http://themilitant.com/2016/8015/801501.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 15 April 18, 2016
(lead article)
‘Workers need to fight to take political power’
Socialist Workers Party campaigns across Wisconsin against
capitalism and its crisis
Militant/Eric Simpson
Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California Eleanor
García, right, on farmworker picket line in Watsonville, California,
March 31. Fights like these “help workers gain confidence, experience on
road to taking power out of hands of capitalist class,” García said.
BY JOHN STUDER
“It’s an outrage that people in this country have to work for just $8 or
$10 an hour. You can’t survive on those wages,” a Teamsters union truck
driver told Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Alyson
Kennedy as she campaigned among those attending a rally for Donald Trump
at Nathan Hale High School in West Allis, Wisconsin, April 3. “But we
have to worry about the people in this country first. We have people
without jobs, people without health care or insurance.”
“I worked as a coal miner in Utah in a mine where the majority of
workers were from Mexico,” Kennedy said. “We organized and fought to
make it a union mine, to raise wages and get protection from the bosses’
disregard for our safety. The answer to the problems you pose is not
deportations, but coming together to fight for the needs of all.
“We face a basic conflict between the owning class, who use the
government to defend their profits, and the working class,” Kennedy
said. “We need a social revolution. Working people must unite and take
political power.”
The Socialist Workers Party organized teams across Wisconsin to present
the party’s revolutionary perspective in the political discussions
leading up to the Republican and Democratic Party primaries there April 5.
The bourgeois elections in 2016 are marked by a splintering of both
major capitalist parties and the emergence of the “outsider” campaigns
of Trump in the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic.
They draw interest because workers have lived through more than a decade
of accelerated capitalist crisis, grinding away at jobs, wages, working
conditions and social and political life. The propertied rulers, their
media and politicians have no answers other than deepening attacks to
make working people pay for the crisis of their system.
The Socialist Workers Party is running Kennedy, Osborne Hart for vice
president, and other candidates across the country, campaigning to win
workers to the party, to the perspective of building a revolutionary
working-class movement that aims to overthrow capitalism and replace it
with a workers and farmers government.
For months the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News and
other big-business papers have declared Trump finished, or Sanders too
far behind to matter. Every week their wishes fail to overcome reality.
After Trump was invited to address the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee conference March 21, both the Times and the Post said large
numbers of delegates were organizing to boycott or walk out of the session.
To the contrary, Trump was greeted with ovations and cheering over 50
times, especially when he denounced the Obama administration’s nuclear
deal with Iran. And those in the audience were not the working-class
“white trash” the press says make up all of the billionaire’s support.
The next day the bourgeois dailies said not a word about the big protest
that wasn’t. They just turned to new efforts to demonize and dismiss
Trump’s campaign.
While Trump in practice has no course different from his fellow
capitalist candidates, he gets a hearing from workers in part because he
points to the crisis they face and claims he will fight for jobs. He
told the Washington Post April 2 that economic conditions are perilous,
with a growing bubble on the stock market, and he sees the country
headed for a “massive recession.” And he accurately described as
“statistically devised” the official 5 percent unemployment rate. “We’re
at a number that’s probably into the twenties,” he said.
“To those voters furious at politicians who sent their children to fight
and bleed and die in Iraq,” J.D. Vance wrote in the April 4 Times, Trump
says “the war was a terrible mistake imposed on the country by an
incompetent president” and “he promises to take care of our veterans.”
Combining these views with coarse, anti-immigrant, sometimes thuggish
comments, Trump offers himself as a strong man for today’s difficult times.
Anti-working-class slanders
Some blame Trump’s support on what they call the “White Working Class’s
Dysfunction,” as Kevin Williamson scornfully titled a March 28 article
in the neo-conservative National Review. “If you spend time in
hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own
native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare
dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy … you
will come to an awful realization,” he wrote.
“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish
culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald
Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin,” Williamson
said, in a slander mirroring the contempt for the “redneck” working
class expressed by liberals and the left.
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his radio talk-show
backers were in the “Never Trump” coalition along with public service
union leaders who have tried and failed to force Walker out of office.
They all joined in calling on people to vote for arch-conservative Texas
Republican Ted Cruz, to return bourgeois politics to “normal.”
Whatever the outcome in Wisconsin, Trump continues to draw workers’
interest. “I’ve never really been interested in politics, it’s like all
the politicians are crooks,” Chuck Choate, a writer, told SWP
campaigners at Trump’s meeting in West Allis.
“Trump and Sanders are getting support because they sound like they’re
making radical proposals. They talk about the working class, continuing
high unemployment and some of the real problems we face,” Kennedy told
him. “But the Republican and Democratic parties are the parties of the
capitalists and the bosses.”
Choate signed up for a subscription to the Militant.
Sanders held a March 31 rally of over 15,000 people in the Bronx, New
York, where the primaries are set for April 19. There too Socialist
Workers Party campaigners got a good response.
When Lea Sherman approached Martha Epstein, a drug rehabilitation
counselor, Epstein was skeptical. “Isn’t Bernie socialist enough for
you?” she asked.
“I answered voting doesn’t make social change, it comes from the mass
mobilization of workers in action, like the civil rights movement and
the growth of the CIO union movement in the 1930s,” Sherman told the
Militant. “In the course of struggle, workers become different people,
conscious of the fact capitalism cannot be reformed and confident of our
capacity to overthrow it.”
“This is what happened in Cuba, where workers and farmers took power in
1959, an example for us to learn from,” she said.
Epstein got a subscription and said to keep in touch.
The Socialist Workers Party will continue to take its campaign to
workers in rural areas, small towns and big cities in states where
primaries are scheduled and all across the country explaining class
politics and building the party.
Related articles:
Join spring activities to build Socialist Workers Party
SWP candidate backs fight to prosecute California cop
SWP Campaign
For $15 an hour and a union!
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