“Everybody thought the way to fight fascism was to get Kamala Harris elected.” — Anonymous
“It should come as no surprise that the Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” — Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders issued a statement on Wednesday outlining for America what happened the night before. His indictment of the Democratic Party for abandoning working people not just in the Harris/Walz campaign, but over the previous decades, helped a nation stunned by the sudden reality of a looming Project 2025 federal administration make sense of their brave new world.
Notwithstanding Sanders’ checkered political history, the statement helps to orient workers and DSA to some stark realities. The most eye-opening of these is that working class people have no political instrument to fight back against the crushing weight of rising prices, stagnating wages, and precipitously decreasing social services in their lives. Ironically, the only relief that some could see was offered through the same party that, on the other end of the spectrum, works to maximize the profits extracted off their backs and from the planet.
Trump’s campaign, as aided by his “working class” running mate, JD Vance, offered a message to working Americans to join them if they wanted to see any solutions to their daily life struggles. Harris’s campaign, on the other hand, offered four more years of the same, even though early on there were indicators that she had more working class appeal. By the end of her campaign, Harris had completely succumbed to a neoliberal, pro-corporate stance and was clearly unable to offer any respite to working Americans. Such solutions threatened the bottom line of the Wall Street billionaires footing the bill for her campaign.
Sanders outlines for working people what just happened. He helps us see that it’s not that half of the country has become white supremacist and hate mongers, though there are most certainly those groups among Trump’s ranks. Instead, he frames the political shift in the Democratic Party that has justified a rightward turn toward New-Yorker-bag-toting coastal elites who have spent the past decade (and since the George Floyd uprising in particular) turning their noses up to voters in “flyover states.” This was a group that the Trump campaign was more than happy to scoop up into their electorate.
Sanders talks about the reality for most working people: wealth inequality, job insecurity insufficient and expensive health care, and opposition to their governments’ participation in genocide. He asks the questions, ”Will the big money interests and well paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? [. . .] Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?” And he answers in words that might as well be our own: “Probably not.” Though we would say, “Definitely not.”
As socialists, we’ve long been critical of the Democratic Party for its connections to Wall Street and the billionaire class. But at a moment when the Republican Party just became the working-class party of the nation, DSA ought to be seriously considering our adjacent relationship to the Democrats, too. The Republicans did turn their heads toward the working class. And DSA must do the same thing, only with a class-struggle socialist program, a program that — if they were more familiar with it — millions and millions of Americans would support and be attracted to advancing.
This program is Medicare for All, figthing climate change, taxing the rich, safe and affordable housing, bodily autonomy and support for abortion rights, an end to imperialist adventures and support of genocide, an end to racial oppression and racist policing, and strong support for unions and labor organizing as a way to build the working class power to realize these goals. But our program doesn’t do us any good if we, like, Harris’s campaign, are not turned toward the working class. We need to be in daily contact with “low-income, blue-collar, and non-college-educated” frontline workers in hospitals, meatpacking plants, auto plants, grocery stores and Amazon warehouses. We are not there. Yet.
Many people who voted, out of desperation, for Trump are our people. Many who, out of resignation or frustration, chose not to vote are, too. We need to bring these people towards us. We need to organize our workplaces and help our coworkers understand how they have the power to change their lives by standing up and demanding changes to the system that slays them. By leveraging the power of organized labor to both close the wealth inequality gap in our workplaces and beyond, and to use that same power to force legislators and big finance to stop killing people in the Middle East in the interest of global imperialism, oil, and US economic and military power — by doing these things, we build workers’ sense of their power and centrality in advancing change. When workers are organized, together we build the mass movement we need.
So we need to make a concerted effort as leaders of the socialist future, powered by a multiracial working class, to also — like the Trump-Vance campaign — turn our head toward workers.
There are two ways to defeat Trump, writes the author Daniel Hunter, in his assessment of the 2024 US Presidential Election results: 1) leveraging electoral power in the next election and 2) developing a movement of massive non-cooperation, so the ruling class will find it inconvenient to keep Trump in power. But to do this, he argues, we need to turn toward workers — the people who actually make things work. Because, of course, if things can’t run, rulers can’t rule.
He cites an example of what this looks like, remembering the flight attendants’ preparation for a national strike in 2019 during Trump’s federal government shutdown. “Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were ‘mobilizing immediately’ for a strike, Trump capitulated.”
As DSA Labor, we vote for Option 2.
As socialist labor organizers, we’re explicitly working to develop a mass movement of non-cooperation centered around the unions and working-class people, in particular. It is this kind of resistance that can stop Trump and a fascist agenda dead in its tracks. Option 1 follows closely behind, and — in our DSA and socialist tradition — in tandem, really, with Option 2: the candidates we run for office and support are fighting for a working-class program, too. Our socialist electeds serve as tribunes for the people, as Lenin said. But this approach only works if we develop a mass working-class movement that can lead, direct, and ultimately support our paired electoral efforts. This also means developing a political alternative to the Democratic Party.
In TCDSA’s Labor Branch, we’re on our way towards building the scaffolding for this movement. We’ve got Union Working Groups, where socialists in the same union, local or sector convene to think about building the power in their workplace through a socialist lens. These groups are an on-ramp for workers looking for solutions.
These working groups, together, form the backbone of our Labor Branch, so solidarity-building among workers in different struggles is baked right in to our branch’s infrastructure. We partner with comrades across TCDSA’s other working groups and branches, like our Palestine Working Group, to build power around important social issues such as fighting genocide in the Middle East. And we partner with our Electoral Branch to build legislative support for issues important to workers and to help support unions in their shop-floor struggles and strikes.
There are millions of working-class people, who at this very moment are desperately looking for a way forward. Many who voted for Trump are soon to join their ranks. Let’s not miss this tremendous organizing opportunity and the chance to be there to help provide answers and a way forward!
By Kip H and Cynthia S