The Trump administration's slashing of federal agencies - led by Elon Musk and his quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - is first and foremost an attack on working people. The Socialist Party urges members of the working class to recognize that what is being done by the gaggle of sycophants that is DOGE is nothing less than an organized assault on the working poor. These efforts have one purpose and hence one outcome, namely the redistribution of wealth upward to the ruling class.
Though they are framed as a response to government "inefficiency" and wasteful spending, the first acts of Musk and his cronies are first and foremost designed to target the working and poor people already victimized by their capitalist employers. What is in the offing here is a plan to reshape the political and economic balance of power to the advantage of capital over labor. The working class must organize itself as an independent force if a decent and livable future is to be achieved.
DOGE's other efforts, such as attempting to take over the Treasury Department's payment system, are unmistakably targeted at working government employees as well as the vulnerable individuals who rely on those systems for long-term support. These systems are responsible for Social Security and Medicaid payments, among other supportive programs. Poor and disabled Americans who rely on Medicaid and other such programs have already been scapegoated by the right for decades. There's never a question of cost when it comes to money for war, only when it comes to meeting human needs is it that such issues are roadblocks.
The Socialist Party without hesitation supports reductions in government spending and waste. We, having different values, have a different idea of what spending is wasteful. More reasonable targets for reductions in spending would be ending corporate subsidies; dismantling the prison industrial complex; and massively cutting military spending. The party believes that it is vital to distinguish between government spending designed to satiate corporate interests and spending designed to provide vital aid to poor and working Americans who deserve to live a decent life.
The Socialist Party calls on the working class to rally to its own defense by organizing itself for independent political action through the agency of its own independent political party, the Socialist Party USA. Only a party standing in unwavering opposition to the dual parties of capital, a party of, for, and by the working class can forge a better future for all working people. Our lives and our futures do not have to depend on, let alone accommodate, capitalist profiteering. Join the Socialist Party if you want to be part of building the kind of future for working people that the capitalist-dominated duopoly can neither offer nor achieve.
passed by the National Executive Committee February 14, 2025
Comments