Working people in the U.S. face a deepening economic, social and moral crisis of U.S. and world capitalism today. Bosses are pushing job cuts, onerous schedules that rip family life apart, attacks on health care and pensions, unsafe conditions and more. Government boards and bureaucrats bar strikes and back the bosses. And these attacks have been deepened under the administration of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris.
Workers have responded with organization and strike action, from autoworkers to port workers, Boeing to hotel workers, and many more. Their fights have won support for other workers, an increasing recognition that workers are a class, with common interests and a common enemy — the capitalist ruling families and their government.
One backhanded reflection of this shift is the election of Donald Trump, who won larger votes from working people of all nationalities and hues.
But no capitalist party or candidate can lead the working class. That requires strengthening the unions and building our own political party, a party of labor, based on the unions with a program to fight for the interests of all workers. Organized and unorganized, immigrant and native-born, employed and unemployed.
It requires a party with a working-class foreign policy, that opposes U.S. imperialist intervention abroad; stands uncompromisingly in defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms; and backs workers’ struggles everywhere.
In The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, available from Pathfinder Press, our party advances such a program:
Central to any communist program is a union-led fight for employment, with wage rates, work schedules, and job conditions necessary for families to live, rather than be torn apart by the bosses’ relentless drive for profits. As our 1938 program affirms, “The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation.” And thus our starting point.
Jobs, not dependence on welfare programs, open a road forward. The historical record shows that after every substantial cyclical crisis of capitalism, the families of working people on welfare are poorer than they had been coming out of the prior downturn. Working people need a course that strengthens confidence in our own worth and our ability to organize together and fight. A course that helps the working class and unions forge alliances with farmers, other exploited producers, and the oppressed.
Class-conscious workers call for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, with regular hours. We call for a massive public works program to provide employment for millions at union-scale wages building hospitals, schools, childcare centers, housing, bridges, roads, and other needed infrastructure. In face of inflation, we demand cost-of-living escalators for wages (as well as retirement, jobless, and disability payments).
These are among the central demands a class-struggle left wing of the labor movement would organize the unions to lead the working class in fighting for.
As the working class and unions carry out these class battles, millions of families need to supplement their incomes.
Not by trying to hold down two or three jobs, leaving no time to relax and to think, no time for union, political, and social activity, no time for families.
Not by dependence on “means-tested” welfare programs and government “poverty” bureaucracies that shame and stigmatize recipients, that create conditions that block people from holding a job, and that tear families apart.
What is needed is a floor for all families of working people — an income that’s sufficient for workers to maintain steady employment, as the labor movement fights for universal childcare and medical care. Enough to enable our class to maintain its solidarity, trade union activity, and the vanguard élan necessary for struggle.
Such a fight can emerge from today’s class battles, alongside growing self-confidence, solidarity and class consciousness. As struggles deepen, a party of labor can be built, determined to lead working people in our millions to fight to take political power.
The 2024 election is over. Join us in advancing this working-class perspective.