Elections: Fighting for Basic Needs in the Fall Campaign
By the League Basic Needs Electoral Committee
But with the stakes so high, the rulers are tactically divided around exactly when and how to crack down. The Project 2025 section of the ruling class plan openly intends to start cracking down in January 2025 by reorganizing the state and drowning any opposition in blood. The other section – including everyone from Republican Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney to Democratic corporate shills like Nancy Pelosi – prefers a more cautious approach of escalating reaction and postponing the risky Project 2025 measures. This grouping recently took the dramatic step of replacing Joe Biden, who was headed to certain electoral defeat, with Kamala Harris. Their intention is to stabilize the status quo and disarm the workers, by appearing to support democracy and some of their demands, while still holding onto complete corporate control of the state.
WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE
The most advanced workers on the fronts of struggle were already organizing to try to stop Project 2025 and secure their positions in the event that it won, for example, by preparing raid defenses, by doubling down on organizing drives and by protecting unhoused encampments. The emergence of the Harris campaign and the real possibility that it could defeat Project 2025 in November caused a sudden surge of hope, voter registration and attention to the electoral arena, especially among young people.
The ruling class always works to ensure its control regardless of which party wins the election. The Republicans and their Project 2025 relentlessly promote hatred of migrants, women, the environment, people of color, LGBTQ people, and low-wealth workers in order to block any form of working-class unity. The pro-corporate Democrats oppose the most extreme forms of this hatred, but their corporate agenda prevents them from defending real working-class unity. The Biden-Harris attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters and on migrants at the border and California governor Gavin Newsom’s attack on the unhoused are clear examples.
Pro-corporate Democrats also fight to tie the workers to corporate capitalism by repeatedly insisting that the private property economy is working and that Democrats represent the best interests of workers. The Harris economic agenda announced on August 16 contains important incremental improvements, especially the child tax credit and medical debt relief, but does not propose the structural reforms necessary to actually meet the needs of the people. The role of revolutionaries is to always expose the corporate agenda wherever it appears.
THE POLITICAL MOMENT
The vast majority of working-class organizations – unions, tenant associations, community organizations, etc. – have already decided to support the Harris campaign. Most are motivated by the urgency of defeating the mass deportations, internment camps, and absolute impoverishment in Project 2025. Revolutionaries dare not ignore this motion, because it offers the opportunity to meet and influence tens of millions of the most advanced basic needs fighters.
The Harris campaign is supported by the Working Families Party, Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice), Seed the Vote, and Movement for Black Lives. They organized a “Progressives for Harris” Zoom call on August 5 attended by 150,000 participants. Whether they openly advocate it or not, many of these organizations are part of the objective, long-term anti-corporate third-party movement that is coalescing both inside and outside the Democratic Party. They are not tied to the Democratic corporate leadership. As WFP national director Maurice Mitchell wrote, “We must block MAGA extremists from seizing governing power and we must build the most viable, durable political vehicle that is beholden and accountable to the people and not the wealthy and corporations.”
Elections offer broader opportunities for revolutionary messaging than any other social motion, aside from general strikes and insurrections. They are an arena for raising all the workers’ basic needs demands – and explaining that the private property system as it exists will never be able to meet them. But we also explain that when we fight for them, we begin the process of political revolution that will lead to economic and social transformation. When we struggle for decommodification of basic human needs, we begin to point the way toward a cooperative society that will treat these needs as human rights. We build the political power necessary to abolish the corporations and eliminate the danger of fascism altogether. Voting is about tactically casting a ballot with a strategic political purpose: fighting for the most favorable conditions for advancing the revolutionary movement. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to use those favorable conditions to disseminate their vision and strategy for building the sustainable and peaceful society that is possible when workers control the means of creating wealth and distribute the product according to need.
Published on August 29, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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“As people struggle to survive war, climate catastrophe, poverty, and pandemic, a new fascist state form is arising to crush us – the naked rule of corporate power.” ..”The battle is a class struggle because the ruling class is the enemy of humanity and the earth itself.” from the Program of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America:
https://lrna.org/lrna-program/
