SMC 2024 General Election Statement
The results of the 2024 general election will have a devastating impact on the working class and is ushering in a new organizing terrain. Over the next four years, we will often be called upon to protect each other. Now is the time for solidarity and a recommitment to building class-based, mass politics.
This work cannot be done alone: join DSA and join the Socialist Majority Caucus.
Our fellow socialists Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani put it well when they say the Democratic Party has abandoned working class people, through promoting neoliberal austerity in times of skyrocketing economic inequality. Harris ran a campaign that favored corporate appeasement over policies that benefit working people, and remained committed to the genocide in Gaza.
Some will insist that we turn to third parties or abandon electoral politics altogether. But we know democratic socialists can run and win on pro-worker and anti-imperial demands without xenophobic fear-mongering or catering to billionaires. And we can have a strategy to beat back the rising far right by continuing to participate in a popular front against the right in general elections, activating working class power through a strong electoral program and in coalition with labor unions, socialists, and progressive civic and religious organizations.
Socialist Majority Caucus believes in the power of a mass movement. Over the last few months, our members led key aspects of the Uncommitted campaign and kept up the pressure for an arms embargo. Our members traveled across the country to canvass in swing states to prevent the disaster of a Trump administration. Others worked to protect voting access in communities targeted for voter suppression by the far right. Several joined Hurricane Helene mutual aid efforts while getting out the vote in western North Carolina. We did this alongside unions, Black and brown organizers, and other socialist organizers committed to building a better world for all.
Even so, we know a popular front alone cannot liberate the working class from capitalism, so we must also advance socialist politics by fighting corporate Democrats…highlighting the shortcomings of liberalism while offering a political alternative. What this political alternative will look like, now, is up to us. Looking ahead, we must continue to build a pro-worker political organization that opposes both the far right and the Democratic establishment and that can win in the American electoral terrain. The Right has gotten even more organized in the last four years and very effectively built power—we must too.
We must protect the fundamental rights of all workers to organize. We must mobilize against Trump’s mass deportations plans, the extension of abortion bans nationwide, book banning and privacy invasion targeting trans people, the repression of free speech and protest on campuses, and beyond. In the face of a 50-year war against the working class that has decimated community institutions and resulted in an epidemic of loneliness and disconnection, we are also faced with the task of bringing people together around a shared vision for a socialist state.
Though these may seem like unprecedented times, the US is not the first country to face the threat of dictatorship. We come from a long line of traditions that have defeated right-wing autocrats. This is the moment that history will look back on—not how we voted, but how we adapted. The road ahead requires discipline and steady hearts. This election was lost to the authoritarians, but the working class can still be won over and we can still build the world we all deserve.
Again, this work cannot be done alone: join DSA and join the Socialist Majority Caucus.