By Ramón Mercader

[from the kites April Fool’s Day 2024 online issue]

During a recent central committee meeting, held via zoom, leaders of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) discussed how to build off of the great success of their letter-writing campaign thanking pro-Israel Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, for his belated support for a nonbinding city council ceasefire resolution passed after more than 25,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. While very proud of themselves for the letter-writing campaign, along with their advocacy for a toothless civilian police review board and other paltry reforms in Chicago, FRSO leadership was not content to run cover for the bourgeoisie at the local level, and wanted to do so on the national political stage. They saw an opportunity in the widespread frustration with the Democratic Party’s choice of Joe Biden as its 2024 candidate and fear that the far more energetic and popular Republican candidate, Donald Trump, would trounce Biden at the polls in November. In accordance with the mass line—or at least FRSO’s interpretation of it—FRSO leadership decided that the best course of action would be to unite with the broad criticism of Biden as being too old to run for a second term and propose a different candidate, one a year older than Biden and even more decrepit than him, but who would do a much better job steering rebellious Black proletarians and protesters for Palestine back into the fold of bourgeois-democracy: Jesse Jackson.

Putting Jesse Jackson on the ballot was a logical choice for FRSO, as they and their predecessor, the Revolutionary [sic] Workers Headquarters, had been ardent supporters of his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, with the Jackson campaigns serving as a sort of 1980s after-party to their celebration of the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup that ended socialism in China. With Jackson, FRSO saw in the 1980s and sees today the ideal presidential candidate around whom to build a strategic alliance—of union bureaucrats, nonprofit organization activists, and local Democratic Party politicians—aimed at diverting protest and rebellion into electoral politics. FRSO considers replacing Biden on the ballot with Jackson an urgent task, given that so many people in the US right now have lost faith in bourgeois politics when police brutality remains rampant despite all the calls for and enactment of reforms and with even the most supposedly progressive Democrats in office failing to do anything to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In a quite good statement issued by its central committee, FRSO proclaimed that “given the present, growing crisis of legitimacy for the bourgeoisie, Jesse Jackson is the right stuff for US imperialism.”