Militant

SWP vice-presidential candidate Arrin Hawkins, right, meets farmer David Howard August 1 while campaigning in Mileston, near Tchula, Mississippi. That weekend 2,500 signed petitions to put socialist ticket on Nebraska ballot.

Julian Santana, a Young Socialist who took part in a full-time campaigning team here for several days, reported that socialists have received an excellent response from many working people. Campaigners are not deterred by the fact that storeowners and cops have stopped them from leafleting and petitioning dozens of times at shopping malls and other locations. In response, teams of petitioners became increasingly adept at “roving petitioning,” that is, rapidly moving from one location to the next when they were shut down, Santana said.

Many of those who signed petitions have responded to the socialist candidates’ championing of the right of workers to organize unions to defend themselves from the employers’ ongoing attacks. Speaking at a July 31 public campaign meeting here, Santana said many pro-union workers “grabbed the pen right out of my hand and asked where to sign.” Meatpacking workers have been involved in union organizing drives in several plants in the Omaha area over the past few years.

“At a big shopping plaza in South Omaha, 204 people signed the petitions,” said campaigner Bill Schmitt. One of those who signed, a worker who had taken part in the 1987-89 strike at the Cudahy packinghouse, “especially liked our campaign’s staunch defense of workers’ right to organize unions,” he said. After that strike, the unionist recalled, the bosses had fired all those who had walked out.

Another worker they met, a veteran of the 1983 strike against Greyhound, said he appreciated the fact that socialists used to come down to their picket lines to offer support and that the Militant was the only paper that told the truth about their struggle. He signed the petition and subscribed to the Militant.

Schmitt reported that “one worker told us he had done some jail time and that the state of Nebraska had deprived him of the right to vote for the rest of his life. He gave a $10 contribution to the socialist campaign.”

The socialists also met some people who viewed the SWP campaign as an obstacle to electing “anybody but Bush” in November. One man said he would vote for Democrat John Kerry even though “there’s a lot that’s negative about him— but Bush is evil!”

At the July 31 public meeting, Ved Dookhun, who is the SWP candidate for U.S. Congress in Newark, New Jersey, contrasted that view with the message captured in the socialist campaign slogan, “It’s not who you are against, it’s what you are for!”

Democratic candidate for vice president John Edwards has sometimes talked about “two Americas,” Dookhun noted. But that is hollow rhetoric by someone who speaks for the interests of capital, not of the vast majority. “Yes, there are two Americas—but they are the America of the bosses and that of working people, with irreconcilable interests, and the socialist campaign advances a platform in the interests of the latter.”

Edwin Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, where the SWP has already achieved ballot status, also spoke. He reported on campaigning at plant gates of nonunion meatpacking plants and among steelworkers fighting for a contract at the Firestone rubber plant in Des Moines.

Fruit said that completing the petition drive rapidly opens up the possibility for broader campaigning among workers, farmers, and young people. For example, he said that in Iowa the socialist campaigners planned to participate in upcoming commemorations of the 59th anniversary of Washington’s atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events are an opportunity to explain the real history of imperialism and why the only road to peace is for working people to take political power out of the hands of the ruling capitalist families through a revolutionary struggle.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialists file for Mississippi ballot
$43,000 collected for socialist campaign, funds still needed
Vote socialist in 2004!  
 
 
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