‘A labor party can organize workers in their millions’
https://themilitant.com/2020/08/08/a-labor-party-can-organize-workers-in-their-millions/
August 17, 2020
Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, issued
the following statement Aug. 5. Malcolm Jarrett is the party’s candidate
for vice president.
Working people need to build our own party, a labor party, to use to
organize us in our millions to stand up to the efforts of the bosses,
their parties and their government to push the burden of the crisis of
their dog-eat-dog capitalist system onto our backs.
We need to organize a union movement in every workplace nationwide to
resist the growing attacks on our jobs, wages and working conditions.
This movement would defend workers on the job as well as family farmers
and all those who are oppressed and exploited by capital. It would be
the backbone of our labor party.
We can take important steps forward today by building solidarity with
every fight that breaks out — from the strike by shipbuilders against
union busting by bosses at Bath Iron Works in Maine, to protests
demanding the arrest and prosecution of the cops who killed Breonna
Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
One of the key challenges workers face is defending our health and
safety on the job. We need to wage a fight to wrest control of
production from the grasp of the bosses — from line speeds, to the
arrangement of work stations, to the size of the workforce, to expansion
of plant size if needed, and much more. Work can be performed safely,
but only when workers are in charge of deciding what is necessary to
stop the spread of coronavirus, injuries and deaths on the job. As the
bosses reopen workplaces and public transport, or debate starting up
schools again, workers in these industries waging such a struggle is the
only way to protect our lives and those of our families and community.
As workers gain experience exercising control over what is produced and
how, we can see that our class can and should run the entire economy.
My party calls for the labor movement to fight for a government-funded
public works program to put tens of millions back to work at union scale
pay. Such a program, run by the workers involved, can build hospitals,
safe workplaces, schools and housing, and other things working people
sorely need.
Getting workers back on the job will end demoralizing isolation and
undercut the ability of the bosses to pit unemployed and employed
workers against each other and attack us all.
Unions need to speak out against every example of exploitation, racism,
attacks on women and undocumented workers, and explain why workers are
capable of uniting to fight to end these conditions. We will gain class
consciousness and learn our own self-worth.
Building a labor party out of these struggles will give us the political
tool we need not only to defend our class interests, but also to chart a
course to take political power out of the hands of the propertied rulers
and establish a workers and farmers government. Workers and farmers in
Cuba, led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, showed that making a
socialist revolution and transforming social relations is not only
necessary but possible.
From the mass battles that won the right of women to vote 100 years ago
this month or built the industrial union movement in the 1930s to the
Black-led popular movement that tore down Jim Crow segregation, the
working-class has a proud record of courageous and disciplined struggle.
But to truly end the dictatorship of capital, and open the door to a new
future for all humanity, we need to take power into our own hands.
To advance this perspective, the SWP is running and campaigning on a
fighting working-class program in 2020. Join our fight to get on the
ballot in as many states as possible!
Workers need a labor party, control of production, safety
FARIBAULT, Minn. — Socialist Workers Party campaigners are knocking on
doors and meeting working people in Minnesota, New Jersey, Tennessee and
Washington to win support for the fight to get a working-class party on
the ballot in 2020. Thousands are…
Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign platform
This is the SWP’s fighting campaign platform to confront the economic,
social and moral crisis caused by capitalism: UNIONS/FOR A LABOR PARTY
Support workers’ struggles to organize to defend themselves, to use
union power on behalf of ourselves and all…
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Letters
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― Carl Sagan, Cosmos