Statements

Wednesday’s lineup of tens of thousands of people seeking housing assistance in Detroit is one of those events that suddenly reveals the social reality in America that is ignored and concealed by the media and political establishment.

The unemployed workers, young mothers with children, disabled and elderly people and jobless youth who lined up in downtown Detroit put a human face on rising jobless and poverty statistics and provided a glimpse of the staggering scale of the social crisis in the US.

Detroit teachers protesting concessions

The Socialist Equality Party calls on all teachers and school employees to fight for a unified struggle, alongside workers throughout the city and state, to defeat the demand for wage and benefit concessions, layoffs and the gutting of public education and other basic services by big business and the Democrats and Republicans.

Detroit city workers opposed to Mayor David Bing’s demands for layoffs and furloughs require a new strategy.

No sooner was the primary election over than Bing stepped up his attack on city workers. The city is planning 500 layoffs this month, on top of the hundreds already implemented since May. The mayor wants the city’s 13,000 employees to accept pay cuts of 10 to 20 percent through furloughs and workweek reductions.

Collier gives an interview with local television

I want to thank everyone who supported and volunteered for the Socialist Equality Party’s campaign for Detroit mayor, along with the more than 1,200 people who voted for me in the primary elections on Tuesday.

This vote is very significant. Despite a virtual media blackout of our campaign, a significant layer of the Detroit working class made a conscious decision to vote for a socialist candidate.

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for Detroit mayor, I extend my deepest sympathy and condolences to friends and family of the four Detroit family members who died of carbon monoxide poisoning on July 16, after their electricity had been shut off.

The World Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is in solidarity with and accepts the political authority of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. The principles of the SEP incorporate the essential experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century and the corresponding struggle waged by Marxists for the program of world socialist revolution. The socialist revolution, which signifies the forcible entrance of the masses into conscious political struggle, portends the greatest and most progressive transformation of the form of man's social organization in world history – the ending of society based on classes and, therefore, of the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. A transformation so immense is the work of an entire historical epoch. The principles of the SEP are derived from and necessarily reference the experiences of this epoch, which opened with the eruption of World War I in 1914, followed shortly thereafter by the conquest of state power by the Russian working class in the 1917 October Revolution.