THE Democrats lost the presidential election some time ago, when the party nominated Hillary Clinton for the presidency and pushed Bernie Sanders aside using any and every means that was on hand to defeat his political revolution and his drive for the Party to give expression to the needs of the vast majority of the US working class.
The working class had been driven into the gutter by President Obama’s decisions to sacrifice them and their jobs in factories and mines after the 2008 banking collapse in order to save the big banks.
Sanders was shown the door, despite his massive support in those very sections of the working class and the youth that had been devastated by the banking crisis. His movement was huge and it had succeeded in building up a massive war chest to take on and smash Trump.
This course was rejected by the Democratic leadership who decided to stand by the discredited Clinton gang. This betrayal was magnified when Sanders accepted his ‘defeat’, pledged allegiance to Clinton and refused to continue to fight Clinton or stand for the presidency as a workers’ and youth candidate.
The result was that Trump’s support grew by default and the army of the oppressed was mobilised by his campaign for the benefit of Trump’s fellow plutocrats. The trade unions now have to deal with this debacle. There is only one way forward. The trade unions must now break with the Democrats and form a Labour party to fight for the socialist liberation of the oppressed working class and youth of the USA.
The most conscious sections of workers and youth must form a US section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the US socialist revolution which was developing under Sanders and which will erupt under the attacks that Trump is planning on the organised working class.
Trump’s class war policy at home against the working class and immigrants will be continued abroad by his economic war on his allies in the EU and NATO. He says that they must pay for their own defence and that all trade deals must be renegotiated in favour of the US ruling class.
This warlike attitude is an expression of US weakness not strength. It means that the US is no longer strong enough to carry any of its allies on its shoulders. They will have to pay their way, and export their jobs to the USA.
So keen is Trump to sort out his allies first of all that he has had some good words to say about relations with Russia. These have been seized upon by the different sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The truth is that the US cannot fight on all fronts at the same time.
He may even try to negotiate some latter-day version of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, to keep Russia on side, while he is levelling the economic power of his allies, and crucially carrying out his main election pledged to spend trillions redeveloping and retooling the US armed forces, with Russia as its number one target.
While all this is happening, the world crisis of the capitalist system is developing in leaps, as the debt mountain expands at an explosive pace. On Tuesday, the Bank of England governor Carney spelt it out once again that the world is now closer than ever to a new banking crash, which the Bank of England has already prepared for. Carney said that this time round there will be no banks too big to fail. Carney’s solution is that the depositors this time will lose their cash, and tens of millions will be bankrupted!
The way out of this major crisis of the capitalist system is not to embrace US or any other form of nationalism.
For the working class of the world, the only way out of this death agony of capitalism is to bury it on a world scale with the victory of the world socialist revolution. It was Marx who established that the working class was the only really revolutionary class and was the gravedigger of the capitalist system.
In the period ahead, the task of the hour is the building up of sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution, as it erupts in every country, to its victory.
