Vol. 74/No. 38      October 11, 2010

As the capitalist economic crisis deepens and generates working-class resistance, it will become clearer that these attacks on constitutional protections—including the right to free speech and freedom of assembly and the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure—are aimed at restricting the political space of workers and farmers throughout the United States to organize. The capitalist rulers and their police agencies anticipate class battles ahead.

Millions without jobs, speedup and unsafe conditions for those who are working, deteriorating social services, failing health care, along with imperialist wars—these features of the crisis are not the result of mistaken policies, but the inevitable consequence of capitalism in decline.

The propertied rulers want us to believe the lie that there is one America and that we are all in this together. That “we” have to tighten our belts; that “we” need tariffs to compete with other nations to save “American jobs”; that “we” are at war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. But we are part of an international working class that faces the same enemy: the ruling rich in our respective countries and the imperialist world order led by Washington.

The labor movement needs to fight for demands that can strengthen the unity and solidarity of our class, protect us from assaults on our living standards, and put us in the strongest position to transform our unions into strong fighting instruments that can wrest concessions, raise workers’ confidence, and be a school for revolutionary politics and action.

The Socialist Workers Party candidates around the country put forward the following demands around which our class can advance through struggle: unemployment insurance for as long as a worker is unemployed; a massive federal public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages building hospitals, schools, housing, mass transit, and other needed infrastructure; and the immediate legalization without restrictions of undocumented workers and an end to deportations so that working people, no matter where they are born, can be in the best position to stand together.

Workers need to break from the Democrats and Republicans and form a labor party, based on a militant union movement, that would be part of leading the fight for these immediate demands and help organize the unorganized.

Along this fighting revolutionary internationalist course working people can wrest political power from the capitalist exploiters—transforming themselves and all of society in the process.
 
 
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Protests denounce FBI raids in Chicago and Minneapolis
Hearing protests FBI targeting Arabs, Asians
Socialists: End spying and disruption!  
 
 
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