EDITORIAL
2024:
A Working Class Program To Combat the Crises of Capitalism

Sep 30, 2024

What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of September 9, 2024.

We are caught in the grip of a deadly capitalist system, ruled by its drive for profit.

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.

We are caught in the grip of a system which not only cheats our schools, roads and water systems to spend money on war; it is preparing to take us to more and bigger wars.

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. Working people pay the full price for capitalism’s wars unless workers take control away from capitalists who head us to war.

To Fight Against Inflation

• 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.

To Fight So Everyone Has a Job

• 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.

To Impose Our Needs, the Working Class Must Control the Situation

• 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 Defend Our Own Class as Capitalism Moves toward War

• 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.

Excerpts from the Program Issued by the Working Class Party