EDITORIAL
Working People Need Our Own Party, Our Own Candidates, Organizers, Agitators, and Fighters

Oct 26, 2020

The following article was the editorial in SPARK workplace newsletters of October 20.

We face the rapid spread of a contagious virus because government for decades raided public health funds—just like it raided funds for roads, dams, bridges, public transit, sewer systems, water systems, flood control, fire control, and education.

The Republican Party and the Democratic Party both handed out tax breaks, subsidies and outright gifts to the banks, the corporations, and the wealthy who own them. Our tax money went into the pockets of a greedy capitalist class.

We are living through an economy in collapse because that same capitalist class sacrificed the needs of the whole population in its mad dash to accumulate more profit. Jobs were slashed, wages cut, employment made temporary or part-time or by contract. Capitalist profits flooded into speculation, endangering our lives along with the whole economy.

For decades, government reinforced this mad dash for profit by legally making it harder to fight back. Republicans openly attacked workers’ rights; Democrats, who pretended to defend unions, did nothing. Both parties made it harder to get unemployment benefits. Both made it harder to get Social Security disability. Both made changes to inflation indexes that lowered our incomes.

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 both have always supported the right of the capitalist class to run the economy.

Working people won’t overcome these crises in the voting booth. The only way to really change our fate is to mobilize our class against the capitalist class and the government that defends it. We will resolve these problems when we fight to put our hands on this wealth stolen from decades of our labor. Maybe there is no big fight by working people today, but that is what we need.

And we need to be united, black and white, immigrant and native born, women and men. The working class needs all its forces to go into battle. But the enemies of the working class seek to inflame differences among us and to divide us. Our answer must be: NO! We will not allow the cancers of racism to spread in our class.

So, what can we do in this election year, when the working class is not mobilized in its own name, fighting for everyone’s interests?

In most states, working people have no way to express what we really think. If we vote for either of the two big parties we say we agree with what they do. We say we want them to continue doing it. Our vote for either gives them a stamp of approval. That means, we throw our vote away.

But in two states, Michigan and Maryland, there are parties on the ballot that give us a choice. Both of these parties took the name Working Class Party, to show their allegiance to our class.

These parties are small parties, new parties. They certainly don’t have lots of money. They fight to be heard in a country where the wealthy classes use their money to control political life.

But a vote for their candidates is a way to express what we really think. It’s a way to point the direction we want to go. Every vote for candidates of these two parties can be a statement that we want to build a party of our class, the working class.

Michigan: Candidates of the Working Class Party, for Congress, Kathy Goodwin, 5^th district; Andrea L. Kirby, 9^th; Gary Walkowicz, 12^th; Sam Johnson, 13^th; Philip Kolody, 14^th.

For State House, Linda Rayburn, 4^th district; Kimberly Givens, 7^th; Simone R. Coleman, 14^th; Larry Darnell Betts, 15^th; and Louis Palus, 75^th.

Everywhere in the state, you can vote for Mary Anne Hering and Hali McEachern for State Board of Education.

Maryland: Candidate of the Working Class Party, David Harding for mayor of Baltimore.

In every state: parties like these are needed, working class parties.