https://themilitant.com/2020/02/15/workers-need-our-own-party-a-labor-party/
ALYSON KENNEDY, SWP CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT:
‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
article
BY GEORGE CHALMERS
Vol. 84/No. 7
February 24, 2020
MILITANT/GEORGE CHALMERS SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy talks
with auto mechanic Rogelio Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24.
Working people
need to break with the capitalists’ parties, she said. figure
SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy talks with auto mechanic
Rogelio Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24. Working people need to
break with the
capitalists’ parties, she said.
MILITANT/GEORGE CHALMERS SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy talks
with auto mechanic Rogelio Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24.
Working people
need to break with the capitalists’ parties, she said. figure end
DALLAS — The two main capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans,
are in crisis, Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for
president,
told participants in a campaign rally here Feb. 8. And, she said, more
and more workers are concluding that neither the Democratic or
Republican parties
are on the side of working people.
MILITANT/SUSAN LAMONT Malcolm Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice
president, visits Reggie Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1.
Jackson got campaign
book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. figure
Malcolm Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice president, visits Reggie
Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1. Jackson got campaign book
<em>Tribunes
of the People and the Trade Unions.</em>
MILITANT/SUSAN LAMONT Malcolm Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice
president, visits Reggie Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1.
Jackson got campaign
book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. figure end
Kennedy explained that she, SWP vice presidential candidate Malcolm
Jarrett and over 20 SWP candidates coast to coast are campaigning on the
need for workers
to have our own party, a labor party, based on our unions.
“One of the ways the wealthy class maintains its rule has always been
its use of the two-party — or more — system,” Kennedy said. “If you
don’t like what
one capitalist politician is doing, they tell you to vote for another
capitalist politician from the other party in the next election.
“The 2016 election showed that the capitalist rulers can’t depend on
this anymore,” she said. “More workers said, ‘He’s worse, she’s worse,’
and that has
the capitalist class worried.
“More and more workers sense the dead-end of lesser evil politics,”
Kennedy told the Militant in an interview a couple days later. “But it’s
not immediately
apparent to them what the alternative is. What workers need in the
political arena will grow out of our experiences fighting to defend our
wages and working
conditions, for our social and political rights, against the capitalist
rulers’ wars abroad.
“Through these battles we’ll transform and rebuild our unions, and
transform ourselves, deepening our self-confidence and class
consciousness,” she said.
“We’ll learn the burning necessity of constructing our own political
party, with a program to take power out of the hands of the capitalist
exploiters.
“A labor party can unite and mobilize all those who are exploited and
oppressed by capital, the vast majority,” she said.
“We don’t have a dog in the race for which Democrat or Republican gets
elected in 2020,” Kennedy told the rally. “Join with the SWP campaign to
fight for
our own party, a labor party, to organize a class struggle for power.”
Not a ‘vote-catching machine’
A labor party would need a program that raises the same kinds of demands
that the Socialist Workers Party is promoting in its 2020 campaign platform.
“The SWP campaign program says our unions need to fight for workers to
take control of production,” she said. “That’s how workers can defend
ourselves
on the job at the same time as we learn how the working class is capable
of organizing the economy itself, of replacing the bosses and their
government,
and of running society ourselves.
“Think what this would have meant if Boeing workers had conquered
control of building and testing the Boeing 737 MAX plane!” she said.
“Workers control of production would enable us to deal with the
questions of industrial pollution of the atmosphere that contributes
greenhouse gases and
other contamination,” Kennedy pointed out. “It is only the working class
that is capable — and has the class interests — to defend our land, air
and waters.
The defense of science and culture, of everything important to humanity,
falls to the working class.
“All of that would point in the direction of working people forming
their own labor party, fighting to put a workers and farmers government
in power,”
Kennedy said.
Open door to Israel-Palestine talks
During the discussion at the forum, Kennedy was asked what the
campaign’s view is of the Trump administration’s recently announced
Middle East peace proposal.
She encouraged participants to read the December 2017 Socialist Workers
Party statement,
“For Recognition of a Palestinian State and of Israel.”
“This is a very important opening for working people in the Middle East
and worldwide,” Kennedy said. “It should be grabbed by the Israeli and
Arab governments
and the leaderships of the Palestinian organizations to open serious
negotiations.”
“These negotiations,” she said, “would have to recognize, as our
statement points out, ‘the right of Jews everywhere to take refuge in
Israel in the face
of the global rise of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic violence, as well as
the unconditional right of the dispossessed Palestinian people to a
contiguous,
sovereign homeland on territory — including East Jerusalem — conquered
and occupied by the Israeli government during the 1967 war.”
There have been no negotiations for decades, she said, a result of
anti-working-class leaderships there.
“The Palestinian people deserve a leadership that takes the moral high
ground,” she said. “The U.S. proposal as it stands would leave the
Palestinian state
looking like a gerrymandered U.S. congressional district. But what could
emerge from serious negotiations would have to recognize today’s
realities. This
could open the road to the fight for two viable states.”
Our starting point, as the SWP statement makes clear, Kennedy said, is
“the class interests and solidarity of workers and toiling farmers
across the Middle
East — be they Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian or
otherwise, and whatever their religious or other beliefs — as well as
working people
in the United States and around the world.”
Participants at the meeting contributed $450 for the national SWP campaign.
SWP Campaign Coupon
Click here
to email Socialist Workers Party 2020 Campaign.
article end
list of 3 items
Share
Email
Print
list end
RELATED ARTICLES
article
Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign platform
This is the SWP’s fighting campaign platform to confront the economic,
social and moral crisis caused by capitalism: UNIONS/FOR A LABOR PARTY
Support workers’
struggles to organize to defend themselves, to use union power on behalf
of ourselves and all…
article end
IN THIS ISSUE
Front Page Articles
list of 6 items
• ‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
• Coronavirus shows need for revolution in health care
• 2020 election deepens crisis of Democrats, Republicans
• Miami car caravan protests US restrictions on travel to Cuba
• ‘This is a fight for the future,’ Asarco miners say as strike enters
fifth month
• Iraqi workers, youth protest attacks by the gov’t, Tehran
list end
Feature Articles
list of 1 items
• Cuba’s fight against Ebola in Africa is ‘a beacon of light’
list end
Also In This Issue
list of 5 items
• Sinn Fein vote surge fueled by social crisis, calls for Irish unity
• UK: ‘Solidarity with protests by working people in Iran!’
• Havana book fair highlights solidarity between Cuba, Vietnam
• Sign up for the 2020 May Day Brigade to Cuba!
• Answer US slanders against Cuba!
list end
On the Picket Line
list of 2 items
• East Bay transit workers fight bosses’ takebacks, seek support
• French workers continue protest against Macron’s pension assault
list end
25, 50 and 75 years ago
main region end
© Copyright 2020 The Militant - 306 W. 37th Street, 13th floor - New
York, NY 10018 -
themilitant@xxxxxxx
Cookies
This site uses cookies to improve your experience.
Learn more.
Okay, thanks
--
___
Sam Harris
“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen
yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence
as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell
him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who
will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every
incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what
so ever.”
― Sam Harris,
