Should you vote and if so for whom?

Left. Trying to keep working people from discussing the issues that are important to them by waving the flag and shouting about national unity. Meanwhile Wall Street, the major corporations and their politicians in the two capitalist Parties, the Republicans and the Democrats rob working class Americans blind.

Some left groups say that people should not participate in elections. This is entirely wrong. Elections are a mass dialogue that takes place in society. If left wing and anti capitalist activists do not participate they leave the field entirely open to the capitalist parties. Look at what has been happening in this election campaign. The dialogue has been able to divert people's minds from the issues that are central to them. That is jobs, homes, wages, education, health and so on. Instead the dialogue has been about the lunatics in the Tea Party and other nonsense. It is the responsibility of all union and anti capitalist forces to take part in the mass dialogue, take on capitalism and put forward an alternative. Sitting out the election process is to leave the field open to capitalism, it is to make it easier for capitalism to win its struggle for the consciousness of the working class.

This does not mean that we who organize this blog believe that capitalism can be ended and a democratic socialist society created by electoral means. If a majority were elected who were dedicated to ending capitalism and establishing democratic socialism then capitalism would show its real nature and move to try and form a dictatorship and overthrow such a majority elected government. They have done this again and again in the former colonial countries which elected left governments. So yes, take part in elections and have the working class socialist alternative heard. And yes, elect people to Congress and other bodies who will use these as platforms to explain why capitalism must be ended and explain the case for the socialist alternative.

In this way a majority of workers can be won to the struggle for socialism and can be won to organize in working peoples' committees in the workplaces, the unions, the military and in this way a new democratic structure can be built. This structure can appeal to the military forces that the capitalists would try to use against the working class and the struggle for socialism. It can also be the base for the democratic socialist society we want to build. This would be a society where the dominant major corporations would be taken into collective ownership and run on the basis of democratic control and management and a democratic plan to meet the needs of all.