Socialist Workers Party candidates around the country present a course of working-class struggle against the employing class — the necessity of fighting to defend and improve our wages, social rights and working conditions. These struggles — and solidarity with others like the copper miners fighting Asarco bosses’ union-busting assault — are central to building a fighting labor movement that can draw into the struggle all those who face exploitation and oppression by the capitalist rulers. It’s the road to build workers’ self confidence and class consciousness.
Key to this is the need to use union power to fight for workers control over conditions of work and safety on the job. Only control by the working class over all aspects of production can enforce healthy and safe working conditions. As long as bosses exert their control over our jobs, their relentless drive for profits will ensure they organize and speed up work with no concern for the consequences to our lives and limbs.
As we fight the bosses over wages, working conditions and attacks on our rights here at home, working people also need to fight the government’s assaults on working people abroad, from Afghanistan to the Middle East, to their economic war against the people of Cuba and their revolution, and elsewhere in the world.
The fight to extend workers control over production is a step towards reorganizing all society, placing the direction and planning of the economy in the hands of working people, whose labor produces all wealth.
The exploiters will not relinquish their grip on power willingly — that will have to be taken from them by a revolutionary movement led by the working class.
Such a movement can only be built if workers see the need to make a clear political break with the bosses and the parties that serve their interests, and set out to organize independently of them.
SWP candidates urge working people to build their own party, a labor party. A party that organizes to strengthen working-class unity in the face of the bosses’ attempts to use each and every division — race, immigration status, sex and more — to weaken our class’s fighting capacities, a party that clarifies the class issues involved in every political question.
As struggles between capital and labor intensify, more workers will be won to act on the need to overthrow the dictatorship of capital we live under. And in the course of that struggle we will become transformed as we change our conditions of life and work. Join the SWP candidates around the country to present a revolutionary working-class course in 2020.