My name is Juan Rey, and I’m running for Congress in order to promote the idea that the working-class builds its own independent political party, a Working-Class Party. I may be the only one running under this banner in Los Angeles. But in this election, there are 15 candidates running in Michigan under A Working-Class Party banner, there is a candidate in Chicago promoting a Working-Class Party and workers in Maryland are campaigning to place a Working-Class Party on the ballot. You can check out the brochures for the other campaigns at the lit table.
We have been involved in this campaign here in Los Angeles for over a year. Last fall, in order to get on the ballot, we collected over 2,000 signatures, although the state authorities ruled that only about half were valid. Then, I ran in the primary last March against two Democrats, one Republican and a Peace and Freedom candidate. Most people don’t have the habit of voting in March. So, the voter turnout was low, 29 percent. I ran as a No Party Preference candidate. But I still managed to come in second place with 8,900 votes, or 10.3% of the vote. That put me on the ballot for the general election this November.
So, for over a year, the people involved in this campaign have been collecting signatures and talking to the public mainly at grocery stores, DMV’s, strip malls and parks. We have heard their concerns; The homeless situation is getting worse, the school shootings, violence in the streets, unaffordable housing, the continued inflation on everything from clothing, food, cars, restaurants. And there is a lot of fear of what would happen if Trump is reelected. People say that things are not right and there does not appear any improvement anytime soon. They say politicians are corrupt, take bribes and can’t be trusted.
Politicians underfund our schools and some schools are laying off workers today, even though they are already severely understaffed. Many people also say they are fed up with the two-party system.
All this is happening in Los Angeles, in what is considered to be an economic powerhouse. Our backyard is home to the ports in Long Beach and San Pedro, the largest seaports in the U.S., and among the largest in the world. There is also LAX, one of the busiest airports in the world, along with other airports in the region. Attached to these massive transportation and logistics hubs are trucks and trains and warehouses. And it is all run by workers. It is a multi- trillion-dollar market which provides access to goods from the international market to us and the rest of the U.S.
The working class built all this and it makes it run. Yet the wages for most workers are extremely low. Low wages keep the working-class poor, while the capitalist class gets richer than ever.
The health care sector is another major employer in Los Angeles. It includes the Pharmaceutical Industry, Hospital Networks and Insurance Companies. These companies are all reporting huge profits. Most hospitals are considered non-profits, even though they make big profits, which allows them to avoid paying any taxes on their profits. We have health care that’s extremely expensive and often times very bad. Most of the technicians, custodians, clerks, aides and assistants are poorly paid. And there is tremendous understaffing. Nurses don’t even want to continue working in the hospitals because of the back breaking hours and work. The rest of the workers also have to pick up the slack. Profit is much too important for the Capitalist Class than to provide the necessary workforce and services we need.
Hollywood is another important money maker in Los Angeles. There are the Studios and Entertainment Industry. Connected to that is the Tourist industry, with Hotels and Car Rental companies. The majority of the workers in these industries barely get by. Many of the people working for the studios haven’t worked for a long time.
Over the last few years, there have been many strikes and protests against the low pay and poor working conditions throughout the economy. Hotel workers have been striking off and on all over the region. Hospital workers went on strike a couple of years ago. For decades truck drivers at the ports have been trying to force the big shipping companies to hire them because, as independent contractors, they don’t even make the minimum wage. The railroad workers tried to go on strike to reduce the extremely long hours they are forced to work, but Congress passed a law signed by President Biden that outlawed a railroad workers strike. There were the very long Writers’ Guild and the actors guild strikes.
What all these strikes and protests have in common is that workers are fighting separately. They are divided by sector, company and craft. And that leaves the workers fights much weaker. It leaves each group of workers separate and divided. We are all fighting the same bosses. But they have us fighting alone.
I believe that has to change. When workers fight, they have to reach outward to other workers and make it a common fight, a class-wide fight, a working-class fight. We cannot expect the bureaucrats at the top of the unions to do this for us. On the contrary, they oppose a bigger fight. So, the workers have to take the initiative and do it ourselves through our own fights.
In order to further these fights, the workers will have to build a Working-Class Party, a party that connects workers in all industries and sectors together. This would make a very powerful organization with our own leadership. This would change the relationship of forces, because workers make everything run. We are it.
Economic and social conditions are getting worse throughout the economy. Politicians and economists try to reassure us that unemployment is low, inflation is decreasing and we are headed to a soft landing. But for working people, conditions get worse, no matter whether we are in a recovery, an economic expansion, a recession, a depression, or a soft landing. And the reason is that employers are constantly attacking the workers’ standard of living in order to increase their profits.
Look at what happened last year, according to the government’s own official statistics. In 2023, the number of people living in poverty increased in the U.S. by two million people to 43 million people, or more people than the population of California. That is their official number. They also said that there were three million more people in the U.S. who are food insecure, which means they didn’t have enough money to put food on their table on a consistent basis. The government admitted that over 47 million people, including more than seven million children, didn’t have access to enough food because of a lack of money. And there are millions more who do not meet the definition of food insecure who are using food banks to meet their food needs. The government also said that homelessness went up a lot last year. And LA and California are not the only places where homelessness is bad. In many parts of the U.S. homelessness is exploding. It was up 61% in Southeast Texas from the year before, 35% in Rhode Island, 20% in both Tennessee and Tulsa, Oklahoma. And this is happening during the supposed good times!
We recently heard the news of a new development in Crenshaw Village where they said a developer and Costco are building affordable housing. In fact, it is a scam. 70 per cent of the apartments will be at market rate, which means completely unaffordable for almost all the people now living here. Only 30% of the apartments will be considered “affordable”. And for that, they get a subsidy of 50 million dollars paid for by us, the taxpayers of California.
There is just no way that politicians and their bosses, the developers, really intend to address the underlying cause of homelessness, which is that the rent that they charge is too damned high. Crenshaw Village is in a working-class neighborhood, but the people living here have no way of having a say what is being built.
The violence that we often hear about in the news is real. Where I work the Metro operators, Custodians and Service attendants are having to deal with people on the margins, who are in terrible physical and mental condition. Workers taking transit are dealing with the same in order to get to work. It’s a terrible human catastrophe that keeps on getting worse. And none of us as individuals has the means to deal with it. Because in order to deal with it, we would have to get to the cause of this terrible catastrophe. We would have to deal with the worsening poverty and income inequality. The money exists to solve many of our problems. This money is our money, we pay in taxes and fees on our wages, services and everything we buy.
But politicians from both parties use our monies to subsidize big business along with the Military Industrial Complex. And this complex is used in order to impose the domination of the biggest U.S. banks, oil companies, military contractors all over the entire world. The U.S. is the number one super power in the world and that means they think they have the right to plunder the wealth and resources of the entire planet. No matter the cost in human life and the environment. And they are the ones who provoke, instigate and support many of the biggest wars. Including in the Middle East and Ukraine and Russia. And they are preparing a great big show down with China. Any of these wars could trigger a third world war. A third world war would make World War Two, which killed 60 million people and destroyed thousands of cities and towns, look like child’s play in comparison.
We face devastating crises on every front. We have an economy which creates more poverty and misery at the same time it creates more wealth. We have an economy which careens from one crisis to another and could crash at any moment. We have an environment which is being destroyed right in front of our nose. And we have the mad rush to war, which is already killing millions, and is threatening to grow so big it wipes out humanity all together.
This madness is not normal, it is not because of human nature. It is because the entire world is run by a tiny class of billionaires who own everything. Including the government. And they are just out for one thing. To increase their profits and wealth. To do that, they go to war against the working class and the poor. At the same time, they fight wars against each other. We live in a society that is torn apart by war upon war.
The working-class is the only social force that has the answer to the insanity caused by the domination of the entire world by the Capitalist-Class. We are it. The Capitalist-Class knows this. They know that we do all the work, produce everything, make everything run. They know that we don’t need them. They know perfectly well that they are just a bunch of parasites enriching themselves on the work of others. They know this better than the workers do.
And that is why they consciously use ways to keep us divided, fighting against each other. It is why they use racism, sexism, immigration, the abortion question, religion, sexuality and other private matters in order to keep workers preoccupied and disoriented. They use these divisions as an excuse to unleash repression against different parts of the working class, keep millions of workers in chains, without any rights. They promote prejudice, racism and chauvinism as an excuse to pay one set of workers much less, and therefore drag down the wages of everyone else. Both the Democrats and Republicans make a show of disagreement on all these and many more questions. In the same breath they give away the piggy bank to the Corporations to subsidize their profits. As long as they can keep us divided the worse conditions will be for the workers and the richer the Capitalist get.
Workers must find a way to overcome all these divisions and unite our forces. It is why workers need a mass working class party.
What would a mass working-class party do? What would it look like? A working-class party would be a party that would lead a fight of big sections of the working class at the same time. It would organize a fight to go up against the power of the capitalists.
A working-class party would use the force of the working class to impose the higher wages we need, so that when prices go up, our wages would go up—immediately. A working-class party would lead a fight to divide up the work so that everyone who wants a job can have a job, and no one is forced to work themselves to exhaustion.
A working-class party would lead a fight so that public money is used for public needs—schools, roads, health care—instead of being given away to the billionaires of Wall Street, like it is today.
Such a party can even lead a fight to take the power away from the capitalists who exploit working people. We can build a decent society for all. The wealth is already there. The working class produced it.
Today we do not have a mass working-class party. But what we can do is use elections to reach as many people as possible. We can use the election to tell the truth. We can tell workers that there are answers to the problems that working people are facing. We can tell workers that elections don’t change things, but the working class can change things.
Of course, when we talk to people, very often they easily agree with what we say. They say it all makes sense. But they just don’t think it is possible or realistic. They think it’s a pipe dream. It’s never been done, and never will be done.
That is because 99 per cent of the workers don’t know their own history. And because they don’t know that history, they don’t know what their real potential is.
The history of the working class in this country, including the massive strike waves of the 1930s and the struggle of black people in the 1940s, the 1950s and 1960s, shows what kind of powerful fights different parts of the working class can carry out. Moreover, the history of workers’ movements and revolutions in other countries show how workers can organize their own powerful independent parties and can actually take the power away from the capitalist class.
No, there is nothing inevitable about the crises that workers in this country face today. When working people organize together, they can open up the possibility of a new future not only for themselves, but for all of humanity. That is the message of my campaign.