PSL’s prediction for the Nov. 5 election: Workers lose
11 min readWhat will happen after the election?
Rob Fisette (Party for Socialism and Liberation, Eugene): You know, there’s a lot that we can expect, no matter who wins. These are the things that are considered ‘bipartisan.’ It’s hard for me to think of a word that’s treated with such undeserved high regard in our culture, especially the media culture. Whenever I hear that a policy is ‘bipartisan,’ I’m expecting to hear about some very intense violence to be visited on working people.
And I think one of the other things that this word ‘bipartisan’ does is, it’s meant to communicate to us that we can’t fight this. So don’t even bother trying. Neither party who actually gets a vote on the matter is with you and so all of your avenues are foreclosed. But of course we don’t accept that, that lacking support from the two parties of the rich means that all of our avenues are foreclosed. And that’s why we organize and fight.
[00:00:56] That said, we can list out the things that will happen no matter what, that are the bipartisan agreements. You know, one is our foreign policy and that includes: The genocide in Gaza will continue.
[00:01:08] The blockade on Cuba, which is only getting worse, as we’ve all seen in the news the last couple of weeks. The cold war with China will keep escalating; with Russia; the threats of war against Iran, the sanctions on much of the rest of the world.
[00:01:24] And we’re talking about $1 trillion and above in military budgets continuing, money that could be used to fund our needs here.
[00:01:33] Inflation, the corporate plunder of the working class, will continue. Neither party is going to address the ways that corporations are destroying our life here and making us pay more and have less to support our families.
[00:01:50] That includes the escalating housing crisis. It includes taking on more debt, health care-related debt and bankruptcy from having to treat our medical problems.
[00:02:03] Generally speaking, we’ll remain the most indebted society on the planet because no one is helping with our debt. Our infrastructure will continue to deteriorate.
[00:02:13] We’ll continue to see non-measures to mitigate climate change. On the one hand, you have outright climate deniers. On the other hand, you have a party in the Democrats who will say all the good words about climate change, but 100% behind fossil fuels, 100% behind fracking, and no plan to transition away from a fossil fuel economy.
[00:02:38] As we’ve seen really in this campaign that’s been a shock to me is the demonization of migrants that started to come from Democrats. Now, we kind of know that their policies have always been ‘Deport,’ Obama as the deporter-in-chief, Biden has deported more people than Obama, considering the length of his term so far.
[00:02:56] But to see even the rhetoric on migrants from the Democrats start to appear like that of Trump’s and the Republicans, was stunning to me, even so.
[00:03:07] And the militarization of the border as well as the militarization of our cities: Biden has invested in the police more, it’s been a record amount of investment in local police and Cop Cities popping up all around the country, and this will continue regardless of who wins.
[00:03:27] To say nothing of the war on women’s reproductive rights, which as we know happens a lot at the state level and Democrats at the federal level have shown no fight back and we can expect that they’ll continue to show no fight back to really win this war.
[00:03:43] And similarly the war on LGBTQ people as Kamala Harris even this week was unable to provide a clear answer as to whether people should have a right to gender-affirming care.
[00:03:55] And this is just really a subset of the full list, but I think gives a good picture that these are the issues that matter really the most in the day-to-day life of working people, neither party is planning to move on any of these issues of the greatest importance.
[00:04:14] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Like Rob said, sometimes the Democrats, yeah, they have a different way of characterizing the policies and the positions that they take, but ultimately there’s very, very little difference between the impacts of those policies.
[00:04:28] Specifically when it comes to foreign policy, the Democrats at this point are so committed to allowing and enabling and perpetrating—actively perpetrating—the genocide of the Palestinian people, that it is almost impossible to imagine a Trump administration doing anything worse.
[00:04:51] The Democrats have brought us closer to a massive regional war than ever before. And I’m sort of, like, speechless about the amount of destruction that has happened under the Democrats’ watch, the loss of life that has happened under the Democrats’ watch, that they are absolutely proud of.
[00:05:16] It’s not that they feel they’ve maybe made some mistakes and that they need to like walk it back. No, they are proud of the number of Palestinians that have been murdered by the Israeli Zionist regime and have no intention of changing course whatsoever.
[00:05:32] In fact, they’re using election day as a bargaining chip. They’ve dangled the carrot in front of millions of people in this country, including Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians in the United States, many of them live in this important swing state of Michigan. The Democrats have dangled the carrot and. they said, ‘If you vote Kamala, if you vote Kamala on Nov. 5, we’ll have a cease-fire or we’ll consider an arms embargo.’
[00:06:01] When I saw that news, immediately I knew it was a lie, manipulating people into voting for Democrats under the illusion that the Democrats will actually do something to end the carnage that we are seeing in the Middle East.
[00:06:17] So that really is a huge one that sticks out for me, but like Rob said, we’re one of the most indebted societies in the world. I live in Portland, Oregon, we’re one of the most rent-burdened cities in America where people spend more than 30% of their income on just rent.
[00:06:34] What have the Democrats proposed to change about that? Nothing. Kamala Harris said that she wants there to be ‘an opportunity economy.’ She wants people to have the opportunity to pay 30% or more of their income on rent. She wants people to have the opportunity to spend $12 on a carton of eggs.
[00:06:58] I like what Rob said about bipartisanship. Bipartisanship in this country is really just a reflection of the extreme and powerful unity of the capitalist class, always united about foreign policy because their class interest is in how they can control the resources of the world. And that’s what imperialism is. So the capitalist class is an imperialist class as well, and they will always be united on those issues.
[00:07:33] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): And the other thing that we know will continue, regardless of who is in power, is that when we organize and when we fight, we can win. And we will win. So we don’t see identifying the things that will carry on regardless of who wins the White House as a source of hopelessness or as a source of nihilism. In many ways, it’s the opposite for us.
[00:07:55] It’s a view of the objective conditions, a frank analysis of the situation we’re in, where we understand that these oppressive structures will continue, regardless of who’s in the White House.
[00:08:07] But those structures will buckle and break when we fight just the same, regardless of who wins and regardless of who’s sitting in the White House.
[00:08:15] So in that sense, it doesn’t matter to us who wins. Regardless, we organize, we fight. And when we organize and fight, we win. And history has shown this, whether they’re Republicans in office, whether they’re Democrats in office, it was FDR in office, when the threat of a revolution during the Great Depression forced the ruling class to give the concession of the New Deal, which, of course, certain factions have been trying to claw back ever since.
[00:08:44] It was Richard Nixon who instituted a price freeze during the high inflation of the ’70s. Richard Nixon, who was in office to end the Vietnam War. These are not decisions that those individual people or those parties made. Those were concessions that were forced from the threat of revolt and that’s what we will be doing regardless of who is in office, that we organize, we fight back.
[00:09:09] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Many of us will remember that when Trump was elected in 2016 people flooded the streets all across the country. Thousands of people were arrested at massive protests against Donald Trump and what people felt was the onset of a new American fascism, right? And rightly so, people were very disturbed by this reality.
[00:09:35] And at every turn of the Trump administration, whether it was the Muslim ban, whether it was more attacks on migrants, the kids in cages, children being detained, separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, at every turn of the Trump administration, millions of people went into the streets again. There were huge protest movements around some of these egregious acts that the Trump administration took against working and poor and oppressed people all around the world.
[00:10:08] The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020—27 million people went into the streets. what did the Democrats do in response? They said, ‘Vote for Joe Biden. Vote for the architect of the 1994 crime bill that has put more Black people in prison than almost any other singular policy in U.S. history.’ They gave us Joe Biden as the solution to the major social unrest and social problems that people were responding to in the summer of 2020, and also as the remedy to four years of the Trump administration.
[00:10:50] And then what did they do to solve the problem of police brutality? They put, like Rob said, millions of dollars into the police. Biden said he was going to put 100,000 more cops on the streets.
[00:11:04] The fact is that after the 2020 uprising, people should have stayed in the streets, right? Like there were still many, many reasons that we should have continued to mobilize, because the Democrats were not actually solving the problems. There have been so many crises last four years, up to the Palestine struggle. People flooded into the streets after last October in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s resistance.
[00:11:33] We’ve experienced the protest movement against injustice, against racism, against police brutality, against war. We’ve experienced that movement under Trump and under Democrats. We already know how to do it. We just have to keep doing it.
[00:11:54] I know what I’m going to be doing on election night, and I know exactly what I’m going to be doing the next day, and that’s organizing. That’s organizing for whatever it is that the new administration is getting ready to do, whether it’s Trump or Kamala. Whoever is in office, we hit the streets. Like Rob said, it’s a source of energy.
[00:12:16] So tonight—this might be a little short notice, but tonight (Oct. 25) we are having a forum at 6:30 p.m. in Portland at the Portland Liberation Center. The title is, ‘Is democracy on the ballot?’ It will be a great discussion about some of the both Republican and Democrat talking points about the election and why we take a different tack and believe in building the movement 365 days a year to fight capitalism and imperialism.
[00:12:43] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): For us here in Eugene Saturday, Oct. 26, we’re going to be canvassing downtown at Saturday Market.
[00:12:49] On Sunday, Oct. 27, we’re going to be at the People’s Fall Fest at WOW Hall from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., which is going to be a great event that collects a lot of different organizations together to who are, you know, all invested in their own movements for social justice and environmental justice. And in our case, definitely all of the above through our fight for socialism, but we’ll be there with a lot of other groups in coalition. And there’ll be some panel talks about different topics like economics, environment, activism, Palestine, and so on. And that’s Sunday the 27th from 10:30 to 2:30 at WOW Hall. It’s going to be, I think, a really fun event.
[00:13:35] Wednesday evening we’ll be canvassing for the Claudia/Carina campaign at Eugene Station and Springfield Station after work, so you can catch us there.
[00:13:44] On Saturday, Nov. 2, we’re going to be having a No Votes for Genocide rally at 2 p.m. at Kesey Square, which we’re co-organizing with the Pacific Green Party, who is also principled in their stance against genocide in Gaza.
[00:14:01] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): On Saturday, Nov. 2, meeting at 2 p.m. at the Portland Liberation Center, we are also engaging in the ‘No Votes For Genocide’ Day of Action. That is taking the form of a mass day of mass outreach where we’re going to put up posters around the city. We’re going to talk to people as they submit their ballots and just try to—
We’re calling it ‘Paint the Town for Palestine,’ basically. We want people to remember all the people who participated in the Palestine protest movement in the past year to see that there is an alternative being built for alternative to the two genocidal parties that they can join. We are accepting volunteers to come and help us poster on Nov. 2 from 2 to 6 p.m.
[00:14:51] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): And then of course, you know, Nov. 5 is election day. So on election day, we’re going to be sure not to vote for genocide. And we’re going to write in Claudia De la Cruz in the write-in section of the president and vice president line on your ballot.
[00:15:08] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): And then on election night at the Portland Liberation Center from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., we’re going to be hosting an election results watch party. We’ll have food, drinks and we’re also going to be joined by Abby Martin of The Empire Files. They’ll start at 7:30, but doors open at 6 p.m. – We’ll have a discussion about the election and about building the movement beyond November.
[00:15:35] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): And then, you know, our next big event after the election is on Nov. 16 at 2 p.m. in Eugene, the location is still to be determined. We’re going to have a Socialism 101 Forum. That’s a forum for people to come and have a conversation about socialism, what it is, what it isn’t, and why we think that this is the path that we need to take for our future and to get plugged into some of our future work. So to hear more about that you can sign up for our mailing list and, yeah, keep your eye out and flag us down when you see us.
[00:16:09] John Q: PSL and the Green Party in Kesey Square Nov. 2, for the ‘No Votes For Genocide’ rally.