“You’re setting an example for other working people who face similar assaults by the bosses,” Koppel told a group of pickets. “We need to be organized in unions and use union power to beat back these attacks on our job conditions and living standards. That’s right at the heart of what the Socialist Workers campaign is about.”

Many of the strikers were eager to talk about their struggle with the socialist campaigners and to exchange ideas on a range of issues—from social conditions in the semicolonial world to the fact that they have confronted strikebreaking efforts by the local big-business media, politicians, and police.

“We’re presenting a working-class alternative to the Democrats, Republicans, and all other capitalist candidates,” Koppel said.

“The problem we face is capitalism. It’s not a particular mayor, or a president, or one or another party. The problem is the profit system itself, which is based on the rule of a handful of billionaire families at the expense of workers and farmers, who produce all the wealth, along with nature. That’s what drives the bosses’ speed-up, lengthening of the working day and week, lowering of real wages, and cutbacks in benefits like health care and pensions. Their wars abroad—in Afghanistan, Iraq, and others they are preparing—are simply the external face of their war on working people at home.”

Socialist Workers candidates have also launched campaigns for local or statewide office in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in New Jersey. The New York campaign plans to organize a petition drive in July and August to put Koppel on the ballot. Petitioning campaigns are planned in New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.

On April 7 Koppel—a Militant staff writer and editor of Perspectiva Mundial—and other socialist campaigners are joining a rally by the Service Employees International Union against state budget cuts. They are also drawing up plans to campaign at campuses, factory gates, in working-class neighborhoods, and in industrial areas such as the Manhattan Garment District and the Hunt’s Point meat market.  
 
‘We’re an international class’
Speaking with bus workers on the picket line, Koppel pointed to “Our Politics Starts with the World,” the title of the feature article in issue no. 13 of the Marxist magazine New International. “To fight effectively, we need to start with a world perspective,” Koppel said. “Workers have a crucial advantage—we are an international class. We have common interests with fellow workers around the world, and a common enemy—the capitalist rulers.”

Some of the strikers studied the back cover photo of New International no. 13, which graphically shows the chasm between the most industrialized countries and the semicolonial world in terms of access to electricity and industrial development.

“We support the fight by Third World nations to develop the energy sources they need for development, including nuclear energy,” Koppel said. “And we oppose the drive by the U.S. government and other imperialist powers to block this development under the banner of stopping nuclear proliferation.”

One striker asked whether the United States had gone from being a food exporter to an importer. “The U.S. is the world’s main exporter of agricultural products,” Koppel replied. “Our campaign opposes the protectionist tariffs that Washington uses against other countries, which devastate the economies of semicolonial countries.”

Some of the unionists who are Puerto Rican remarked that U.S. domination of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico had wreaked havoc with their agriculture and transformed them from rice exporters to importers of rice from the United States.

The TWU members explained that one of their demands is for a lower retirement age. They pointed to the impact that years behind the wheel have on the health of their fellow unionists. “It’s a stressful job. A lot of people develop real health problems and have to retire early. We want to end the company’s 24.6 percent penalty on people retiring at 57 who have 25 years or more on the job,” said picket captain Angel Giboyeaux.

“What you face is part of what millions of workers face today,” Koppel said. “To boost their falling profit rates, the employers need to squeeze a lot more out of us than they have done by driving down our wages and speeding up production, workplace by workplace. Today they are stepping up an offensive against Social Security and other hard-fought extensions of our wages. The moves to raise the retirement age and shift more of health-care costs onto individual workers are part of that. Our campaign calls for a federally funded program of universal, lifetime health care.”  
 
Controversy over Ferrer statement
The election campaign in New York is in full swing. Incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to win the Republican nomination. Of the Democrats in the race, the frontrunners are former Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer and Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields.

On April 5 the Socialist Workers campaign released a statement by Koppel in response to a controversy over comments by Ferrer. In a March 15 speech to a group of police sergeants whose endorsement he is seeking, the Democrat declared that the 1999 police killing of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo in the Bronx was “not a crime” and that the cops, who were all acquitted, had been “overindicted.” Diallo was gunned down by four cops in a hail of 41 bullets on the doorstep of his apartment building. In the wake of widespread outrage at these remarks, Ferrer’s poll ratings have plunged, but Fields, Bloomberg, and other capitalist candidates have low-keyed the issue.

“The shooting of Amadou Diallo was a crime,” Koppel said. “The main defense of the killer cops was that Diallo fit the ‘generic description’ of the criminal they were supposedly looking for. In other words, he was a Black man in a working-class neighborhood. This is how cops approach working people and oppressed nationalities—as criminals or potential criminals.”

“The Diallo verdict is not an example of how the U.S. judicial system malfunctions. This is how the capitalist justice system works. The entire system of police, courts, and prisons is designed to protect the rule and property of the tiny class of billionaire families and keep working people in check.”

The striking bus drivers in Yonkers told Koppel they too have had experience with the police, who have arrested more than 40 pickets for blocking buses used by the company to train replacement drivers.

“This government and this system cannot be made to serve the interests of our class,” Koppel said. “Working people need to organize independently of the bosses’ parties and build a movement that can take political power out of the hands of the billionaires and establish a government of workers and farmers.”  
 
Getting on the ballot
The New York Socialist Workers campaign will be organizing to collect the necessary signatures to get its slate on the ballot in the November elections. “We urge people to vote for a program that stands for what they are for, not to ‘defeat Bloomberg’ or ‘defeat the Bush agenda,’ as some supporters of the Democrats are advocating,” Koppel said. “By getting the socialist ticket on the ballot here and elsewhere in 2005 we will be able to get a broader hearing for this perspective.”

As of now, the SWP is the only socialist organization to field candidates in New York City.

The pro-capitalist Libertarian Party has also announced it will run. Their main mayoral contenders are a smokers rights advocate and the reactionary “subway vigilante” Bernard Goetz.

The New York SWP campaign plans to get at least twice the required 7,500 signatures to get on the ballot for the mayoral race. The petitioning period runs from July 12 to August 23.

In New Jersey, the SWP has nominated Angela Lariscy for governor and Michael Ortega for State Assembly in District 28, and will kick off a ballot drive on May 7 to collect 1,500 signatures, nearly double the requirement of 800. In Seattle, the Socialist Workers campaign will begin a petitioning effort in June to put its mayoral candidate, Chris Hoeppner, on the ballot. (See Socialist Workers launch campaigns across U.S.)

Willie Cotton contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers launch campaigns across U.S.  
 
 
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