November 3rd, 2024, Update: Socialists Without Borders has withdrawn its support for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSOL) candidates, as the organization has decided to back Democrats in the San Francisco local elections. These Democratic Party candidates are actively campaigning for Kamala Harris.
We remember Kamala Harris as a career prosecutor who enthusiastically contributed to the mass incarceration epidemic in California, first as the District Attorney for San Francisco, then as the Attorney General for the State of California. We remember not too long ago, Kamala on the radio joking about the cannabis she has enjoyed smoking in the past after putting hundreds if not thousands of people in jail for cannabis-related offenses. We also remember her as the person who was supposed to address former President Trump’s draconian immigration policies – themselves continuations of former President Obama’s policies – and then oversaw the continuation of the same policies as before.
As Marxists with a revolutionary point of view, we would not support Kamala Harris, or indeed any other candidate of the Democratic Party, for any public office whatsoever. The Democratic Party is a pillar of U.S. Imperialism, conducting endless campaigns of bombing and murder against poor people around the world. After October 7, 2023, when Israeli Occupation Forces ramped up their genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, Democratic President Joseph R. Biden continued to shovel trillions of dollars and millions of pounds of ordnance to support the killing of Palestinans. The climate crisis now destroying ecosystems all over the planet was brought about under the political stewardship of Democrats, who presented themselves as being serious about solving the climate crisis, while ramping up the exploitation of fossil fuel resources in the continental U.S. The Democratic Party and its candidates actively work to undermine social movement toward the liberation of workers and the oppressed, and we do not cross this line.
We do, however, participate in elections. We see elections as an opportunity to communicate directly with politically-conscious workers by raising our candidates and policies. We look for candidates that we can support that could potentially serve as a catalyst to organize more workers and young people against the system that oppresses them. Typically, we are looking for candidates that make central to their campaigns the question of left-leaning activists breaking with the Democratic Party and its institutions. Such candidates need not be explicitly anti-capitalist if they raise credible threats to the bipartisan system, but they do need to articulate positions that address the needs of workers and the oppressed. We seldom find perfect candidates, however, we sometimes find someone we can work with to move our mutual interests forward. We looked carefully at three independent left candidates for U.S. President: Jill Stein, of the Green Party; Cornel West, an independent; and Claudia de la Cruz, of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Presidential Candidates We Call to Support
Jill Stein — Green Party
In 2024, Jill Stein is running as the Green Party candidate for President for the third time.The Green Party is a centrist party organized around principles that are broad enough to where they could be subject to several different interpretations, as, in fact, they often are. This ‘neither left nor right’ approach to politics has led the Green Party to develop close relations with the Democratic Party, especially at the local level, to the extent that their operations and campaigns and candidates may be indistinguishable from one another. On the other hand, the Green Party has done a lot of organizing over the last forty years, and Jill Stein’s name will appear on the ballot for President in most U.S. states, far more than the other two independent candidates we looked at, which means that Stein’s campaign will be far easier to find and vote for than those of West and de la Cruz. The Green Party is still the Green Party, so there are indeed certain weaknesses in Stein’s campaign. For instance, although her campaign is outspokenly anti-imperialist, Stein only calls for a partial reduction of the defense budget. On the other hand, Stein’s platform does reflect a thoughtful consideration of issues of importance to the working class that is likely the result of her consolidation as a candidate over the last twelve years.
Cornell West — Left independent
Also running in 2024 is the prominent African American academic Dr. Cornel West, who initially intended to run in the Green Party, but left in October, indicating that the intraparty dynamics of the Green Party were taking too much of his attention from connecting with potential supporters of his campaign. Dr. West is a highly skilled public speaker with many television appearances over the last ten months where he has forcefully argued for the liberation of Palestine. Dr. West, however, also has a long history of collaboration with Democrats, having supported Barack Obama’s candidacy, and later Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. For the moment, he runs an explicitly anti-imperialist campaign, but it is easy to imagine Dr. West once again making common cause with the Democrats, especially given that the bulk of his platform is basically cut and pasted from the policies of non-profit service providers, many of whom operate on public grants administered by the Democratic Party.
Claudia de la Cruz — Socialist
Thirdly, we looked at the campaign of Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSoL). Ms. de la Cruz explicitly campaigns as a socialist, from her website ‘votesocialist2024.com,’ inviting her supporters to ‘end capitalism before it ends us!’ Her platform consists of basic bullet points about nationalizing big corporations and freeing Palestine and saving the planet from capitalism that do not go into very much detail. This is consistent with the methodology that PSoL has used for as long as anyone can remember of running a paper thin propaganda campaign aimed at recruiting new activists to their organization rather than serving as an electoral expression of the movement for liberation on the streets. The good news is that Gloria La Riva is not their candidate. Otherwise, this campaign seems likely to have very little impact outside of PSoL. So, of the three, none of them are absolute recommendations. Certainly Jill Stein is the candidate that has the most points to recommend her from our point of view, and the fewest strikes against her. Jill Stein, however, is now on the verge of being a perennial candidate like the above mentioned Gloria La Riva.
