October 2, 2000
Tens of thousands of farmers, truck drivers, and fishermen have been organizing massive protests across Europe in recent weeks against skyrocketing fuel prices that are driving many of them to ruin. Blockades of fuel depots, ports, airports, and refineries have marked the actions, along with marches and demonstrations.
The actions have won widespread support from working people. Following mass actions in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, large mobilizations have taken place in Spain. In Finland, Sweden, and Norway similar events unfolded.
Truckers in Belgium have tied up the center of Brussels, the capital, and fishermen in Ireland vowed to tie up their boats around the country. Protests have also been reported in Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, in Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. Truckers in Israel have also threatened strike action.
October 3, 1975
The recent assassination attempts against Gerald Ford are part of the violence, hatred, and irrationality that is accepted as routine by the current rulers of this country — Democrats and Republicans alike. Human life is counted as cheap. And the official violence sets into motion its unofficial hangers-on and imitators.
The SWP opposes everything Gerald Ford stands for. But the Marxist movement has from its very inception rejected individual terrorism and political assassination.
Our objective is a society cleansed of violence, and our goal is to win the support of the masses of American working people. The violence in this society is not a product of “human nature.” It is a necessary prop of this decaying capitalist system, in which a wealthy ruling minority will stop at nothing to uphold its “right” to exploit and oppress the majority.
October 2, 1950
“We will fight this law to the last ditch,” declared all candidates of the SWP after Congress enacted the McCarran-Kilgore police-state law. Their statement said:
“Congress has ordered the American people to shut up or go to jail. Congress has commanded all of us not to think and not to speak except as the ruling plutocrats and their political gangsters dictate. Congress has demanded that we submit in servile silence to war, militarism, wage-freezing, price-gouging, profiteering and Jim Crow. The law atom-bombs the Bill of Rights.
“The American people have great historic models showing how to fight oppressive laws. We will hold up these glorious traditions before the American people in this election campaign. We will call on them to fight by building a mighty crusading party, a labor party of the workers, Negro people, working farmers, youth.”