Socialist Workers Party campaign

 

Militant/Ruth Robinett

Chris Hoeppner, right, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in New York's 9th District, talks with factory worker Lloyd Wright while campaigning in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, August 9.

 

In face of capitalist crisis, we need a fighting course to win workers power

 

Vote Socialist Workers Party in Sept. 13 NY special election!

Vote for Chris Hoeppner and other Socialist Workers Party candidates in New York's special September 13 election. Hoeppner is running in the 9th Congressional District. The party's nominees for State Assembly are Harry D'Agostino, Seth Galinsky, and Rebecca Williamson in the 27th, 23rd, and 54th districts, respectively.

The SWP candidates are the only campaign calling on working people to break from the Democrats, Republicans, and other parties of the propertied ruling families. The socialists explain the need for workers and farmers to forge a revolutionary social movement to take power from the capitalists and establish a government of the working class and other exploited producers.

Only by doing so can we end the dog-eat-dog social system whose rapacious drive for profits is responsible for high joblessness; rising prices of food and fuel; cuts in health care and pensions; racist bigotry and cop brutality; women's oppression; bloody wars in which young workers and farmers are sent to fight and die; and tightening government restrictions on our rights to organize and act in defense of our class interests.

The Labor Department reports that in August, for the first time since World War II, no jobs—zero—were created in net terms. The official jobless rate is 9.1 percent, and almost double that, 16.7 percent, for African-Americans. And the true figure for workers in need of full-time jobs is more than 20 percent.

To put millions to work at union-scale wages, the SWP candidates call for an immediate, government-funded jobs program building and repairing roads, bridges, railroads, and public transport; affordable housing, schools, and hospitals; and restoring the infrastructure capitalism allows to rot. In the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, Hoeppner says, a massive jobs program is urgently needed along the entire East Coast. Thousands could be restoring roads and repairing downed power lines and bridges.

Hoeppner's opponents—Democrat David Weprin and Republican Robert Turner—offer no plan to clean up the devastation or to meet capitalism's mounting jobs crisis. Their indifference to what working people face mirrors the callousness and class contempt for workers of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who demanded those living in low-lying areas evacuate during Irene, but then shut down subways and buses well before the deadline.

Hoeppner and the other SWP candidates oppose government attacks on undocumented workers and call for legalization now to strengthen the fighting unity of the working class. They defend the right to choose abortion as necessary for women's equality.

The socialist candidates help mobilize solidarity with workers fighting employer takebacks and union busting—from striking Verizon workers continuing to fight concessions after returning to work in August, to locked-out American Crystal Sugar workers in the Upper Midwest, to wherever else working people are in struggle.

The Socialist Workers Party campaign calls for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops and a halt to U.S.-led military assaults, including drone attacks, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. It calls for an end to Washington's decades-long economic war against Cuba's socialist revolution and for freeing the Cuban Five—Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, René González, and Fernando González—held in U.S. prisons for 13 years on frame-up charges.

In addition to the races in New York, SWP candidates are running for office this fall in six other cities (see below). Join them campaigning on street corners, at factory gates, and door to door in working-class neighborhoods.

Vote Socialist Workers Party in 2011.