Support the Socialist Workers Party! Working-class alternative to Trump-Biden!
In this class-divided society, the capitalists have two parties, and reformist "third parties." Working people have none. SWP calls for national labor party.
The capitalist class — owners and shareholders of big business who control and make production decisions in their own interests of profit — have a dictatorship in this country. Working people — those of us who sell our labor to those big businesses in order to survive — are bound by the laws the capitalists and their legislators create, laws which are then enforced by their police. They have a choice in deciding how their class interests will best be represented. Some years, they decide Democrats are best for their interests. Other election years, it’s the Republicans.
In either case, working people lose and continue struggling to make ends’ meat.
Although both major capitalist parties claim to act in the interests of “all Americans” and “hard-working Americans”, this is a two-part lie. The first lie is intended to project the illusion that they care about working-class people, wage earners and small businesses who don’t get paid if they don’t show up for work. The second lie is intended to reinforce the illusion that citizens and residents living in the United States can all be lumped into one category — “Americans.” Both of these illusions are intended to blur and conceal the fact that society is class-divided.
There’s no “we, as a country”, or “our government”, or “our military.” It’s their government, their military, their police. The only power we (working people) have is our unions and our combined force as a class.
Over the centuries since capitalism took hold in America and elsewhere, the capitalists have learned how to distract those they exploit for profit. Distracting workers from the real enemy is essential to their class survival. One of their favorite and oldest tricks is to pit immigrant workers against indigenous workers.
“They’re taking your job” or “they’re responsible for all the crime in the city,” they say. Republicans utilize this one most. Democrats, inversely, say that the problem is “white, Christian Americans”, supporters of Donald Trump, who are the main obstacles to progress. Both are lies, yet this is how they keep working people tied to their two-party system, using how “bad” the “other side” is to attract voters.
“For decades the capitalist rulers have ruled through the two-party system, seeking to convince working people their only choice is to hold their nose and vote for first one, then the other, lesser evil. Today that system is fraying at the seams,” SWP member Terry Evans wrote in a Militant article titled, “Defend rights! No to Democrats’ attack on workers’ right to vote for whom they want”.
The Socialist Workers Party has been truly fighting for the interests of working people ever since its founding, in 1938, and well before that. The SWP’s predecessor, the Communist League, was founded in 1927, when the party’s central leaders and founders were expelled from the original American Communist Party, of which they were founding members. They were expelled for supporting Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, and his positions on Soviet policy and international questions. Upon Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in 1924, supporters of Trotsky were increasingly persecuted, including Trotsky’s family and himself, killed in 1938 in Mexico City.
And even before the formation of the American Communist Party, in response to the successful Russian Revolution which saw working people take away state power from the feudal capitalists of Russia, the future leaders of the SWP were active and important members of the original American Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), during the first imperialist world war. This political continuity extends back to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who were strong supporters of President Lincoln’s war against the slavocracy, champions of “Free Labor”. The workers and revolutionaries who fought to defeat slavery in the 1860s went on to be active members of the labor movement in the 1870s, 80s, into the 1900s.
The Socialist Workers Party is a working-class party, in composition and program. Their members work in factories, mills and mines across the country, and are members of unions. They advance demands intended to unite and strengthen the resolve of working people to take on the bosses and their government, with the broad perspective of leading workers in their millions to have a socialist revolution against capitalist rule, whereby working people take control of factories, mines and mills, as well as the government, to create a new society.
A society where production and government decisions are not made in the interests of a few wealthy families and their middle-class servants and managers, which is the current situation. But a society that acts in the interests of the vast majority and joins the international struggle to create a socialist world. For more than 100 years, the Socialist Workers Party has fought for that future.
Subscribe to SWP’s weekly newspaper, The Militant, and check out their publishing house, Pathfinder Press, which publishes historic and contemporary texts on class struggle, including this text on Chicano politics, written by an RGV native, Olga Rodriguez.
Get in touch if you’d like to read and discuss socialist politics in the RGV!
rgvworkersvoice@substack.com