the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 24, 2020
Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate, spoke on the four crises engulfing us: “The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.”
The four-day televised Democratic Convention, which featured speeches from Democratic leaders along with stories by ordinary people whose lives are being torn apart, struck an emotional response from a population devastated by multiple crises.
The strategy of the Democratic Party is to put the responsibility for all of this pain and suffering squarely in the lap of the current President, Trump. And of course, it is a call to vote Democratic, to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
No doubt, Donald Trump has been horrific and has made and continues to make policy decisions that cost lives and jobs. But it is simply not true that replacing one President with another, no matter how experienced, no matter how empathetic, no matter how kind, will lead us out of the crises we are in today.
These crises are not the making of one man, nor of one political party. They are the making of a system designed for the purpose of making profits; a system designed by generations of a wealthy upper class and run by two parties, both Democratic and Republican. They are the making of capitalism at its highest stages of destruction and decay.
On an hourly, daily basis, the capitalist class is making the decisions that force the majority of the population to pay the cost of the economic crisis, the health care crisis and the environmental crisis. They impose divisions on the working class which relegate some workers to lower incomes and worse conditions than others. In this, they are backed up by the violence of the police.
Does anyone believe that the horrific pandemic that we face is the product of mismanagement by one man? The huge health care infrastructure, the huge for-profit insurance empire, the huge drug monopolies were here well before this aberration they call Trump. Practically alone among developed nations, the U.S. ruling class has refused to enact public health care, universal health care, health care for all. And why? Because the drug companies, the insurers and the hospital corporations are among the most profitable.
When the virus pandemic hit, there was not only mismanagement of masking, testing, tracking and isolation. There were inadequate supplies and a shortage of hospital rooms, ventilators, medical personnel.
Who died and at the highest rates? Essential workers, health care workers, black workers, Latino workers, the working class and poor populations. Those who have received inadequate health care for decades. Those who had no fabulous, hi-tech hospitals to go to.
Institutional racism and infrastructure disrepair have made a deadly combination, and millions are paying the price for it. Over 150 years of allowing discrimination in hiring, firing, education, health care, housing! Surely, no one can assign the blame for all this hateful social activity, backed up by brutal violence, to one man in 2020.
The economic crisis we are suffering through is not the result of the pandemic. It is, first and foremost, the result of decades of a policy to decrease total numbers of jobs while reducing wages and benefits. It has resulted in a downward spiral of devastation of cities and rural areas alike by poverty and neglect.
Finally, the environmental crisis, unleashed by decades of capitalist exploitation of natural resources in an irresponsible way has put the world population at risk. We would have to be simpletons to think that we are in a situation of raging heat, catastrophic fires and hurricanes and flooding because of one man’s actions.
If the examination of these crises by Biden doesn’t go beyond a condemnation of Trump, there is a reason. And the reason is that both political parties have presided over this rotten system for decades, profiting from the misery of the population.
Election? We need a revolution. We need to replace this rotten, murderous system with a system run by and for the working population.
Leaders of the Democratic Party won’t do that. So it is up to us. Workers are perfectly capable of building a party that will organize and fight to replace the capitalist system with a system run by and for working people.
Aug 24, 2020
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is the only delivery service that covers the entire U.S., even the most remote parts, six days a week. Yet this summer it has been breaking down. Residents in big parts of Chicago’s South Side have waited weeks at a time for mail. Similar problems have been reported in upstate New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and many other parts of the country. People have waited weeks for medicine, legal documents—even the results of some COVID-19 tests.
Postal workers report that the immediate cause of the breakdown was a June order by Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, to ban overtime. There is just too much mail and not enough workers to deliver it all in eight-hour shifts, so mail sat on the floor for days.
The Democrats accuse Trump of plotting to make mail-in voting impossible with this overtime ban, and also by removing mailboxes and sorting machines, and shortening post office hours—and that might be Trump’s idea. He even admitted as much in an interview about postal problems.
Under pressure, on August 18, DeJoy pulled back and said he would allow some overtime and delay other “cost cutting” measures until after the election, but he is not planning to reverse any machine or mailbox removals that have already taken place.
In fact, Trump’s attacks are just the latest straws to fall on the back of the postal service—straws thrown by both parties, for decades. At base, the USPS has been undermined by requiring it to fund itself, while also making it subsidize business.
The USPS subsidizes “junk mail,” charging much less for it than regular letters, even though it takes just as much work to get it to your house. That’s why we all get so much of the stuff!
Private companies like UPS and Fedex profit from delivering in dense cities and suburbs, but only the postal service delivers to every corner of the country, including for those companies. It’s obviously more expensive to maintain this country-wide network—but it’s also vital.
On top of all that, in 2006, Congress mandated that the USPS “pre-fund” its pensions and retiree health care for 75 years, creating a giant artificial budget hole.
One Postmaster General after another has used “budget holes.” These policies have created the excuse to attack postal workers and restrict hiring, which is why the postal service has increasingly relied on overtime. And now, on top of all that, many postal workers are coming down with COVID-19—workers reported 40 cases at just one Chicago processing center, meaning workers calling in sick, and more delays.
The postal service has been running for over 200 years. It’s a sign of the utter bankruptcy of this society that it is now being destroyed.
Aug 24, 2020
It’s that time of year. Schools around the country are going back into session, or preparing to. Many school districts, including L.A., Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., are starting with almost all students attending remotely—which is to say, from home, over the Internet.
But in Chicago at least, the city and the school district have not solved the basic problem of distance learning: technology. Most families were able to get at least one computer—but that’s not enough for the many families with more than one child. The mayor, the district, and Comcast promised that everyone would get Internet access. But that did not happen. In fact, even for people with Internet, the Comcast service many in the city get is not strong enough to provide the seamless live video feed needed for class. Many teachers faced this problem alongside their students.
In addition to technology, in order to be successful in distance learning, every student needs a quiet place to get onto “class,” and freedom from other responsibilities—like work or childcare. Students from the working class are less likely to have these things. A reasonable society would make resources available to make sure all students have them, in whatever form they need during a pandemic. But in this society, the pandemic increases the “education gap” that already exists between working class and better-off students.
The federal government proved only too happy to shower billions to prop up the bottom lines of corporations, banks, and the financial system. It might not be simple to safely provide students with a good education during the pandemic—but it would be possible if the money were spent on the scale that has been provided to the corporations. A society run by workers would figure it out. The government we have does not even try.
Aug 24, 2020
Nearly every type of food has become more expensive since the pandemic started. Compared with this time last year, prices for beef are up 25.1%, eggs are up 12.1%, and pork is up 11.8%, as reported by the Federal Government. Already-rich owners of the food related businesses are churning very fast profits out of their scheme and getting richer with every passing day.
A handful of companies control the meat industry, starting from very large animal farms and ending with very large meat processing plants. Fruit and vegetable farming is also concentrated in highly industrialized, very large farms, and dominated by a few companies. This monopoly power of a few companies pushes the food prices higher; and the pandemic provides these food companies the excuse to further jack up the prices. This year, when these companies could not sell their products to the restaurants closed due to the pandemic, they destroyed the food on the farm grounds or in the meat and dairy processing plants to keep prices high.
Workers lost their jobs and stable income in large numbers this past year. Available jobs are scarce; and when available, they are low-paying temporary jobs. Under such dire conditions, drastically rising food prices are a real burden for workers. More than 1 in 6 adults were food insecure in May, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute.
That is, workers have been cornered with lack of good income, while the society is very rich; and at the same time, also with the skyrocketing food prices, while the food is plenty. The root cause of these maladies is the capitalist society organized by the rich for their profits.
Public control of these few companies in order to feed the needy, and confiscating food from the companies before they destroy it are sacrilegious acts in the capitalist system. So, the food is produced in large quantities, but it is kept from the workers’ reach.
Aug 24, 2020
On August 10 an explosion in northwest Baltimore killed two people. It also completely destroyed three houses, leaving 30 people with no place to live, with nothing. Three people remain in the hospital. This blast was heard a mile away and many nearby homes were damaged. Neighbors hurried to join rescue crews, saving one woman trapped in the rubble.
BGE, Baltimore Gas and Electric, a subsidiary of Excelon, says it was not the fault of leaking gas pipes. Are we really expected to believe this? For years, Baltimore area customers have paid for an aged system with leaking gas pipes. At least 8,000 gas leaks were reported last year alone.
The state of Maryland has supposedly told the utility to fix its pipes, but at the rate BGE is going, it will take 20 years to do it!
Last year, an office building in a nearby suburb was leveled by an explosion. That one was caused by a BGE gas leak. The only reason there weren’t deaths that time is that the explosion happened on a Sunday. What did the state do? It issued a $240,000 fine. That’s nothing when BGE issues constant rate increases and brings in earnings of three BILLION dollars a year.
The inadequate amount BGE spends on maintenance endangers its customers. In a functioning society, utility companies would complete the maintenance and repairs that are needed. But in this society, nothing matters if it might endanger profits.
Aug 24, 2020
California’s three biggest utility companies cut power to more than 410,000 customers in “rolling blackouts”on the evening of August 14.
What followed is a picture of chaos: State agencies responsible for managing and regulating California’s electricity network pointing fingers at each other; state politicians like Governor Newsom stepping on the podium to wag a finger at all of those agencies; and commentators still scratching their heads as to why hundreds of thousands of people were left without electricity in the middle of a severe heat wave.
As for the three big utility companies responsible for supplying 80% of California’s electricity—it turns out they have retired several power plants over the last five years, reducing capacity by the amount of power used by 7 million homes!
These companies have not been spending enough money to maintain their networks either, as wildfires caused by aged and poorly maintained power lines showed in recent years.
These huge, investor-owned companies make such decisions for one reason only—to maximize profit. And in the end that’s where the real problem is: The supply of electricity to 40 million Californians depends on the decisions made by a few executives in a few corporate boardrooms, for the sole purpose of making a small number of very wealthy shareholders even wealthier!
Aug 24, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Eighty years ago, on August 20, 1940, Ramon Mercader, a killer sent by Stalin, murdered Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, with an ice ax.
Thus disappeared the last great figure of a revolutionary generation, that of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the Bolsheviks who had ensured the success of the proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917.
Trotsky was a distilled essence of revolutionary experience. Already in 1905, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he had inspired the action of the first workers’ council in the capital. After the revolution of February 1917, says a witness, he “ran from the Oboukhovsky factory to the Troubotcheny factory, from the Putilov factory to the Baltic factory, from the Manege to the barracks, it looked like he spoke everywhere at the same time. Every soldier and worker in Petrograd knew him and listened to him. His influence on the masses and even on the leaders was irresistible.” This activity, in complete agreement with Lenin, Stalin had written in 1918: “All the practical organization of work of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky.” This did not prevent Stalin from asserting six years later that “Trotsky had played no role in the October Revolution”!
In the summer of 1918, the imperialist powers led by France governed by Georges Clemenceau, and England governed by Lloyd George, invaded Russia to try to isolate the country and condemn it to perish from starvation, supporting the White Armies who wanted to re-establish the tsar. The civil war lasted until 1921. The workers’ state lacked everything, but Trotsky succeeded in building up a revolutionary army of workers and peasants, which would prevail. He gave the key to this success: “For our army, the strongest glue were the ideas of October.” As one enthusiastic farmer said: “The Reds were ready to give their lives for the world of the Soviets, a world without beggars or infirm.”
For Lenin and Trotsky, the revolution could only survive by spreading to developed countries, like Germany. In 1919, the Bolsheviks laid the foundations of the Communist International, to bring together the militants who in different countries rejected the socialist or trade union leaders who had supported their bourgeoisie during the First World War. During the period of the first four congresses of the International, Trotsky played a major role.
However, the revolutionary wave of the aftermath of the First World War did not lead to a victory for the proletariat elsewhere than in Russia. In a country drained of its lifeblood, only the party apparatus continued to function, never ceasing to grow and attract those who, tired of the struggle, saw it as a means of making a career. Stalin, the boss of this apparatus, maneuvered to dismiss the militants who remained faithful to the objective of the world revolution. Lenin and Trotsky saw this danger and decided in 1922 to oppose it. But illness and then death would take Lenin in 1924.
In 1923 Trotsky published The New Course, which criticized the growing weight of bureaucracy within the workers’ state, called for the return of democracy in the party and the implementation of industrialization and a plan. A statement signed by 46 other leaders went in the same direction. The struggle of the Russian Left Opposition began. Trotsky and his comrades, in the general retreat of the workers’ movement, despite the weariness and discouragement of workers in Russia and elsewhere, stood up step by step for the workers’ state, its future and that of the world revolution. The Left Opposition criticized, in particular, the economic policy of the Stalinist leadership and the orientation of the International which, in 1927, had led to the defeat of the workers’ revolution in China. Many members of the Left Opposition were then removed from all responsibility and deported by Stalin.
Expelled, Trotsky began a vast correspondence intended to bring together all the Communists who were aware that Stalin was betraying the revolution and launched a Bulletin of the Opposition intended for the USSR. The Permanent Revolution, History of the Russian Revolution, My Life, The Revolution Betrayed and many other texts remain as the distilled capital of the revolutionary experience.
Until 1933, the Trotskyists struggled to try to straighten out the Communist Party and the International. But in 1933, the German labor movement surrendered without struggle to the Nazis. The International failed to react to Stalin’s political orientation which prevented any real workers’ response to Hitler’s rise. These failures meant that the International was dead and a new one had to be built.
For Trotsky, the victory of Nazism also heralded a world war. Time was running out. The workers’ surge of the 1930s in the United States, France, and Spain was short-lived. The Fourth International was proclaimed in September 1938, in a period of decline. Its program, the Transitional Program, was to arm militant workers in anticipation of a new revolutionary period. At the end of World War II, the front of imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy succeeded in preventing a new wave of revolutionary workers. The program nevertheless remains current.
With the Moscow trials, staged from 1936 to 1938, Stalin liquidated the October generation and poured lies and slander against Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov, denounced as responsible for everything wrong in the USSR and as so-called allies of Hitler and Mussolini! A commission, chaired by American liberal academic John Dewey, allowed Trotsky to refute these slanders, but the message was clear: the Stalinist apparatus wanted the head of Trotsky and his relatives. Before him, Sedov and several of Trotsky’s collaborators were assassinated.
By raising the flag of internationalism, that is to say the need for the proletariat to extend the revolution to the whole world, the only way to overcome the dictatorship of capital over humanity, Trotsky ensured the continuity of the Marxist tradition. Now, in order for the bureaucracy leading the USSR to be able to claim to speak and act in the name of the proletariat, while actually turning its back on it, it had to suppress those who denounced this usurpation. Stalin and the Soviet ruling caste feared that, despite their efforts to erase the memory of October, there would remain a voice to continue and organize the struggle against capitalism and against the bureaucracy.
By having Trotsky assassinated, Stalin dealt a severe blow to the revolutionary workers’ movement, depriving it of its most experienced leader. But, eighty years after his death, the Trotskyist current still exists. It is certainly weak, divided, and lacks links with the working class. But Trotskyist ideas still represent the hope of the proletarian revolution—the only way to send capitalism to join Stalinism in the dustbin of history.
Extract from the Journal in Exile:
“For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionary; for forty-two of those years I fought under the banner of Marxism. […] I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and therefore an intractable atheist. My faith in the communist future of humanity is no less ardent, on the contrary it is firmer today than it was in my youth.”
Léon Trotsky, 1935
Aug 24, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Almost one in four coronavirus outbreaks happens in workplaces. The government decided to sit bosses down with unions to draw up new policies.
So starting September 1, it will be mandatory for workers to wear a facemask in hallways, conference rooms, and tight spaces. Even before they knew all the details, the bosses moaned about the cost. The bosses’ association, Medef warned that enforcement might make some workers not want to return to work. As if workers have any choice! These bosses’ so-called concern for their workers doesn’t hide their desire to lord over them—or their desire for higher productivity.
Many big companies and some others provide antiseptic hand cleaner and facemasks. But they don’t schedule the time needed for workers to stay the necessary distance from each other.
Washing your hands often requires taking more breaks. Cleaning equipment and rooms thoroughly requires hiring more people.
On the assembly line, what matters is the line speed the bosses set. If you fail to finish a task on time, you will bump into the next worker. In an auto factory like Renault at Flins near Paris, the bosses didn’t take long before imposing the same line speed as before the lockdown, and even faster. At slaughterhouses, workers work almost shoulder to shoulder.
Space out the positions. Slow down the line. Stop the line if necessary to finish each operation. This is what real social distancing requires. And workers are very capable of figuring out the time that is needed to work safely.
Working less frantically and for fewer hours, without reducing anyone’s wages—this requires forcing the bosses to hire more people. This is essential to withstand the workload in a workshop or office.
It is impossible to preserve both the profits of the companies and the health of the workers who create the profits. To protect their health, workers will have to insist on their safety.
Aug 24, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The United Arab Emirates and Israel announced in mid August that they agreed in Washington to start normal diplomatic relations with each other.
The U.S. government pushed this deal to strengthen the anti-Iranian axis in the Middle East. It’s the first time any country in the Persian Gulf has officially recognized Israel. Possibly other oil fiefdoms will follow, such as Saudia Arabia—another ally of the U.S. and adversary of Iran. As for trade relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, that started even before the deal was signed.
The United Arab Emirates claimed the deal ends any further annexation by Israel of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked that back right away, saying annexation is simply postponed. The very day after the meeting, the Israeli air force dropped more bombs over Gaza.
But even if Netanyahu pushes back grabbing land for a few months, that doesn’t change anything. Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to take over the entire West Bank. In part he is catering to his far-right electorate. But there is a distance between speechmaking and boots on the ground. Some Israeli leaders consider that the cheapest option is to let the Palestinian Authority maintain order in its part of the West Bank.
The deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel confirms what many Palestinians already knew. To defend their rights, now as in the past, they can only rely on their own struggle, without expecting anything from the Arab governments and ruling classes.
Aug 24, 2020
Kaiser Permanente reported a 2.1-billion dollar operating profit from its health insurance business in the second quarter of 2020—almost twice as much as the same period last year.
The reason for the huge jump in Kaiser’s profit is that, with its hospitals cancelling elective surgeries and other procedures in the first months of the pandemic, Kaiser did not pay for such medical claims—while it continued to collect premiums from its customers.
Kaiser, which doesn’t pay taxes thanks to its supposedly “non-profit” status, will add this to a war chest of over $30 billion in reserves!
The same thing happened at the other big health insurance companies. Second-quarter profits of three of the biggest for-profit insurers in the U.S., Anthem, UnitedHealth and Humana, added up to $10.7 billion—more than double their combined profits of $5.3 billion in the second quarter of 2019.
For the bosses who run these insurance companies, health care is just an excuse to grab money. For them, the pandemic, with all of its death and suffering, is a bonanza!
Aug 24, 2020
The following article was the editorial in SPARK workplace newsletters of August 17.
The headlines proclaimed it: fewer than a million people signed up for unemployment benefits last week. You would have thought the economy was in great shape.
Nothing of the kind. Yes, less than a million people signed up for the first time, because already thirty some million had already signed up. There are tens of millions of people out of work today. Unemployment continues at a level not seen since the Great Depression.
The same government, which was unable to organize the simplest public health measures to prevent a rapid spread of coronavirus, today is unable to organize the simplest measures to make the economy run again.
Government may not be the main cause of the unemployment. But there are many things, basic things, that government could do to overcome it. First of all, government—if it were controlled by the population—would hire workers to staff the public services we desperately need today.
But this government—which is controlled by the capitalist class—continues to cut services. Every government, going back decades, has starved public services for the funds that are needed.
Every one of us is touched by those cuts. The Post Office can’t deliver the mail on time—so we don’t get our medications when we need them and important legal papers don’t arrive in time, if at all. Dams collapse, taking out people’s homes. Water systems are left to rot so our kids are poisoned with lead. Sewage runs untreated into waterways. A whole town is destroyed by fire. Public transit stagnates. Highways left unrepaired take years off our cars’ suspension systems.
Today, we are beset by a spreading coronavirus epidemic because public health departments didn’t have the resources they needed to do basic research and simple testing, as well as provide protection for health care workers.
Behind all these examples, there is the same simple cause. Money that should have gone to public services instead went to big corporations in the form of subsidies, tax breaks and outright gifts. Money that should have gone to public school education for all children went to still more tax breaks to the very wealthiest people in the country. Money that should have gone to the medical needs of the population instead went to the big banks and real estate speculators.
In other words, public money that should have gone to serve the whole population instead went to a tiny capitalist class.
The defunding of public services meant that fewer workers were hired to carry out those services. Government added to the unemployment.
It’s not a question of Trump or Obama, Bush or Clinton, Republican or Democrat. No matter who was running the government, public services were being defunded. Useful jobs were eliminated.
The government of this country long ago outlived any usefulness it might once have had—a century and a half ago. This government—of and for the capitalist class—today is a barrier to prevent the population from organizing to address our problems.
A government like this needs to be tossed aside, gotten rid of, replaced by the self-organization of working people, the only ones who really know how everything essential works.
Working people—collectively putting all our knowledge, experience and abilities together—could organize and run an economy to serve the whole population.
This government—as it exists today, of and for the capitalist class—won’t be replaced in an election.
But it can be replaced by the mobilization and conscious organization of the whole working class.
Aug 24, 2020
Online shops such as Fashion Nova are ready to deliver trendy and fashionable dresses to your doorstep with hard-to-believe prices as low as $25 for a dress and even $9 for a silky undergarment. This high-quality but very low-price apparel is manufactured in garment shops located in Downtown or East Los Angeles.
Very profitable companies like Fashion Nova and Nordstrom don’t manufacture any apparel, but contract out their manufacturing to sweat shops. These shops pay workers by the piece, not by the hour. Garment workers typically work 65 to 70 hours a week for $300 to $325, which often corresponds to less than $5 an hour, according to the Los Angeles Times. Thus, they pay wages that are much lower than Los Angeles’s $15 per hour minimum wage.
The Los Angeles garment shops employ roughly 45,000 mostly immigrant workers, forming one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class. This is how and why sweatshops operate in Los Angeles, one of the richest cities in the world.
Aug 24, 2020
General Iron is a scrap metal recycler, operating for 60 years in an industrial corridor on Chicago’s near North Side. It’s a dirty business—spewing particulates and “metal fuzz” into the neighborhood around it. But a new, multi-billion dollar development for the wealthy is opening next door. So now General Iron is moving to a new site in East Side, on the far Southeast corner of the city, near the Indiana border.
The far Southeast of the city has been a dumping ground for years. Chicago’s steel mills, for a long time the main employer in the area, closed up shop forty years ago, taking jobs with them—and leaving behind plenty of polluted land. The working class neighborhood has pulled in more than its share of polluters since. Landfills moved in. More recently, neighborhood activists fought against chemical companies leaving piles of toxic petcoke dust out in the open air. Activists today note that the recycler’s new site is half a mile from George Washington High School ... and prevailing winds will carry the pollution right to the students.
General Iron’s new location is the site of one of the old mills. Some people in the neighborhood hope to get one of the handful of jobs General Iron will provide. This is how the society confronts us—jobs for a few at the expense of a neighborhood’s health. Once the wealthy wanted General Iron’s old neighborhood, they used influence to push this company off of the North Side ... and onto a working class neighborhood.
Aug 24, 2020
The following is the text of a leaflet put out by the Working Class Party of Michigan.
We face the rapid spread of a contagious virus because the government raided public health funds—just like it raided funds for roads, dams, bridges, public transit, and education—in order to hand out tax breaks, subsidies and outright gifts to a greedy capitalist class.
We are living through an economy in collapse because that ruling capitalist class sacrificed the needs of the whole society in its mad dash to accumulate ever more profit. Jobs were slashed, wages cut, employment made temporary or part time or by contract. The extra profits they wrung out flooded into speculation, endangering our lives along with their own economy. When the virus hit, it just compounded all the problems of an economy in crisis.
Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has an answer to these crises because each in its own way supports the right of the capitalist class to run the economy.
Until working people are ready to fight to take back this wealth stolen from decades of our labor, we won’t begin to resolve the problems we face. Until the working class mobilizes to grab hold of the economy, taking control of it, we will continue to live through one crisis after another.
Facing a society in crisis, the working class needs all its forces to go into battle. But it’s exactly in this current situation that the enemies of the working class seek to inflame differences among us and to divide us. Our only answer must be: NO! We will not allow the cancer of racism to spread in our class.
Working people won’t overcome these crises in the voting booth. We can change our fate only through a determined mobilization of our class against the capitalist class and the government that defends it. But with your vote for the Working Class Party, you can show your support for this perspective.
For more information about this campaign, our earlier campaigns and other workers’ campaigns, see the independent website: https://workingclassfight.com
If you want to help on this campaign, talk to the person who gave you this leaflet or write us with a way to contact you.
Our postal address is: Working Class Party, P.O. Box 2033, Detroit MI 48202
Our Email address is: contact@workingclassparty.org
Aug 24, 2020
Top Row: Sam Johnson, 13th Congressional; Gary Walkowicz, 12th Congressional; Simone R. Coleman, 14th State House; and Andrea L. Kirby, 9th Congressional district.
Middle Row: Larry Darnell Betts, 15th State House district; Kimberly Givens, 7th State House; Mary Anne Hering and Hali McEachern, our two candidates for State Board of Education; and Louis Palus, 75th State House district.
Bottom Row: Linda Rayburn, 4th State House; Kathy Goodwin, 5th Congressional; and Philip Kolody, 14th Congressional district.
Aug 24, 2020
The Republicans and Democrats in Congress let funding for federal relief for the unemployed run out at the end of July. As a result, for the month of August, over 30 million jobless have had to depend on state unemployment benefits that nationwide average less than $300 per week—which is not enough to cover the rent in many cities, not to mention pay for food, utilities or anything else. Tens of millions of workers and their families now face homelessness and hunger.
Don’t believe the Democrats’ and Republicans’ blame game for not extending the little bit of federal relief and protections for the unemployed. The politicians of both parties claim that somehow they can’t work together. But they did work together closely... when it came to assuring the profits of big businesses.
In early March, the Democrats and Republicans pushed through new tax breaks for big businesses and the very rich that are worth 650 billion dollars in this year alone. The Democrats and Republicans also gave the Federal Reserve full authority to buy up trillions of dollars in private debt of both highly indebted big banks and big non-financial companies, thus putting trillions more dollars in the capitalists’ hands.
In reality, the Republicans and Democrats also did agree this time to let the federal relief benefits for the unemployed run out. Thus, the politicians help the bosses to try to force workers to accept much lower wages and worse working conditions.
The same thing is true for the moratorium on evictions, which the Republicans and Democrats also let run out at the end of July. In this way, the politicians also help deliver working class families on a silver platter to capitalists and bankers, who are lining up to take advantage of the growing wave of evictions and foreclosures by snapping up properties at fire sale prices and facilitating the gentrification of working class neighborhoods.
No, all the fighting between the Democrats and Republicans is really a disguise for the bipartisan support of the politicians to help the capitalists to attack the working class in order to increase corporate profits and wealth.