(lead article/editorial)
Vote Socialist
Workers Party!
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Militant/Eric Simpson
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Gerardo Sánchez, SWP candidate for U.S. Congress, 8th District in California, campaigns at October 23 rally outside Oakland City Hall protesting cop killing of Oscar Grant.
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Working people across the United States have a choice on Election Day, November 2—you can vote for the Socialist Workers Party. Socialist Workers candidates are running for federal, state, and local offices in 33 races in 11 states and the District of Columbia.
At a time when the capitalist economic crisis is battering working people worldwide; imperialist wars are expanding in Afghanistan and Pakistan; high levels of joblessness persist for years on end; safety violations on the job claim more lives and limbs; and health care is being restricted; candidates of the two capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—offer little more than pronouncements about what they are against. Their program to deal with the disaster facing working people is one or another version of “throw out the incumbent” or “the other guy is worse.”
The working class needs to break from the capitalists’ two-party system and fight for a labor party to challenge the representatives of the dictatorship of capital, which is daily destroying the lives of millions. Voting for the Socialist Workers Party candidates is a step toward that perspective. It is a way of voting for what you are for, not what you are against.
The socialist candidates put forward immediate demands to protect working people from a capitalist crisis that is only just beginning. They project a real jobs program—organizing and fighting politically to demand a massive public works program to build schools, hospitals, and affordable housing and to rebuild deteriorating infrastructure; raising the minimum wage to union scale; providing unemployment payments until workers can find a job; and workers control of safety on the job. This is a program to help unify working people as we compete for the few available jobs that can provide for a decent living.
The socialist candidates have used their campaigns over the past months to raise a working-class voice in the electoral arena. They have used their campaigns to stand with union members on the picket lines, support farmers fighting for their land, march with immigrant workers for legalization of all who are undocumented, defend the rights of women to abortion, and rally against racist discrimination and cop violence. They have used their campaigns to win support for the imprisoned Cuban Five, and to defend revolutionary socialist Cuba from Washington’s unrelenting attacks. The socialist candidates have spoken out against the government’s attempts to restrict democratic rights and narrow political space for workers to organize.
Socialist candidates have also pointed out to fellow workers that any gains won in struggle today cannot alter the fundamental laws of the capitalist profit system. Only the conquest and exercise of state power by the working class and the expropriation of the wealthy minority can lay the basis for a world based on solidarity among working people, instead of class exploitation, war, and race and sex discrimination. With state power, working people will have the most powerful tool possible to uproot those conditions, to provide productive labor for all, and reorganize all of society in the interests of workers and farmers.
On November 2 make your vote count. Vote for the Socialist Workers Party candidates, the working-class alternative to imperialist war, economic depression, and racist discrimination.
After the elections socialist workers will continue to be in the streets joining the battles for workers rights. Join with us to fight for the only realistic program that can end capitalist rule and open the road to a socialist world.
Related articles:
Socialist candidates offer revolutionary, fighting perspective for working people
SWP candidates in 2010
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