 Now, I have to admit, when I was asked to write this lead-off, I puzzled to myself, how on earth can I make Joe Biden interesting for 45 minutes, arguably the most tedious man in politics, with the possible exception of Kier Stammer? But really the grey doddering stooge of Joe Biden is an embodiment and a reflection of the senile decay of US capitalism. If you remember, when Joe Biden won the US presidential race last November, there was a sigh of relief all over the world after four years of Trump's racist fire and fury. But it has to be said, the loudest sigh went up from the ruling class, because the madness of the Trump presidency was a colossal disruption to world trade, to world relations, but most importantly to the legitimacy of the US capitalist system. When Biden was billed as a safe pair of hands, he was going to restore normality in the aftermath of Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course is still going on. And bourgeois commentators all over the world gushed with praise for the new president. In the run-up to the election, the New York Times editorial board wrote the following, the former vice president is the leader our nation needs now. Biden's focus will be on healing divisions and rallying the nation around shared values. And liberal representatives of the establishment also hope that Biden would restore the standing of the so-called political center against the so-called populist right, but also, perhaps more importantly from their point of view, the left. Jonathan Friedland, a journalist noted for being wrong about essentially everything all the time, wrote in The Guardian, The true radical is not the fiery deliverer of revolutionary speeches or writer of maximalist manifestos. The true radical is the one who wins power and uses it for good. Biden has achieved more in two months than those who like to trumpet their radicalism manage in a lifetime. So this political center that Friedland and Co. vociferously defend in reality, using the term that Alan likes, which I think is very good, is a gigantic zero. It's collapsed given the extreme polarization of society. And we find ourselves now, 257 days into Biden's Build Back Better program, with his honeymoon pretty decidedly over. A recent university poll found that 38% of the US public approve of Biden's job performance and 53% disapprove. Just before jetting off to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, he admitted himself that his presidency is, I quote, on the line. This is not the phrase used by someone confident in their grip over the system. And the bourgeoisie have also started to sour on their white night. The FT wrote the following a month or two ago. A few weeks ago, Joe Biden's presidency was widely hailed as a triumph. All of a sudden, people are proclaiming Biden's failed presidency. The last few months have told us something worrying about this president. He's proud, inflexible, and he thinks he's much smarter than he really is. That's all true, of course. But the reality is that capitalism, US capitalism is incapable of guaranteeing a decent existence for American workers and youth, irrespective of who leads. Biden is a chosen representative, an establishment that is widely and deservedly despised. He's never hidden this. He promised his rich donors during his campaign trail. Again, I quote, nothing will fundamentally change if I win. The transforming consciousness and the rising class struggle that we're seeing in the United States is going to rock the country. It's already begun to rock the country. We saw this with the Black Lives Matter protests last year, the wave of strikes occurring this month. And these events are already fully exposing Biden to anyone who had any lingering illusions as a class enemy, not a lesser evil, but exactly the same evil as Trump with a slightly kinder face. Now, just cast your minds back to that election 2020. It was clear that the result was a vote against Trump rather than a vote for Biden. Despite being more or less directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to COVID-19, despite setting the National Guard and militarized police against BLM protesters, Trump received 74 million votes. That's the highest ever for a Republican candidate and an incumbent. Biden promised to take the country back to the good old days under Obama. But these days were already a nightmare for millions of Americans. The blue wall states so-called like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, the former industrial states were treated like rotten burrs by the Democrats for decades. They were crushed by capitalists globalization and outsourcing. And the factories and mines were closed to be replaced with mass unemployment, poverty and epidemics of opioid dependency, obesity and mental health crises. These were places that had their dignity destroyed, had their hearts ripped out under the Democrats. And Trump flipped these states in 2016 by demagogically promising to make America great again. What did that mean to the working class Americans who voted Republican maybe for the first time in their lives? It meant reopening the mines and factories, reversing globalization and restoring dignity to big swathes of working families who felt ignored by the Washington elite. It was a lie. Trump is a huckster, but it was a compelling lie. And the Democrats, it's increasingly clear, are heavily discredited. During the historic boom of capitalism after World War II, presidents like FDR and Lyndon Johnson were able to grant some concessions to workers in the poor. And this coupled with a tendency to skew liberal on social issues like gay, black and women's rights meant the Democrats were often assumed to be more worker friendly or the lesser evil was a term that we hear a lot. But after decades of betrayals and disappointments, millions of Americans are fed up with the Democrats and rightly so. Now, Trump's core support base is in the hysterical small business owners, white collar professionals, picket fence retirees, other petty bourgeois reactionary riffraff. But he posed as an outsider to the corrupt Washington swamp. He was scrappy, he was determined, and he tapped into an anti-establishment mood amongst workers as well. And this is only possible because of the lack of a viable class independent alternative, a workers' party through which to fight for genuine reforms as the great American author and essayist Galvid Alputus. Americans were once again forced to choose between two right wings of the same party, the property party. Now, in both 2016 and 2020, the number of eligible voters who sat out the election altogether was higher than the number of votes that either candidate received individually. The majority felt that neither candidate represented them. And then as now, Biden was not especially popular. He's not an especially inspirational figure. Although I have to say, he recently gave a particularly good speech, really rivaling the Gettysburg address as far as presidential oratory goes. Now, he thought that Trump's speeches were occasionally a bit disjointed. Biden said, this was a few days ago, as one computer said, if you're on the train and they say portal bridge, you know you'd better make other plans. If you can interpret that, then you refine a political analyst than I will ever be. The guy seems half awake all the time. And his so-called progressive credentials are dubious to say the least. I won't dwell on this, but it's common knowledge that he compromised with segregationists while Delaware Senator in the 70s, he historically opposed abortion rights. He's got his fingerprints all over the so-called war on drugs that killed and incarcerated thousands of mostly black and Latino men in the 90s onwards. And he's fervently supported US military adventures abroad. And I think it reflects just how degenerate the Democrats are. You know, really the main bourgeois party, the party of Wall Street, that this is their man, this semi-senile, besuited mediocrity was the best they had to rally around. It just shows how bankrupt they are as a party. And of course, Biden was a major influence on Obama-era policies to bail out the fat cats behind the 2008 crash and the historic levels of deportation and incarceration of migrants of the US border under that administration. Not to mention the litany of accusations of inappropriate behavior and assaults of women over the course of his career. He came in fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire democratic primaries in 2020, well behind the self-described democratic socialist candidate Bernie Sanders. The ruling class knew at that moment that they needed a reliable puppet to rally behind, especially faced with the danger of Sanders, who at least in words, called for a revolution against the billionaire class and seemed to be on track for winning the Democrats ticket. So after those caucuses, all the other democratic primary candidates pulled out simultaneously for South Carolina and endorsed Biden, helped him to win that primary and gave his campaign the boost of momentum that it needed to win the nomination. The entire presidential run for Biden saw $1.5 billion in funding, mainly from super PACs, such as Priority's USA Action, including $145 million in so-called dark money donors, people who don't disclose the amounts that they contribute and this dwarfs the amount of money that was spent on Trump's campaign. The bourgeois also ran a furious media campaign attacking Trump and pressuring disappointed Sanders supporters to vote for the lesser evil. Sanders himself shamefully endorsed Biden. He led his supporters to the top of the hill and he led them all the way down again. And though the ruling class got their man elected to the light of the stock market, which rallied after the election, it was far too close for comfort. A few thousand votes across a few key states were really all that saved Biden. And after the election, Trump immediately spread the lie that it was stolen. He whipped up his support base into a frenzy that culminated with the storming of the Capitol building on the 6th of January. And this image of the embodiment of the US state under siege from a furious mob a few months after the genuinely insurrectionary BLM protest showed that far from a return to normality, Biden would inherit a highly polarized society in the middle of the deepest capitalist crisis in 300 years. But in the first few months of his presidency, Biden hit the ground running. He won a lot of plaudits for his so-called progressive economic measures. In reality, he had to spend a truckload of cash to rescue US capitalism from the crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. He immediately proposed $7 trillion in stimulus measures, including the 1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed in March. But more than half of this money went to rescue businesses. And even the stimulus checks mailed to millions of ordinary Americans unable to work due to lockdowns learned their way back into the boss's pockets eventually in the form of rents, interest payments and so on. And the motive behind this spending, Biden's so-called Build Back Better Plan, is an altruism and it's certainly not communism as the Republicans seem to think and some Democrats too. It reflects the need to spend from above to avoid revolutionary explosions from below. Without those stimulus checks combined with an evictions moratorium, tens of millions of people would have found themselves staring down the barrel of abject poverty and homelessness. It showed the inability of the so-called free market, the invisible hand of the market that's supposed to be worshipped by the US projects to deal with a real crisis. The system would have collapsed had it not been propped up by the helping hand of the state. But now Biden's spending spree has ground to a halt, not helped by America's economic recovery falling below expectations and partly due to supply chain bottlenecks and the impact of the Delta variants of COVID dragging out the crisis. The Dems control the Senate more or less 50-50, which means that a few of their most right-wing representatives are able to hold any policy to ransom. An opposition from right-wing Democrats like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema from Arizona means that Biden has had to slash two further spending bills intended to invest in America's creaking infrastructure, social services, and green technologies in half. So much for the left-wing Democrats. It's unclear exactly how much more Biden will have to shave off his spending plans to appease his own reactionary party, but neither is to say it wasn't clear that any agreement had been reached before he jetted off to Glasgow. But in truth, even Biden's original proposal of $3.5 trillion would have been grossly insufficient. And because there are no free lunches under capitalism, the unprecedented spending he's carried out so far has created a mountain of debts and it's raised the specter of inflation. About $10 trillion in total was pumped into the US economy last year. And in August this year, the public debt of the USA was around $28.43 trillion. Forbes predicts within a few years by 2029 it could reach $89 trillion. That's a debt-to-GDP ratio of 277%. This is dynamite in the economic foundations. And the super-loose fiscal policy of the Fed since 2008 went into overdrive in 2020 when an ocean of cash had to be printed and billions of borrows to fund COVID response measures. And predictably the inflation index rose to over 5% this month. And this is taking a huge bite out of ordinary Americans' wallets. In August, real personal income was below the pre-pandemic level of February 2020. This is not a recovery. No one feels this as a recovery, even if in real terms you could argue that it is a small recovery. And like a junkie, like a drug addict, going cold turkey could be fatal for US capitalism. Any attempt to tighten the money supply by raising interest rates could push the economy straight back into recession. So Biden's attempt to spend his way out of a hole on a capitalist basis has already come back to bite him. Keynesian spending cannot resolve this crisis. Only a massive program of expropriation, nationalization and investments under a democratically planned economy could do that. And obviously that's not on the agenda for Joe Biden. Now, in terms of foreign policy, it's still America first. Let's be very clear about that. Just with a slightly more polite veneer, Biden is still a loyal defender of the interests of US imperialism, which is drenched in blood from head to toe. For example, he reiterated his longstanding support for Israel's right to self-defense after the IDF launched a series of deadly airstrikes on Gaza in June. And he's maintained the vicious economic sanctions on Cuba, including all the new measures introduced by Donald Trump. But unlike in the past, Biden can't always rely on the US's military might to pursue his interests. So he's increasingly using economic and diplomatic warfare, tariffs, trade alliances, and what amounts to the export of unemployment. And this is actually very similar to Donald Trump's approach, just without the angry, scary Twitter posts. The relative decline of US imperialism means an unavoidable clash with rising powers like China, with whom the US now has a 70% trade deficit. But the damaged standing of the US on the world stage makes even these forms of so-called soft power harder to wield. Biden failed to assemble a united front of Western leaders against China of the recent G8 meeting in London, and he's butting heads with the US as traditional allies as the imperialists increasingly descend into internal bickering. The current period is marked by protectionism and the unraveling of globalization. That typifies and motivates Biden's policy on foreign affairs. The capitalist system is wracked by overproduction. So beg of thy neighbor economics and narrow national considerations are coming to the fore. To this process during the pandemic, for example, by maintaining wartime embargoes on COVID-19 products initiated by Donald Trump, which wreaked havoc with global supply chain to vaccine production, that led directly to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths because on the question of vaccine nationalism, once again, it was America first. And you also see this and the protectionist scramble for microchips in their components recently and the ham-fisted pivot away from France towards Australia over the nuclear submarine deals in the Pacific. But all of the contradictions of Biden's foreign policy were brought to a head by the Afghanistan withdrawal. And I know there's been a discussion on this already, so I won't go into it in depth. But needless to say, this was an historic humiliation, a humiliation for the mightiest imperialist power on Earth, one that shut the confidence of all its allies in U.S. military and political strength in general and the Biden presidency in particular. It's been quoted several times over the course of this event and it doesn't bear quoting enough. So in July, Biden said the following, the Taliban is not the South, I mean the North, the Vietnamese army. That was his mistake, not mine. There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. And in August, that is exactly what you saw. The Americans running with the tail between their legs, leaving thousands of personnel from their supposed allies in the lurch and wiping six percentage points off Biden's public approval. And this was a long-threatened defeat, a long-threatened chaotic withdrawal from a 20-year long war that severely undermined Biden's reputation for competence. But in reality, again, this incompetence just reflects the relative decline of U.S. imperialism, which has been going on for years and which really Biden's has inherited. Now, we shouldn't overstate this. The U.S. is still the world's foremost military and economic power, but it can no longer impose its authority on the will. Biden basically has inherited an empire in decline. But the withdrawal was actually popular with the U.S. public, who are sick of wasting trillions on losing wars while suffering increasingly brutal financial hardship at home. And this is also a factor in the changing strategy of the U.S. ruling class. They can't count on domestic support for foreign wars by whipping up jingoism anymore. I saw a tweet recently, which captured this mood. I apologize for the colorful language, and this is actually all written in capital letters, so I'll have to imagine that. The feds take 25% of my fucking paycheck. I don't want you to spend it on making little Palestinian kids into skeletons. I just want fucking healthcare. And I think that attitude really reflects changing consciousness in the U.S. public. The American dream has become a cruel joke for working people. The economy and society have been totally dislocated by the pandemic, which directly caused 750,000 U.S. deaths so far, that easily surpasses the total who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. And across the country, life expectancy has plummeted by nearly two years as the sharpest decline since 1943. But while COVID was the trigger, it wasn't the cause for this crisis. U.S. capitalism has never really recovered from the crisis that began in 2008, which at root is a crisis of chronic overproduction. Even before 2020, nearly 80% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. And during the pandemic, GDP in America contracted at a 3.5% annualized rates. That's the biggest fall since 1946. 35% of households with children suffered from food insecurity. And 5.3 million more Americans now remain out of work than in February 2020. Again, so much for the recovery. As of June this year, 10 million renters and over 2 million homeowners are behind on housing payments. Biden promised a return to normality, but he's running headlong into the limits of the capitalist system in this state of crisis. Within his first few months in office, he'd already walked back on a whole host of promises to struggling and desperate working-class Americans. He dropped the $15 an hour minimum wage despite inflation gobbling up wages, and he's dropped his pledge to forgive student debt. The moratorium on evictions has ended, meaning 750,000 households could be evicted across the country before the end of the year. And despite the pandemic making an unanswerable case for free universal healthcare, Biden has fallen decisively on the side of big pharma in rejecting so-called single payer. And despite the Democrats and Biden's woke credentials, the situation for the most oppressed layers of society hasn't improved one jot under their watch. The recent Texas abortion ban approved by the Supreme Court was basically met with a shrug by the Democrats. Yeah, that's not great. Don't know what we can do about it. It was more or less their attitude. And despite cheap words of support from BLM, the police killings of black people haven't even slowed under Biden's presidency, because ultimately the problem lies in the racist oppressive nature of the bourgeois state itself, which Biden and the Democrats both represent and defend. And far from ending Trump's brutal border policy, the Biden administration arrested 170,000 migrants at the border in March alone. This is the highest number of any month in 15 years. Biden hasn't closed the camps. He's just recast them as holding facilities that are exactly the same. You've got kids crammed in there, facing the danger of infection from COVID, denied amenities like toothbrushes. It is exactly the same policy. And earlier this year, vice president Harris, you know, Bay Harris, gave a blunt warning to prospective migrants. She says, do not come, do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and protect our borders. And that was reconfirmed recently by images of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers on horseback, whipping Haitian migrants, fleeing the country, racked by turmoil after the assassination of their presidents. In short, Biden's mask has already fallen. Any illusions that this new presidency would fundamentally improve the lots of working class and oppressed people have been shattered. And when increasingly seeing a change in consciousness, a sea change in the USA, disillusionment and anger at the system are the order of the day and a desire for an alternative on the order of the day. A full 10% of the U.S. population took part in the BLM protests last year and 54% believed that burning down the police precinct in Minneapolis was justified. This was an act of insurrection that the majority of the U.S. public supported as justified. Now, of course, that movement was sparked specifically by police violence against black people, but it became a point of expression for a much more general simmering rage at the rotting state of society. And this is a move that affects the young of the new generation in particular. One poll found that 54% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 view capitalism negatively and 52% view socialism positively. So when Biden says, and I quote, pardon me, I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't the bad guys. He's utterly out of touch with the real mood, especially with the likes of Jeff Bezos taking a rocket to space. At the same time as millions of Americans suffer from disease, poverty, insecurity and precarity. Now, Biden launched a feeble attempt to capture some of the zeitgeist with his 23% billionaire tax on incomes on 800 of the absolute richest people in the States. But that was only in turn because the Democrats blocked an attempted rise on corporation tax. And the same democratic senators blocked this billionaire tax. They said it was too radical. A 23% income tax on 800 of the biggest fat cats was regarded as too radical by the so-called left-wing party in the USA. One unnamed party donor commented on this, what are we, socialists? And this shows where the loyalty of the Democrats lies. It's the polar opposite in its outlook to the resentful, anti-rich mood growing in society. We saw this mood begin to express itself on a mass scale during the Sanders campaigns for 2016 and 2020, powered by millions of enthusiastic, mainly young people and small individual donations rather than the big business backers and super PACs who threw their money at Hillary and Biden. And now, this month, Striketober, the great sleeping giants of the US labor movement is starting to awaken after a long period of dormancy. A major turning point in this was the 2018 strike by 35,000 teachers starting in West Virginia. And that was followed by a historic strike in General Motors in 2019. The pandemic cuts across this uptick in labor struggle for a period, but we're now seeing a huge wave of industrial action relative to the last period with 100,000 workers in the States voting to authorize strike action across a range of different sectors. A whole sweep, healthcare, construction, carpentry, coal mining, media and communications, food production and so on. Now these workers accepted huge sacrifices during the pandemic for the good of the nation. They were forced to choose between their work and their health or otherwise straight through on government handouts. And they're angry at the utter reckless incompetence of their ruling class. They're not prepared to accept the continuation of extreme exploitation following what were meant to be temporary, exceptional circumstances, especially when the rich have added two trillion dollars to their wealth over the course of a pandemic. So for example, you saw 30,000 nurses and healthcare workers for the Kaiser consortium striking after risking their lives against a pandemic that was exacerbated by the insane policies of the US ruling class. 3,600 healthcare workers died directly from COVID during the pandemic. And many spent 2020 in a blur of 24 hour shifts struggling from staff shortages to people abandon the profession totally burned out. But workers have also been emboldened by the job shortages that have emerged in the US economy caused again by the dislocating effect of the pandemic crisis. For the first time in a generation, working people in the States feel that they have the leverage, not the bosses, especially in sectors that are now booming. Thank you. Workers are demanding a slice of the pie. So coal miners for example in Alabama swallowed cuts while coal prices were low during the pandemic. But now prices are booming again because coal is used to power industry through much of the world and the economy is reopening much of the world. But the bosses aren't budging. A very bitter dispute is underway. The bosses actually sent strike breakers in a van to drive their vehicles into the miners' picket line sending a few of them to hospital. But nevertheless, the miners are holding firm and the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere recently reported record profits this year of $6 billion. The CEO, John C. May, rewarded himself with a $15 million annual salary. For context, that's 220 times that of an average John Deere employee. And the workers are simply not prepared to accept miserable wages and uncertainty any longer. One employee said, and I quote, after 30 years or more of giving your body to a company, moving 1,000 pound castings around or assembling tractors, it rips your body apart. It's not unreasonable to not want to have that worry in life of what if. And this is the thing. The American working class aren't asking for the moon. They're asking for reasonable wages and conditions after being called heroes, key workers, essential workers during a pandemic, risking their lives and livelihoods. They're simply asking what they're owed. And the bosses are not only saying no, they're enriching themselves even further. It's a double insults. More than 2,000 carpenters in Washington States also voted to strike. And the strike leader said the following. It has just been a kind of downward spiral. Wages aren't keeping up with the cost of anything, the cost of parking and the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare. We just feel like enough is enough. Work is at some Kellogg's plants all over the country are striking. Now, if you're like me, serial kept you alive during the pandemic. At least it was a key part of your diets. And serial sales went up massively last year. And the bosses' profits also went up by more than 8% in 2020 for Kellogg's. But rather than sharing those gains, they're attacking workers. They're threatening to sack workers and they're attacking paying conditions. And this came after Kellogg spent the pandemic squeezing their workers for every drop of profit. One striker said, we just work seven days a week, sometimes 100 to 130 days in a row. For 28 days, the machines run, then rest three days for cleaning. They don't even treat us as well as they do their machinery. I really enjoyed the session on Marxism and Cinema the other day. Has anyone ever seen the movie Network? It's one of my absolute favorites. And there's a bit where this furious, overworked news anchor, Howard Beale, has a mental breakdown on stage. And the thing he says reminds me of the aptitude of the American workers today. He says that he's mad as hell and he's not gonna take this anymore. And that's the American working class. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. And this militancy is also bringing the new grassroots into conflict with the old layer of union bureaucrats who are doing everything they can to sell out and hold bat-bees struggles. The Carpenter Union tops ended their strike with a rotten deal a few weeks ago despite opposition from below. And we heard in a previous session about how the Iatzi tops narrowly averted the biggest Hollywood strike since World War II. Now a rank and file striker said correctly of this, the union leadership has taken on this market share philosophy over the years. And it's basically come to see itself as a labor broker, not a labor union. That absolutely typifies the attitude of the union leaders in the US in the past. The AFL-CIO has 12.5 million members and around 500 labor councils. This is the biggest trade union confederation in the States. And it's increasingly seeing an influx of younger, more radical layers of class fighters. It potentially wields enormous power, but the union tops see their role as negotiating deals behind the scenes with the bosses and leaning on a working class to make sure they keep their struggle in safe channels, working hand in glove with the Democratic Party to do that. But there's a sea change again. Grassroots members of the UAW Automotive Union and the Teamsters are fighting to push their unions in the direction of radical class struggle politics. They're trying to elect left-wing leaders and the demanding Democratic accountability from those leaders. And this is only the beginning of the beginning. Unionization is still low in the USA. But there's the highest level of public support for unions in decades, around 60, 70%. And the Democrats and labor leaders feel the way that the wind is blowing and are desperate to get out ahead of this radicalizing energy, which explains Biden's declared support for Amazon workers and the pro-acts, which was intended to make it easier for workers to unionize the strike, although it probably won't pass. And he knows that. It's a diversionary tactic, basically. No matter what they try though, the Democrats and labor leaders will struggle to co-opt and restrain the full strength of the US working class in the next period. And they've done nothing concrete to assist these strikes, which is going to increasingly expose them. Now, I'm running out of time, so I'll go on to my last point and perhaps the most important point. The main arguments for workers and youth to hold their noses and vote for Biden in 2020 was lesser evilism, as I said. The need to beat Trump at all costs. But Biden's brand of politics paved the way for Trump and it will continue to pave the road for the greater and greater evil. Trump also hasn't gone. He's still holding big rallies for the faithful and he's preparing to launch yet another presidential bid with even more hysterical and reactionary supporters in his base. In the US, every election is presented as this two horse race between the Democrats and the Republicans. If you don't support one, you must support the other. But Marxists don't see politics in these narrow terms. The question is, for us, does supporting the Democrats in any way advance the cause of working people or the fight for socialism? For us, politics is not just elections. Politics is the struggle between class interests. And based on all I've said, the Democrats and Biden are clearly agents of the bourgeoisie. They're enemies of working people. They represent a dead end for the left. Now, bodies like the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, and so-called progressives like New York Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say Democrats are the only game in town and building up strength for progressive politics within the party allows you to drag it to the left and achieve change. But we're seeing the exact opposite of that. The squads are being dragged to the right. For example, AOC recently voted for continuing to fund Israel's Iron Dome despite speaking against it. And you've got that shameful display of Ilhan Omar calling Margaret Thatcher her idol during a Channel Four interview. These people aren't even left reformists. They're left liberals at best. And by tying themselves to the Democratic mass, Sanders, the DSA, AOC, the squad share responsibility for their failures at discrediting themselves amongst radical layers. I wish that I had it to hand. There's a fantastic quotes from the campaign manager of a so-called radical DSA Democrat who's running for Buffalo Mayor. And the campaign manager was basically asked why she's dropping her rhetoric about defending the police. And he says, well, you know, when she was an activist, she had to like speak truth to power and take on oppositional language. But now we're looking at a serious run for a serious political position. And you need to have a more level-headed and intelligent approach. Basically, you can be a radical as you actually stand to win power on the Democrats and you have to ditch it to play grown-up politics. That's the attitude of the DSA. Some left reformists pundits internationally in Britain commented positively on Biden choosing to allegedly embrace the left rather than fighting them or trying to destroy them. The Starmer is done in the British Labour Party. So James Medway, another man's fain for being wrong about most things, and a former economic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn said the following, Biden didn't win from the moderate centre and then shift to the left. He took on important parts of the left programme and deliberately built the left into his coalition. Labour's own moderates and centre-ists should once again look to America for guidance. It's the voice of Corbynomics right there. So a few things. Firstly, Labour, the Labour rights recently lost control of the party. And they know that and they're desperate to crush and make an example of what remains of the left and the Corbyn movement. Actually winning elections is a secondary concern to them. If he thinks that's explained in their behaviour, he misunderstands what's going on. They want to destroy the left in the party. Biden, by co-opting these so-called left leaders, hopes to maintain a degree of credibility for the Democrats amongst the working class. What he wants to do is prevent the emergence of a genuine workers' party to the left of the Democrats. His objective is to keep the workers and youth who are radicalising in the States safely contained in the Democratic mire. American Left reformist journals like Jacobin talk about a so-called party surrogate, so running a left-wing party within a party. The DSA talk about a dirty break, so pushing with the formation of a new party at some point in the distant future. All of these ideas basically delay the essential task. I'm very proud to say that our comrades in the US stand alone for calling for a class-independent approach within the DSA. And some people say that building a left-wing party in America is impossible, that it's just too reactionary, too right-wing, could never be done. I'll offer an analogy. Not perfect one, but I think it's still useful. Britain in the 19th and early 20th century had two conservative liberal parties that took turns in power, the Tories and the Whigs, both ultimately representing the interests of British capitalism. But the formation of the Labour Party out of the trade union movement soon swept aside the liberal Whigs as workers and their millions found their aspirations better represented through a party of their own. Now, despite Labour's current rotten leadership and its history of betrayals, this was a massive step forward. And no one really saw it coming. And it happened very quickly that Whigs were relegated to third place in the matter of a decade or two. And such a development in the States would finally offer the possibility for a class-independent worker struggle in the political field in the US. And if that were to happen, Marxists would get stuck in. We'd enthusiastically participate. We'd agitate for a socialist solution to the dire problems of working people within a worker's party. We'd agitate for a transitional program demanding a genuine living wage tied strictly to inflation, for healthcare, for education, funded by expropriating the biggest American companies and billionaires. And such a party could already have existed and could have been started by Sanders in 2016. There was huge momentum behind Sanders' campaign and there was a cross-section of Trump supporters who also had a degree of respect and support for Sanders. Let's be clear about this, comrades. I don't mind saying this. Trump, in a distorted way, represented something potentially progressive, a rejection of the establishment, a rejection of the status quo. He sold it with lies and he himself is an arch-reactionary. But the only reason he was able to do that is because working-class Americans were jettisoning support for the status quo. And it would have been very different if such a party, if a left-wing workers' party had existed at the time. But instead Sanders capitulated to the pressure of lesser evilism and he ran on a Democratic ticket in the name of beating Trump. And of course, in the end, there was no way that the DNC were going to let him have their nomination anyway. But if he'd done that in 2016, if he'd decisively broken, I think that party would have been a powerful force in US politics right now. Can I say it would have won the last election? No, of course I can't say that. But I do think it would be a powerful alternative. I think that there would have been pressure placed upon the labor unions from their rank and file to break with support for the Democrats and put support towards this new party, a workers' party calling for a political revolution against the billionaire class. And ultimately, unless workers get a party of their own as night follows day, Trump or something worse will inevitably return. A workers' party coupled with this radicalizing labor movement led by fresh elements could have been a decisive factor in, for example, the Black Lives Matter movements. It could have reached out to those activists on the grounds. It could have led them into revolutionary class struggle against the entire rotten, racist, decrepit capitalist system. It could have given it political oversight and representation. It could have given it a program rooted in the working class. It would have given workers a voice and young anti-racist activists to voice in Capitol Hill, helping to build and generalize their struggle all across the country. This strike now, if a workers' party existed in America, it could provide direct political support to that strike. It could agitate for it in the political field. It could provide workers with the kind of ally in the political field that they have never had in US politics. And all those opportunities were squandered because the likes of Sanders and the squad didn't have the courage and conviction and trust in the working class to make that decisive break with the Democrats. All right, I'll finish now. The US is the most important country in the world from the perspective of class struggle. I don't mean that it's the best country. I mean, it's the nicest country. I don't mean that it has necessarily the most radical working class at this time, but it's the mightiest economy. It's the black hearts of world imperialism. And it has a very powerful and developed working class. And the main task of workers and youth in the belly of the beast of world imperialism is to fight a fierce struggle to turn their unions into fighting organizations and to win a party of their own. We're facing an incredibly tumultuous period in US politics. And ultimately, in the end, it'll be the ideas of Marxism and socialist revolution that will be decisive in determining the destiny of the American working class. I'm delighted to see the incredible turnout at our recent US Congress, for example. There's been huge gains made over the last period by our US comrades, and they've been the ones arguing consistently for a class independence, class struggle approach based on Marxist ideas. I'm sure that growth will continue. I'm sure I have faith that the tide of history is turning towards us. The fact that the White House had to release a document explaining why Marxism is wrong, why socialism is wrong, shows the ruling class is paranoid about the influence of Marxism. That explains what propaganda about the influence of Marxism in schools, at football games and the Super Bowl. It shows that they fear our ideas and they're right to fear ideas. They're right to fear our ideas because the future is with us. The future is with a socialist struggle to transform the USA into a socialist country, despite the worst fears of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Joe Biden is no friend of American workers and youth. He's our class enemy. We can rely on no one but our own forces, comrades. So for socialist revolution in the US today.