As the social, political and moral crisis of capitalism continues to unfold, workers need to organize together to fight for our own class interests against the bosses and their government. We can stand up to their assaults on our jobs, wages and working conditions and join struggles against cop brutality, the capitalist rulers’ use of the barbaric death penalty and for a woman’s right to choose abortion. We can build solidarity with workers locked out or forced out on strike by bosses seeking to boost their profits off our backs.
To combat layoffs, workers cannot wait for the government or bosses — who have thrown millions out of work — to provide us with jobs. We need to fight for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to share the available work around. Our unions should mobilize workers to demand a government-funded public works program to put millions back to work at union-scale pay building schools, hospitals, day care and other things working people need.
It will be by organizing as a class challenging the class that exploits us that working people will chart a road forward. As we do so we will counter bosses’ efforts to foster divisions among us and their attempts to get workers to look to the lesser evil among the Democratic and Republican parties.
Joseph Biden assumes the presidency claiming he will govern for “all Americans.” It’s a lie. He will act as chief executive officer for the ruling families. He will defend the bosses’ assaults against working people here at home and deploy their armies against uprisings by working people around the world. This is what every U.S. president has done. And, like them all, Biden and his administration will seek to regulate our lives with disdain for our capacities. This is the biggest challenge workers face — to transform in struggle our own view of ourselves, our capacities to fight together, and to join in defense of our common class interests.
To advance these interests workers need a party of our own, a labor party, that is forged through our struggles — that does everything to raise our fighting spirits, self-confidence and class consciousness; that teaches workers the root of the problems we face is the rule of the capitalist class; that uncompromisingly defends all those exploited and oppressed by the dog-eat-dog capitalist system.
The best way to advance that perspective today is to join the campaign of Socialist Workers Party candidates around the country in 2021.
They are discussing with working people on doorsteps and at picket lines and social protests, presenting a fighting working-class program that explains how our class can wrest control of production from the bosses. They are pointing to hard-fought lessons learned in previous revolutionary struggles, from the rise of the industrial union movement in the 1930s to the powerful example of Cuban workers and farmers holding political power for 62 years. By forging the leadership we need, like they did, working people can fight in order to win—replacing capitalist rule and bringing to power our own workers and farmers government. This is truly something to fight for.