On November 2, the campaign of Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) presidential candidate Claudia De la Cruz entered into a vote-swap agreement with Jill Stein’s Green Party presidential campaign. The same day, De la Cruz announced a separate cooperation agreement with the campaign of Cornel West. Jill Stein’s campaign has also been endorsed by the Dearborn-based pressure group Abandon Harris, as well as Socialist Alternative and Kshama Sawant’s Workers Strike Back.
The announcement on the PSL-Green Party agreement stated: “In Montana and Arkansas, the Claudia De la Cruz campaign is calling on its supporters to vote for Jill Stein, who is, in turn, calling on her supporters to write in Claudia De la Cruz in Indiana and North Dakota.”
A video posted on the PSL’s national YouTube channel announcing the deal with Cornel West stated: “The Claudia/[VP candidate] Karina campaign is calling on its supporters to vote for West and [VP candidate] Abdullah in Alaska. In turn, West/Abdullah are calling on supporters to vote for Claudia and Karina in Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Tennessee.”
The pre-election rush of these middle-class radical groups to coalesce behind Stein and the Greens exposes their reactionary role in opposing a political break by the working class with the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system.
These same forces have led the mass protests against the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza into a dead end by orienting them to pressuring the Biden-Harris administration and US imperialism to end their support for the slaughter, rather than mobilizing the working class in a political struggle against the two capitalist parties and all of the war criminal governments on the basis of an international socialist program. The result has been an intensification of the genocide, its extension into Lebanon and the launching of war against Iran. At home, the Biden-Harris administration has overseen an unprecedented police-state crackdown on anti-genocide protests on college campuses across the country.
The statement announcing the deal between the PSL and the Greens declared that its aim was to “… send the strongest possible message that people are fed up with the war machine, genocide against Palestinians, and the other injustices that characterize this system dominated by the billionaire class!” Send a message to whom? Obviously, to the Biden-Harris administration, the Democratic Party and the powers-that-be.
The Green Party election campaign is in no serious way politically independent of the Democrats. On the contrary, it continues the role the Green Party has long played as a pressure group in the orbit of the Democratic Party. Stein herself has made this clear in the course of her campaign.
At an October 8 press conference in Dearborn, Michigan, at which Abandon Harris announced its endorsement of Stein, the Green Party candidate said of the Harris campaign: “They can win this election right now. All they have to do is implement that weapons embargo now, and you will win the election. They need to have their feet held to the fire.”
At that event, Abandon Harris explicitly oriented its appeal toward the Democratic Party, arguing that a protest vote for the Green Party would “bring a reckoning to the Democratic Party.” At a June 13 panel discussion held by Abandon Harris, under its previous name Abandon Biden, which featured Stein, West and De la Cruz, the organization defined the task at hand as working “hard to transform the Democratic Party and to bring Republicans towards declaring peace and the end of occupation.” None of the three candidates challenged this orientation.
On October 7, Stein gave an extensive online interview to Newsweek magazine in which she said of Harris’ loss of support among Arab Americans: “The Democrats could win those votes back right now simply by doing it. … They can fix it. There’s absolutely nothing stopping them from fixing it. … We have to represent the continuing pressure of the American people for our government to actually represent us.”
In fact, Harris and the Democrats in the run-up to Election Day have dropped any talk of Trump being a fascist and promised the Republicans a “seat at the table” of a Harris administration, i.e., a de facto coalition government. This is a call for a united ruling class offensive to prosecute and expand the genocide in Gaza and wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, combined with a brutal intensification of attacks on the social needs and democratic rights of the working class at home.
There is, according to Stein’s “analysis,” no objective crisis of American and world capitalism driving the US imperialist-led global war (In her interview, Stein made no mention of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine or the war preparations against China). There is no growth of class conflict that is prompting the capitalist ruling elites all over the world to turn to fascism and dictatorship, exemplified in the US by Trump and the MAGA makeover of the Republican Party.
Therefore, there is no need for socialism or revolution in ending the worst abuses of the present system. Indeed, in the same Newsweek interview, Stein explicitly rejected being called a socialist. “I don’t particularly look at ‘isms,’ she said. “I look more at policies and who’s running the show. I don’t care what label you put on it.”
Stein’s official election platform, posted on her campaign website, lists many reforms, but they are all based on the tattered fiction that the ruling class, via the Democratic Party, can be pressured into ceding a significant portion of its vast wealth and economic power. She and her party are bourgeois defenders of the capitalist system. Their platform calls for putting the health care industry, the utilities and some banks under public ownership, but rejects the abolition of the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production and production for profit.
And it rejects the role of the working class as the revolutionary social force in modern society and the fight for the political independence and political mobilization of the working class in the struggle for power—for the destruction of the capitalist state and establishment of a workers state.
This perspective, fought for by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International in opposition to the various pseudo-left and reformist organizations, will find growing support in the aftermath of the election, whatever the outcome. None of the contradictions of American and world capitalism—the economic crisis and decline of the United States, the staggering growth of social inequality, the collapse of bourgeois democratic forms of rule—will be resolved. The aftermath of the election will see an explosive intensification of the class struggle, a sharpening of the objective preconditions for socialist revolution and the growth of the influence of the Trotskyist movement in the working class.