The prospect for rolling back US capitalism and reforming the conditions of the working class is bleak if it is seen to depend on the Democratic Party. A whole generation of Democrats now believe]that their political survival depends on being even more bellicose on both domestic and foreign affairs than Republicans. Capitalism bends both parties to its will. There are no vital issues between the two parties. The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace, or the issue of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties. Reforms make their appearance only as vague campaign pledges never to be redeemed. Political patronage and public plunder persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
There exists disillusionment and disenchantment with the Siamese twin set-up of the two-party system. Solutions will not come from the swamp of the two capitalist parties. If the American people understood the facts before them, they would convince them that this nation is run by the corporations, and that the corporations control both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Those in public office are all the political creatures of the wealthy. The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad. The capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. Over the years the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether. Both parties have common war policies, both support Wall Street’s economic programs, both are united in support of the most reactionary governments in the world. Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent wars and costs of the pandemic.
Candidates promises and campaign platforms are not especially important. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties. The personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists, easily indicated by amiable buffoon, Biden and the pompous property billionaire, Trump. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice, so-called, decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. Ministers of the gospel are subject to the same influence and their sermons are molded to serve the same purpose.
The aim of any electoral work engaged in by the World Socialist Party is not primarily to amass votes, but to reach the maximum audience with our ideas, to bring the message of our party to fellow-workers. It aims to establish economic equality by making all owners in common of the means upon which all depend for employment, and without which there can be no “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This insures economic freedom for every human being. As no one would have private property in that upon which another depended for employment, industrial mastery and slavery would disappear together and competition for profit would give way to cooperation for use. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for essentially the same system of exploitation, and a worker realizes that it makes precious little difference whether they are exploited by a few great capitalists or an innumerable brood of small ones. They propose to put an end to exploitation entirely by abolishing the system and transferring the means of production from private hands to the collectivity and having them operated in the interest of all alike.
The World Socialist Party is necessarily an international party. It is as wide as the domain of capitalism.
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