http://themilitant.com/2015/7926/792602.html
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Vol. 79/No. 26 July 27, 2015
(SWP campaign statement, front page)
‘Removal of Confederate battle flag
is victory for working class’
The following statement was issued July 13 by Osborne Hart, Socialist
Workers Party candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, and John Staggs, SWP
candidate for City Council at-large.
The decision by the South Carolina state government to take down the
Confederate battle flag, a rallying symbol for racist thugs and
opponents of Black rights since it was unfurled over the Statehouse in
1961, is a powerful victory for all working people. Millions watched the
historic event on television worldwide.
The removal of the flag, its rapidity, the overwhelming bipartisan
political support for it — all register the powerful social and
political consequences of the victorious struggle led by
African-Americans in the 1950s and ’60s that overthrew Jim Crow
segregation. Those battles transformed the consciousness of the U.S.
population.
The victory in South Carolina lays the basis to mobilize this broad
sentiment to make further advances that strengthen the unity of working
people, including deepening the Black Lives Matter fights that have
pushed back cop violence and brutality and the fight to overturn
restrictions placed on the right to vote after the Supreme Court gutted
the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
This course strengthens the working class. The propertied capitalists
and their government seek to rule by divide and conquer, turning
Caucasian against African-American, those with a job against the
unemployed, men against women, native born against immigrant. Victories
that strengthen working-class solidarity help workers see more clearly
that our common enemy is the bosses and their two-party system.
Today their world system faces a deep economic and social crisis of
declining capitalist production and trade. They have no answers, except
to try and take it out on our backs, to try and increase their
profitability through cutting jobs and speeding up work for those
remaining, gutting workplace safety, and attacks on our social and
political rights.
Workers need our own political party, a labor party, to unite us in
action to defend ourselves against the capitalists’ attacks and to chart
a course to take political power out of their hands.
The Socialist Workers Party candidates — both Walmart workers who are
active in the fight for $15 an hour and a union and participants in the
fight to bring the flag down in South Carolina and other working class
battles — are running to advance this perspective.
Related articles:
‘Workers need our own political party’
Socialist Workers launch Phila. ballot drive: Help campaign get 2,300
signatures
‘Now take down the monuments to enforcers of white supremacy!’
How Black struggle has strengthened working class
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
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