This article, originally published in issue 7 of The Communist, is the first in a series of commentaries on the Fighting Program for the Revolutionary Communists of America. In light of the upcoming election and the RCA’s Class War 2024 campaign, we began the series with a discussion of the program’s second point, “Down with the Democrats and Republicans! Build a Communist Party!”
The US working class has no party. In 2024, the political options for working people are: vote for one of the ruling class’s candidates, cast a protest vote for an insignificant third party, or abstain altogether.
The Democrats and Republicans exist to defend the capitalist system. They have superficial differences in rhetoric and policy, designed to dupe different sections of the working class, but on the most fundamental issues, they are united. Both rule in the interests of capital, supporting austerity, exploitation, oppression, and American imperialism.
The slaveholders’ party
The Democratic Party was organized in 1828 to support Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign. Advances in textile production made Southern cotton plantations more profitable, and the Democrats emerged as the political representatives of the slave masters.
On its own, support from this reactionary layer was insufficient to win elections, so Democrats built powerful political machines in big cities, demagogically appealing to immigrant laborers and engaging in mafia-esque patronage to buy votes. Democratic presidents launched genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples and a war of conquest against Mexico. These bloody policies “opened” the Western frontier to small farmers; many of them rewarded the party with support at the ballot box.
Democrats opposed centralized government, the abolition of slavery, public education, internal improvements, and other progressive reforms because they represented a dying system: the Southern agricultural export economy, based on the exploitation of slave labor.
Democratic presidents launched genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples and a war of conquest against Mexico. / Image: Carl Nebel, public domain
“A remorseless revolutionary struggle”
The Republican Party, founded in 1854, represented the interests of big Northern capitalists. They opposed the westward expansion of chattel slavery, partly for moral reasons, but mainly because wage labor was a superior form of exploitation for modern industrial production. Republicans won support from anti-slavery workers and attracted many small farmers—who feared competition from slave plantations—away from the Democrats.
The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, sparked the Civil War. The only way to defeat the Southern rebels was to transform the war into what Lincoln called “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” against slavery. After smashing the slave power, however, Republicans betrayed the former slaves, abandoning radical Reconstruction and leaving Southern Blacks and antiracist whites to the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan and its Democratic allies.
While Democrats consolidated their control of the South, Republicans dominated national politics for decades after the war. They transformed the federal government into a modern, centralized state and brutally repressed the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Under Republican William McKinley, American imperialism emerged as a truly global force with the invasion and occupation of the Philippines Cuba in 1898.
Great Depression and postwar boom
In the 1930s, the class struggle heated up as the Great Depression ravaged the country. Militant strikes led to the creation of the CIO, and the Communist Party grew to 100,000 members. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to make concessions to the working class—which was now the majority of the population. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” aimed to save capitalism from revolution through social programs and make-work infrastructure jobs.
Capitalism survived the Great Depression, and American imperialism emerged from World War II as a global superpower. The temporary stability and prosperity of the postwar boom allowed the Democrats and Republicans to unite in an anticommunist crusade. Communists and other radicals were purged from the unions, and the reformist leaders who remained were tied to the apron strings of the capitalist parties. Gradually, organized labor drew closest to the Democrats, trotting out mythologized memories of Roosevelt’s reforms to paint them as the more “worker-friendly” of the two capitalist political machines.
The Democrats held the presidency from 1961–69, and the explosive Civil Rights movement forced them to make concessions—winning them support from Black voters of all classes. This is now beginning to break up, as Black workers increasingly see that the Democrats have no real interest in fighting exploitation and oppression. The Republicans turned into their opposite, too. The same political force that waged a revolutionary struggle against slavery and passed the earliest Civil Rights legislation came to lean on racism and the misguided resentment of backwards white workers for political support.
In the 1930s, the class struggle heated up as the Great Depression ravaged the country. Militant strikes led to the creation of the CIO. / Image: public domain
Historical dead end of capitalism
The primary representatives of these two parties today—Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—personify the historical dead end of capitalism. Workers are asked to choose, once again, between the lesser of two evils. In reality, these parties have collaborated to drive down wages, attack living-standards, and ensure the political domination of our class enemy.
Both parties emerged to represent the interest of property-owning classes, not the working masses. Our class requires a political party of its own in order to end the oppression and exploitation of this system. As the great Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained:
The liberal bourgeoisie can seize power and has seized it more than once as the result of struggles in which it took no part; it possesses organs of seizure which are admirably adapted to the purpose. But the working masses are in a different position; they have long been accustomed to give, and not to take. They work, are patient as long as they can be, hope, lose patience, rise up and struggle, die, bring victory to others, are betrayed, fall into despondency, bow their necks, and work again. Such is the history of the masses of the people under all regimes. To be able to take the power firmly and surely into its hands the proletariat needs a Party, which far surpasses other parties in the clarity of its thought and in its revolutionary determination.
American workers have attempted to form such a party many times. The history of the Socialist and Communist parties, as well as the development of the labor unions, is worth studying. The overarching lesson is clear: class independence and trained Marxist leaders are prerequisites to organize a mass workers’ party that can lead the struggle against the bosses and ultimately take power.
Since the 2007–09 recession, working-class consciousness has been shifting rapidly. Betrayals of the social democratic “left” over the last decade have clarified the need for class independence to a significant section of the working class. Mass movements against police brutality, racism, and war have brought tens of millions onto the streets. 20% of young people say that communism is the ideal economic system. Even greater events are on the horizon, which will turn this trickle into a tsunami.
The escalation of imperialist war and austerity will force the working class to struggle. Workers will begin to see themselves as a class with interests opposed to those of the politicians, warmongers, and capitalists. Capitalism has socialized production worldwide. Communist revolution will reconcile this development by socializing ownership of the key levers of the economy. In order to be successful, we must build a revolutionary communist party that can lead the workers to seize political and economic power. Our task today is to organize the early adopters who see this flood tide coming and can lay the foundations of a mass communist party that will fight in our own interest and win.