Here is the plain and simple truth: there is no party of the working class. And there has not been for the better part of a century.
Working people need our own party, a party of our whole class, built around the conviction that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common,
in the words of the IWW.
As the 2016 results of Working Class Party in Michigan show, the idea that workers should form their own party touched many people. That was important. But it was only a very small beginning.
The posts that follow come from people who worked on the campaign for Working Class Party, who are raising the question: What can be done in the current situation?
Philip Kolody was one of the people who worked to create Working Class Party in 2016, and he was its candidate in Michigan’s 14th Congressional district in 2018 and 2020. In a candidates’ questionnaire he filled out for the “Patch,” he explained his reasons for stepping forward like that: “No other party has the understanding of the problems the working class faces, and no clear idea of them, nor intention of dealing with these problems.” He often expressed this conviction: “The only friend the working class has IS the working class.”
The new Working Class Party of Maryland has nominated David Harding for mayor of Baltimore, to run in the November 2020 election.
People are killing other people, in the schools, in the workplaces. It even happens in different families. Young people kill themselves.
The Michigan legislature is getting ready to pass a bill which will cut many people from Medicaid. These well-fed legislators – who show up to work in the state legislature only 94 days out of a whole year and who get top-shelf medical coverage from the state for themselves and their families – want to require all “able-bodied” adults to work 29 hours every week in order to qualify for Medicaid.
Last fall we campaigned on this idea: that the working class needed its own party. We said that the working class in this country has been suffering through an economic crisis that has gone for over 30 years, under the watch of both the Democrats and the Republicans. We said that the two main political parties both spoke for the capitalists and that the working class needed its own voice.