The Working Class Party campaign for the 4th Congressional District of Illinois held a rally on September 1, 2024.
Ed Hershey, the WCP candidate in Illinois, was unable to attend due to a family emergency. Nonetheless, other members of the campaign spoke, and some of what they said is reproduced below.
I’ll be talking about the situation of the working class today and how we got here, getting to the real root of our problems. So productivity has actually more than doubled since the 1970s. This means that each worker is producing more than twice as much wealth per hour of work. This could mean we each work fewer hours, have more time to rest, take care of our families and do the things we enjoy. AND live better than we did 50 years ago. Instead, the capitalist class has taken all the benefits of this productivity increase, and workers’ lives have gotten worse, decade by decade.
For the past 50 years, they have hired fewer workers, many of whom are hired part-time. Like, at the UPS hub where I work, the waitlist for a full-time position is something like 10 years! So, they don’t hire enough people, and push the existing workers to work harder and faster, often doing the jobs of several people. At my job, they used to have two workers load one trailer. Now, one worker sometimes loads three trailers. We’re working harder than ever. And our backs are feeling it.
So are we making more money from all of this hard work? No, just the opposite! Wages have not kept up with how expensive everything has gotten. Rent has skyrocketed. People are forced to live with roommates, if they can even afford to move out. Or some, like me, are forced to move back in with their parents [thanks mom], instead of starting a family of my own, which is what many people my age were thinking about before. It seems unattainable now. Groceries cost a fortune. It’s difficult to get around without a car, but if you do have one, you know how expensive they are to maintain. And just hope no major medical bills or emergencies come up. If you’re “lucky” enough to get a raise, it’s nowhere near to keeping up with inflation. It’s just not enough money to live a decent life! High productivity means that a larger amount of wealth is being created. But the companies, and the capitalist class that owns them, take that wealth that we create from us.
And what they exploit is not even enough for them! They also take from taxes that should be going to services that we need. Look at what happened with Obamacare. It was never about providing people with access to affordable healthcare. It was just a big handout to insurance companies. We didn’t get a better healthcare system because our needs are not the priority.
Not only are the corporations taking money from the taxes we pay, they don’t even contribute enough. They use every trick in the book to get out of paying taxes. In fact, “corporate taxes accounted for about 15% of government revenues in the 1970s, but only about 6% today.” For example, in 2021, Amazon got away with not paying $5.2 BILLION dollars in taxes because of the tax breaks it received.
Workers are often accused of taking advantage of government assistance programs, yet corporations receive the biggest amount of government assistance in the form of bailouts. When a company is in trouble, the government quickly runs to its rescue using our tax money. Look at auto – Chrysler, which is now Stellantis, was bailed out in 1979, and again after 2008. Each time the government promised it would save jobs. Instead, workers’ jobs were lost, pay and benefits were cut – and the company still took our tax money on top of it! Not to mention the trillions that the banks got in the bailouts in 2008 and again in 2020.
Because the capitalists have stolen the money needed, working class schools are underfunded. In an advanced industrial country like the U.S., clean drinking water isn’t even a guarantee. Flint, MI, to this day, is dealing with the water crisis from ten years ago. Hospitals are closing, especially in rural areas. Roads are not built to last and are not properly maintained, meaning we have to dodge potholes and avoid doing damage to our cars.
All of this means that instead of taking advantage of technology to live better lives, instead of dividing up the work so that everyone who wants one can have a job, our standard of living has plummeted. We see society crumbling around us. You can see it especially among young people: hopelessness about their future and worsening mental health. With no adequate answers provided by society, people are increasingly turning to drugs to escape – 100,000 people per year die of overdoses. Not to mention the increasing number of people who casually get high every day. Taken with the fact that unemployment and homelessness are on the rise, things are bad.
Yet on the other hand, the ruling classes are wealthier than ever. Because of our increased exploitation, because we’ve been squeezed so much, the capitalist class has made tremendous profits. There are more billionaires than ever before, and they are now racing to become trillionaires!
And all of this has happened under the control of both political parties. Democrats and Republicans oversaw a handful of corporations loot society’s wealth. Wealth that we created.
Which means that only the working class itself can make it better. We need our own answer to get us out of this crisis. So that we benefit from the increased production we put out. We need to fight.
We know that capitalism creates massive unemployment. Our answer is that we need to organize the work so that everybody who wants a job has a job. There is plenty of work that needs to be done, and we can divide it up. This would mean slowing down work and having people work fewer hours. But the bosses would never do something like that! Which means we will have to.
We know they’re not using tax money to make our lives better. So, we need to take it from the capitalists who have stolen it from our labor and use it for our needs!
To deal with inflation, we propose that wages should go up as prices go up. But the capitalists won’t do that either. The working class will have to take control. We know that we, the working class, make the economy run. We produce the food, manufacture goods, provide services, deal with transportation. Where I work, we have 6,000 workers handling packages from all across the U.S. Yet it is UPS who profits from our labor. But because we, the workers, make everything run for them, that gives us power. They do everything in their power to divide us in different ways. We’re set against each other. But if we come together, as a class, we have a lot of power. Enough power to take over the economy and control it for OUR needs.
To do this means the working class has to be organized. We need a party that can propose this fight, this program. Working Class Party in one district isn’t that party – but voting for it is a way to say you agree that such a party needs to be built.
While the Democrats try to pretend that things for working people have improved on their watch, Trump and the Republicans talk about the disaster confronting workers that Auguste just explained. This has been part of Trump’s appeal since he announced his candidacy in 2016, and he has reinforced it this year.
But far from pointing to the capitalist class that is really responsible for these problems, Trump and the Republicans blame immigrants for every problem under the sun. They blame them for taking jobs. They blame them for low wages. They blame them for taking services other workers need.
And most of all, they claim that those coming here are criminals. They talk about every case of an immigrant accused of attacking a white woman. They blame immigrants for bringing in fentanyl. They blame them for a wave of “migrant crime.”
All this is a call to violence to far-right thugs. And Trump promises that if elected, he will deport 15 to 20 million people, and says he will use the military if necessary to do so. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric amounts to a threat of violence against the immigrant part of the working class.
The Democrats may not threaten the same kind of violent attacks on immigrants, but not only do they open the door for Trump’s attacks by pretending the economy is doing well, the Democrats don’t call out Trump’s lies or defend immigrants in the slightest. Just the opposite – in her CNN interview broadcast Thursday, Kamala Harris criticized Trump for blocking “a border security bill that would have put 1,500 more agents on the border,” insisted that there should be “consequences” for people who cross the border illegally and bragged that she prosecuted “transnational gangs.”
In this way, the Democrats also reinforce the idea that immigrants are a threat to workers in this country, that many are criminals who need to be blocked from entering.
This is rich, coming from representatives of the biggest transnational gang in the world – U.S. imperialism.
Look at what’s happening in the Middle East. The region produces an enormous amount of wealth – but most of its people live in poverty. Why? The lion’s share of that wealth flows here – not to us, but to the same capitalist class that exploits workers in this country. To keep that system going, the U.S. relies above all on its most reliable cop in the region – the Israeli state. The U.S. has provided the weapons for the ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinian people, the almost total destruction of their homes, hospitals, and schools, the displacement of millions of people. That is crime on a scale that dwarfs anything even the most violent drug cartel might carry out!
Few Palestinians can get here. But most of the migrants trying to get to this country are also, in one way or another, fleeing the ravages of U.S. imperialism. Chicago has recently been flooded by people from Venezuela. But why did they come here?
Like much of the Middle East, Venezuela is rich in oil. But that oil wealth has also long flowed overwhelmingly to U.S. corporations.
When Venezuela tried to keep a little more of its oil wealth in the country, the U.S. responded by backing two coup attempts. Those failed. So, under Obama, Trump, and Biden, the U.S. been imposing increasingly harsh sanctions. Step by step, the U.S. undermined Venezuela’s ability to sell its oil and to buy the food and medicine that it has long imported. This helped push the Venezuelan economy into total collapse, with the price of food skyrocketing 800%, jobs disappearing, hospitals shutting down. This human disaster is what people are fleeing.
It recently came out that when Trump ramped the sanctions on Venezuela in 2017, his own State Department told him that “sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration.” Of course, the Trump administration imposed the sanctions anyway – knowing exactly what would happen. And the Biden administration has maintained them, even after seeing what happened.
In the face of this predicted economic collapse, millions of people have fled, mostly to neighboring countries like Colombia which are themselves impoverished. Some have braved the journey of thousands of miles to try to get to the U.S., carrying young children, walking through roadless rain forests and deserts, fording rivers, braving police, military, and gangs, which are often one and the same.
For the last year and a half in Chicago, we have seen thousands of these Venezuelan migrants sleeping in police stations, crammed into dirty shelters, begging with their kids in front of stores. They are not coming here because they are criminals. Nor are they coming here because they crave “the American Dream.” No, they are victims of a massive crime carried out by both parties that alternate in running the U.S. – the destruction of an entire country’s economy. And yet we are supposed to believe that they are somehow responsible for the problems facing workers in this country?
Most of them were workers in their home country, and they will become workers here. And when they do, the bosses will take advantage of their vulnerability to pay them as little as possible – just like bosses always do. And of course, like they always do, the companies will use the fact that they have workers who can be super exploited to try to drive down everyone’s wages, and attack everyone’s working conditions.
But these migrants are not the enemy. They aren’t the ones driving down wages – that is the capitalist class that gets the money! They aren’t the ones costing jobs – that is the capitalist class that drives one person to do the work of two! They aren’t closing hospitals or stealing the money for government programs – that is the capitalist class that has sucked the money out of every corner of the health system and drained every pot of public money. They aren’t the ones creating crime – that is this same capitalist class, that ruins whole countries to maintain its domination of the world’s wealth, and that denies a future to a huge share of the young people even in this rich country.
The leaders of both parties serve that capitalist class when they try try to dupe workers in this country into blaming immigrants for our problems. It distracts us from our real enemies. By dividing workers against each other, it weakens workers’ own class forces. And it raises the real threat of mass violence.
This is one more reason the working class desperately needs its own political party, that tells the truth about who workers’ enemies are, and who our potential allies are. A party willing to say the obvious truths about the wars – military and economic – carried out to maintain the domination of the U.S. capitalist class over the whole world. A party dedicated to bringing together all the forces of the working class, wherever they were born, whatever they look like, to oppose that ruling class that is leading us to even more destruction and violence.
Working Class Party as it currently exists is not that party. We are a tiny group. But it is a start. A vote for Working Class Party in the upcoming election is a vote to say that you agree such a party needs to be built. That is what we need to tell people in the next two months as we campaign.