"Workers and farmers need to chart our own road forward"
Good article. Unfortunately the numbers of people whose brains need
stimulating by such articles are busy at their local Trump rally. We
can use someone who holds our values, but can put a spin on describing
them in a way that connects with those members of the working class
who are suffering from Trump Fog.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/22/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Workers and farmers need to chart our own road forward
https://themilitant.com/2020/12/19/workers-and-farmers-need-to-chart-our-own-road-forward/
December 28, 2020
Hundreds of vehicles lined up outside Roadrunner Food Bank in
Albuquerque Nov. 24 to get food for Thanksgiving.
Hundreds of vehicles lined up outside Roadrunner Food Bank in
Albuquerque Nov. 24 to get food for Thanksgiving.
Workers and our unions need to raise the banner of fighting to shorten
the workweek to 30 hours without a single penny cut from take-home pay.
This can prevent layoffs and keep millions of fellow workers on the job.
Winning 30 hours work for 40 hours pay in the mines, mills, factories,
warehouses and retail outlets would sharply reduce the mounting
competition among us for jobs. It would prevent bosses using the threat
of furloughs or slashing working hours to press for cuts in wages. Most
importantly, it would get more workers back to the one place where we
can join together and act as a class to fight the bosses’ efforts to
force us to pay for the crisis of their capitalist system.
The struggles we wage on the job over hours, wages, working conditions
and our health are the only road forward. Nurses at the Montefiore
hospital in New Rochelle, New York, organized a two-day strike for more
hiring to make desperately needed medical care safely available, and to
ease the unbearable workloads they face. Tens of thousands of farmers in
India and toilers in Kurdistan are mobilizing to defend their
livelihoods. These fights occur amid mass unemployment and government
lockdowns.
Broader struggles by workers for better wages and safer working
conditions, and for cradle-to-grave health care as a right will grow
faster when hiring picks up and workers sense there is more room to fight.
Through these battles working people learn the full measure of our own
worth and our capacities for disciplined action and to win solidarity.
In action we gain class consciousness and we see more clearly there is
no common interest between workers and bosses.
Today the government shows its disdain for the life and limb of working
people by refusing to use the centralized resources of the country to
produce, distribute and deliver the vaccine to everyone. Instead, this
is all organized in ways geared to advance the profits of private
bosses. It’s in the hands of bosses at FedEx and UPS, Walgreens and CVS
and for-profit hospitals who insist on short staffing.
In their hands the vaccine or any medical care will always be a
commodity to be bought and sold. They act to prevent competitors from
acquiring it, ensuring millions in other countries and throughout the
semicolonial world will be left without immunization for months, if not
years.
Their actions reflect the values of a class whose morality is whatever
turns the highest profit. Their Democratic and Republican parties, their
cops, courts, prisons and death penalty are organized to defend that
dog-eat-dog system.
Working people must build our own political party, a labor party that
defends all those oppressed and exploited by capital. With a labor party
we can chart a course to take political power out of the hands of the
bosses and bankers and replace their bankrupt system with a workers and
farmers government.
The revolution made by working people in Cuba in 1959 showed that when
workers and farmers take political power, and establish control over the
land, factories and banks, they control their own future. It is a
powerful example for working people everywhere.
Learning how Cuban workers and farmers made their revolution, joining
activities to celebrate its 62nd anniversary on Jan. 1, and organizing
public actions to defend the Cuban Revolution against Washington’s
brutal embargo can help point the road forward.
No layoffs! Cut workweek with no cut in weekly pay!
A spreading second wave of government-ordered lockdowns on production,
retail, restaurants and other stores is worsening the crisis conditions
inflicted on working people by the bosses and their governments. Small
shopkeepers are being crushed and mass unemployment is deepening
competition…
Front Page Articles
No layoffs! Cut workweek with no cut in weekly pay!
Workers and farmers need to chart our own road forward
New Rochelle nurses fight for more staff, new contract
India farmer protests grow in fight to stop gov’t assaults
Family leads protests for arrest of cop who killed Casey Goodson Jr.
Socialist Workers Party campaigns widely with ‘Militant,’ action program
Feature Articles
Protests across Kurdistan demand unpaid wages, jobs, services
Also In This Issue
Venezuelan elections deal blow to US rulers’ attacks
Bob Cantrick, communist cadre for over 5 decades
Walmart workers give ‘blood money’ bribes to build SWP
US executes two more federal inmates, three others scheduled
Editorials
Holiday greetings to workers behind bars
On the Picket Line
Rolls-Royce jet engine workers strike to defend their jobs
Books of the Month
Teamsters show ‘with proper leadership, workers can overcome’
25, 50 and 75 years ago
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--
Carl Sagan “Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No,
no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection
for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics,
Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s
done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule
is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.” ― Carl
Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
