http://themilitant.com/2016/8007/800701.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 7 February 22, 2016
(lead article)
Join the Socialist Workers Party
2016 US presidential campaign!
Alyson Kennedy for president ❖ Osborne Hart for vice president
Militant photos: Left, Laura Anderson; right, Hilda Cuzco
Socialist Workers Party candidates Alyson Kennedy, front in sunglasses,
marching on 2014 picket line with Steelworkers on strike at Sloan Valve
in Franklin Park, Illinois; Osborne Hart, far right, at November 2015
rally in Philadelphia demanding $15 minimum wage and a union.
A working-class alternative to the capitalist parties
Join Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party
candidates for president and vice president, and other SWP candidates
and their supporters fighting alongside workers in cities, towns and
farming areas against depression-driven attacks on our living and
working conditions. The bosses and their government are escalating
assaults on the working class and our unions to shore up profits at our
expense.
All the bourgeois candidates — from socialist Bernie Sanders and Hillary
Clinton in the Democratic Party to demagogue billionaire Donald Trump,
John Kasich, Marco Rubio and other Republicans — aim to rescue
capitalism from an economic, social and moral crisis as production,
trade and employment contract.
In Flint, Michigan, Democratic and Republican officials alike told
working people it was OK to drink poisoned water. In workplace after
workplace job safety goes out the window as employers impose speedup and
either lengthen the workweek to increase exploitation or slash hours to
boost their bottom line. They scapegoat immigrant workers, seeking to
intimidate them with deportations to drive down wages and divide the
working class.
The ruling capitalist families use Washington’s economic and military
forces to protect their investments and interests abroad against any who
rise up to struggle for national sovereignty and to close the chasm
between their conditions of literacy, electrification and sanitation and
those in the imperialist countries.
The Socialist Workers Party campaign poses a working-class way forward
out of the dog-eat-dog, crises-ridden capitalist system.
The SWP strives to advance the class-consciousness and self-confidence
of workers as we fight together. We know from history that working
people, relying on our own power, solidarity and mobilization, can take
over and run the mines, mills, railroads and factories — without the
bosses.
As we gain experience in struggle we become different people, capable of
organizing our class and its allies — millions strong — to overthrow
rule by the billionaire capitalist families and establish a government
of workers and farmers.
Socialist Workers Party supporters fight within the ranks of labor to
transform the unions into effective fighting instruments against the
employing class and its government. The labor movement can become a
powerful force for human solidarity — championing the fight for $15 and
a union; for a government-funded public works program to create jobs,
build schools and medical, child care and recreation centers, replace
crumbling infrastructure and other things working people need; the fight
for Puerto Rican independence; for free preventative and comprehensive
medical care for all; to extend equal protection under the law to women
who seek an abortion; to demand that cops who kill or brutalize working
people be prosecuted.
SWP campaigners point to the need to break from the bosses’ parties and
build our own independent labor party based on the unions.
Kennedy and Hart point to the example of how Cuba’s working people made
their 1959 revolution, an example for working people in the U.S. They
demand Washington end its brutal economic embargo against the Cuban
people and return the Guantánamo naval base. Hart is in Cuba at the
Havana International Book Fair, the better to tell workers here about
Cuba’s socialist revolution.
In the 1950s workers and farmers across Cuba, led by Fidel Castro and
the July 26 Movement, learned as they organized and fought to overthrow
the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. They became different men and
women, capable of working together to change society to meet their needs.
Working people took over and began to run U.S.- and Cuban-owned
factories, sugar mills, utilities and banks. The revolutionary
government backed landless rural laborers in an agrarian reform that
turned cultivation of the land over to the tillers.
They destroyed the old army and police and built new armed forces,
militia and police out of their own ranks to defend, not oppress,
working people.
The revolution enforced laws putting an end to racial discrimination,
drew women into the workforce and revolutionary political activity and
made abortion a woman’s choice.
The Cuban Revolution extends internationalist solidarity, from sending
almost 400,000 volunteers to fight against apartheid South Africa’s
invasion in Angola to sending doctors to help lead the fight against
Ebola in West Africa.
A similar transformation began among many Blacks active in the fight
against Jim Crow, worker combatants in the building of the CIO and
stalwarts of the decade-long fight against Washington’s war in Vietnam.
Malcolm X said fighters “find their self-worth” in the course of such
struggles.
A victorious revolutionary struggle by working people here in the U.S.
can inspire emulation worldwide.
Candidates who are fighters
The Socialist Workers Party candidates have taken part in rallies of
Pennsylvania Steelworkers locked out by Allegheny Technologies and
Verizon workers without a contract. They are part of the fight for $15
an hour minimum wage and to organize unions.
The fight against police brutality and killings is their fight. They
have joined protests at home and across the country, demanding cops who
killed youth and others — African-American, Latino and Caucasian, from
Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Laquan McDonald in Chicago to Andrew Thomas
in Paradise, California — be charged and jailed.
They are part of the effort to free Dwight and Steven Hammond, Oregon
ranchers jailed twice on trumped-up arson charges. The SWP candidates
demand the arrest of the FBI and Oregon cops who killed Robert LaVoy
Finicum, one of the ranchers who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife
Refuge to protest the imprisonment of the Hammonds.
The Socialist Workers Party speaks out against Washington’s imperialist
military attacks — from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria. SWP candidates
fight the rulers’ efforts to use workers’ revulsion at Islamic State’s
terrorist acts to scapegoat Muslims and roll back workers’ rights.
Through our experiences, workers will see more and more that all
political questions are class questions. We will see that here, as in
Cuba, the only way forward is to organize independent working-class
struggles that point toward overturning the dictatorship of capital,
building a new society based on human solidarity and joining the
worldwide fight for socialism. This is a life truly worth living.
Join the Socialist Workers Party campaign!
Related articles:
The SWP candidates
Sanders’ socialist reform program aims to save crises-ridden capitalism
‘Workers need control on job to ensure safety’
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home