BY JOHN STUDER
On Nov. 4 make your vote count. Pull the lever for the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party. Don’t waste your vote on Democrats and Republicans – the two parties of the capitalist class.
Cast your vote for the working class against the growing assault by the bosses and their government; cast your vote for a course of struggle through which working people and our allies can build a movement to fight for political power, transforming ourselves and all of society in the process; cast your vote for a future in which the needs of toiling humanity and preservation of the earth are priorities, not the profits of a few.
As Socialist Workers Party candidates across the country promote solidarity with working people in struggle, they have been pointing to the need of workers and their allies to break from the twin parties of capital and build their own party, a labor party based on the unions that gives political voice to all the exploited and the oppressed.
The capitalists rule through the two-party system, with the alternative for working people always being the lesser of two evils.
Don’t waste your vote on capitalist politicians. They are the ones who promote war to protect the profits of the bosses; the ones backing the employers’ drive to cut wages and make our conditions of work more dangerous; the ones piling restrictions on the right of women to choose abortion; and the ones who back the brutality of cops and the imprisonment of millions of working people.
The propertied rulers have no answer to the worldwide crisis of capitalist production and trade. But their assaults on our living standards, rights and very dignity are already generating stirrings of working-class resistance. Through growing class battles ahead, working people in the U.S. and worldwide will gain the experience, confidence and a sense of self-worth necessary to take power as working people in Cuba did in 1959. For more than five decades, the ethical values that have always guided the Cuban Revolution have stood in sharp contrast to the moral bankruptcy of dog-eat-dog capitalism and show what working people can accomplish.
Over the course of the campaign, SWP candidates have joined labor resistance and social struggles, and speak to the issues of world politics from the point of view of the interests of working people around the globe.
John Benson, SWP gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, joined a rally and spoke at a city council meeting in Thomaston, Georgia, July 17 to support the demand by working people there to sack police officer Phillip Tobin, notorious for harassing and brutalizing area residents. “I’m here from Atlanta to extend a hand of solidarity to those standing up and fighting,” Benson said. “History is made by those who fight, not by those who are elected.”
Mary Martin, SWP candidate for U.S. Congress in Washington’s 9th District, helped build protests outside the Tacoma Detention Center to support hundreds of immigrant workers behind bars who organized rolling hunger strikes against deportations and brutal conditions. She campaigned among native-born and immigrant workers alike on the need to “back the fight for equal status before the law for foreign-born workers” and “organize the unorganized!”
Dennis Richter, the party’s candidate for Nebraska governor, traveled to Creston, Iowa, to join with rail workers defending job safety and the safety of those who live near the tracks by fighting demands by the owners of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad to operate trains with a one-person “crew.” The SWP campaign in Nebraska demands rail crews of no less than four people, a cap on train length at 50 cars and mandatory repairs and safety upgrades.
After returning from a reporting and solidarity trip to Ukraine, Frank Forrestal, the party’s gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, addressed some 75 participants at a May 9 rally in Minneapolis to protest Moscow’s occupation of Crimea with a message of international working-class solidarity. “The Russian government is worried that working people there will follow the example of the mass uprising in Ukraine,” Forrestal said.
Chris Hoeppner, SWP candidate for Pennsylvania governor, joined some 60 people originally from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in an Oct. 25 walk in Philadelphia against stigmatization of West Africans because of the Ebola epidemic. Hoeppner also helped organize events and spoke out to build support for the fight to free the Cuban Five.
Vote Socialist Workers Party November 4! If you find undemocratic and anti-working-class laws have kept the socialist ticket off the ballot, write in the candidate’s name. (See list on this page.)
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