With early voting already underway, Democrats and Republicans say the midterm elections are the most important in decades. The two main boss parties are laser-focused on factional battles against each other. Whichever party controls the House and Senate after Nov. 8 will govern for the bosses, who are stepping up their efforts to offload the crisis of their capitalist system onto the backs of workers.
Today, more and more workers face threats to their jobs, wages that don’t match skyrocketing prices, reduced access to health care, grueling and arbitrary hours, unsafe working conditions and other attacks. More and more workers are looking for ways to organize and use unions to resist.
At the same time, the White House and its fellow Democrats unleashed the FBI, the leaders’ political police, against Donald Trump and others, including supporters of the Cuban Revolution in Puerto Rico and the African People’s Socialist Party. They deal serious blows to the constitutional freedoms needed by workers who want the political space to fight to change the conditions we face.
The only party offering a class struggle course is the Socialist Workers Party. Its candidates are winning solidarity for union battles, defending constitutional rights and calling for the formation of a Labor Party based on our unions, to organize workers to take political power into our hands.
“Using our unions to resist attacks from the bosses is key to strengthening workers,” said Alyson Kennedy, SWP candidate for Texas governor. Activist. “We need to maximize the support that can be garnered for contract battles, like those being waged by tens of thousands of railroad workers, and for strikes like the United Mine Workers against Warrior Met Coal in Alabama.”
Democrats say the key issue in the election is the need to stop Trump. They insist that a Democratic victory is crucial to prevent a takeover by “MAGA Republicans”, who are nothing less than “semi-fascists”. Basically, their target is the large and growing number of workers who they believe cannot be trusted in important things like politics.
Members of the House Select Committee are “investigating” the Jan. 6, 2021 melee on Capitol Hill and demanding that Trump submit to a deposition, which they plan to be an inquisition.
All of this attracts the attention of like-minded liberals and the middle-class left, but does nothing to meet the needs of today’s working people.
While the Republican candidates point to some of the issues facing working people, like soaring inflation, rising crime and more, they also fail to present a way forward.
Democrats say the other key election issue is abortion. They present themselves as defenders of women’s rights and claim that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last June banned abortion. In fact, this decision correctly concluded that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that decriminalized abortion, had no basis in the Constitution. The decision did not ban a single abortion. He returned the matter to the people and their state representatives to be debated.
Biden implored the people on Oct. 18 to elect enough Democrats so he could sign into law a Women’s Health Protection Act, an election ploy and a danger to the fight for women’s emancipation. The law would interrupt the debate essential to gaining a solid majority among workers and would prevent states from legislating on abortion.
The decriminalization of abortion can only be won as part of a broader struggle by the working class against the onslaught of the bosses and their government. These battles can bring gains that will help young workers be able to build and support families, make the burden of household chores the responsibility of society, and advance the construction and availability of health care centers. and family planning that provide access to contraception and Abortion.
None of the business parties presents a path against the current capitalist crisis and its galloping inflation. And now production and trade are contracting, here and around the world. Our jobs are at risk.
Workers also face a deep social crisis due to the crushing realities of capitalism. Suicide rates increased by 4% last year. Drug use, alcoholism and gambling addiction weigh more and more heavily on workers.
“Our unions must fight for a sliding scale of hours and wages. Thirty-hour work weeks with no pay cuts to avoid layoffs. Cost-of-living adjustments in every contract, Social Security and all benefits, so that when prices go up, our salaries automatically go up to match,” Kennedy said. “Today’s labor battles show the way forward.”
Dealing with Antisocial Behavior
Republicans say Democrats are responsible for the rise in crime, pointing to Biden’s calls in 2020 to “defund the police.”
“When working people succeed in taking power from the ruling class, we will replace their brutal cops with proven fighters from our own ranks,” Kennedy said. “Today, the bosses need the cops – and the entire American “judicial” system, with its courts, its prisons and its executioners – to defend their property and control us. They cannot be “defunded” or abolished under capitalism. Efforts in this direction can leave people helpless.
Crime is a by-product of a social system based on the brutal exploitation of the working majority by ruling capitalist families and dog-eating dog values and the murderous violence it engenders.
Both management parties regard workers as a criminal class. They see in our struggles today a future where their power is challenged and they increasingly fear us.
Criminality falls during mass struggles when working class solidarity comes to the fore and workers feel they have something to defend. This was true during the rise of industrial unions in the 1930s and the civil rights movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation.
At the top of the capitalist rulers’ “criminal justice” team is the FBI, which is tasked with targeting anyone who threatens their regime. Democrats are using the FBI to do their dirty work, from its role in promoting the false accusation that Trump was a tool of Moscow in 2016 to his armed raid on his Mar-a-Lago home this summer. Their goal is to restore the reputation of their political police so that they can be used against the working class and its vanguard in the battles to come.
Vote the Socialist Workers Party on November 8!
