Rather than opt for either  prime minister, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, or the opposition leader, Judith Collins from the National Party, the World Socialist Party (New Zealand) proposes you spoil your ballot paper. Each side calls your attention to the shocking lies now being disseminated by the other. Each will tell you that a vote for the other is a vote for catastrophe. 

Unlike the usual election statements, this is addressed to those who do not a vote as well as to those who do. Its object is to gain, not your vote, but your understanding.

Members of the World Socialist Party on principle will go to the polling booth to ‘spoil’ their ballot paper. This is in fact a long, noble and meaningful practice by those of us who simply wish to reject ‘what’s on offer’ and to say ‘a plague on all your houses.’ whilst registering the importance of the vote itself, and in that regard this makes perfect sense. It is somewhat frustrating therefore that this practice is not given more attention in the media. 

Since a World Socialist Party candidate is not running, you should write the word ‘World Socialism’ across your ballot paper, your vote is spoiled but at any rate you have not signified that you are a willing supporter of capitalism.

We will be chastised about not voting. There will be pressure brought to bear upon those of us who are cynical enough about politicians and governments that we will advocate abstention or in the case of the Socialist Party propose spoiling one’s ballot paper by writing “world socialism” across it. In the media the message will be  “if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, or “it is your duty to vote”, or “Whatever you do, just make sure you get out there and vote”. We will be lectured on the virtues of voting for the lesser evil. We have been there over and over again.  Don’t play the game, don’t be forced into a false and hypocritical “choice”. 

In the contest between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, our advice is to spoil the ballot paper and abstain from voting for either. If you cannot vote now for what you want, it is folly to vote for what you do not want. The vote, like the razor, is an instrument for a purpose. If you cannot for the moment use it to your advantage, it is madness to cut your throat. And by voting for your enemies, for traitors and charlatans, you are surely cutting your throat.

Call us naive and idealists if you wish but the WSPNZ is organised for world socialism and the global class struggle. That should be the message we have to send and we shouldn’t be distracted by squabbles within the capitalist class that doesn’t benefit us as a class. 

 In Greece, the strawberry growing season has left a bad taste in the mouths of the over 8,000 undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men who are the bedrock of this sector.

“Neither the Greek state nor the afentiko (boss) care about our lives or health. Only our cheap labour matters,” says “Ahmed”, an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant strawberry picker.

“Without ‘papers’ (regularised status), we have no healthcare… If any one of us had contracted ‘corona’, all Bangladeshi workers here would have been stigmatised and removed from work,” shared 22-year-old “Mohammad”.

 A few farmers initially dispensed disposable masks and gloves only to small groups of workers. Twenty-year-old “Anwar” stated, “the aftentiko told us, ‘get your own masks.’ At that time, masks were €1.50 each in the market. Till the time we were able to purchase reusable cloth masks, we had no other option but to spend this money every two days.”

Over 90 percent of Greece’s strawberry agribusiness is clustered in a small region commonly known as Manolada, located around the villages of Nea Manolada and Lappa in western Peloponnese. Almost all seasonal labour here is provided by 10,000–12,000 undocumented Bangladeshi men. 

The exploitation of this unfree migrant labour has made Greece the 8th biggest exporter of strawberries in the world. It has also enabled farmers to undertake a scale increase, expand agricultural activity by leasing underutilised farmlands, modernise farming, and market over 85 percent of their produce to wider markets such as Russia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Middle-East. In Greece, agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of its exports with around 90 percent of its agricultural workers being migrants.

Strawberry workers are paid a daily wage of €23–25 for a workday lasting 10–12 hours. In 2013, protests by Bangladeshi workers against delayed wages led to Greek farmers shooting at them, earning the sobriquet of blood strawberries for Manolada strawberries. The workers won a landmark Human Rights case with the Greek state being forced to pay a total of €588,000 to 42 of them.

The workers created informal community support mechanisms and restrictions. “We relied on herbal remedies such as nimbu-ada cha (lemon-ginger tea). If someone had a fever, we’d check on them and bring painkillers from the pharmacy,” stated “Forid”, who had obtained temporary regularised status after a 2018 fire razed his shanty. 

“Matiur”, a regularised Bangladeshi supervisor said, “we requested our men go to the farm and return straight to their baranga (Bangla colloquial term for the Greek faranga, or tent) after work. Those who were not hired for the day had to stay inside. After all, if any one of us had contracted COVID-19, it would have spread like fire through the barangas.”

This fear was not misplaced as the barangas epitomize inhuman living conditions. The workers are forced to rent unused farmland and build makeshift plastic shanties out of salvaged cardboard, plastic sheets, and reeds. Each cluster of 12–15 barangas easily houses 200-odd workers. There is no provision for potable water, electricity, garbage disposal, or sanitation facilities. Makeshift outdoor latrines and bathing areas are breeding grounds for infectious diseases.

One worker stated, “If I told the afentiko that I would not come for work because of corona, his reply would be, ‘okay, no problem. I will get someone else.’” “There was constant tension – tension about contracting the disease, tension about getting some work during the season, tension about rent and food,” said another. With a reserve army of migrant labour at the farmers’ disposal, the men feared being replaced by other more desperate migrants, creating friction between the men as they jostled for a smaller pool of jobs.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, lobbying by farmer cooperatives resulted in a slew of relief measures, including a fast-track procedure (in place until 30 June) allowing farmers to hire “third country citizens in an irregular situation” who were already present in the country. Greece also waived visa requirements for seasonal agricultural workers coming from neighbouring Albania and arranged charter flights to ferry them. 

No state relief measures for migrant farmworkers has yet been forthcoming. According to Elias Ahmed, president of the Workers Union of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Greece, “the Greek state, with the interest of agribusiness and capital at heart, is enabling the exploitation of precarious migrant workers. It knows that if they remain undocumented, their labour can be easily exploited. If they get ‘papers’ (temporary permits or regularised status under an amnesty), then the state is obliged to be responsible to the workers who will demand fair wages. They don’t have the intention to help migrant workers.”

Ismini Karydopoulou, program officer at G2RED, argues that “first important step (for the Greek state) is to design and implement a proper legal framework that will give access to a legal residence status that will recognize this community. As long as land workers are not legally recognized, any attempt to protect their rights cannot be effective and complete.”

 The current centre-right government led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been critiqued for its anti-migrant stance. Greece’s resistance against regularizing undocumented migrants is situated within a larger initiative to avoid more shocks to its fragile agricultural economy, the recovery and profitability of which rests on demand-based flexible migrant labour. Anxieties around holding on to precarious jobs will increase vulnerability to workplace exploitation and abuse. Already, workers prefer acquiescence rather than speaking out due to threats about deportation, unsurprising given that under the controversial European Union–Turkey deportation deal, an overwhelming number of deportees have been Pakistani and Bangladeshi men.

Called absolutely irreplaceable by farmers and “essential workers,” by the state, migrant workers, who form the backbone of this agribusiness, feel they are “like flies swatted away when our use value is over.” Such migrant agricultural workers whose work ensures that we do not have to worry about food shortages, while they constantly juggle worries about just wages and better work and housing conditions as they plant and harvest crops, deserve better.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/pandemic-border/bitter-taste-greek-strawberries/

 Back  in 2019, 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable issued a statement promised to deliver more corporate responsibility to communities. Some optimists declared it was the beginning of the end to the primacy of the share-holder.

But a study (pdf)  by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police violence and racial injustice, and intensified climate crisis—”stakeholder capitalism” has failed to follow through to do more to benefit workers and communities, continuing to “put profits ahead of people” instead. 

TCP’s study, which was conducted with KKS Advisors and supported by the Ford Foundation, summarized it this way: “The interests of stockholders and other stakeholders will not always align.” Their analysis showed that U.S. companies that signed the BRT statement “performed no better than their non-signatory counterparts through the 2020 crises.”

Researchers pointed to stock buybacks, political spending, tax evasion, and unchecked pollution as additional examples of practices reflecting the continued prioritization of shareholder interests despite pledges to pursue “inclusive prosperity” for all stakeholders. 

In the words of the report’s authors, many companies still “campaign for one world while publicly proclaiming a vision of another.”

The report noted that only a handful of the signatories to the BRT statement even submitted it to their companies for approval, which is why some scholars have argued that the promises made by proponents of “stakeholder capitalism” are a public relations gimmick that will not improve social welfare. 

According to the New York Times reporter Peter Goodman, “The study enhances doubts that corporations can be depended upon to moderate their quest for profits to pursue solutions to challenges like climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality.” 

 Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of The Democracy Collaborative, argued that the study noted: “Given the enormous influence major corporations have over the trajectory of policy and regulation, no analysis of corporate purpose and its alignment with a stakeholder primacy model would be complete without incorporating an evaluation of companies’ lobbying and political spending activities,” which often contradict the information coming from marketing departments. “Any talk of corporations being responsive to a broad spectrum of stakeholders is just that—talk—as long as stakeholders don’t have power,” said Kelly. “And power means ownership.”

Economists Emily Kawano, former director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Julie Matthaei, co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, argued that profit-maximization is intrinsic to capitalism and the privately owned corporations that characterize it, so even the “stakeholder” variety is incapable of balancing moneymaking with competing objectives like greater equality and sustainability. 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/22/study-shows-stakeholder-capitalism-failing-live-promises-corporations-continue

 Palani is one of about 500,000 workers in the Sri Lankan tea industry. Like most of them, she descends from Tamils who were brought to British Ceylon from the Indian mainland in the 1820s. Tea cultivation was introduced to Sri Lanka by the British after coffee cultivation had failed. To get the industry going, plantation owners needed lots of manual labor, and people from India’s southern Tamil regions were recruited into an indentured labor system that tied workers to plantations. Although slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, these workers were unpaid and completely at the will of plantation owners. They arrived indebted and had to pay for their own transportation, until this rule was changed in 1922. Workers lived in crowded shacks, without sanitation, running water, medical facilities or schools for their children. Working conditions were very harsh, with long hours and heavy quotas. When Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, the tea workers were legally designated as “temporary immigrants” and were denied citizenship. In the 1980s, after more than 200 years living in Sri Lanka, the descendants of Indian Tamil indentured servants were granted Sri Lankan citizenship rights. However, they continue to be among the most marginalized and impoverished people in the country. There are few people advocating for the plantation workers, and their living wage remains below €5 a day.

Sri Lanka currently produces around 300 million kilograms of tea annually. It is the fourth-largest tea producer in the world, behind China, India and Kenya. But tea workers remain mired in poverty. Tens of thousands of plantation workers throughout Sri Lanka have united in recent years to demand a minimum wage of 1,000 rupees a day (about €5).  The “1000 Movement” is one of the largest mobilizations of Sri Lankan workers.  The last agreement between workers and owners was in October 2018. Companies refused the demand for 1,000 rupees daily. A wage increase from 500 to 700 rupees was tentatively agreed to, although the agreement still needs to be signed by the tea companies. However, taking into account attendance and productivity incentives, the old wage was actually 730 rupees, say workers. These incentives were removed under the new 750 rupees agreement, resulting in an actual increase in wages of only 20 rupees (about 10 cents). 

To earn a daily wage of 700 Sri Lankan rupees (€3.50, $4.15), Palani has to collect a minimum of 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of tea leaves.

https://www.dw.com/en/sri-lanka-tea-workers-and-a-legacy-of-exploitation/a-55006963

 California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sent hundreds of people to Ice at the end of their prison sentences. Even though the law doesn’t require the transfers, and Newsom positions himself as a leader in the resistance to Donald Trump’s xenophobia, the Democratic governor continues to funnel immigrants into the president’s deportation machine.

In his inaugural speech in January 2019, Gavin Newsom said he would stand up to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, fight family separation and ensure California remains a “sanctuary for all”. But despite the state’s high-profile “sanctuary” law, intended to limit local law enforcement collaboration with Ice, CDCR has a close working relationship with federal immigration authorities. 

When the governor ordered the expedited release of thousands of prisoners due to Covid, at least 78 people were sent from prisons to Ice. In the first three months of the crisis in northern California, state prisons and jails were the number one source of new Ice detentions (94 people, representing 59% of immigration arrests in the region), according to a study by advocacy group Centro Legal de la Raza.

Some prisoners aren’t aware that they are facing transfers until they happen.

When his release date came on 6 August and his sister was waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire fence to take him home, California prison guards did not let them reunite. Instead, officers handed the 41-year-old over to a private security contractor who shackled his hands, waist and legs, put him in a van and drove off. After 22 years in prison, Kao Saelee, was placed into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody and flown 2,000 miles to an Ice jail in Louisiana. He is now facing deportation to Laos, a country his family fled as refugees when he was two years old.

 In 2018 and 2019, he worked as an incarcerated firefighter, battling the kinds of blazes that are currently devastating huge swaths of the western US. California has for decades deployed thousands of incarcerated people to respond to wildfires, paying $2 to $5 a day for the grueling work, whether clearing brush or saving lives and property.

“I paid my debt to society, and I think I should have a chance to be with my family,” Saelee told the Guardian in a recent call from the Pine Prairie Ice jail. “What is the point of sending somebody back to a country where they don’t have no family?”

Saelee was born in Laos in 1979, the oldest of four. His parents were farmers and his family is of Mien descent, an ethnic minority that sided with the US during the Vietnam war and faced subsequent persecution. After fleeing to a refugee camp in Thailand, his family ended up in California in 1987.

“His story is similar to that of a lot of south-east Asian refugee youth who got resettled in neighborhoods in California that had really high rates of violence, poverty and incarceration,” said Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus (ALC), who is representing Saelee.

Ice issues “detainers” for people in state custody eligible for deportation, which could include undocumented residents, as well as longtime Californians and refugees with green cards who could be deported due to their criminal record. CDCR complies with Ice requests, meaning the state proactively informs the agency about the release dates for prisoners with detainers – and facilitates the transfers.

While the state has no legal obligation to respond to Ice’s requests, Newsom has said this is standard protocol. When asked about the criticisms of this practice, he recently responded that “it’s been done historically” and was “appropriate”.

State data from January through May of this year suggests that CDCR released more than 500 people to Ice custody, according to the Asian Law Caucus. And the state has not backed away from this practice in the wake of mass Covid outbreaks within CDCR, which have claimed 60 lives so far.

Newsom’s policy risks shipping Covid from state prisons to Ice jails, and in some cases, to other nations, advocates said. Ice has been a key domestic and global spreader of the virus, regularly deporting sick detainees.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/22/california-inmate-firefighter-ice-deportation

The United States has been the world’s leading producer of major weapons systems and the leader in global arms sales for the past several decades.

Many of these sales have taken place in the globe’s most volatile region, the Middle East, than in any other region of the world.  The so-called peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which were brokered by the United States, were business deals designed to expand U.S. arms sales in the Persian Gulf.  The Trump administration has made arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Middle East countries the focus of its foreign policy in the region. No sooner had the ink dried on these agreements than disputes emerged over whether Israel had agreed to permit the sale of U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft—the most expensive weapons system in the U.S. arsenal and the most sophisticated jet fighter in the world—to the United Arab Emirates.  Until now, no Arab country had been allowed access to this aircraft.

U.S. arms sales generally have contributed to tensions in some of the world’s most sensitive arenas.  Saudi Arabia’s misuse of U.S.-supplied fighter aircraft in Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian nightmare, has contributed to the rising civilian death toll there.  For the past five years, the United States has earned billions of dollars in sales to the Saudis, whose coalition has considerable responsibility for many of the deaths of more than 127,000 Yemenis, including more than 15,000 civilians. In 2016, the Department of State’s legal office concluded, in fact, that U.S. officials could be charged with war crimes for approving bomb sales to the Saudis and their partners.  

The Trump administration is currently taking on a great risk in proposing seven large weapons packages to Taiwan. The weapons would represent one of the largest sales to Taiwan, and would include long-range missiles—Boeing’s AGM-84H—that would allow Taiwanese fighter aircraft—Lockheed Martin’s F-16—to hit distant targets in China.  Last year’s sale of 66 F-16s for $8 billion represented one of the largest arms packages to Taiwan in history.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/23/arming-the-planet-the-usa-as-the-worlds-leading-weapons-dealer/

The 11 richest people in the world control in their combined net worths $1.106 trillion.

The total wealth of these 11 multi-billionaires is greater than the combined GDPs of Austria and Belgium, for instance.

But what is a trillion dollars?

 A trillion dollars stacked up in one dollar bills would stretch nearly one quarter of the way to the moon. That stack of dollar bills would weigh about 10 tons. 

To put one trillion into perspective in time—going back a billion seconds in time would take us to 1989. A trillion seconds in the path would land you in 30,000 B.C..

You could spend more than $54 million every single day for 50 years and still leave several thousand dollars left.

With $1 trillion, you could spend $1 million a day for more than 3,000 years. 

 In terms of what you could buy—well $1 trillion could but you every single professional sports league in the U.S. You could buy the NFL and then go out and snap up the NBA, NHL, and NASCAR and still have ¾ of your money left.

You could  pay a year’s salary for 18 million teachers.

#1. Jeff Bezos: $205 billion

#2. Bill Gates – $126 billion

#3. Mark Zuckerberg – $112 billion

#4. Elon Musk – $110 billion

#5. Bernard Arnault – $86 billion

#6. Warren Buffett – $82 billion

#7. Mukesh Ambani – $80 billion

#8. Steve Ballmer – $81 billion

#9. Larry Page – $78 billion

#10. Sergey Brin – $76 billion

#11. Larry Ellison – $70 billion

= $1.1 TRILLION

 Federal Reserve figures show that household net worth went up 6.83 percent in the second quarter, reaching nearly $119 trillion.

The data also reflected a “rebound in stocks and housing,” but, as Bloomberg reported, ” 45% of the U.S. population doesn’t own equities and about one-third of households don’t own a home.”

According to (pdf) a survey released this month from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, more than half of households in the nation’s four biggest cities—Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City—reported facing serious financial problems during the public health crisis.

Robert J. Blendon, executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard Chan School, warned that “it’s going to get worse because there is nothing for the people we surveyed who earn under $100,000 a year to fall back on.”

In August, consumer finance company Credit Karma conducted an analysis of nearly 20 million members in the U.S. and found that they have a total of $45 billion of medical debt in collections, which averages to about $2,200 of debt per member. Medical debt has been growing further during the pandemic, rising 7% from the end of last year and just over 3% from when the pandemic started.  Experts expect it to continue to rise in the coming months since there’s a 180-day lag before unpaid medical debts can show up on consumers’ credit reports

“This is a lot of money when you consider nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of an emergency,” says Colleen McCreary, chief people officer at Credit Karma. “What’s worse, this number is expected to rise in the coming months as Americans begin sorting out their finances in the aftermath of the pandemic.”

The nation’s billionaires, meanwhile, have been enjoying fatter pockets over the past six months. An analysis released last week by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) showed that 643 billionaires saw their wealth surge $845 billion, or 29%, since the Covid-19 crisis began six months age.

The redistribution of wealth to the richest 1% over the past 45 years is hard to comprehend. In a Time report on a study by the Rand Corporation, it is estimated that the $50 trillion shift from the bottom 90% to the top 1% would pay every working American an additional $1,144 a month, every single month, year after year. If wealth distribution since 1975 had continued in the same manner as between 1945 and 1975, today’s $35,000 salary would be over $60,000. It’s little wonder that so many Americans are lashing out at the broken system.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/21/rebounding-stocks-surging-wealth-haves-and-widespread-economic-misery-have-nots

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/21/how-hypocrites-high-places-have-contributed-riots-streets

 Trump is a far-right politician and chauvinistic nationalist. Biden too plays the patriot card also declaring America is the greatest nation in the world. What makes the US so exceptional is that its nationalism and patriotism is shared across the political spectrum. USA Number One is something Republicans and Democrats agree on. In the United States the national anthem is played at every sporting event whereas other countries will play it only on international occasions. 

Americans are proud of their democracy yet they are oblivious to the numerous flaws and faults that are obvious to many observers from other parts of the world. Gerrymandering and voter suppression affect almost every state. 

 Economically, America ranks eighth in GDP per capita. In terms of its Gini coefficient, the indicator of economic inequality, the US ranks 51st – sandwiched between Djibouti (50) and the Ivory Coast (52). Other indicators of development, like corruption (23), education (26) and healthcare (30), the US also scores far below a long list of other countries. 

No wonder Americans are only the 19th happiest people in the world.  

The aspirations of American progressives are for goals long ago achieved by most European countries: free healthcare for all, access to abortion provisions, strict gun laws, affordable education and so on.

Americans have to face reality. The World Socialist Party tells our fellow-workers they are not, and never have been, the greatest country in the world.

The two-party system is why the choice is demented Trump or dementia Biden. Both fight for Wall Street and maintaining America as the world’s dominant military power. The Democrats are the ‘left’ wing and the Republicans the ‘right’ of the Capitalist Party.  On all the issues vital to the plutocrats and oligarchs they are at one, offering their masters bipartisan support. It is a fake rivalry creating an illusion of choice in America. Biden and Trump are aligned on many crucial issues, from opposing universal Medicare4All, supporting fracking, financing the military and deploying it in foreign countries, to the support of Israeli apartheid and Saudi Arabian despotism.In the one-sided class war the capitalists have been waging against the working class for decades. The two-party racket rests on duplicity. During election time the candidates of the major parties masquerade as dedicated servants of the peoples’ welfare in order to solicit votes and win office. The Republocrat partnership to secure funds for campaigning and to stay in office must do the bidding of business interests on all major questions of foreign and domestic policy. 

Biden is seen by many as the knight in shining armor who will come to the peasants rescue and do battle with the evil baron. A romantic fiction. Biden is no champion of the people and he is not the sworn enemy of the bourgeoisie. He is no savior who will throw the money-changers out of the temple. The Democratic Party cannot become a vehicle to raise progressive politics, as was shown by the rejection of Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. 

The Justice Democrats, the DSA, and all the other progressives will never be a voice within the Democratic Party machine. They have fallen into the trap of voting for the lesser evil. Such electoral tactics are pretty much a ploy by the ruling class and eventually lead to the same, or very similar, outcomes. For sure, an independent party of labor, a real socialist party, will not be a majority for many years to come with the capitalist parties dominating but it gives a choice to those of us who will not accept the status quo. It offers a possibility of progress. Business interests, the plutocracy, rule the land and loot the people. The capitalists who rob within the law will feel secure for four more years if either Trump or Biden is sent to the White House. The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others. The thought of four more years of Trump certainly is frightening. No one would dispute that. And it is the message of the sheep-dogs to shepherd us all into the the Democratic fold, as the “the lesser evil”. We should not be accomplices to any illusion of substantive change with Biden. People think they are electing Democrats to fight for them. It turns in reality, that the Democrats barely believe in fighting for what little they believe in, and that what they believe in isn’t much worth fighting for.

The World Socialist Party recognizes that lesser evil capitalist politics can never free workers from exploitation and domination.  Backing any candidate of the most powerful military industrial complex in the world is impossible for a genuine socialist. We appeal to our fellow-workers to quit capitalist parties of whatever name and join the World Socialist Party, the only party of the working class in the United States. This election is a splendid time for an educational campaign against the capitalist state; and not for a reformist party to take governmental office as a handmaiden of capitalism, but for a party to overthrow the capitalist system. It is a splendid time to campaign for a revolutionary socialist party. This is the splendid time when our fellow-workers can learn about the liberating ideas of socialism from its genuine proponents and work towards a fundamental socialist transformation of the United State

The World Socialist Party completely divorces itself from the Democratic and Republican electoral machines and declares a war to the death upon them. We pledge intransigent opposition to the capitalist parties. While Debs urged people to climb out of the two-party swamp, the Left today has become totally immersed in it with its path of lesser evilism. The price to be be paid by the pseudo-realists and opportunists of the “lesser evil” choice, practitioners of coalition politics with the capitalist candidates is that a viable independent socialist movement never materializes because the Left will never enjoy the harvest without first tilling the soil and sowing the seeds for a new departure in American politics.

The result of the November 3rd election will likely be further demoralizing for the social movements and for working people. But ultimately — we do not pretend to predict when — capitalism will try to cross a bridge too far in their lust for profit and power. When that happens, the fight–back may well break out for real and change politics forever.