US Election: No vote for Obama or Romney!
US-American workers and oppressed need a new Workers Party on a revolutionary program
Statement of the Revolutionary Workers Collective, 17.10.2012
1. At the presidential election in USA, none of the candidates stand for the interests of the working class and the oppressed people. While Republican candidate Mitt Romney represents the greediest and reactionary sectors of the ruling class, Obama too is an enemy of the working class. His administration stands for the interests of the big corporations and the military brass. The whole workers and oppressed movement – trade unions, immigrant organizations, black community organizations etc. – must not rally behind the Democratic Party. They should break with them and form a new Workers Party. Such a party of workers and oppressed for the interests of the workers and oppressed should be based on a revolutionary program.
Republican Romney: the personified greedy rich
2. Republican candidate Romney reflects the disdain of the greedy super-rich for the popular masses. At the same time he stands for the typical capitalists’ behavior of using off-shore bank accounts and countless tricks to avoid paying taxes. Romney openly expressed this in his remarks on the 47% of the population who are poor and wouldn’t vote for him anyway. He stands for open class warfare against the laboring masses. And he stands openly for an intensified US war drive against the oppressed people around the world as his close links with the Zionist war-mongers of the Israeli Netanyahu government underline. He is Bush 2.0. However exactly for these reasons, he gets support only from the most reactionary sectors of the US society.
Democrat Obama: the disguised defender of the corporations and military brass
3. President Obama and his Democratic Party stand for a policy of the ruling class which essentially promotes the same kind of attacks against the working class and the oppressed in the USA and around the world. But in opposite to the Republicans and the Romney campaign, the Democrats and Obama are much more skillful in disguising their anti-working class policy. Obama as the first black president and with his promises of “change” aroused much hope for a fundamental transformation of US policy.
4. The reality however is that Obama is a president in the service of the corporations and the military brass. When the banks and financial institutions needed a bail-out in 2009 – financed by working class and the middle class taxes – he promptly delivered. When the corporations wanted more concessions for oil drilling, Obama agreed to expand the use of particularly environmentally poisonous methods of energy production like shale gas and fracking on national forest lands, offshore and in the Arctic.
5. The real character of Obama’s Democratic Party was also once again shown recently in Chicago where Mayor Rahm Emanuel – Obama’s former chief of staff – attacked public education and the teachers union. Similarly Tom Barrett, the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, also attacked public employees’ unions. It is also visible in the government’s racist policy against migrants. While during the Bush government, in 2001 “only” about 190,000 migrants were deported by the state apparatus, this figure rose to nearly 400,000 a year since Obama took office. And what has the Obama administration done about the 3.6 million foreclosures of homes since August 2007 of which most took place since the president took office?!
6. Obama’s change in the US foreign policy – in particular the retreat of the US occupation forces from Iraq and the announced withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan – are not an expression of a peace policy. It is far more a realistic recognition of the weakened status of the US in the global relation of forces between the Great Powers and of the US’s defeats in the Middle East. However, the systematic killing programs by drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen as well as the continuation of the barbaric prison in Guantanamo, demonstrate the government’s continuing commitment to an aggressive militaristic foreign policy. Likewise Obama’s determination to keep the US’s hegemonic role in the world was expressed in the administration’s decision to position 60% of its navy in the Asian region by 2020.
New Workers Party needed!
7. Various third party and independent presidential candidates like the Green Party‘s candidate Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson from the newly formed Justice Party or the Roseanne Barr/Cindy Sheehan campaign of the Peace and Freedom Party are no alternative neither. They represent various forms of petty-bourgeois, left-wing populism, which is useless for the US-American working class.
8. While there is no alternative for the working class at the ballot paper, there is a way out: The building a Workers Party which fights for a program of liberation of exploitation and oppression by socialist revolution. Class conscious workers and socialists should argue at workplaces, in the communities, inside the trade unions and the organizations of the migrants, black and other oppressed for the formation of a Workers Party which is completely independent of all sectors of the capitalist class. It should be a party that participates in elections in order to spread socialist ideas, but its main orientation must be the class struggle. It should be a consistent internationalist and anti-imperialist party which oppose all forms of US great power policy. It should be a party which fights for working class revolution in order to build a socialist society without exploitation and oppression.