Left groups and people

Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, SWP, Socialist Party, Weekly Worker, IWCA, RDG, Green Party, Ken Livingstone ... and a few others.

How the major parties spoil the election

By Angela Walker (candidate for Vice President on the Hawkins/Walker Green Party US ticket) Republicans spoil elections by suppressing the Democratic vote and the Black vote. They orchestrate voter roll purges, most notably in the 2000 election in Florida, and restrict the number of polling places in Black and Brown communities. The GOP encourages voter intimidation at polling places, which seems to be higher this year. Democrats spoil elections by trying to suppress the Green vote, kicking us off the ballot, instead of embracing the proven non-partisan solution to spoiled elections. The...

Backing Biden will not stop Trumpism

Much of the United States Left is in the midst of an oddly-timed embrace of lesser evilism. They are calling for socialists to support Biden at the very moment Trump’s campaign seems in crisis and headed for defeat. Nevertheless, key figures on the US Left, including long-time supporters of independent politics, are pushing the new socialist movement not just to vote for Biden, but to actively campaign for him. To be clear, our argument is not about what comrades do during the time it takes to cast a ballot. What we oppose is the new socialist Left, especially the Democratic Socialists of...

Back Hawkins, not Biden

Workers’ Liberty’s National Committee on 24 October debated the 3 November US election. This is the motion it passed. The political crisis that will probably happen in the aftermath of the US Presidential election will be caused by Trump refusing to accept defeat. That crisis may, if it takes an extreme form, push Trump to begin co-ordinate a violent right-wing street response. Our role is to back US socialists, the labour movement and the oppressed, to rally in defence of democratic rights. Trump is not a fascist. His aim is to stay President. Being a vile, sexist, narcissistic, right-wing...

A policy based in realities

Donald Trump is “setting the stage for an authoritarian Second Term”, putting people in place, putting down markers for street violence and for the rigging or flouting of elections. Branko Marketic gives some recent detail in an article for Jacobin . In our debate in Solidarity , I think everyone has agreed that Trump and his base are at least “pre-fascist”, or “proto-fascist”, or “could develop in a fascist direction” after the 3 November election. That makes Joe Biden, a standard neo-liberal, a lesser evil. The obvious response in a vote between a lesser evil and a greater is to vote for the...

Use election to build socialist politics

Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins. • See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Much of the debate amongst Workers’ Liberty members about the US election has focused on the question of whether Donald Trump, and the movement around him, can meaningfully be described as “fascist”. Whilst this question has an analytical significance (personally I think “proto-fascist” is a more accurate description), it does not, in and of itself, settle the matter of how we think the class-struggle left should orient in the election. One might think Trump is a fascist, and...

Howie Hawkins interview: "A stronger vote against Trump"

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Howie Hawkins is a socialist running in the US presidential election on the ticket of the Green Party. On 12 October he talked with Stephen Wood from Solidarity. Workers’ Liberty backs Hawkins in the election. Part 2 of this interview is here . The invective of Trump is what is worse than previous incumbents. Egging on the vigilante militias. Calling the election as being fraudulent before it is even run. People get scared and they think Hitler is on the horizon. But it is quite different. These rag tag militias aren’t going...

Democrats: no space for radicals

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . The main impression I get from Thomas Carolan’s article ( Solidarity 565, Trump is a fascist) is that Carolan has belatedly woken up to the threat posed by Trump and is now panicking. Most of those who have labelled Trump a fascist have done so demagogically to advocate for the right wing and lamentable Democrat, Joe Biden. But Carolan is at least coming from the other direction, declaring Trump a fascist first before, last week ( Solidarity 566 ), following the drift of his first article, and declaring support of Biden’s...

Democrats: the danger of co-option

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Thomas Carolan (“A socialist vote for Biden”, Solidarity 566, 7 October 2020) is right that a “tradition” should not be allowed to become “superstition”. He is also right that “making an absolute principle of never working in or voting for a bourgeois party” would be mechanical and dogmatic. Standing aside from the Sanders movements in 2016 and 2020 because he was running in the primary of a “bourgeois party” would have been hopelessly sectarian; refusing to campaign or vote for him if he had won still more so. But Carolan...

Different in two ways

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . This US presidential election is different in two ways. It narrows down to a contest between a fascistic demagogue with a militant and part-militarised mass base, and a standard-issue neoliberal. And recent years have seen a sizeable though diffuse new US socialist current round Sanders’ campaigns and the Democratic Socialists of America. At the same time, the International Socialist Organization has wound itself up, and Solidarity sees itself more as an “educational centre” than an activist group. Conclusion: the most active...

Hawkins-Walker: socialist candidates

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Workers’ Liberty supports Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in the 2020 US presidential election: socialists, standing as the candidates of the Green Party. We also carry debate about that stance and on assessment of Trump. Below is how Hawkins and Walker sum up their pitch, from a statement on the hospitalisation on Donald Trump. Our campaign and the work of the Green Party has never been to isolate or target one politician. Behind Donald Trump is an army of Republicans who are cheering him on at every turn. Behind the...

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