After the elections, supporters of the SWP campaign are fighting for the same program, which grows out of the struggles of workers and farmers to confront the effects of the bipartisan offensive by the bosses on our wages and working conditions.

There were no differences on the fundamentals between the major capitalist candidates. The twin parties of the ruling class agreed on continuing to push down wages, stretch out the workday, speed up the production line, and further weaken the unions to shore up the bosses’ declining profit rates.

Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on the ongoing transformation of Washington’s global military posture and the pursuit of the imperialist “war on terrorism.”

These remain the U.S. rulers’ main answers to intensified interimperialist competition and the opening stages of a world economic depression, as well as the fact that they lost the Cold War.

The standard of living of the working class has deteriorated over the last 30 years and will continue to decline. The rulers can’t give the real reason for this: the normal workings of the capitalist system, with its dog-eat-dog morality, and the tiny handful of billionaire families that perpetuate their rule at the expense of the vast majority. The employers and their government—whether headed by Democrats or Republicans—will increasingly use the war in Iraq, and other wars to come, to build a patriotic mobilization around their need to convince us to tighten our belts for “common sacrifice.”

In face of this, Calero, Hawkins, and the other SWP candidates joined workers and farmers in struggle and discussed with them the need to stop looking at ourselves as objects, as the victims of the bosses, but instead to discover our own self-worth.

When some workers said that it’s more difficult to fight now because the government uses bankruptcy courts to tear up union contracts and slash wages and benefits—pointing to the owners of the largest U.S. airlines or the Horizon coal mines—Calero and Hawkins joined the issue. The SWP candidates responded that no judge ever ordered workers in these companies to give back wages. The boss does that. The court, whose job it is to preserve the capital of the ruling families, goes along. The answer workers need to give to Delta, US Airways, or other employers, when they say they need cutbacks to survive, is simple: walk out. And if the bosses threaten to shut down, tell them that any company that can’t afford decent wages and benefits does not deserve to be in business. When some employers do fold up tent and move, follow them everywhere—even abroad—and collaborate with workers wherever they go to organize a union and fight the bosses wherever they are.

A growing number of workers—from the Co-Op miners in Utah to cannery workers in Yakima—are beginning to draw such conclusions and act accordingly, the SWP candidates pointed out, based on their experiences on the campaign trail. These struggles are not episodic. Through them, a number of militant workers become seasoned cadre who will be indispensable when more decisive battles come.

It’s out of the generalization of such working-class struggles in the United States and around the world—now and in the past—that the SWP campaign platform was crafted. Socialist Workers candidates championed the need of workers to organize unions and mobilize union power to fight the bosses’ attacks effectively. Out of these fights, they said, the need also grows to build a labor party, based on the unions, that fights in the interests of workers and farmers worldwide. This is needed so that workers can have an instrument to fight, not only on the economic level, but on the political plane, too, to take state power out of the hands of the exploiters.

Socialist Workers candidates also called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. and other imperialist troops from Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, the Balkans, Colombia, Korea, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they promoted the right of semicolonial countries to acquire the sources of energy they need, including nuclear energy, for economic development, which is a prerequisite for political and economic advances for working people in the colonial world. They exposed the hypocritical campaign under the banner of “nonproliferation” of Washington—the only government in the world to have used the atomic bomb—and its imperialist allies to prevent countries like Brazil, Iran, and north Korea from developing nuclear power.

SWP campaign supporters are continuing to stand and fight for this working-class revolutionary perspective after the elections, and they do so 365 days a year. We urge you to join with them in campaigning for socialism with the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books at plant gates, picket lines, working-class neighborhoods, and social protest actions. What they offer is knowledge about, involvement in, and emulation of struggles in the United States and around the world through which workers can take what they are big enough to take. For information on how to contact us, see the link to the directory on the Home Page.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers 2004 campaign: on to next 365 days!
N.Y. meeting: The real results of the U.S. election campaign before the vote took place  
 
 
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