SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY CAMPAIGN STATEMENT

Organize workers to defend class interests

September 9, 2019

The following statement was issued Aug. 28 by Seth Galinsky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New York City public advocate.

Working people from New York and Puerto Rico to the coalfields of Appalachia and the Powder River Basin face attacks by the bosses and their cops, courts and government. We don’t have to accept this state of affairs.

Today there are examples of working people standing up to defend our interests — like Blackjewel miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, thrown out on the street after bosses declared bankruptcy. Miners are preventing the company from shipping out coal until they get the pay they’re owed.

Wherever workers are standing up to the bosses’ assaults we can organize to bring solidarity. Every act of solidarity helps unify the working class and strengthens our ability to stand up and fight.

The capitalist rulers’ efforts to make us pay for the crisis of their system has no end. As competition sharpens between bosses at Walmart and their retail competitors, they tighten their squeeze on the workers to maximize their profits. Rail workers confront bosses operating longer and longer trains with fewer workers, making conditions increasingly dangerous. Federal officials plan to grant the packing bosses’ demands to end all limits on line speeds in pork processing plants, further threatening workers’ lives and limbs.

The Blackjewel miners have been winning widespread support and aid, from retired United Mine Workers union members, churches, small businesses, other unions and individual workers. What we do makes a difference! Win your co-workers, family and friends to offering solidarity for this working-class struggle and others like it.

As workers organize together we gain experience and become more confident, like our fellow workers in Puerto Rico did when their mass actions brought down the governor.

We develop consciousness of our power as a class. We learn how to fight in a disciplined way. We see more clearly how our interests are tied together with those of fellow working people around the world.

Two years ago U.S. colonial rulers and the capitalist government in Puerto Rico left working people there to fend for themselves, in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Now another hurricane threatens to wreak more havoc. Working people in Puerto Rico and the U.S. have common interests in fighting for an end to U.S. colonial rule and cancelling Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt.

The capitalists want to convince us to see each other as the problem, not their exploitative system and the crises and wars it breeds. To look out for “number one.”

The Socialist Workers Party candidates do the opposite. Our program is aimed at advancing the unity of working people, to point a road forward together against our common enemy: the capitalist system.

That’s why we demand amnesty for all immigrants in the U.S. without papers. That would open the door wide so they can more easily join in struggles for higher pay, safer conditions and for dignity without the fear of deportation. This will put all workers in a stronger position.

The Socialist Workers Party campaign organizes to involve other workers in every union fight and social protest in the interests of the working class.

Through common struggle we become different people, more conscious that working people are part of the exploited class that creates the wealth that the capitalists take away from us. That we are capable of overturning capitalist rule and taking power into our own hands.