Faced with the threat of fascism, attacks on our rights, increasingly militarized racist killer cops, endless wars abroad, environmental collapse, and skyrocketing rents, voters are mobilizing to the polls in numbers not seen in generations. Indeed, by some accounting, the 2020 Presidential election witnessed the highest rate of turnout in the United States since 1900.

Of course, women were not legally allowed to vote in 1900, and jim crow apartheid kept millions more from participating in elections until after the second reconstruction of the Civil Rights movement. Expanding the franchise has made way for mass participation in elections never before seen in the United States. And it’s not just who can vote — it’s how. Early voting and voting by mail gives millions of workers who may not be able to vote the chance to participate.

Traditionally, the minority who hoard most of the wealth have sought to limit the franchise. That is the reason why racist terror was the bedrock of a jim crow society pushing back against the first reconstruction. That is why federal elections are held on Tuesdays, why there are laws against felons or incarcerated people voting, et cetera. Mass struggle has not only beaten back these anti-democratic forces, but has also brought forth progressive politicians like Jamaal Bowman and others in “the Squad” who have introduced progressive legislation. Their calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are not perfect, but their policies and positions are the culmination of decades of struggle to push a working class agenda in Washington. Attacks on elected officials like Bowman are attacks on the many millions of workers who fought hard to realize these gains, and mean to send a message to other candidates to avoid such practices. They also serve to demoralize and demobilize working class forces in motion.

United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

Despite Bowman’s ultimate loss, Big Business will find it difficult to put the mass upswell of ground support for Jamaal Bowman’s re-election campaign in New York back in the bottle. The center-right is obviously on the defensive. They paid dearly (more than $1600) per vote that his opponent, George Latimer, needed to beat him, and had to rely on paid canvassers, glossy mailers, and sleazy attack ads on television. In Bowman’s corner were hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers from New York and across the country who toiled for weeks, for months, in adverse weather conditions. Volunteers worked hard; we mobilized to knock on more than 170,000 doors and make 1.2 million phone calls for Bowman.

Why was this race in particular so high-stakes? What made it so important that such tremendous effort was made by opposing class forces to influence its outcome? Most critically: was it worth it for our class to fight to get him re-elected?

There’s no question: Bowman was up against a lot. The racist redistricting, the big money from AIPAC and MAGA donors, and the ire of the big business wing of the DNC…these are the same frustrations that Bernie Sanders supporters encountered not once, but twice when the progressive wing of the Democratic party attempted to elect him president in 2016 and 2020, and is increasingly what sends that wing into a nihilistic apathy or defeatism.

But we are not part of the Democratic party. We are Communists, and therefore we unflinchingly face the material conditions in which we struggle.

In the United States, we live under a two-party system wherein different class interests congregate to do war with themselves before they do war with each other.

Crowd of Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021

On January 6th 2021, the extreme right overtook the other class interests represented within the Republican party as Donald Trump attempted a coup against the United States. The Heritage Foundation began to spin its Project 2025, and Trump-appointed justices to the Supreme Court began to hack away at our basic rights.

Meanwhile, the Big Business sector of the Democratic party found itself suddenly overrun by progressive forces like Jamaal Bowman and the rest of the Squad, backed by the increasingly assertive and independent forces of organized labor, activists, and small-donors. As of late June 2024, 94 members of congress were calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, a number that would have been unheard of 20 years prior. This is as a result of decades of struggle, which is just one of the reasons why NY Governor Andrew Cuomo began attacking progressive third party efforts, such as the Working Families Party, back in early 2020.

The Democratic establishment can work hard to suppress the progressive forces in its own party, but they are increasingly unable to protect themselves from the forces that are bolstering Trumpism in the GOP. There is a dialectical relationship here that plays out as candidates like Bowman can draw enthusiastic volunteers in the thousands, while center-right candidates like Latimer are forced to pay for canvassing and rely more on paid media to solicit votes.

At the same time, neither Bowman nor Sanders has a clean bill of health when it comes to our working class platform. They can appear gun-shy when it comes to defending the working class and its right to the value it creates. Neither Sanders nor Bowman were willing to fight to the last. Sanders conceded twice — some say too early — to darlings of Wall Street and the Pentagon. Bowman quickly assured the Democratic establishment that he wouldn’t push a third party run that he might have won in NY-16. Both of them have taken courageous stances on the US-financed and armed Israeli slaughter in Gaza, but for some outspoken activists with large platforms on social media, it’s not enough. To hear them crow over the corpse of Bowman’s campaign: they should have taken more radical positions, they should have called for a ceasefire earlier, they shouldn’t have voted for more weapons before they decided to stop doing so.

And yet, not one of these critiques takes into account the lived reality of Bowman’s working class constituents in NY-16. They don’t consider an African American father of three who grew up in NYCHA housing taking office on a progressive platform as a victory in its own right. They don’t see the impact of an establishment Democrat backed by AIPAC and MAGA interests taking his place.

Young CPUSA / YCL members at the June 18, 2022 Poor People’s Campaign rally

Cameron Orr stakes our claim to this struggle in his recent article Why elections? Nuts and bolts of how movements change laws on the need for Communists to engage with elections on a material basis: “Our vote is not an individual expression of our personal convictions, but is rather part of a huge, tactical collective action we take in conjunction with millions of other working class and oppressed people, based on the immediate political reality we find ourselves in.”

As Communists, we owe nothing to bourgeois candidates, but we owe everything to our class. That is our foundational mandate. Seeing the vote as an exercise in individual morality, as opposed to a hard-fought gain for our class, or losing ourselves in nihilistic apathy, puts one closer to the disaffected Democrat than it does to a Marxist-Leninist.

Thursday’s geriatric debate between Trump and Biden made one thing crystal clear for those watching: it was never so obvious that the two candidates were simply a pile of warring class interests wearing suits. And one could clearly see which side the forces of finance capital preferred. Just two days after the Bowman defeat, Biden suffered his own when squaring off against Donald Trump in the first presidential debate of 2024. Despite Trump side-stepping questions meant to expose his fascistic positions on January 6th, Palestine, immigration, and more, the immediate coverage from the mainstream media had their talking points focused on just one issue: Biden was no longer an acceptable nominee for the Democratic ticket. Both men are showing signs of decline – one from his age and stress of office, and the other from his looming sentencing on his recent 34 felony charges and hate-killed heart. Yet, only 130 days before the November election, the business interests behind every mainstream media outlet were stoking division and conflict between the right and left wings of the DNC.

Add to that mix a handful of 3rd party candidates who have nothing to offer but conspiracy theories and slogans with no chance of winning. Add to that messaging on blast from all corners of social media aimed at youth about how hopeless it is to even vote. It would seem like the working class has a recipe for disaster in November.

There is only one way for us to collectively tackle the coming months, which will be challenging. We can approach elections like the scientists we claim to be. Thorough, level-headed investigation is necessary, and building unity in action is key. As our leadership has asserted over and over again: collectivity is our super power. We must apply this thinking to how we approach elections. An individualist, idealist, moralist approach to the vote is useless when it comes to building a new world. It is only by approaching elections as a critical front of class struggle that we can effectively interact with them as Communists.

Images: Jamaal Bowman with Bernie Sanders and AOC (X/Twitter); United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965 by Yoichi Okamoto (public domain); Crowd of Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, ultimately leading the building being breached and several deaths by TapTheForwardAssist (Wikimedia); Young CPUSA / YCL members at the June 18 Poor People’s Campaign rally in the nation’s capital, DC Communist Party (Twitter)

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