The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 80/No. 42      November 7, 2016

 
(editorial, lead article)

Vote for and build the
Socialist Workers Party!

Join party to challenge capitalist exploiters

 
 
Militant/Eric Simpson
Restaurant worker Stephanie Vasquez speaks with SWP vice-presidential candidate Osborne Hart, right, and party member Joel Britton from Oakland Oct. 6 in Turlock, California.
 
 
 
Vote for the Socialist Workers Party, the working class party, your party on Nov. 8. Join with the party to discuss with other workers a way forward for our class, before and after the election.

And join us Nov. 3-12 as party members along with workers and youth we’ve met in recent months use the new book The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People to present this course in discussions on porches and in kitchens, in labor and social struggles. This political work is at the heart of the SWP’s activity today.

Alyson Kennedy, the party’s candidate for president, was a coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers for many years. She has helped lead union battles, built the fight against police brutality and defended a woman’s right to choose abortion. Vice-presidential candidate Osborne Hart, who has worked in meatpacking, on the railroad and at Walmart, has opposed imperialist wars and fought for Black rights for decades. Both champion the Cuban Revolution, pointing to the revolutionary internationalist accomplishments of workers and farmers there as an example for working-class fighters everywhere.

Don’t throw away your vote on the capitalist parties of exploitation, depression and war. Their rule relies on you holding your nose and backing the “lesser evil.” But there is no lesser evil. Democrat Hillary Clinton is a warhorse veteran of a bourgeois political family and a leader of imperialist aggression who has used government positions to enrich herself and her $400 million family foundation. She oozes contempt for workers she writes off as “deplorable” and “irredeemable.”

Republican Donald Trump is a coarse, demagogic billionaire landlord who acknowledges the economic crisis facing workers, but says the answer is to enrich the bosses, push “American interests” and scapegoat immigrants and Muslims. Both parties promote the lie that “we” Americans — workers and capitalists — have common interests.

No matter who is elected, the slow-burning depression conditions will worsen, imperialist wars will metastasize and the need for the working-class road to power will be posed more sharply.

The propertied rulers respond to the world contraction of production and trade the only way they can, by attacking the working class — the source of their profits — trying to drive down wages and working conditions here and around the world, divide us and erode our confidence. Ultimately, capitalism’s crisis drives the rulers toward the kind of imperialist world slaughter they unleashed twice in the 20th century, seeking to arise triumphant from the mass destruction of human beings and productive capacity.

Both Republicans and Democrats will continue to carry out the ruling families’ war against workers at home and abroad. Both will continue the trillion dollar “modernization” of Washington’s nuclear weapons arsenal, increasing the danger of annihilation.

The Socialist Workers Party explains that only the working class can stop capitalism’s march toward economic catastrophe and world war.

The Cuban Revolution shows that ordinary working people can wage and win a struggle to form a workers and farmers government, end the dictatorship of capital and join the world struggle for socialism. Workers here can do the same, becoming different people along the way.

This is a fight worth fighting, a life worth living.

On Nov. 8, pull the lever for Kennedy and Hart, and for the candidates for federal and state office listed below. If the SWP has been kept off the ballot where you live, write them in.

Vote Socialist Workers Party! Join the Socialist Workers Party!


 
 
Related articles:
Join SWP in 10-day effort to deepen reach to workers
SWP: ‘We need to change class in power, build a new society’
Alyson Kennedy addresses oil workers union
Join SWP campaigning! Make a donation
SWP candidates
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home