From the Middle East, where the reactionary rulers in Tehran still hope to carry out a new Holocaust in Israel, to Ukraine, where Moscow rains down death nightly on working people in the country’s cities, the absence of parties that speak for the class interests of all workers exacerbates the deep-going challenges we face.
This is the most important question confronting working people worldwide: to build parties of our own, irreconcilably opposed to the capitalist class and against all attempts by middle-class forces to get workers to subordinate our interests to the rulers. Proletarian parties capable of leading the fight to emancipate working people from capitalist exploitation.
Such parties will not spring up fully formed, nor can they be built overnight. But sharpening class antagonisms built into capitalism ensure that workers are increasingly driven to defend ourselves. As these struggles unfold, alongside fights against Jew-hatred, national oppression and the subjugation of women, vanguard workers will begin acting on the line of march of the working class to take political power.
Revolutionary working-class parties have been built before as workers acquired class-struggle experience and gained knowledge of the fundamental lessons learned by the communist movement in past sharp capitalist crises, wars and revolutionary upheavals.
Well before decisive battles for power unfold, working-class parties must be built out of the class battles, parties that become known and trusted by workers.
Led by V.I. Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia showed the kind of party needed to unite and lead working people and all the oppressed to topple capitalist rule and establish our own state power. In the face of a murderous counterrevolution carried through by Joseph Stalin, and the betrayal of revolutionary struggles by Stalinized parties worldwide, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky fought to maintain the program and continuity of Lenin’s example and build revolutionary workers’ parties true to those aims.
In 1959 the cadre forged by Fidel Castro in Cuba were able to lead millions to make the first socialist revolution in the Americas, helping to renew communist leadership worldwide. They set a political and moral example of the highest caliber.
Since it was formed in the 1930s, the Socialist Workers Party has strived to build a party proletarian in composition, as well as in program and action.
The SWP’s 2022 resolution, available in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The SWP Looks Forward, points to the caliber and integrity of revolutionary leaders produced by the working class in the U.S. “The norms of conduct set by Farrell Dobbs and others in the class-struggle leadership of the Midwest Teamsters battles, and by Malcolm X in his revolutionary political evolution in the final period of his life, are examples to learn from and emulate,” it says.
To contribute to resolving the crisis of leadership in the workers’ movement today, the best thing you can do is to join the SWP.