U.S. Presidential Election: There’s No Lesser Evil

Athens, Greece Oct 18 2024   Outraged dock workers in Piraeus stopped a truck carrying ammunition bound for Israel from entering the port, saying they will not allow the port to become a transit point for the deadly war machine of the state of Israel. Some of these workers got in touch with a friend of ICWP.  They were impressed that younger workers were stepping up to prevent genocide.

Evil vs. Evil on the Ballot

LOS ANGELES (USA), October 21—“I am not voting for Trump, but I don’t want to vote for genocide either,” a student told a comrade over coffee. Harris’s campaign for presidency might have been more convincing if the U.S. working class had not already lived through a Trump administration and the Biden administration where Harris was second in command. The working class sees no difference.

“I won’t be voting at all,” responded the comrade. “I’m a communist, which means I’m for the working-class taking power, not politicians.”

The Democratic Party is rolling out their same tricks: calling Trump a threat to “freedom” and the working class. But Harris’ track record as a prosecutor in California coupled with her support of Israel has turned a lot of traditional Democratic voters off. In response, President Obama and others have wagged their finger at the working class’s disgust.

Different faces, same capitalist, imperialist administration

None of them is any good. One of the candidates promotes race war, one of them World War III. And whoever wins, the US is moving toward both. The only real choice is revolution.

ICWP does not support any bosses or politicians in any election. The working class knows Trump is bad news, but Harris is the candidate who has divided the working class. Her identity has been pushed to the forefront to show that the working class can trust her. Yeah, right. She’s a woman of color who completely supports genocide in Gaza. She uses the deceptive catch phrase of fully “supporting Israel’s right to defend itself.” Many of the workers and students who have participated in the “Free Palestine” movement are clear that neither Republicans nor Democrats serve working class interests. Now they need to be convinced that communist revolution is the answer.

Even if Harris was credible—which she’s not—we don’t rely on key individuals. Even Hamas knows that their resistance will go on without Yahya Sinwar. But we also know that a movement that does not involve the masses, that operates in an isolated manner, makes the masses defenseless in the face of attack. Only by mobilizing the masses in a communist-led collective can we defeat capitalist-imperialism and build the communist world we need.

As we go to press, the Zionist entity is engaged in an aggressively genocidal policy in the north of Gaza. Four hundred thousand people have been encircled. No food has gotten into the north for two weeks. People ordered to leave are bombed as they leave. People who stay are killed. Men are rounded up and marched off in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi death marches. The Biden-Harris administration has given the Israeli government 30 days to show that they will allow some food aid into the north—if there is anyone left alive to eat it by then. And they continue to fully fund this genocide.

This is a war to protect the role of the US dollar as the world reserve currency trading in oil. But this is the US’s wishful thinking. More and more oil transactions are not conducted in dollars. US imperialists and their allies in decline are willing to commit genocide to protect their investments in natural gas off the Gaza coast and for control of Mediterranean shipping lanes. They fear that Iran and Russia will corner the market for the oil necessary for World War III.

No Workers Are Safe

History tells us that the bombs that blow families to pieces in Gaza today will blow families to pieces in the US and Europe tomorrow.

The first systematic use of strategic bombing [bombing civilians] was by the British in Iraq in 1924. They bombed the city of Mosul and its surrounding villages, which had refused to pay taxes to the Empire. After two days of bombing and seven hundred dead, Mosul surrendered, and the British military declared a swift victory.

 In 1932-34, Britain prevented a worldwide disarmament conference from banning strategic bombing. Within 10 years of this Geneva conference, the Nazi blitz rained bombs night after night on nearly every major city in Britain, obliterating Coventry and wiping out a third of the housing in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Birmingham.

Join ICWP and Fight for a Communist World

Whoever becomes president will violently defend US capitalism-imperialism. We are living in an historical moment characterized by a general crisis of capitalism worldwide. This crisis is driving an intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry that is increasingly engulfing the globe into World War III. The onslaught of terror unleashed on the Palestinian masses, the armed conflicts raging in several African countries, the destruction in Ukraine, as well as the crisis in Taiwan are but a few examples of the sharpening rivalry among imperialists.

In the midst of all this, the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) is growing internationally. From Israel and Palestine to India and South Africa, from El Salvador to the United Sates and beyond, workers are joining the party and are organizing to mobilize the masses for communism.   Only a mass ICWP worldwide will turn capitalist-imperialist world war into a communist revolution for workers’ power. Workers and students involved in these campaigns and protests against the horrors of capitalism, imperialism, and war, join us! Help create the future we need and deserve.

Front page of this issue