EDITORIAL

Join SWP in taking its campaign out to workers!

October 29, 2018
Dan Fein, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Illinois governor, talks with Willie Norwood, right, in Kankakee. Bedrock of party’s campaigning is going door to door to talk with workers
MilitantDan Fein, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Illinois governor, talks with Willie Norwood, right, in Kankakee. Bedrock of party’s campaigning is going door to door to talk with workers

The Militant calls on working people to join the Socialist Workers Party candidates campaigning up to the Nov. 6 elections. They are the only candidates who explain that working people need to break from the bosses’ political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. We need our own party, a labor party based on the unions.

The big-business press tries to convince us to “be practical, don’t throw away your vote” — that our only choice is to vote for the lesser evil. But to vote for anyof the candidates of the bosses’ parties is throwing away your vote.

They tell us “we” are all Americans, but there is no “we.” There are two Americas — the America of the relative handful of billionaire families who own the banks, mines, factories and retail giants, and their hangers-on, and the America of those forced to work for them to survive.

They say that when they get richer, it’s good for us because we get the crumbs off their table. But it’s a lie. When they get richer, it’s off our backs. Our interests are fundamentally counterposed.

Working people need to think socially and act politically. We aren’t just workers fighting for our class interests here in the U.S., we are part of the international working class. We have no interests in the U.S. rulers’ trade pacts, much less their wars to seize markets and profits off the lives of workers abroad. We have common class interests to fight against the bosses and their governments alongside all the oppressed and exploited the world over.

Millions of workers and farmers are looking for a solution to the growing carnage of the capitalist economic and social crisis. Deaths on the job because of the bosses’ greed. The opioid and alcoholism epidemics. Lack of adequate health care. Young people used as cannon fodder in the rulers’ wars around the world. Some 115,000 students in New York City public schools who are homeless — fully 10 percent of all students. The social catastrophes coming out of so-called natural disasters. The conditions faced by our brothers and sisters behind bars.

We face a challenge. Only 6.5 percent of workers at private companies belong to a union.

Feeling a little more confidence with the cyclical upturn in the capitalist economy, more workers are seeking to join unions, or are fighting, or striking to improve conditions and wages — like Uber and other drivers, like thousands of striking hotel workers who proclaim, “One job should be enough.” But under capitalism today, one job is often not enough to pay the rent, to feed and clothe our families.

The SWP candidates encourage workers to organize solidarity with the hotel workers and all those who go on strike or are organizing to be in a union today.

We need a fighting union movement that says, “We don’t care where you were born, we don’t care what language you speak, we don’t care about the color of your skin. Join us! Let’s fight together!”

But we need more than that. We need our own working-class political voice.

Our own labor party, based on the unions, would challenge the Democrats and Republicans not just in the elections. It would build a fighting alliance between workers and exploited farmers. It would be a tribune of the people drawing in all the oppressed. And it would open the road to taking political and economic power out of the hands of the capitalist carnage-makers once and for all.

Join the Socialist Workers Party campaign!