Statement issued by John Studer, Socialist Workers Party national campaign director, Nov. 16.
Socialist Workers Party candidates in 2022 were the only voice saying that politics is not Red vs. Blue, or liberal vs. conservative, but class vs. class. They explained working people need our own party, separate and opposed to the bosses’ Democrats and Republicans, and a working-class line-of-march forward. They built support for union strike struggles, presented proposals to protect working people from soaring prices and unemployment, and pointed to the common interests we share with workers worldwide.
Every other political force campaigned for or against former President Donald Trump, from Democrats of all stripes, the middle-class left, Never-Trump and newly minted No-more Trump Republicans to the Trump-endorsed Republican candidates. All these choices are a trap for workers.
Under capitalist rule, all those in the political arena serve the needs of one or the other of the two main classes, but not both. The bosses have two parties, and act as if that presents workers with a real choice. It’s a sham. For the bosses, “which party do they support? They support both,” wrote Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon in 1944. “And what is even more important, both parties support them in all fundamental questions.”
History shows — from the massive labor battles that built industrial unions in the 1930s to the Black-led working class movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation — that as the class struggle deepens more workers become fed up with the bosses’ parties. They increasingly recognize we need to rely on ourselves, to organize all those oppressed and exploited by capital to fight together and build solidarity with one another.
The road forward on this course is to organize and strengthen our unions, to build solidarity with all those on the front lines, from school workers in Ontario to 115,000 rail workers in the U.S. to the courageous workers and youth in Iran to the inspiring fighting people of Ukraine.
SWP candidates advanced this perspective and explained the decisive question is which class holds political power. They explained what workers and farmers can do together to establish our own government.
Working people in Cuba, under the Marxist leadership of Fidel Castro and other leaders of the July 26 Movement, took political power into their own hands, making ever deeper inroads against capitalist exploitation and property relations. Through their struggles they made, and recognized, the socialist character of their accomplishments and revolution — an example that can be emulated everywhere.
Ever since Cuban workers and farmers stormed to victory in 1959, the Socialist Workers Party here has acted on its pledge to do likewise. Join us!