Statement by Seth Galinsky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New York City Council, May 31.
The Socialist Workers Party’s 2024 campaigns are beginning, with Laura Garza announcing her campaign for U.S. Senate in California at a sizable labor rally in Los Angeles. More will follow. The 2024 campaigns of the Democratic and Republican parties — the bosses’ two main parties — began early because of the bitter partisan conflicts between them.
The two capitalist parties are leading the assaults that today’s deepening crisis of capitalism impels them to take out on working people. While more than 5 million are unemployed, rising prices and interest rates are forcing millions of others to work longer and longer hours or take on another job. More young workers face difficulties getting a place of their own and starting a family.
It’s only by building the unions that we can advance a working-class course to combat these conditions and defend the interests of all those exploited and oppressed by capital.
“The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation,” the 1938 founding program of the SWP says. A union-led fight for 30 hours work for 40 hours pay can prevent layoffs by sharing the available work around, with no cut in pay. A government-funded public works program is needed to put millions to work at union-scale pay to build houses, child care centers, schools and other things working people need.
The labor movement can champion demands for escalator clauses in all contracts and benefits, so when prices rise, our wages automatically match them. That takes the burden off workers’ backs and places it onto the capitalists, whose profit system is the root cause of the problems we face.
Millions of families need income supplements to ensure they can meet their expenses and maintain steady employment, as the labor movement fights for universal child care and medical coverage.
Nothing in the deal between President Joseph Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to boost the government debt ceiling addresses workers’ needs. Democrats and Republicans joined together to bar rail workers from striking for livable schedules and conditions last year. With a new arms race underway after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, both parties place expanding the U.S. rulers’ massive arsenal for future wars above all else.
The capitalist class has two parties, but the unions — the largest and most powerful class organizations workers have — have none. Whatever gains workers make in hard-fought class battles will erode away unless labor charts an independent political course. That’s at the heart of what the SWP’s 2023 and 2024 candidates present — the need to break from the Democrats and Republicans and build a labor party based on the unions that can be an instrument for working people marching toward the elimination of the wages system and replace capitalist rule with a government of our own.