July 15, 2024 | Socialist Action
Change in the interest of the working class comes about through mass, democratic political action — not by means of individual acts of violence. V.I. Lenin learned this, up front and in person when his brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was executed in 1887 for attempting to assassinate the Russian Tsar. Only the Russian revolution of 1917, carried out by the organized mass of the working class, led by the mass-based Bolshevik Party headed by Lenin and Trotsky, changed the world decisively in favour of the majority.
The attempted assassination of U.S. candidate for President Donald Trump already shows signs that it will be weaponized by the authoritarian right wing. The result tends to marginalize labour and the left. It actually promotes political repression and targeting of the left by the state machinery of the ruling rich.Socialists harbor no sympathy for the racist, homophobic, labor-hating,
misogynist, imperialist Trump. We part company with liberal moralists and hypocrites like Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who state their concern for the well being of Trump, and who, like ‘Genocide’ Joe Biden, fully back the Zionist state which has murdered thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention waging countless wars of imperial plunder around the world.
Socialists reject individual acts of political violence because, as a strategy, such actions are ineffective. History demonstrates how easy it is for the ruling rich to replace one capitalist politician with another. While the hatred of the masses for individual agents of our oppression is understandable, political assassination is never a substitute for mass action aiming to achieve progressive popular change.
Impatience is an unreliable guide to action. It mis-educates the majority. There is no personal substitute for the massive power of independent working class political action. Join Socialist Action. Together we can build a party that understands the fight is not primarily against individual evil doers, but against a class that owns the means of production, against an outmoded system that appropriates the surplus value derived from labour and nature for the benefit of a tiny minority while humanity suffers inequality, privation, endless wars, and environmental catastrophe. To be clear: the battle to be waged for liberation is class against class.