The U.S. ruling class is in chaos. As the presidential election campaign kicks into final gear, the splits among the capitalists are getting sharper by the day.  The debate between Klan hero Donald Trump and mass incarcerator Joe Biden degenerated into an incoherent shouting match between two lifelong racist liars. After Trump and more than a dozen of his closest advisors tested positive for Covid-19, the Superspreader in Chief was left to shamble around a mostly deserted White House, jacked up on steroids and contradicting himself from one minute to the next. In the face of full-blown fascist China’s disciplined, sword-rattling challenge to U.S. dominance, the rupture between the Big Fascists (led by multinational finance capital like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) and the Small Fascists (organized around domestic energy firms and short-term profits) has reached a breaking point.
Elections are a critical tool for resolving the capitalists’ internal conflicts. The Big Fascists need masses of workers to vote for their side to legitimize their plans for inter-imperialist war and fascism. Equally important, they need the myth of electoral democracy and the “peaceful transition of power” to mask their brutal capitalist dictatorship (see page 5). This time around, however, it’s unclear whether either gang of bosses will accept the results of the November ballot. The stakes are high. The future of the U.S. profit system and its teetering liberal world order hangs in the balance.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on all workers to see that their power lies not in the voting booth but in class struggle in the streets and workplaces. Among capitalists there is no “lesser evil,” only a choice between blood-sucking mass murderers. Democrats and Republicans alike stand for racism, sexism, exploitation, state terror, and the death of millions from  lack of food, shelter, medical care, and public health infrastructure.  Only by organizing anti-racist fightback and building for communist revolution will we turn the tide against rising fascism and impending global war.
Rise of Small Fascists throws U.S. bosses into disarray
The Small Fascists’ agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy, remove the U.S. military from costly overseas commitments, withdraw from international alliances, eliminate social services for the working class, and scrap environmental regulations. After years of organizing on the margins, with fringe third parties like the Libertarians, they found their chance to move inside the tent with the rise of the gutter racist Tea Party. But they were unable to challenge the Big Fascists’ stranglehold on state power until Trump. The failed developer and reality TV con man hijacked the Republican Party with a base of alienated white workers, hard-right vigilante racists, and hypocritical evangelicals. Finance capital placed its bet on the despicable Hillary (“Super-Predator”) Clinton and is still paying for its arrogance.
We know through dialectics that the internal is primary. The Big Fascists’ lack of discipline—their corruption, individualism, and short-term outlook—enabled the Small Fascists to grab power. The loss of decent-paying industrial jobs and two failed Middle East wars cracked open the door. The Great Recession of 2008 and Barack Obama’s bank bailout opened it wider. Small Fascists like the Kochs didn’t much like Trump and his anti-immigrant rants, since much of their profits come from immigrant labor. But in an act of mutual opportunism, they came together to seize the executive branch.
Trump’s wildly disruptive presidency reflects a qualitative change in the capitalist bosses’ internal struggle. To many CHALLENGE readers, Trump and his openly racist and sexist backers are repellent, the very essence of capitalist callousness, selfishness, and greed. They aren’t wrong. But for our class, the alternative can’t be Joe Biden and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Because it’s the Big Fascists who have an even more dangerous long-term outlook for the international working class.
Big Fascists in jeopardy
For over a century, and especially since World War II, U.S. finance capital has controlled the military, the intelligence agencies, all three branches of government, and virtually all of the big media. Along with rulers in Western Europe, they established alliances to maintain U.S. supremacy and contain their enemies, like the old Soviet Union and current-day China and Russia. Not so long ago, the bosses could work out their differences before the knives came out. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and named George W. Bush president. A united ruling class rallied behind the fascist Patriot Act and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formulated the Hart-Rudman plan, a blueprint to sustain its domination through the 21st century. The contradiction between the bosses’ two wings, so glaring today, was still young.
But external pressures have sharpened the contradiction. China’s rise—its Belt and Road Initiative, its global leadership in the pandemic—gives the U.S. bosses less room to patiently work out their disagreements. This reality is driving finance capital to fascism that much faster—first to destroy the Small Fascists, then to build a multicultural, patriotic movement to control the working class and prepare for World War III.
U.S. allies are plainly worried. After the first (and maybe last) Trump-Biden debate, labeled “a shit show” by CNN, a French political analyst said, “European leaders must have woken up this morning thinking, ‘The American leadership is over, and for a while, even if Biden is elected and tries to rebuild what Trump has destroyed.’” The U.S. bosses’ rivals also took notice. According to a state-controlled newspaper in China, “Such a chaos at the top of U.S. politics reflects division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. political system” (NYT, 9/30).  
Although Trump proclaims himself the “law and order” president, the Big Fascists have a much longer and uglier history of promoting state terror against the working class. Biden, who built a career on serving the profit-hungry banks and credit card companies, is the embodiment of finance capital’s decay. From his 1994 mass incarceration crime bill, to the bloody Middle East wars executed by the Bushes and Obama, to his latest refusal to “defund” his beloved police, Biden has been the most loyal of stooges for the Big Fascists’ lethal program. His running mate and former prosecutor Kamala Harris, proudly known as California’s “top cop,” played a significant role in unleashing the Klan in blue to kill Black workers like Oscar Grant (NYT, 8/9).
Don’t vote, revolt!
Fighting for communism means building a mass revolutionary party and a world run by and for the international working class. We can’t get there with the bosses’ sham of democracy, with elections that force us to pick one racist exploiter over another. And we can’t get there without smashing the racist, sexist, and nationalist divisions that keep our class in shackles.
Over the seven months of the worldwide capitalist pandemic, in their fightback on the streets and their courageous labor in hospitals and grocery stores, workers have shown that our class can take the lead in caring for one another and overcoming the most challenging obstacles. These communist impulses within the working class are what keep the bosses up at night. The next step is to sharpen our struggle with comrades and friends to create that better world. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!