A road forward for workers, our unions

Editorial
March 23, 2020

Workers today need to organize together to protect ourselves from the assaults of the bosses and their government. In order to protect their crisis-ridden profit system, the bosses are forced to step up their attacks on workers and farmers the world over. 

Their economic and social assaults will intensify. Today the capitalist rulers leave workers to fend for themselves, without adequate testing and a class-divided broken health system, to face the spreading coronavirus outbreak, with deadly results. 

The deepening economic crisis will sharpen competition among workers for jobs, access to health care and other necessities. The employers count on these divisions to prevent us from fighting against what they push onto our backs.

But workers won’t stop looking for ways to stand up to the bosses’ attacks on wages and working conditions. In the process of fighting together we begin to overcome the disunity in our ranks that their dog-eat-dog system imposes. And our fight will win growing working-class solidarity.

We need to spread the word and build solidarity today with copper miners on strike against Asarco bosses’ naked union-busting assault in Arizona and Texas.

The Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett explains that advancing struggles for higher wages and better working conditions is the foundation on which workers can begin to build broader resistance to the bosses’ offensive. Out of experiences in labor struggles workers become more confident that our actions make a difference, more open to seeing our own worth and more interested in discussing the kind of party we need.

We will build and strengthen our unions to reach out to join the struggles of the unemployed, farmers, fighters for women’s right to abortion, and victims of racist discrimination.

As millions are drawn into these battles, workers and consumers will be won to fight for workers control of production. We’ll find that what is necessary for our class runs into conflict with “property rights” claimed by the capitalist owners. They use their control to hide the truth about how their system of exploitation works.

As we fight to take control of production, we learn that our class will have to take over management of the entire economy to prevent the disastrous impact of capitalism’s economic and social breakdowns.

That can only become possible by building a labor party to lead our battles and to chart a course to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and establish a workers and farmers government. Join the SWP campaign in fighting for this perspective.