From the perspective of someone whose priority is to free those who being exploited by U.S. capital, rather than to advance imperialism, the reality that Biden’s Ukraine proxy war is especially hurting Black workers can provide a powerful argument for voting Cornel West. West is a Black voice who’s speaking against the Ukraine psyop, and therefore he has great potential to attract the most conscious elements of the workers; those being the elements which are aware that the Ukraine aid effort lacks justification, and that our government is condemning the workers to an inflation crisis that’s been greatly worsened by this needless war.
Democratic Party elites don’t recognize this reality, probably because they believe their own absurd propaganda about how we’re fight for freedom in Ukraine; therefore, they aren’t able to empathize with the perspectives of the millions of workers, many of them being among the Black voter base, who are increasingly feeling the war’s economic impacts. Biden’s advisors are reassuring him and his campaign team by claiming these voters aren’t likely to turn to West due to decreasing Black unemployment rates. The context they leave out, and perhaps don’t even see as relevant, is that Biden’s imperialist project is causing tremendous harm to these workers.
The corporate media isn’t going so far as to refuse to talk about the ways the inflation is harming the Black community, but it’s never going to help lead us towards making the connection between this problem and the war machine. CNN did a report last summer about how African diaspora families are being disproportionately impacted by the rise in food, gas, and rent prices, yet due to the false neutrality which media outlets like it operate according to, it didn’t look for any place to apply blame for the problem.
When it comes to issues that don’t pertain to whether U.S. imperialism should continue, such as the pandemic, these outlets are willing to point out how presidents are responsible for disastrous outcomes; a few years ago, CNN was ridiculing Trump for spreading misinformation about the pandemic, and for otherwise mismanaging the crisis. When Biden portrays the situation in Ukraine out of context to make Russia’s actions appear unprovoked; to the effect that this prolongs a war which is worsening inflation; these outlets act like the inflation crisis is simply happening on its own.
Whether or not the corporate outlets are being directly assigned to advance the DNC’s interests, which is something that’s happened in recent history, their pretending like the war shouldn’t be blamed for the inflation is having the effect of enabling the Biden campaign’s misleading narratives. Its narratives about the present conditions of Black America, and of the working class more broadly, being far better than they actually are. The Democratic Party is trying to point to how many Black Americans are now technically working (regardless of how well they can live off the jobs which are available to them), and say the recent slowdown of inflation represents an adequate reason for staying loyal to the Democrats. Should West’s campaign and the other counter-hegemonic political forces prove successful, though, the Democrats will find that they can’t expect to keep working class voters simply by trying to slow down the progression of our economic crisis. The damage to the lives of the workers has already been done; making that damage start to happen slower, or getting more jobs for people who are still subject to these high new prices, can’t stop living standards from continuing to fall.
As Conor Gallagher wrote this week in Naked Capitalism, the families that are finding housing to be less and less in reach have been continuing to have that experience, however much the Democrats say the economy is improving:
More than 30 U.S. economists have signed a letter expressing support for strong federal tenant protections and rent control as housing costs remain sky-high, even amid broadly cooling inflation. The economists note in their letter, released Thursday, that the median rent in the U.S. “has surpassed $2,000 for the first time, and there is not a single state where a worker earning a full-time minimum wage salary can afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.”…Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign at People’s Action, said in a statement Thursday that “tenants are coming for rent regulations, and everyone from senators to economists agree: tenant protections are common sense.”…“The system as we know it today has failed everyday people, many of whom make impossible choices between rent and food, their homes or their medications,” said Raghuveer.
The situation is the same in regard to food. Culinary writer Sam Stone observed this spring how food companies have been using the inflation crisis as an excuse to artificially inflate grocery prices:
Producers and sellers of food claim that increased costs from inflation and factors like higher wages are driving up prices, but in reality wages are not keeping pace with inflation. Though higher wages might be responsible for a slightly higher price for consumers, the increase in retail cost for items is often rising higher than employee wages. In fact, many food producers have been accused of raising costs simply because they can. “Corporations have used inflation, the pandemic, and supply chain challenges as an excuse to exaggerate their own costs and then nickel-and-dime consumers,” Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog organization Accountable.us, alleged to The New York Times. In 2022, the average price of potato chips was $5.26 in January. By December of that year that number had increased to $6.28. Meanwhile, the Times reported, PepsiCo, the owner of Frito-Lay, increased profits by 20% in its third quarter alone.
This week, Democratic Party-adjacent Paul Krugman of the New York Times reaffirmed this reality that food remains overwhelmingly expensive for working people, even as the speed of inflation goes down. But we’re never going to hear from voices like him a proper systemic critique about this issue; one that exposes how our government has been using lies to justify waging the Ukraine proxy war, which made the people’s conditions as bad as they now are. It was Biden’s proxy war that not only raised prices via inflation, but gave the corporations an opportunity to then make these living necessities even more expensive.
Gas, the third big factor in how the war has made workers feel economic harm, is continuing to be subject to disproportionately inflated prices; prices that remain excessively high, even when the Democrats try to partly alleviate gasoline price gouging. In San Diego, gas prices have been continuing to go up, regardless of how California Democrats passed a measure this summer to end gouging. Even if inflation is no longer as rapid as it used to be, and if the ban on gouging is genuinely effective (which we don’t know it is), that inflation and gouging have been happening has placed workers in a situation which keeps worsening. The biggest victims are the same Black workers who the Democrats assume they can depend on to give them popular support during this election cycle.
The Democratic Party’s decision to assume the role of the new cold war’s primary driver has, in the long term, destroyed its ability to maintain its old role as the absorber of radical sentiments. It can’t successfully present as the best option for the working class, and especially for the types of workers who are subject to racial capitalism, at the same time that it wages wars which drive these workers into economic desperation. These are contradictory goals, yet the Democrats don’t want to choose one; they want to try to do both by attacking challengers like West, hoping this will get their traditional base not to abandon them. The reality is that to win elections, the Democratic Party will increasingly have to embrace the strategy of appealing towards petty-bourgeois and labor aristocrat Republicans; a strategy which Chuck Schumer described in 2016 as being the party’s new way of operating.
Given how heavily this country’s electoral system is rigged against workers (especially Black workers), the Democrats could survive electorally after coming to solely want to get votes from an economically comfortable minority. But the real purpose of the Democratic Party isn’t to win elections; it’s to divert the political organizing efforts of Black workers, and of other people with revolutionary potential, towards reformist projects. By becoming the new primary source of neocon politics, the Democrats have brought workers revolution closer.
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