1.⁠ ⁠Fight the Rich! End the Billionaire Class & Their System

We need to build an organized, unified movement of working people to systematically take on the rich who run society, and to undermine their ability to rule. Our goal must be to both fight for radical change in the present and to bring down the billionaires and their system. There is no other path to avoid total disaster for human civilization and the planet. 

Working people need to be clear about who our enemies are. Our enemies are not other working-class or middle-class people, immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people, ordinary Republican or Democratic voters, nor independent voters or nonvoters. Our enemies are those who make millions or billions of dollars a year, own the politicians, own the land and resources, and who call the shots in this system. Our enemies are also those who justify and protect the interests of the rich.

The billionaires themselves are fully responsible for the disasters engulfing us — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the healthcare CEOs, the major shareholders on Wall Street. It is not some collective “we” or “human nature” which is responsible; it’s the rich who put their profits ahead of everything and everyone. We need to end the billionaire class and their system once and for all.

2.⁠ ⁠Workers Need a Real Raise — $25/Hour Minimum Wage  

Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep giving themselves raises but can’t pass a bare $15 federal minimum wage for working people. We are fighting for a $25 an hour minimum wage — in major cities, that’s just a basic living wage. With prices sky-high on everything from food to housing to transportation, we demand a 35% raise for all workers with automatic cost-of-living increases above inflation going forward. Instead of long hours and multiple jobs just to pay the bills, we need to shorten the workweek to 30 hours a week with no loss in pay or benefits. We work to live, we don't live to work!

3.⁠ ⁠Good Union Jobs for All

With billionaires and corporations making obscene profits, there is no reason we cannot have guaranteed good union jobs for all. Unions are the key tool workers have to fight the bosses for the things we desperately need. Organize the unorganized—unionize Amazon and every workplace! We need to build a fighting workers’ movement that arms itself with clear, bold demands and is prepared to go on strike to win them. As part of this, we need a rank-and-file revolt in the unions against the business-unionist leadership which is misleading the movement and holding back struggle. These leaders want to find an illusory “common ground” with the bosses and their two parties instead of mobilizing the membership to fight militantly against them. We need to restore the traditions on which the American labor movement was built — class struggle not “class snuggle,” bold strike action that shuts down profits, and wide working class unity against the bosses and billionaires. The labor movement needs to break with the Democrats once and for all and launch a new party for working people.

4.⁠ ⁠Stop the Climate Catastrophe — Take Big Energy Corporations into Workers’ Ownership

Time is running out to avoid a climate apocalypse. We need a lightning-fast transition to a clean energy economy and an end to all fossil fuel use, with a just transition and free retraining for all fossil fuel workers. This must include a massive green jobs program that employs millions of workers in the move to clean energy. We need free mass transit and a massive expansion of buses and rail, paid for by taxing the rich. We need to carry out a massive program of energy efficiency retrofitting in commercial and residential buildings, paid for by taxing big business. To avoid total climate disaster, we must take the big energy corporations into democratic workers’ ownership and retool them for clean energy production. This is a vital step because we can’t control what we don’t own. Capitalism is a myopic, anarchic system which offers no way forward — it’s based on billionaire greed, not the needs of humans or the environment, and is completely incompatible with a sustainable world. 

5.⁠ ⁠Fight Racism, Sexism & All Oppression 

Only the bosses profit from divisions among the working class. We need to build a united, multi-racial, multi-gendered movement of working people. We must fight sexism and demand full and equal pay and benefits for women. We need to organize to win legal, safe, free abortions for all who need them. We must fight back against anti-trans legislation, against all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and for full and equal rights for people with disabilities and for free gender-affirming care. American capitalism was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples and built on the exploitation of enslaved Black people — we have to fight to end the war on Black, immigrant, and other communities of color. We must bring an end to racist policing and tax the rich for a massive expansion of good jobs and public services for all, especially for communities that have been marginalized. Put police under the control of democratically elected community boards with full power over department policy, hiring and firing. Movements are how change happens—we need to get organized to fight for our rights. An injury to one is an injury to all!

6.⁠ ⁠Stop Mass Deportations 

Working people must unite against the mass deportations being carried out by both parties of the billionaires, which represent an attack on the entire working class. The bosses’ super-exploitation and marginalization of immigrants is used to undermine the wages and conditions of all workers, both native-born and immigrant, and as a weapon to divide us. Native-born and immigrant workers must stand together to fight for better wages and conditions, and defend the right of all workers to unionize without fear of retaliation, including deportation. We need mass action, including mass strike action, to beat back workplace immigration raids and to stop mass deportations.

The alternative to the bosses’ attacks on immigrants, and to anti-worker “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, is for the labor movement to launch mass organizing drives and build fighting unions not only in the United States, but also around the world. We must combat the bosses’ race to the bottom which seeks to pit workers in different nations against each other. Instead of corporate globalization, economic nationalism, and imperialism, we need working-class internationalism. We need to build a militant international labor movement to unite all workers in the fight for living wages and good working conditions for all.

7.⁠ ⁠Medicare for All & Quality Affordable Housing — Tax the Rich 

We face an epidemic of unaffordable housing—the rent is too damn high! We need strong rent control with no rent increases above inflation. Fund a massive expansion of publicly owned, high-quality, highly energy-efficient affordable housing by taxing the rich. The private housing market has failed us—take the big real estate corporations and banks into democratic public ownership. New housing construction should be planned in coordination with free, frequent, and highly convenient mass transit routes.

We’re dying from unaffordable healthcare as the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry make bank off our sickness. We need Medicare for All, as a step toward free, state-of-the-art, universal public healthcare—owned and democratically run by working people. Bring big pharma and the hospitals into democratic public ownership, run by healthcare workers, with patients having the right to choose their physicians and specialists. End the private insurance industry — no more denial of care, no more profits from sickness!

8.⁠ ⁠End the Genocidal War on Gaza — No Military Aid, No Occupation 

We oppose the Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza and imperialist war everywhere. We call for an immediate end to all U.S. military funding for the Israeli war machine and to the brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The roots of the crisis are in the Israeli occupation, which has been backed by U.S. imperialism for more than three quarters of a century because of the strategic interests of U.S. billionaires in the oil-rich Middle East. We need to build the strongest possible movement against both Trump and the Democrats’ genocidal plans for Gaza.

The Palestinian people have both the right to self-determination and the right to defend themselves. We oppose the terrorist acts of October 7th, but there is absolutely no equivalence to the unspeakable acts of state terrorism and war by Israel, which have led to genocide. This horrific onslaught against the Palestinian people is the greatest humanitarian disaster of our generation, and in reality it makes working people in Israel less safe. 

We also oppose the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. We don’t support U.S. imperialism, Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism in that bloody conflict, or either bloc in the larger US/China conflict. None of these imperialist powers represent the interests of working people in Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else. 

We need to build a global antiwar and workers’ movement made up of workers of all nations and ethnicities fighting against the bosses' wars and for our common interests. Working class action has stopped wars in the past. Today, working people and the labor movement need to organize a one-day general strike in the U.S., demanding an end to all military aid to Israel, and that those tens of billions be spent on things working people need like healthcare, housing, and jobs.

9.⁠ ⁠Bring Down Trump, the Billionaires & Their Two Parties

The Democratic Party not only failed to stop Trump — they prepared the ground for much of his agenda. Now they are standing aside (or even joining in) as he brutally attacks workers, immigrants, Palestinians, trans people, people with disabilities, and antiwar activists. 

It is up to working people and the Left to organize independently of both parties of the rich to defeat these attacks and bring down Trump. Last year, many of us correctly rejected Harris and the Democrats as genocidal representatives of the billionaire class by voting instead for antiwar, pro-worker candidates like Jill Stein (who we campaigned for) while others refused to vote at all. Some hoped Trump would be a better alternative, but as we repeatedly warned, Trump is no friend of working people and is now viciously ramping up his attacks. 

Many of Trump’s attacks — like major tariffs (causing major inflation), tax cuts for the rich, or undermining workers’ rights and healthcare — will have devastating effects on millions of working people. Regardless of how people voted in the election, we must unite against Trump’s anti-worker, far-right agenda on the broadest possible basis, independent of the bankrupt Democratic Party. Left organizations need to call joint protests and organize mass civil disobedience in a united front, including coordinated national days of action. We need to organize together in a non-sectarian way, allowing different views to be aired and debated, and including speakers from individual organizations. Labor unions need to join us, use the power of mass coordinated strike action to defend against these attacks, and build toward a nationwide general strike. Rank-and-file union members need to lead efforts to bring their unions into the fight, because labor leaders like Sean O’Brien and Shawn Fain are too busy cozying up to Trump and the bosses. 

We must consistently connect our fight against Trump to the fight against the wealthy elite who are backing him, expecting to profit from his increasingly dangerous agenda. Elon Musk and a number of other billionaires are directly helping Trump carry out his attacks. We must be clear that both political parties, Democrats and Republicans, are weapons of the billionaires against working people. 

In an earlier era, Richard Nixon was brought down by the combined strength of the protest and workers’ movements — the Watergate scandal was just the formal basis for his removal. While we can’t know at present exactly how Trump will be defeated, we do know that we need to urgently build the strongest possible movement to bring down this administration, the billionaire class, and their system of capitalism. We completely reject the Democrat’s fake efforts to pose as the “Resistance.” They represent the wing of the capitalist class which fully backed the genocide in Gaza, broke the railroad workers’ strike, and put Trump back in the White House. Throughout its history, the Democratic Party has expanded wars around the world and carried out endless attacks on working and oppressed people in the US. We need a new mass party basing itself on fighting methods of class struggle and working class power.

10.⁠ ⁠No More Sellouts — We Need a New Mass Party

The Democrats and Republicans both serve the rich; that’s why working people keep getting screwed. The Squad and other so-called progressives in Congress have completely betrayed working people and offer no solutions. Trump is a dangerous representative of the billionaire class.

We need a new, multiracial, mass working-class party that organizes movements and fights unambiguously for our needs. In such a party, all elected leaders would accept only the average workers’ wage, like former Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant. We need elected leaders to be fully accountable to our membership and our demands, or else be removed. We need a party that consistently opposes war and imperialism, and fights unambiguously for working people and the oppressed. Under capitalism, the bosses call the shots and have a dictatorship over our workplaces. We need a fundamentally different kind of society — run by and for working people, not the billionaires. We need to fight the rich and bring an end to the billionaire class and their system.