Graham Platner: A Critical (Communist) Perspective

[Draft]

[Note: What follows is a draft we’ve written as our contribution to a debate currently taking place within Maine Democratic Socialists of America around whether or not the organization will endorse senatorial candidate Graham Platner. As we state in the draft, we were even part of a debate on the contents of a candidate questionnaire which is to be presented to Platner. At time of writing, a Maine DSA endorsement of Platner feels unlikely, and this article is intended to keep it that way. This article has yet to go through Cosmonaut Magazine’s editorial process, so some of its contents may be subject to change. This rough draft is intended primarily for circulation within Maine DSA, and our publication of this draft on our sub stack is meant to facilitate that circulation while the original google document goes through the editorial process. — Bluebird, September 2025]

Graham Platner: A Critical (Communist) Perspective

“The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement… The communists disdain to conceal their views[.]” — Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Why We are Criticizing Graham

Since launching his senatorial campaign in August 2025, Graham Platner has attracted a lot of attention from the left wing of the US political spectrum, being added as a speaker to Bernie Sanders’ anti-oligarchy tour, and featuring multiple times on The Majority Report, a popular progressive talk show hosted by Sam Seder that has been running continuously for over 20 years.

Platner presents himself as a progressive populist, a champion for the working class, and he talks a good game on this front, but talk is cheap, and the actions Graham has previously taken have drawn criticism of the reasonable and unreasonable variety.

There are several reasons why we intend to add our voice to the chorus of those criticizing Graham. Firstly, as a political matter. Since Graham is from Maine and is running to represent Maine in the US senate, and presents himself as a progressive candidate, debate has begun within Maine Democratic Socialists of America on whether or not the chapter wants to endorse Graham. As a Maine DSA member ourselves, we even participated in debate on the contents of a candidate questionnaire which will be presented to Graham, whose answers will help to inform the chapter’s ultimate endorsement decision. The pro-endorsement faction of the chapter mostly consists of the more social-democratic members of Maine DSA, but also alarmingly includes a few radical members who we consider dear friends.

Secondly, this is also a personal matter for us. We have a couple friends who consider themselves close to Graham and have been defending him from criticism. It is through these connections that we could probably contact Graham directly if we chose to, but we have so far opted not to bother because we are not impressed by the image that Graham presents to the public. We were actually within a few feet of Graham at the Southern Maine Labor Council’s Labor Day breakfast the morning of the day Graham gave a speech alongside Bernie Sanders at the Cross Insurance Arena.¹ If you’re reading this Graham, we were the beautiful blonde devil sitting at one of the rear tables whose nail polish matched their blue, white, and black outfit. It is precisely that some of our dear friends are publicly defending Graham that we feel obligated to criticize him.

Despite the fact that our friends claim to be acquaintances of Graham's, this critique will not include any salacious information previously undisclosed to the public—we frankly don’t have anything of the sort to disclose. It is also out of respect for our friends that we pull our punches in our critique. We are also a firm believer that criticism can and should be constructive. We do not deny that there are many objectively good things about Graham and his campaign and do not intend to tear him down with our critique. We will not criticize Graham as scathingly as we have criticized Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in articles like Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce! and Birth of a Bonaparte? Many readers may also be surprised by how much time we also spend defending Graham. That being said, Graham will probably not enjoy reading this should he ever become aware of it. And for that we are genuinely sorry.

And lastly, we will not be reciting the criticisms of electoral politics we made in our article Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism. It is not that our position has changed since the publication of that article—we very much stand by the positions we expressed in that article. Neither is it that we think our criticisms of electoral politics don’t apply to Graham—they very much do. We will not be reciting those arguments because we want this article to focus on Graham and his specific contradictions.

A Communist Defense of Graham Platner… Wait, Really???

In a sharply-produced ad published on his campaign’s instagram page on August 19, Graham said “I’m not pretending to have all the right answers, but I know I’m asking the right questions.” And we very much agree with Graham on this point: he is asking a lot of good questions, but he very clearly doesn’t have the answers in our opinion. While there is much to like, and even praise, about Graham’s presentation as an uncompromising progressive populist, deeper interrogation of his messaging reveals a contradiction, a contradiction we believe he is very much oblivious to, between what he aspires to be and what he actually is. There are many ways in which Graham personifies the total social relations of the overall Maine electorate, but this is also the problem with Graham to a large extent. This all sets the stage for our critique of him.

One thing we are pleasantly surprised Graham has not received more criticism for is that he is not actually working class, but petty-bourgeois. This is abundantly clear in this profile of Graham, in which he is described as owning a fishing boat, an oyster fishing company, and pays his wife and business partner checks for the labor they contribute. It really doesn’t matter that Platner doesn’t pay himself for his own labor, his aforementioned property serves as capital for him. Rather than making money by selling his labor power to a capitalist, or by consuming the labor power of other people exclusively, Graham is the consumer of his own labor power, and this situates him in the lowest stratum of the petty-bourgeoisie. Graham’s oyster farming company doesn’t need to be profitable for him to still be a member of the petty-bourgeoisie either.² Class is a property relation, it correlates with one’s income, but is not synonymous with it.

It would be incredibly idiotic to criticize Graham on the basis of the class that he belongs to because the history of the labor movement is populated with many upper-class individuals who nevertheless tried to advance the interests of the working class despite the fact that it was not in their personal interests. There is no better example of this than the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels, who spent his entire political career, from his twenties to his death, advocating for a revolutionary working class program despite the fact that he came from a family of Manchester textile mill owners.³

When talking about Graham’s class, it is not simply the class to which he belongs that matters, but whether or not that class has opposing interests to the working class, and if so, whether or not Graham is pursuing his class interests rather than working class interests. It is also important to note that classes with opposing interests can still also have converging interests, or at least converge on similar conclusions for different reasons. This is incredibly important when talking about how the middle classes relate to the working class.

So is Graham pursuing his petty-bourgeois class interests, or is he pursuing working class interests? The question is tricky to answer because Graham’s statements on class are fairly ambiguous, but indicate a conflation of the working class and petty-bourgeoise if we are correctly interpreting his statements. For example, in his aforementioned instagram campaign ad, it seems to us like he uses the terms working class and middle class interchangeably. But, once again, they are not the same. The working class are those individuals who have nothing to sell but their ability to work. Middle class, generally speaking, is a compound term that encompasses both the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. The peasantry, in classical economics, is a class of subsistence farmers who own private property, but exclusively consume their own labor power without any paid employees. No such class of farmers really exists in sufficient numbers to constitute a class in the US, so small proprietors who exclusively consume their own labor power would be a more accurate description for a post-industrial country like the US. The petty-bourgeoisie (literally “small capitalists”) are those proprietors who still perform some labor themselves, their labor power may be the primary labor power consumed by their businesses, but who also employ wage laborers as part of their business operations, and this is the class we believe Graham falls into.

Traditionally, the petty-bourgeoisie is even more hostile to the working class than the bourgeoisie proper for several compounding reasons. Since the petty-bourgeoisie cannot produce on the same scale as the big bourgeoisie, it is more challenging for them to maintain a foothold in the market. They often cannot afford, and therefore do not have, as advanced instruments of production as the big bourgeoisie, meaning that the products produced by the petty-bourgeoisie are often more labor-intensive than those produced by the big bourgeoisie, increasing production costs for the petty-bourgeoisie. Yet despite producing more labor intensive products, the petty-bourgeoisie must sell their products for roughly the same market rate as the big bourgeoisie in order to remain competitive, unless they can ensure higher quality at a higher price for a secure market of consumers who can afford these more expensive products. This means that the petty-bourgeoisie often operates on narrower profit margins than the big bourgeoisie, and the only way to increase these margins is often by suppressing labor expenses, as this is the most easily variable part of their overhead costs.⁴

Since the pressures of market competition incentivize the petty-bourgeoisie to cut labor costs, but do not permit the same level of automation of production accessible to the big bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie is often more hostile to the working class and working class organizations like labor unions because labor organization often increases labor expenses for employers by raising wages and implementing strong pensions and healthcare plans for the workers. And this hostility to the workers persists even though petty-bourgeois individuals exist in much closer proximity to the working class than the big bourgeoisie, even laboring directly alongside the workers they are exploiting in some cases. And it is precisely this mixed character that also leads the petty-bourgeoisie to identify with the working class on the basis of shared labor while also being virulently anti-union.

So do we see any of this in the rhetoric Graham uses when speaking on class issues? Certainly in some ways, but not in other ways. As we mentioned above, we believe that Graham uses the terms middle class and working class interchangeably, indicating that he sees no distinction between the working class and the larger demographic of people who also perform labor. It is also reasonable to assume that he identifies with the working class because he performs labor, even though he actually belongs to the lowest rung of the capitalist class. And this all typifies the petty-bourgeois mindset. We know quite well because it is also our class background, and we had to overcome such class biases to become the Marxist we are today. But Graham has also shown that he may also be capable of transcending petty-bourgeois ideology, as he has made pro-union statements.⁵ This not only goes against his personal class interests, but is also not really in his interests as an American politician, as it forces him to rely on smaller donations from working class voters to fund his campaign because such pro-union rhetoric actively alienates large segments of the capitalist class. Do we think Graham could still do better on the labor front? Yes, and we intend to explain how later. But we must also give him the credit where it is due. It is not in his interests to be pro-union. Nobody is forcing him to be pro-union. It is an active choice to be publicly pro-union, and he deserves credit for that.

Lastly on the subject of class, Graham’s underdeveloped concept of class also manifests in the way he talks about the ultra-wealthy in the US. He makes allusions to the “billionaire class” and the “ruling class” in many of his public statements. While it is true that many Marxists also use the term ruling class interchangeably with the term capitalist class in some contexts, you will not hear them use the term “billionaire class” because there is no “billionaire class” independent of the rest of the capitalist class. It is not the fact that billionaires have all accumulated at least a billion dollars that makes them members of the same class, rather, it is the fact that they are all members of the class that has allowed them to accumulate at least a billion dollars of wealth. We reiterate that class is a property relation. It is the fact that certain capitalists own an amount of property that allows them to exploit on a scale that enables them to accumulate billions of dollars. This is why Elon Musk can make billions of dollars while spending all day on Twitter, but our coworkers would be deadbeats if they did the same. Billionaires certainly create many problems all by themselves, but they are only able to exist due to an already-existing organization of production—capitalist production, or “generalized commodity production”—which is not changed by taxing the wealthy. And everything we have said of billionaires goes likewise for the ruling class. It is not due to their rule that they belong to the same class, rather, they rule due to their class—the members of the ruling class of the US belong overwhelmingly to the capitalist class in the US, and Graham would actually be no exception should he win Susan Collins’ senate seat.⁶ Graham’s vague rhetoric around class leads us to believe that he simply has no firm concept of class, even if it’s one that differs from the Marxist conception.

Many leftists have made it known on the internet that they already dislike Graham due to his extended service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his employment by the notorious military contractor Constellis (formerly Blackwater). And while this is all very concerning, it is actually a fairly weak critique of Graham for several reasons.

Firstly, Americans live in an incredibly militaristic society. We are essentially propagated from birth to see military service as virtuous. We are expected to pledge allegiance to the country’s flag every day before class starting in kindergarten.⁷ We are expected to thank every former and active duty US servicemen for their service.⁸ Many businesses offer military discounts to former and active duty US servicemen. And many of the country’s largest sporting events, including every NFL game, begin with USAF planes flying over the sporting venue. While there have been anti-war movements throughout US history, including in opposition to the wars Graham served in, these movements consist mostly of vulgar peaceniks who derive their position from a moralist humanitarianism rather than a class-based materialism—their position is not one of “no war but class war,” but “no war” period.⁹ The end result of all this military propaganda is that even in the year 2024, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US government’s support of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, 79% of US adults still believed that the US military acted in the public’s best interests¹⁰ while 62% also believe that the Iraq war was a mistake!¹¹ The effects of pro-military propaganda become even clearer when one discovers that the military is often the only US government institution that polls positively overall with the American public. The Supreme Court has an approval rating of 39%.¹² Congress only has an approval rating of 24%.¹³ President Trump’s approval rating is 43% at time of writing.¹⁴ It seems to appear that a majority of Americans don’t think the US military takes its orders from the US government! Does this mean that a majority of Americans are idiots and/or militarist pigs? No, it means that the pro-military propaganda of the US government has so far been working as intended, and this is important to consider when discussing Graham’s past military service.

As explained in the previous paragraph, the US has a particularly strong militarist culture, and Graham was born into this culture in the mid-1980s. This means that it was not possible for him to witness firsthand several key events from prior years that deeply changed how Americans of older generations saw their country for the worse, such as the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, the Kent State massacre, the leak that exposed the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the 1973 Chilean Coup, and the Pentagon Papers leak.¹⁵ Graham was instead born into an America that had already gone through damage control and reconstruction from such earthshaking scandals. Graham’s early formative years, during which he would’ve started to develop his sense of self and his place in society, would’ve happened during the 1990s and early 2000s, when everyone thought that history ended with the Cold War. With no global counterweight to American hegemony, an unprecedented era of American exceptionalism and excess was introduced in which many inside and outside the US saw it as a genuine force for good.

But that facade of American benevolence would crumble with the Twin Towers. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were a great tragedy, but they were the inevitable blowback of decades of American imperialism around the world. The victims of the 9/11 terror attacks were ultimately indirect victims of the US government, and the US government weaponized the tragedy to justify war against two countries with no involvement in the attacks—Iraq and Afghanistan.

The case for war against Iraq was especially thin, and many people could tell at the time, as is evident from the scale of protests organized to try and stop the invasion of Iraq before it even happened. And this brings us back to Graham, who was documented opposing the war before it started, only to enlist and serve multiple tours in the war he had previously opposed.¹⁶ Graham has been questioned about this several times since launching his senatorial campaign, and has mostly shrugged the questions off by saying different versions of “I was young and stupid.”¹⁷ But this is also where we will give our most shocking defense of Platner by agreeing with him on this point. Very few 18-19 year olds have a coherent worldview, we certainly didn’t at that age, nor did our acquaintances. Furthermore, polling on the Iraq War indicates that Graham’s position is not terribly unique among the American public. Before the Iraq war started, 66% of Americans supported invading to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but 62% of American adults and 59% of Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans said that invading Iraq was a mistake when polled in 2019.¹⁸ We are not pretending that none of this reflects poorly on Graham—it does—but it serves to illustrate that 1) his position is fairly typical among Americans his age and older, and 2) there is a high likelihood that a portion of his critics are guilty of the very things for which they criticize him.

This brings us to our first real criticism of Graham, which we have been implying so far, but will now state explicitly: one of the most pernicious aspects about Graham Platner is that he’s just a regular American; humanitarian in word, but reactionary in deed. However, this is a conclusion we have arrived at by examining Graham’s previous words and actions. As we’ve already established, Graham is someone who has displayed the ability to grow and improve himself over time, so we will actually be generous to Graham and not judge the man he is today by the actions of his younger self.

Our first criticism of Graham, however, actually brings us to our second defense of Graham from those who criticize him for his military service: there is actually a long and well-documented history of military veterans going on to become staunch anti-military activists upon returning to civilian life. Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt was a decorated Vietnam War veteran who went on to become the Deputy Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party—his radicalism would result in his being targeted by the FBI.¹⁹ Pat Tillman was a professional football player who volunteered to fight in the Iraq War, only to develop anti-war sentiments while overseas. It was rumored that he had arranged to meet with the prominent left wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, but Tillman was killed in a mysterious friendly-fire incident while serving in Afghanistan—his surviving family members continue to fight for more information surrounding his death to be publicized by the government. Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner founded the anti-war organization March Forward! which encourages active duty servicemen to become conscientious objectors and seek honorable discharge from the military. Prysner is also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER coalition. And finally there is Aaron Bushnell,²⁰ the active-duty airman who took his own life in 2024 by self-immolating outside of an Israeli embassy in protest of the US government’s material support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

If past military service of any sort is criteria for condemnation from the socialist movement, then we must condemn the other veterans mentioned in the previous paragraph. But while such a consistent position may seem desirable, it would actually be a serious chauvinist error for reasons we will explain later. The fact of the matter is that if one does not look very closely, Graham actually appears to be of the same mold as the dissident veterans mentioned above. In the statements he makes to the public, he talks about how war, including the wars he served in, did not serve the interests of the American public, did not make America safer, and just made a few already extravagantly wealthy people even more wealthy while working Americans remained poor. Graham actually makes many of the same punchy criticisms of the military industrial complex as the anti-imperialist left, but Graham invokes these criticisms for different ends as we will show in the next section.

Graham Platner is not an Internationalist

The limitations of Graham’s politics are clearest, not in his past life as a soldier, but in his current stance on US militarism, which would be just as problematic if Graham had no military experience whatsoever. But these limitations are often masked behind a half-baked imitation of anti-imperialist rhetoric.²¹ For example, in an interview with The Majority Report, Graham explained how he became disillusioned with the wars he served in, saying,

“It became fairly clear that what we were doing [in Iraq and Afghanistan] was transferring an immense amount of taxpayer wealth into the pockets of a fair amount of very wealthy defense contractors.”²²

This observation about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are very much on point, and there are mountains of evidence to support it. The journalist Naomi Klein wrote extensively about Iraq specifically in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, and more popular retellings of the War on Terror have been done in recent years in seasons 1 and 4 of the Blowback podcast.

Graham’s pseudo-anti-imperialism is also on display in his position on the US government’s support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. His campaign’s website refers to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide,²³ and during his speech at Bernie Sanders’ Labor Day Rally in Portland Graham said,

“Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy [schools and hospitals] in Gaza.”²⁴

And lastly, Graham’s policy platform says he will never vote to send Americans into a pointless war.²⁵ What’s not to like?

The trouble starts with the section of Graham’s platform titled Take on Waste and Corruption at the Pentagon; Rebuild American Shipbuilding on his campaign’s website. On the one hand there is still much to like in this section of Graham’s platform, such as making explicit reference to the “revolving door,” the phenomena of powerful individuals in the private sector occupying positions of power within government and vice versa. This part of Graham’s platform is particularly focused on the US military apparatus, and we find no shortage of examples of the revolving door in this sector of government. Such contemporary examples include the Deputy Defense Secretary to the second Trump Administration, Steven Feinburg, cofounder and former CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, an investment firm that does business with the Department of War/Defense.²⁶ Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, left government during the first Trump Administration to sit on the executive boards of several large companies, most notably United Technologies, which merged with Raytheon in 2020 to create Raytheon Technologies, now known as RTX Corporation.²⁷ But the revolving door is nothing new. It is well documented how figures such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used their positions in government to further enrich the companies they were connected to.²⁸ Graham is also quite correct when he says in his policy platform that this is all “encouraged by deliberate government policy.” However, the revolving door is not unique to the defense sector, but actually encompasses the entire US economy, as is shown in the data on open secrets²⁹ and explains the findings of the study we cited in our article Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism, which showed that US government policy outcomes were dominated by the interests of businesses and their executives while the influence of average citizens on government policy was “near zero.”³⁰

We do not deny that Graham correctly perceives several problems, nor do we deny that his proposed solutions to those problems are largely positive. Graham also deserves credit for his opposition to US government support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.³¹ But we find Graham’s responses to the problems he observes to be extremely misguided on the specific topic of the US military.³² This section of the platform currently says,

“We need to take the funds currently paying for mansions in Virginia and Maryland for defense contractors, and reinvest them into closing the massive shipbuilding gap.

I’ve seen under the hood. I know exactly how much money is wasted, and where. Send me to Washington and I will work tirelessly to rebuild the American military” (our italics).³³

The inclusion of the shipbuilding gap in Graham’s policy platform is no coincidence. General Dynamics maintains a large shipyard at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Bath, Maine. BIW is the only real heavy industry to speak of in Maine and many of the workers at BIW are organized under IAM Local S6, which is highly visible at many Maine AFL-CIO events. Several S6 workers can be seen sitting behind Graham during his Labor Day speech, and the inclusion of closing the US-China shipbuilding gap is clearly a gesture towards these workers.

This brings us to the US-China shipbuilding gap itself. How big is it? What are its causes? And what, if any, available solutions might Graham pursue once in office?

The current state of US shipbuilding is a story of US industry more generally: the infrastructure is old, outdated, and poorly maintained;³⁴ more workers are leaving than entering the field because the compensation isn’t competitive and the working conditions aren’t attractive.³⁵ Parallel to the decay of American shipbuilding, China has been investing heavily in its shipbuilding.³⁶ The result has been dramatic, but also incredibly foreseeable: the US currently accounts for 0.1% of global shipbuilding, while China accounts for more than the rest of the world combined at 53.3%.³⁷

Now the US doesn’t need to make up the entire gap by itself. US allies South Korea and Japan rank second and third in global shipbuilding,³⁸ so adding their output to the US’ current output brings the total US shipbuilding output to 42.3% of total global output. This would narrow the US-China shipbuilding gap to 11%, but China would still have the edge. Additionally, leaning on allied countries to make up the shipbuilding gap does nothing to resurrect US shipbuilding. It wouldn’t be creating jobs for anyone in the US. Japan and South Korea’s geographic proximity to China also means that US shipbuilding would remain incredibly precarious in the face of potential conflict between the US and China.

No matter which way one looks at the subject, the conclusion is clear that the US needs to invest in its own shipbuilding infrastructure if it wants to compete with China. But even bringing US shipbuilding capacity up to 1% of global output would require US shipbuilding to expand manyfold from its current size and would require unprecedented investment. This raises the question of where that investment is supposed to come from?

Let us first lay to rest any idea that US defense contractors could raise the money themselves by selling more weapons to foreign countries. Firstly because it would require a manyfold increase in the amount of weapons being produced and sold to raise the necessary funds to expand shipbuilding, but also because it wouldn’t be saving the US government much, if any, money in the process. US weapons manufactures frequently make use of the US government’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program,³⁹ in which the US loans or grants money to foreign countries under the stipulation that this money be spent purchasing US military equipment.⁴⁰ So even if an expansion of US shipbuilding were to be funded by weapons sales, that money would very likely still be coming from the state coffers. The US could also push its financial acrobatics to the limits by lending money to itself by borrowing against the money owed to it by foreign countries. All of this would also likely undermine Graham’s position on Gaza, as Israel is the largest recipient of US FMF assistance.⁴¹

Graham presents himself as a left wing populist in the style of Bernie Sanders though,⁴² so his first plan to subsidize US shipbuilding would probably be by raising the necessary funds through increasing taxes for the ultra-wealthy. And we are certainly in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy—by all means tax them at the highest possible rate—but we have already coauthored a short article explaining the limitations of such social-democratic policy.⁴³

Can the US subsidize its shipbuilding industry by issuing money? No. We are not modern monetary theorists here at The Revolutionist, and we don’t believe Graham is either. The state cannot simply issue money as it pleases.⁴⁴ The state only has two real non-inflationary ways of raising funds: taxation, and borrowing money by selling treasury bonds. Since government bonds have to be paid back at interest, the state must find a way to generate income in order to repay them. This opens another contradiction with regards to taxation: Assuming a bond has to be paid back to a domestic actor⁴⁵ you cannot use taxation to pay them back, because you would be paying them back with their own money,⁴⁶ defeating the whole premise of issuing bonds. The US has no substantial state-owned industry to raise money for itself, and since taxation is also not an option, this leaves imperial plunder as the only means the US government has of servicing its debt.

China’s shipbuilding industry has been able to dwarf that of the US in such a short period of time for the following reasons: China has a greater shipbuilding capacity because Chinese labor is less expensive and more plentiful than US labor; China subsidizes its shipbuilding far more than the US subsidizes its own shipbuilding; China had the advantage of being able to paint on a mostly blank canvas, allowing it to create a more modern and efficient shipbuilding infrastructure. This is also proven in the example of South Korea, which developed its shipbuilding infrastructure several decades after the peak of US shipbuilding.⁴⁷ Before the US can close the shipbuilding gap with China, it must first wipe its canvas clean, but even ignoring this, expanding US shipbuilding on the scale necessary to compete with China requires an amount of funding that can only be acquired or repaid through imperial plunder.

This unavoidable conclusion is in obvious contradiction with the rest of Graham’s platform. But the more interesting question is whether or not Graham is conscious of this contradiction? We honestly think that he isn’t. Why would he know about any of this? He was a soldier in his past life and is currently an oyster farmer. Neither of those professions require one to have a knowledge of government fiscal policy and its intersection with global conflict. It’s true that Graham probably has advisors now that he is a political candidate, but we’ve heard directly from political advisors on cable news, and indirectly through our acquaintances who are already sitting politicians, and we are thoroughly convinced that they don’t even have a basic understanding of politics, let alone policy.

We think that it is more likely that Graham simply subscribes to a version of American nationalism with aspirations of progressivism. The kind of American mythology that all Americans are indoctrinated into believing from childhood, in which the US is the global vanguard of progress and security, without which anarchy would reign. This is another possible explanation for why “rebuilding the American military” is part of Graham’s policy platform⁴⁸—as if most of the world didn’t think the US military was already powerful enough! This is the next pernicious thing about Graham: he doesn’t need to be a conscious agent of American imperialism to be a participant in it, his sincere belief in a progressive American nationalism serves the same ends.

The American mythology Graham believes in is simply that however: mythology. It isn’t real, nor has it ever been. The closest it has ever come to being true was when the US fought the Nazis in World War II, but wars like the Vietnam War and the Iraq war are actually closer to the norm than the exception.⁴⁹ “Who let them overthrow Jacobo Arbenz?⁵⁰ Who let them overthrow Mohammed Mosadegh?⁵¹ Who let them assassinate Salvador Allendé?⁵² (I didn’t let them but they did it anyway!)”⁵³ The progressive America in which Graham believes has simply never existed historically, and as the above paragraphs show, his progressive nationalism will produce the same results regardless of Graham’s good intentions.

No version of nationalism can truly serve the interests of the working class, and Graham’s progressive nationalism is no exception. The working class has no country.⁵⁴ A shipbuilder in the US does the same job and has the same interests as their counterpart in China or any other country. Any authentic working class politics has to have internationalism at its core.

The concept of internationalism rests on several important observations: 1) under capitalism, individuals make money by selling commodities; 2) the thing that distinguishes the working class from all other classes is that they sell their ability to work to an external consumer as a commodity; 3) as a commodity, the price of labor power is subject to the same basic laws as any other commodity; 4) the price of labor power therefore decreases when workers compete with each other for work or when there is an increase in the availability of labor power; 5) workers should not compete with each other for any reason because all it accomplishes is the mutual immiseration of workers to the benefit of capital owners; 6) workers should cooperate or unite with each other for the mutual benefit of all workers; 7) this idea extends to workers of different national origins because competition between workers of different nations has the same mutually destructive effects on workers as competition between workers of the same nation, especially as labor markets become increasingly globalized in step with the rest of the economy.

It is for these reasons that we consider internationalism to be the highest form of working class solidarity, because it stresses the common interests of all workers regardless of nationality and emphasizes the importance of their cooperation on the basis of their shared interests. It is the exact same logical formulation that underpins the concept of labor unionism, but taken to its logical conclusion.⁵⁵

But internationalism is not simply a sentiment to be expressed in word without concrete action. Internationalism is also a practice, and its highest practical expression is revolutionary defeatism; the concept that in a war between capitalist states, the working class will refuse to fight, even if it means the military defeat of their own country.⁵⁶ After all, if we believe that competition between workers is mutually detrimental to all workers, why would we support workers killing each other? This is why any authentic working class politics must have internationalism at its core: because a politics which makes exception to advancing the interests of the working class is not a working class politics.⁵⁷

And this is why we believe that Graham should not be endorsed by any labor organization, although that ship has already sailed to a large extent (pun intended),⁵⁸ nor should Graham be endorsed by any socialist or communist organizations, including Maine DSA. We will explain later why we believe there is some room to support Graham without endorsing him, but socialist, communist, and labor organizations should not endorse Graham because his politics as expressed in his current platform do not serve the interests of the working class. If Graham wants to earn the endorsement of the working class and its organizations, then he should amend his platform to make it an internationalist platform rather than a nationalist and militarist one. The American working class has nothing to gain from fighting the workers of another country and should not endorse anyone who would send workers to fight each other.

Conclusion: Critical Support for Graham Platner

What have we learned so far? There is certainly much to like about Graham Platner, and we are sure that much of the public would agree based on how quickly Graham has taken the spotlight in his senatorial race. As his public profile has grown, he has also faced much criticism from the left wing of the American political spectrum, but this criticism has been shown to be extremely shallow upon investigation, and it shows that the overall development of the political left in the US remains quite low. And this is why we have defended and criticized Graham in equal measure in this article, as we find his own underdeveloped politics to be far more pernicious than his past actions.

We could very easily add our voice to the chorus of those making shallow criticisms of Graham’s military service, especially since our hands are clean in this regard. We were only 2 years old when the September 11 terror attacks happened. We grew up at a time when it was already clear that the War on Terror was an abject failure that actually contributed to the spread of terrorism rather than its eradication.⁵⁹ Despite this, there was still a time when we were very young when we thought in a very similar fashion to how we believe Graham thinks. We believe that the polling shows that Graham’s thinking is fairly indicative of people his age, and we might be even more similar to him if we were his age, but none of this means that Graham, his politics, and his generation are above criticism or that we should not ask more of them.

We also believe that Graham deserves the benefit of the doubt because he has shown the ability to learn and become more progressive over time. Even if this were not actually the case, there is an argument to be made that we should still be generous to Graham in our criticism of him, as that would be in complete keeping with critical left wing scholarship. It is true that Graham contributed to the victimization of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is also true that some can be a victim and a victimizer at the same time. Frantz Fanon, one of the founders and most radical thinkers of Post-Colonial Theory, could see that in many ways, even unrepentant French colonists were victims of French colonialism in Algeria, as these men had to make beasts of themselves to successfully dehumanize the indigenous Algerians.⁶⁰ Many serious Feminist writers will observe that while men victimize women in patriarchal society, men also suffer from the pressure to perform a very narrow and toxic version of masculinity imposed on them by patriarchal society. And many anti-racist scholars have observed how even white people are harmed by white supremacy, the standard example being how poor whites also lost access to public swimming pools when they were made private to prevent access to African Americans. Those who continue to criticize Graham solely on the basis of his past military service are not only incorrect, but are social chauvinists who ignore the ways in which structures of oppression also hurt oppressors; they essentialize and reproduce the categories of oppressor and oppressed in order to dehumanize the oppressors in the same way that right wing ideologues dehumanized marginalized groups.

Our position is a more radical one: we recognize Graham’s humanity and his victimhood. His naive progressivism allowed him to be made into a pawn in a terrible war that was started on false pretenses and killed innumerable innocent people. We would also need therapy if that happened to us. And this is why we can neither condemn most veterans of the US military nor thank them for their service: we feel sorry for them. All gave some, some gave all, but none of it was ever actually in their interest. They were all unwitting pawns sacrificed at the altar of capital. Graham is actually one of the lucky ones, as he is still alive and relatively unscathed. How many of his brothers in arms lost a limb, or lost their lives, to make a few dollars for a few already rich people?

In summation, Graham is the strongest candidate running for the senate seat currently held by Susan Collins. Graham deserves to win his election on this basis, but there are still important ways in which he is no better than any of his opponents. For this reason, specifically the lack of internationalism in his platform, we do not believe that Maine DSA, or any other labor or socialist group, should endorse Graham. But we also believe that he has the ability to win his election without the endorsement of Maine DSA.

While socialists should not endorse Graham, there is still room for socialists to support Graham, provided that they maintain a critical orientation towards him. This is because Graham has already positioned himself so that a victory for Graham will be a victory for the socialist movement as long as socialists do not endorse Graham. If Graham reads our criticisms, makes the corresponding changes to his platform and advances a genuinely socialist platform once in office, then it will be a benefit to the socialist movement, even if Graham does it without being a representative of socialism. If Graham wins without making any changes to his platform, and advances that unamended platform once in office, then it will prove our critiques of him and Bernie Sanders and open people to more radical forms of socialism. And if Graham turns out to be another opportunist like John Fetterman once in office,⁶¹ then this will also be a victory for radical socialists like ourselves, as it will simply reinforce all of the criticisms we’ve already made of existing US politics and our calls for a real alternative. But the victory of the socialist movement in all these scenarios is contingent upon them withholding an endorsement for Graham. We have given our position, and so we win no matter what happens. Graham doesn’t know us (yet), but we have him in a three-way checkmate, and we know it.

Bluebird,

September, 2025

1. We also know several of the people who were sitting behind Graham as he spoke at Sanders’ rally, although most of them know us by a different name. We do not claim to speak for them however. Quite the contrary in fact.

2. Capitalists big and small lose money all the time. It is not one’s income, but their relation within the process of production that determines their class.

3. This is significant because the Manchester textile mills were the cradle of capitalism in the way that the Horn of Africa is the cradle of all human civilization. Engels’ class background could not have been more capitalist for the time and place he existed in, yet he remains one of capitalism’s most scathing critics to this day.

4. Marx, Karl. 1867. “Constant Capital and Variable Capital.” Capital Vol. 1. Marxists Internet Archive

5. We could cite his campaign ads, the policy platform on his campaign’s website, or his Labor Day speech. The overtures to labor unions are very hard to miss.

6. The fact that the term “ruling class” has entered common parlance in the US is a sort of indictment of US democracy in itself. The fact that people of different backgrounds feel that most US politicians belong to a different class from the general public means that the US government is not “of the people,” as many a patriot likes to assert. The observation that a “ruling class” exists in the US is an implicit statement that not any random citizen can hold office in the US; that the American public’s ability to choose who represents them is far more limited than what one would and should expect within a democratic-republican form of government.

7. Our IBEW local also begins each of its monthly meetings by reciting the pledge of allegiance. We stand for the pledge so as not to cause too much of a scene, but we do not lower ourselves by actually reciting the pledge.

8. We also do not thank former and active duty servicemen for their service. Our reasoning for why will be explained in more detail later in the article. For now it will simply suffice to say that it is not out of hatred or animosity that we do not thank servicemen for their service. We have no hate for them generally speaking. We actually take great pity on them.

9. We are not only speaking from having listened to the way that older anti-war activists, such as the surviving members of the Weather Underground, talk about the horrors of war, but are also speaking from our experience as an activist in the Maine Coalition for Palestine, where even many self-proclaimed socialists refrained from using the language of class war and internationalism in their rhetoric, and labor organizing for Palestinian liberation became increasingly minimized during our time in that organization.

10. Hatfield, Jenn. 2025. “6 Facts About the US Military.” Pew Research Center.

11. Doherty, Carroll, and Jocelyn Kiley. 2023. “A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered US Public Support for War in Iraq.” Pew Research Center.

12. Jones, Jeffrey M., and Sarah Hogenboom-Jones. 2025. “Record Party Gaps in Job Approval of Supreme Court, Congress.” Gallup News.

13. Gallup News. 2025. “Congress and the Public | Gallup Historical Trends.”

14. Perry, Stephanie, and Marc Trussler. 2025. “Poll: Trump's job ratings stay negative; Americans express strong support for vaccines.” NBC News.

15. Graham also probably would not have been taught an accurate history of these events in school either. We were taught an incredibly sanitized version of the Vietnam War by our history teachers, and were not taught about the other scandals mentioned in this article at all in the US education system.

16. “I started yelling, ‘Don’t attack Iraq. If our best generals tell us not to go to war, why should we,'” — Graham Platner at 18, quoted in Bangor Daily News.

17. Cox, Ana M. 2025. “The Political Awakening of the Oyster Farmer Taking on Susan Collins.” The New Republic.

18. Doherty, Carroll, and Jocelyn Kiley. 2023. “A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered US Public Support for War in Iraq.” Pew Research Center.

19. Summary of Pratt’s court case and Amnesty International statement made upon Pratt’s release from prison

20. Democracy Now. 2024. “The Life & Death of Aaron Bushnell: U.S. Airman Self-Immolates Protesting U.S. Support for Israel.” YouTube.

21. We are not claiming, however, that Graham portrays himself as an anti-imperialist of any kind. He has consistently avoided identifying himself with any particular political movement or ideology, instead portraying himself simply as a humble guy who would like to become Maine’s Bernie Sanders. And we quite agree with this self-selected characterization of Graham.

22. The Majority Report. 2025. “Populist Dem Runs In Maine.” YouTube.

23. “I have not minced words on this issue. We are sending American taxpayer dollars to underwrite the starvation of Gaza, in what can only be accurately described as a genocide.” (“Platform — Graham Platner | Democrat for U.S. Senate.” 2025. Graham Platner for Senate. Archived.)

24. Bernie Sanders. 2025. “Fighting Oligarchy in Portland, Maine.” YouTube.

25. “Platform — Graham Platner | Democrat for U.S. Senate.” 2025. Graham Platner for Senate. Archived.

26. The Revolving Door Project. 2025. “Billionaires and the Trump Admin: Stephen Feinberg.”

27. McFadden, Alyce. 2021. “Lloyd Austin • OpenSecrets.” OpenSecrets.

28. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. Picador.

29. “Top Industries | The Revolving Door.” 2024. OpenSecrets.

30. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 564-581.

31. Opposition to genocide is honestly a very low bar to clear, but it’s something that many Democratic Party politicians fail to do despite 77% of the Democratic voter base wanting a ceasefire in Gaza. (“American Attitudes: Palestine and Israel in the 2024 Election.” 2024. Arab American Institute.)

32. We are still giving Graham the benefit of the doubt here, as we believe he has earned it from us. Hence why we are calling his solutions misguided instead of some more accusatory characterization.

33. “Platform — Graham Platner | Democrat for U.S. Senate.” 2025. Graham Platner for Senate. Archived.

34. “The U.S. naval shipbuilding sector faces critical hurdles. The most commonly cited are skilled-workforce constraints, antiquated shipyard infrastructure and equipment, insufficient use of new technology including digital tools and modular construction techniques, and legacy organizational structures.” (Carroll, Henry H., and Cynthia R. Cook. 2025. “Identifying Pathways for U.S. Shipbuilding Cooperation with Northeast Asian Allies.” Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2025.)

35. “A near universally agreed-upon challenge for the U.S. shipbuilding industry is the need for a larger skilled workforce. A demographic shift away from manufacturing careers, coupled with the retirement of workers with shipbuilding skills, has created recruitment and retention issues, resulting in an inexperienced workforce that lacks proficiency in skilled trades and requires increased supervision to avoid quality problems.18 A March 2025 Congressional Research Service report found that part of the difficulty in recruiting and retaining new workers lies in the relatively low wages and benefits of shipbuilding jobs. While such jobs still pay better than service and retail, the differential in wages has narrowed, and the latter are less likely to involve risk of serious injury, are often located in areas with easier commutes, and are generally done in cleaner indoor settings. Although increasing total wages for shipbuilding workers could reestablish a large differential in wages and benefits, it would also substantially increase ship procurement costs.” (Ibid.)

36. “Due to substantial industrial subsidies, China’s shipyards have gone from producing 5 percent of the world’s commercial ships in 1999 to over 50 percent in 2025[.]” (Ibid.)

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. “Foreign Military Financing (FMF).” Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

40. NPR. 2013. “The U.S. Defense Contractors That Benefit From Aid To Egypt.”

41. Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. 2025. “U.S. Security Cooperation with Israel - United States Department of State.” US Department of State.

42. “He’s barefoot and drinking coffee out of a Bernie mug that’s both stained and faded. ‘Not for show,’ he promises, and points to the Bernie bumper sticker on his refrigerator, itself buried under flyers for arts and crafts shows, fundraisers, and a poster for Indigenous rights.” (Cox, Ana M. 2025. “The Political Awakening of the Oyster Farmer Taking on Susan Collins.” The New Republic.)

43. Bluebird and Todd Chretien. 2025. “Why taxing the rich isn’t enough.” Pine & Roses.

44. We understand that serious modern monetary theorists recognize that inflation would still take place within their framework for monetary policy, however, their premise that the state can simply issue money to raise whatever funds it requires, without taxation or issuing bonds, is pure utopianism.

45. About two thirds of government debt is owned by various domestic investors, while Japan is the biggest foreign owner of US government debt. (DeSilver, Drew. 2025. “Key facts about the U.S. national debt.” Pew Research Center.)

46. We are quite aware that this is an oversimplification, but we already have a very short article explaining the limitations of taxation, hence why we are not dwelling on it here.

47. “South Korea rose as a commercial shipbuilding power between 1970 and 1990 as significant government subsidies, technological advancements, and favorable economic conditions such as low labor costs enabled it to outpace US and European industry during a challenging period for the global shipbuilding market.” (Carroll, Henry H., and Cynthia R. Cook. 2025. “Identifying Pathways for U.S. Shipbuilding Cooperation with Northeast Asian Allies.” Center for Strategic & International Studies.)

48. “Platform — Graham Platner | Democrat for U.S. Senate.” 2025. Graham Platner for Senate. Archived.

49. We are omitting the American Civil War from our analysis because the south of the US was on the wrong side of that war and continue to be very bitter about it to this day.

50. Blum, William. 2003. “Chapter. 10 Guatemala 1953-1954.” Killing Hope. Common Courage Press.

51. Ibid. “Chapter. 9 Iran 1953.”

52. Klein, Naomi. 2007. “Chapter. 3 The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution.” The Shock Doctrine. Picador

53. These italicized words in quotation marks are taken verbatim from the song Same Thing, from the Flobots’ 2007 debut album Fight with Tools.

54. For those who don’t know, this phrase is taken verbatim from section 2 of the Communist Manifesto.

55. This is also why we do not participate in recitations of the pledge of allegiance.

56. “A ‘revolutionary struggle against [World War I]’ is an empty and meaningless exclamation… unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime.” (Lenin, V.I. 1915. The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War. Marxists Internet Archive.)

57. This must still be differentiated from workerism, which is the vulgar support for whatever large portions of the working class wants. The wants of the working class are not always the same as the class interests of the working class. The classic example being how American trade unions resisted racial integration in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The most advanced workers in the unions wanted to remain closed to black and brown workers, but this was not in the interest of the union and non-union workers, because it forced them to compete for employment instead of working together, splitting the working class. Communists always support the interests of the working class, even if the workers want something that is not in their own interest.

58. Maine State Nurses United/National Nurses Organizing Committee (MSNA/NNOC), an affiliate of National Nurses United, provides one recent example of a labor organization that has endorsed Graham, having announced their endorsement on September 18, 2025.

59. “[A]ccording to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. [T]he number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the US State Department, more than doubled [since the beginning of the War on Terror.]” (Turse, Nick. 2022. “The War on Terror Has Been Very Successful at Creating New Terrorists.” Jacobin.)

60. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. “Colonial War and Mental Disorders.” The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

61. Graham also promised that he would not be another John Fetterman in his interview with The Majority Report, so we will see how much his word is worth on this front.