Trump's election and the U.S. working class

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While opinion polls were predicting Kamala Harris' victory, and in any case a close score, former president Donald Trump was nonetheless largely re-elected for a second term after his defeat in 2020; not only did he win the largest number of “electors” elected in the various states, but he also gathered on his name the largest number of votes nationally – the first time for a Republican president since George Bush in 2004: 50.1% of the vote to Kamala Harris's 48.3%, while when he won in 2016, he garnered just 45% of the vote (to Hillary Clinton's 48.2%). While the percentage of abstainers was higher than in the last presidential election (36% vs. 34% in 2020, the lowest rate in decades, and 40% in 2016) he garnered more than 2,000,000 additional votes, while the Democratic candidate lost more than 8 million.

Suffrage analyses show that abstention increased in places that had voted predominantly Democratic in 2020; the percentage of voters for Kamala Harris fell among whites as well as blacks and Latinos, among men as well as women (in equal proportions); she increased her score over Joe Biden's only among voters over 65 and those with the highest incomes (over $100,000 a year) (1).

These few figures show that the Democratic candidate's electoral defeat is not primarily due to racist or misogynist prejudice.

Neither the verbal outrages and fake news of candidate Trump and his supporters, nor the calls to vote for Harris in the name of defending democracy against a “fascist” convicted by the courts, nor the pronouncements of showbiz stars, nor the declarations of leading economists on the good health of the American economy, have succeeded in mobilizing voters comparable to that which resulted in Joe Biden's victory in 2020. For millions of Biden voters, especially among the less privileged, disillusionment and discontent dominate: over the past 4 years, inequalities have grown; the poorest, the proletarians, have become poorer, and even sectors of the middle classes have been hit by inflation unseen at this level for some 40 years: only capitalists and stock market investors have seen their gains increase, sometimes spectacularly.

Elections are always a highly distorted reflection of the state of mind of the population in general, and of proletarians in particular, since the democratic system has been perfected over the decades to intoxicate the exploited, reduced to the state of voters gorged on propaganda. The electoral circus, richly endowed (it is calculated that nearly 16 billion dollars were spent by the various parties for this year's electoral cycle, a record) (2), has as its primary function to divert the aspirations, frustrations and discontent of the electorate onto the harmless terrain for the bourgeois order of competition between different parties and candidates in the service of the capitalists (when these candidates are not themselves billionaires like Trump - the candidate supposedly opposed to the elites and the establishment!). As Lenin said, quoting Marx: the “essence of capitalist democracy” is that the “oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!” (3).

This proletarian discontent, which can be traced back to electoral ups and downs, is manifested on the real terrain of class relations by a renewal of workers' combativeness. The most recent example is the 7-week strike by over 30,000 Boeing workers, who twice refused to accept the agreements reached between management and the IAM union. According to official statistics, which only record strikes involving more than 1,000 workers, in 2023 (the latest figures available) more than 450,000 proletarians went on strike, a number not seen for several years (4).

Trump's election represents the accession to the presidency of an adversary of the proletarians; but Biden-Harris and the Democratic Party have demonstrated, if that were still necessary, that they are in no way, as ultra-opportunist union leaders like to present them, “friends of labor”; they have not hesitated to break strikes like that of the railway workers, to intervene to put an end to others like at Boeing, or to deport more undocumented immigrants than Trump. Those who, despite the Democrats' criminal policies abroad (Israel...) and anti-worker policies at home, call on proletarians to support them in the name of the “lesser evil” or the “defense of democracy”, are in fact the proletariat's most insidious adversaries. To defend themselves against the capitalists and their state, proletarians can only rely on their own class struggle; they must reject not only the nationalist, racist and xenophobic tendencies spread mainly (but not exclusively) by right-wing and far-right currents: they must also break with all the false “friends” who bind them to the deadly class collaboration with the capitalists, in which their interests are sacrificed to those of the company or the national economy.

The period ahead will inevitably be marked by redoubled attacks on American proletarians, not because of the evil will of a Donald Trump, but because US's economic difficulties and worsening inter-imperialist tensions demand it. Like their comrades in other countries, American proletarians will have to rediscover the path of independent class struggle and organization to face up to this; but they will also have to reconstitute their internationalist and international class party: by no means an easy or quick task, but an indispensable one if the battles ahead for the working class are to be directed towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/what-numbers-actually-say-about-2024-election/

(3) See Lenin, “The State and Revolution” ch.5 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm

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