Breakup of Trump rally sets back working class

Socialist Workers Party campaign statement

The following statement was released March 12 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president.

On March 11, hundreds of people organized to disrupt and force the cancellation of a Chicago rally where thousands had come to hear Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. This was a blow to free speech — a vital conquest of working people and protection of our right to speak, organize strike pickets, and mobilize protest rallies and marches.

I was at the Chicago rally talking with workers and finding interest in what the Socialist Workers Party has to say. Most of those who came to hear Trump are working people, hard hit by the world economic depression and fed up with a system that ignores persistent unemployment, employer attacks on wages and job conditions and other indignities. They’re interested in Trump because he thumbs his nose at party bosses and says he has a “winning” plan to create jobs.

Efforts to shut down those you disagree with set back workers’ struggles. The working class must defend free speech for all. We need it to discuss and debate how to defend ourselves from employer and government attacks. We need an independent working-class political alternative to the rulers’ parties. Shutting down political expression is inevitably turned against workers, our unions and other organizations by the capitalist government, courts, cops and hired goons.

Liberal and middle-class radical groups that call for thuggish actions to shout down Trump play into the hands of his campaign and his Republican and Democratic rivals. They put wind in the sails of Trump’s own thuggish rhetoric targeting immigrants, Muslims, women and protesters.

The arguments by such political groups go hand in hand with bourgeois commentators of all stripes who say that those who attend Trump’s rallies are bigoted Caucasian workers. This is a slander, something we confirm as the SWP campaigns, whether in workers’ neighborhoods or elsewhere, including Trump rallies.

Trump isn’t a fascist. There is no growing ultrarightist or fascist movement today. The bosses don’t need one, because the working class is not yet strong or organized enough to challenge their rule.

Some protesters in Chicago carried signs against deportations, defending rights for Muslims, opposing cop killings and championing Black rights. The working class has a big stake in these struggles. But strengthening them is inseparable from defending space to speak and demonstrate.

The Socialist Workers Party urges working people to break with the capitalist parties, to build our own party, a labor party based on our unions.

Join us in campaigning for the socialist, working-class alternative. Join us in the fight for $15 and a union and other labor actions, protests against cop violence, rallies backing a woman’s right to choose abortion, against deportations and attacks on mosques, and in support of ranchers and farmers defending their livelihood.

Without championing the right to speak out and organize, none of this will be possible.

Related articles:
Socialist candidate gets hearing at Trump event
Socialist Workers Party launches state campaigns

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home