At most Kamala only “lost” 2.1 million voters to other candidates this election (realistically it’s probably around a million). If that’s the case then 5.9 million voters voted for Biden in 2020 and nobody in 2024 but still casted a ballot. Now maybe that’s because of Gaza but from my experiences with the American electorate I highly doubt that the majority of those people are refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza, refusing to vote third party, and yet still voting. I think if Americans had coherent anti-genocide politics then the anti-genocide candidates would have seen more growth than 5% of Harris’ losses. I don’t believe Americans have coherent politics though so I doubt most of those voters were taking a principled anti-genocide stance when they didn’t vote for anybody.

This isn’t to say that abstentions or votes for other candidates because of the genocide could not have played a significant role in the fucked up math of the American electoral system, merely that it didn’t drive her huge loss in the popular vote from Biden’s victory in 2020.

I honestly don’t think any more than 10% of the voters Kamala “lost” were because of Gaza. Otherwise there would be millions more votes for the third parties that ran almost exclusively on ending the genocide. The vast majority of these voters abstained from the presidential election and voted down ballot either because they did not like Harris or Trump, or more likely they didn’t know anything about either of them and did not feel confident casting a ballot for them.

As much of a farce as 2020 was, the political divide was quite clear. Trump represented COVID and racist cops murdering people. Biden seemed to represent something else. The mass mobilisations and the initial response to the pandemic taught people that and many more of them voted accordingly. The Democrats didn’t even try to reach the masses this time around though and so the masses were left confused and aimless and did not vote.

A 2020 Gallup poll found that 46% of American adults read below a 6th grade (11 or 12 year old) level. Many surveys have found slightly better but still worrisome reading levels in the adult population. This is not a matter of Americans being able to read what is on a page, but rather that they do not know how to take in and process information.

Any political analysis that does not start with this fact is fundamentally flawed.

Essentially capitalism had progressed to a point sometime in the late 19th century where industrial monopolies had formed in the major European powers. The industrial monopolies had been purchased by finance capital, and the finance capital became monopolized as well. In search of cheaper profits, these monopolies began exporting capital overseas to other countries and colonies. The secret treaties were a product of this. France for instance was heavily invested in Russia (I think Lenin said France owned half of all foreign capital in Russia at the start of the war) so France signed a defense pact with Russia to protect their investments there.

The treaties also carved up the world outside of the major European powers so the Balkans, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were all legally divided between the imperialist powers so that they could be more securely be exploited.

The German, French, British, and American finance capitalists ability to carve up the world (as they did with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire, Africa, Asia, and they intended to do to Russia had the Bolsheviks not won) and exploit the people in these imperial holdings was why the war was fought and they were happy to liquidate the proletariat of all nations to do so. It had nothing to do with fighting autocracy or the right to self determination which only served as ideological cover for the postwar settlement and were quickly done away with especially in the British and French colonies. Therefore the British and French were not the “good guys”. Tens of millions of people were slaughtered just so the British and French could pillage and enslave most of the world.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

This might get at your question somewhat but I’d strongly suggest reading the whole of State and Revolution if you haven’t already.

Essentially, liberal democracy is a sham because of capitalism. Even if there’s some aspects of a democracy like elections or a parliament the capitalist class still rules and democracy will be subordinated or ignored if the capitalists deem it necessary. Marxists recognize that democracy is an important tool in teaching the proletariat how to govern itself and that capitalism must be overthrown therefore it is an important stage of historical development. As communists we also recognize that the democratic state must one day wither away and therefore democracy will wither away. In that way we are not mere democrats with some idealistic belief in majoritarian rule or the perfect democracy or whatever the way liberals are. If democracy becomes impractical or unnecessary in the pursuit of communism than it can be done away with.

I had some CPUSA members tell me Trump was a fascist threat that needed to be defeated even if it meant voting for genocidal Democrats and I desperately want to ask them why they aren’t organizing a new Abraham Lincoln brigade now that the fascist threat is here.

The purpose of this is to spread it as “educational content”, to arm people online with talking points. The goal is to create thousands of people with this information in their heads so that everywhere an org name comes up (PSL for example) immediately gets dozens of comments dropping these talking points.

There was a small workers group in my area that had existed for years and hadn’t really done anything until myself and my partner joined and got regular meetings going and set up a plan to do some public facing work. Suddenly one of the prominent members pulled out and shared a post detailing these exact points on Instagram the next day and the group quickly fell apart shortly after. My partner and I were the only two in the group that would even identify ourselves as Marxists and while I like PSL and Workers World neither of us are members of it or any other “vanguardist” organization.

The fascism has been here since at least 1946. Probably more like 1776. Libs are just scared it might hurt them now unlike before.

I have to flesh it out but I keep being struck by the contradictory nature of American elections and how frankly nonsensical it all is and it returned me to this (from Wikipedia)

Gallup principal economist Jonathan Rothwell concluded, in a 2020 analysis and economic impact study of the PIAAC results collected during 2012 - 2017;[55] commissioned by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy,[56] that the United States could increase its annual GDP by 10%, adding $2.2 trillion in annual income, by enabling greater literacy for the 54% of Americans reading below a sixth-grade level nationwide.[57][58] The analysis noted that, of the 33 OECD nations included in the survey, the U.S. had placed sixteenth for literacy, and surmised that about half of Americans surveyed, aged 16 to 74, had demonstrated a below sixth-grade reading level.[55]

If this and similar studies are accurate it means a significant number of Americans can read what’s on a page and repeat it back to you, but couldn’t tell you what it means or draw anything from it. If it is the case that people can read but not understand than no wonder Americans are so clueless - they’re thinking at the level of twelve year old children.

I think coming out of this election one of the things we should be doing is organizing for the collective education, both political and general. It’s no wonder that communists of yore prioritized workers schools, study groups, newspapers, etc. Illiteracy is a tool of the imperialist because it allows people to wallow in ignorance and uncritical thought. We should be organizing study groups (and schools where possible) for the people in our lives to study, appreciate, and create not just theory but also art, music, literature, etc. of both the expressly political and seemingly apolitical varieties. As long as we are engaging with people and challenging them to think for themselves they will come closer to socialism.

These groups can also serve as the basis for actual organizing which is the second thing that we as a society need to learn. We must make change if we want it, politicians and bureaucrats will not do it for us. This is especially true in the workplace where workers have come to rely on government intervention or legal contracts for far too long into a time when capitalists do not care and will only respond to actual labor action.

Somewhere between forty and seventy percent of American adults do not demonstrate comprehensive English literacy meaning they can technically read and write but the ability to recall, analyze, reference, or think critically about text is at or below the level we expect twelve year olds to read at. This is not a matter of them being able to read words on a page, it’s a matter of them being able to think. America makes a lot more sense when you realize this.

Final tallies aren’t in but it seems like significantly over half the population also did not participate in this election.

I’m kinda curious how badly the CPUSA has burned its bridges with the international community around this issue with their continued support for Democrats. The IMCWP was supposed to meet in Beirut last month and now the CPUSA’s Lebanese and Palestinian comrades are being slaughtered while they unconditionally support someone who has pledged to continue the carnage.

Very much social democratic with a revolutionary veneer. They run Organizing for Power which promulgates the organizing model of “don’t do anything unless 90% of the workforce basically already agrees with you”.

We spent the last month touting a Dick Cheney endorsement and now the Arab-Americans hate us? How could that be?

Yeah I agree that most of the union workers in the US are not particularly well off. Unions like NEA and UFCW are massive, business-oriented, and many of their members are dirt poor. I think the issue we run into as leftists is that we just sorta dogmatically look at unions as a good thing (or at least Lenin’s century old formulation of them as useful forms of proletarian organization) or we go ultraleft and reject them as colloborators in colonialism and genocide (which isn’t to say they aren’t) with very little insight into the internal contradictions of a union, how they came to be this way, or what a union even is. The lack of democracy and the outright hostility to workers self organizing within the big unions fucks their members over just as their protectionism or militarism fucks the global proletariat over.

Near where I live for instance there are union members in mills who are frequently ordered to work 24 or more hours in a row and their local has been outright hostile to any sort of strike or activity to fight it. Idk what their contract looks like or how well they’re compensated but they’ve had multiple members killed in car accidents driving home and many more injuries on the job after working for a day straight. These are the “good union mill jobs” everyone’s grandparents had.

There are of course union workers in military contractors and such that are directly benefiting from Imperialism or other forms of exploitation, but the reason the big unions suck is because they are one degree from state institutions designed to choke out proletarian revolution and democracy, not because their members are all living rich off the blood of the global south and have democratically decided to keep it that way. White collar non-union workers in email jobs are much more likely to be true labor-aristocrats that produce nothing than a UFCW grocery clerk or an NNU Nurse.

Actually, some of the people this address was given to would go on to create the SPD and Marx and Engels would support them. The SPD, though it contained a conservative wing, would remain the party of the German proletariat until it split over supporting the first World War and the Bolsheviks in Russia.

I’m not sure what specific names the German petty bourgeois were organizing under in 1850 but at the end of the Communist Manifesto they discuss a number of trends in German politics that would include the petty bourgeoisie.

They were talking about the German petty bourgeoisie who they thought would betray the revolutionary proletariat once a bourgeois republic was established. 70 years later the Social Democrats put down the proletarian revolution in Germany to protect the Weimar Republic, inaugurating the reaction in Germany.

Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled.

-Marx and Engels, March 1850

Real poli-sci/political history heads know that the Federal Government was designed to not work so that white people could murder, steal, and enslave nonwhite people freely without interference and if you wanted to do something else with it you needed 90% of the population to support it.

The big unions are all corrupt as fuck and absurdly top-down and undemocratic. (edit: also a lot of people in the labor movement are grossly incompetent and gullible) This is because they’ve been shaped that way since FDR. The NLRA was designed to turn unions into state sanctioned and controlled institutions and then they were purged of anyone who had ideological commitments to democracy or socialism. From there they were allowed to collect dues from employees working under their contracts even if those employees were not members of the union which meant there was no material reason for them to actually do anything more than win an NLRB run election and a single shitty contract. Then they could embed themselves like ticks in job sites.

Today most unions are sitting on billions of dollars in pension and insurance funds. Union officials regularly make six figure salaries for nothing while their members make poverty wages. They are blatantly undemocratic institutions in which the members have so little say that the federal government consistently intervenes in elections. The unions do not have any obligation to recruit, educate, agitate, or organize their members. Most of the unions are only interested in getting Democrats elected primarily to fight right to work so that they can continue to extract dues from non-members. The unions also frequently suppress the self activity of their members and make it harder for them to organize and will even collaborate with management to remove problematic workers. When strikes or other actions do happen they happen at the whim of union leadership, not the members. They have been shaped this way by decades of opportunism and US government interference.

Unions do not have to be this way though. There’s no actual obligation to go through the NLRA process. There’s no obligation to work under the boots of the big unions. We should aim for strategic militancy not timid super-majorities. We should exercise working class power and democracy, not legalistic state power. We should fight like guerillas, not like liberals. Communists in the US should focus more on workers and sow our roots deeper into job sites, but among the 90% of American workers that are not organized in any sort of union who are generally the most proletarian workers, not among the 10% who are in unions. We should not seek to join bigger unions that will stamp us out. We and should replicate the successes of the CIO ninety years ago. If we are in the big unions already we should be organizing within them as communists, forming caucuses along our political orientations and tactically supporting reform efforts.

I like to try and believe most people are fundamentally good but your median American is probably casually racist and misogynistic (and all around an ignorant bigot). They don’t want to vote for a woman or a POC even if they might not feel comfortable saying that out loud. To their right only gets worse and the population of voters skews right.

Of course the Democrats have no real strategy to get around this issue besides running women or POC with further and further right politics which doesn’t seem to be working.

As leftists we recognize that the solution is building a proletarian class that can either correct the politics of the average proletariat here or crush the proletariat’s enemies here. There’s no magic candidate we can run that will attract masses of workers because there are very few people who self identify as workers in any meaningful sense.