EDITORIAL
2024 U.S. Elections:
Working People Need Our Own Party

Nov 4, 2024

This editorial was published in Spark workplace newsletters just before the election.

Sunday before the election, as this is being written, we don’t know who will be president, Harris or Trump. We don’t know which party, Democratic or Republican, will control the new Senate, nor the House of Representatives.

But two things we do know. No matter who wins, the mega-wealthy capitalist class will have its interests defended. Once again, the working class will not be represented.

You hope that’s not true? You hope one of these candidates will be a break with the past?

Yes, Donald Trump may sometimes be stick-it-in-your-eye boisterous. Kamala Harris may have a more modern style than the usual boring wealthy male who’s been president.

Different, maybe. But they each were chosen by their own parties. And those two parties have always represented the wealthy class of people which controls the economy of this country.

Trump and Harris may pretend to speak to working people, but, when in office, they both acted for big business, banks and the financial industry. They inflated business profits with contracts, subsidies, tax laws and grants. They both used their office, when elected, to push funding for wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and unknown places.

Their two parties have a history. Ever since the end of the Civil War, one of them has been in power. One of them or both—and no other party.

No matter what happened—warfare which never ended or economic crisis which never ended—no matter what happened, one of these two parties led the government.

There might have been two parties—the better to fool the population—but it was still a dictatorship, a two-party dictatorship, the longest lasting dictatorship in the world. Behind it was the social/economic dictatorship of the capitalist class.

What was missing during all these years was a party representing the interests of working people, who are by far the majority. There was no working class party, organized by the working class, putting forward working class demands, pushing to build unity inside the working class.

Certainly, there have been candidates who spoke to workers about the disasters caused by capitalism. The most important was Eugene Debs who ran for president in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. He went to jail for leading an important railroad strike. He went to prison for campaigning against World War I, declaring, “there was only one war in which I would enlist and that was the war of the workers of the world against the exploiters of the world.” Debs was a militant of the working class. But there was no party.

There has not been one since. But that is what needs to be built. Until the working class organizes itself politically, working people will be trapped within this two-party system, which may give workers a vote, but no representation.

The appearance of Working Class Party on the ballot goes against this whole history. Compared to the two parties with their army of campaigners, with their hundreds of billions of dollars, with the big media on their side, Working Class Party may seem insignificant. There were only 15 candidates in Michigan, out of thousands, and only one candidate in Illinois, one in California, while people in Maryland were still only gathering signatures to put Working Class Party back on the ballot.

Working Class Party on the ballot will not change the workers’ situation today. For that, the working class has to move, to organize itself to carry out a real fight. And it needs to organize its own party. But those are the very points Working Class Party candidates made with their campaign.

With this party on the ballot, some tens of thousands of people could break with the two-party system. With their vote, they could say they want the working class to build its own party. They had a way to say publicly what they want.

It’s only the very beginning, but beginnings are necessary.