The working class must fight back

Tyneisha Bowens WW photo: John Catalinotto

From an opening talk to the WWP national conference given by Tyneisha Bowens, a leader of Fight Imperialism-Stand Together youth group and a candidate for membership in Workers World Party.

Hello comrades and guests, I want to welcome you to the Workers World Party conference.

I know that people give speeches and say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” without really explaining that compassion, so I want to make mine clear. I’m going to tell you why I’m glad we’re all here. I’m glad we’re here because our presence today at the School of the Future gives me hope for the movement, hope for liberation but most of all hope for the revolution. Our presence here proves that the state can repress people but the state can’t repress THE people.

We will continue to rise because for us, the exploited working class, there is nothing else to do but revolt and destroy this fucked up system. And the system I’m talking about is the system by which we are all oppressed, and that system is capitalism.

We cannot ignore the real issues here with distractions of reforms and bourgeois politicians. None of them have worked a day in their lives and if they were ever a part of the working class they have left us in a cloud of dust as they rushed away to do the bidding of the ruling class.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So I’ll step back for a minute to talk about why I think we’re really here. We’re not here just to talk about socialism, we’re always talking about socialism—we’re communists and that’s what we do. But we are here to discuss and emphasize the necessity for international class solidarity through a socialist perspective. This means unifying the working class across race lines, across gender lines, across sexuality lines, and especially across the bourgeois legal lines of immigration status.

These lines are the creations of the ruling class and we must do away with them in order to fight the real enemy. We must realize that an attack on all people of color is an attack on the working class; an attack on women is an attack on the working class; an attack on the queer community is an attack on the working class; an attack on the homeless, an attack on the youth are all attacks on the working class.

And we as the working class must fight back!

No boss can or will liberate us; no politician, Republican or Democrat, can or will liberate us. We are the only ones who can realize our liberation and we must do it now! We must fight now in honor of those who struggled before us, those who gave their lives and those who still dedicate their lives to revolution. We must struggle now out of necessity for ourselves; we are the ones who need food, homes, healthcare and education. We must struggle out of love for our future, because I do not want to have children who are never allowed to truly love.

I am here to incite a revolution and I will not stop kicking the system’s ass until it has crumbled at my feet and paid reparations to all the people who deserve it. All power to the people!