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.
The Sinhala section of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported recently that a group of Jaffna University students raised the following question to the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka: “There is a widespread global protest movement supporting the Palestinians; But during the war in Sri Lanka, when the government carried out a genocide against the Tamil people, there was no such global movement to support us. why is that?”
What they are questioning is about the brutal attack by the Colombo government in 2009 in Mullivaikkal, where 150,000 Tamil people were trapped in an area of 14 square kilometers, just like what is happening in the Gaza Strip today. There is no reason for the pain in the hearts of these people to go away automatically, who were shaken by human feelings, exacerbated by the truth that the world betrayed them, when they were made helpless and subjected to cruel treatment and tortuous conditions.
A View of the Final Carnage in the Civil War [Photo:opiniojuris.org]
But, instead of facing this reality, the SEP, through an article published in Sinhalese on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on January 24, authored by Navin Devage, titled “A Reply to the Political Questions Promoted by Tamil Nationalists Among Jaffna University Students Regarding the Gaza War,” is attempting to narrow down the crisis of the Tamil people as a mere product of Tamil nationalists, pretending that there existed a global protest movement to fight against the Tamil Genocide.
Accordingly, “the claim that there was no global opposition to the genocide against the Tamil people during the war in Sri Lanka is false,” writes the SEP, pointing out the campaigns of the Tamil diaspora who were exiled from the island as a result of the war, such as, “8000 Tamils in Central Berlin marched from the CDU headquarters to the Indian Embassy”, “a hartal movement took place in Tamil Nadu”, “50,000 Tamils protested in Paris”, etc. The question that has arisen now is the fact that the cries of the oppressed Tamils, from within the country and abroad, for the protection of their lives in the last genocidal attack by the government forces, did not receive a favorable response from the world.
To elaborate further, all the radicals, left parties and trade unions in Sri Lanka as well as in other countries, were engaged in the “war against terrorism” campaign unleashed by US-led imperialism at that time. The left parties of Sri Lanka were already smearing the blood of the oppressed Tamils on their hands. Temples and churches had become centers blessing the attrocities against Tamil people. The racists came to the fore, suppressing the progressive artists. Racist films and other creations had become part of popular culture. Unions encouraged their membership to donate wages to war funds. Creation of a horrified graveyard in the north was celebrated with milk rice (The traditional Sri Lankan food of celebration). In the midst of all this, with the massive escalation of military attacks in 2009, in order to cover up the massacres on the ground, the Rajapaksa government announced that it could not assure the safety of the lives of journalists and even of the Red Cross members. The oppressed Tamil people who did not then have smartphones, and access to Facebook and social media platforms, did not have the ability to share the events of the bloody tragedy that was unfolding before them, as in Gaza today. In this way, by the time of the final onslaught, the fact that a reactionary pro-war mass sentiment had been built against the Tamil people in the southern partk of Sri Lanka, gave the government an easy war victory.
The effort made in the article, to insinuate that the resistance to the genocide of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka was included as a common slogan of the mass struggles around the world, which were erupted by the global economic and financial crisis of 2008, is similarly false.
This objective reality must be overcome by a genuine movement of the working class. Instead, it is naive to try to console the Tamil people by distorting the reality and to say that such an idea was promoted by the Tamil elite, and to assume that the oppressed people can be hence freed from the influence of Tamil nationalism. It should be specially noted here that the article is written with the good intention of liberating the oppressed Tamils from reactionary nationalism, but the way followed to achieve it goes against the very objective. In other words, the purpose itself has revealed that the way followed to achieve it is unfair.
Against this distortion of the said article, we have to note that it was only the SEP, the WSWS and the ICFI, that have been carrying out a principled fight against the communal injustice and racist war against the Tamil people in the North-East of the country, by launching an international campaign and presenting a socialist program, over three decades uninterruptedly.
The February 4, 2009 WSWS editorial board’s statement quoted in the SEP article itself makes things clearer:
“Working people internationally have shown mass opposition to their governments’ support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and horror at the war crimes in Gaza. They will feel the same way if made aware of the situation in Sri Lanka. Tamil workers must link their struggles with that of workers all over the world against the common imperialist enemy.”
According to the article, “…by puffing the formula of problems unique to the Tamil people and a Tamil solution, what the students’ union is actually doing is to prevent such a united struggle of the oppressed of all races and creeds against the outdated social order – that is their common enemy – in which the capitalist ruling elite holds political power.”
In this way, the SEP leadership is exposing a struggle carried out within the party on the issue of whether the Tamil people have had no special problems. It is an illusion of the SEP leadership to believe in winning over oppressed Tamils to the international working class program, while denying to recognize the special discriminatory circumstances of Tamil people and thereby standing with the same infamous capitalist slogan.
As stated in the February 4, 2009 WSWS editorial board’s statement quoted in the SEP article, “The allies of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora in the imperialist countries are the working class. It is the only social force with the power and whose class interests lie in ending the war, overthrowing the Sri Lankan bourgeois state, and ensuring the democratic rights of the Tamil population, as part of the struggle against the imperialist world order.”
Thus, “SEP the Sri Lanka branch of the International Committee fights to build a revolutionary alliance of Sinhala and Tamil working class and peasants to form a socialist united republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The democratic or social aspirations of the people cannot be realized under capitalist rule in Sri Lanka or within the confines of the nation-state system established in the Indian subcontinent in 1947-1948. The backwardness of Sri Lanka and Eelam, which is the result of the colonial past and continued imperialist rule, can only be overcome by the establishment of a worker-peasant government as part of the world socialist revolution.” [The SEP and the fight for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam, ICFI on release of SEP members by LTTE, December 1, 1998]
SEP and its pioneer RCL fought for decades for this perspective of the Sri Lanka-Eelam Socialist Republic. The said article refrains from mentioning the term, “Sri Lanka-Eelam”. We know that there is an “inevitability” behind every coincidence, even though it may appear to be a coincidence. Later, according to the policy developed by the SEP leadership, ‘Tamil people have no special problems’ compared to Sinhalese majority working class; If so, there is no question of the right to self-determination. It means that the national question is resolved automatically, already, with or after the defeat of the LTTE by the Colombo government. Then this ‘Sri Lanka-Eelam’ slogan cannot be valid. That is the very inevitability that caused it to disappear from the article.
As the SEP had pointed out from the beginning, the end of the war with the victory of the Colombo government suppressing the Tamil people’s struggle in the North, was opening up space for the suppression of the working class in the south. Also, the end of the war led to the strengthening of the right wing. It happened in the context of a pre-emptive strike by the ruling class against a possible popular uprising in the South. Buddhist extremist attacks started by the end of 2009 against other religions, the state campaign of extrajudicial killings under the guise of suppressing the underworld, continued unhindered with the approval of all the media and the majority of the middle class. The Party’s response was a belated, half-hearted one.
This policy went to the extent of the party’s tacit approval of the government’s move to forcibly cremate Muslim corpses during the Covid pandemic. In the face of these attacks, instead of continuing the struggle on the basis of its own history, it adapted to the status quo, taking a rest. These diluted responses of the party have reflected that the party was directed to adapt a little, in order to avoid isolation caused by the hostile attitudes against the party developed in the Sinhalese majority South, throughout the determined struggle that party carried out over three decades, based on the slogans calling not to give one cent, one man or one drop of blood to this war and to withdraw troops from the North and the East.
The theoretical conclusion of the International Committee that the campaign for self-determination of a nation understood as a right up to freedom of secession plays a regressive role in the context of a tendency to fragment states into Imperialist-backed statelets, and the rightward movement of national liberation movements and of all national political movements, including trade unions, consequent to the globalization of production, was employed by the party leadership to justify its adaptation. Accordingly, they argued that there is no question of self-determination anymore. Even the talk of self-determination was interpreted as representative of separatism and support for imperialism.
According to the International Committee, the demand for self-determination, as the right to freedom from national oppression, which is clearly a transitional demand, has not been used since Lenin’s time to promote the formation of a separate state. As long as we could subjugate it to the working-class strategy of united mobilization for the socialist perspective, we have fought for it firmly. As the current crisis exacerbates pressure on national groups, democratic issues including self-determination have emerged more acutely than ever. But, it must be based on the truth,”that the essential progressive content of ‘self-determination’—the eradication of national oppression—can be realized only through the SEP’s program for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam.” [The SEP and the fight for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam, ICFI on the release of SEP members by LTTE, December 01, 1998]
To elaborate further, “To the extent that the nation-state persists as a basic unit of political and economic organization of bourgeois society, the national question—which, at this point in history, would be more aptly called the “national problem”—persists. But Marxist tactics flow from a scientific understanding of the historical obsolescence of the national state. (David Noth, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century) As long as the working-class party avoids it, pro-imperialist, national separatist opportunism would build its kingdom on it.
The SEP article defects from that responsibility. Its distinguishing feature is its rejection of the historical materialist method. The writer selects only the things he prefers from the whole composition, and from it, arrives at the conclusions he is biased towards. In emphasizing the lessons of the 1985 split, the leadership of the International Committee has pointed out correctly on many occasions that, when pragmatism is thrown out of the front door, it creeps in through the back door. The revolutionary should carefully be aware of this.
