It may be hard to do, as I- like many on the left am angry and upset at the election results, but as hard as it is to say, you can’t get mad at people for voting Trump. Yes, he is a bigot, a xenophobe and his campaign was fueled by racism and hate. But Trump ran on an anti-establishment platform, everyone knows the system is rigged against them and the politicians are corrupt, what they don’t know is how. You have to understand that this whole election is what decades of lesser evilism has done to us as a nation.

Most people only voted for Trump because Hillary is such a terrible candidate and in essence- nothing but a corporate shill. The same goes for Hillary supporters, the only reason 9 out of 10 people voted for her is because Trump is a xenophobe and a bigot. Everyone knows the DNC was rigged against Bernie Sanders from the beginning. Hillary Clinton was an establishment candidate, like it or not. Trump is still a member of the bourgeoisie, of the ruling class but he ran on an anti-establishment platform and many people who didn’t understand how the system is rigged against them saw him as a viable option. The republican AND democratic party only represent the rich and powerful. They DO NOT represent the people. So long as money and politics are so irreparably intertwined and so long as the ruling class is able to throw money at the establishment candidate which represents their interests first, and that of the working masses second, nothing will ever change. Everyone knows the system is rigged against them, but the majority of people are not class conscious in any real way. They do not understand how capitalism works, they do not understand the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the state. Most of them don’t even know what the bourgeoisie and proletariat are. Trump prayed on this sentiment in a non class conscious way, it is 100% true that the system is rigged, but it is rigged by the bourgeoisie themselves… and Trump is literally as bourgeois as a candidate can get. Thus it is well established that he will not offer any real solutions to working people as he will never address the root causes of their problems, for they are utterly and irrevocably contradictory to both his interests and his class interests.

We need a mass workers party, like the British Labour party. A party that runs on a democratic socialist, and utterly anti-capitalist platform to truly represent the interests of working people and not the rich ruling elite. Many people, especially the youth are more than ready to embrace a democratic socialist party, Bernie Sander’s campaign alone vindicates this. But in order to really build a mass party we need to go to the masses ourselves and educate them from our side while encouraging them to hear out the other side as well.

We need to raise class consciousness, not condemn people who don’t understand in what ways the system is rigged against them and voted for someone who seemed to be against it in order to get into office. We must educate the masses, not alienate them by putting them down or ridiculing them. History has taught us that mere political democracy without industrial democracy amounts to virtual oligarchy in practice, and the people are beyond fed up with oligarchs like Hillary Clinton. The only solution is to democratize the enterprise! To make the government represent the 99% and not the 1%!

Of course the literal definition of socialism is work-place democracy, so this will not be an easy progress as most people don’t spend a year reading both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist economists to come to a logical conclusion before flaunting their uninformed opinions in the air. But I am convinced that if more people take a logical and well informed approach to these things like I did that many of them will come to the socialist conclusion, like I did. Of course not everyone will, but education is a weapon. We need to encourage people to read Marx, but also pro-capitalist economists like Keynes and Smith. People need to come to informed conclusions and not simply repeat bourgeois propaganda whenever they hear the word socialism. Education is a weapon, we need to use it!