Fighting to Win

Editorial by Carole Seligman

This speech was delivered to the January 20th Rally Against Racism, Fascism and for a General Strike in San Francisco.

President Biden’s inaugural address was focused on unity—but the unity he espoused is the big lie that American politics is based on—that there can be unity of the oppressed and the oppressor; the exploited and the exploiter; former slaves and former slave owners; immigrants and refugees and the border patrol; the poor and the wealthy; the working class and the owners.

There is no fruitful unity between the main opposing groups of our society—the working class and the ruling class.

But there is a true unity that we must have, a unity in resistance, a unity of the working class, the masses of people of this country—Black, white, Brown, Asian— based on the struggle for our basic needs.

Working people must unify independently to fight for these things:

1. Demand all the means to end the global pandemic, now. Take profit completely out of the COVID-19 picture and implement a massive public health program to vaccinate the population.
2. End all evictions and foreclosures on housing. Make housing a human right, with rent tied to income with no rent surpassing ten percent of income. Forgive rents and mortgage payments during the pandemic. Make the banks pay. Crash program to build housing and end homelessness.
3. Food is a human right. Federal financing to provide food for all.
4. Massive program of green jobs to repair the planet and build infrastructure—housing, schools, mass transit; socialized medicine, including mental healthcare for all.
5. Abolish the death penalty and life sentences without parole; vaccinate and clear the prisons of all non-violent prisoners.

All of these things can be accomplished by ending the nuclear weapons program, the military bases and occupations in foreign countries, the production of weapons, the trillions in military expenditures.

These are the things we need, but in order to fight for them and against the fascist danger growing in this country, we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that there could be unity with the Democratic Party, which (as much as the Republicans,) represents the ruling class, and the state of armed people—the cops and all branches of the military. Working people need our own organizations independent of the capitalists.

Watch out for the union leaders and non-profit organizations who have aligned with the Democratic Party. They proved themselves corrupt by approving and even surpassing Trump’s last military budget! They have run departments of murderous police who kill Black people and go unpunished. Kamala Harris refused to order DNA testing for innocent death row prisoner Kevin Cooper which caused him to spend several more years in prison where he still languishes—so much for progressive Democrats.

NO, working people need our own unity—of, by, and for the working class. That is how we will fight fascism and win!