On Wednesday, October 16, the Socialist Equality Party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates Joseph Kishore and Jerry White advanced a political strategy for the working class to fight against capitalist exploitation and imperialist war abroad.
The wide-ranging discussion was joined by World Socialist Web Site labor reporter Tom Hall, and was moderated by SEP (US) Political Committee members Andre Damon and Lawrence Porter. The discussion focused on the development of workers’ struggles in the US and internationally, the deepening political crisis in Washington, and the need for the working class to unite internationally in the struggle against war.
Kishore elaborated the main themes of the event in his opening remarks, declaring, “We have emphasized in our election campaign and in all of our discussions with workers… the inextricable connection between the war abroad and the war at home.” Kishore noted recent statements made by fascist Republican candidate Donald Trump at an investor forum in which he denounced the “enemy within” America, a thinly veiled reference to the working class.
Tom Hall emphasized this theme in his contribution as well, noting that this was “not just a slogan” but “actually how the ruling class sees it.” Hall explained that the American ruling class requires “a full scale mobilization of the entire society” to carry out its wars abroad targeting Russia, China and Iran. To emphasize this point he cited a 2022 White House defense strategy document, which notes, “the Biden-Harris administration has broken down the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy.”
Critical to this plan is the role of the American trade unions, who have worked closely with the Biden White House to suppress working class opposition to exploitation as well as the mobilization for war. Hall referred to Biden’s July 2024 visit to the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., in which the president referred to the unions as his “domestic NATO.” Hall also noted Biden’s constant references to the “arsenal of democracy,” a slogan the United Auto Workers (UAW) has adopted over the past year, invoking the unions’ “no strike” policy during World War II.
Kishore referred to the graph below, revealing the connection between the unions’ suppression of strikes starting in the 1970s and the steady rise of income inequality in the United States. “Democrats rely on unions to suppress the class struggle,” he repeated.
This White House policy has run into mass opposition, however.
In his comments, Jerry White explained that the month-long strike at Boeing among 33,000 aerospace workers represented “a rebellion against the pro-company and pro-war [International Association of Machinists] union bureaucracy.”
He noted that Boeing workers had rejected the first IAM-company endorsed tentative agreement (TA) by 95 percent, a rebuke which caused the corporation to note a “disconnect between the union leadership and the rank-and-file.”
A special emphasis was placed on the role of the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain. White noted that the UAW’s phony “stand up” strike last year during the auto contract negotiations was designed to keep the auto industry running. Fain and the UAW mobilized “at best” less than a third of the union’s autoworker members. “None of the major profit centers were called out until the last minute before they pushed through the contracts,” White stressed.
This phony strike and the rotten contracts it produced have now left the door open for thousands upon thousands of layoffs to occur in the auto industry.
Instead of partial strikes and other stunts, the SEP is fighting for “the development of an international counter offensive of the working class, because these are global companies,” White explained. He concluded by reading several powerful greetings from autoworkers in both Mexico and Italy, appealing for international class unity.
The conversation then turned to the political crisis in the United States and the threats of violence against workers which Republican candidate Donald Trump has made central to his campaign.
Kishore noted the various episodes throughout history in which the capitalist class has employed violence against striking and protesting workers, going back to the frame-up of the Haymarket Square martyrs who were executed for protesting for the eight-hour day.
Kishore noted that this was part of an “extended process… the crisis of American democracy” which the SEP had been analyzing for decades. “Trump is giving expression to that and does represent a dangerous threat to the working class,” he explained. However, “the Democratic Party has really enabled this.”
Kishore noted Democratic President Biden’s words in response to Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup attempt, declaring that there was a need for a “strong Republican Party.”
“The Democratic Party has absolutely nothing to offer. It is correctly hated by broad masses of the population, the working class. Its policy is one of endless war… and the war on the working class at home,” he said.
In a critical exchange, White and Porter addressed the Democratic Party’s obsessive focus on race and gender and other forms of identity politics, as a way to distract attention away from social inequality.
Porter explained that he joined the SEP’s predecessor the Workers League in the 1970s at a time when “the Black Panthers were very popular… I knew people in the Panthers, and I knew they were courageous fighters, but they had no perspective.”
“Society is based on a class basis, not a racial basis,” he explained. “It's just a phenomenal situation now,” he continued, noting that recently “Harris came to Detroit and she didn't address even the conditions of workers who were losing their jobs.” He added, “The conditions today in Detroit are worse than they were in 1967 when the riots took place. This is after 20 some years with a black mayor. The conditions have... become worse.”
White replied: “When you go to the factories at Sterling Heights or Warren truck, where there are plenty of young African American men and women. They're not affected by such arguments. They see the endless wars. One young worker said to me yesterday: ‘Look, I’ve got kids. I don’t want them to be drafted. And then, of course, the fact that you’re losing a job, and that your sole source of income is being taken away...”
Such politics have been relied on to suppress genuinely revolutionary, working class politics. Speaking about a recent visit to Marathon Oil workers’ picket lines, White noted the growing interest in socialist ideas, stating, “Workers want to know what happened in the Soviet Union, [they want to know] if we take power, will we have a [Stalinist] bureaucracy again.” He added, “We’re seeing more and more an intersection between the striving of the working class to assert their class interests and the leadership of our party and the perspective we’re fighting for.”
Hall elaborated the strategy of the party’s fight to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File-Committees (IWA-RFC) and its role in developing the consciousness of workers in struggle.
“The basic challenge which workers confront in… answering the attacks of the ruling class and making significant inroads against inequality and exploitation is the development of organizations which they actually control democratically and which are based on a strategy, not of accepting whatever crumbs management is willing to part with, or of defending so-called domestic or ‘American companies’ against foreign rivals.” Such organizations must remain independent, both of the company and the trade union apparatus, which is “deliberately and systematically acting to frustrate their initiative, to isolate them, to impose contracts favorable to the company.”
Near the end of the event, Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who challenged Shawn Fain for leadership of the UAW in the 2022 presidential election, addressed the event. Lehman explained to workers watching that “the union bureaucracies are institutions which have material interests of their own, and they have become totally unaccountable to the workers they claim to represent.”
While these organizations go all out to promote Democratic Party warmongers who are justly hated by the working class, workers must also oppose Trump and the Republicans, who sow anti-immigrant xenophobia as a means to divert their anger “from a real common class enemy, the corporations that exploit us.”
Lehman endorsed the candidacy of Kishore and White, calling for other workers to do the same in a class conscious vote for their own interests.
Kishore concluded the event by calling for workers to support the SEP’s campaign, noting the party’s ballot status in Michigan, the heart of the auto industry as well as in Washington State and New Jersey, and over a dozen states where the party has write-in status or is seeking to obtain this in the final weeks of the election.
The SEP will hold its next online event at 8pm Eastern on Wednesday, October 23, titled, “Democratic rights and the fight against war: Stop the repression of pro-Gaza protests!” Register today and invite your coworkers, family and friends.
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