Editorial

Working people need their own party

October 14, 2019

As growing evidence points to a slowdown in the world capitalist economy, no ruling class around the world has any solution to defending their profits and national interests other than through currency, trade and military conflicts — and above all offloading their system’s crisis onto the backs of working people.

Workers also face the consequences of the factional clashes between the bosses’ parties. The target of liberals in both the U.S. and U.K., who are criminalizing the political differences of their rivals, are the millions of workers who voted for the U.K. to get out of the protectionist European Union, or who cast their ballot for Donald Trump seeking to “clean the swamp” in Washington. Liberals think workers are too ignorant and bigoted to be allowed to make such decisions. They are determined to overturn those votes.

But workers today are neither reactionary nor stupid. They are searching for a course to fight against the attacks of the bosses and their government.

Workers look to organize together to resist the bosses’ attempts to profit off our backs. Such struggles are bred by the very workings of capitalism — from the strike by autoworkers against GM bosses, to the fight for dignity and national rights waged by the people of West Papua against Indonesian authorities and the fight of millions for political rights in Hong Kong.

Bosses and their governments count on keeping working people from gaining confidence in ourselves and on fostering divisions to pit us against each other. But as workers fight together to change the conditions we face, we also change ourselves. We learn our self-worth and begin to act on our capacities as a class. And fighting workers begin discussing how to use our numbers and union power to defend all those exploited and oppressed by capitalism.

As long as the capitalist class holds state power, the workings of their system guarantees they will endure and we will pay. What the working class requires is a party with a program and strategy for the conquest of power by our class and its allies.

The struggle to build such a party “does not arise spontaneously” and “is impossible without the generalization of lessons of working-class battles — not in any single factory or industry, not in any single country, nor at any given moment,” explains the Socialist Workers Party resolution “Their Transformation and Ours,” published in New International no. 12.

The Socialist Workers Party is launching a nine-week campaign to win new readers — on strike picket lines, at social protests and door to door in working-class neighborhoods — to the Militant and books that explain the lessons won in blood from past revolutionary battles. And to raise $100,000 to finance the ongoing work of the SWP.  Join us!