War and the Democratic Party National Convention

The entire Democratic Party National Convention is an exercise in political falsification, from which reality is completely excluded. The most significant element of this reality is the escalating global war, which has gone almost entirely unmentioned. 

Even as the convention is being held, a massive expansion of the US-NATO war against Russia is underway, with Ukraine deploying NATO tanks on Russian territory and launching, just yesterday, a major drone attack on Moscow. The genocide in Gaza is continuing and threatens to develop into a regional Middle East war. 

And the New York Times reported yesterday that the Biden administration has approved a new nuclear strategy, focused on China and preparing, in the words of the Times, for “possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea”—that is, nuclear Armageddon. 

The escalation of war has been the central priority of the Democratic Party and it will be the central priority of any future Harris administration. 

The claims by Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and others that Harris will implement major social reforms are lies, and they know they are lies. Everything is to be subordinated to the ruling class agenda of war abroad, of global plunder, which requires a massive escalation of the war on the working class at home. 

The trade union apparatus is to play a central role—Biden referred to the AFL-CIO as his “domestic NATO.” This is what he and UAW President Shawn Fain, a featured speaker at the convention, mean when they talk about an “arsenal of democracy.”

The DSA members and DSA-backed politicians and trade union officials are being elevated in order to try to strengthen the Democratic Party and its war policy.

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This also motivates the systematic efforts of the Democratic Party to cover up the fascist threat posed by Trump and the Republicans. In an article published on the World Socialist Web Site yesterday, I drew attention to the significance of Biden’s statements Monday night, in which he warned of a second Trump coup.

These statements have been universally ignored in the media and at the convention itself. And while Biden drew attention to the threat, he posed no measures to stop it.

I wrote:

To prosecute this war, Biden has sought bipartisan agreement with the Republicans, beginning with his statement following the January 6 coup calling for a “strong” Republican Party. Indeed, even as he was warning about a second coup, Biden was careful to present it solely as a matter of Trump the individual, and not the Republican Party itself.

This is because the Democratic Party defends the same social interests and economic system as Trump and the Republicans. Whatever their differences, they are both parties of the corporate and financial oligarchy.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties, Harris and Trump, are committed to a massive expansion of the war abroad and the war on the working class at home. 

The fight of the working class to defend its interests and secure its basic social and democratic rights must be connected to the fight against a global war that threatens all of mankind. And the fight against war must be rooted in the development of a political movement in the working class, opposed to both the Democrats and the Republicans.

This fight is itself necessarily a fight against the corporate and financial oligarchy, in whose interests both the abroad and the war at home are being waged.

The path forward for humanity must be forged through the building of a mass political movement, which has as its aim the conquest of power by the working class and the socialist transformation of economic life, in the United States and throughout the world.