The US political and economic system is failing the working class. Millions struggle with low wages, dangerous working conditions, and limited control over our own lives, all while the top one percent has gotten richer and richer.

Billionaires control access to basic human needs like housing, healthcare, and education and make a profit off of them. This capitalist economic system is the cause of violence, unemployment, and a climate crisis that poses an existential threat to life on earth.

Black and brown workers in racially segregated communities bear the brunt of capitalism’s cruelties, suffering especially from poverty wages, discrimination, deportation, and unemployment, often pushing workers into illegal activity to survive. Instead of investing in working-class communities, capitalists prefer to police and incarcerate workers they consider expendable to protect their wealth.

Accelerating declines in living standards are exploited by the Christian nationalist right and figures like Donald Trump. Americans rejected the far-right agenda in the 2020 elections and watched a failed coup attempt to overturn the election results.   

The far-right threatens Americans’ civil liberties. They attack the right of people to decide whether to have a kid by overturning Roe v. Wade and continue to restrict abortion access. Now they attack the rights of queer and transgender people by banning gender-affirming care. These culture wars are intended to pit workers against each other to empower a right-wing government.

These attacks are all the more disturbing because we’re missing a real and powerful opposition to it in the U.S. The center-right Democratic Party is controlled by its elite donor class, and cannot act as an effective political counter to the nationalist far right. Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism.

Under Joe Biden, the United States has prioritized funding a massive military budget and expanding oil drilling. Democratic elites are embracing Trump’s racist immigration policies and — most abhorrently — are supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, all while brutally cracking down on student protests. This undermines the trust that many placed in Biden and the Democrats.

Without a working-class alternative to the Democratic Party, capitalists, Democrats, and the far right will continue to perpetuate violence and injustice at home and abroad. Workers are realizing that we deserve more from our political parties. As socialists, our goal is to defeat the right and build a real democracy. We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests at the expense of the rest of us.

We recognize that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class. Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working. An  independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority is necessary to build a future free from exploitation and oppression. 

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) believes that we as working people can beat the ruling class and forge a better world. Our members have taken on the capitalist class through our labor and tenant unions, out in the streets, and at the ballot box by running socialists for elected office. 

We’ve won higher wages and better working conditions by going on strike as unionized teachers, auto workers, nurses, and graduate students. We’ve joined the movement to defend abortion rights and helped win ballot initiatives from Ohio to Kansas to protect the right to get an abortion. 

And we organized more than 350,000 calls to Congress demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. DSA’s youth section, the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), has been fighting on their campuses for university divestment from Israel, and for a free Palestine.

Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics. 

With a government by, for, and of the working class and with powerful labor unions and social movements organizing in every city and town, we hope to build a socialist society where people come before profit, basic needs are guaranteed, the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control, peace around the world is secured, and workers around the world join together in common struggle to construct socialism worldwide.

This year, defeating the far-right, protecting the rights of the working-class, from the U.S. to Palestine, and fighting for democracy are our top priorities. Through our grassroots struggles we will build a movement with the power to take on the capitalist class and build an equal, democratic, and liberated world.