The Significance of November 5 and What Next?

Statement of Socialist Organizer on the November 5 Elections

(November 9, 2024)

If one were to go by the corporate media’s account of the November 5 election, one would have to conclude that the electorate has dramatically shifted rightward toward fascism and that the U.S. working class and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities suffered an historic defeat. They would be wrong.

What was defeated on November 5 was the orientation of the misleaders of Labor and BIPOC communities toward the Democratic Party — its false expectation that supporting Democrats, however radical their rhetoric – can somehow be a bulwark against the rising tide of fascism. Not so.

True, working people and oppressed BIPOC communities were dealt a serious blow. True, the attacks from an emboldened government and corporate elite will be stepped up.

 A defeat, however, would mean that the U.S. trade union movement and BIPOC organizations have been irreparably smashed, and immigrants rounded and deported en masse, which is not the case, yet. 

To claim defeat at this moment would mean that working people and BIPOC communities have no chance of redressing the situation in favor of all the exploited and oppressed – a task that we still can, and we must, carry out post haste.

Trump Has No Mandate! A Referendum Against the Democrats!

Not everyone was taken in by Trump’s circus. A growing number of voters stayed home on Election Day as a form of protest. It has been called a “Turnout Collapse!” 

With 93% of the vote counted, Trump was elected by approximately 50.5% of those who voted while Harris got 47.9% of the vote. Notably, only about 26% of the voting-age population voted for Trump. In fact, Trump did not receive more votes than he did in 2020 (he received approximately the same), while Harris garnered 10.9 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020.

These statistics alone belie the claim that Trump has a rightwing mandate from the American people. The rightwing vote did not grow, but the vote for the Democrats certainly collapsed: by nearly 11 million!

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, funded and controlled by the billionaire class. It cannot be wielded to advance workers’ interests. The Harris campaign, following in the traditions of past Democratic presidents, alienated working people and helped to pave the way to a Republican victory. Tellingly, even red states like Nebraska and Missouri that voted for Trump also passed pro-worker measures to increase the minimum wage and enact paid sick-leave. Far from a right-wing mandate the corporate media would have us believe. 

Some Reasons Explaining the Democrats’ Debacle

• Newsweek magazine (November 7) ran a feature story titled, ‘Why Did Democrats Reject Harris?” Their main answer centered on the economy. “Voters became disillusioned over the high level of inflation in the post-COVID years. … The economic crisis was largely ignored, and so the voters took their frustrations out on Harris.”

• Intercept magazine (November 7) quoted Kandice Cabeza, a worker in North Philadelphia, on this issue:

“What are you [Harris] doing for the people? What’s changing with the cost of living, food, medical assistance, medical bills – all things that count. I haven’t heard about this. They are feuding about who will be Number One, but what about us?” 

• The Kamala Harris campaign oriented primarily toward “neo-cons” like war criminal Dick Cheney. This “tactical shift to the center” did not win new voters to her campaign; in fact, it drove many away.

• The Harris campaign promoted harsh border and immigration policies, barely distinguishable from those of Trump. Harris did not disavow Trump’s policy. Instead she only criticized Trump for blocking its implementation during the Biden/Harris administration.

• Like Biden, Harris supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza (in Lebanon, and the West Bank, too) refusing to separate herself from Genocide Joe on this issue. And this, despite the fact that poll after poll showed that voters supported a ceasefire and that many also supported ending U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

* Harris’s economic plan, which was mainly kept under wraps, was crafted by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It did not speak to the needs and demands of working people.

• On the issue of abortion rights: The Democrats were counting on women turning out to oppose Trump’s abortion bans and SCOTUS’s decisions. This was a major Harris campaign rallying cry. They expected that it would carry them over the hump. 

Fifty-four percent of women who voted did so for the Democrats, but that was in no way an outpouring. Women took matters into their own hands by ballot measures, even in states that went for Trump. (Seven out of 10 of these states passed pro-abortion measures. The key southern state of Florida would have, too, were it not for a 60% threshold, that even so was almost met with 57% voting in favor of abortion protections.)

Harris, as Biden, had nothing to offer women, their position being that Harris would sign a bill if it crossed her desk. Women in the U.S. know that it is more likely that hell will freeze over first. 

The Democrats didn’t act even when they had control of the Congress and approved every budget – even though it included the Hyde Amendment restricting funding for abortion. That is just the tip of how the Democrats have run away time and again from abortion as an issue.

Why the Labor Movement Is Pivotal

The continued subordination of the 10-million-member trade union federation – via the labor bureaucracy – to the Democratic Party is the worst obstacle we face. Labor contributes millions of dollars to the Democratic Party candidates every election. It mobilizes millions of its members to do phone-banking and door-knocking. Without labor’s support, the Democratic Party candidates wouldn’t stand a chance. Yet, these resources could be used to build a political alternative.

Labor’s continued subordination to the Democratic Party is ultimately the main factor explaining the Democrats’ debacle.

This subordination and co-optation were particularly visible during Biden’s State of the Union address, when UAW President Shawn Fain was featured and presented to the nation, with Fain’s approval, as the Democratic Party’s “best friend.” Biden’s speech, it should be noted, was all about pursuing the genocide in Gaza and fueling the endless war in Ukraine, winning him the moniker of Genocide Joe.

What is needed is for the labor movement to break with the Democratic Party and to anchor, in alliance with the organizations of the BIPOC working class, the fight to build a Labor Party. And it must be a clean break from both capitalist parties. 

Overcoming the Obstacles

In our view, all those who are tied at the hip of the Democratic Party, primarily the labor officialdom, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and the AOC-DSA-Bernie wing of the Democratic Party, are the biggest obstacles facing working people and oppressed BIPOC communities in their struggle for labor, economic, and other social justice rights. 

Bernie Sanders accused Harris of having “abandoned the working class,” and he asked the question: “Will the big business and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” The question itself summed up Sanders’s long-time role: to bring any attempts to promote independent politics back into the framework of the capitalist Democratic Party.

With a more “leftist” language, on the eve of the presidential election the leadership of Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) published a document, “Workers Deserve Better.” They write: “If Trump wins, the blame will fall on Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party establishment.”

And they add that next time, “We will need more candidates who want to build a new working-class political party.” 

DSA is not talking about building a Labor Party, a political party that is independent of the twin parties of capitalism. The DSA leadership is talking about reforming the Democratic Party and transforming it into this “new mass working-class party.”

But who is DSA trying to fool? One has only to look at recent events to see how the Democratic Party was instrumental in ousting DSA members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush from the House of Representatives as well as preventing Jessica Cisneros from becoming the Democratic Party candidate in a significant Texas race. 

Still, the DSA leadership participated in the Democratic primaries. The DSA leadership, last August 6, presented as a “great victory of DSA and the left” the nomination of Tim Walz as candidate for vice president. 

And even worse, on April 20^th in Congress, both AOC and Cori Bush, voted to support the $61 billion additional military spendings to fuel the war in Ukraine, as well as an additional $8 billion for U.S. military provocations against China, — all of this without a single word of protest from the DSA leadership!  

Equally guilty are all the Black misleaders who channel back into the Democratic Party the legitimate aspirations of Black people for their Liberation. This is true of BIPOC misleaders within NGOs who are tied to the Democratic Party.

United Front Resistance to Trump and Building an Independent Working-Class Party

The new militancy among workers as demonstrated by a strike wave not seen in decades tells us that there are openings for labor to take independent action in the workplaces and public squares side by side with community activist groups — and to participate in its own name in the political arena, starting at the local level. 

That is why we are proposing that at the beginning of next year, labor and community coalitions gather nationwide to organize the fightback in support of workers and BIPOC’s pressing demands – demands and rights that will be trampled upon by Trump as soon as he takes office. 

We cannot let fascism catch wind. Most urgently, we call on unions (specifically the AFL-CIO and Change to Win) and BIPOC organizations to organize mass mobilizations, walkouts, and strikes to stop, on inauguration day and beyond, Trump’s plan for mass deportations of immigrants, attacks against striking workers, as well as all reactionary attacks against students and workers resisting the genocide in Palestine. Labor is the only social force capable of stopping Trump in his tracks. 

We also call, within these united-front actions against fascism, for the creation of labor and community assemblies — open to all who wish to promote a clean break with the Democrats and Republicans and who support the formation of a mass independent working-class party, rooted in the unions and communities of the oppressed. Such cross-movement assemblies or coalitions would then democratically select candidates, accountable to these assemblies, for local elections (school boards, city councils, etc.) and promote an independent working-class political program, while simultaneously leveraging the platform provided by the electoral arena to deepen the mass mobilizations against fascism in our workplaces, schools, and communities. 

Only this way, from the bottom up, can we begin to set the building blocks of a new mass independent working-class party, capable of defeating the twin parties of capital and begin the process of addressing the existential crisis facing humanity and the planet.

The Democratic Party has proved that it does the bidding of the capitalist class – even to the point of funding an horrific genocide in Palestine, which has now expanded into a regional conflict that could easily become a nuclear war destroying humanity – rather than building peace, racial and gender equity, climate justice, and economic security. 

The Democratic Party allowed Trump to win by its anti-worker policies that enabled the political climate that makes fascism possible. If we are to defeat the dangerous, even fascistic, goals of the new Trump administration, we need to stop supporting our enemies and build a party that represents us.

Please join with us to build Labor and Community for an Independent Party (LCIP), an organization that supports the strategy Socialist Organizer has outlined above.

Of equal importance, we pose to you that the path forward requires a socialist revolution by and for the working-class that places society’s wealth in the democratic control of those who create all value in society: workers. To such an end, we invite you to join Socialist Organizer, the U.S. section of the Organizing Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International — a revolutionary international organization with militants in over 40 countries. 

We look forward to hearing from you, to hear your reflections on our statement. We also encourage you to take the steps to join Socialist Organizer by participating in our study groups and forums.

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Collapse of Turnout in Democratic Centers in California

By Bradley Wiedmaier

The normal presidential year election turnout in Democratic centers hovers around 80% of the vote. The November 5, 2024 turnout has collapsed into the worst turnout, nearly on record. Oakland  Alameda County – 24.3%; San Francisco City & County  – 45.1%; Sacramento – 35.0%; San Jose Santa Clara County – 44.7%; Los Angeles – 46.9%; and even in Marin County suburbs of San Francisco which often has the highest Democratic turnout was only 45%. 

The absence of voters in the Democratic centers sank measure after measure, including the ending prison slavery (Proposition 6), which failed statewide even as it passed in over a dozen states in the last several elections cycles. 

These figures are with all precincts reporting, but may change slightly with the relative volume of later-counted ballots. But they won’t be decisively different from what was reported above.

This Democratic collapse is contrasted with the high turnout in Republican centers, as in the Sierra Nevada counties where the turnout was in the 70s%.

The significant failure of the Democrats to entice a lesser-evil vote in the face of the most dangerous opposing candidate is unprecedented and shows how urgently necessary the effort to offer a real Working Class Political Party alternative is the question of the hour.