On the degraded spectacle of the Biden-Trump debate
The presidential debate yesterday between Biden and Trump was one of the most degraded spectacles in the history of American politics. It gave expression to the political, intellectual and cultural degeneracy of the American ruling class.
Much of the media commentary has focused on Biden’s obvious mental decline. The president of the United States, who maintains control of the nuclear “football,” could hardly form a coherent sentence.
Whatever his personal degeneration, however, Biden personifies the Democratic Party as a party of Wall Street and the intelligence agencies. Its central priority is the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, which it will continue, along with the genocide in Gaza, under Biden’s direction or someone else.
Trump focused his comments on violent and fascistic denunciations of immigrants, to which Biden acceded. Trump represents the filth and reaction of the capitalist oligarchy as it turns to authoritarian forms of rule. His one true statement was that under the Biden administration the world has come closer to “World War III” than ever before, but this war will continue no less ruthlessly under the Republicans than under the Democrats.
This is what the ruling class has to offer as a “choice” in the elections?
The debate gave expression to the political rot in the United States, the center of finance capital and the cockpit of imperialist war planning. This crisis must be understood as an expression of profound objective factors.
While the exact course of events cannot be predicted, one thing is absolutely certain. There will be no progressive resolution to this crisis until the working class, on a world scale, comes together as an international force on the basis of a socialist program.
The problem is not Biden or Trump—or Putin, Xi Jinping, Macron, Scholz or any other individual capitalist politician. The problem is the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state system with which it is indissolubly bound up.
The resources exist to abolish poverty and provide a decent and fulfilling life to every human being. But these resources, produced by the labor of the world’s population, have been appropriated by a relative handful of corporate exploiters and billionaires, who subordinate all of society to their increasingly deranged pursuit of wealth.
The chasm between the essential interests of the masses and the privileges of the ruling class is becoming ever more obvious. The ruling elites have normalized genocide, nuclear war, mass death from COVID, and fascistic attacks on democratic rights.
The essential task, to which the Socialist Equality Party election campaign is dedicated, is the normalization of socialism in the political outlook of the working class, in the United States and throughout the world. Join and support this campaign today at socialism2024.org!
