What is Working Class Democracy?
In the wake of the George Floyd movement, the American Party of Labor made the fight for working class democracy central in the fights against white supremacy, police murder, low wages, lack of healthcare, inhumane housing, and the many other problems that the diverse working class in the United States faces and rose up against in streets across the country. To defeat all the symptoms, we have to vanquish the disease—capitalism.
The American Party of Labor calls for a program of working democracy! We will not return to the exploitative “normal!”
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that capitalist society is not organized around the interests of its people, but instead to serve the market and bosses paying subsistence wages. When the pandemic ends, we will not and cannot return to the same system of day to day exploitation, repression, and alienation. Let us move towards a system of real, working democracy that represents the diverse American people because it is made by the power of those people.
Employment and prosperity are universal rights. We demand that the tools, resources, and means to build, progress, and sustain society be owned by the working class as a whole—from the farms, factories, power plans, and utilities, to the planes and trains that connect us. Competition has been proven to be insufficient to the task of addressing the crises we face and will continue to face with the environment, healthcare, and jobs. The right of working people to organize and control the policies of their places of work must be protected and built at the local and national levels. There must be a reduction in the working week to 30 hours with six weeks paid leave. Payroll taxes, sales tax, property taxes, and other regressive taxes have to come to an end. The working class must remove the vampiric chains of the capitalist state.
This working class democracy at every step fights against all social discrimination. Redistribution of the mega fortunes of those who gamble in the stock market to the working class is an integral part of this fight against discrimination. Violent criminal acts of discrimination towards race, sex, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, or disability must be actively fought and punished. Abuse of women, a crime that has increased dramatically during social distancing, must be prosecuted. All nations within the U.S. have the right to self-determination, including the right to secession. The walls, both socially and physically, between peoples must be torn down by the unity of the people. With the abolishment of private property and the regular practice of working democracy no particular grouping of people will be able to assume power over another. Private prisons, a particularly terrible manifestation of the intersection of class and discrimination in American society, must be abolished. The police harassment and targeting of people of color, immigrants, the mentally ill, and countless others, must be struggled against and ended. Civilian oversight committees must be formed in order to truly police the police.
Education is a right for all! Full and equal educational opportunity must be guaranteed to all by right. Education must be free, both in its cost and in its content. The educational system must present an honest education to the people, and not propaganda for imperialist, chauvinistic, and capitalist society. Dangerous religious teaching like creationism and abstinence-only sexual education must be removed and replaced by education that represents the real lives of people. The people must have quality education in a clean and safe environment. Teachers must make a real living wage. Highly paid administrators must be done away with and replaced with a board of students, teachers, and the community.
The private healthcare system must be abolished, replaced with a national healthcare system available to all. Preventative healthcare must replace profitable healthcare. Patients must retain their full rights. Medicine for profit must be abolished with research focused on preventative medicine, routine checkups, and developing new cures like those made in Cuba.
Quality housing is the right of all working people. Social or physical discrimination of people in their homes is widespread, and now more clear than ever in the era of COVID-19 when almost all landlords refuse to offer even an extra week for fired workers. Private real estate, housing development companies, and rented properties are exploitative institutions of private property and social discrimination. Housing is a right and not to be used as a means of private profit and personal gain. No worker should worry about having a roof over their head, or the heads of their family. Housing and public infrastructure must be repaired, updated, and maintained.
All military troops from around the world must be brought home. Military occupation of world with the loss of life it brings should brought to an end. We demand the end all imperialist wars, proxy wars, interventions, and CIA-backed operations and regime change. All colonial and neo-colonial debt must be canceled. Sanctions against sovereign states must be removed. We demand mending our relationship with other countries, including, but not limited to, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Syrian Arab Republic for the sake of peace and prosperity. It is time to build international fraternity abroad, and economic democracy and prosperity at home.
We will not return to a system of profit, exploitation, and hate. We will not return to a system that requires unemployment, ignorance, chauvinism, exploitation, and war to survive. We will not return to a sham democracy that benefits the elite few. We will fight to end all oppression and exploitation! We will fight to end imperialism! We will fight for a working democracy! Join Us in Our Fight For Working Democracy, and Against Discrimination! No more compromises with bosses and capitalists, no more hate — build the working class party now!