NEW YORK — “Increasing numbers of working people in the U.S. and worldwide can see that the imperialist ruling classes of the world are steadily marching humanity toward World War III, with everything that means in the age of nuclear weapons,” Paul Mailhot, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor here, said at a Sept. 7 program.
“But another global conflagration is not inevitable,” he said. “The working class is an actor in the world, including in the U.S. It will have its chance through the class struggle to prove that the capitalist class is incapable of ruling without wars, hunger, racism. It has the capacity to take power out of their hands. To do this, workers need to build revolutionary parties in every country.”
Wherever Washington intervenes to broker or impose a so-called peace, whether between Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, or elsewhere, it acts solely to “protect U.S. imperialist interests and Washington’s influence around the world,” Mailhot said. It is never to advance the interests of the toilers at home or abroad. “Renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War is an indication of what the U.S. rulers want to prepare working people for.”
This is especially true in the two major wars shaking world politics today — Israel’s war of self-defense to defeat Hamas to prevent another Holocaust and the fight of the Ukrainian people to beat back Moscow’s invasion and defend the country’s sovereignty, Mailhot said.
U.S. rulers won’t stop drug trade
Washington now has at least eight warships deployed off the coast of Venezuela, supposedly to stop drug smuggling. U.S. forces blew up a small boat there, killing 11 people. Such attacks are aimed at protecting oil deposits in the region that the U.S. wants to exploit and to send a message to the Venezuelan and other governments, especially Cuba, that dare to stand up against U.S. interests, Mailhot said.
“Drugs are a scourge on the working class. It’s hard to find a working-class family that hasn’t been affected by the legal and illegal marketing of drugs and the psychoses, dependencies and deaths that result,” Mailhot said. “The idea of ‘taking drugs off the streets’ and ‘stopping the drug traffickers’ gets a hearing. But no capitalist ruling class is trying to end the drug trade.” It’s a profitable business under capitalism and the damage to human beings is coldly calculated as a cost of doing business.
Military moves by U.S. imperialism are reflected within the U.S. as well, Mailhot said. He pointed to the deployment of National Guard and federal troops in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as well as masked Homeland Security agents in flack jackets knocking down the doors of a factory in upstate New York. Workers there reported to the press that federal agents “detained anyone who was Hispanic.”
“These raids are conducted in such a way as to sow fear in the entire working class — immigrant and native born,” Mailhot said. “They aim to normalize arrests and denial of rights,” like due process, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
They’re aimed against workers trying to organize unions. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at the Hyundai plant near Savannah, Georgia, comes as the United Auto Workers is making inroads with organizing drives in the South, he pointed out.
Working class ready to resist
“Capitalism thrives on divisions among workers that hinder our ability to stand together and fight for higher wages and safer working conditions,” Mailhot said. “That’s why the Socialist Workers Party calls for amnesty for all immigrants living and working in the United States. That’s the only way to unite the working class to better be able to fight.”
“As the crisis of capitalism bears down harder on millions today, the working class shows it is ready to resist,” Mailhot said. He pointed to the Air Canada flight attendants, who defied a government order to return to work. Their powerful strike action convinced the union leadership to not give in, saying they’d go to jail if they had to. Now workers have a better understanding of their power, Mailhot said.
The contract the union leadership agreed to is far short of what workers were fighting for and felt their struggle was capable of achieving, Mailhot said. That was made clear by workers’ 99% rejection of the wage raise, the only part of the contract the workers got to vote on. Many Air Canada flight attendants say they have a new found appreciation of themselves and their ability to fight, and millions of other workers took notice. “That is the victory of this important struggle,” Mailhot said.
Mailhot pointed to many Labor Day activities this year that reflected the importance of the fight to unify the working class through support for the rights of immigrant workers. The SWP participated in these events across the country, raising a working-class road forward. The party explains why workers need to break from the parties of the bosses — Democrats, Republicans and any others — and fight for the working class to take political power.
Many workers welcomed this discussion, as they talked about their own battles over wages and working conditions at the companies where they work.
One participant asked what the SWP hopes to accomplish through its election campaigns.
“The Socialist Workers Party uses the increased interest of workers in politics during the elections to point to the examples already set by the working class throughout its history,” Mailhot explained. “We especially point to the two great revolutions of our epoch, in Russia in 1917 and in Cuba in 1959, when the working class took power, and used the power of the state not to defend an exploiting class, but to defend the toilers who have absolutely no material interest in exploiting and oppressing others.
We ask workers to join the SWP, he said, and to help fight for workers power, unleashing the tremendous capacities of working people to solve every question, to put an end to discrimination and national oppression, to eliminate the source of war, and eliminate the massive buildup of the means of destruction underway today.
The SWP is the party of today’s working-class struggles and the future of humanity.