Should I hold my nose and vote for the ‘lesser evil’?
https://themilitant.com/2020/10/10/should-i-hold-my-nose-and-vote-for-the-lesser-evil/
BY TERRY EVANS
Vol. 84/No. 41
October 19, 2020
“I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for
something I don’t want and get it,” Eugene V. Debs, the presidential
candidate for the Socialist Party and supporter of the 1917 Russian
Revolution, told working people over a century ago.
Debs’ comments are as true today as they were then, as backers of both
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden insist
workers do the opposite. Both say working people should cast a vote for
them because they are the “lesser evil,” despite the unbroken records
both have of upholding the rule of the top capitalist families, the
class that is responsible for the crisis conditions workers face.
At a rally in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, Debs called on workers to turn
their backs on the Republicans and Democrats and to look to our own
class and build our own party. “Be true to yourself and to the best you
know,” Debs urged, and back a revolutionary working-class party that
“stands for a principle and fights for a cause.” He was sent to federal
prison for this speech and campaigned for president in 1920 from his cell.
Last month Biden told factory workers in Wisconsin that Trump looks down
on them because he thinks he’s “better than you.” Days before, Trump
said that Biden’s Democrats “had waged war on the American workers for
half a century.” They’re both right.
Whether Biden or Trump wins in November, he will use the presidency to
loyally protect the ruling capitalist families who have thrown millions
of us out of work, cut wages, sent the elderly to die of coronavirus in
nursing homes nationwide, and left workers defenseless against rising
inflation — all measures enforced to defend their profits, but
increasingly intolerable for working people.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans offer any proposal aimed at what
workers most need — a road to fight to reverse today’s massive
joblessness, get millions of us back to work at union-scale pay and
provide adequate unemployment relief now for as long as needed until
everyone has a job. Instead, both start from what the bosses say is
“reasonable” or “possible,” with the overriding aim to defend at all
costs the dog-eat-dog private profit system.
In contrast, the Socialist Workers Party presidential ticket of Alyson
Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett campaigns on a program for workers and our
unions to organize to defend ourselves. To speak out and act in the
interests of all those exploited and oppressed by capitalism. To unify
working people in action. To build our own party, a labor party, to
organize us in our millions to take political power into our own hands.
It’s not good intentions, but through working-class struggle that we can
gain self-confidence to see ourselves as a class that is capable of
making history.
Join us in the final weeks of campaigning to take this perspective —
along with the Militant and books by Socialist Workers Party leaders and
other revolutionaries — to workers and farmers in cities, towns and
rural areas!
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‘Militant’ fights yet another Florida prison impoundment
New Hong Kong protests defy cops, repression
Should I hold my nose and vote for the ‘lesser evil’?
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_____
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm
of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii
