The Aplutsoc Editorial Board, meeting on September 26, 2024, decided to pronounce itself as such in favor of the Kamala Harris vote, against Donald Trump, in the United States.

This position is of course intended to spark discussion and motivate reflection among the comrades and political currents, French and international, that we rub shoulders with: it goes without saying that we do not claim to weigh on the results, but on the other hand, the understanding of strategic issues among our own is important to us.

Moreover, it is indeed an international issue that is at stake.

Donald Trump represents a global orientation for North American imperialism that is far from being limited to his person: on the one hand, adaptation to imperialist multi-polarity, on the other hand, preparation for war with China. This means alliance with Russia, and at the same time total support for Netanyahu’s headlong rush, which needs war. Two nations fighting for their freedom therefore have absolutely everything to fear from his election: the Ukrainians and the Palestinians.

This underlines how great is the stupidity of the political currents for whom the head of US imperialism, Joe Biden, and the Democrats, would be the most active supporters, or even promoters, of the « genocide » of the Palestinians. By actually playing into the hands of the Trump vote (by abstaining or by voting for the pro-Putin campists Jill Stein or Cornell West), it is in reality they who are making the Palestinians in Gaza, or even beyond Gaza, run the risk of a real genocide.

Beating Trump would be a blow to this international political orientation, without resolving the question of a democratic American foreign policy, which requires a completely different power in place of a capitalist power at the head of the country.

Now, Kamala Harris is obviously a capitalist candidate. But the proletarian, democratic and revolutionary vote for Kamala Harris is not a vote by default. It can be not an alignment with the Democratic Party, but an independent affirmation of the need, right now, to block Trump’s path, to be able to build in the country, in the youth, in the unions, a real independent anti-Trump movement, as our comrades at Oakland Socialist are advocating.

In the same way, in France we have just prevented the formation of a Macron/Bardella executive, offering the leadership of the government to the National Rally (RN), by blocking the path to a maximum of its candidates in the second round of the legislative elections, on July 7, by voting for bourgeois candidates of the « right » or the « center ». Aplutsoc did not call for any « republican front » with them but for a class vote, in all conscience, to stop the threat and engage in the independent battle that the New Popular Front (NFP) and the unions should engage in.

Trump takes responsibility for the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, he said that if he were elected there would be no need to vote, that he would allow the police, « for one day », to do whatever they want, including killing without limits, he threatens to track down, lock up and expel millions of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean, his supporters are preparing a plan to subjugate unions to private employers and ban unions among civil servants and are organizing the rigging of elections in the states he controls and the reduction or even prevention of the black vote. Armed groups support him, fascist groups, heirs of the Ku Klux Klan. This is a neo-fascist type threat.

The defense of democratic and union freedoms, women’s rights (abortion, contraception, divorce, bodily integrity, etc.) and LGBT people, academic freedoms in education, is a primary task of worker activists, revolutionary activists. And Trump’s defeat would be a defeat for all the fascist forces in the world, for which Trump and Putin are their two « suns ». In France, the fact that Trump would be defeated in the United States would count in our fight against the National Rally of Le Pen and Bardella.

Biden, because of his policies – defense of capitalist interests, measures against migration from the South, refusal to break with Netanyahu and refusal to arm Ukraine to the level necessary for its victory – could probably not beat Trump. Kamala Harris can. But to win, we need the independent mobilization of the workers’ movement, of the youth, of all the oppressed. The very recent wage victory of the dockers, after those of the auto workers in particular, indicates that victories are possible. And it is political victories that we need. Let us make Trump’s defeat a first political victory of the American and world proletariat: this is the only path that can lead it to initiative and independent political organization!