Early Wednesday morning, with a victory in Wisconsin that put him above the required 270 electoral votes, Trump won the presidential elections. While it will take days to know the final count, he looks set to win both the electoral college and the popular vote, and has cinched every battleground state.
With Republicans cinching other key races, Trump’s heading back to the White House with what looks to be a Republican-led Congress and will have a right wing supreme Court.
In what is a rightward shift nationally, whether city or country, red or blue states, Trump increased his proportion of the vote across the board. He made an important headway among Black men, Latinos, and men under the age of 30. More independents voted than Democrats this election too, which is indicative of a lack of enthusiasm around Harris around the party’s base.
Trump’s decisive victory is likely to open up a period of huge attacks on the working class and oppressed given that, unlike in 2016, Trumpism now stands hegemonic within the Republican party.
But we have no time to despair. We have to organize our ranks and unite our struggles to fight the far right.
Thrust into the race after Biden withdrew 4 months ago, Harris struggled through her campaign to differentiate herself from the current administration.
Where she tried, she tacked to the right on most every issue, including immigration, climate change, trans rights and the military. She had little to offer to the progressive wing of her party or the new generation which is unionizing workplaces, fighting for their rights, and fighting against the genocide in Palestine.
Instead, she offered empty platitudes, relying on the fight to “defend democracy” to drive numbers for her to the polls. This at a time when Democrats have, at best, done little to build any meaningful resistance to the attacks on democratic rights carried out by Trumpists at both federal and state levels over the last four years, or, at worst, been the ones to unleash repression like against the Palestine protests.
Meanwhile, millions of working people, increasingly disenfranchised by a party that supposedly spoke to their aspirations, and feeling the worsening economic conditions, saw some part of their lives represented in Trump’s campaign, as he spoke to the deteriorating conditions the working class and thumped on about putting “main street over Wall street””.
But let’s be absolutely clear: Trump has NOTHING to offer to the working class but more misery. For all his talk, Trump’s policies are geared towards making his capitalist buddies like Elon Musk richer – all of which will come on the backs of even more precarious working conditions for all of us.
His hateful rhetoric against immigrants is geared towards dividing our ranks, to make us believe in the lie that the immigrants and workers across the world are the problem – not the bosses who exploit us here and our class siblings across the borders. He also based the end of his campaign on a fierce anti-trans politics, trying to turn people against trans rights.
He tempts a sector of our class with promises of some crumbs while he plans on unleashing absolute terror on everyone else, attacking our rights. He uses fear to sow divisions in our ranks.
But it doesn’t have to be this way – there is another way.
Against any attack by Trump and his base, to fight against the advance of this ultra-reactionary far right, we have to unite our struggles and fight with one fist.
We have seeds of this already – in the generation of anti-Zionist youth who took to the streets and occupied universities, who stood up against the complicity of U.S. imperialism in Israel’s genocide. We have it in the labor movement, where workers have been organizing and striking for better conditions and been fighting for their unions to break with Zionism.
As the multi millioned, diverse working class, we have a tremendous power – we are the one who make everything run. We need to leverage that power, and fight for a united front that can fight against every attack levied by the far-right.
For years, the Democratic party has blown smoke in our faces, disorganizing our ranks and co-opting our struggles for their own political ends. They are not coming to save us. It’s about time we broke up.
Against the cycles of capitalist despair, and instead of relying on the very powers who oppress us, it is time we organized ourselves as a political force that can not only fight the right, but can also organize our class to fight for its own program – and take up the fight for socialism.
We have no time to lose.
Originally Published: 2024-11-08 11:16:24
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