The future of humanity depends on building a leadership, a party, that can mobilize the working class in our millions to take state power away from the capitalist rulers and place it into our own hands, to start down the road to a socialist revolution. This will open the door to ending the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalist rule worldwide.
The U.S. today is a capitalist dictatorship, a deeply class-divided society ruled over by the bosses, their political parties and their government, backed by a bloated layer of upper-middle-class hangers-on. There can be no proposals that can unite us. The politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties claim to speak for working families, but working people increasingly recognize this isn’t true.
The Socialist Workers Party puts forward a program to organize and build a powerful union movement for working people to join together to fight for the things we need — wages and hours that enable us to raise our families with a decent place to live, safe working conditions so we can make it home in one piece, government-funded all-embracing health care, child care and elder care, and more. Hundreds of thousands of workers and their unions, from auto, rail, truckers, flight attendants, nurses and others are fighting for demands that point in this direction.
Well over a half million workers will see their union contracts expire this year, from postal workers to dockworkers, teachers and grocery clerks. And they are willing to fight after years of losing ground.
Inspired by last year’s auto strikes, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, have signed up to join the United Auto Workers union. Their fight deserves the solidarity of all working people. The company says this is not the right time, and this is not the right way, says autoworker Jeremy Kimbrell, but the thing is “this is our decision.”
That statement expresses a widespread willingness to fight among working people today. We are human beings who can take action to shape our future. We can organize society without exploitation and oppression. Workers’ solidarity can overcome the ways the capitalists divide us for profit by fighting to end two-tier contracts, life-sucking “suicide” schedules and women’s second-class status. Amnesty for immigrant workers in the U.S. would allow them the right to work without fear of deportation and open the door to unifying the working class. Organize all workers!
The labor movement is made up of unions representing millions of workers today. The unions need to break from the political parties of the bosses — Democrats and Republicans alike — to build a labor party capable of fighting for our class interests in the political as well as economic arena. To speak as a tribune for all those exploited and oppressed by capital.
Workers and farmers helped lead two great American revolutions, for independence and the overthrow of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of workers joined forces in the 1930s to organize powerful industrial unions. These gains, and the mighty post-World War II battles for independence from colonial rule in Africa, Asia and Latin America, helped kindle the Black-led mass working-class movement that brought down the scourge of Jim Crow segregation once and for all.
Our class has never been in a stronger position to join hands to fight all attempts by the bosses and their parties to divide us, and to take on the war, exploitation and oppression that marks our epoch — the capitalist system itself. We can rise to the task imposed on us by history.
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The working-class party that seeks to lead our class to political power must, first and foremost, defend the Jewish people from a new wave of pogroms. Jew-hatred is a life-and-death question for the working class. The Oct. 7 massacre in Israel carried out by Hamas with help and direction from the reactionary capitalist government of Iran — truly a pogrom — was the worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It unleashed a torrent of Jew-hatred around the world.
The Holocaust did not have to happen. Stalinist and Social Democratic governments and parties betrayed working-class struggles in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere whose victories would have prevented Hitler from ever taking power. The so-called democratic imperialist countries, including the Franklin Roosevelt-led United States, slammed their doors shut to Jewish refugees, condemning Jews in Europe to the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. These historic disasters made Israel a necessity as a refuge for the Jewish people.
Immediately after the Oct. 7 pogrom, I, and other candidates of the SWP, took to the streets in protest, spoke to the press, joined debates at city councils and other activities against Jew-hatred.
As we campaign in our unions and in working-class communities, we explain that Jew-hatred, a reflection of the crisis of capitalism, is the tip of the spear. Ultimately, when they feel their rule is threatened, the capitalists will back fascist thugs who, with their banner of “Kill the Jews,” will move to smash the unions, crush the working class and annihilate the Jewish people.
Abram Leon, leader of the communist movement in Belgium, wrote The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. He said, “There is no way to resolve the Jewish question independent of the world proletarian revolution.” Leon was killed in 1944 in the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Two years ago, the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia unleashed its murderous war against Ukraine with the aim of erasing it from the map — its history, its language and culture, its right to exist.
Ukrainian workers and farmers have been conducting a courageous 10-year fight to defend their national sovereignty and independence. In 2014 hundreds of thousands of working people across the country took to the streets in pitched battles known as the Revolution of Dignity. Since 2022 they have fought heroically to push back Moscow’s invasion, winning the solidarity of workers worldwide, including in Russia.
For working people in the U.S., the toilers in Ukraine are our class allies, and their fight for national independence is our fight. For the U.S. rulers, the plight of Ukraine is an opportunity to find new ways to strengthen their hand for future wars to expand their control over markets and profits.
We are at a turning point in world politics. These two historic watershed events — in Ukraine and Israel — reflect the weaknesses and breakdowns of the imperialist “world order,” and the danger of spreading wars and potential for nuclear catastrophe.
The SWP’s 2022 political resolution, printed in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, states, “Only socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries can bring the danger of a world nuclear conflagration to an end once and for all.”
We don’t call for nonproliferation or arms treaties or disarmament. We say, “The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers.”
The reality we are living through today is beyond the control of the capitalist powers. But it is not outside the control of the tens of millions in the working class who, with a communist leadership, are capable of changing the world.
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The Socialist Workers Party presents a working-class program to fight for the interests of all the oppressed and exploited. Workers see the effects of the capitalist crisis every day of our lives.
- Defend constitutional protections — freedom of speech, assembly, and of worship — won over 250 years in mighty class battles. This is at the center of the class struggle today. We oppose the Democratic Party-organized witch hunt of Donald Trump and hail the victory in the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision overturning the attempt by Colorado authorities to throw him off the ballot, affirming the right of millions to vote for the candidate of their choice.
- Every worker has a right to a job. The SWP calls for a government-funded program of public works to create millions of union-scale jobs to build housing, schools, hospitals, child care and elder care centers, and rebuild the collapsing infrastructure the employers are letting rot throughout the country.
- For a sliding scale of hours and wages. Reduce the workweek with no cut in pay to help ensure no worker is laid off. For automatic cost-of-living clauses in all union contracts and social programs like Social Security to assure wage increases keep up 100% with inflation.
- For workers control of production, organized by the unions. No worker has to die on the job! Workers have a right to know the bosses’ business secrets — of the company, whole industries and the national economy, and to take control over what is produced and to meet the needs of the vast majority.
- The fight for women’s emancipation, the ability to participate fully in all aspects of building a new society, is tied to ending the capitalist-caused crises of joblessness, lack of quality housing, child care, medical care as well as suicide and drug-addiction — all of which bear down on working-class families and women especially. We fight for women’s right to reproductive and maternal health care, sex education, safe and reliable contraceptives and the decriminalization of abortion.
We look to the example of the two great working-class revolutions of the past century — the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia, led by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and Cuba’s socialist revolution, led by Fidel Castro. These are part of the Socialist Workers Party continuity that show working people are capable of taking political power and transforming society, as well as ourselves. A new world can be built. Join the Socialist Workers Party.