2024:
A Working Class Program

Aug 5, 2024

To Combat the Crises of Capitalism

This system creates inflation, driving down our standard of living—letting the corporations, banks and financial groups take an even bigger share of society’s wealth. Capitalism relegates many people to unemployment, temporary or part-time work, while forcing others to work overtime—this, too, comes from the drive to amass profit. In such a system, working people die young, 10 or even 15 years younger than those who profit from our labor.

War today is a giant commercial enterprise. Military spending props up the profits of almost every big corporation in the country, depriving us of needed schools and services. But it’s not just money. Today, the U.S. is involved in actual wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and in shadow wars throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. To accept these wars prepares us to accept tomorrow’s deadlier wars. Working people will pay the full price for these wars unless the working class takes control away from the capitalists who head us to war.

· Wages, pensions, and disability payments should automatically and immediately be increased whenever prices increase.

· The capitalists won’t do that. The working class will have to impose those increases on them, make the big companies use the money they give to wealthy stockholders today—use it to guarantee everyone’s wages.

· Divide the available work among everyone who wants to work. Let everyone work fewer hours, but let everyone keep a full week of pay. Decent pay. Slow down the pace of work—this would also provide jobs for people who need them.

· The capitalists won’t want this either. But they could pay for it. They have hoarded vast amounts of wealth they stole from our labor. We need to take it back.

· The working class today sits in the very heart of the economy. We produce the food, goods and services society needs; we transport them; we see they get distributed. We work in the center of financial services. We can control the capitalist class’s own economy, where its power is, when we mobilize our forces together.

· To fight, we need the full forces of our class, which is powerful—when it is united.

· But to unite our forces, we have to recognize the reality of all the vicious ways parts of our class are attacked, leaving us divided. We have to have each other’s back.

· We are all part of one class, black, white, native-born, immigrant, women, men—all of us. We have the power to change our situation—when we stand together.

We won’t change our situation with an election. But we can use this election to speak, to show there are tens of thousands of people who want to fight for a program like this.