The People's Forum: Lesser evil, same empire
Op-ed #1: The People's Liberation Front is honored to offer an open platform for community members to share their writing! Our first op-ed was written by J, a badass member of our People's Committee.
As the 2020 Presidential election looms over the entire globe, the options forced upon millions of voters and billions of colonized individuals hinge between a Democrat and a Republican. Out of some kind of psychological necessity, the country collectively pretends to be two ends of a red-blue spectrum. The options are really between Imperialist A and Imperialist B. “One is a fascist, though!” some will retort, attempting to galvanize U.S. citizens into participation in these theatrics. What does this mean for the looming 2020 presidential election? What does it mean for those who’ve been told their choices are between a rapist and a rapist, or a hawk and a hawk, or a capitalist and a capitalist? To what extent is there a lesser evil?
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Marx and Engels chose this banger to open the Communist Manifesto, insisting that history until that point had been a class-power struggle between those who control natural resources and those who have had to grovel for subsistence.
It serves to take a step back and discuss not the candidates themselves but the role for which they are auditioning. The presidency is an audition, in the theatrical sense, because regardless of which major party holds office, the same function will be carried out, i.e., the repression of the exploited, the workers, women, colonized folks abroad, Black and Indigenous folks.
Since its inception, the USA has been drenched in the blood of Black and Indigenous people. Its ruling class has developed the State as an infrastructure to enforce and justify its rule by repressing labor and liberation movements. As discovered by Karl Marx, “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.” One’s participation in the elections is, to an extent, an opinion on whether there can be a reconciliation between the class who exploits and those exploited. If this pandemic and the recent congressional recess are any indicators, they are willing to sacrifice you. They'd rather head home than work to create relief for the millions facing evictions, starvation, and medical crises.
The decision to vote is always portrayed as a chance to improve the U.S. or save it from some sort of moral collapse. But the vote will always go to an oppressor. Presidents don’t campaign for guaranteed housing, food, and water. They don’t campaign for you to receive the fruits of your labor as opposed to merely surviving under wage theft.
As movements around the globe struggle militantly against their oppressors, some in the First World would like to portray voting blue as some kind of harm reduction. Leagues of supposed harm-reductionists decry critiques against the Biden-Harris ticket, instead insisting on the possibility of accountability after the election. Less reduction and more justification. This mass delirium prompts us to consider how effective the propaganda has been for so many citizens to imagine that upper-crust politicians would consider the opinions of poor workers over billionaires. Recent experiences out in the streets also call harm reductionism into question, especially since the assassinations of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor have occurred in Democrat-controlled cities. If our binary electoral choices are truly substantial, why do Democratic governors and mayors crush protest movements with such fervor? Obama's militaristic National Guard response to the Ferguson uprisings should be instructive: Democrats are as eager to use the State to repress true people's movements.
Both voters and non-voters have fallen prey to the neoliberal idea that one office-holding person is responsible for the conditions of the era. Trump or no Trump, it took longer than four years to build the infrastructure required to execute the recently publicized crackdowns and disappearances. And before Bush's frenzied consolidation of state power in the wake of 9/11, law enforcement agencies spent decades disappearing and assassinating movement leaders (COINTELPRO). Again, it is not the individual president themself that is solely responsible for imperial autocracy; rather, the problem lies in the very function of presidency as an enforcer of bourgeois class rule.
The global context considered, how many people are sacrificed so that the empire may continue? What solidarity do we express to victims of U.S. imperialism if we vote for someone who will, at the most, be more subtle about their utter contempt for non-Americans. Since the very position of presidency demands the blood of those colonized domestically and internationally, we must ask ourselves the question posed by Hồ Chí Minh in 1960: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?”