Pro-Palestinian protest converging on the White House against president Joe Biden Picture:(Flickr/ Ted Eytan)
A huge power has risen up across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in the largest and broadest Palestine movement ever seen in the US.
Activists have picketed companies that design or manufacture for the Israeli military and disrupted the offices of US representatives who refuse to call for a ceasefire. Now they have adopted a new form of protest against president “Genocide Joe” Biden’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
They are campaigning for “uncommitted” votes in Democratic primaries, which nominate the party presidential candidate. The protest vote movement took off after a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups called for a vote of “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary.
Mike, a teacher in the state of Michigan, spoke to Socialist Worker about the strategy. “In Michigan, Biden was running unopposed. There were no serious candidates running against him, just fringe candidates. The campaign for ‘uncommitted’ was a way of saying, ‘I’m not happy with any of these’.
“It isn’t an option that’s usually used,” Mike explained. “People began campaigning around the question of Palestine and Biden’s failure to support a ceasefire. The organisers planned to get 10,000, as the argument was that Donald Trump won the state by 10,000 votes in 2016.”
But 101,000 people voted “uncommitted”, totalling 13.2 percent. Following this, 51,000 voted “uncommitted” in Colorado with 8.9 percent of the vote. And 59,000 did so in Massachusetts equating to 9.3 percent, 46,000 in Minnesota at 19 percent and 88,000 in North Carolina at 12.7 percent.
In the latest Democratic primary in Washington on Tuesday last week, 58,000 voted “uncommitted”—8.1 percent of the total vote. As Socialist Worker went to print, the total amount of uncommitted votes recorded was 434,000.
The votes “are going to send a message to the Democrats—‘if you ignore us, you could lose Michigan again’,” Mike said. This will have little impact on Biden’s path to nomination. The “uncommitted” votes in Michigan translate into just two of the state’s 117 delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
“But it sends a very powerful protest message,” Mike argued. “The movement came out of nowhere—it was very spontaneous.” Mike thought the first indication that the movement could be something serious was when he received a “whiny gas-lighting message from the Biden campaign saying, ‘A vote for uncommitted is a vote for Trump. This was of course bollocks,” he said.
“Clearly the Democrats are worried. The grassroots are having an impact as can be seen in the scale of the vote.” Mike pushed back against any reductive analysis of the “uncommitted” vote in Michigan.
He explained, “A lot of arguments credited the result to Michigan’s large Arab and Muslim population, as Michigan has one of the biggest Arab American populations in the country.
“But the entire Muslim and Arab population of Michigan is less than 5 percent, versus the 13 percent who voted “uncommitted”. “While the anger of the Arab and Muslim populations is driving this in some ways, it is also a lot bigger. It’s not possible to dismiss it as just Michigan. It
goes beyond that.” Mike thinks the “uncommitted” votes reflect “a real anger in the Democrat’s base of voters about its handling of Israel”.
But that doesn’t mean anyone will turn to Trump and his reactionary brand of populism. “Trump is Islamophobic—and he handed Israel the gift of recognising Jerusalem as its capital,” Mike said.
“People might just stay at home. If people stay home or people vote third parties, it’s because the Democrats are doing nothing for them. On the question of imperialism and Palestine, both Trump and Biden are awful. If anything, Trump was less interventionist.
“But he was less interventionist from a perspective of right-wing nationalism, not because of a love of Arabs and Muslims. And we know Trump is perfectly willing to use the US military. Nobody should have any illusions about him.”
Mike also spoke about the movement’s limitations. “The campaign was deliberately planned around elections, but it needs to be carried into something more concrete. Because it’s framed as a protest vote against Biden, it’s again framed in terms of Democratic Party politics and the internal processes of the Democrats.”
But Mike isn’t dismissive towards the “uncommitted” votes. “They have the potential to be more than just symbolism if they’re turned into a movement outside of electoralism and outside of the Democratic Party,” he argued.
Historically movements in the US have suffered from being pulled into the framework of electoral politics. “In the past, anti-war movements in the United States, such as the Iraq war movement, were pretty much put on ice when Obama was elected.
“This meant there was nothing there to oppose the Iraq war. The problem for the US left is that it’s hard to find a sensible left that isn’t either merging into the Democratic Party as Bernie Sanders or the Squad do, or utterly sectarian.”
The Democratic Party always acts as a shock absorber to mass movements pushing for change. Biden’s done his best to absorb the recent revival of strikes. It can be seen most clearly in the 1960s mass movements for civil rights, women’s rights and gay liberation, which were corralled behind Democratic presidential campaigns.
And it’s happened more recently with the Black Lives Matter movement. But Mike says that the Palestine movement has to resist this trap. “Palestine is one of those issues in the US where there’s pressure not to speak about it as US imperialism is so closely linked with Israel,” he explained.
“But I think that’s been broken. There’s been polling that most Democratic voters want a ceasefire. The fear that you can’t re-match offers up more of the same talk about Palestine is beginning to crack and we’re seeing far more open support.
“Biden has limited himself to saying how unhappy he is with Binyamin Netanyahu but ultimately gives limitless military aid to Israel. But the fact he’s even having to talk about these things shows there have been shifts from below that’ve made him fearful.
“I’ve limited faith in the ability of electoral politics to shift US imperialism, but if Democrats start fearing they could lose the election over this—that might have an impact. But we need it to be backed up by protests on the streets, or else it is just going to dissipate like the Bernie Sanders campaign dissipated.”
And revival of the labour movement remains a source of optimism. “You hear about the big strikes of the United Auto Workers, but there are loads of strikes that don’t get much publicity because they’re local or regional,” Mike said.
“There is resistance bubbling under the surface. We need to pull together the revival of the labour movement, the radicalisation of issues around Palestine and the revival of socialism. It’s a big task and it involves people working with fairly small but green shoots.
“But the potential is there. The depressing prospect of this election is that it’s a contest between fear and apathy—fear of Trump versus apathy against the awful Democrats.”
This Autumn’s election will be the first presidential rematch in 70 years with Joe Biden and Donald Trump both securing their party’s presidential nominations last week.
The rematch is set amid a crisis for United States politics—with a revival of strikes, US imperialism fighting on multiple fronts and deep unpopularity of both candidates. But it is hardly a rematch that many want to see.
In a recent Gallup poll, 63 percent of American adults agreed that the Republicans and Democrats are failing to represent people and that a third major party is needed. Biden fits exactly what the Democratic Party stands for.
He’s a staunch defender of US imperialism and a valiant fighter for the interests of bosses. Trump’s nomination stems from the continued failure of neoliberal politics to offer any answers to the problems facing ordinary people.
And it’s a sign of the growing disintegration of the US political establishment. Only 27 percent of adults say they’re satisfied with Biden’s nomination and 32 percent satisfied with Trump’s nomination.
Most US voters also say they feel worse off under Biden, after the Covid pandemic and high inflation have led to diminished living standards. On the same day that Biden won the Democratic nomination, he announced an additional £230 million to be sent to Ukraine in aid.
This is on top of the £36 billion of military support and £20 billion of financial support the US has sent under Biden’s watch. Congress is currently stalling a Ukrainian support package worth £45 billion.
US imperialism is fighting on multiple fronts against Russia in Ukraine, China in an economic battle and for its position in the Middle East. Trump doesn’t want to fund the proxy war in Ukraine.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban said Trump told him that he’d “not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war”. He has pledged to end the proxy war “within 24 hours” if elected. Without US support, Ukrainian resistance to imperialist Russia would likely crumble.
Trump is clashing with sections of the imperialist ruling class, but that’s not to say he is breaking from it. There’s a section of the US establishment that wants to retreat from the front against Russia so it can focus on its more threatening front—China.
But as chaos at the top heightens, workers are fighting back. In 2023, US workers went on the highest number of strikes in 23 years. The strikes included 75,000 health workers in the largest health strike in US history.
And 53,000 workers struck in the first simultaneous action against Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Stellantis. A total of 458,900 US workers struck in 393 different strikes. This revival provides a sense of resistance from below.
It shows the depth of workers’ anger at stagnating wages, erosion of health insurance or retirement benefits, long hours and poor working conditions.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans offer any solutions to these hardships. We need to see more strikes. A revolutionary socialist alternative—outside of the Democrats and the Republicans must be built.
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