WHY A PEOPLE’S PROGRAM?
The 2025 People’s Program for the Cleveland Worker was written by the Party for Socialism and Liberation and volunteers at the Cleveland Liberation Center after deliberation with community leaders, council candidates, and community members.
The People’s Program seeks to create a bold vision for Cleveland’s future. For too long our local politicians have worked for big business, real estate developers, and the billionaires. This common denominator - From the White, Jackson and Bibb administrations - has resulted in the decimation of our city’s population, particularly among the Black population of Cleveland’s east side.
Once thriving communities are now filled with boarded-up businesses and condemned homes while our city’s leaders make deals with out-of-state developers to build unaffordable housing projects and the removal of home-grown Cleveland businesses for corporations.
For decades, Cleveland’s City Council has green-lit, participated in, and benefitted from the selling of our city. Instead of prioritizing affordable housing, accessible transit, the creation of good paying union jobs, and the expansion of public utilities, City Council leadership has been an active facilitator in stripping our city for its parts.
But it doesn’t have to be this way - Clevelanders deserve a better vision for their families, workplaces, and public services. However, we cannot envision this future until we are willing and organized enough around a shared vision for immediate and bold change within our city.
From this, the People’s Program for Cleveland was created to begin the long work of demanding more from the City’s government. We have watched half-measures and partial solutions in Cleveland dominate for too long. As one of the poorest major city’s in the United States, the people of our city deserve solutions which are to scale to the crisis before us.
From affordable housing, to ending the war on Black America, to comprehensive education and democratic control of our council, the People’s Program for the Cleveland Worker is a starting point in pushing our political conversation and demands towards the direction it so desperately needs: immediate solutions for working people, not sweet deals for billionaire investors.
