http://themilitant.com/2016/8038/803852.html
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Vol. 80/No. 38 October 10, 2016
SWP finds thirst for workers’ party in UK, Canada
BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN
LONDON — “People don’t have a choice when they come here but to fight
for jobs,” construction worker Vyto Pocios, who was washing his car,
told Alyson Kennedy, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party presidential
candidate, and members of the Communist League here when they went to
his house. “If you do get a job the companies push you out eventually if
they can get someone to work for less.
“There is a lot of competition for jobs between workers who are
Romanian, Polish, or Lithuanian,” said Pocios, who came to the U.K. as a
boy with his Lithuanian parents.
Kennedy, Communist League members and Mary Martin, SWP candidate for
governor of Washington state, were knocking on doors in Dagenham, a
working-class suburb here, Sept. 11. Meeting workers on their doorsteps
and discussing a road forward from attacks by the bosses was a central
part of Kennedy’s eight-day tour in the United Kingdom.
“The bosses increase competition between workers on the job as they
press down on wages and conditions,” Kennedy replied. “It’s happening
around the world.
“The Socialist Workers Party calls for the unions to lead a fight for a
massive public works program to put millions to work. We say all workers
should be organized in unions, regardless of their birthplace. The
competition for jobs won’t end until the dog-eat-dog capitalist system
is replaced,” she said. “But a growing fight for jobs waged by native
and immigrant workers alike can build solidarity and class
consciousness, helping us prepare to fight to take political power for
ourselves.”
Pocios told Kennedy and Martin that he is classified as self-employed,
even though he works for a company. The huge growth of so-called
“self-employment” in the U.K., along with a big rise in temporary agency
workers, is another way the propertied rulers intensify exploitation.
According to government figures, there are 4.6 million “self-employed”
workers in the U.K., about 15 percent of the workforce, up by more than
780,000 since 2008.
The median wage for those designated self-employed is a little over half
of what other workers get. Millions more are employed through temp
agencies, of whom over 800,000 are on “zero hours contracts” — with no
guaranteed level of work hours or income.
“We’re finding that workers in the U.S. and the U.K. face similar
grinding assaults on our wages, working conditions and social rights,”
Kennedy said.
Pocios was one of 15 workers in the London area who bought copies of Are
They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under
Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes during Kennedy and
Martin’s tour.
“It doesn’t please me,” Eve, a cleaner in Harlow, a small town north of
here, told Kennedy, describing her concerns about her son’s “education”
in secondary school. “It’s a way of conditioning him to become a perfect
wage slave.”
The government recently announced its latest proposed education reforms
— to bring back selective grammar schools for “academic high achievers.”
In a victory for the working class, such schools were largely replaced
in the state education system in the 1960s and ’70s.
“Education reform under capitalism is always a fraud,” said Kennedy.
“Education is class divided under capitalism. Special schools prepare
carefully selected ‘brights’ to track them on the road to the
meritocracy and service to the ruling class. For the rest of us, it’s to
learn us how to follow the rules and get a job. It’s preparation for a
life of obedient labor.
“Our class learns the most from our experiences in social struggles, in
union battles and on the streets,” she said. “Only a socialist
revolution will overturn this system and provide the opportunity for
real lifelong learning, as we work together to build a world built on
human needs, not private profit.”
Richard Peploe, a retired bus driver in Harlow, said he had long
supported the Labour Party.
“I was a strong trade unionist all my life,” he said, “but Labour is not
labour today. Corbyn is a capitalist politician — perhaps with a streak
of honesty, unlike the others who are a bunch of crooks.”
Explaining he voted for the U.K. Independence Party in the last two
elections, and for the U.K. to leave the so-called European Union,
Peploe said, “I know it’s not going to make much difference. The attacks
on all working people are going to mount.”
Peploe picked up a subscription to the Militant and said he was pleased
to learn of the Militant’s coverage of the Angola Three, Black Panther
frame-up victims held for decades in Louisiana’s Angola prison. He told
Kennedy he had corresponded with and visited Lane Nelson, who spent two
and a half years on death row in Angola prison and edited The Angolite,
the prison paper, before he was released in 2011.
❖
BY JOE YOUNG
CALGARY, Alberta — “I was very excited to do it,” Abdurahman Ali, a
31-year-old Teamster warehouse worker, told Communist League members as
he joined them and Osborne Hart to campaign on workers’ doorsteps in the
Ogden neighborhood here. Ali had learned about the Sept. 20-22 visit of
Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president, a few
days earlier.
“It was my first time. Every door, you want to see who will answer, what
kind of person,” he said. “I like your goals, to bring workers and
farmers and regular people to power. I hope it can happen everywhere in
the world. I like that you invite everybody to join.”
Over the three days, Hart and supporters of the Communist League
campaigned with the Pathfinder book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?
Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism and the Militant in five
different working-class neighborhoods around Calgary.
“What kind of democracy is there going to be if Trump wins?” asked Rishi
Nagar, the host of a popular Punjabi-language radio program on 106.7 Red
FM, when he interviewed Hart.
“The same democracy that exists now, the same if Clinton wins,” Hart
replied. “The democracy of the dictatorship of capital, where workers
can vote for one of the capitalist parties, but both represent the
rulers. Workers, who produce all the wealth, have no say over how it’s
used because the boss class holds state power.
“The elections don’t change anything. Every social measure that benefits
the working class was won by workers ourselves through labor and social
struggles — from the American Revolution against British colonialism to
the Civil War that ended slavery, to the strikes and organizing drives
that built the labor movement during the 1930s depression, to the mass
Black-led movement of the 1950s and ’60s that overturned Jim Crow
segregation. The same is true in Canada.”
“What is going on in Syria? What is the U.S. doing supporting Turkey
against the Kurds?” Mustafa Alhasan, a Kurdish worker, asked Hart at a
citywide meeting organized by the Communist League.
“The Socialist Workers Party supports the Kurds’ fight for national
rights in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran,” Hart said. “Washington uses its
effective fighting capacity for its own ends, but is no friend of the
Kurds. President Obama and Vice President Biden both cheered the
Turkish-organized military intervention into Syria and joined in
demanding the Kurds pull out of areas they have won control over.
“There is no revolutionary working-class leadership in the Middle East,”
he said. “The void is filled by the brutal, anti-working-class Islamic
State. There, as elsewhere, a revolutionary workers movement needs to be
built.”
“In building a movement, how can we overturn the dictatorship of
capital?” asked Tanya Johnston, who supports Native Americans in North
Dakota protesting the construction of a pipeline near the Standing Rock
Sioux Reservation.
“The SWP stands in solidarity with the Native people at Standing Rock,”
Hart said. “Our candidate for Senate in Minnesota has joined the
protests there and I’m going in October. For over 150 years, Native
Americans have been forced onto reservations under oppressive conditions.
“Now, when the ruling rich seek to run a pipeline over land they hold
sacred, threatening their water supply, the Sioux are standing up in
dignity to demand their sovereign rights,” Hart said. “And their fight
has attracted thousands more Native people and others from all across
North America.
“In the course of labor and social battles to come, we will transform
ourselves, conquering the political program and self-worth needed to
take political power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and
establish our own workers and farmers government.”
Katy LeRougetel contributed to this article.
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Socialist Workers Party is workers’ party! Runs against capitalist rule
Socialist Workers Party launches $100,000 fund drive
Socialist Workers Party: Protest police brutality!
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