What is happening in America?

The following remarks were delivered by Joseph Kishore, the Socialist Equality Party (US) candidate for president, at the final rally for the SEP (UK) in the British elections.

I’m very honored to be able to speak at the final rally of the Socialist Equality Party election campaign here in London and to bring the greetings of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States to this very important event.

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It is entirely appropriate that the final rally takes the form that it does, that is, as an international event. There is no national, let alone local, solution to the problems we confront.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the intensifying climate crisis, exposes the inability of capitalist governments, mired in national conflicts and beholden to corporate interests, to protect public health. The ruling classes in every country are turning towards authoritarianism and fascism. Social inequality is at record levels throughout the world, driven by a global economic system that benefits a tiny elite at the expense of the vast majority of the population.

And above all, as has been reviewed today, escalating global war threatens humanity’s very existence.

These are global problems, and therefore the solutions must be global.

As Chris indicated, workers and young people throughout the world are carefully following political developments in the United States.

I had the opportunity to campaign with Comrade Tom yesterday here in London, and a question on the minds of many people is: What is happening in America? Perhaps with the addition of a few colorful words. The political system seems to have descended into an abyss.

And one can certainly say that the debate that was held just a few days ago, on Thursday night between Biden and Trump, the two candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties, was one of the most degrading spectacles in the history of American politics.

Much of the media commentary in the United States and throughout the world has focused on the evident cognitive decline of the American president, who, after all, as “commander in chief,” has the sole authority to initiate a nuclear war.

There are calls from some within the political establishment for Biden to step aside. What, however, would be the aim of such a change in the candidate of the Democratic Party? What policies would it be intended to facilitate?

In a word, war. That has been the priority of the Biden administration over the past three and a half years. Indeed, during the course of the debate, Biden was, as he is always when it comes to his public appearances, most articulate, or perhaps in this case, only articulate, in the demands of the military intelligence apparatus that the Democratic Party represents.

On the question of the US support for the genocide in Gaza, Biden declared, “We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.”

Indeed. American imperialism is arming, as well as financially backing and politically justifying, a genocide that has provoked revulsion and anger all over the world. In nine months of merciless bombardment, more than 40,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, have been murdered.

And there is not a single building that has been destroyed or bomb dropped or child murdered in Palestine that has not been done so with the support of the United States and the Biden administration.

It was recently revealed in a Reuters article that the Biden government, since October 7, has provided Israel with 14,000 2,000-lb. bombs, which are used to level entire neighborhoods.

Netanyahu, the Israeli Hitler, is due to speak at a joint session of Congress on July 24, just a few weeks away, to give what amounts to a progress report to American imperialism and its two capitalist parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.

For American imperialism, the genocide in Gaza is seen as part of and inextricably connected to a regional and global war, including the escalating US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

On this point, Biden declared that the US would do everything in its power to counter efforts by Putin “to reestablish what was part of the Soviet empire by conquering all of Ukraine along with Eastern Europe.”

Now this places reality on its head. The Biden administration and its NATO allies provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now more than two years ago, through the continuous expansion of NATO to the east. It has relentlessly escalated the war since, rejecting any measures that would bring it to an end.

In just two weeks, in the immediate aftermath of the elections in the UK and in France, the NATO powers are holding a conference in Washington D.C. to discuss and finalize plans for the further shipment of NATO weapons to Ukraine that will be used to target Russia, as well as the already advanced preparations for the direct deployment of NATO troops into the conflict.

At the beginning of this month, Biden traveled here to Europe as part of the official commemoration of D-Day, an event which was devoted to warmongering threats against Russia.

And Biden explicitly referred to the fact that American troops would soon be dying once again in their thousands in a European war to defend “democracy,” as he put it. There is, in fact, growing talk within Congress of the reintroduction and expansion of the draft.

And as always, when there’s talk, it means that the decision has already been made, and they’re working out how to do it. But this has provoked widespread concern and outrage among workers and young people in the United States.

I was at an election campaign event in Detroit about a week ago, and many young people were speaking about their concerns about the reintroduction of the draft. The war is not popular in the working class.

And who believes all the talk about “democracy”? The active participation of the US and NATO powers in the genocide in Gaza must obliterate for all time the notion that American foreign policy has anything to do with human rights.

In Ukraine itself, the puppet regime operates on the basis of martial law. Opposition parties have been outlawed. Elections have been canceled. Fascists have been elevated into the highest levels of the state.

Facing growing domestic opposition, the Zelensky regime is moving against its opponents and responding with repression, most significantly in the arrest of our Comrade Bogdan, who has been imprisoned on the false and slanderous allegation of supporting the Russian government.

Such are the real priorities of the Democratic Party: War. Whether it is Biden at its head or someone else, it is a party of war, of imperialism, of the military intelligence apparatus, of Wall Street and the corporate financial oligarchy that is directing this increasingly reckless militarist policy.

Biden’s opponent in the election, of course, is Donald Trump, the fascist conman who had Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table, who just three and a half years ago staged a coup that was aimed at overturning the results of the election, the 2020 elections, and establishing a personalist dictatorship.

Trump has focused his comments, including at the debate and elsewhere, on a violent attack on immigrants and refugees. There is talk of deploying the National Guard and the military in cities throughout the United States to arrest immigrants.

The very fact that Trump remains at the head of the Republican Party, one of the two parties of the American ruling class, testifies to the deep going rot of American democracy. At the time of his nomination in 2016, prior to his election, we remarked that Trump’s fascistic personality was “forged not in the beer halls of Munich, in the trenches of World War I, but in the real estate market of New York City, with his casinos, his fictional universities, and his endless stream of failed businesses.”

We wrote that this “personification of corporate fraud could hardly be a more fitting symbol for the state of American capitalism.”

I think this has been confirmed over the intervening period. Trump oversaw the initial response of the American ruling class to the pandemic, with the president spearheading a policy of mass infection, a policy that in fact has been continued and indeed fully implemented under Biden. An estimated 1.4 million Americans have now been killed by COVID-19 and over 20 million debilitated with Long COVID, figures that rise with each new wave of mass infection, as is the case globally and here in the UK.

The attempted coup of January 6, 2021 was a political turning point in America, and indeed in world politics. With the support of significant sections of the ruling class and military state apparatus, the sitting president sought to stop the transfer of power, and he nearly succeeded.

That Trump could very well win the presidency in the upcoming elections is the product, on the one hand, of the turn of the ruling elites towards authoritarianism and dictatorship, and on the other hand, the thoroughly right-wing character of the official opposition.

The response of Biden and the Democrats to the coup in 2020 was to insist on the need for a “strong” Republican Party, the better to prosecute war abroad and the war on the working class at home.

More recently, the Democrats have forged a bipartisan alliance with the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson, and they all appeared on a panel on the anniversary of the Holocaust, of all things—Johnson, Biden and the heads of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress—to denounce students protesting the genocide as “antisemitic.”

Johnson himself compared students who were outraged over the genocide to the Nazi academics who helped implement the Holocaust. Such outrages! But Biden was there, of course, praising Johnson. The basis of that alliance is support for the war, for the genocide and for the war against Russia.

This is the choice that the American people are given in the election. To speak of a “lesser evil” between the two parties is politically meaningless. They are two representatives of the corporate and financial oligarchy that is driving the entire world toward catastrophe.

And it’s important to emphasize again the two parties. The Democratic Socialists of America had a statement recently in which they called for Biden to step down and for someone else to take his place.

Of course, “Genocide Joe” is a perfectly apt and correct term for the president of the United States, who will never be able to wash the blood from his hands for his participation in the direction of the genocide.

But it’s not just Biden, it’s the Democratic Party. It’s the two parties of the capitalist ruling elite.

To understand what is happening in America, however, it’s not just necessary to examine the current political situation but to review the underlying objective factors and place the present situation in its historical context.

The elections here in the UK are being held on July 4, which happens to be the anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.

The document of the American Revolution sounded the tocsin for bourgeois democratic revolutions throughout the world, proclaiming the right of revolt against unjust governments and the principle, rooted in the Enlightenment, that “all men are created equal.”

The leaders of the American Revolution subsequently spelled out the “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which were proclaimed in the Declaration, in the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, the press and assembly, freedom from detention without trial, freedom from arbitrary searches and seizure.

The American Revolution was followed 85 years later by the Second American Revolution, the Civil War, which culminated in the abolition of chattel slavery and the greatest redistribution of wealth prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In light of these anniversaries, one can ask the question, what remains today of the democratic principles proclaimed and established in the revolutionary struggles of the early days of American capitalism?

Well, to ask the question is to answer it. Everywhere they are under assault.

The Supreme Court of the United States, controlled by a gang of fascists, corrupt fascists at that, is waging a rampage against the Bill of Rights. Students and workers protesting the genocide in Gaza have been arrested in the thousands.

The institutions of the capitalist state–the Congress of millionaires, to the executive presidency, to the military state police apparatus–exist as a permanent conspiracy against the interests of the vast majority of the population, the working class.

The crisis of American democracy did not begin with the present election. It has been developing over an extended period of time. Nearly a quarter century ago, there was the theft of the 2000 elections in which the Supreme Court intervened to stop the recounting of ballots and hand the presidency to George W. Bush.

At that time, the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site explained that the outcome demonstrated that there exists no significant constituency within the ruling class for democratic rights.

That event was followed by the “war on terror,” Guantanamo Bay, torture as an instrument of imperialist foreign policy, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which perhaps have only been exceeded now by what has been revealed with the torture of Palestinians by the Israeli regime. Drone assassinations under Obama. The persecution of Julian Assange, who finally received his freedom this month, as well as that of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers. Endless waves of police killings. The rise of Donald Trump and the fascist insurrection of January 6. And now the Biden administration, “Genocide Joe.”

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The basic objective cause of this political degeneration is the extreme growth of social inequality. American society is dominated by an oligarchy whose wealth has been accumulated through financial fraud, speculation, and the ever more extreme exploitation of the working class.

Just last month, Tesla shareholders agreed to award Elon Musk–the fascistic owner of the company and the company’s CEO and also the owner of Twitter, one of the largest social media companies in the world–a pay package of $45 billion, an amount which really is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the world’s population.

It’s 1.2 million times the median income in the United States. That is, one worker earning the median income would have to work 1.2 million years, if he or she were lucky to live that long, to earn the amount handed out to Musk in a single bonus.

But Musk, in his extreme wealth, epitomizes the connection between financial parasitism, political reaction and intellectual stupidity characteristic of the ruling oligarchy.

And he’s hardly alone. In November 2023, US billionaires’ collective wealth reached a record $5.2 trillion, increasing enormously during the course of the pandemic. By the third quarter, the top 10 percent of Americans owned two-thirds of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half owned just 2.6 percent.

The wealth of the oligarchy is bound up with its control over the gigantic corporations. Through the mechanism of the stock market, this oligarchy presides over an economic and social system in deep crisis.

The proclamations of the “end of history,” the “unipolar moment,” which greeted the dissolution of the Soviet Union 35 years ago, have proven to be short lived. The financial system is sustained by a series of massive multi-trillion dollar handouts made possible through the printing of money by the Federal Reserve.

And a significant factor in the evermore reckless warmongering of the ruling class is concern over the fate of the dollar, which threatens to undermine the whole edifice of the American financial and economic system.

Trotsky once compared democratic forms of rule to “a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for the protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggles.” He said, “when internal and international contradictions become too high, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode.”

Extending the analogy, one could say of the United States today, that not only are the currents overpowering the circuits, but the wires have become rusted and corroded, and the entire mechanism is mired in muck and filth.

The extreme backwardness of official political life in the United States, so clearly expressed in these elections, is inextricably connected to the decades-long suppression of the class struggle, accompanied by a war on socialist thought, on Marxism.

This war has been waged not only by the ruling class, but by its various adjuncts, the proponents of identity politics, of racial and gender division. The politics of the upper middle class, what we have referred to as the pseudo-left, have played a critical role in suppressing opposition to capitalism and opposing politics based on the working class, of legitimizing and supporting imperialist war.

Workers and young people in the United States, and certainly internationally, now have had significant experiences with the likes of Bernie Sanders, the American Corbyn, along with Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, perhaps who could be likened to the American Feinstein.

They promised reform and even, in the case of Sanders, a political revolution. But they have delivered nothing but establishment politics, imperialist politics. They all have backed the war against Russia for $61 billion to finance that war.

All of them are declaring that there’s no option but to vote for Biden in the elections. But they all support the “good war,” the war against Russia and Ukraine. They are pro-imperialist, establishment politicians.

As for the trade union apparatus, it has been integrated even more directly into the state and corporate management in the United States. The Biden administration has elevated Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, who is backed by the DSA.

Fain has joined hands with Biden in declaring that the working class must be the “arsenal of democracy,” in reality, the arsenal of genocide, that is, that the interests of workers must be sacrificed at the altar of militarism and war.

There is, however, a powerful social force within the United States, the American working class, which, in alliance with its class brothers and sisters in every country, has the social power to overthrow imperialism.

There’s a powerful history of class struggle in America, from the Haymarket martyrs, the fight for the eight-hour day, through the sit-down and general strikes of the 1930s which established the industrial unions, through the massive battles of the 1970s, including insurrectionary struggles in the coal mines.

The Achilles heel of the American working class has always been its subordination to capitalist politics, in particular, the Democratic Party, in which the apparatus of the trade unions has played a dominant role.

But there are, however, many signs of a shift in the political situation, of a breaking up of the decades of enforced suppression of the class struggle, of the stultifying atmosphere of official reactionary politics.

In 2022, amidst a systematic campaign of voter suppression in the elections in United Auto Workers, 5,000 autoworkers voted for Will Lehman for president on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program that called for the abolition of the trade union apparatus and the transfer of power to the rank and file.

Over the past several months, hundreds of thousands of workers and young people in the US as well as in Britain, of course, and internationally, have participated in demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza.

The stranglehold of the capitalist two parties is maintained not through broad popular support but through every mechanism of political and ideological rigidity, through censorship in the mass media, through the massively undemocratic measures aimed at excluding any genuine expression of the interests of the working class.

People are always shocked, even in the United States, when we explain that just to get on the ballot, which we are trying to do in this election campaign, in all 50 states in the United States, one would have to gather more than 1 million signatures.

The Democrats, whose own candidate may be forced to drop out, has declared an all-out war on third parties and independent candidates in order to prevent workers and youth from being able to vote for someone else.

In our campaign, however, we have spoken to hundreds of thousands. We’ve encountered deep and abiding hatred of both capitalist parties, which has only been heightened by last week’s debate.

Now I’ve referred to the situation in the United States, but none of these issues are unique to America. As the other speakers have made clear, they are present in different forms in every country.

The crisis takes a particularly acute form in the United States because of the centrality of American capitalism and American imperialism. But these are particular national expressions of global tendencies.

We live in a period of shocks, sharp transformations, mass protests and demonstrations, of snap elections and the downfall of governments. The situation can shift very rapidly. It is shifting rapidly.

The critical question is the development within the working class of a political leadership capable of orienting the masses toward the conquest of power and the socialist transformation of economic and social life.

The problems we confront now are serious, matters of life and death. They require serious solutions and serious politics. Those who promise a way out by tinkering around the edges of a bankrupt social and economic system are selling snake oil. Trotsky once referred to the priests of “half truths, of quarter truths, that is the worst form of falsehoods.”

In order to meet the challenges that we confront, it is necessary to bring forward the experiences of the past, to reappropriate the great traditions of Marxism, of socialism.

These traditions are embedded in the history of the Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and nowhere else. Nowhere else can the great answers to the great questions that millions of workers and young people are asking be found. The ICFI embodies the lessons of these great struggles.

So in conclusion, I urge you to vote. Vote for Tom Scripps, vote for Darren Paxton, and build the leadership, the Socialist Equality Party, in the working class, which is the aim of the SEP campaign, here in the UK and in the United States and in the work of the ICFI throughout the world.

We have the highest political confidence that the working class, armed with this perspective, will fight and will win.