The electoral process is simply the means by which the different white rulers conduct generally safe, non-violent contests among themselves to take control of the State for the security and advancement of their economic interests.
That’s the way it has always been, with the exception of some glitches that were overcome by occasional assassination and/or forced resignations of offending candidates or officeholders.
The Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. are the main political parties through which electoral wars are waged.
The Democratic and Republican parties, like all political parties, are parties of a particular class. They are organizations of the advanced sector of a particular class, in this instance the white ruling class.
Generally speaking, the game is rigged to guarantee that only the ruling class, through these parties, are guaranteed easy access to the electoral process, especially during a presidential election.
The electoral process is generally tame and insipid because of this, hardly inspiring participation by masses of people.
Nevertheless, the people, like the white rulers themselves, are experiencing a profound crisis. It is the crisis of imperialism, a crisis of a system created by slavery and colonialism, that is daily losing control of its bounty.
The majority of people who are politically active attempt to advance their interests through the electoral process. This participation is a requirement within a system of white bourgeois democracy.
The participation of the people gives the winner of an election the mass base upon which to assert white ruling class policies as mandated by the will of the people. This participation allows a president to claim that he/she is holding up the policies of the masses.
This lie is facilitated by the fact that the ruling class owns the media, with six major corporations controlling 90 percent of every medium that defines social, economic and political reality in the U.S.
This time around, however, during the 2016 electoral campaign for president, everything is out of whack.
2016 Electoral campaign reflects imperialism in crisis
First of all, there were at least 25 candidates for president representing both parties at the start of the electoral season. This in itself was a signal of the crisis of imperialism. The white ruling class was fractured, with different sectors sponsoring each of the different candidates. Every white man for himself, so to speak.
Secondly, the white rulers, in their hubris, certain they controlled the general narrative that they created, dismissed out of hand the candidates that would offer the biggest problems for them–Donald Trump, the Republican celebrity billionaire and Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont, running as a Democrat.
Both Trump and Sanders, along with Republican Ted Cruz recognized the disenchantment of the people and struck out to win an election based on this disenchantment by running against the “system” as they defined it.
Trump, Sanders and Cruz, while presenting themselves as “outliers” not controlled by the “system,” are tackling the issues that has most plagued the system they claim to defy.
This includes the issues of immigration, “terrorism” or resistance, big money in politics, power of the banks, wage and income gap and loss of U.S. authority around the world.
The big problem is that Sanders, Trump and Cruz fought against the established, tightly controlled prevailing ruling class arrangement and vetting system to go directly to the people for approval.
Imperialist similarities between Sanders and Trump
Trump and Sanders also challenged the traditional decorum by taking the ideas of bought politicians out of the abstract and actually called names and pointed fingers at politicians and corporate rulers.
This added to their appeal to the people. They simply stated what the people already knew but had no idea of how to deal with within the established electoral process.
Now, according to Trump and Sanders, they can. They don’t have to abandon the colonialist capitalist system or even the Republican and Democratic party of the white ruling class.
It is not certain that either of Trump or Sanders will be successful in capturing the nomination of their respective ruling class parties. They have, however, succeeded in mobilizing the people into the safe embrace of both parties.
Moreover, it is likely that their candidacies will result in an improvement of the Democratic and Republican parties, forcing them to overturn their ossified process to become more effective in selling the message and program of the white ruling class to the masses without having to give up anything.
The one thing we can be sure of, whatever the outcome is for Trump and Sanders, the real winner in this electoral campaign will be the capitalist colonialist system that won’t be scathed by the intra-bourgeois contest.
Sanders’ insidious threat
Most African observers of the presidential electoral process have already assigned Trump to the “racism” camp. Most find his opinions about Mexicans and Muslims repugnant.
They have viewed his mass rallies of nearly all white people and heard his supporters declare their support for Trump because “he tells it like it is.” He is against the Political Correctness that prohibits whites from “calling a spade a spade.” Harrumph!
Indeed, some militant African pundits have declared Trump to be a proto fascist with all the attendant horrors awaiting us.
It is Sanders, however, that represents the more insidious threat. Sanders has also mobilized thousands of mostly white, mostly young enthusiastic people in rallies throughout the U.S.
Like Trump on the Republican side, Sanders has sorely staggered the main bourgeois endorsed candidate, Hillary Clinton, embarrassing her for her ties to finance capital and her fidelity to Obama’s wars.
The bourgeois media, as in the case of Trump, humored Sanders as an impossible threat to their plans until it was too late and he gained traction with the masses of white young people.
What makes Sanders a bigger problem, however, is the fact that he is sweeping up the disaffected masses by using terms like “socialist” and “political revolution,” giving political neophytes the impression that his is a genuine challenge to the existing social system.
Sanders calls himself a socialist. His socialism, however, is not the socialism that is the early stage of communism, the socialism where the white ruling class State has been defeated and the workers—in arms—have become the new State.
Sander’s phony definition of socialism attracts Africans
Sanders’s promise to the workers is a measly $15.00 per hour minimum wage cap to be achieved over “a number of years.” Real socialism places the means of production in the hands of the workers, not a mere $15.00 per hour minimum wage guarantee
Sanders’s “political revolution” is only a threat to the electoral system directly dominated by particular sectors of the white ruling class undermining confidence in the political shell game by openly purchasing politicians, something that Trump is also exposing.
His revolution does not promise to overturn the capitalist system that relies on the ongoing, permanent exploitation of Africans and the peoples of the world for its success, the real basis of the wars for which he condemns Hillary Clinton for endorsing.
Sanders’s democratic socialism does not allow him to condemn the white nationalist, settler State of Israel that is responsible for untold misery heaped upon the people of occupied Palestine while being in bed with the most malignant reactionary Arab regimes that are pursuing Obama and Clinton’s wars.
Sanders is the white man who has refused to support the demand for reparations by the U.S. and imperialism in general to African people. Indeed, Sanders, even as he faces severe electoral limitations for his white campaign, has made no specific policy initiatives favoring African people in the U.S. whose enslavement and brutish treatment made the U.S. possible.
Nevertheless, there appears to be a growing number of Africans being attracted to Sanders campaign because of his criticism of the “billionaire class” and his promise of a $15.00 per hour wage cap.
His easy demagogic bluster about a “political revolution” also appears to have won some of the high profile black militants to his camp.
This is because, unlike the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), none of them are serious about real revolution, the actual capture of black political power in our own black hands. None of them are talking about the complete destruction of the colonialist capitalist system.
We of the African People’s Socialist Party are preparing to govern. We see no future for African people or the peoples of the world under a white nationalist capitalist colonialist regime.
At best, the Bernie Sanders campaign is an attempt to rescue capitalism and the ongoing oppression of our people through appropriation of militant language and taking it to masses of people.
Ironically, most of his black supporters have refused to even call for revolution or socialism before now. It took an opportunist white man to use the terms “socialist” and “revolution” as an attack on both, to win the support from these Africans.
Sacrificing the long-term interests of the masses of African workers for short-term advantages of other social forces is called opportunism.
The bourgeoisie in “socialist,” “revolutionary” clothing is a case of using socialist and revolution to fight socialist and revolution.
In reality the road to socialism is painted black. African Internationalism and the African People’s Socialist Party provide the GPS to that destination.
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