June 24 statement by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president. Malcolm Jarrett is the party’s candidate for vice president.
Join the Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign — the working-class alternative to the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties! Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both staunchly committed to defending the interests of the capitalist rulers, their never-ending assaults on jobs, wages and working conditions and the cop brutality and wars their system breeds.
Our campaign starts from the fact that workers and farmers have the capacity to fight to change these conditions, to build a movement of millions that can end them once and for all.
SWP candidates around the country are building solidarity with striking union machinists in Bath, Maine, who are standing up to the shipyard bosses’ demands to replace them with more and cheaper subcontractors and for other concessions. Strikers told SWP campaigners who joined their picket lines June 23 that they are determined to stop the bosses from doing away with union jobs that area youth will need in the future. Join us in getting the word out about their struggle and help spread resistance to the bosses’ attacks!
Every fight waged by workers is important, whether we have a union or not — from the Machinists strike in Maine and the many on-the-job actions at Walmart and elsewhere where workers come together to push back bosses’ attacks, to the widespread protests against cop brutality.
SWP campaigners build actions to push forward the fight to win the prosecution of cops who brutalize working people, from George Floyd in Minneapolis to Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, to Mike Ramos in Austin, Texas, and many others.
But deadly assaults by cops will not end under capitalism. Cops are an irreplaceable part of the capitalist rulers’ “justice” system, with its frame-ups and plea-bargain railroad to prison that exist for only one reason — to protect those who profit from our exploitation. One of the main reasons the bosses and their government set up the cops beginning in the 1830s was to use them against the labor movement.
The same ruling class that relies on the cops’ violence enforces life-threatening speedup on the job, leaves millions of workers without health care and sends us to fight and die in their wars.
As SWP campaigners talk with fellow working people in cities, towns and rural areas, and learn more about the conditions they face, we point to what can be done today to build a movement that workers and farmers will use to end capitalist rule.
We explain why workers need to build our own party, a labor party, based on our struggles against attacks by the bosses and their government. A party that can unite and mobilize the immense power of all those exploited and oppressed and lead us to break from the capitalists’ twin parties and chart our own course forward.
As we do so workers will fight to take more control of production out of the bosses’ hands, so that we set line speeds and safety conditions, decide how many workers are hired, and ensure that the shoddy and dangerous goods they produce — like the Boeing 737 Max — are never made that way again.
Taking control over all aspects of production will be a school for our class and our allies to learn how to run the entire economy as we organize to take political power into our own hands.
“Only the conquest, and exercise, of state power by the working class and the expropriation of finance capital can lay the foundations for a world based not on exploitation, violence, racial discrimination, class-based pecking orders, and dog-eat-dog competition,” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes writes in Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, “but on solidarity among working people that encourages the creativity and recognition of the worth of every individual, regardless of sex, national origin, or skin color.
“A socialist world.”
This is a life truly worth living! Join the SWP campaign!