Vol. 80/No. 15 April 18, 2016
(front page)
Join spring activities to build Socialist Workers Party
Among key aspects of this concentrated effort:
Getting Socialist Workers Party candidates for U.S. president and vice president — Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart — on the ballot in six states: Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Colorado, Minnesota and Washington (see details on page 3).
Joining and promoting the fight for unionization. Organize the unorganized! We will be right in the middle of the April 14 nationwide protests for $15 and a union, and winning solidarity for other union actions by workers standing up to attempts by the bosses to make working people pay for the capitalist crisis.
Going door to door in small towns and big cities talking to workers, small farmers and young people to put forward a communist perspective and win new readers to the party’s press — the Militant and books that are part of advancing a Marxist program that points the way forward to putting an end to the dictatorship of capital.
An important beginning piece of this are teams in Wisconsin, where the big discussions and debates over the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns are an opportunity to talk to workers — no matter what bourgeois candidate they support or don’t — who are fed up with politics as usual and looking for a way to fight back against the bosses.
We will build other social protests, from the fight against police brutality to opposing the firings and deportation of immigrant workers to defense of women’s right to choose abortion, such as the April 9 demonstration in Indianapolis.
As part of all these activities, party branches are setting goals for selling subscriptions to the Militant from April 2 to May 17. Along with the paper, we will be getting Pathfinder books, with the continuity of more than 100 years of Marxist experience, into the hands of working people and youth looking for a way forward. The $110,000 Militant Fighting Fund drive will run concurrently to raise the money needed to keep the Militant in print. Weekly charts starting in the next issue will track our progress on subscriptions and the fund.
The newest of Pathfinder’s arsenal of books — The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working class: “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System” — is worth noting. This is not primarily a book about prison conditions or how to stand up to solitary confinement. It’s about the dog-eat-dog morality fostered inside that “microcosm” of capitalism that is prison in the United States. And about the lessons and example from five Cuban revolutionaries who conducted themselves with, and won others to, the morality and values of working-class solidarity and internationalism. Seven Pathfinder books, including this one, are on special during this drive.
All the capitalist candidates from Trump and Sanders to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton want you to believe that who is elected can change something fundamental. Or that whoever they appoint to the Supreme Court can do so.
The Socialist Workers Party has a diametrically opposed view. The problem working people face is worldwide. It is the dictatorship of capital. The worldwide economic crisis can’t be voted or legislated away.
As working people stand up and fight for better work conditions and wages and join other social struggles, we gain self-confidence and combat experience. But these struggles by themselves cannot put an end to the exploitation that is part and parcel of capitalism.
That’s why the Socialist Workers Party and its candidates combat illusions in electoral politics and point a road forward to workers taking power out of the hands of the capitalist class, as the workers and farmers of Cuba did in 1959. The example of what Cuba’s working people have accomplished since then, standing up to every attempt by the U.S. rulers to overthrow that revolution, shows what workers can accomplish.
After these weeks of intense work, many of those we meet will want to attend the June 16-18 Socialist Workers Party conference in Oberlin, Ohio. This international gathering will be an unequaled opportunity to bring together the experiences of the last several months, continue political discussion, gain a better understanding of the communist movement and map out the work ahead.
Our work building the communist movement won’t stop after this spring campaign, but continues 365 days a year.
Join us!
Related articles:
‘Workers need to fight to take political power’
Socialist Workers Party campaigns across Wisconsin against capitalism and its crisis
SWP candidate backs fight to prosecute California cop
SWP Campaign
For $15 an hour and a union!
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