Campaign Literature—General Election


Socialist Workers Party
    
Flyer  8 1/2" x 11", 2016.

CAMPAIGN WITH THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY

Alyson Kennedy for US president   Osborne Hart for vice president!

Don't organize around who you're against, fight for what you're for!

The capitalist economic crisis is battering workers and farmers in the United States and around the world. It’s a slow-burning global depression, and it’s working people who are paying the price. Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart, the Socialist Workers Party candidates for U.S. president and vice president, are discussing with workers on their doorsteps and on strike picket lines from small towns to big cities, from coast to coast, how we can organize to overturn the dictatorship of capital, which is at the root of the crisis.

The bosses throw job safety out the window as they impose speedup or slash hours to boost their profits. They scapegoat immigrant workers, seeking to drive down wages and divide the working class. Millions have no jobs, or temporary, part-time work at minimum wage. Workers wages are stagnating.

The bosses try to convince us that they’re rich because they’re smart and we’re stupid. And they run the government because they say they know what’s best for us.

They have unleashed a propaganda war against the working class, churning out articles saying things like, “the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”

This is the biggest crisis of capitalism, and their twin parties, the Democrats and Republicans, in our lifetimes. The capitalist class and their media blast Trump and Bernie Sanders, but what they really fear is the hundreds of thousands of working people who have turned out to hear what they have to say, looking for an alternative to politics as usual, to the patronizing attitude of the capitalist class and their politicians who look at working people as “white trash,” “welfare cheats” or “crack-heads.” But more and more working people are refusing to keep quiet.

The Socialist Workers Party poses a working-class road out of the dog-eat-dog, crises-ridden capitalist system and its wars, racism and oppression of women.

As working people fight together to defend ourselves we gain class-consciousness and self-confidence and learn that we can rely on our own power, solidarity and mobilization. We become different people. Like Malcolm X said when asked if he was trying to wake Blacks to their oppression, he said “No, I’m trying to wake them up to their self worth.”

The Socialist Workers Party joins with fellow class-conscious workers in battles to defend our class and its allies, working to transform our unions into effective fighting instruments against the propertied rulers and their government. We are part of the fight for a government-funded public works program to create jobs at union-scale pay to replace crumbling infrastructure and build schools, medical, childcare and recreation centers, and other things working people need; for $15 and a union; for free and comprehensive medical care for all; to demand an end to Washington’s colonial rule over the people of Puerto Rico; to guarantee women the right to choose abortion; for prosecuting cops who kill or brutalize working people.


The Socialist Workers Party
speaks out against Washington’s imperialist military attacks — from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria. SWP candidates fight the rulers’ efforts to use workers’ revulsion at Islamic State’s terrorist acts to scapegoat Muslims and roll back workers’ rights. The party speak out against Jew-hatred, which seeks to divert workers attention away from the real enemy: the capitalist system.

We join in the fight against deportations and e-verify. It doesn’t matter whether you are from Mexico or China, Indiana or Texas; it doesn’t matter what language you speak or the color of your skin, we need to organize the unorganized into unions and expand solidarity to stand up to the bosses.

SWP candidates have joined rallies of Pennsylvania Steelworkers locked out by Allegheny Technologies and Machinists at Triumph Composites in Spokane battling company bosses’ efforts to maintain a divisive two-tier wage system. They have joined protests against police brutality across the country, demanding cops who kill — from the stranglehold death of Eric Garner in New York to Freddie Grey in Baltimore, from cattle rancher Jack Yantis in Council, Idaho, to Robert Lavoy Finicum in Oregon — be charged and jailed. They back the efforts to free Dwight and Steven Hammond, Oregon ranchers jailed twice on the same trumped-up arson charges for defending their right to raise cattle. And to free political prisoners from Puerto Rican independence fighter Oscar López to Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

The SWP points to the need for working people to break from the
bosses’ par-ties, build our own independent labor party based on the unions and set out to take political power into our own hands.

The Cuban Revolution: 

An example for workers today

In the 1950s workers and farmers across Cuba, led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, launched a movement to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. They took political power and took control of their own destiny — leading mass mobilizations to overcome illiteracy, and advance culture, health care for all and built a new peoples’ army, militia and police out of their own ranks to defend, not oppress, working people. In the process, they became what Che Guevara called “new men,” capable of changing the world. They showed that a revolution is not only necessary, it is possible.
 
Cuba’s revolutionary people extend internationalist solidarity, from sending almost 400,000 volunteers to fight against apartheid South Africa’s invasion in Angola to sending doctors to help lead the fight against Ebola in West Africa.

Working people everywhere are capable of doing the same thing.

Join with us
Socialist Workers Party candidates and their supporters campaign to discuss these issues confronting our class. As a central part of this they explain that the only way forward is to organize independent working-class struggles that point to-ward overturning the dictatorship of capital, replacing it with a government of workers and farmers and building a new society based on human solidarity and joining the worldwide fight for socialism. That is a life truly worth living.


photo captions
Socialist Worker Party candidates Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart have long histories in class struggle. Left: Kennedy joins Verizon strikers at April 25 rally in Trenton, New Jersey. Right: Hart (at left) at November 2015 rally for $15 and a union in Philadelphia.

Alyson Kennedy campaigns at construction sites in New York February 9, discussing fight for workers control of conditions on the job to enforce safety.

Osborne Hart talks with fellow participant in Oct. 2015 protest against police brutality.