A recent article by Fred Glass, “Words and History: The Trouble With ‘Genocide Joe” (Stansbury Forum, April 14, 2024)  makes the essential correct argument that defeating Trump and the New Confederacy that Trump represents requires a Biden victory. Glass lays out some of the likely devastating impacts on our peoples of a Trump victory,both the immediate material consequences  and the repression that will make building our movement more difficult. And as a historian, he explains how a divided left that missed  the principal threat of fascism helped bring about Hitler’s rise, and more recently the election of Richard Nixon. 

But he also makes wrong arguments for defeating Donald Trump in November. In opposing the term “Genocide Joe,” he condescends to and underestimates the Ceasefire movement. He also separates domestic and international issues in a metaphysical way that, coming from the belly of the beast, is objectively national chauvinist.

Calling Out Biden for Genocide

Opposing the term “Genocide Joe” is a waste of time and comes off as lecture-y. Biden is the key supporter of a genocide, and it is fully accurate to say so. If we understate that, we lose all credibility with the youthful Ceasefire movement and cede ground to the sectarian line on November 2024 that Glass is arguing against. Variations of the sectarian line include abstaining from the presidential vote, casting a pure and symbolic useless vote for a third party candidate, or even accelerationism, i.e.,  “the worse the better”–the idea that, despite all the history that Glass cites, fascist authoritarianism will somehow bring about progress or even socialism.

Would those of us who ran through the streets in 1968 chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” have listened to some old folks lecturing us on proper language, like “Don’t call LBJ a baby-killer, it’s really the system”?  Biden is the principal defender of the slaughter, the president, the Commander in Chief! To equate the use of the term “Genocide Joe” with Trump’s personal insults at his enemies, as Glass does, makes no sense. Biden is funding a genocide. This has no resemblance to calling someone “horseface” or “Sleepy Joe” or whatever. Prefigurative politics—acting today in a way that  mirrors the society we hope to build–doesn’t preclude calling a purveyor of a genocide what he is.

Domestic and International Struggle: Two Sides of the Coin

The domestic (Biden good) vs. international (Biden bad) dichotomy Glass puts forth is inexact and counterproductive. In both arenas we are in a better position to win victories if Biden wins. 

On the domestic front, those who support abstention or worse have to explain why it does not matter if Black people or students can still vote, it does not matter if women can decide for themselves if they want an abortion, it does not matter if Trump deports millions of immigrants in a fascist sweep, it does not matter if every environmental protection we have is lost, and taxes are again cut for the most wealthy, it does not matter if the Department of Education is eliminated and public education defunded and left to Christian nationalist zealots, it does not matter if all government employees are stripped of job protections, fired, and replaced by those loyal only to Trump, and so on.  

And anyone who celebrates the union organizing victories at places like Starbucks or the  election of Shawn Fain in the United Auto Workers (due in part to organizing victories among grad students) has to be honest that these would not have happened without the Biden appointed National Labor Relations Board forcing expedited union elections.  This will disappear in a Trump presidency. 

Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates had it right at a meeting during the Labor Notes conference last month: “I want things to be ‘less hard’ for people like me.” Under Biden, things will be ‘less hard’ in ways that matter if you are deeply committed to the welfare of our peoples. The things that are “better about Biden” are things that the social movements won, and that we can continue to expand upon going forward.

Turning to the international arena–is it true, as Glass argues, that domestic policy is “a different story” from international policy?  To the contrary, with a Biden victory we have a better chance of influencing U.S. racial capitalism in positive ways around international as well as domestic affairs. For example, the Biden Department of Labor has acted promptly to support democratic union elections under the reformist regime of AMLO and the Morena party in Mexico, through the rapid response procedure in the U.S.-Mexico Canada Agreement that replaced NAFTA. Trump and the Republicans have promised to send more troops to the border and special forces into Mexico, and to “bomb the cartels”. Will an invasion of Mexico eliminate the billion dollar market for drugs in the United States, or stop the flood of U.S.-made weapons into Mexico that arm the cartels?  Is anyone confident that they won’t do what they threaten to do?

It was Biden, not Trump, who got U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.

The centerpiece of the abstentionist or third party or accelerationist argument today is of course Gaza. But here again the argument is  wrong. We have a better chance of influencing Biden than Trump to end the carnage in Gaza.  

The two political parties in the United States represent coalitions of different social forces, or social blocs. The Democratic and Republican parties have different social bases and respond to different pressures. Despite his protests to the contrary, Biden has begun to respond to his loss of support among people of color and young voters, where the rage over the genocide in Gaza is the strongest. So, for example, he is scrambling to forgive more student debt, and spoke at Howard University about “the poison of white supremacy.”

Biden is a traditional coalition builder in the U.S. goal of world domination, especially in his efforts to rebuild relations with Europe, as opposed to Trump’s erratic go-it-alone aggression and isolationism. So Biden has to be concerned about the splintering of support for the U.S. position and Israel’s well-earned position as a pariah state. UN resolutions and charges against Netanyahu and Israel from world courts matter. Perhaps most of all, the splintering of European support for Israel, such as the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by Spain, Norway, and Ireland, undermine U.S. dominance of the Western bloc. Diplomacy without action is words, but diplomacy is not nothing, either; it has political impact.

Biden’s constant criticism of Netanyahu and the “pausing” of the delivery of large bombs is a small opening. His efforts to maneuver Israel into a ceasefire agreement that they originally supported is a more recent example. We need to kick down the door with powerful protests, whatever you choose to call the president. 

Trump, on the other hand, is already attacking Biden for “abandoning Israel” and other Republicans have even called for nuclear strikes to defend Israel. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and has promised to recognize Israel sovereignty over the West Bank, where Biden has initiated sanctions against a few of the most murderous of the 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers in that occupied territory. The Republican House of Representatives is trying to force Biden to reverse even his small gesture. 

The white nationalist evangelical base of the Republican New Confederacy, now dominates the older big business groups and traditional fiscal conservatives of the party.  This leaves Trump little room to create separation from Israel and the “end times” apocalypse the Christian nationalists long for in the Promised Land.

To separate the domestic and international the way Glass does leaves our position open to the criticism that we are willing to turn our eyes away from the Gaza genocide for the self-interest of getting a better NLRB. 

Transforming Democracy and Independent Political Organization

Ours is a fight over terrain to build an independent working class movement by defeating the main danger at this moment. This means educating people around the basic concept of strategy, as an analysis and a practical effort to build a united front/social bloc to contend for governing power and ultimately state power. The “terrain” notion comes from founders of Black Lives Matter, among others. And the “Block and Build” formulation that has come from Convergence magazine is a good formulation: Block the MAGA right and build our independent political power.  

The goal is not just to “Defend Democracy,” but to “Defend, Expand, and Transform” democracy, which requires a brutally honest and loud assessment of the actual state of democracy in the U.S., as explained in Liberation Road’s Strategic Orientation.[p. 6] This formulation is a Marxist one; it doesn’t simply defend “the democratic experiment called the United States” that Glass mentions, a phrase that covers multiple generations of sins. 

A strategic understanding of social blocs and terrain is important. Defending material benefits that we have won from Biden or can win in a second term is important.

This does not mean making cold calls for the Democratic Party. It means developing our own independent political organizations that can fight inside and outside the Democratic Party, and inside and outside the electoral system. We vote our resistance, and we take to the streets. This certainly means marching against the Gaza genocide. It also means supporting the Working Families Party, or the Democratic Socialists of America, or the many local formations from the Carolina Federation to the Working Families in Chicago. Without that, the ‘Build’ part of ‘Block and Build’ is just a thought. 

I grew up politically in the social movements of the late 1960s and ‘70s, stuffing envelopes for SNCC, trying to end the war in Vietnam, organizing unemployed people, and fighting for my union. The times were exhilarating in many ways, but strategy was often displaced by a comforting dogma. The contributions of social movement leaders and thinkers like Ella Baker of SNCC or Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau or the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci were unknown or under-appreciated, and sectarian divisions were commonplace. The concepts of building a united front and independence for our forces within it were missing or underdeveloped.

Today a different and substantive struggle on the left is taking place, between a vaguely insurrectionist outburst and righteous personal outrage on one hand, versus a serious analysis of social blocs and a road to governing and political power for a Third Reconstruction. [p. 9] from those of us who are equally outraged–but want to win. How we carry out that line struggle may make the difference between a momentary challenge and a strategic challenge–an outcome that we will have to deal with for a very long time. 

Yes, Biden is a war criminal. And yes, I am voting for him. For the material needs of our people, and for more favorable terrain to build a better world–including a Free Palestine.

Jeff Crosby worked at the General Electric aviation plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, as a grinder and elected union official for 33 years, serving as president of his local and of the North Shore Labor Council. He has written for Labor Notes, New Labor Forum, Working USA, Monthly Review and The Nation, and taught at the UMass Boston labor studies program and the Harvard Trade Union Program. He is a member of Liberation Road.

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