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	Workers Vanguard No. 1104	27 January 2017

On Trump and the Election

Democrats, Liberals and the Union Tops

(Letters)

[Received 19 December 2016]

Inherent in bourgeois rule is maintaining “class peace”: a high-rate of exploitation, with social oppression. WV #1100 [18 November] wrote a pointed article of capitalist machinations in We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party! The bi-line “Democrats Paved the Way for Trump” can only be a truism, and not a link to struggle. Obama, “consummate Wall Street Democrat” (WV) bailed-out GM at union/worker expense; deported immigrants en mass; tripled arms sales to Israel over the next decade, i.e., carried through as administrator for Wall Street. In turn, one could conclude: Republicans Paved the Way for Obama. Liberals around the publication, The Nation, were some of the loudest for Obama in 2008. By 2012 they squealed like gutted pigs that Obama “failed the people”. With Trump, Liberalism (a bourgeois ideology), and its variants, is “bleeding-out”! From mainstream Hillaryites to the Revolution Now/Vote Bernie-crowd, many proclaim Inauguration Day promises a “Fascist State”! Cooked into this is the alibi that Trump ran a “brilliant campaign”. Rather, it was crass, and the lowest common-denominator of racist, sexist, backward reaction! Trump’s “base”? A leaderless working class reeling under “Republicrat” rule. This bi-line feeds the Liberal frenzy; and, the despair of a population justifiably frightened of the surreal and vicious declaration for an “up-tick” of capitalist assault. Obama’s mission to “make imperialism work again” guaranteed an increase of oppression of the black population, whereby the State via its thug-cops carry out summary executions in its “impulse toward genocide” (a role the State and Klan seek to resurrect as the “New, New South” of Jim Crow). Nonetheless, to much of the bourgeoisie/Tea Party Obama remained the “House ‘N’”! In mid-term elections of 2010, e.g., black House Representative, Sheila Lee stated: “We’ve been called the ‘N’-word. I was asked why my braids were wound so tight?”!

WV presented a case for “revolutionary optimism”: class conscious struggle; revolutionary integrationism/Black Liberation; a Socialist egalitarian society. Social struggle is set to occur, as workers/students are responding. But, the “one-sided class war” prevails until a break from “Republicrats”; until a Multiracial Workers Party is established! Truer still, than that “Friends of Labor” Democrats “paved” the way for reaction, is: AFL-CIO Bureaucrats—Bootlickers for Wall Street—Paved the Way for Trump!

Comradely,
B. Montoya

WV replies: B. Montoya’s interest in putting more teeth into WV headlines and his sharp words for the Obama administration are appreciated. However, to make the argument that our printing the self-evident statement “Democrats Paved the Way for Trump” somehow feeds a pathetic post-election liberal frenzy, the letter writer goes out of his way to ignore the main headline below which it ran. Some liberals, stung by Clinton’s loss, have used similar phrases in brooding about how best to refurbish the discredited Democratic Party. But we expressed our class opposition to the Democrats with the slogan “We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!”, drawing an unmistakable class line and pointing to a path forward for the working class and the oppressed.

B. Montoya’s preferred headline: “AFL-​CIO Bureaucrats—Bootlickers for Wall Street—Paved the Way for Trump!” disappears the fact that the trade-union bureaucracy is in fact a key component of the Democratic Party. For decades, the union bureaucracy has substituted voting for Democrats for the class struggle necessary to defend workers’ livelihoods. AFL-CIO officials poured record sums of dues money into the warmonger Clinton’s campaign; the time and energy of union members were wasted canvassing for the class enemy. Trump appropriated a part of the playbook of the pro-Democrat union tops: the lie that American workers’ jobs could be saved or restored if only they imbibe the protectionist poison against Mexico or China. The enemies of U.S. workers are not foreign workers, but the U.S. capitalists.

Today, with Trump having succeeded Obama as Commander-in-Chief, “progressive” Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are at the center of the latest incarnation of the “fight the right” movement, tailed by various labor bureaucrats. Particularly in this context, it is confusing to subsume, as B. Montoya does, the differences between the two capitalist parties under the term “Republicrats.” Trump’s cabinet picks are a chemically pure expression of Republicans reveling in bashing the unions, black people, immigrants and the poor. The Democrats cover up the fact that they do the same thing by posing as “friends of labor.”

We seek to break the hold that the Democratic Party still has on activist youth and workers, and it was correct to underscore its role in the “peaceful transition of power” so highly prized by bloody, racist U.S. imperialism.