http://themilitant.com/2016/8008/800801.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 8 February 29, 2016
(lead article)
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Fight attacks by bosses!’
Working-class campaign challenges capitalist parties
Militant/Laura Anderson
SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy, right, discusses fight to
defend workers jobs, conditions with Electro-Motive Diesel worker Dwayne
Johnson at plant gate near Chicago Feb. 17.
BY NAOMI CRAINE
“I am running for U.S. president on the Socialist Workers Party ticket
because the other parties don’t represent workers. They are the bosses
parties,” Alyson Kennedy explained to members of the United Auto Workers
at the morning shift change at Electro-Motive Diesel in La Grange,
Illinois, where railroad locomotives are built. Workers there have been
through several rounds of layoffs, as the deepening capitalist
contraction of production and trade has hit hard at workers in oil,
steel, coal, transportation and other manufacturing.
Many workers stopped, glad to discuss a key point of the SWP campaign —
that our class is capable of organizing independently of the bosses and
their parties, both to confront immediate problems we face and to
advance toward taking political power into our own hands.
“Falling profit rates have pushed the bosses to assault workers’
conditions of work and life worldwide,” Kennedy said. This is what
underlies the broad discontent among workers and others reflected in the
turmoil of the 2016 presidential elections, and especially the response
to “outsider” candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Trump remains well ahead in the Republican primary, playing on the
anxiety, fear and anger generated by the smoldering depression
conditions workers and middle layers face when he attacks the lies and
hypocrisy of the “establishment” candidates.
Trump’s insistence that as a strong and wily businessman he can “make
America great again,” combined with promises not to start any new ground
wars, is popular among many workers, including veterans who Trump often
points out have been “treated so horribly” by Washington.
Attacks on Trump from his rivals on grounds that he’s not a “real
conservative” miss the point. The fact is he’s a New York liberal, a
former Democrat. When Ted Cruz accused him of defending Planned
Parenthood, Trump responded that it does “wonderful things” for women’s
health, though he now says he opposes abortion.
He says while he would have made a better deal, Obama’s moves to restore
diplomatic relations and open the door to more trade with Cuba are a
good thing.
Following his victory in the New Hampshire primary, Trump said the real
unemployment figures are many times the official 5 percent, “I even
heard recently 42 percent.” This comes closer to the truth than what
most bourgeois candidates will admit. Less than 60 percent of those over
16 are employed today, a big drop from before the 2008 recession.
“If we had 5 percent unemployment, do you really think we’d have these
gatherings?” he asked.
“I was laid off in 2009 for two years, and called back in 2011,” Dwayne
Johnson, a union member and team leader on the receiving docks, told
Kennedy outside the EMD plant in Chicago. “There have been steady
layoffs, one after another, in the past few years. The union is weak.”
Example of Cuban Revolution
“We point to Cuba as an example for working people here,” the Socialist
Workers Party candidate responded, “because they made a revolution, took
political power, changed themselves as they fought and learned, and set
up a government that has ruled in the interests of working people, not
the bosses, for 57 years.”
“They got rid of the casinos,” Johnson said.
“Yes,” said Kennedy, “and prostitution,” one of the only “jobs” for
women before the revolution. Through participation in transforming their
society, millions of women, youth, farmworkers who had been only
seasonally employed, and others were drawn into productive work, the
opposite of the squandering of human potential under the capitalist
profit system.
They discussed the importance of supporting every effort by working
people to stand up to the bosses’ attacks. “I joined the picket lines in
Kohler, Wisconsin, where the United Auto Workers went on strike in
November to get rid of the two-tier wage system,” Kennedy said. “The
contract they approved still has two tiers, but unionists there felt
that by fighting they came together, and they’re stronger for fights to
come. We need to do that more.”
“Yes, we need to stick together,” agreed Johnson. “You guys are doing a
good thing.” He took a card to subscribe to the Militant.
“Sanders says he wants a political revolution,” a reporter said to
Kennedy while she was campaigning on the street outside Sylvia’s
restaurant in Harlem Feb. 10, where people had gathered while Sanders
was meeting with Rev. Al Sharpton to seek his endorsement.
“He’s talking about reforms that won’t change anything fundamental,”
Kennedy said. “We need to overthrow the rule of capital, to change which
class rules.”
The central theme of Sanders’ campaign has been the call for a
“political revolution” to “take big money out of politics” that he says
is ruining “our democracy.” At the top of his agenda is overturning the
2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United, which lifted
restrictions on corporations paying for political advertising.
Sanders’ emergence as a serious competitor for the Democratic Party
nomination comes from a similar source as support for Trump — the
widespread discontent among workers and others fueled by the depression
conditions. His answer is the same liberal program he’s been advocating
for decades. When asked, Sanders says he’s a democratic socialist, but
his program is not socialist, as the Militant’s coverage last week
wrongly stated.
Both Sanders and Trump also benefit from an ongoing shift in politics
toward the bourgeois left. Trump has shoved the old Tea Party out of the
picture. All the political pundits said Sanders had no chance against
Clinton, but now they’re neck and neck.
The centerpiece of Sanders’ Johnny-one-note campaign is the proposal to
raise taxes on the wealthy and on “Wall Street speculators,” to finance
social programs, including a national health system and free tuition at
public universities, and to provide some jobs. His campaign has
generated enthusiasm, especially among a layer of youth, and he
continues to draw large crowds rivaled only by those Trump attracts.
With the race tightening, and heading toward primaries in states in the
north, south and west, many with large Black populations, Hillary
Clinton received the endorsement of the Congressional Black Caucus
Political Action Committee Feb. 11. Clinton resonates with Black elected
officials and meritocratic minded professors, NGO staffers and
like-minded “brights.” She and husband William Clinton have done the
most to elect Black Democrats, help them become chairs of subcommittees,
and “has been on the stump with us” throughout the years, said Rep.
Gregory Meeks, chair of the CBC PAC.
The Socialist Workers Party puts forward the only working-class
alternative to all these capitalist politicians. Campaigning in New
York, Kennedy invited all those she spoke with to join in the struggles
that advance workers interests today.
“I’ve marched in the street against the Chicago cop killings of Laquan
McDonald, Quintonio LeGrier, Bettie Jones and others,” Kennedy said.
“We’ve succeeded in making the propertied rulers rein in their cops.
When we organize together and fight, we can change things.”
“I will be going to Oregon to support the campaign to free the
Hammonds,” ranchers jailed on frame-up charges of arson, she said.
“We’ll be walking the picket lines with ATI workers who have been locked
out since July, participating in the March 2 protest in Chicago against
police brutality, and joining actions in support of a women’s right to
choose abortion.”
Ilona Gersh in Chicago and Dean Hazlewood in New York contributed to
this article.
Related articles:
Support Eleanor García, SWP candidate for US Senate in Calif.
Support the SWP 2016 campaign!
Scalia’s death prompts debate on Supreme Court, Bill of Rights
Join the Socialist Workers Party campaign in 2016
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