By JOHN PRIETO
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) is over. What we saw was a commitment to the same old politics that are a dead end for working people and the oppressed.
Despite the best efforts of the “Uncommitted Campaign,” the question of Palestinian human rights and the ongoing genocide in Gaza was never going to be given a speaking spot, and their efforts certainly weren’t going to change the Democratic Party’s long-standing support for Zionism and the U.S. imperialist project. As we said at the start of the campaign, “The efforts of the movement could be far better spent organizing mass action for Palestine in ways that break with the Democratic Party.”
Ultimately, the uncommitted campaign served the same purpose as the rest of the performances and pageantry at the DNC, to build illusions in the Democratic Party amongst activists and organizers and have them circle the wagons around Kamala Harris.
A campaign for freedom?
In her speech on Thursday night, Aug. 22, Kamala Harris set the tone for her campaign, stating that it was about “the freedom to live safe from gun violence, in our schools, communities, and places of worship; the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride; the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis; and the freedom that unlocks all the others—the freedom to vote.”
While the rhetoric is new in that it seeks to use the traditionally conservative framing of government interference to defend progressive issues, it is not fundamentally different from what we are told every election—this is the most important election in our lifetimes and if we don’t support the Democrats we will lose our rights.
But this has always been an empty threat—not because the Republicans and their far-right allies don’t pose an actual risk to our rights, but because the Democratic Party is not committed to defending them. Just look beneath the surface of the rhetoric at the actions and policies they carry out!
Freedom from gun violence is the first freedom she mentions. But research consistently shows that gun violence is highly correlated with poverty, even after addressing the possible roles of sex, race, density, and firearm ownership. In fact, there is evidence that workforce development programs in the local community help to alleviate gun violence by increasing employment and helping to alleviate poverty.
Despite this, however, Democrats have consistently supported the slow but steady erosion of even minor social programs meant to help the poor and the working class. In fact, they can’t and won’t support actions that actually undermine the causes of gun violence since they support the very capitalist system that causes the poverty, immiseration, and exploitation of oppressed people and the working class as a whole.
Perhaps they are better on LGBTQ+ rights? “The freedom to love whom you love,” she says. Yet, less than two months ago, the Biden-Harris administration announced its opposition to gender-affirming surgery for minors, stoking the trans panic campaign of the Republicans and far right. As we said at the time, “What [drives] the Biden administration’s choice to step away from supporting transgender rights has nothing to do with what’s important to working-class people and everything to do with a deeper historic pattern of the Democratic Party, and ultimately any political party that is bankrolled by the capitalist class. At the end of every campaign, both Democrats and Republicans rely on and answer to the same masters—big banks and corporations of every kind.”
We see this most starkly when we turn to the third freedom mentioned by Harris in her speech, “the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” While the rhetoric might be slightly different, Biden claimed to support this freedom when he campaigned in 2020 on “no more drilling.” Despite this promise, we learned in 2023 that the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration had seen more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands than during the first two years of Trump. In fact, the United States is currently experiencing an oil boom!
And then there is the last freedom she mentions, the freedom to vote. Here she refers to the wave of laws passed at the state level that are attempting to restrict access to the voting booth. And, while the laws she refers to are often seen as the exclusive actions of Republicans, the reality is that Democrats too, have no principled position on democratic rights. In Atlanta, the city’s majority-black Democratic city council passed a change to the process for citizens to get referendums on the ballot in response to a mass campaign that had collected 116,000 signatures from voters to let citizens vote on the infamous “Cop City” project. The change would require that all signatures on the petition for a referendum be matched against signatures from the voter registration database, a process that voting rights advocates condemn for disproportionately impacting people of color. Who is the mayor of Atlanta leading the fight against democracy? It’s Democrat Andre Dickens, an advisor to the Democratic campaign for president.
We witnessed a glaring and horrific example of where the lesser-evil logic of the Democratic Party gets us in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The Democratic Party had 49 years to enshrine the protections granted by Roe v. Wade in federal law.
Instead, we saw the repeated support of Democrats for things like the Hyde Amendment, which was used starting in 1980 to deny the use of federal funds to access abortion care. Bill Clinton supported it, Joe Biden supported it, Obama issued an executive order expanding it to cover the Affordable Care Act, and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey even introduced a bill to codify the Hyde Amendment and make it federal law covering all federal funding. Our assessment of the role of the Democratic Party in the fight for abortion rights could be generalized to all popular movements for justice: Democratic Party politicians have been the most unreliable allies, using party discipline to thwart mass mobilization in favor of an electoral approach that has failed over and over since 1973.
Dobbs is not an aberration; it is the result of Democratic Party policy. It is an example of what will ultimately come from following the Democratic Party’s lead.
As a rule, and especially at election time, both capitalist parties maneuver to mis-lead voters and co-opt the movements for social change with vague promises. But after grabbing our vote, the Democratic and Republican politicians rarely hesitate in their assigned job of promoting big-money interests while spurning the aspirations and needs of working people and the oppressed. For this reason, we must redouble our efforts to build mass protest movements in the streets and in our workplaces, and strive to ensure that our movements remain fully independent of the Democrats and the Republicans. It is more and more urgent that working people in the United States undertake the task of building their own independent party, which would consistently fight for their interests.
