Growing numbers of workers are looking for the way to bring an end to today’s wars and prevent even more deadly conflicts. Workers’ desire to live in peace is founded on the fact the working class has no interest in exploitation or oppression. In contrast, capitalist rule is based on the dog-eat-dog competition of rival states chasing profits at the expense of each other. This drives their race to build larger and deadlier weaponry.
Throughout their history, the Democratic and Republican parties have backed Washington’s wars, from the First and Second World Wars, to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their drive today to reassert domination of the Western Hemisphere, from Venezuela to Greenland.
The U.S. rulers are driving to rebuild their industrial capacity and seize resources to feed their war machine. They know they have to expand or be crushed by more ruthless rivals. The choice left to workers is to overthrow their rule or face nuclear devastation.
The Socialist Workers Party is the peace party in the working class. It’s the only party that advances a road for the working class to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist war makers, to make a socialist revolution. It is deeply involved in today’s struggles of workers and our unions, pointing a way to unite working people of all colors and nationalities, with or without papers, and to deepen our reliance on each other, not the bosses and their parties. The SWP points to the capacities of the working class to take society’s immense productive wealth and use it to meet the basic needs of all, to truly liberate humanity.
The U.S. rulers can only go to war if they can convince us we have a common interest in doing so. They say the road to peace is through war on “our” rivals. These claims are a fraud. Their march to war is driven by the capitalists’ unquenchable thirst for profit and plunder.
“Our party is unalterably opposed to all imperialist wars,” SWP National Secretary James P. Cannon told a federal court in 1941. He was among 18 leaders of the SWP and the Teamsters union framed up and imprisoned for organizing opposition within the labor movement to U.S. entry into World War II.
Since its founding in 1919, the communist movement in the U.S. has stood in implacable opposition to every one of the rulers’ military operations, up to their murderous assault on Venezuela and threats against Cuba today. The SWP is forging a vanguard working-class party in the U.S. that can lead tens of millions to end the source of imperialist war. Join the SWP!