THE US presidential election is on a knife edge as Donald Trump confounded all the polls that predicted a landslide for his Democratic Party opponent Joe Biden.
The Democrats clung to the belief that the election would be a walkover for the 77-year-old Biden and that the only way Trump could deny them victory was through him resorting to the courts or by manoeuvring to declare postal votes invalid.
The election, with both Trump and Biden running neck and neck, proved however that the Democrats, even under the most favourable conditions, have proved incapable of wiping Trump out.
US capitalism is in the grips of the deepest economic crisis in its history, greater than the Great Depression of the 1930s. The US national debt has soared to over £26 trillion; unemployment levels have reached over 60 million with the accompanying mass homelessness, poverty and hunger.
At the same time the US has recorded the highest number of deaths (currently 235,000) and infection rates for Covid-19 anywhere in the world.
Biden and the Democrats offered absolutely no solution to the misery and impoverishment of the millions of US workers being driven into the gutter.
On the contrary, the entire Democratic campaign was dominated by virtual silence on the economic crisis with no sweeping proposals for alleviating the suffering of workers.
They made no attempt to reach out to the millions of workers and young people, instead counting on Trump’s vote to simply collapse.
Even if Biden manages to squeak home after all the counts are completed, he will still face the threat of Trump heading to the Supreme Court to declare a Biden victory fraudulent.
What is clear is that this election, whoever wins, has solved nothing for the American working class.
What it has done is expose the fact that the Democratic Party is completely unable to deal with Trump and the big gang of US rogue capitalists.
Just as in 2016 election, the Democrats made sure that the only candidate who made any attempt to win the support of workers and the trade unions, the self proclaimed ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders, was kept from becoming their candidate.
Despite winning the support of millions of workers and youth who have had enough of the billionaires, Sanders dropped out leaving Biden, another loyal servant of Wall Street, to stand against Trump.
If the Democrats thought about the working class at all it was to take for granted that the servile US trade union bureaucracy would get workers out to vote for Biden.
With no policies for the US workers or rural poor, whose lives have been devastated by the world crisis, the Democrats have come unstuck in their belief that you could stand any idiot against Trump and sweep to victory.
The 2020 Presidential election, whatever the eventual outcome, demonstrates conclusively that US capitalism has been torn apart politically and economically, and both the bourgeois parties are powerless to prevent its collapse.
Both are united in carrying out the most ferocious attacks on workers to keep the profits of the bankers and bosses continuing to flow. The only force that can deal with Trump and prevent US capitalism from dumping the full burden of its crisis on the backs of workers and young people is the American working class itself.
Trade union organisations across America have already passed resolutions calling for a general strike in the event of Trump trying to overturn the election if he loses. They must now demand that their leaders break with the Democratic Party and go on to build an independent Labour Party to fight for socialism.
The US crisis has gone far beyond Presidential elections – what is posed before the powerful American working class is to organise to bring down any administration that emerges from the wreckage of this election and go forward to expropriate the bosses and bring in a socialist planned economy.
There has never been more favourable conditions for the working class to build a Labour Party, with a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International playing a decisive role in it – leading the struggle to overthrow capitalism, expropriate the bosses and bankers and go forward to the Socialist United States of America.
