For decades the ruling capitalist families have governed through a two-party shell game, keeping workers tied to voting for the “lesser evil” between the bosses’ parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
A working-class alternative needs to be built. It begins with workers joining together to fight for better wages and conditions, and unions advancing demands for protection from the ravages of inflation, and fighting for health care, child care and other necessities that make family life possible. But that’s not enough.
Just as workers need unions to defend us on the job, we need our own voice in the political arena. That requires a decisive break from the Democratic and Republican parties, to independent working-class political action. The intense factional conflict between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump today is not the fundamental political division in the U.S. All political questions are an expression of the irreconcilable class conflicts between the capitalists and working people.
We need to build a labor party, based on the unions, that advances the broad political and social interests of the working class as a whole. In thousands of ways, the capitalist rulers tell us we aren’t capable, aren’t smart enough, to run society. This is a lie. The working class makes everything, we are the only productive class.
As our class-struggle battles deepen, we see more clearly that we can draw on the experiences of all sections of the working class to act on workers’ capacities to unite and fight to change the conditions dog-eat-dog capitalist exploitation imposes on us, transforming the world and ourselves in the process.
There is no motion towards building a labor party today. But backing Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, is the road in 2024 to advance independent working-class political action.
The SWP campaign explains that without a political party of our own, gains that workers make in union struggles are more vulnerable to assault from the bosses and their government, which use tools like the notorious anti-labor Railway Labor Act. A labor party would generalize workers’ struggles beyond our fights with bosses in one industry, to an overall struggle against the capitalist class as a whole. It would fight for a working-class foreign policy based on our shared interests and solidarity with workers worldwide. It would mount opposition to the U.S. rulers’ predatory foreign policy and their imperialist wars. And to all expressions of Jew-hatred — a deadly threat to the working class.
Establishing a labor party would mark a powerful step forward in forging the class independence and working-class leadership needed for the revolutionary battles to come. Workers in our tens of millions will have the chance to take power into our own hands.
Join the Socialist Workers Party fighting for this perspective!