On the Results of the Elections
The elections in the United States concluded on 6 November, to elect the President-Vice President of the country, state representatives of the House and Senate, members of state Supreme Courts, several local legislatures, and municipal governments of various states. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for election. 34 of the 100 Senate seats were contested. At the state level, 11 states held gubernatorial elections. Dozens of local referendums were conducted alongside elections for various local offices, including judges, mayors, council members, and sheriffs. Votes were also cast for statewide ballot measures such as abortion, education, the privatization scheme of “school choice”, recreational drug policies, minimum wage, sick leave, and unionization policies.
The electoral process was marked by government intervention favoring the Democratic party and the demagogy from both major factions of the bourgeoisie. Candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris ran dirty campaigns which saw an election cycle rake in an obscene $15.9 billion from big business to determine the outcome. Hundreds of capitalists and monopolies poured millions into the campaigns of both candidates.
Both parties’ strategies are firmly aimed at reinforcing U.S. monopolies and fostering international imperialist alliances to compete with Beijing, all while continuing their unyielding support for the genocidal state of Israel. Regardless of their differences, both candidates remain fully committed to managing and upholding the capitalist system.
Behind the intense inter-bourgeois struggle, we find the contradictions of the rotten system itself, in times when the primacy of the USA in the imperialist system is threatened. The US fights tooth and nail to maintain its position at the top, with US capital seeking to confront its rival China, which is claiming new leads in more and more fields. This fierce antagonism between the blocs of imperialist powers and the intense competition between them marks this election cycle.
Despite all the efforts of the bourgeoisie, their agents in the labor movement, and opportunist forces to portray the struggle between Harris and Trump as a battle between "fascism" and "democracy," we reaffirm that both candidates represent a continuation of anti-popular policies. The independent and third-party candidates have merely served to bolster the campaign of Donald Trump and mislead the working-class movement. These so-called “alternative” political options—including those that claim to be “socialist”—only step forward to attempt to hand the revolutionary forces banners from foreign bourgeoisie.
Under both Republican and Democrat administrations—at every level from federal to state to local—the people of this country have been sacrificed on the altar of profit. They have been abandoned in the face of hurricanes, floods, and fires, with hundreds of lives lost across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Texas, and beyond.
Both parties have funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into packages to support U.S. monopolies and fuel imperialist conflicts, from the Middle East to Ukraine to Taiwan. Both have presided over the gutting of social rights—education, healthcare, housing, utilities—while enacting barbaric policies. They have governed amid surging costs for basic necessities, eroding the incomes of workers and their families. Both have saddled the people with crushing taxes, only to see them siphoned off to bail out banks and monopolies in times of crisis or otherwise pouring them into expanding the military capabilities of the bourgeois state and its imperialist alliances. Both parties have presided over widespread poverty and millions of homeless.
Both have been complicit in and aided crackdowns on worker and popular struggles, presiding over administrations that leave millions of Black and Latino workers facing racism, police brutality, and violent discrimination. The victims of these two imperialist parties are not only here at home but extend to all peoples around the globe, who have suffered from their interventions, wars, massacres, coups, and sanctions.
The confrontations between the two parties, which have alternated power for more than a century, have nothing to do with the interests and needs of the great majority of people. Our country has all the keys necessary to unlock the emancipation of the working masses and they must be ripped from the hands of exploiters.
The results are clear: Donald Trump has once again won the presidential election in a decisive victory. His victory is borne out of a deep dissatisfaction with the anti-popular policies of the Biden administration. Trump is clearly the preferred candidate for a faction of the U.S. ruling class that insists on prioritizing the “strategic adversary,” China—a focus that traces back to the Obama administration—and undermining the growing China-Russia alliance. This faction of big capital is determined to confront China more aggressively to revive the fading influence and “glory” of American business. Among Trump’s backers, this election cycle are a plethora of billionaires, including Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Tim Mellon (billionaire banker), Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel of PayPal, Johnson & Johnson, Kenneth Griffin of Citadel LLC, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, and Jeff Yass. Trump has not only garnered support from this segment of the bourgeoisie but has also, since 2016, won the confidence of the market and investors who view him as a boon to investments. This is why his first victory triggered a market surge, as investors shifted towards backing Trump’s economic agenda. Although he has yet to take office, we’re seeing a similar trend as in 2016: S&P 500 futures have already jumped over 2%. While the political establishment largely leaned toward a Harris victory, the financial system viewed a Trump win as equally favorable, and likely just as profitable.
The previous Trump administration secured the trust of corporate leaders by slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, echoing his plans for a new term. Playing on the cultural backwardness still plaguing U.S. society, Trump has leveraged the deep distrust among the people for the political system amid worsening social problems and policies that offer no relief from the deeper cuts to the incomes of the majority of people. To this end, immigration has been a focal point of his administration and will remain so in the next one. In his first term in 2016, Trump introduced a series of anti-immigration policies aimed at fulfilling his campaign promises of mass deportations. A key example was the administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum seekers to return to Mexico while awaiting their U.S. immigration court hearings. Trump's scapegoating of immigrants and reactionary rhetoric have remained consistent. There is no doubt that such policies will intensify in his new term. Despite all their talk and opposition to Trump, the Biden administration did not repeal this policy. Instead, they used it to deport thousands of asylum seekers to the southern border, where they were left vulnerable to the Mexican National Guard and organized crime.
We cannot forget that Trump’s last government presided over an escalation of far-right violence and racism, the eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, which were met with militaristic crackdowns, and the loss of millions of lives due to his administration’s failure to effectively curb the COVID-19 outbreaks. Despite the slogan of “End the Wars,” the Trump administration proved as brutal as the Biden-Harris administration, signing off on over $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, propping up the murderous Israeli state, and launching bombings in Syria to confront Assad's government. His administration rattled sabers with North Korea and began funneling military and economic aid to Ukraine. Despite the populist rhetoric, his administration was no less complicit in the barbaric machinery of war and repression - an inevitable result arising from the capitalist system.
Throughout this election cycle, Donald Trump has campaigned on a return to “common sense” policies, a pretext for vast privatization schemes. He has vowed sweeping reforms to immigration, voting, and the economy, among other areas. A new Trump administration would likely roll back Biden’s reforms, introduce even more favorable tax policies for monopolies, intensify the crackdown on immigration, ramp up aggressive confrontations with China-Russia, continue backing the murderous Israeli state, and, without a doubt, take a chainsaw to the incomes of the working masses. Among other things, Trump has promised to stimulate the US economy by further strengthening trade protectionism, with less emphasis on the "green economy".
The Communist Workers’ Platform will unyieldingly continue to fight against the Biden administration and from January 20, 2025, against Donald Trump because they represent the interests of the exploiting capitalist class. There is an urgent need for the reconstitution of the Communist Party in our country, for the working-class alternative that we have lost. There is a deep necessity for the only political option that is capable of strengthening its ties with the popular struggles, with the workers, working women, the youth, students, migrants, indigenous and other oppressed peoples, and the fighting organizations of the working class in order to lead the forces needed for the overthrow of this rotten system which breeds so much misery. The situation we find ourselves in today is one where the revolutionary workers’ movement is in shambles resulting from the ideological and political degeneration of the class-oriented forces. The domination of opportunism has left the proletariat unarmed in the face of capital’s attacks.
Nevertheless, recent workers' and student struggles, along with the Palestinian liberation movement, represent emerging class-oriented forces that have the potential to be rallied in the fight for social revolution.
The Communist Party is the only force capable of opposing the major blocs of the bourgeoisie in an anti-capitalist and anti-monopoly direction, for the victory of the working class.
We stand in solidarity with all those who rejected the quagmire of the “lesser evil”, many of whom are aware that the Democrats and Republicans are no way out. It is a good prospect for the workers and people who refuse to be trapped in the games of the ruling class.
Shoulder to shoulder with the proletariat, fighting every day, the party will be built. A better future is possible. In the ranks of the Communist Party, our destiny is in our own hands.
Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Platform