Socialist Workers Party 2020 presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy issued this statement April 15 in Washington, D.C. Malcolm Jarrett is the party’s vice presidential candidate.
As the capitalist rulers debate how fast they can ease up on their shutdown of workplaces and production, they will face fierce competition following similar shutdowns worldwide and a universal sharp contraction in production and trade.
Each of them will fight with all they have to protect their markets and profits against their rivals, doing so by intensifying their assaults on working people. They will step up what they have already been doing — pressing workers to work longer, harder, faster, in less safe conditions, and for lower pay. Any recovery for their class and their system built on exploitation and oppression can only be built on our backs.
This makes every effort by workers today to stand up to the bosses and to fight for dignity important. It means we need to overcome the panic and dread the rulers try to inculcate in us to get us to acquiesce to being pushed out of work and “socially isolated.”
Each time we combine together with fellow workers to fight the bosses we gain much needed experience and advance our self-confidence and trust in each other.
Socialist Workers Party members look for and listen to what’s happening to our co-workers where we work and join together with fellow workers to organize resistance to the bosses’ attacks. We get word out about these skirmishes to the workers, farmers and other exploited producers we talk to in cities, towns and rural areas, learning about the fights they’re involved in. We discuss how we can involve all those attracted to working-class struggle in whatever way possible.
We extend solidarity to all those fighting today — here and around the world. My campaign urges you to join with us to combat the impact of depression conditions inflicted on our class by the workings of capitalism.
The SWP is advancing a fighting program to meet today’s social crisis:
We need to wage a fight for a massive federally funded public works program to put millions back to work at union-scale pay, replacing crumbling infrastructure and building clinics, housing, schools, day care centers, mass transit and other things working people desperately need.
- The increasing number of workers without jobs serves the bosses as a reserve army of labor they use to deepen competition among us. The fight for a public works program and jobs is inseparable from advancing the unity of the working class and strengthening the skirmishes workers are organizing on the job.
- To prevent the bosses from producing dangerous and shoddy goods, or refusing to make what workers need, and lying about their costs, workers need to wrest increasing control over production. This is the only road to control the pace of work and safety on the job and for consumers as well. Organizing control over production will be a school for workers to prepare for taking over and running the whole economy in the interests of the vast majority.
- Fight for amnesty for all workers without papers in the U.S. Bosses use the threat of deportation hanging over millions of undocumented workers to drive down the wages and working conditions of all working people. These workers — hardest hit by the current crisis — are fellow workers and fellow fighters. This struggle can strengthen the entire working class and advance the prospects for organizing the unorganized.
- Workers need our own party, a labor party. A party that fights on the shop floor and on the streets 365 days a year. A party that organizes working people to lead all the exploited and oppressed to replace the capitalist rulers’ government with a government of workers and farmers.
Join in fighting for this perspective as we organize together with fellow workers to push back against the bosses’ assaults!