The following is a Nov. 6 statement by Malcolm Jarrett, who ran as the Socialist Workers Party 2019 candidate for Pittsburgh City Council.
The capitalist rulers use their two-party shell game to try and get working people caught up chasing after “lesser evil” candidates who won’t do as much damage as those of the bosses’ other party.
My party says workers need to break from all lesser-evil politics. We need our own party, a labor party, to fight to unite all those who are exploited and oppressed by capital and to chart a course toward taking political power into our own hands.
The boss class engages in dog-eat-dog competition at home and abroad for markets and profit, working to push wages down and speed up labor — disdainful of the effects on safety as they despoil the land, sea and air. They do so with little thought to whether we have enough food to eat, a place to live, the means to raise a family or any way to survive as we get older. The propertied rulers in the U.S. have their tentacles everywhere in the world with the same agenda — seeking control over resources and to rake in profit off the backs of labor.
This leads to sharpening competition, trade conflicts and wars from the Middle East to Afghanistan and threats of war elsewhere. When workers are killed in their wars, or come home maimed and distraught, they’re tossed aside as no longer useful and left to fend for themselves.
The rulers increasingly fear the working class and coming class struggles. So they look for ways to regulate us, control us and stop us from becoming actors in history.
Their biggest ploy is to try and pit workers against each other — employed versus those without jobs, Caucasians against Blacks against Hispanics, men against women, native-born against immigrant, and more. They work overtime trying to keep us divided.
But even buttressed by the millions of self-absorbed meritocrats who clog up the liberal press editorial offices, college faculties, government regulatory agencies and do-gooder nongovernmental organizations, the rulers and their hangers-on are a minority who do nothing to create anything of human value. With our labor we produce all the wealth.
In their insatiable drive to make profit off of land and labor, they ruin everything around them. To working people falls the guardianship of science and art, and the earth and all that is on it. Working people need to fight to impose workers control over the pace of work and conditions at the places where we labor, and to extend our control over all production and transportation to prevent the bosses’ fouling of the earth, skies and oceans.
They work to try and “learn” us that we aren’t worth anything, we’re just not smart, we’re bigoted and irresponsible. And that the best we can do is try to stay out of their jails and scrape and save to send our kids to a “good school” to get out of the working class and join them in keeping working people down.
But that is a lie.
Today the capitalist rulers are in the midst of an economic, social, political and moral crisis. Their disdain for working people; their greed; their willingness to step on anyone and anything to advance their wealth and the way their system daily fosters homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness — these conditions are beginning to change the outlook of millions.
The great U.S. working-class leader Malcolm X explained that the exploiters rule by trying to destroy our self-confidence. By coming together in struggle, we learn our own self-worth and our common interests and power as a class.
Heading into the 2020 presidential elections, the capitalist rulers’ Democratic and Republican two-party system is weakened. From Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren, from libertarian to capitalist-reform socialist, their candidates do not point a way forward for the working class.
The Socialist Workers Party will be fielding a slate of candidates for president and vice president, the Senate and House, and other offices all across the country, armed with a fighting working-class program to confront the assaults of the bosses and their government.
We’ll be part of millions worldwide, from Iraq to Lebanon, from Ecuador to Chile and Haiti, from Sudan to Algeria and Hong Kong, organizing to fight together and looking for a road to successfully bring an end to oppression and tyranny.
We’ll explain there are examples we can learn from that point the way forward — from the building of the Teamsters union movement in the Midwest, led by Socialist Workers Party leaders in the 1930s, to the Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in 1959 and has been setting an example of workers and farmers in power for decades since.
We have nothing to lose but oppression and exploitation. We have a world to win. Join us, there is no better life to live!