On July 13, at a Donald Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, former President Trump was shot by a lone gunman.
As Gus Hall, former General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, said, “individual acts of violence are methods of a class that history is rejecting. The working class, the carrier of all that is progressive and the class that is leading the way toward social progress and a socialist society free of violence, relies on masses in motion, mass movements, and mass struggles [not individual acts of violence].” Therefore, workers should be under no illusion that spontaneous acts of violence will play a progressive role.
Shortly after the shooting, before any facts on the shooter were known to the public, Donald Trump, Jr. already placed blame on the so-called “radical left”. These unfounded statements are reminiscent of the slanderous anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthyite 1950s which attacked our Bill of Rights. Along the same vein was the PATRIOT Act of 2001 which was the result of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This act infringes on the right to privacy in the name of so-called “national security”. Such erosion of civil liberties harkens back to the Enabling Acts in Hitler’s Germany, which paved the way to fascism.
As the 2024 election approaches, workers must understand that neither major party is capable of solving the issues which they all face on a day-to-day basis: the unsustainable cost of living, job insecurity, excessive military spending on foreign wars instead of spending on education, healthcare, housing, and public infrastructure. The two major parties are both controlled by the same financial institutions and lobbying groups, and they both conduct mass surveillance against all of us. Violence at home is ultimately caused by the decay of US imperialism abroad.
Bourgeois corporate media has attempted to frame this election as a battle between democracy and fascism. However, the truth is both parties support fascism, with the Democrats delivering military and financial aid to the fascist Ukrainian regime and with forces within both the Democrat and Republican Parties calling for providing weapons and money to the apartheid, genocidal, regime of Netanyahu.
The fundamental analysis of the Party of Communists USA has not changed. The American working class must continue along the same course, building a labor-centered, anti-monopoly coalition to oppose the current two-party duopoly which represents only the ruling, capitalist class.
Secretariat
Central Committee
Party of Communists USA