NEW YORK — “The U.S. rulers and their counterparts across the globe in their sharpening competition for markets, resources and cheap labor, answer by implementing measures to increase the exploitation of working people worldwide,” Paul Mailhot, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New York, said. “This inevitably leads to more conflicts and wars, including toward a third world war with all the devastating consequences that would bring.”
Mailhot and Willie Cotton, the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, were describing the party’s perspectives at a special Militant Labor Forum here Aug. 1.
Cotton pointed to the “combined character of the capitalists’ wars on working people at home and their wars abroad, one accompanies the other.” He explained Washington’s war in the Middle East, saying the U.S. rulers’ goal “is to dominate and plunder the region.” Having emerged from World War II as the dominant imperialist power, they view the world — its resources and labor — as theirs for the taking today, even as their power erodes.
He contrasted this to Israel’s goal in the present conflict, which is to survive as a refuge for Jews. Israel confronts the reactionary Iranian government and its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and its allies in Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere — that explicitly state their goal is to “kill Jews” and “wipe Israel off the map,” he said.
The Socialist Workers Party candidates used the forum to explain how the working class taking power out of the hands of the exploiters and war makers, through revolutionary struggle and building revolutionary workers parties, was the only realistic answer to counter imperialism’s drive toward fascism and war.
Assault on Cuban sovereignty
The U.S. rulers are also stepping up their attacks aimed at strangling the Cuban Revolution, Cotton said. This includes launching attacks on dozens of organizations and individuals in the U.S. who have spoken out against U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Washington has never forgiven the Cuban workers and peasants for making a revolution in 1959 and “mobilizing working people there to take back the patrimony of their country, driving out U.S. colonial domination,” Cotton said.
“It’s crucial that the labor movement and all defenders of constitutional freedoms take an unequivocal stand against attacks on any organization, whatever its political outlook, that speaks out in opposition to Washington’s offensive against Cuba.”
Cotton described how Cuban working people are using the creativity they learned from their revolution to respond to the crisis the U.S. blockade has imposed. “The Cubans are not victims,” he said. “They are combatants and they continue to resist.”
DSA’s contempt for working class
“There is no socialist content, no working-class content, represented by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his fellow Democratic Party politicians in and around the Democratic Socialists of America,” Mailhot said. “These politicians view workers as victims, not fighters. Their program is to maintain capitalism, keep workers from breaking with the capitalist rulers’ parties, by advancing reforms and the vision of a ‘welfare state.’”
As examples, Mailhot pointed to a couple of Mamdani’s much-touted (and as yet unrealized) promises — five city-run discounted supermarkets to serve a city of more than 8.5 million people — and free bus rides.
These are schemes made up by people who are not connected to the real life struggles of working people, Mailhot said.
What workers need is a fight led by the unions for jobs, higher wages and better working conditions, as well as for amnesty for workers from other countries who come to the U.S. without “correct” papers. This is the road to unite the working class and make us stronger to address higher prices, transportation costs, and other measures affecting our standard of living.
What we say and act on is the opposite of what DSA candidates put forward. They advance “ideas” that are just new forms of capitalist government welfare. They have nothing to do with mobilizing workers to come together in struggles to advance their class interests. Mailhot quoted from Frederick Engels: “Communism is not a doctrine, but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts.”
Politicians who claim to be socialists, yet run as candidates of the Democratic Party, sow pessimism about what the working class is capable of, and confusion about why workers must act in our own interests. In contrast, Mailhot pointed to comments by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.
“All methods are good which raise the class consciousness of the workers, their trust in their own forces, their readiness for self-sacrifice in the struggle,” Trotsky wrote. “The impermissible methods are those which implant fear and submissiveness in the oppressed before their oppressors, which crush the spirit of protest and indignation.”
“The capitalist class — the class that holds economic and political power in every country in the world save for Cuba — always acts in its own interests,” Mailhot said. “In the U.S. it has two parties — the Democrats, including its socialist wing, and Republicans — that it uses to defend those interests. This two-party system is designed to maintain the illusion that workers and others have a choice in how society is governed.
“Working people need unions, but that is not enough. We need our own political party, armed with a program to serve the class interests of the men and women who toil for a living. The Socialist Workers Party is building that party,” he said.
Fight against Jew-hatred
Both Mailhot and Cotton stressed the importance of the fight against Jew-hatred today. Much of the discussion focused on this question.
One participant said she was surprised by what Cotton said about how a nuclear attack on Israel could wipe out nearly half the world’s Jews. “That would be a catastrophe for everyone,” she said. She added that her teenage daughter has been getting in trouble at school because of her defense of both Israel and Cuba.
“The Tehran-organized, Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom against Israel had been in the works for years,” Cotton said. “They are determined to destroy Israel and the Jews. As the wars there show, it’s becoming clearer that Washington does not act in the interests of Israel and the Jews. The capitalist classes of the two countries have different interests. The U.S. rulers are for creating stability for their plunder and domination, while Israel fights to prevent a new Holocaust.”
Another speaker pointed out that to understand what is going on in the Middle East and why Israel’s right to exist must be defended, it’s crucial to understand the essential place of Jew-hatred in the arsenal the imperialists use to crush the working class when their brutal system is threatened by growing working-class combat. “That’s why it’s a life-and-death question for the workers,” she said.
It’s also why building the Socialist Workers Party is crucial for helping construct the leadership the working class needs to move forward.