Gary Walkowicz Speech at Working Class Party Convention, June 23, 2024

Jul 22, 2024

The following speech was taken from the independent website, workingclassfight.com

It’s really exciting to be here to start another campaign for Working Class Party. So, I would just like to take a few minutes to say some things about what we’re going to talk about in this campaign this year and why we’re running.

Trump and Biden both work for the enemies of the working class. These two parties, these two politicians and their parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are faithful servants of the capitalist class, which exploits the working class. These politicians work for the same capitalists who raise prices and hold down our wages. They work for the same capitalists who cut jobs and work the rest of us harder.

Republicans and Democrats need our votes because the millionaires and billionaires who fund their campaigns are only a handful of people, a handful of votes. So, the Republicans and Democrats want the votes of the millions of working people who make up the vast majority of the population of people in this country.

These politicians need our votes, but we don’t need them or their parties. The working class needs its own party. And that’s what we will say in our campaign this year. The Working Class Party is not the mass party that the working class needs, but it is a step toward building that party.

We will talk about the problems faced by the working class today. And we all see these problems, low wages and high prices, people living paycheck to paycheck, jobs that are only part time or temporary, working conditions that are getting worse. We all see that the schools for our children are declining. We can’t afford to buy a house or rent an apartment. Healthcare costs are out of control. Roads and water lines and sewer systems are falling apart.

The Republicans and Democrats have no answer for these problems. Trump had four years, and Biden had four years, and the Republicans and Democrats had over a hundred years, and the problems are getting worse. But the working class has their own answers to these problems.

We will talk about inflation, which is killing working people today. The corporations raise prices faster than they raise the wage that they pay us. It means higher profits for the corporations and a lower standard of living for the working class. So, this inflation really amounts to a wage decrease.

A price increase without a wage increase means a pay cut. Okay. And so, we say no more pay cuts. We need a pay raise. Our wages should go up immediately for us to catch up for all the ground we have lost to inflation. And in the future, when prices go up, our wages should go up and immediately go up every week. And the same should be true for pensions and Social Security and all retirement money. Money should go up for disability and unemployment and any other money that working people get.

Everyone Should Have a Job

The truth is that millions of people don’t have a job, but the government doesn’t count them as being unemployed. And we know that the only jobs available are part-time or temporary jobs. Not enough to live on, much less support a family. And while all this is going on, the people who do have full-time jobs often have jobs that are more than full-time. They’re working 50 or 60 or more hours a week doing the work of two people or three people or four people. The people who do have jobs are being worked to death.

The working class answer to jobs is very simple. Divide up the work among everyone who wants a job. The people who do have a job can work fewer hours at a reasonable pace. The people who need a job can have a job. And everyone can be paid a full wage, a decent wage, more than we get now, enough to live comfortably.

The corporate bosses of course are going to cry they can’t afford this. That they can’t afford to pay higher wages and work more people. And the politicians are going to back them up. They’re going to back up the bosses, saying, “Oh, this is impossible. The money isn’t there.”

To that we say, “Bullshit.” We say, “Open up the books and let the workers look at them.”

We already can see that the capitalists are making record profits. We already can see that most of these profits are going to wealthy billionaires through dividends and stock buybacks.

From what we can already see, we know there’s enough money to pay for higher wages and jobs for everyone. And how much more money are they holding and hiding that we would see when we opened up the books?

What about everything else that is falling apart in this society?

We see everything getting worse today. The schools for working class children don’t have enough money. Hospitals and health care clinics are closing. Roads are crumbling. Water mains are breaking. There is lead and PFAS in our drinking water.

It’s all happening because money is not being spent on these things. But the money is there. And workers pay plenty in taxes, as everybody knows. But most of this public money does not go for what the public needs. Most of the money goes to wealthy people and corporations in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and grants. Hell, the rich who get most of the tax money don’t even pay any taxes themselves.

So, workers are paying for the rich to get richer.

But the working class has an answer to that. Take the public money that is being given to the wealthy and the corporations and use it for public use for what people need. Use the money to fix the damn roads, clean up the water, improve our schools and provide the health care that we need.

Working Class Answer to Immigration

Immigration has become an issue because Biden and Trump and the media talk about it every day, putting it in front of the working class. Biden and Trump are trying to outdo each other, blaming immigrants for everything that’s going on.

Instead of talking about who is really responsible, they blame immigrants for working for low wages and pulling down the wages of all workers. And that’s one thing we can say is true. When the bosses get away with paying some workers less, it makes it easier to pressure other workers to work for less. It’s just like when UAW auto workers, like myself, we were forced to give a concession and it helped the bosses push down everybody’s wages.

But let’s put the blame where it belongs. Put the blame on the capitalists who are exploiting every worker wherever they were born.

Immigrants don’t come here wanting to work for low wages and work under unsafe conditions. They want what every worker wants, decent pay and safe working conditions. But immigrant workers are forced to work for less money, and they have to work unsafe jobs, because the politicians of both parties keep immigrant workers in an illegal status, which means that the bosses can threaten them anytime they want with deportation if they ask for more money or better working conditions. Keeping immigrant workers in an illegal status is just another way for companies to pay workers less and increase their own profits. And the politicians who make the immigration laws are doing the bidding of their corporate masters.

By keeping immigrant workers illegal, the capitalists benefit in another way. The capitalists and the politicians hope to keep the working class divided against itself. Just like the bosses always try to use racism to divide white workers from black workers, they also want workers whose families were immigrants in the past or who were brought here in chains in the past, they want us to blame the newest immigrants who are coming here now looking for work.

But that only works if we are foolish enough to listen to the politicians and listen to the bosses. It only works if we listen to the very people who are exploiting us every day. We know these people are not on our side, so why should we listen to them? We can’t fall for their tricks and their lies.

Working Class Answer to War

The world is moving toward war, a bigger war, even a world war. If there’s another world war, the working class in this country will not escape it, will be affected and suffer for it.

We are already affected by the buildup for war. The U.S. military budget is taking many billions of dollars that could be and should be used for the needs of the population.

The U.S. military budget is already the biggest in the world, by far. The U.S. spends more money on its military than the next nine countries in the world put together.

But the U.S. government is not stopping there, because this monstrous military budget is increasing every year. It is now getting close to one trillion dollars a year. And what are they spending all this money for, if not for war?

And it’s not just the increased military spending. Look at all the wars going on around the world today with the U.S. government right in the middle of them. The war in Ukraine is basically a U.S. war against Russia. The U.S. and its NATO allies have been surrounding Russia for decades, stationing more troops and missiles right up to the very border of Russia. These threats against Russia finally provoked Putin into launching his brutal invasion.

Then there is the war in Gaza, or rather what should be called the genocide in Gaza. Hamas may have struck first by killing over a thousand Israelis, but since then the Israeli government has slaughtered over 37,000 Palestinians, children, women, and men, most of whom have nothing to do with Hamas. The Israeli government could not be conducting this massacre without the weapons and support of the U.S. And this U.S.-supported war in Gaza has turned the whole Middle East into a tinderbox that could draw in more countries and explode into a bigger war.

There are also wars going on in Africa and Asia, wars where the big powers, including the U.S., are involved behind the scenes, arming and supporting one side and sometimes supporting both sides against each other.

What we see happening today is very similar to what happened right before World War II. And there are more indications of a coming war. Today in this country, we are being inundated with propaganda designed to prepare people to accept to go to war. This propaganda comes from politicians and the corporate-owned media.

Today, much of that propaganda is aimed against China, as well as against Russia. They want us to believe that somehow China is threatening the U.S., when in reality, the opposite is true. And when the media and the politicians try to tell people that China is a threat to the U.S., when it isn’t, they are doing it for a reason.

Today the capitalists and their two political parties are preparing workers here to accept this coming war. They want to convince us to go to war to kill the working people of another country, and in turn be killed by them. Working people in every country have no reason to go to war against each other. Workers in every country in the world all want the same thing. We just want to benefit from our labor and have a decent life. Workers in every country should be fighting against their own bosses, not against each other.

The Working Class Party is the only party that stands on the side of the working class and says what needs to be said. The Working Class Party is the only party that speaks the truth to the working class. By voting for Working Class Party, workers can vote for something that really expresses our own interest as working people.

By voting for Working Class Party, we can say to them what we really think instead of voting again for the lesser of two evils.

We know that voting is not going to change things. We know that voting is not going to change things for the working class, and we’ll say that in our campaign. We know that it will take a fight of the working class using the power of the working class to change things.

By voting for Working Class Party, workers can make a statement and show that there are many other workers who agree with what we have to say.