And given our laws and how they and the financial elites support our present
two party system, electing a third party candidate is a pipe dream. I hear
lots of people on the left who want to change the system, and there are a
number of different ideas about how to do it. There's a lot of organizing
going on via social media and podcasts, but I don't know whether it reaches the
majority of working class people. Given the complexity of our system, making
change is a mammoth task.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2020 11:04 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] ALYSON KENNEDY, SWP CANDIDATE
FOR PRESIDENT:,‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
Building a strong Working Class party is the logical solution. But of course,
that calls for involvement and some sacrifice of time and energy. Our
Capitalist System enables the Boss to delegate his work, giving him time as
well as money and connections, to become involved in politics.
We see examples of socialists elected to lower offices, such as the Seattle
City Council, and making progress in social reform. But electing a socialist
as president without strong support in Congress, would be like playing Russian
Roulette with a gun loaded with five bullets.
However, since socialism has been around as long as democracy, it is not
appearing to be catching on.
Capitalism has the advantage of setting the rules to the political arena.
Money is the main tool. And unfortunately, the Working Class has been robbed
so often that they simply hand over their money with barely an objection, not
even understanding that the United States is as much a Class System as is India.
.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/16/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://themilitant.com/2020/02/15/workers-need-our-own-party-a-labor-
party/ ALYSON KENNEDY, SWP CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT:
‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
article
BY GEORGE CHALMERS
Vol. 84/No. 7
February 24, 2020
MILITANT/GEORGE CHALMERS SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy
talks with auto mechanic Rogelio Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24.
Working people
need to break with the capitalists’ parties, she said. figure SWP
presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy talks with auto mechanic Rogelio
Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24. Working people need to break
with the capitalists’ parties, she said.
MILITANT/GEORGE CHALMERS SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy
talks with auto mechanic Rogelio Rodriguez at his home in Dallas Jan. 24.
Working people
need to break with the capitalists’ parties, she said. figure end
DALLAS — The two main capitalist parties, the Democrats and
Republicans, are in crisis, Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party
candidate for president, told participants in a campaign rally here
Feb. 8. And, she said, more and more workers are concluding that
neither the Democratic or Republican parties are on the side of
working people.
MILITANT/SUSAN LAMONT Malcolm Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice
president, visits Reggie Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1.
Jackson got campaign
book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. figure Malcolm
Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice president, visits Reggie
Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1. Jackson got campaign book
<em>Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions.</em> MILITANT/SUSAN
LAMONT Malcolm Jarrett, right, SWP candidate for vice president,
visits Reggie Jackson in Hogansville, Georgia, Oct. 1.
Jackson got campaign
book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. figure end Kennedy
explained that she, SWP vice presidential candidate Malcolm Jarrett
and over 20 SWP candidates coast to coast are campaigning on the need
for workers to have our own party, a labor party, based on our unions.
“One of the ways the wealthy class maintains its rule has always been
its use of the two-party — or more — system,” Kennedy said. “If you
don’t like what one capitalist politician is doing, they tell you to
vote for another capitalist politician from the other party in the
next election.
“The 2016 election showed that the capitalist rulers can’t depend on
this anymore,” she said. “More workers said, ‘He’s worse, she’s worse,’
and that has
the capitalist class worried.
“More and more workers sense the dead-end of lesser evil politics,”
Kennedy told the Militant in an interview a couple days later. “But
it’s not immediately apparent to them what the alternative is. What
workers need in the political arena will grow out of our experiences
fighting to defend our wages and working conditions, for our social
and political rights, against the capitalist rulers’ wars abroad.
“Through these battles we’ll transform and rebuild our unions, and
transform ourselves, deepening our self-confidence and class
consciousness,” she said.
“We’ll learn the burning necessity of constructing our own political
party, with a program to take power out of the hands of the capitalist
exploiters.
“A labor party can unite and mobilize all those who are exploited and
oppressed by capital, the vast majority,” she said.
“We don’t have a dog in the race for which Democrat or Republican gets
elected in 2020,” Kennedy told the rally. “Join with the SWP campaign
to fight for our own party, a labor party, to organize a class
struggle for power.”
Not a ‘vote-catching machine’
A labor party would need a program that raises the same kinds of
demands that the Socialist Workers Party is promoting in its 2020
campaign platform.
“The SWP campaign program says our unions need to fight for workers to
take control of production,” she said. “That’s how workers can defend
ourselves on the job at the same time as we learn how the working
class is capable of organizing the economy itself, of replacing the
bosses and their government, and of running society ourselves.
“Think what this would have meant if Boeing workers had conquered
control of building and testing the Boeing 737 MAX plane!” she said.
“Workers control of production would enable us to deal with the
questions of industrial pollution of the atmosphere that contributes
greenhouse gases and other contamination,” Kennedy pointed out. “It is
only the working class that is capable — and has the class interests —
to defend our land, air and waters.
The defense of science and culture, of everything important to
humanity, falls to the working class.
“All of that would point in the direction of working people forming
their own labor party, fighting to put a workers and farmers
government in power,”
Kennedy said.
Open door to Israel-Palestine talks
During the discussion at the forum, Kennedy was asked what the
campaign’s view is of the Trump administration’s recently announced
Middle East peace proposal.
She encouraged participants to read the December 2017 Socialist
Workers Party statement, “For Recognition of a Palestinian State and
of Israel.”
“This is a very important opening for working people in the Middle
East and worldwide,” Kennedy said. “It should be grabbed by the
Israeli and Arab governments and the leaderships of the Palestinian
organizations to open serious negotiations.”
“These negotiations,” she said, “would have to recognize, as our
statement points out, ‘the right of Jews everywhere to take refuge in
Israel in the face of the global rise of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic
violence, as well as the unconditional right of the dispossessed
Palestinian people to a contiguous, sovereign homeland on territory —
including East Jerusalem — conquered and occupied by the Israeli
government during the 1967 war.”
There have been no negotiations for decades, she said, a result of
anti-working-class leaderships there.
“The Palestinian people deserve a leadership that takes the moral high
ground,” she said. “The U.S. proposal as it stands would leave the
Palestinian state looking like a gerrymandered U.S. congressional
district. But what could emerge from serious negotiations would have
to recognize today’s realities. This could open the road to the fight
for two viable states.”
Our starting point, as the SWP statement makes clear, Kennedy said, is
“the class interests and solidarity of workers and toiling farmers
across the Middle East — be they Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Kurdish,
Turkish, Persian or otherwise, and whatever their religious or other
beliefs — as well as working people in the United States and around
the world.”
Participants at the meeting contributed $450 for the national SWP campaign.
SWP Campaign Coupon
Click here
to email Socialist Workers Party 2020 Campaign.
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“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that
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eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the
universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.”
― Sam Harris,
