Vol. 76/No. 10      March 12, 2012

The March 10 meeting begins with a reception at 2 p.m., followed by a political program, time for questions and discussion, dinner and a party. The next morning a meeting will be held for those attending one of their first national meetings of the communist movement to continue discussion on the political themes from the day before and to learn more about the Socialist Workers Party.

U.S. bosses, and their competitors around the world, are driven to attack the working class by a decades-long crisis of capitalist production and trade, which has escalated sharply since 2008. Their profit rates are increasingly being squeezed, leading to intensifying cutthroat competition among the capitalist owners within each country, as well as from rival nations. The exploiting class is united only in a frontal assault against the working class to deepen the exploitation of labor.

On the plant floor, wage cuts, speedup, slashed health care and pensions, and union busting are the order of the day. The bosses use their government to target Social Security, Medicare and other social gains wrested in struggle by the working class, in order to shift responsibility onto the backs of workers and their families, pocketing more of the surplus value workers produce.

These steps are a necessity for the employers to attempt to revive production and profits. Spreading impoverishment, widespread unemployment, broken trade unions, large-scale imprisonment of working people, especially African-Americans—this is what is in store for us, as month after month, year after year, the bosses grind away on this course.

Workers who are Black are a special target of the massive expansion of “stop and frisk” and plea-bargain-driven imprisonment. This is the rulers’ answer to the demonstrated fighting capacity of the Afro-American nationality, forged in two centuries of resistance to slavery, Jim Crow segregation and systematic racist discrimination.

These mounting assaults are being met by resistance, from the docks of Longview, Wash., to American Crystal Sugar in the Upper Midwest, generating crucial solidarity. They provide workers with a quick education on how the bosses mobilize their cops, media, courts and government against our class.

What lies ahead is a cycle of defensive battles, temporary lulls, followed by the bosses pushing further and another fight.

What workers need is to take the fight onto a different level—a political road forward, to build a proletarian party, drawing on the continuity of more than 150 years of working-class struggle, that can chart a course toward political power.

They can look to the experiences of workers and farmers in Cuba, who conquered power through revolutionary struggle, and have defended and maintained that political power for more than 50 years.

In the course of making and consolidating their revolution, millions of Cuban working people transformed themselves, gaining the confidence and experience to wield their new state power to transform the world around them. Pressed by the bosses’ relentless assaults today, working people must take the same political course here and elsewhere in the world.

These questions, the answers to which will be decisive to whether the working class will prevail against the dictatorship of capital or be crushed in the name of private profit, will be at the heart of the March 10 meeting.  
 
 
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