Our Workplace Press

We publish workplace bulletins every two weeks. Below is the most recent editorial from our workplace newsletters. Older editorials are linked to the right.

Needed:
A Real Working Class Party
– A Revolutionary Party!

May 6, 2012

The November election campaign has begun. President Barack Obama, the Democrat, says that the Republicans want to give tax breaks to the rich and cut social programs and public services. He’s right. And they say it.

But that’s exactly what the Democrats have been doing. In 2010, they voted to reduce taxes on the banks, the corporations and the rich, and to cut spending on education, social and public services.

What choice do workers have in this election? We get to pick between an open enemy and a false friend.

We can vote for the Republicans, who speak and act for the big banks and the big industrialists. Or we can vote for the Democrats, who get money from the unions, smiling at us when they take it – but then act for the big banks and industrialists.

Here is the plain and simple truth: there is no party that represents the interests of the working class. And there has not been for decades.

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1912, Eugene V. Debs ran for the presidency as a Socialist. He did not expect to win. Then, like today, money controlled the elections. But he ran to speak for the workers and farmers. He used the elections to denounce the capitalist system, a system in which we are still trapped: “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Six years later, he was put on trial. He had committed the so-called “crime” of opposing the slaughter the capitalists had fomented: World War I. And he had supported the workers’ revolution that broke out in Russia.

Two years later, still behind bars in federal prison, he won nearly a million votes in the 1920 elections. It was only 3.4% of the vote, but it showed that there was already a sizeable current of workers who agreed with Debs that it was necessary to “organize, not to conciliate, but to fight against the capitalist class.”

Debs was not like capitalist politicians, who smile to your face and stab you in the back.

He was truly a militant of his class – having led the great railway strike of 1894. Unlike today’s unions leaders, he took his place alongside the striking railroad workers – and went to prison for it. He agreed with Marx that the working class has the force and power to emancipate itself.

If we want to go forward, we have to resurrect our history – a history filled with revolutionary working class militants like Debs, or like the many devoted, and often nameless revolutionary syndicalists who made up the IWW, or the selfless and committed activists who made up the Communist Party and the Communist League. The communists of the 1930s led the sit-down strikes, the vast wave of strikes that forced the capitalists to step back in defeat. The communists led the workers’ movement that built the unions.

The working class needs its own political party, built around the conviction held by all those revolutionaries that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common” – in the words of the IWW.

That’s never been more true than today. The capitalist class has engaged itself in a vast class war against all of us who do the necessary work that lets this society run. Up until now, it has been a very one-sided war. Workers have not found the way to come together in a common struggle against our enemies – against the bankers, the big industrialists and the two big parties that serve the capitalists.

It’s time for the working class to step forward. We have the force to defend ourselves. We make the whole economy run. Not only can we defend ourselves by bringing the economy to a stop. Together, we have the power to start it running – this time, in a way that will serve all of humanity.