Vol. 79/No. 26 July 27, 2015
The following statement was issued July 13 by Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, and John Staggs, SWP candidate for City Council at-large.
The decision by the South Carolina state government to take down the Confederate battle flag, a rallying symbol for racist thugs and opponents of Black rights since it was unfurled over the Statehouse in 1961, is a powerful victory for all working people. Millions watched the historic event on television worldwide.
The removal of the flag, its rapidity, the overwhelming bipartisan political support for it — all register the powerful social and political consequences of the victorious struggle led by African-Americans in the 1950s and ’60s that overthrew Jim Crow segregation. Those battles transformed the consciousness of the U.S. population.
The victory in South Carolina lays the basis to mobilize this broad sentiment to make further advances that strengthen the unity of working people, including deepening the Black Lives Matter fights that have pushed back cop violence and brutality and the fight to overturn restrictions placed on the right to vote after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
This course strengthens the working class. The propertied capitalists and their government seek to rule by divide and conquer, turning Caucasian against African-American, those with a job against the unemployed, men against women, native born against immigrant. Victories that strengthen working-class solidarity help workers see more clearly that our common enemy is the bosses and their two-party system.
Today their world system faces a deep economic and social crisis of declining capitalist production and trade. They have no answers, except to try and take it out on our backs, to try and increase their profitability through cutting jobs and speeding up work for those remaining, gutting workplace safety, and attacks on our social and political rights.
Workers need our own political party, a labor party, to unite us in action to defend ourselves against the capitalists’ attacks and to chart a course to take political power out of their hands.
The Socialist Workers Party candidates — both Walmart workers who are active in the fight for $15 an hour and a union and participants in the fight to bring the flag down in South Carolina and other working class battles — are running to advance this perspective.
Related articles:
‘Workers need our own political party’
Socialist Workers launch Phila. ballot drive: Help campaign get 2,300 signatures
‘Now take down the monuments to enforcers of white supremacy!’
How Black struggle has strengthened working class
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
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