Statement by Vivian Sahner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New Jersey lieutenant governor, Aug. 11.
Working people are not only capable of waging mighty revolutionary struggles, we have proven we can win. That is the lesson of the two great socialist revolutions of the imperialist epoch — the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Cuba’s socialist revolution. Decisive to both was forging a Marxist vanguard party to lead workers and farmers to take power.
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the July 26 Movement led working people in Cuba to overturn the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and replace capitalist rule with a workers and farmers government. They uprooted capitalist exploitation by seizing the factories, land and banks from the propertied owners; organized production to meet human needs; and drew working people into taking ever more control over their lives. As they transformed themselves, workers and farmers understood the socialist character of the revolution they were making and determined to defeat all attempts by the U.S. imperialists to crush them.
Cuba’s socialist revolution opened the possibility of using state power, the most powerful instrument fighting toilers can ever wield, to carry through to the end the struggle to eradicate racial and national oppression, the subjugation of women and all other forms of exploitation and human degradation from millennia of class-divided society. These politically class-conscious and organized fighters and their government offered fellow workers worldwide selfless internationalism. Cuba provides the most powerful example of what working people can and must do as we face the rulers’ attempts to put the economic and moral crisis of their dog-eat-dog system on our backs.
Only by taking — and wielding — state power, can the working class prevent deeper capitalist crises and, with them, the rulers’ inevitable march toward fascism and war. Before fascist forces can grow, we will have our chance. We will have the opportunity to forge a leadership to emulate what Castro led workers and farmers to do.
The powerful example of a living socialist revolution is the reason the Democratic Party administration of President Joseph Biden — like every Democrat and Republican since Cuban workers and farmers took power — is ratcheting up the U.S. rulers’ brutal economic war against Cuba, financing counterrevolutionary agents and interfering in Cuban affairs. That is why it is stepping up the U.S. rulers’ six-decades-long drive to try to starve working people in Cuba into submission.
We will tell the truth about Cuba’s socialist revolution, the example it sets, and mobilize opposition against Washington’s attacks. And above all build a party capable of uniting working people to win the massive battles the crisis of capitalism is preparing. Join the Socialist Workers Party!