https://themilitant.com/2018/12/01/join-workers-in-struggle-break-with-bosses-parties/
Join workers in struggle, break with bosses’ parties
Join Socialist Workers Party campaigning in working class
By Seth Galinsky
Vol. 82/No. 46
December 10, 2018
Dennis Richter, Socialist Workers Party candidate for US Senate in
California during 2018 election, talks with worker at Farmer Johns
meatpacking plant in Vernon, Oct. 31.
Militant/Laura Garza
Dennis Richter, Socialist Workers Party candidate for US Senate in
California during 2018 election, talks with worker at Farmer Johns
meatpacking plant in Vernon, Oct. 31.
Socialist Workers Party members found widespread interest in the party’s
program, and in how it championed workers on strike to defend their
jobs, wages and safety, and joined in protests against police brutality,
Jew-hatred, for women’s right to choose abortion and for amnesty for
undocumented workers in the 2018 midterm elections. Opportunities are
wide open to continue the discussion in state and municipal elections
set for 2019.
Battered by the crisis of capitalist rule today — from veterans
returning from imperialism’s wars abroad to workers facing low wages and
unemployment, from the deterioration of public transportation and
inadequate housing to attacks on political rights — working people are
looking for ways to defend their interests.
That’s also what lies behind the outcomes of the midterm elections, and
why the crisis in the Democratic and Republican parties — the capitalist
parties that have ruled for decades through their “lesser evil” shell
game — will continue.
It’s why the anti-Donald Trump hysteria of the liberals and middle-class
left, and their “resistance” to his presidency, will continue. Their
anger is aimed at the working people who they blame for keeping Trump in
office, the so-called deplorables who they say are becoming increasingly
reactionary, racist, xenophobic and anti-woman.
The Democrats took the majority in the House — nothing new, as it’s
common for the party not in the White House to make significant gains in
midterm elections. Workers who voted for change and didn’t get what they
wanted feel compelled to vote for change again.
The Republicans increased their majority in the Senate. Trump remains
the president, with candidates he backed winning election.
“The most striking feature of Tuesday’s voting was the absence of a blue
wave,” Gabriel Schoenfeld, a former adviser to 2012 Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney, wrote in a Nov. 8 column in USA Today.
“Pundits and politicians can split it a million different ways, but the
bottom line is that the electorate did not repudiate Trump,” Schoenfeld
whines. “Instead, it chose to normalize the grossly abnormal.”
Schoenfeld charges that “Trump’s fascist-style rallies” are proof that
“thousands of our fellow Americans” have been “lured into moral
degradation.”
No shift to the right
In fact, the elections confirm the opposite — there has not been a rise
in racism, xenophobia, misogyny or any other form of ideological
reaction among working people in the U.S. Working people are taking the
moral high ground.
In Florida, liberals howled that the election of Trump-backed Ron
DeSantis as governor of Florida was further proof workers are becoming
rightists and racists. But those workers ensured that Amendment 4 to the
state constitution, restoring voting rights to more than a million
people convicted of felonies — over a third of them African-American —
passed in a landslide with 64 percent in favor. The amendment won a
majority of all but a handful of districts in the state, from Democrats
and Republicans alike, regardless of race or nationality.
In Louisiana, an amendment requiring that finding someone guilty of a
felony will require a unanimous jury — strengthening the right to be
considered innocent until proven guilty — was also passed
overwhelmingly. Louisiana had been one of the two states, the other
being Oregon, that allowed conviction if just 10 out of 12 jurors agreed.
And within days of the elections President Trump announced his support
for a bipartisan bill before Congress that would get rid of some of the
most onerous and draconian “minimum sentences” and “three strikes” laws,
first imposed during the Bill Clinton administration. The bill includes
reductions in egregious sentences for crack cocaine, which have been
used by cops and prosecutors to target Blacks. Working people would
welcome any measure that lessens the vindictiveness of the capitalist
rulers “justice” system.
The scorn for the working class expressed by Schoenfeld is nothing new.
In April 2008 then-President Barack Obama, referring to workers in small
towns and rural areas hard hit by the capitalist economic crisis, said,
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people
who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment
as a way to explain their frustrations.”
After Trump won the 2016 election Obama mused that “maybe we pushed too
far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe. … Sometimes I
wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early.”
In case you had any doubts on what Obama was saying, New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd spelled it out. “We were constantly disappointing
him,” she writes. “He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh
and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.” She said
what he meant was, “What if we were too good for these people?”
To the liberal pundits and meritocrats, working people are “grossly
abnormal.”
What about the ‘socialists’?
The liberal and left media has focused on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a
member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the youngest woman
ever elected to Congress. Despite all the hype, her election, like that
of a handful of other new “socialist” Democrats is no break with
capitalist politics.
Ocasio-Cortez ran as a Democrat to promote a kinder form of capitalist
rule. The excitement about her in the media is motivated by the same
desire. Her Bernie Sanders-like program of Medicare insurance for all
and other reform schemes would do nothing to challenge capitalist
exploitation and rule. She backs septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi “as the
most progressive candidate for Speaker” of the House.
Neither the Democrats or Republicans of any stripe, nor their
strife-riven parties, nor Donald Trump point a road forward for the
working class and all victims of capitalist oppression.
SWP points road forward
That’s why the Socialist Workers Party says working people need to break
from the two parties of capitalist rule and embark on a road of
independent struggle and working-class political action. The party will
be fielding candidates in upcoming 2019 elections, including for
governor of Kentucky; mayor of Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia; for New
York City Public Advocate; and more.
SWP candidates will explain why working people need to think socially
and act politically, independent of the capitalist parties and state.
Joining in today’s struggles, telling the truth about the crisis of
capitalism, raising demands that can unite working people will point the
way for workers to take political power out of the hands of the
capitalist class.
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In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Join workers in struggle, break with bosses’ parties
•Workers seek road forward out of crisis of capitalism
•SF, Hawaii hotel strikers: ‘One job should be enough!’
•Big response to win in fight for ex-prisoners’ right to vote
•California Camp Fire catastrophe caused by dog-eat-dog capitalism
•‘UK out now!’ Brexit is best terrain for the workers to fight
Feature Articles •Join May Day brigade, learn about Cuban Revolution
Also In This Issue •U.S. rulers push back against Beijing’s expanding
challenge
•‘Yellow vests’ in France protest against ‘president of the rich’
•Protests hit widespread gov’t corruption, misrule in Haiti
•Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books (Week 7)
•Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive (Week 7)
On the Picket Line •Bus drivers in New Zealand beat back lockout, pay
raise agreed to
•Lorain, Ohio, nurses fight bosses attack on health benefits
Books of the Month •‘Socialism is next inevitable stage of social evolution’
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Letters
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