Statement by Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New Jersey governor, June 22.
As workers face bosses demanding speedup, givebacks in wages and attacks on safety, more of my fellow workers ask why is this happening? What can we do?
My campaign, and the national ticket of Socialist Workers Party candidates, invites you to join us on the frontline of labor battles and strikes, organizing to support them and presenting a road forward that can end the root cause of the problems working people face.
Between now and November we are offering a fighting perspective to unite and strengthen working people in our skirmishes on the job and the picket line, and to join in building a working-class political alternative to the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties. The wealthy owners of the factories, the land and the banks can only profit and accumulate obscene wealth off our backs. That is how their capitalist system works. We need our own party that acts in the interests workers share in common — here and around the world.
We find widespread interest in our campaigns among workers outraged at persistent unemployment, rising prices, cop brutality, rising crime in our communities, which the rulers don’t care about, and at the efforts of “woke” employers to tell us what we can and can’t say.
We need our own party to organize all those oppressed and exploited by capital to fight to take power into our own hands. The working class would set out “to govern, expropriate the exploiters and oppressors, and lead a great social movement to reorganize society to eliminate oppression and lay the foundations of a socialist society — changing ourselves utterly in the process,” wrote Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP, in The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party.
Malcolm X explained this transformation, Barnes writes, “with exemplary clarity only a few weeks before his assassination in February 1965. A reporter asked him: Was his goal to ‘wake [African Americans] up to their exploitation?’ Malcolm replied, ‘No to their humanity, to their own worth.’”
SWP candidates act on the demonstrated capacities of working people to organize disciplined and united actions in our own interests and to transform ourselves in so doing. Examples abound — from the breathtakingly rapid rise of the industrial union movement in the 1930s to the mighty Black-led mobilizations that overthrew Jim Crow segregation and changed social relations forever.
We can join in the fights taking place today at the Warrior Met coal mine, ATI steel, Marathon Petroleum and more, and at protests against the U.S. rulers’ wars abroad, in defense of a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, against the barbaric death penalty, and for science and culture. We see in action how the working class is capable of carrying the fight against capitalist rule through to the end.
That is what working people did in Cuba in 1959. Under the leadership of Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, workers and farmers made a revolution and established their own government. They organized massive mobilizations to support nationalizations of capitalist companies and began to run these enterprises for human need not private profit. Millions of acres of land were expropriated, eliminating the capitalist rents and mortgages system, providing land for all who wanted to till it. In the course of these giant class battles working people saw their true capacities, recognized the socialist character of their accomplishments and the Marxist character of their leadership.
That powerful example is what SWP campaigners are organizing to emulate. Join us in building a party to do that here!