PARTISAN!

Mila Volkova argues that the victory of the GOP in the recent U.S. elections is part of a delayed reaction to earlier wins of the women’s and queer liberation movements.

In the USA’s 2024 Presidential and Congressional elections, the Republican party has won a complete victory. Controlling both houses of congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, Trump has obtained essentially dictatorial power over America.

He will increase tariffs to escalate the trade war with China, bringing about a recession and a rise in inflation so dramatic that it will kill many working-class Americans. He will enact federal bans on abortion and transgender hormone-replacement therapy that will kill many women and Queer Americans.

In a repeat of 2016, the progressive activists that placed their trust in the Democratic Party are leaving. They have re-discovered the Democrats’ abject failure to resist the far-right on the electoral stage.

What happens in America spreads to Australia. Many left-liberal progressives and previously inactive socialists are looking for a new movement and many will join the ranks of organised communists like us. Meanwhile, in a mirror to Trump’s victory, the Liberal National Party have won the Queensland state election and may vote for anti-abortion legislation brought forward by Katter’s Australia Party.

Why did the Republicans win the election? What lessons have we learned since the failures of 2016 to now? What must the organised communist left do with our new comrades? How can we resist the rise of the far-right in Australia?

The Class Basis of the Republicans and Democrats

Polling data from the 2016 US federal election and onwards gives us a clear picture of the class makeup of the two American political parties.

The Democrats are an unstable coalition of the poorest American workers, college-educated middle-class renters, and the urban ultra-wealthy. While both the Republicans and the Democrats are capitalist parties, the Democrats are the preferred home of publicly traded companies i.e. international finance corporations. The ultra-wealthy individuals that run these firms are the dominant faction in this coalition.

These class allies of convenience are unhappy bedfellows. Through their control of the Democratic party, the financial wing of capitalism chooses politicians and policies that serve their interests: anti-union legislation, budget austerity, maintaining and expanding US imperialism, supporting Israel, pursuing war in the Middle East, and antagonising China.

Where does this leave the other arms of the Democratic party? The capitalists in charge of the party are more opposed to reform supporting the working class than they are to the Republicans. Because of this, they refuse to allow the working-class base of the party to push for reforms that would alleviate inflation and poverty. This unresolvable conflict between the working class and ruling class elements of the Democratic coalition leaves the party in a trap that it is unwilling to escape.

This manifested itself in this year’s election. Disappointed by the Biden administration’s failure to address poverty and inflation, and Harris’ refusal to publicly break with Biden’s policies, working class voters simply did not turn out to vote Democrat. Celebrity endorsements and massive spending on election advertisements were not enough to turn out working voters. While Trump won roughly the same number of votes as in 2020, the Democrats lost some 14 million.

This is how the Democrats lost the election. The Republican swing voter is a myth. The fantasy of the anti-Trump conservative appealed to the sensibilities of the ultra-wealthy that run the Democrats. After the failure to make good on Obama’s promises of healthcare reform, and the failure to make good on Biden’s policies of policing and gun reform, no working-class voter trusts the Democrats anymore. Come election time, they stay at home. By pursuing policies they knew their working-class base doesn’t care about, the Democrats effectively lost the election on purpose. Guilting your base into voting for you, while promising them nothing, is not a winning strategy.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are a coalition of family-owned business, middle-class homeowners, and young men. These family-owned businesses tend to be smaller than the finance corporations behind the Democrats, they are involved in the agricultural and energy sectors, and do not publicly sell their shares.

While these capitalists are just as interested in anti-worker, pro-austerity, and pro-imperialist policy as the Democrats, they are much more concerned with the state of domestic industry. Whereas American finance enjoys the freedom to move wherever on the planet it can make the greatest return on investment, this is not the case for American industrial firms. From this inflexibility emerges their obsession with using massive tariffs to re-industrialise America.

This is almost identical to the class makeup of the 20th century European fascist parties. But why do homeowners and young men support them? How and why are the Republicans different from those fascist parties? What motivates them?

The Delayed Counter Revolution

During the 1980s, the Neoliberal vanguard parties successfully smashed the male breadwinner wage. Simultaneously, the liberation movements of women, Queer people, and racial minorities won enormous concessions. Queer people won relative freedom of expression and recognition, and racial minorities ended formal segregation and obtained equal legal status.

Women in particular made enormous leaps forward. By pushing for equal opportunities to work, women entered the workforce en masse and obtained economic independence from men. Despite the continued existence of the gender pay gap, women no longer require a husband just to make enough money to survive. Families can no longer rely just on the wage of husbands and fathers, but also require wives and mothers to make contributions. Women are now expected, and thus allowed, to work for a wage while also being mothers and carers.

No longer forced to get a husband as quickly as possible, women have obtained relative sexual freedom. Many young men, frustrated with the loss of the economic privilege that guaranteed their fathers the sexual and household servitude of women, have gone over to the far-right. The misogynist’s sexual frustration manifests, as it always has, in Queerphobia.

The classes that make up the Republican coalition have the most to lose from this revolution due to their material interests. Capitalists profit off women’s unpaid household labour by outsourcing the cost of keeping workers fed and healthy. Domestic American businesses thrive on racialised and feminised low wages. Family-owned businesses are obsessed with producing male heirs to share their property with. Industrial firms are constantly hungry for workers and therefore are concerned with low birthrates. Male workers benefit from a system which entitles them to the sexual services and household labour of their female peers in marriage. The sexual revolution poses a threat to all these interests.

While the fascists of the 20th century targeted the organised socialist workers movements, the target of the 21st century reactionary movement is women, Queer people, and racial minorities. It has not come about by random chance. It is the expression of a concrete structural link between male domination of women in the family and capitalist exploitation of workers in the workplace.

This is not to say that patriarchy and class are two distinct systems. Each is premised on the existence of the other. Capitalism could not function without patriarchy to reproduce itself. Patriarchy has only ever existed in relation to a class system that organises production and property. It does not make sense to imagine one without the other, or one more fundamental than the other. The logic of capitalist accumulation is also the logic of patriarchal reproduction.

But there is a contradiction between the patriarchy, which aims to keep women out of the workforce, and capitalism, which wants to maximise work, profits, and growth. The sexual revolution sharpened this contradiction. By refusing to limit themselves to making new workers, women are starving capitalists of fresh labour. By demanding that the state and businesses share the burden of care labour, the sexual revolution attacked profit margins. By demanding access to work, abortion rights, and sexual liberty, women have shortened the divide within the working class between men and women, reaching for concrete unity with male workers.

The election of Trump is concerningly mirrored by brother movements of reactionary misogyny in Europe and East Asia. This is a global counter-revolution against the sexual and racial revolution that has taken place over forty years. It has gained more success in America than Australia due to the worse economic position of these classes in the US, where the ultra-wealthy financial elite has total economic power, stoking reactionary sentiment. But the result of the Queensland state election demonstrates that we are not immune to this reactionary turn.

Next Steps – The Need for Political Education

With the need to defend against this counter-revolution made clear, it is obvious that communists must expand the liberation struggle. But what are the next steps?

2016 onwards proved that many who leave the Democrats in disgust, and join the radical activist or communist left, will simply be re-absorbed into the NGOs and co-opted back into the electoralist progressive parties. But these parties, by upholding the capitalist system, do not address the structural forces behind the counter-revolutionary movement! They leave the cause of the issue unaddressed. They are helpless to stop it.

Similarly, the women’s liberation struggle was limited where it did not acknowledge the fundamental structure of class. Yet, socialists were unable to completely win over these movements because their political theory underplayed the structure role of patriarchy.

What the left has lacked is consistent and meaningful political education. Uneducated in revolutionary praxis, the progressive revolter was easily swallowed up again by the reformists. Deployed, like employees, into direct action and mutual aid networks by dogmatic sects, organiser burnout was inevitable.

We need to move beyond the Instagram education of the intersectional left, who shy away from class politics. We need to move beyond the dogmatic employee education of the sectarian socialists, who too often underplay the material basis of patriarchy and imperialism.

But we have also learned that radical politics alone are not enough. Over the next four years, the Democrats in opposition will simultaneously trend further right in policy terms and blame left-leaning working-class voters for not turning out. As in 2016, there will be greater calls for unity against the alt-right. But the absolute failure of the Democrats to electorally challenge the Republicans demonstrates that electoral coalitions between the working class and the ruling class are dead ends. We give them our votes, and they give us nothing in return. They won’t campaign on pro-working-class reform, and they can’t win elections, so we must cut ourselves adrift from them.

We need to focus on giving people a proper political education, one that teaches independent-thinking and dedication to the revolution, one that raises awareness that patriarchy is a structural force. We need working class institutions that are independent of the capitalists. We need revolutionary politics that address the structural cause of the sexual counter revolution. These are the first steps to fighting the counter-revolution and re-igniting the struggle for universal human liberation.