Election officials have informed nine of these contenders that their names will appear on the ballot; three others have submitted applications for ballot status or are collecting thousands of signatures on nominating petitions, to comply with anti-democratic election laws aimed at keeping working-class candidates off the ballot; and three are running write-in campaigns.

In their campaign leaflets, statements, and in interviews with local newspapers the candidates have laid out a program of immediate, democratic, and transitional demands, which begin from today’s conditions and today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and lead to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat and its allies on the land.

Supporters of Dave Ferguson, a garment worker who is on the ballot for the Seattle city council, took the campaign to clerks organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) who rallied July 23 to oppose contract proposals by the Bon Marche department store. The bosses’ demands include a wage cut for some workers and a wage freeze for others, and an increase in workers’ contributions to health insurance payments. The workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize the leaders of the three union locals involved to call strike action.

Supporters of Brian Taylor, 29, who is campaigning for mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, have talked about the campaign with workers involved in organizing drives by the Carpenters Union. Taylor himself was able to campaign among co-workers at the Oak Grove coal mine before he and others were laid off in mid-July. Under the headline, “Coal miner to run for mayor,” the Birmingham News reported July 9 that Taylor “wants to change the workweek from 40 hours to 30 hours without cutting anyone’s pay. That proposal would raise hourly wages and create more jobs. Taylor supports public works projects to create more jobs, and improve services such as hospitals and day cares.”

Campaign supporters in Birmingham are not obliged to gather signatures to place Taylor on the ballot, said Susan LaMont, of his campaign committee.

This was not so for John Staggs and Hilda Cuzco, the candidates for mayor of Philadelphia and city council member at-large, respectively. They organized a range of supporters to collect 5,544 signatures—“more than double the required number for placement on the ballot,” Cuzco told the Militant. Ballot status, she explained, “gives us openings to campaign more broadly.”

A petitioning effort with a goal of 4,000 signatures is under way right now for Tony Dutrow, the Socialist Workers mayoral candidate in Houston. “We’ll tell the truth, the unvarnished truth,” he told the August 9 Houston Chronicle. The article said that in his campaign, Dutrow will push for “bringing home all troops stationed abroad and ending the American ‘occupation’ of Iraq, creating jobs for everybody, allowing immigrants to obtain drivers licenses, defending women’s access to abortion, and re-establishing U.S. relations with Cuba.”

The Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Standard Speaker showed Tim Mailhot, 50, the SWP mayoral candidate there , on its August 2 front page. “Worker unity at top of Mailhot’s agenda” read the headline. “Tim Mailhot wants to make sure his stand on the issues is crystal clear,” the article began. “So, a list of 10 demands he lists on a campaign flyer is punctuated with exclamation points—one after another. Among them:…

‘Defend workers’ rights! No secret detentions or trials!

‘Defend women’s access to abortion.’ ”

Boston’s Chelsea Record reported on the campaign of William Leonard for city council at-large. The former candidate for governor of Massachusetts, it stated, “has been involved in trying to organize a union” at his workplace at Kayem Foods, a meatpacking plant. “My campaign is to unify the working people,” Leonard told the paper, “especially as we head toward a Depression and toward more wars.”

The Des Moines Register in Iowa was struck by the internationalist stand of Mary Martin, who is running for mayor of Des Moines. Her campaign “focuses primarily on international issues,” noted the June 23 issue: “an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba and military action in Iraq, abolition of the death penalty, and the removal of U.S. troops in South Korea.”

“We don’t see our campaign as stopping at the borders of Des Moines,” the 51-year old sewing-machine worker told the daily newspaper. “Martin said…. ‘What we call for is a movement to replace capitalism with a workers’ and farmers’ government.’”

Samuel Farley, who is running for City Council in Ward 4 of St. Paul, Minnesota, also took a stand in opposition to Washington’s imperialist plunder abroad. In a statement titled “U.S. Hands off Africa” he called on working people to oppose U.S. intervention in Liberia. Under the cover of “humanitarianism,” the deployment of U.S. troops there is aimed at strengthening the U.S. position against its “imperialist competitors in Africa and to reinforce the debt bondage of the continent’s peoples—a key means for siphoning off the wealth produced by Africa’s toilers and nature into the coffers of the imperialist ruling families.”

Farley, who works at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul and is a UFCW Local 789 member, ended his statement with the demands, “All imperialist troops out of West Africa! Cancel the immoral and unpayable Third World debt!”

Chris Remple, 54, a write-in candidate for the Allegheny County Executive in Pittsburgh, issued a July 22 statement in response to a recent incidence of police brutality. After welcoming the coroner’s ruling of homicide in the case of Charles Dixon, who suffocated to death last December when “police swarmed over him, forcing him down and preventing him from breathing,” Remple demanded that District Attorney Stephen Zappala “immediately charge and prosecute the cops responsible.”

“A lesson of the fight for justice for Jonny Gammage,” he said, “was that unless enormous pressure is mobilized, killer cops will not even be tried for their crimes.” Gammage died in 1995 at the hands of five suburban cops, none of whom were convicted in the killing.

The struggle against police brutality is a campaign issue in New Jersey, too, Abby Tilsner told the Militant. Tilsner, 37, is on the ballot for State Senate, 29th District. Campaign supporters have joined with those protesting the recent killings of Jose Luis Ives, 17, in Union City, and Michael Newkirk, 20, in North Newark.