(Photo: Vanissa Chan)
The following statement was distributed by the Party for Socialism and Liberation at the April 29 Showdown on Wall Street, a protest chiefly organized by the AFL-CIO.
There is no better time to march on Wall Street. Today’s rally defies the corporate media and politicians who are trying to turn people’s economic frustrations against immigrants, social services and labor unions. We are making an important statement today: Our real enemies are on Wall Street.
These banks were built on slavery and exploitation, and only stay afloat by engineering new ways to exploit people on a daily basis.
But what’s the solution? Democrats in the Senate claim their fiscal reform bill is going to “take on Wall Street.” But why then have Goldman Sachs and other bank lobbyists expressed their support for their bill? If Wall Street supports the bill, it cannot possibly be the type of change we need.
The organizers of today’s rally have called for the big banks to be broken up into smaller private banks and appealed to them to “help people build wealth, instead of plotting strategies to nickel and dime our communities.”
The PSL is organizing to put another plan into action: to build a powerful movement of poor and working people to take on the rich, and advance socialism as the only alternative to the capitalist crisis.
Conservatives attack everything progressive as “socialistic,” while liberal politicians instruct working people to distance themselves from the word. We don’t think so. Socialism is simple: It is a system in which working people control society. It is the only system in which the wealth we collectively create is used to meet people’s needs.
We do not want to just reform the banks, owned and operated for private profit. We want to get rid of them and liberate the resources they have stolen from us.
The bank bailout that the White House and Congress pushed on us was nothing less than grand-scale looting. The politicians, with very few exceptions, function as the bagmen for these Wall Street criminals. This sort of “organized crime” —legalized theft—is the essence of the capitalist system.
For years, people were told that the problem in the U.S. government is that it was led by Republicans, by neoconservatives, by George W. Bush. But now Bush is gone. Even though Democrats firmly control the White House and Congress, the rule of the banks is just as strong today as it was under the Republicans. We need to change the economic system—not just the party in power.
That means talking about revolution. Every worker in this country is taught that the current form of the U.S. government was the result of a revolution. Revolution is upheld as something righteous—as long as it happened 200 years ago! We were taught that when the then-existing ruling powers were a source of oppression, the people of this country rose up and threw them out.
We need a movement to take on the banks responsible for the foreclosure crisis, to take on police brutality, fight for immigrant rights and defend public education. But we can’t always be on the defensive. As we organize against these forms of exploitation, we also need a revolutionary movement, rooted in workplaces, schools, and poor and working-class communities, which talks openly and seriously about a new society free of exploitation altogether.
Build the movement against Wall Street and all the politicians in their pockets!
