Election 2020

Excerpt:

....For well over a century, the great weakness of the working class in the U.S. — workers of all skin colors, religious beliefs and national origins, both men and women — is the fact that the parties the big majority of working people look to for political leadership are instruments of the capitalist class whose wealth and power stem from exploiting us. Trade unions, churches, organizations claiming to speak for the interests of debt-laden farmers, shopkeepers and contract laborers, African Americans, women, Hispanics, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and more — all, almost without exception, are integrated into the political machinery of the capitalist state and its political parties.

The working class has no political instrument of our own, through which we can debate and make our own decisions, independent of the bosses and their Democratic, Republican, or various “third” capitalist parties. To the degree workers and our unions are drawn into political activity, it’s to try to engage us in capitalist electoral politics. Is he worse or is she worse? Throw the current “bad” guys out and bring the “good” guys in, then repeat the cycle with the same results, year after year, decade after decade … until world capitalism does us all in, in one or another manner.

That profound miseducation will only begin to be bypassed as class battles unfold in factories and other workplaces over wages and working conditions, and struggles for Black rights, women’s equality and other burning social issues become more working class in composition and leadership. The course of those struggles and growth of working-class consciousness will at the same time be accelerated by advances in revolutionary struggles in other regions of the world, in the same way the Cuban Revolution educated and helped transform earlier generations of workers and youth in the United States and elsewhere. Today’s deepening world capitalist crisis brings those days closer.

That’s why the most important aid we can bring to our embattled brothers and sisters in Cuba or anywhere else in the world is to do everything in our power to advance those struggles as we tirelessly educate about the example set by Cuban working people that socialist revolution is not only necessary — it can be made.

Above all, as SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, we are confident in our knowledge that in the U.S. “the political capacities and revolutionary potential of workers and farmers are today as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the Cuban toilers. And just as wrongly.”

Defending the Cuban Revolution, strengthening US working people – The Militant