The Socialist Equality Party (US) announced, on February 27, the selection of Joseph Kishore and Jerry White as the SEP’s candidates in the 2024 US presidential election campaign. The campaign website can be accessed at socialism2024.org. We, theSocialist.LK, are posting here the announcement of this campaign by David North, the national chairman of the SEP-US. As comrade North points out, the US election is a global event, which affects billions of the working people of every country and, so, they should have the right to participate in.
Joseph Kishore and Jerry White as its presidential and vice presidential candidates for the 2024 US election
On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party, I am honored to announce that the SEP will stand candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.
Joe Kishore, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, will be our candidate for president.
Jerry White, the labor editor of the World Socialist Web Site, has been selected as the SEP’s vice presidential candidate.
Both Joe Kishore and Jerry White have long and distinguished records as fighters for socialism and the interests of the working class.
Joe, who is 44 years old, has been active in the socialist movement for a quarter century. He has been national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party since 2008, and has played a central role in the development of its political program and the building of the SEP. He represented the Socialist Equality Party as its presidential candidate in 2020.
Jerry, who is 64 years old, joined the Workers League—the predecessor organization of the Socialist Equality Party—45 years ago. During these many years, Jerry—dating back to the historic PATCO strike of 1981—has, as a revolutionary journalist, covered and intervened in countless struggles of the working class. He has also represented the Socialist Equality Party in earlier national elections, most recently as its presidential candidate in 2016.
The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in this election to raise the political consciousness of the working class, to develop its understanding that no solution can be found to any of the problems confronting working people except through the ending of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, and that this great historical task can only be achieved by adopting a global strategy aimed at the mobilization of the power of the American and international working class in a unified struggle against the world capitalist system.
The program of the Socialist Equality Party is not a utopian scheme. It is a necessity. Mankind confronts an existential crisis. The capitalist system is historically obsolete. It is not only incapable of improving the conditions of life for the vast majority of the world’s population. It is leading humanity to a catastrophe. The alternative that confronts mankind is socialism or capitalist barbarism.
What is the reality of capitalism in 2024?
David North
Not since 1945, the end of World War II, has the danger of a cataclysmic Third World War loomed so large. In fact, the conflict now underway in Europe and the Middle East, and those that are spreading throughout the Sahel region in Africa and the Transcaucasus in Central Asia, are the opening rounds of a rapidly developing global war.
The war in Ukraine, which the Biden administration deliberately provoked two years ago with the aim of weakening Russia and tightening the grip of American imperialism and its NATO allies over Eurasia, in preparation for the coming showdown with China, threatens to escalate into a nuclear conflict. Germany is once again on the warpath. The NATO powers have repeatedly stated that they will not be deterred from pursuing the war by the threat of a nuclear exchange. The deliberate use of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons—which was rejected for decades as synonymous with madness—is now being “normalized” as a legitimate component of imperialist geopolitical strategy.
As the war rages in Ukraine, the fascistic Israeli regime—with the full support of the White House and allied governments in Europe—continues its murderous campaign against the people of Gaza. The death toll is approaching 30,000. Two-thousand-pound bombs, supplied by the Biden administration, are being dropped indiscriminately on a defenseless population. Even as hundreds of women and children are being killed every day, the Biden administration refuses to demand a cease fire. Genocide is being “normalized.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has now entered its fifth year. Well over 1 million Americans have died after being infected. On a global scale, it has been estimated that the total number of excess deaths caused by the pandemic now exceeds 28 million. Countless millions are being infected multiple times and, even if spared a fatal outcome, endure the misery and debilitation of Long COVID. Every capitalist government has dismantled the most minimal measures to prevent the spread of the disease.
Even the use of masks is being opposed and, in some cases, threatened with criminal sanctions. The slogan of the ruling elites, initially proclaimed by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is, “Let the bodies pile high.” Opposing the implementation of well-known and effective public health measures to stop the transmission of the virus, it continues to spread and mutate, infecting millions of people each day. Mass death and debilitation is being normalized.
The criminal indifference of capitalist governments to the lives of the world’s population is duplicated in their attitude toward the survival of the planet. No amount of information confirming the disastrous consequences of global warming will compel the ruling class to adopt policies that scientists insist are urgently required to avoid planetary suicide.
The reactionary social essence of the capitalist system is the absolute subordination of the needs of human society to the drive for massive profits and the concentration of staggering levels of wealth in the bank accounts of the financial-corporate oligarchs who rule society.
The French novelist Balzac, who observed with a critical eye the rise of the capitalist class in the early 19th century, noted, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” But the brilliant writer could hardly have imagined the extent to which his aphorism would be confirmed by the astronomical sums controlled by the present-day oligarchs. The “great fortunes” to which Balzac referred amounted to several millions. Those of the modern corporate-financial oligarchs are measured in the tens and hundreds of billions.
The most basic indication of the progressive or reactionary character of a society is whether it is becoming more equal or more unequal. By this standard, the reactionary character of American and global capitalist society is beyond debate. Social inequality has reached levels that are beyond anything that has existed in at least a century.
The richest 1 percent of the world’s population now owns almost half the world’s wealth, while the poorest 50 percent own just three-quarters of 1 percent. Eighty-one billionaires have more wealth than half of the global population. The richest 1 percent raked in 38 percent of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, while the bottom 50 percent received just 2 percent.
The United States has the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, whose collective wealth grew to $5.2 trillion in 2023. This vast concentration of wealth and the corresponding degree of social inequality is totally incompatible with democracy.
There is much talk in the media about the threat to American democracy. President Biden declares that he is all that stands, or should I say totters, in the way of a dictatorship headed by Trump. If that is truly the case, then democracy is certainly doomed.
But the fight against dictatorship and fascism can only succeed to the extent that its causes are understood.
Trump—who emerged from the smelly sewers of the New York and New Jersey real estate and casino industries—only personifies the criminality of American capitalism.
Democracy cannot survive alongside of massive social inequality. The capitalist oligarchs turn today toward authoritarianism and fascism—as they did in Germany in the 1930s—to defend their wealth against the rising tide of social discontent and class struggle. This is not only an American phenomenon. It is taking place all over the world. The strike wave that swept across the United States in 2023 was part of an international movement.
This global upsurge will continue and grow stronger in the course of 2024.
Neither of the two major capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans —have anything to offer the working class but impoverishment, political repression and war. The attempted coup of January 6, 2021 was not an isolated episode. Indeed, it had more the character of a dress rehearsal. American democracy is on its last legs. It cannot survive on the basis of capitalism.
Therefore, the Socialist Equality Party will advance a program that calls for the end of the corporate-financial dictatorship, the establishment of democratically controlled public ownership over the financial-corporate conglomerates, and the dissolution of the vast military-industrial complex.
The SEP will advocate a comprehensive and far-reaching redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the broad mass of the population.
The SEP will also fight against the vicious chauvinism of the capitalist parties. We will denounce and expose the brutal treatment of immigrants from Latin America, and uphold the fundamental democratic right of all working people to live in dignity wherever they choose.
The Socialist Equality Party will explain that the implementation of this program will require the transfer of political power to the working class.
The United States election is a world event. What happens in the US affects every country in the world. Given the global impact of the US elections, every person in the world should have the right to cast a ballot in November.
The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in the 2024 presidential election because the critical character of the present crisis requires the development of a class conscious, socialist movement of the working class.
The economic, political and social crisis of the capitalist system will intensify throughout 2024. In turn, the global resistance of the working class will grow more determined and politically conscious. In this process, the SEP and its co-thinkers in the parties affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International will play an increasingly decisive role.
The Socialist Equality Party is not a mere vote-catching organization, shouting demagogic slogans, mouthing platitudes, and adapting its program to the lowest common denominator. We leave that to the political charlatans of the pseudo-left organizations that hope to achieve minor and inconsequential reforms with the permission of and in alliance with the Democratic Party. Moreover, the Socialist Equality Party does not chop and dice the population into different conflicting personal identities—such as ethnicity, race, gender and sexual preference—each fighting for a more personally favorable redistribution of wealth within the framework of capitalism.
The program of the Socialist Equality Party is based on the recognition that the fundamental conflict in society is between classes.
The SEP is a party of history. Its theoretical, political and practical work is based on a vast experience of revolutionary struggle, spanning more than a century. Our traditions are rooted in the international principles and program of Marxist socialism, as it has been defended and developed by the Trotskyist movement, which was founded in 1923, in opposition to Stalinism, social democracy, reactionary nationalism and countless varieties of middle-class politics.
The Socialist Equality Party recognizes the global scale of the capitalist crisis and immense tasks that confront a movement that seeks to change the world. But we derive confidence and optimism not only from the fact that the extraordinary advances in science and technology make fully possible the rational and progressive reorganization of the world economy in the interests of mankind, but also from the fact that there does exist a social force that is sufficiently powerful to carry out the revolutionary transformation of the world—the American and international working class.
The SEP will conduct its campaign on an international scale, to explain to workers the necessity for a unified world-wide struggle against capitalism’s descent into barbarism.
But its success, the success of our campaign, depends on your support and participation in the election campaign of the Socialist Equality Party. Help us place Joseph Kishore and Jerry White on the ballot in as many states as possible. We urge workers and youth—indeed, all those who recognize that capitalism has arrived at a dead end—to join this fight. Step forward for the working class. Contribute financially and participate actively in our campaign. Build SEP campaign committees in your factories, work places, schools and neighborhoods.
The fight against poverty, repression and World War III is the fight for World Socialism!
[This announcement was originally published on WSWS.org February 27, 2024]
By the Executive Committee of the CACPS and the Editorial Board of theSocialist.LK
“The death toll in Gaza is staggering. More than 30,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed in just 150 days; 5% of the population is dead, injured or missing. It is impossible to adequately describe the suffering in Gaza”
Philippe Lazzarini, Head of UNRWA (Tweet on X on February 5, 2024)
Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles (CACPS) and theSocialist.LK yesterday (05) launched a public online Petition titled “Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to Zionism! No to Imperialism!”. The significance of this political act to mobilize the working class, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, and all those who want to stop the massacre in Gaza, is expressed by the statement of Lazzarini, quoted above.
The Petition calls upon masses to reject the reactionary appeals to imperialist warmongers to stop the massacre. “Crisis ridden, these powers are planning a war with China, and are waging a war against Russia in Ukraine, as part of a global nuclear war that would entail Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world. In these imperialist centers too, the war abroad has brought social counter-revolution at home,” Petition states.
Pointing out the necessary relationship between war on the one hand, and debt and austerity on the other, over billions of people around the world, the Petition states, “Manifestation of the hold of imperialism takes different forms: it may be war, it may be debt and austerity. Therefore, there is no fight against debt and austerity without a fight against war, and vice versa.”
It calls upon mass solidarity with the Palestinian people and to fight till their demands are met. These demands are expressed in the slogans the Petition fights for. These include, Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to imperialist Barbarism! Punish War Criminals!
Refuting the imperialist political trap of the two-state solution, it calls upon to fight for a socialist programme to build a Jew-Arab Unified Socialist State, which would be part of a Federation of Socialist Unified States of the Middle East and the World.
In the backdrop of traditional working class organizations, the trade unions and their pseudo-left bckers, being lined up with imperialism and the capitalist state of austerity and international finance capital, the CACPS and theSocialist.LK call upon working class of Sri Lanka, united with the Israeli and US working people, to “unleash our enourmous power to fight for political power, independent of the State-Company-Trade Union alliance, to call general strikes, to stop war funding and military aid, and stop the Genocide and the world war.”
This Petition was launched as part of the wider campaign by the CACPS and theSocialist.LK against the long oppression of Palestinian people by the imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
We invite fellow workers and our readers to sign the Petition today, share it widely and fight to stop the Gaza Genocide Now and halt to the impending neuclear war.
මෙහි ගැබ්වන ඉදිරි දර්ශනය ලෝක සමාජවාදී වෙබ් අඩවියේ, “කම්කරු පන්තිය, ධනපති ම්ලේච්ඡත්වයට එරෙහි සටන සහ සමාජවාදී විප්ලවයේ ලෝක පක්ෂය ගොඩනැගීම (The working class, the fight against capitalist barbarism, and the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution)” යන මැයෙන් කොටස් හතරකින් යුතුව පළ කර ඇති ඉදිරි දර්ශනයට ලියූ පූර්විකාවක් වැනිය.
Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 13, 2024. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Thursday’s attack by the United States and United Kingdom against Yemen. With no popular mandate, with no congressional or parliamentary authorization, without even an attempt at a serious explanation, the Biden administration in the US and the Sunak government in the UK have carried out an illegal act of war against an impoverished nation.
The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak ]
The attack on Yemen is a major escalation of the developing war in the Middle East. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and its imperialist allies in NATO have overseen a massive militarization of the region, directly targeting Iran. This is itself part of an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the developing economic and military conflict against China.
US President Joe Biden did not even see fit to go on national television to explain the launching of a new war, under conditions in which there is overwhelming popular opposition to the expansion of war in the Middle East. As the Pentagon was planning to attack Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted to the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Hospital, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but unbeknownst to the president. This bizarre episode underscored the reality that US war-making is operating on autopilot, increasingly outside the pretense of civilian oversight.
As always, the rationale provided to justify the war is a pack of lies. Biden declared that the missile strikes were “defensive” and “a direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks.” The American media, with the same breathless reporting that has accompanied every US military operation, proclaims that a country with a gross domestic product 700 times smaller than the United States is carrying out “intolerable” actions, against which the American military is “forced” to defend itself. Overnight, Yemen’s Houthis have been turned into a new bogeyman, requiring urgent military action without any discussion or explanation.
In coordination with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the United States has dispatched to the Middle East a massive military armada, consisting of two aircraft carrier battle groups, multiple guided missile destroyers, an unknown number of submarines and dozens of warplanes. These forces have provided logistics, reconnaissance, and target selection to Israel in a deliberate effort to provoke retaliation from Iran and its allied forces such as the Houthis.
Yet, supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen,” asserted the Pentagon on Friday, “We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
In fact, the imperialist powers have been waging a war against the population of Yemen for nearly a decade. The Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.
The immediate antecedent for the escalating war in the Middle East, of which the genocide in Gaza is a part, is the collapse of Ukraine’s “spring offensive.” But the imperialist powers are doubling down. “Backing Ukraine is key to the West’s security,” declares The Economist, while Foreign Affairs asserts that “Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace.”
Overriding all of this, the United States is involved in a struggle to fend off the challenge posed by China to its global hegemony, which threatens to trigger a shooting war in the Pacific. In the US media and political circles, there is growing talk of a new “axis of evil” involving Iran, China and Russia.
Each one of these conflicts cannot be understood in isolation. The bombing of Yemen is part of a global counter-revolution, in which the imperialist powers are seeking to reestablish direct control over their former colonies.
The countries carrying out this agenda are the old imperialist powers: the US, UK, France, and Germany. The British ruling class, unable to carry through its policies independently, seeks to exploit the so-called special relationship, that is, Britain’s role as the principal ally of American imperialism, to advance its own interests on a global stage.
Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.
American Imperialism, to paraphrase the words of Leon Trotsky, is “tobogganing towards disaster with eyes closed.”
Over the past three months, millions of people all over the world have marched in protest of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. The US strikes on Yemen occurred on the same day as the International Court of Justice heard devastating evidence that Israel, and by extension the United States, were responsible for genocide in Gaza.
The response of US imperialism to these mass popular protests and exposures of its war crimes has been to accelerate its war plans. This is because the eruption of war, genocide and political repression is not an aberration. Imperialism, as Lenin explained, is not merely a policy, but rather a specific historical stage of capitalist development. Opposition to imperialism is, therefore, a revolutionary question.
It is not a matter of appealing to the capitalist governments responsible for these crimes to alter course, but rather mobilizing the working class, fusing the struggle against war with the developing struggles of workers all over the world against inequality and exploitation. The logic of these struggles requires the conquest of political power by workers all over the world, the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs and war criminals, and the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale.
