A ‘PERVASIVE sense of fear and uncertainty’ hangs over the US Democratic party as 81-year-old president Joe Biden faces increasingly strident calls for him to withdraw from November’s presidential election and even immediately resign his position as leader of the most powerful capitalist nation in the world.
These calls have been reaching a fever pitch after last week’s disastrous televised confrontation with Donald Trump where Biden’s inarticulate responses and verbal freezes indicated a man on the verge, if not already in it, of mental incapacity.
Questions have been raised in the press about whether a man with such obvious mental problems can deal with the huge economic and social crisis erupting in America while carrying out, on an international scale, the military domination and wars demanded by a ruling class desperate to re-impose its domination on the world.
After all, Biden is the US Commander-in-Chief responsible for carrying out the war to weaken Russia in the Ukraine, and give full support for US imperialism’s genocidal attack dog Israel, in the war to crush Palestinian resistance to occupation.
The crisis has been accelerated by the complete failure of US imperialism to win these wars.
The US bourgeois press has been inundated with reports that Biden is on the way out despite all denials from the White House. Denials cannot disguise the fact that a political crisis of immense proportions is rocking the US and causing irreversible damage to its status as world imperialism’s ‘super-power’.
This week the US Supreme Court passed a law giving any present or future US president dictatorial rights to commit any crime, including murdering opponents, with complete immunity from prosecution.
The American ruling class is tearing up any pretence of bourgeois democracy and turning to outright dictatorship, where all the democratic rights of workers and their trade union organisations can be obliterated by the president.
All opposition to imperialist wars is being silenced while any group or individual raising dissent is crushed or even liquidated. Trump, naturally, has been delirious in his welcoming of the powers the Supreme Court has handed to him should he be elected in November.
But this political crisis is not about the geriatric Biden or the increasingly demented Trump. It stems directly from the historic crisis of the US and the world-wide capitalist economic crisis.
This crisis is most acute in the US where the national debt stands at over $33 trillion, and growing by the day through interest charges and the continued billions spent on propping up the Ukrainian and Zionist regimes.
In March 2024 this debt stood at 124.7% of the US GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the total wealth created.
Last week the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned there is an immediate ‘pressing need to reverse the ongoing increase in public debt-GDP ratio’.
The same pressing need exists in all the capitalist economies that have subsisted entirely through piling up debt mountains.
The only way forward for the US capitalist class and its counterparts in Britain and Europe, who face the same crisis, is to impose cuts on the wages, jobs and every gain made in the past by the working class.
It is this absolute need by the bosses and bankers to impose a dictatorship over workers to enforce the drive into recession and poverty, not seen since the 1930s Great Depression, that created the political crisis currently erupting in the US, and mirrored in a similar crisis in the UK, France and across Europe.
The old traditional parties the ruling class relied upon have collapsed, like the Tories in Britain and Macron’s government in France, in the face of a powerful and undefeated working class that is rising up against foreign wars and is now waging a class war at home to make the ruling class pay the full bill for the crisis of the bankers and bosses.
The working class in this revolutionary situation must break with the old reformist leaders in the trade unions, replacing them with a leadership prepared to lead general strikes to end the rule of the bosses and bankers by taking power and advancing to socialism.
This means building up the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain, and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in the US, and every country, to provide the leadership required for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
