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Louisiana Workers Have No Candidate In Governor’s Race

We Must Build a Workers Party

By Malcolm Suber

The multi-national Louisiana working class finds itself in well-worn and familiar territory as we approach the October gubernatorial election. We are being asked to choose between three rich, conservative, anti-choice white men who are squabbling among their class to see who best represents the interests of the oil and gas millionaires who are the real puppet-masters that run this state.

Neither Ralph Abraham, Jon Bel Edwards or Eddie Rispone have a program that will serve to improve the living conditions of Louisiana workers. All three are pursuing the right-wing goals of more intense exploitation of the workers while promising even more tax cuts for the rich. Rispone and Abraham promise to be the most loyal suck-ups to white supremacist President Donald Trump. Their program boiled down and addressed to the white workers and the white middle class is “if you like Donald Trump, you will love me”.

Meanwhile, the gist of Jon Bel Edwards’ program which is addressed to the white Republican majority is “I have successfully maintained your priorities for four years, why not extend my stay.”

Nowhere are there any promises to move Louisiana from the bottom of the list of places to live and raise your family. New Census Bureau data released in September showed that nearly 1 in 5 Louisiana residents lives below the poverty line. We now have the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. after Mississippi and New Mexico. Nowhere is there a promise to move Louisiana off the list as the most incarcerated state where thousands of working people are held in gulags for minor infractions of the law. Nowhere are there promises to improve the education of our children. Nowhere is there a program to end air pollution from the oil and chemical companies. And nowhere is there a program to lessen the regressive tax burden on the working class, replacing it with progressive taxes on the property of the rich.

Louisiana workers will never get off the bottom until we begin to organize and fight for our class interests, rejecting the program of the capitalist rulers to divide us along race, gender, sexual preference and immigration status. What that requires is for us to realize that the two political parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—are parties controlled by the rich to protect the interests of the rich. We should be working to develop a mass workers party that promotes the interest of the working class in opposition to the program of the capitalists who are hellbent on keeping us from redistributing the wealth created by our labor, which they currently hoard for themselves.

We must engage our fellow workers in discussions about the deceptive role of the Democrats and Republicans whose campaigns lie, lie, lie, proclaiming they represent all classes. We as wage-slaves do not share the same problems as the bosses and rich capitalists. They want to maintain this system of privilege for the rich and forced misery for the working class. We must get clear that we are at war against the rich billionaires and their government. Workers must fight to put political power in the hands of the workers’ political representatives who have no interest in exploiting working people.

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South African Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Founded

04 April 2019: Members of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg during the launch of the party. Picture: Ihsaan Haffejee
On April 4-6, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) held its Launch Congress in Boksburg, South Africa. Over a thousand worker delegates from provinces across the country and international guests met to announce their party’s intention to participate in upcoming national elections under the slogan “equality, work, and land.”

The party draws its strong base from the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), which has over 800,000 members throughout South Africa. Last year SAFTU organized a nationwide strike—one of the largest in recent history—to demand reforms to the country’s labor laws and an increase in the national minimum wage. More generally, SAFTU organizes for the “creation of JOBS for all, a living minimum wage, return of LAND, good housing for all and free quality education.”

SAFTU was formed as an initiative of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) who broke the ruling African National Congress (ANC)-led ruling alliance after the Mari-kana Massacre of 2012, during which 34 striking miners were killed by police.

The ANC once led the heroic struggle to bring an end to apartheid (the Jim Crow system of white political rule) but has since betrayed the poor and working masses. The ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa, a billionaire and current South African president, was found to have egged on the police responsible for the massacre. The ANC has pursued anti-worker labor laws and has implemented widespread privatization of public resources which have worsened the conditions for the working class of South Africa.

The Workers Party stresses that history has shown that human dignity and rights for workers cannot be guaranteed by the ANC or any other capitalist government. In a party statement, the SWRP declared “for all the world to know that we as Socialists are committed to building the organ-ization of a revolutionary working class. A class aware of its own interests. A class that will over-throw the capitalist parasites. A working class that will seize power for the project of building So-cialism, in which no human will be exploited by another.”