THE 2006 SOCIALIST
ACTION PLATFORM
Human needs before capitalist profit!
Tax the rich, not working people!
A revitalized, fighting labor movement!
Bring all U.S. troops home now!
Close all U.S. military bases!
Defend the environment!
Civil liberties & democratic rights for all!
End racist oppression!
Defend the Cuban Revolution!
Building today for a socialist future!
Human needs before capitalist profit!
Tax the rich, not working people!
The ruling rich and their corporations have reduced their tax rates to historic lows, in many instances, through loopholes in the very laws that they write, avoiding taxation outright. Meanwhile, working people’s tax rates have risen to historic highs. If the progressive income tax rates of the 1970s were in place today, the rich would have paid trillion of dollars in taxes that they did not pay, an amount sufficient to eliminate poverty in the U.S.
The richest 1 percent of all Americans, about 2.5 million people, now receive nearly as much income after taxes as the bottom 40 percent, about 100 million people. The wealthiest 13,000 families in the USA have more income than the bottom 20 million families. The wealthiest one percent of the population, the ruling class, owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent!
Socialist Action campaigns for:
• A steeply graduated (progressive) income tax, including a 100 percent tax on all annual incomes of over $250,000.
• End corporate welfare! Tax the corporations! Close all the loopholes! End all “tax breaks” for the ruling rich! No taxes on working-class incomes of less than $50,000.
• A living wage for all! Quadruple the federal minimum wage and apply it to all states! No one can live a decent life on the current minimum wage.
• Free quality public education from the cradle to the grave!
• Free quality national health care for all!
• Build schools, not jails!
• Quality, affordable housing for all!
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A revitalized, fighting labor movement!
Socialists fight for union democracy, the direct control by the rank and file over all union affairs. We oppose the present union bureaucracy’s subordination to and partnership with capitalist corporations and capitalist parties. We fight for a break with class-collaboration policies of both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win national federations. We fight for a return to the fighting unionism and solidarity that originally brought labor to the forefront of U.S. politics.
Socialist Action campaigns for:
• Organize the unorganized! Break with the Democrats and Republicans! Build a fighting Labor Party now to compliment labor’s struggles on the job in the national, state and local political arenas!
• End all restrictions on the right to organize and strike! Repeal all reactionary labor legislation, beginning with the Taft-Hartley Act!
• Unity and solidarity with all the oppressed! End racist polices in the unions! Welcome all immigrant workers to the ranks of organized labor!
A policy of class-struggle unionism requires the construction of a fighting class-struggle left wing in the unions today. Labor retains the power to win and advance the interests of all. Solidarity indeed means “An injury to one is an injury to all!” That means that we respect all union picket lines—when our sisters and brothers in one union take on the bosses, their struggle is ours!
May Day 2006 demonstrated the potential power of working people, when 4-5 million immigrant workers and their families and friends took to the streets and momentarily stopped capitalist business as usual.
But organized labor largely stood aside on this momentous day. Had it decided to join the battle for equality, amnesty, and legalization, it could have closed down the entire country and taught the boss class some important lessons. The result could have been a qualitative step forward in labor’s capacity to expand its ranks and reverse the present route that today’s union workers and all others have been compelled to endure.
• The bosses’ problems are not our problems! Solidarity applies at the national and international level. No worker can be allowed stand alone! No union can stand alone!
To the bosses who say they can’t operate at U.S. union wages, we say:
• Open the financial books and let everyone see where the profits go!
• Nationalize “bankrupt” companies under workers’ control!
To those corporations who seek to close or move their plants, we respond:
• No plant will be closed or moved at the expense of its workers! Close or move one and a fighting labor movement will close them all—and more!
• Jobs at top union wages for all! For a massive public works program to rebuild our inner cities and schools and to convert polluting industries, such as auto production, to the manufacture of environmentally clean and accessible public transportation systems for all!
• End unemployment now! Shorten the workweek, with no cut in pay! Thirty hours work for 40 hours pay!
Under capitalism technological advances—robots and labor-replacing machines—mean unemployment. In the world we seek to build safe, environmentally sound technology means a shorter workweek, more leisure time, and a major rise in the cultural level of all.
These are essential demands for all workers today. They will not be won without a fight, without a fighting labor movement allied with all the oppressed and exploited.
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Bring all U.S. troops home now!
Close all U.S. military bases!
• Socialists say “No!” to all U.S. wars, occupations, and threats of intervention—from Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran to Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
• Take the profit out of war! One hundred percent tax on all war profits! No profits for mass murder!
• Dismantle the U.S. war machine! Money for human needs, not war! Trillions are budgeted for U.S. super-profit-making war industries and related military spending, spying, torture chambers, military coups, and secret illegal operations worldwide—enough to feed the entire world and end poverty and deprivation everywhere. Close it all down now!
• For a democratic and secular Palestine! End all U.S. aid to apartheid Israel! Stop the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza! For a united socialist federation of the Middle East!
Socialists reject the legitimacy of the Zionist colonial settler state of Israel, just as we do all colonial settler states. We see no difference between the imperialist colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East of yesteryear and today’s U.S.-backed Zionist conquest and occupation of Palestine.
Israel today serves as the chief U.S. instrument for the imperialist domination and exploitation of the Middle East.
Zionism is an ideology of racism and apartheid segregation. It is a deathtrap for the Jewish people, a central source of almost 60 years of war and oppression of the Palestinians. Socialist Action supports the creation of a democratic and secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs can live together as equals in a new society, a society predicated on the immediate right of return of all dispossessed Palestinians. In this society, revolutionaries will fight for the construction of an egalitarian socialist state.
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Defend the environment!
Inherent in capitalist production is the elimination of all restraints on profits. Capitalists insist that environmental protection laws must be eliminated because they reduce the competitiveness of U.S. corporations on world markets. They say the same for everything else, from union wages to health care and pensions. Nothing is sacred except profits for the few.
Capitalists put their interests first. Their interests are directly counterposed to ours. We seek to live a decent life while they seek to profit, regardless of the costs to us and to the earth itself.
Today, the planet earth is experiencing major climatic changes due to global warming brought on by the burning of fossil fuels. U.S. corporations are the world’s greatest offenders. Global warming and the pollution of the air we breath and the oceans and rivers that we depend on are a reality that cannot be ignored.
Some 55,000 chemicals that are known carcinogens are used daily in the process of capitalist production. They are employed to raise profit rates even though they are deadly to human life.
Socialist Action campaigns for:
• An emergency program to combat global warming! Trillions for the use of safe, efficient, non-polluting, and renewable energy sources! A minimum 50 percent reduction in the use of fossil fuels worldwide!
• For rationally planned cities and an end to suburban sprawl! Sustainable timber harvests in the forests! Stop the despoliation of public land and Native American land through mining, oil drilling, and power-generating schemes!
• A 100 percent tax on the profits of all corporate polluters.
• Stop environmental racism: the dumping of deadly waste products and the location of polluting plants in the communities of the oppressed!
• No to nuclear power and nuclear weapons!
• Nationalize the energy industry under union and community control!
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Civil liberties & democratic rights for all!
Capitalism in crisis cannot tolerate dissent. Yesterday’s anti-communist witch hunt is today’s fake war on terrorism. The bipartisan attack on working people requires an across-the-board assault on basic civil liberties and democratic rights that were won through decades of struggle.
The U.S. has the largest percentage of its population in prison and on death row in the world. The massively expanding prison-industrial complex and its rapid privatization are designed to increase corporate profit rates and punish society’s most oppressed—for whom capitalism has no jobs, no hope, and no future.
The coordinated and nationwide attacks on abortion rights are part of capitalism’s need to control every aspect of people’s lives, including the fundamental right of women to control their own bodies.
Attacks on immigrants are designed to guarantee a cheap and docile labor force, to divide working people, and to re-enforce capitalism’s inherent racism.
The attacks on gays and lesbian are designed to legislate morality and sexual preference and deny equal rights for all.
The attacks on the Bill of Rights—and its guarantees of free speech, press, assembly, and political association—are aimed at deepening government repression and preparing the ground for a police state society.
Socialist Action campaigns for:
• Repeal the Patriot Act, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and all other legislation restricting democratic rights and civil liberties! End all restrictions on the right to organize, assemble and protest!
• Abolish the death penalty!
• Repeal the racist “three strikes” legislation!
• Jobs, education, and rehabilitation—not incarceration!
• Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free Lynne Stewart! Free All Political Prisoners!
• We defend a woman’s right to control her own body! Defend Roe v. Wade! Free abortion on demand at every hospital and medical facility! Reopen the closed women’s clinics! Ready access to abortion is a fundamental right!
• End police brutality!
• Legalize same-sex marriages and end all discrimination based on sexual preference!
• Immediate amnesty, legalization, and equal rights for all immigrants! De-militarize and open the border! No worker is illegal! End the economic and political exploitation of Latin America and all other nations whose workers are compelled to leave because their economies are destroyed by imperialist plunder! No to La Migra!
• Close Guantanamo and return this U.S. colonial conquest to Cuba! Immediate freedom for Guantanamo’s political prisoners! Close the government’s worldwide secret torture chambers! Stop the racist attacks on Arab and Middle Eastern communities in the U.S.!
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End racist oppression!
Socialist Action stands in the tradition of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Both Malcolm and Martin began to consider the socialist alternative as they learned that the racist oppression they were fighting was endemic to the capitalist order worldwide.
Malcolm X was an uncompromising revolutionary nationalist who insisted on the right of self-determination for Black people. Self-determination included the necessity for the independent organization of Blacks to fight for their own interests.
Self-determination, as Malcolm saw it, also included the right of Black people to decide whether to seek full equality and freedom in the context of U.S. society or to express their national identity by one or another form of separation—wherein the oppressed independently control their own lives and destiny.
Socialist Action believes that the coming challenge to capitalist rule in the U.S. will have a combined character. It will consist of working people uniting as a class—Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and white—to challenge capitalist exploitation. But it will also consist of oppressed nationalities, organized independently and separately as oppressed people, challenging capitalism’s racist discrimination and oppression.
The nationalism of the oppressed is an inseparable component of the class struggle. To the extent that it is embraced and championed by the broad multi-racial working class, the potential for a successful revolutionary challenge of the vast majority is maximized.
To the extent that racism in the working class is not overcome, and the interests of the white population are counterposed to all others, there will be no victories for anyone except the boss class.
Socialist Action campaigns for:
• An end to racist discrimination and oppression! Self-determination for oppressed nationalities!
• Affirmative action with quotas to remedy past and present discrimination!
• Rebuild the schools, clinics, and communities of the oppressed!
• Full restoration of bilingual education!
• Full support to Latino and Black independent political action!
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Defend the Cuban Revolution!
The Cuban Revolution—beleaguered, embargoed, and blockaded by the U.S. for nearly 50 years—stands out as an example to the world of what can be achieved with the abolition of capitalist rule, even in a tiny island nation cut off by U.S. force and violence from access to the world’s markets.
In the face of an U.S.-sponsored invasion and U.S.-sponsored terrorist attacks on Cuba, the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people and its leadership has prevailed. For every Latin American nation that begins to challenge U.S. neo-colonial rule and take control of its own affairs, Cuba is cited as the example, the model of a society that places human needs before capitalist profit.
Socialist Action demands:
• End the blockade and embargo of Cuba!
• End the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and repeal all anti-Cuban legislation!
• Stop the U.S.-backed terrorist attacks on Cuba!
• Normalize U.S. relations with Cuba! Remove Cuba from the U.S. list of “terrorist” nations!
• Free the Cuban Five!
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Building today for a socialist future!
The resources are there to end the scourge of capitalist greed and inequality if we build a world where human needs come first. Under capitalism, workers are expendable. Health care is eliminated—47 million are without it! Pensions are voided. War spending is a necessity. Destruction of union wage levels that have prevailed for decades is almost instant.
But this system, run in the interests of big corporations and their wealthy stockholders, is archaic given that all wealth is produced by working people. Socialism is based on the premise that with a rationally planned economy based on the collective ownership and control of industry and society’s basic resources and government, there is more than enough to go around.
Indeed, we have more than enough resources to eliminate poverty and want while protecting the earth’s air, soil, water, and climate. We have more than enough to raise the quality of life for the world’s people to unheard-of heights.
Socialism means the democratic rule by working people and their allies, of every race and creed. It means an end to the minority rule of the ruling class few—who own and control everything and share nothing.
Socialism means a society, the first in human history, where the basic decisions affecting our lives will be made by us, for us, and through institutions that we control on a daily basis.
Join the fight for a socialist future! Join Socialist Action! Vote for Jeff Mackler for the U.S. Senate!
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