A corporate Democrat in the White House won’t end systemic racism and inequality

Virginia Rodino, a socialist and member of Marx21 in Baltimore, spoke at a forum on the election result organised by Solidarity:

What we’re seeing play out is the weakness of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, as we saw with Hilary Clinton four years ago.

The Democrats tell workers they’re on our side and then enact policies in every sphere that tear down our interests.

The corporate Democrats have assessed that socialism and the calls of the movement to defund the police are the reasons voters didn’t vote for Biden. Apparently establishment Democrats believe that saying ‘I am not Donald Trump’ should be enough to earn our embrace.

This is a party that deliberately deactivates mass movements, such as Obama breaking the Black basketball players wildcat strikes, or the Democratic National Committee suppressing at all costs the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and in 2020.

But it’s not through electoral politics and voting, it’s through class struggle, that we will see change. We have seen a rebirth of calls for socialism by the movements. Occupy Wall St, the climate justice movement and the two Sanders campaigns saw the crystallising of anti-capitalist arguments.

The movements must break from believing that a corporate Democrat in the White House will end systemic racism and sexism, climate disaster, our mess of a privatised health care system or our illegal foreign policy.

Late last month the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice project and the Working families party launched The Frontline, an initiative aiming to forge a Black-led multiracial coalition that can carry forward the energy of the uprising, the largest social movement in US history.

They commented, “we are committed not to fighting for a saviour on Pennsylvania avenue (where the White House is located), but to fighting for our next target. And we will come as hard at the new administration which we hope will follow the Trump administration as we are at Trump right now.”

We have to support this line of thinking. Biden wants to give another $300 million to police departments. Obama’s administration deported more people than Trump. He kept families in cages. Biden has stated his administration will not separate families but does not intend to stop caging them.

Billionaires saw their fortunes rise by 27 per cent during the pandemic, while 40 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits.

How do we change this perversion of priorities?

The Black Lives Matter movement is a multi-racial force that politicians ran to catch up with, the Climate justice movement has been proven right again over the past few months just in the United States with the raging fires in the northwest.

We can’t let the ruling class co-opt these movements to drain their energy and vitality.

We have to continue building movements like the movement for Black Lives, and united fronts against racism and fascism.

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