Working Class Party Speeches to the Membership

Oct 13, 2025

On Sunday, October 5, Working Class Party of Michigan held its 2025 Convention. These are excerpts from several speeches given by 2024 candidates as the Party looks ahead to planning for 2026:

Andrea Kirby

The working class is under attack from every direction. The youth, the elderly, men, women, and even the earth are being attacked. Our health, our economy, our housing, our food are being attacked. Who can we turn to for protection and help, from the horrors occurring in Washington, and spreading throughout our states, and local governments? It should be obvious by now that the Democrats and the Republicans don’t have the answer. As of this moment the United States government is shut down. They are using this shutdown as a way to fire more federal workers and attempt to operate the government with less workers. This means less oversight, and fewer people, doing more work.

We are living in a society where politicians can run wild, disregard laws and impose crimes on humanity, all while the lives of the working class are going straight down the tubes. The downward spiral of the working class is not a new subject; it has been happening to us for a very long time. Prices for everything are going up. People are having to make choices about getting their medical services or getting food. Our youth are being left alone because families may not have enough money for childcare; nor are there enough facilities or programs being offered.

Inflation is up, therefore our money doesn’t go very far. The job market is horrible. Current job growth is being compared to December 2020, when COVID-19 was ravaging the population, and there was negative growth. This means that people who are willing and able to work, even those with college degrees, are unable to find work. Not because the work is not there—it is because the capitalists want to make sure they can keep their lakefront summer homes, and make other workers do more with less. They will cut jobs and then threaten to fire anyone they don’t believe is working fast enough—knowing there are so many unemployed willing to accept less.

Access to medical care is becoming a luxury. Huge hospital systems are swallowing up smaller ones and rural hospitals; then either closing them or converting them into non-emergency centers. Sick people are having to drive hours just to seek medical care, even for something as simple as a diagnostic test.

The Trump administration has said from the beginning they were not going to touch Medicare, but Trump recently enacted a federal budget law that blocks supplemental services for Medicare recipients. Long story short, what the law does is suspend a plan that helped seniors who qualify get money to cover the cost of premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses and automatically enroll people in the federal Low Income Subsidy. The Congressional Budget Office says that suspending this service will save $66 billion over 10 years because of lower enrollment. So, what they are saying is, we are saving money, but they are only doing so by making the process harder and less accessible for the people that actually need it.

While they claim to be saving money on one hand, they are spending billions attacking immigrants. These attacks are not new; deportations are not new. Both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump, including in his first term. This is a part of their plan. Immigrants are used as a tool for capitalists to drive down wages of the entire working class. They hire them, pay them less, knowing that they are less likely to fight over wages or better working conditions.

Then ICE is running around the country, often masked, terrorizing people. They claim they are rounding up all of these alleged murders, rapists, and other violent criminals, but that is not true. Less than 5% of those deported have been convicted of violent crimes. Most of those being deported are ordinary, tax-paying working-class people like you and me. This includes some American citizens.

The cost of housing is skyrocketing. There is a house in my neighborhood; a little over 10 years ago, that house was on the market for about 55K. It is now on the market for almost 200K. And trust me, 150K in upgrades was not done to this house. But because we live in a world of speculation and greed, homes are being priced so high that many working-class families are unable to buy them.

We are seeing increased acts of violence and hate, including lynchings and mass shootings. We are seeing more incidents involving those with mental health concerns. What we are seeing is the desperation people are facing. A desperation that’s taken years, decades, to fester in this society. Cuts in health care and mental health services. Cuts in education, after-school programs and child development. Cuts in jobs, pensions and financial security. But why are there so many cuts when the money is there?

Just recently the Michigan legislature was facing its own budget shutdown. The debate was over money to ‘fix the damn roads’ or to provide money to our schools. Why is this a debate? We need both, and there should be money for both!

The federal shutdown is over money. They have already gutted so many social programs, and they’re still looking to fire more workers and cut more programs that directly benefit the working class, yet the rich continue to get richer. Why? Well let me tell you, they are giving the money to the rich, through tax breaks and other capitalist insider strategies. They are stealing the money produced from our labor, from our children and elderly, and packing up their coffers.

We are currently on a path where our youth and future generations will be fighting some of the same fights our great grandparents had to fight. They are going to have to fight for the right to have adequate education, health care, wages. They are going to have to fight for the right to their own bodies. Women will have to fight for the right to stand alone and not be under the control of a man. But this future is not set in stone. The working class must organize itself as a class and stand up for its needs.

Blaming our situation all on Trump would be easy, but that would give him way too much credit. The conditions of the working class have been going downhill for a very, very long time under both Republican and Democrat administrations. Things seem to be worse now because the Trump administration has pulled out all the stops and safeguards, moving at a faster, chaotic pace to destroy the working class. They are able to do this because the working class has remained silent for too long. Over the years we have seen a decrease in unions and strikes. We do not see protest or mass organizing over working-class issues.

In the absence of the working class fighting, they tell us we have to depend on the Republicans and the Democrats. This has been the same message for over 160 years, since the Civil War. We have been stuck between the two parties, and neither has represented the working class. They both represent the capitalists’ class. They have set up a system where year after year, we are expected to put our hopes in the same two parties, expecting a different result. Under both parties, the voice of the working class has been silenced and beat down.

Well, we are here today to say we want more. We are sick and tired of doing all the work and reaping only the crumbs. We are here to say it is time to stand for our class, the working class. We are here to say we need our own party. We are here, in our grassroots effort to build that party, OUR party. The Working Class Party.

Gary Walkowicz

I am going to add one more thing that Working Class Party has to talk about.

There is something else very serious that is facing the working class today. The world is moving toward war, a bigger war than those we are already seeing today. We are moving toward a global war that people in this country will not escape.

Look at the direction that things are going. The U.S. government, under both parties, has been steadily increasing the military budget, year after year. It is now over One Trillion Dollars a year, which is more than the next nine countries in the world combined. Why are they doing this if not for war?

We know that names are just words. But given everything we see happening, I think it is no coincidence that Trump has just changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

Today the U.S. government is planning a big push to build more naval warships and to increase their capacity to repair them. Why? Because in a war, ships get damaged and destroyed. This is another sign that the capitalists and the politicians who work for them are planning for war.

The U.S. government has troops stationed all over the world. They have military bases, army, navy, air force, in 170 different countries. No other country has anything close to that.

For over three years now, the U.S. has been actively supporting and continuing the war in Ukraine. The U.S. government has continued to support and provide weapons for Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

These wars and the other wars going on in the world are a sign of a capitalist system in crisis. The capitalists of every country compete against each other for profits, trying to gain more markets to sell products, trying to gain access to more natural resources, trying to exploit more low-wage workers around the world. Tariffs are a sign of an economic crisis, and it was economic crises like these and the competition between capitalists that led to WWI and WWII. In those times, there were regional wars that expanded into a world war. This is very similar to what we are looking at today.

When there is a global war, people in this country won’t escape it. Young men from the working class will be sent to kill and be killed by young men from the working class in other countries. And the population at home will be victims in a war also. With today’s missiles, nuclear bombs and all the modern weapons, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans won’t protect people here like it did during WWI and WWII. Everyone will pay the price when war comes.

We don’t know if war will come in the next six months or the next six years, but it is coming.

… More and more, the capitalist class, aided by the politicians of both parties, is taking the money produced by our labor and using the wealth stolen from us to further enrich themselves. This is where the capitalist system is taking us.

But we are not doomed to this kind of future. Working people, together as one class, can determine what our future will be.

We can have a better future. But having a better future depends on what the working class does. The working class has power. The working class, when it fights, has enough power to change the direction we are headed. The working class has enough power to even change the whole system.

We in Working Class Party understand that and that is why we started Working Class Party nine years ago.

We said that the Republicans and the Democrats both work for and represent the interests of the capitalist class—the bankers, the wealthy and the corporate elite.

We say that the interests of the working class and the capitalist class are opposed to each other. We started Working Class Party by saying that the working class needs its own party.

We know that elections alone won’t change things, no matter who is elected.

… But when the working class is ready to fight, the fight can come on fast and spread like a tidal wave. It has happened before.

Working Class Party is not the mass party that the working class needs. But it can be a starting point for the working class to build a mass party. There is not a fight by the working class today. But the working class, by building a mass party, could open the door to a fight.

In this time period, we must keep this truth alive.

This is why Working Class Party is important.