The world today has entered a deadly spiral of war, environmental crisis, deepening inequality, and widespread economic and political disorder. 

Working people have faced the brunt of a historic cost of living crisis, with out-of-control housing costs and sky-high food and energy prices, alongside stagnating wages. Meanwhile the billionaires have become more obscenely wealthy than any ruling class in history. From 2020 to 2024, five billion people have become poorer, while the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes, at a rate of $14 million per hour, according to Oxfam. 

Record breaking global temperatures are becoming a regular occurrence as more fossil fuels are burned and carbon-storing ecosystems are destroyed to make way for profit-seeking industry. Climate change is no longer a problem of the future, but a lethal process in the present. It’s been estimated that global warming has already killed four million people globally since 2000 just from malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, malaria and cardiovascular disease, and worse is to come with 2023 having been by far the hottest year on record.

War and climate catastrophe are fueling mass migration. The UN Refugee Agency has estimated that 117.3 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced by the end of 2023. 

The bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine and the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza continue, both part of the broader conflict between the U.S. and China, which is preparing the ground for the potential of a direct war between the two nuclear-armed superpowers. 

At the same time, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression are being deliberately stoked by Right-wing political forces funded by a section of the billionaire class. This is helping fuel the growth of far-Right forces. 

But workers, young people, and the oppressed are not taking it lying down. The years 2018, 2019, and 2023, each featured more than 400,000 workers going on strike in the U.S., the most since the 1980s when the decades-long all-out neoliberal, bipartisan assault on labor unions began.

Millions are angry at the repeated betrayals of politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties, and have lost faith in all the institutions of capitalism. Many have drawn the conclusion that this system is utterly bankrupt and that change will only happen if ordinary people fight back.

In response to the genocidal war on Gaza, working-class and young people have moved into action. In the first half of 2024, students at hundreds of college campuses around the world set up encampments to call for a permanent ceasefire and an end to military aid to Israel. In Kenya, months of mass protests recently forced the government to withdraw a sales tax increase that would have raised the cost of food and other basic necessities, but the protests continued and demanded the president’s resignation. In January, over a million people in Germany rallied in solidarity with immigrants against a Right-wing party’s plans for mass deportations. And in Bangladesh, a mass movement led by students, and involving tens of thousands of workers and young people, forced the resignation of the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister and forced the Supreme Court to back off its attempt to restrict availability of public-sector jobs. In the U.K., attacks by the organized far Right on immigrant hostels and Muslim places of worship were stopped by thousands of counter demonstrators protesting these atrocities. 

So far, these movements have generally been on a national basis, but they point in the direction of what’s necessary. A global antiwar movement is urgently needed against the wars on Gaza and Ukraine and the ongoing wars and civil wars ravaging sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the incredibly dangerous military exercises being conducted by all sides around the South China Sea.

Capitalism is the root cause of the fundamental crises facing humanity. It is a Frankenstein’s monster on a global scale whose only measure of success is the ruthless maximization of profit. As Karl Marx explained, it “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” based from its earliest beginnings in the theft of land and resources and the brutal exploitation of human labor. Its blind and unrelenting drive has set us careening down a path towards decreasing living standards, poverty, hunger, homelessness, environmental catastrophe, and war. It is a system that has crisis built into its foundations. It recklessly pillages the planet’s resources in order to maximize profits, with no interest in operating sustainably or making the transition to renewable energy that is long overdue to slow or end climate change.

The enormous profits generated under capitalism are created entirely by the labor of working people, but are concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority at the top, whose institutions then use the wealth that we create against us. 

The capitalists can only maintain their power by stoking whatever divisions and oppressions they can amongst working people, using gender, skin color, country of origin, language, religious belief, sexuality and any other differences as a means to divide and rule.

They also rely on creating illusions about their allegedly fair and democratic governments and institutions like the courts and the media. Today, however, the legitimacy of these institutions in the eyes of working people are at record lows, significantly undermined by the 2008 recession and how the big banks and billionaires were the only ones who got bailed out, by the 2020 crisis, and by the attacks on working people from one political party after another. 

When workers and the oppressed fight back, and the capitalists feel threatened, they will use the open violence of their police and military against us.

Millions of people are recognizing that this system doesn’t work for us and are looking for answers and a way forward. Many are looking to the Left and to the power of worker organizing to move society in a progressive direction. But with the low levels of organization on the Left, historically low levels of unionization, and the repeated capitulations by progressive politicians and union leaders to the political establishment, an opening has persisted for the growth of Right-wing ideas in society and the victory of Right-wing candidates and parties in elections. 

We saw this sharply in the far Right’s exploitation of people’s legitimate questioning of the pharmaceutical and hospital corporations to attack the scientific basis of vaccinations and other basic public health protections during and since the pandemic. Similarly, real doubts about the reliability of bourgeois voting systems, in an atmosphere in which both major parties practice their own versions of vote suppression, have allowed the far Right to continue to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 U.S. elections. Polarization to the Left and Right will continue to increase as the many crises of capitalism deepen in the coming years.

When we fight, we can win

To win victories against the capitalist class and beat back the Right wing, workers and young people need to get far better organized and take up fighting methods. 

We should use the history of struggles of working-class and oppressed people around the world as our guide. It was the U.S. labor movement and the mass socialist and communist parties of an earlier era, strengthened by the victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917, that forced FDR to pass New Deal programs. It was the combined power of the civil rights movement and labor movement that brought down the racist system of Jim Crow segregation. The mass movements of youth, women and the oppressed along with a renewal of rank-and-file militancy within the labor movement in the 1960s and 1970s forced a Right-wing reactionary president, Richard Nixon, to end the Vietnam War and pass historic legislation. Those gains included workplace safety laws (OSHA), affirmative action, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the expansion of civil rights through the Voting Rights Act of 1970 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act which created the EEOC. Those same movements also forced a conservative Supreme Court to establish abortion rights with Roe v. Wade.

Globally, most major reforms, such as universal public healthcare, have been won through the formation of working class political parties combined with pressure from powerful mass movements and sometimes the threat of socialist revolution. 

In 2020, mass protests in Argentina under the Green Wave banner forced the government to legalize abortion in the country. Thousands of UAW workers in the U.S. went on strike in 2023, using their power to shut down production at multiple auto plants, which ultimately forced the big auto companies to concede 25% wage increases — four times larger than the wage increases of the 2019 contract. 

There are also crucial lessons to learn from the rare experience in Seattle of having an elected revolutionary socialist, Kshama Sawant, for a decade on the City Council from 2014-2023. Movements built around Kshama’s socialist council office were able to win huge victories for working people with a fighting approach, completely independent of, and despite fierce opposition from, the Democratic Party.

Our movement won the first $15/hour minimum wage in any major city, which then spread to cities around the country, lifting the wages of millions of workers. Our victory in Seattle included regular adjustments for inflation, making the current minimum wage just under $20/hour, and the highest of any major U.S. city. 

We also won the Amazon Tax in 2020, a progressive tax on the city’s wealthiest businesses that raises over $214 million every year to fund affordable housing and Green New Deal initiatives. 

Over the course of the decade, Kshama’s office won a series of landmark renters’ rights laws as well, including a ban on winter evictions and the evictions of families during the school year, a requirement of six months’ notice for any rent increases, and economic eviction assistance to make landlords pay three months’ rent to any tenant forced to move out by a major rent increase. We made Seattle the first jurisdiction outside of South Asia to ban caste discrimination, and we won one of the first and strongest resolutions demanding an end to the genocidal war on Gaza.

Most progressive politicians, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attempt to make change by negotiating with establishment politicians rather than organizing working people. This has failed every time, and instead of making change these “progressive” politicians are themselves changed into sellouts providing left cover for pro-business policies and candidates. 

We took a completely different approach in Seattle, helping build broad democratic movements of regular workers and young people to put maximum pressure on Democratic Party elected officials, which forced them to concede historic victories, despite the fierce counter-pressure of big business. Lobbyist Jamie Durkan explained in 2017 the real estate industry’s view of the dynamic in Seattle politics. He noted that every dollar being spent to lobby the City Council for corporate interests was wasted because the Democrats “say all the right things in their offices, then they get out on the podium and it all goes south” due to “Sawant’s army.” 

In fact, Democratic Party politicians fought us every step of the way over the last decade in Seattle, even most of the so-called “progressives.” We need a new party for working people — rooted in, and accountable to, workers’ and social movements. As a step toward that, we need to run our own candidates, independent of the two parties of big business.

Workers Strike Back

The shining example of Kshama Sawant’s socialist council office and our movement’s victories in Seattle stand out as the only such case in many decades, despite the fact that we based ourselves on historic methods of working-class struggle. Unfortunately, no other progressive politician has come anywhere close to this type of relentless determination to use the organized power of the working class to defeat the political establishment. And hardly any major union leaders have yet taken up this kind of approach in struggles against the bosses. 

The 2023 UAW contract stands out as a big victory with significant gains for workers. However, union president Shawn Fain’s use of the “stand up strike” strategy limited the number of workers on the picket lines, meaning that the workers were kept from bringing their full power into the fight. Consequently, a lot more was left on the table that could have been won by shutting down production completely. And while the gains were huge because of the strike, there is still major ground to cover after the decades of dramatic backslide in living standards. Importantly, a stronger strike at the Big Three also would have strengthened UAW’s subsequent unionization efforts at non-union automakers, and could even have turned the recent defeat at a Mercedes plant in Alabama into a victory.

We launched Workers Strike Back (WSB) and our weekly video broadcast, On Strike! with Kshama Sawant, after Kshama left her council office position in order to spread our fighting, movement-building approach as far and wide as possible. Every movement will ultimately need to take up this kind of class-struggle approach to be successful, whether for better wages and benefits in the workplace, for an end to racist policing and anti-abortion laws, or for quality affordable housing and healthcare for all. This is because the capitalist class fights tooth-and-nail against every progressive demand in order to defend their profits and to maintain their control over the economy and society. 

Workers Strike Back is for anyone who wants to get organized in order to fight back and win real gains for workers and the oppressed. WSB members are united around our core demands that serve as a framework for putting our ideas into action: 

1. Workers Need a Real Raise — $25/hour Minimum Wage
2. Good Union Jobs for All
3. Fight Racism, Sexism & All Oppression
4. Quality Affordable Housing & Free Healthcare for All
5. End the Genocidal War on Gaza — No Military Aid, No Occupation
6. No More Sellouts — We Need a New Party

Revolutionary Workers

You do not need to be a socialist or revolutionary to join Workers Strike Back. But some of us in WSB are revolutionary socialists, who are organized into Revolutionary Workers, because we are convinced that the capitalist system cannot be reformed to serve the needs of working people, nor can it be made environmentally sustainable. So in addition to building Workers Strike Back, we are also building Revolutionary Workers.

Capitalism is owned and controlled by the bosses. Under this bankrupt system, all major gains for working people will require powerful movements to win. All of our victories will be continually under assault from the capitalists, who will relentlessly work to roll them back. 

Since the titanic struggles, and threat of revolution, that won social welfare systems in Europe subsided and the mass workers’ parties were defeated, past working-class gains like the UK’s National Health Service and affordable good-quality public housing have faced massive attacks by successive pro-capitalist governments. They have severely underfunded them, forcing them into a state of crisis, and allowing private corporations to encroach. Here in the U.S., workers’ living standards improved due to the victories of labor unions in the 20th century, but the Democrats and Republicans severely weakened the power of labor unions during the neoliberal period and ushered in decades of wage stagnation while the cost of living rose astronomically. 

Working people need to fight for every major reform that can be won under this system: for Medicare for All, a national $25 minimum wage, national rent control, and taxing the wealthy to fund free healthcare and affordable housing for all. We also need to go further and take all major corporations into democratic public ownership to run them in the interests of human need, rather than for the profits of a tiny minority.  This includes the healthcare industry, big pharma, major energy corporations, the big banks, and real estate corporations. This is because, fundamentally, we can’t control what we don’t own.

As revolutionary socialists, we fight for gains under capitalism both because they are in the interests of the working class, and also because workers and young people will develop increased confidence, class consciousness, and organization out of these struggles. 

But ultimately, as Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels explained, the global capitalist system needs to be overturned and replaced in order to achieve a world based on solidarity, sustainability, peace, equality, and prosperity for all. 

Without a socialist revolution, capitalists will always find ways to claw back control, increase exploitation of workers everywhere, and concentrate more and more wealth into their hands. Their system will continue leading us head first toward the devastation of a new world war and climate catastrophe.

Revolutionary Workers is a Marxist organization.

In short, Marxism is scientific socialism. It is based on the study of history, of capitalism and its inner laws, and about what is necessary to take humanity forward. As Marx wrote in 1845, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, the point is to change it.”

The basic ideas of scientific socialism are now over 175 years old, but they are and will remain the most modern of ideas so long as the bankrupt system of capitalism exists.

Marx recognized that history under capitalism, as under all previous class-based societies, was defined by class struggle. That the ruling class viciously exploits the majority of society to whatever degree it can get away with, and the exploited can only win any gains by getting organized and fighting back. And that capitalism is a system of ongoing crisis, characterized by instability, recessions, and depressions. Marx saw that the ruthless quest for profits would lead to imperialist powers dominating not only their own working classes, but increasingly those across the globe.

Marx concluded that the working class was the only force that could take society forward, and that could only happen if we get organized around clear ideas and theory. Under capitalism, workers find ourselves relying on one another in the workplace, in the face of often brutal working conditions and exploitative bosses. We develop working-class consciousness and build solidarity, and are required to organize collectively for our interests. Through our role in the economy, the working class holds the power to shut down the capitalists’ profits.

Marx also saw that no ruling class anywhere, ever, would allow a society based on equality and solidarity, and would instead use the state apparatus to oppose any such attempts by violent means. He saw that the engine of change under class-based society is revolution.

These ideas are as true today as in Marx’s time, and the urgency is greater than ever — as the capitalists threaten to drag humanity into another world war and over the cliff of climate catastrophe.

We draw inspiration from Marxists of previous eras, especially from the leaders of the Russian Revolution — the only example of a successful socialist revolution so far — when workers and peasants took their destiny into their own hands. The Russian Revolution was the most progressive event in human history. It lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty and illiteracy, won access to healthcare and affordable housing for the masses, and made unprecedented gains for women, LGBTQ people, and other oppressed groups.

But socialism cannot succeed in one nation alone. The Soviet Union ultimately degenerated due to its global isolation by the failures of revolutions in the industrially advanced European countries, and through the horrific betrayals carried out by Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. This only serves to underscore the need for revolutionary socialists to organize internationally around the ideas that are shown to be the most successful in leading struggles of workers and the oppressed. 

Many of us currently in Revolutionary Workers were formerly members of Socialist Alternative (SA) and International Socialist Alternative (ISA). We are proud of the decades of work we did in that organization. The work we carried out, especially using our elected position on the Seattle City Council to lead many victorious campaigns, was the most pivotal in building SA. However, we decided to leave SA because we believe that the leadership of that organization has tragically departed quite far from the principles that enabled us to carry out such exemplary work in Seattle. 

We had fundamental disagreements about the approach to the class struggle. After we launched Workers Strike Back, the leadership of SA decided it wanted to make WSB into a front group entirely under SA’s control, with no independent democratic structures, and no accountability to the members and donors of WSB. While there were some initiatives by SA members, the national leadership refused to build chapters of WSB outside of Seattle, carried out minimal activity with WSB, and then voted to dramatically deprioritize and undermine WSB and On Strike, breaking SA’s promise to working people to build on our Seattle example of class struggle nationally. 

We also believe that SA’s leadership is unfortunately moving in an opportunist direction towards both the Democratic Party and the bureaucratic labor union leadership. They have been holding back in their criticisms of Kamala Harris, taking a sectarian approach towards Jill Stein’s Left independent antiwar campaign, and are increasingly hesitant to criticize or challenge labor leaders like Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien, despite the best rank-and-file members of those unions clearly seeing the limitations of their union presidents. We will continue to work with SA in concrete struggles, as we do with any organization that agrees to fight for working people, and we encourage SA members to help build Workers Strike Back. However, we believe it was necessary for us to leave Socialist Alternative and launch Revolutionary Workers in order to carry forward the best traditions of revolutionary Marxism and to advance the struggles of the working class. 

The struggle against capitalism is international

As we are building Revolutionary Workers in the United States, we recognize that the struggle against capitalism can only succeed if it is international. This is most clearly seen today with the rapid escalation of the imperialist conflict between the U.S. and China, which has the potential, at a later stage, to become a new world war. The only way to prevent such a catastrophic scenario is by workers everywhere organizing on a mass scale to fight against the bosses and their political representatives. 

Ultimately, workers will need revolutionary socialist ideas to move forward and win fundamental change. And the example of the Russian Revolution shows that even a successful socialist revolution cannot continue to progress in only one country. We aim to build Revolutionary Workers into an international organization, united around a fighting Marxist approach. 

Join us!

We encourage everyone who is inspired by our ideas and accomplishments to immediately join Workers Strike Back. Workers Strike Back is a broad democratic organization that holds monthly membership meetings and takes on fighting campaigns against the billionaires and their political representatives. If you agree with us that capitalism is an utterly bankrupt system, contact us to get involved in Revolutionary Workers and join the fight. We have a world to win.