Building towards a socialist future

This report is based on a talk given at the Nov. 7-8 Workers World Party national conference in New York City.

The great revolutionary V.I. Lenin said that when communists are victorious “on the world scale,” we should build public bathrooms in all the largest cities — out of gold!

Not for beauty, he said, but as a memorial for the millions and millions of people who died in world wars for profit. To say to the workers who survived: “War for gold and for profit is over! In a communist world, this is all gold is good for.”

The world is now off the gold standard as a monetary measure. The capitalist class, with manipulative sleight-of-hand, replaced gold with the U.S. dollar — flimsy pieces of paper, nowhere near as durable or glamorous as gold. But the dollar still represents something immensely powerful.

Each crumpled dollar we earn as workers under wage-slavery represents some of the value created by our labor. And each dollar hides something: the value of what we workers have created that is above and beyond what we receive for our work.

This is our stolen labor, our stolen lives, and our stolen dreams — all more powerful and beautiful than any shining gold.

We say “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!” to take back our stolen labor and build a workers’ world. But meanwhile we still have to survive in what Lenin called this “world of wolves,” among the predators of capitalism.

Workers World Party’s newly launched 2016 national election campaign comes at a critical moment. After years of economic turmoil, imperialist wars, anti-communism and right-wing racist, anti-immigrant, anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ attacks, workers in the U.S. are again wondering about and talking about socialism.

WWP candidates Monica Moorehead and Lamont Lilly represent and appeal to the hopes of millions who deserve to learn what socialism really is, and can be.

The high-tech/low-pay revolution has transformed the U.S. workforce. A majority of workers are now women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Black, Latino/a, Native, Asian, and/or other people of color. They are already leading and will be in the vanguard of coming class struggles and a movement toward socialism. New movements like Black Lives Matter and Fight for 15 are showing the power in this struggle.

The WW election campaign gives voice to this broadening of the struggle as the candidates call for “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”

But we still need money to seize the moment and build that unity.

So please donate as regularly and generously as you can to the WW Fund Drive. Every contribution strengthens our grip on the future. We have nothing to lose but the chains of capitalism. We have the power to forge our own engine of change, to know and seize each moment to build a socialist world.

Build Workers World to build a socialist world!

Send donations to Workers World, 147 W. 24th St., 2nd floor, New York, NY 10011. Please include your name and address. Or donate at www.workers.org