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
Feb 3, 2025
The following is taken from speeches given at a Spark meeting in Chicago on January 26.
Donald Trump is once again the president, and the Republicans “control” the Senate and, just barely, the House of Representatives in Congress. Many around us are, without a doubt, dismayed that this crass billionaire, one who is so virulent against immigrants, women, and black people, could win again.
It’s very important to say, 89 million voters did not vote in this election—way more than voted for either Harris or Trump. Those voters, many of them working class, did not see themselves in either the Democrats or the Republicans and sat out the election. Only a little over a quarter of the voting population voted for Trump.
Trump only won a few more votes than he got in 2020. Harris and the Democrats, however, saw a big drop-off: about six million fewer than Biden got in 2020. We can read this: it’s the Democrats that lost their own election.
Throughout the Working Class Party campaign, we heard from working people about inflation, especially for groceries, and the economy in general. Biden and then Harris tried to tell us that the economy was fine. Many voters, especially in the working class, were having none of that. They say many people voted their wallet this election—well, workers’ wallets were empty. While the inflation rate may have dropped for a moment, prices stayed high, and wages stayed low. The Democrats took the blame, since they were in office.
Harris and the Democrats, wanting to sidestep the economy, campaigned on a fight for abortion rights, among other things. Activists put abortion rights measures on the ballot in ten states in November. In eight of those states, those measures won a clear majority of voters. Nonetheless, Trump won the vote for president in many of those same states, which included Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. So even though it’s clear that the majority support abortion rights, that wasn’t enough for the Democrats to win, given all the problems workers face.
Trump may have been able to pull some working-class voters by claiming “prices will come down.” But he didn’t even wait to take office before throwing out those promises, pivoting instead to talk about buying Greenland, calling to end birthright citizenship, and saying he will carry out massive deportation raids in Chicago and other places. Bringing down prices—for groceries, for cars, for rent—would mean cutting into the profits of the ruling class. Trump is no more willing to do that than Biden was.
The economic crisis that has continued for fifty years has pushed back the working class—our standard of living has been cut dramatically in that time. The unions, our only large organizations, are much weaker—they organize a much smaller part of the working class now and have carried out only small and scattered fights for decades. The working class is not organized to fight back against the blows rained down on us by a rotting capitalist society. This creates a real and serious political danger for the working class in this moment.
This country’s working class has always included a large portion of people who were not born here. And the ruling class of this country has always played on anti-immigrant sentiment, as a way to divide the working class. They lay the blame for the crisis and the economic situation at the feet of immigrants, who are fleeing wars and economic disasters created by capitalism in their own countries. Trump has put attacks on immigrants front and center since he entered politics.
Trump’s talk is, for now, mostly talk. Bush, Obama and Biden all deported more people than Trump—they just weren’t as loud about it. Still, Trump’s rhetoric has an effect. Workers have been “lying low,” wanting to try to avoid the raids that Trump keeps announcing. The fear he instills intimidates many working people—it can mean people will accept worse situations, that they will be less likely to push their bosses. When any part of the working class is made to accept less, that’s an attack on the entire working class. Lower conditions for one section of the working class mean worse conditions for everyone.
The issues that we face were not up for a vote in the election. Neither party proposed a way out of the problems of the working class. If any of our issues were discussed, it was only to use our problems as a talking point. Or to blame everything on immigrants or transgender people or whatever their current scapegoat may be.
But even if a Working Class Party candidate was elected, we wouldn’t be able to fix our problems that way. Voting in one or another person will not be the way to make a change. The problem is the capitalist system that we live under, which is organized to create profit for a small group of billionaires. Politicians do not have the power to change this system because the state apparatus is set up to run for the interests of these billionaires.
Everything is organized to help corporations profit as much as possible. So even if our candidate was elected, the system is set up in a way that we wouldn’t be able to change much. But there is a force that can change things: the working class!
The wealth of society is created by workers. We manufacture the parts. We assemble the cars. We build the houses and fix the roads. We deliver the packages. We take care of our sick. We make and serve the food. Yet we are living worse and worse. That’s because corporations have been carrying out attacks on workers for decades, so that they can give even more money to their shareholders to increase their billions.
It’s the parasitic shareholders who reap the lion’s share of all the benefits of all of the new technology and increases in our productivity that have happened over the past five decades. Yet they do none of the work! It’s our backs that are hurting, while they just pocket much of the wealth that we’ve sweated over.
But we workers are not just victims. Because we make everything run, we are key in how this economic system functions, and that’s how we have power. If we stop working, everything stops running.
This might sound far from where we are now, but that’s because we’re made to feel powerless. The boss can fire any one of us at any time. I, by myself, can’t make my boss give me regular hours or slow down the pace of work. Layoffs can happen at any time. If they decide that it would be more profitable to close a plant or warehouse down, they do it with no regard to how that impacts workers’ lives.
We are made to feel like we have no power. Individually, that’s true. One worker against a giant corporation has very little power.
They reinforce this by blaming individuals for social problems. Can’t afford rent? Your fault. Get another job. You’re depressed because you don’t see hope for the future? Too bad! Get a therapist, take a pill and get back to work. If your kids aren’t doing well in school, it’s your fault. You should spend more time with them. Got pregnant in Texas? Your fault. Should’ve kept your legs closed.
But these problems are created by society: unaffordable housing, mental health crises, declining quality of education, reproductive rights getting taken away. This means that we need social answers rather than individual ones.
I don’t make this system run by myself. We all participate. Capitalism has organized the economy in a collective way. I load a truck, someone drives it off, someone else unloads it. The system relies on people outside of the warehouse too: those who assemble the trucks, transport gas, grow food so we can stay alive, teachers who teach us to read.
Many people are connected through their role in the economy. I’m not just an individual against a giant company. I’m part of a giant class, the class that makes everything in society run: the working class. But while the work is organized collectively, only a small handful of people, the capitalists, reap the benefits. And that’s crazy!
But it also gives us a possibility. Because the system is organized collectively, we have the possibility of taking it on together and fighting for a different society. We have to find a way to come together to fight for our common interests.
As a class, workers have common interests because we play the same role in the economy. We face the same problems. Yet we’re divided by different companies. Union vs. non-union. Native born vs. immigrant. White vs. black. Old vs. young. We’re in different states. We’re in different countries. But all workers have the same interests.
The problems that workers face in the U.S. are similar to problems workers face around the world. We all want to work fewer grueling hours, have access to healthy food and healthcare, have our children taken care of. And we’re also linked because we all work for wages.
We’re all exploited by this capitalist system. It may take slightly different forms in different places, but the reality is the same. The working class has the same interests around the world: getting rid of our exploitation. But this requires getting rid of the system that creates this exploitation and running society ourselves.
We could use the resources and organization that are already there. But instead of running it for profit, we could run society around the needs of humanity. We can organize things differently because we know what’s needed; we know what to do.
If workers ran society, we could prioritize everyone having a decent life. We could give everyone a way to take care of their health, create better access to education. We could guarantee that people have a place to live when they’re old, or when they want to live on their own. But for this to happen, we need to be organized collectively and not see problems as individual problems.
Our collective interests can only be expressed when we fight together. The only way that things have improved in the past have been through fights. When workers fight for our common interests, we have big possibilities of expressing our collective power.
But it won’t be enough if it doesn’t spread. One fight in one workplace is not enough. But if a fight starts somewhere and spreads, that’s when we have a chance. All workers against all companies is where the power lies.
We have to have in mind the goal of getting rid of capitalism, which is the system that puts corporate profits above all else. Once we get at the root of the problem, capitalism, we can organize society in a way that fits OUR needs, not the needs of the corporations and the banks. When we fight for our interests, we’re fighting for the interests of humanity as a whole.
We need to counter the idea that each worker is alone and has to solve their problems on their own. We have to find a way to come together. A couple of friends can reinforce each other that our problems come from society and are not an accident or individual fault. Talking with neighbors and family members. Even two people in one work place can be the start of something.
There may not be many of us, and it may be small, but it’s something. The nearly 11,000 votes that Working Class Party received in Illinois mean something. It means that some people saw the name Working Class Party on the ballot, or saw our flier, or talked to one of us out on the street and chose to vote for us.
There are other people who think that something else is possible, and we need to find them. No one else is talking about these ideas, which makes what we have to do all the more important. We have to spread the idea that the working class has power and start to build an organization of people who can see it and want to do something about it.