Vol. 71/No. 27      July 9, 2007

Class exploitation, police brutality, imperialist war, environmental destruction, and racist oppression are endemic to capitalism, a system based on maximizing the profits of a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority. Capitalism in its highest stage, imperialism, is responsible for and profits from the most heinous crimes against the world’s toilers. These include the millions who die every year from starvation and curable diseases in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the semicolonial world; or the thousands of workers killed, maimed, and made sick on the job as a result of the bosses’ relentless drive for profit. The rulers’ brutality—whether meted out by cops on the streets or by imperialist troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and other theaters of Washington’s “global war on terror”—is part and parcel of capitalism’s dog-eat-dog values.

In their voracious quest for profit, the U.S. rulers are on the offensive against the wages, working conditions, and living standards of the working class in the United States. With this grinding assault, however, the bosses are sewing the seeds of their system’s eventual destruction. Pushed to the wall by the unrelenting speedup, abuse, and ever more intolerable conditions of life and work, workers are finding themselves with no choice but to resist. Even as standoffs and setbacks continue to be the rule for the labor movement today, the swelling ranks of immigrant workers, many denied legal papers, are playing a central role in fights for dignity on and off the job. The recent union organizing victory by packinghouse workers in Windom, Minnesota, is a case in point.

On May Day this year, nearly half a million workers took to the streets in cities and towns across the country to demand legalization of undocumented immigrants. Together with ongoing actions against raids and deportations, these mobilizations are a harbinger of the emergence of a new working-class vanguard—in the belly of the world’s strongest imperialist power. The questions of class solidarity and class consciousness posed in the battle for legalization lay the basis for strengthening the trade unions and transforming them into effective tools for working-class resistance to the bosses’ offensive.

Nearly five decades ago, Cuba’s workers and peasants took political power out of the hands of the capitalists in that country and ended imperialist domination. With a conscious proletarian political leadership, Cuban toilers transformed the economic foundations of that island nation, and the social relations that went along with it. They have offered internationalist aid with no strings attached to working people around the world. And they have stood down Washington’s unwavering threats ever since.

The Cuban Revolution shows that revolution is not only necessary—it is possible. To overthrow the destructive social order that dominates the world today, workers and farmers in the United States must make such a socialist revolution.

The U.S. rulers will stop at nothing to defend their property and privileges. To defeat the most powerful ruling class in history, working people in the United States need a political leadership that’s prepared well beforehand. They need a revolutionary party deeply rooted in the working class, the only force in society that has the power, the interests, and the capacity to go all the way. Such a movement exists in the United States today—the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. Workers, farmers, and young people who truly want to fight to win a better world should join the communist movement.
 
 
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Socialists campaign at U.S. Social Forum with ‘Militant’ and ‘New International’
Young Socialists join swirling debates at U.S. Social Forum  
 
 
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