Statement by John Studer, Socialist Workers Party national campaign director, Nov. 10.
The only party that told the truth in the 2021 elections about how working people can fight back against mounting attacks we face today was the Socialist Workers Party.
Our candidates explained the root cause of the crisis — the capitalist rulers, who put their profits above all the needs of land and labor — and how workers can chart a course to take political power into our own hands. They set an example by joining union struggles and building solidarity that is crucial to the outcome and to strengthen the entire labor movement.
Because of the crisis of their system and sharpening competition worldwide, the rulers are driven to carry out assaults on our jobs, wages and working conditions. They know they will meet growing resistance. That is why they attack our political rights and why they use their cops and courts to ban picketing by United Mine Workers strikers at Warrior Met. They use their state power in a myriad of ways to wrap us and our unions up in red tape and regulations aimed at blunting our fighting power.
Underlying every political question are class divisions. On one side stand the bosses and their legions of middle-class enablers, who depend on squeezing working people harder to defend their profits. On the other side are workers and farmers fighting to wrest from their hands a greater share of the wealth that our labor alone produces.
Working people and our unions lose when we look to the rulers’ two political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Both claim to act for “all Americans,” but loyally serve the wealthy rulers. When they want you to vote for the fox, Malcolm X explained, they show you the wolf.
Workers can only address all political questions together from the standpoint of our class interests, just as the bosses do to defend theirs.
For that we need our own party, a labor party, based on our unions and the struggles they lead. It would show in word and deed that workers have common interests in combating all exploitation and oppression. It would lead fights to win protection from joblessness and inflation, and organize opposition to Washington’s wars and interventions around the world. It would champion the fights of all those oppressed and exploited by capital.
Most importantly, it would act on the capacities of workers and farmers themselves to mount the uncompromising struggle necessary to overturn capitalist rule, as working people did in Cuba in 1959.
With a communist leadership they took power, established a workers and farmers government, took the factories, land and banks from the capitalist exploiters and reorganized production under workers control to meet human need. The courage, discipline, class consciousness and internationalism they acquired shows what working people can become. That has made possible their decadeslong resistance to the U.S. rulers’ economic war against their socialist revolution.
Their example is one working people in the U.S. can emulate.