Obama, Clinton: No Friends of Workers, Blacks, the Oppressed

Break with the Democratic Party of Imperialist War and Racism!

For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

The following article was issued by Workers Vanguard on April 17. It was distributed at the Philadelphia April 19 “Free Mumia” demonstration initiated by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and at the Partisan Defense Committee/Labor Black League-initiated united-front protest for Mumia’s freedom in Oakland the same day.

The 2008 presidential elections have been called “historic.” For the first time, the nominee of the Democratic Party will either be a black man, Barack Obama, or a woman, Hillary Clinton. As the second term of the oddly demented and widely despised Bush administration comes to a close—with the bloody and unpopular Iraq occupation, the Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals, an impending recession, foreclosures, job losses, union-busting, escalating attacks on civil liberties—there is a desire among the populace for “change.”

Trade-union bureaucrats, black bourgeois politicians, reformist leftists and others have seized on social discontent to peddle the lie that support to the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party—the other party of war and racism—will serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. But as we wrote in “The Obama Campaign and the ‘End of Racism’ Myth” (WV No. 906, 18 January):

“If this deeply racist country, where religious obscurantism and anti-woman bigotry are pervasive, ever sees a black or female president, it would certainly be a significant development. But it would do nothing to change the oppression of women, which is rooted in the institution of the family in class society, or of black people, which forms the cornerstone of American capitalism. Simply put, the liberation of black people and women will not happen short of the destruction of the capitalist system through socialist revolution.”

As Trotskyists (i.e., genuine Marxists), we fight for the political independence of the working class from the capitalist class enemy. We do not extend any political support on principle to any capitalist politician—Democrat, Republican, Green or “Independent.” In his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underlined that bourgeois democracy means voters get to “decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people.” The bourgeoisie uses the facade of “democracy” to mask its class dictatorship, to give a democratic veneer to decisions made, as Lenin said, in the stock exchanges, clubs and dinner parties of the big bourgeoisie. In this, the rulers are aided by the reformist left, which promotes the lie that Democratic Party “lesser evilism” serves the interests of working people and the oppressed. (read on)