Sanders, Biden: Different Talk, Same Con

Democratic Party: Class Enemy of Workers, Oppressed

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

This election season, a section of the trade-union bureaucracy and their reformist left tails have once again lined up to support Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, a capitalist politician. The Democratic Party is one of the two major parties of U.S. capitalist rule—that is, a party of brutal exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist war. Sanders is running a liberal populist campaign with hot-air electoral promises like “Medicare for All” to get out the vote for that party and “beat Trump.” Former vice president Joe Biden is touting his “electability” to the same end.

The con game of presenting Democratic Party politicians as “friends” of labor and black people or as a “lesser evil” is one of the primary means by which workers and the oppressed are politically tied to the ruling parties of the exploiters. The pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy as a whole is central to pushing this fraud. We revolutionary Marxists oppose on principle voting for any representative or party of the class enemy, not least Sanders and all other Democrats. The only way forward is to build a multiracial workers party, independent of and in opposition to the Democrats, one dedicated to sweeping away the capitalist order through socialist revolution and founding a workers state—that is, a government based on workers rule.

In contrast, pseudo-socialists such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Socialist Alternative and Left Voice have buried themselves in the anti-Trump “resistance,” which aims to reinstall a Democrat as Commander-in-Chief of the special bodies of armed men that are the core of the repressive capitalist state apparatus. Dating back to Sanders’s 2016 run for high office, they have been putting “lipstick on the pig” of Sanders, seeking to pull the wool over the eyes of workers, black people and radical youth and bolster the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects.

The PSL explicitly calls for a vote to Sanders. Typical of the reformist traitors to the cause of the exploited and oppressed, its 4 February article paints the Sanders campaign as “a radical break from the established order” and a “referendum on socialism.” Hardly. For decades, Sanders has consistently voted with the Democratic Party. In the Senate, he caucuses with the Democrats and has twice sought the Democratic nomination for president. He has already pledged to “strongly support the Democratic nominee,” as he did Hillary Clinton four years ago. Among his most enthusiastic supporters are the members of the Democratic Socialists of America, which from its inception has been part of the Democratic Party.

Sanders’s self-professed “democratic socialism” is nothing more than Democratic Party liberalism. He advocates economic protectionism, pitting workers in the U.S. against their class brothers and sisters abroad. He has supported virtually every U.S.-led war and military intervention, and is a virulent anti-communist who promotes counterrevolution in every country where capitalism has been overthrown—China, Cuba and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states.

In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama, hyping “hope and change,” was elected to take over the White House from the widely reviled George W. Bush. The result was yet another kick in the teeth for black people, workers and the oppressed. Obama bailed out the banks and auto bosses by squeezing working people and their unions, including the United Auto Workers, while overseeing mass home foreclosures, unprecedented deportations of immigrants and the racist killer cops who gun down black people and other minorities on the streets. Obama deployed U.S. military force with a vengeance around the globe to bomb and occupy countries and overthrow governments. For all the liberal hand-wringing about the reactionary Trump, the reality is that the hellish conditions of life for working people are fundamentally no different today than they were under Obama/Biden.

Regardless of which capitalist party is at the helm, the government acts in the interests of the ruling class of exploiters. The real difference between Republicans and Democrats is not what they do, but how they do it. The Republicans bask in attacking unions, black people, immigrants and the poor, while the Democrats lie and do the same thing. In 2016, Hillary Clinton didn’t even bother making a pretense of throwing a bone to working people. Sanders simply wants to restore the practice of offering empty promises before sticking in the knife.

Today, black preachers and elected politicians are playing on fears among black people of a Trump re-election to get them out to the polls to vote for the Democrats, in particular Biden. On the eve of the South Carolina primary, black Democratic Party Congressman Jim Clyburn endorsed Obama’s vice president, declaring, “We know Joe. But more importantly, he knows us.” You bet he does. An opponent of school busing who has long flaunted his friendships with segregationist politicians, Biden helped the Clintons craft the 1994 crime bill that condemned a whole generation of young black men to prison hell. For his part, Sanders voted in favor of the act.

There is an urgent need to break the chains that bind the proletariat—black, white, Latino, Asian, native-born and immigrant—to the class enemy. The power of the workers lies in their numbers, organization and central role in production. To unleash that power requires opposition to the class-collaborationist union bureaucracy. This is linked to the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party that struggles for the vital needs of all working people and fights to put an end to the system of wage slavery altogether.

Such a party would champion the cause of black freedom. Black oppression is integral to American capitalism. Racist divide-and-rule has proved invaluable to the capitalist masters, serving to pit workers against one another and to obscure the class line between the working class and its exploiters. A century and a half ago, Karl Marx, who had urged American workers to support the struggle of the slaves for emancipation, proclaimed the following truth: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” This is just as true today.

The only road to working-class emancipation is the road of socialist revolution, led by a workers party that acts as a tribune of the people, defending all the oppressed. Our model is the 1917 October Revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. For the working class to take state power in the first and to date only successful proletarian revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to wage an intransigent struggle against those parties, such as the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, that supported the liberal bourgeoisie. As the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), the Spartacist League/U.S. is committed to building a Leninist vanguard party. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!