international proletariat: Maoism, with the election boycott in its service. Ideological unity is the first question of our times, and the conditions make this prospect increasingly necessary. There is greater criticism of the elections among the masses, and as things develop the disgust rightly felt by the people must be developed by active elements into revolutionary politics. The main and most glaring thing is that the working class lacks its political Party, which is the Communist Party, that fights to become the recognized vanguard; it must be reconstituted. This is not possible without unity under Maoism. The Communist Party will not be reconstituted by dispersed groups from the bottom up, it cannot treat the question of centralism as an afterthought.
The Worker expects that regardless of who gains control over the state bureaucracy and heads the government, the growing rejection of imperialist politics and policy, the increasing difficulties faced by the masses, and the intensification of class struggle will produce more and better revolutionaries. There is no such thing as a revolutionary not forged in struggle. All organizations will mature and make leaps in the struggle to unite under Maoism, combating imperialism, revisionism and reaction inseparably and implacably.
