This statement was issued Oct. 27 by Socialist Workers Party candidates for president and vice president, Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett.
Vote for the Socialist Workers Party! We are the only party offering working people a way to defend ourselves from a deepening economic, health and moral crisis that the capitalist rulers are foisting on our backs.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump say “Americans” need to come together. But there are two Americas — the rulers of the propertied capitalist families on one side and the tens of millions of workers, farmers and youth on the other.
For the capitalist system of the bosses to return to profitability they need to restore their dog-eat-dog competitive edge against rivals at home and abroad by inflicting deep cuts on our jobs, wages, and health care provisions. Whether Trump or Biden is elected, they will loyally serve the ruthless self-interest of the exploiting class, and working people will go to the wall.
The socialist candidates are presenting a road forward to build an independent, fighting working-class movement of millions to take political power into our own hands. That’s a struggle that will continue long after Nov. 3.
For government-funded public works program
The SWP urges fellow workers and our unions to fight for a government-funded public works program, putting all those thrown out of work back into jobs at union-scale pay to build the housing, hospitals, schools and other things working people need. To fight for a cut in the workweek with no cut in take-home pay, to spread the work around and prevent layoffs. To build solidarity with workers who are standing up to boss attacks on their wages and conditions, like the strikers at Dominion grocery stores in Canada.
As bosses push speedup on the job, with utter disregard for our health and safety, workers need to fight to wrest control of production out of their grasp. Under workers control, decisions are made based on the protection of life and limb of all, not the bosses’ profits, and workers learn more about our own capacities.
Workers need our own political party, a labor party, that acts in the defense of all those exploited and oppressed by capital and leads millions to take political power and put a workers and farmers government in place.
Along the way, fighting workers confront blows aimed at our political rights. The SWP has initiated an urgently needed fight to halt officials of Washington state from making the names and addresses of its presidential electors public. Such a disclosure would open the door to harassment, spying and attacks on SWP supporters by cops, bosses, rightists, middle-class radicals and all those who believe the way to deal with those you disagree with is to shut them up. It comes on the heels of a series of death threats made against party campaigners there.
This fight is in the interests of all working people and deserves your support.
The mighty revolution made by working people in Cuba in 1959 and defended for decades since shows it is possible to build a movement that can end the dictatorship of the capitalist class and reorganize society in the interests of the vast majority.
Vote for the SWP presidential ticket and all its local candidates in your area. If the party’s candidates have been kept off the ballot where you live, write them in. We’re out to build a movement that can change the world.