Join Socialist Workers Party campaigning coast to coast

BY MAGGIE TROWE

The Socialist Workers Party’s experience in campaigning from Philadelphia to New Jersey to Washington state is that when we go to workers on their doorsteps, they want to discuss what is the way forward," Mary Martin, SWP candidate for governor in Washington, reported May 17. “They give a hearing to our party’s perspectives and program. Many want to try out our newspaper, the Militant, pick up a book on revolutionary politics from Pathfinder Press, and help us get our party on the ballot."

Martin filed to be on the ballot in Olympia, the state capitol, the same day.

Workers reject President Barack Obama’s claim that the U.S. “right now has the strongest, most durable economy in the world." They are looking for a way forward out of the grinding depression conditions they face in today’s feeble economic recovery — including low pay, unsafe working conditions and degrading treatment.

The government’s list of what they call NILF — people Not In the Labor Force, workers 16 or older who are not employed or actively looking for work — increased by over half a million last month to bring the total to 94 million, the highest number ever recorded.

It’s in this context that members and supporters of the SWP are taking their revolutionary working-class perspective to workers at their doorsteps and in struggles against the bosses’ attacks — from East Coast Verizon strikers to locked-out aerospace workers in Indiana to warehouse workers fighting firings in Los Angeles — and as they put the party’s presidential ticket of Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart on the ballot.

The SWP is also running candidates for Senate and Congress in California, Minnesota, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, Florida and the District of Columbia.

Communists find many people who want to join in discussing how the working class can unite and build a powerful movement to organize unions, fight police brutality, defend women’s rights and transform ourselves to become capable of displacing the dictatorship of capital and building a new society based on human solidarity.

SWP campaigners have put Kennedy and Hart on the ballot in Colorado, and are prepared to file in Louisiana in July. Ballot drives to get the party out to workers in small towns and big cities are underway in Washington and New Jersey, and begin in Tennessee and Minnesota May 20.

Betsy Farley, a union steelworker and Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in Chicago, joined pickets May 15 in South Bend, Indiana, where aerospace workers, members of United Auto Workers Local 9, have been locked out by Honeywell because they refused to sign a concessions contract. “They treat us like we’re a commodity, like corn or soybeans," electrician John Billington told Farley. Four locked-out workers subscribed to the Militant.

SWP branches are organizing meetings with workers and young people interested in going to the June 16-18 SWP Active Workers Conference in Oberlin, Ohio (see article this page).

“I’m looking forward to going to the SWP conference because I enjoyed the party forums I went to in Omaha," Chris Steffen, who works in a plastic fabrication plant in Lincoln, Nebraska, told the Militant May 18. “As some of us were organizing a demonstration in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion at the state capitol here in April, we had a forum where Alexandria Smith, one of the organizers of the protest, and I spoke, and a dozen people took part in the discussion."

Steffen and SWP member Joe Swanson went to a May Day meeting on the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. “We raised the need to organize unions as part of winning $15," he said.

Workers fund the ‘Militant’

At a May 14-16 meeting to prepare the conference, the SWP National Committee decided to extend the deadline for the party’s drive to win readers and contributors to the Militant to May 24 to help branches of the SWP and Communist League sister parties around the world go over the top.

To date 1,435 subscriptions and $94,286 have come in toward the quota of 1,550 subscriptions and $110,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund. The cost of the paper’s production is sustained by hundreds of contributions every spring.

“Twelve readers of the Militant here contributed $621 to the Militant Fighting Fund," Nat London writes from Paris. “Five workers on the SNCM ferry boat line in Marseille and a group of ‘temporary’ workers joined workers at the Peugeot auto plant in Poissy near here to put us over our goal of $450." The workers read French translations of Militant articles sent out each week by supporters in Paris.

Twenty-one prisoners have subscribed during the drive. “I feel privileged that the Militant has opened my eyes and educated me to social issues that affect all working classes and struggles that unite us all," a prisoner in New Zealand writes. He said he appreciates books he has gotten from Pathfinder, especially It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System: The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class.

To join with the Socialist Workers Party in winning workers to a revolutionary perspective, contact a party branch listed in the directory on page 8.