SPARK Summer Festival:
Working Class Under Attack

Aug 18, 2025

The following are from speeches given at the 2025 SPARK Summer Festival on August 10, by Working Class Party 2024 candidates Andrea Kirby and Gary Walkowicz.

Andrea Kirby:

To say that the working class is under attack is somewhat of an understatement at this point. We are in crisis. Our health, our housing, our economy, our humanity, are all in crisis. Thousands of workers were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services. Recent legislation changed Medicaid rules, which will make it harder for people to qualify and keep the health care services they need. The same goes for the food stamp programs, making the requirements so difficult that millions of working-class people will suffer food insecurities. They have cut money to FEMA at a time when global warming is causing more natural disasters. Hospitals in rural areas are closing, leaving working-class people without any options. People are having to travel hours to get medical care. The Department of Education is a joke, cutting funding and programs for our youth. They are making it so expensive that only the rich will be able to afford to get an education.

The current attacks on immigrants are just another distraction to keep us from focusing on the high prices, low wages, and poor or unaffordable living conditions. These attacks are just another way to keep the working class divided, a way to blame immigrants for the conditions that those in Washington and the corporations are creating for us. We have heard the story repeatedly, “they are taking our jobs”, “they are the reason we can’t get a raise”. Let us cut that crap right now. We cannot continue to feed into this B.S. Blaming immigrants is used as a tool for capitalists to drive down wages of the entire working class. They will hire immigrants and pay them less, knowing that they are less likely to make a fuss. They threaten firing and deportation when immigrant workers are no longer needed, or they become unruly.

Then there are the tariffs. I bet some of you have probably never heard that word used so much before. What do tariffs mean? Simply put, higher costs for us. If the corporations must pay more to make or ship the product, do you think they are going to eat those costs? No, they are going to pass those costs on to us as the consumers. We see it already, and most of the tariffs are just going into effect. The costs of food, clothes, electronics, cars, and home improvements are going up. You know what is not going up? Our wages, our SSI payments, and our pensions—if you are fortunate to have one of those—are not going up.

Trump says there are going to be some growing pains with all these new tariffs and his plan to grow the U.S. economy, but there is scratch-your-knee pain and then there is shank-to-the-belly pain. The working class is going to feel the latter, shank-to-the-belly pain.

The actions taken under this current administration are not new. Biden and even Obama deported immigrants; they slashed funding from social programs. Every administration increased the military budget. Hospitals have been closing for decades now. Our education system has been racing downhill for years. Global warming has been on the radar for a long time now, and there have been no actions by Washington to slow it down. Why? Because it is not profitable.

Regardless, under Democrat or Republican, the conditions of the working class are getting worse. They used to do a lot of their dirt in secret, behind our backs. Not anymore. These attacks are happening right in front of our faces. We see it every day on the news and social media. It has gotten so bad that many of my co-workers and friends don’t watch the news anymore. Well, comrades, that is not the answer. We cannot bury our heads in the sand. Now is the time to organize ourselves. Now is the time to stand up for our class, the working class. We must organize our own party. We cannot sit back and just continue to complain about the cowards that are in office, because they are not representing our interests. We need people to represent us, the working class and only the working class.

But let’s be real, elections are not the answer either. The answer is in the power of the people. The power in us to come together and take over the wealth that we create, to be used for our needs and not just the 1%. For over 160 years, since the Civil War, we have been stuck between the two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, and neither has done anything for the working class. They both represent the capitalist class and not the workers. We keep putting our hopes in the same system and parties year after year, expecting a different result. The system is incapable of doing anything different except squeezing every penny and bit of sweat it can from the working class. Today is the day, now is the time. We need our own party, and it starts with each of you. We need a working-class party.

Gary Walkowicz:

Today the world is headed to war. A global war, a world war. A war that will directly involve this country and the population here.

When Trump was running for president, he said he would end the war in Ukraine on Day One. But Trump has been in office for over 200 days, and for 200 days, he has kept the war going by sending more weapons to Ukraine. Just like Biden did.

Trump said he would immediately end the war in the Middle East. And then Trump gets in office, and he continues the same U.S. policy of arming Israel, doing the same thing that Biden did. When Israel bombed Iran, Trump backed up Israel. Just like Biden did.

Some people voted for Trump because he said he was going to end these wars. Yes, Trump WAS against war … UNTIL he got elected and became president. Now Trump is doing the same thing as Biden—supporting these wars. That’s because Trump and Biden are the same in this way: both are serving the interests of U.S. imperialism.

No matter who the president is, the U.S. government, under both parties, arms the Israeli regime because Israel serves the interests of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. The U.S. arms Ukraine to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism against Russia. The U.S. has kept these two wars going, and either of these wars could spread further and bring in more countries.

Maybe the U.S. government doesn’t intend for these wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to escalate any further. Maybe the U.S. leaders don’t plan to send in their own troops right now. But once wars are started, they have a logic of their own. One attack leads to retaliation, which leads to counter retaliation, and a war goes beyond what either side wanted.

But even if the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East don’t escalate any more than they already have, the fact is, the danger of a wider war is growing.

This is not just about what Trump is doing now. It’s not just about what Biden did. These two politicians work for the capitalist class, and it is their whole capitalist system that is moving toward war.

Why, in the richest country in the world, are they making such drastic cuts in social spending today? They are cutting social programs and lowering the standard of living of the working class in order to pay for war.

The money they are taking from Medicaid and food stamps today is being used to increase the military budget. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will increase the U.S. military budget to over one trillion dollars a year. This big bill is The Biggest Military Bill ever. And it’s “Beautiful” only for those who are planning to go to war. And Trump’s bill is just building on what the Democrats did under Biden—increasing military spending year after year after year.

Look around. The U.S. government already has military bases, army, navy, marines, and air force bases all over the world—they have bases in 170 different countries. The U.S. government already has ships and naval task forces stationed all over the world.

The U.S. government is now planning to put a lot of money into shipyards that build and repair naval warships. Why? Government leaders are openly saying that the U.S. does not have the naval capacity they need to go into a major war. Trump said it, and so did someone who wants to be the next president—Gretchen Whitmer.

Another sign of their plans: the U.S. government today has their military generals and admirals already game-planning for a war against China.

At the same time, the politicians of both parties, as well as the major media, are constantly demonizing China. If they go to war against China, they want us to support it.

Even the attacks on immigrants are part of the push toward wars. They are trying to convince us that people who live in another country, working people like ourselves, are our enemies. They need to convince us of that if they plan to send us to war against other peoples.

What does all this tell us? It tells us that the U.S. capitalist class and the political leaders who work for them are planning to go to war, sooner rather than later. We don’t know if that sooner is in the next 6 months, or the next 6 years. But war is coming.

War is part of the logic of the capitalist system. The whole world today is linked together economically. No country can produce everything it needs by itself. But the capitalists of every country compete against each other for profits. They use the state apparatus of their own country to back them up and to gain an advantage over the capitalists of another country. The richer countries drain wealth from the poorer countries. And when the capitalist economy is in a crisis, the only way for the capitalists to gain more markets or access to natural resources is taking from other capitalists—by force if necessary.

All of Trump’s tariffs might look like it’s just Trump being crazy. But tariffs are a sign that the capitalist economy is not working. When the economy is in a crisis, the capitalists of one country use tariffs to protect their own profits and aggressively take from the profits of another country. What do tariffs and trade wars lead to? A leading capitalist, Warren Buffett, said that tariffs and trade wars lead to shooting wars. History shows us that this is true. When that competition between capitalists gets extreme, it becomes a military confrontation. Regional wars, like we are seeing now, turn into a wider war, bringing in more countries. That’s how WWI and WWII happened.

We can’t stick our heads in the sand to what is coming. If the global war comes, our young generation will be sent to kill and die, fighting against young working-class people from another country. And no one should believe that those back home won’t feel the war. With all the advanced technology of today’s weapons, no one will be safe. And in a war, we will all pay the price when the economy crashes down on us, because there are so many goods we get from other countries that we won’t be able get in a war.

The capitalist class is leading us to war. The working class has no interest in war.

The working class may not be able to stop the war from breaking out. War is too deeply ingrained in the capitalist system to stop the war in its tracks. But the working class, even by fighting for its own immediate interests, could slow down the move toward war. And a fight by the working class can change the dynamics of the whole situation. In the course of a fight, the working class can discover how much power it has.

The working class has the power to get rid of the capitalist system that produces wars. The working class has the power to build a society that does not need wars. That’s what we have to fight for.