Harris and running mate Margaret Trowe, along with Socialist Workers candidates listed on page 7, have stayed true to this initial campaign pledge. They have taken this message to workers, farmers, and young people across the United States, as well as to Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

This fighting, working-class campaign has reached tens of thousands through speaking engagements, petitioning drives to achieve ballot status, and media coverage. It has meant that the parties of union busting, racism, economic depression, and war--the Democrats and Republicans--have not gone unanswered in the elections.

Why vote Socialist Workers? Because working people need our own political voice, independent of the capitalist rulers. The big-business servants of the rich have no perspective to offer working people for a way out of economic conditions that, while prosperous for a few wealthy families, are getting worse for millions. Their system, and all their representatives--Democrat, Republican, and "independent"--simply offer more wars, unemployment, police brutality, strikebreaking, attacks on affirmative action, and other assaults.

The socialist campaign has explained why working people don’t need a third, pro-capitalist party such as that advanced by Ralph Nader. It has pointed to the danger posed by fascist-minded Patrick Buchanan of the Reform Party. We need our own program and political course, based on working-class solidarity and joining in struggles that advance the interests of workers and farmers worldwide.

Socialist candidates participate in and support battles like those waged by transit workers in Los Angeles, packinghouse workers in the Midwest, coal miners and other working people in mining communities, Teamsters standing up to Safeway, and many others. They join in actions to defend immigrant rights, to oppose police violence and killings, and in defense of the Palestinian people’s fight for self-determination. They explain the conquests of working people in the Yugoslav workers state and oppose U.S.-led imperialist intervention there. They demand an end to the U.S.-imposed division of Korea and the withdrawal of all Washington’s forces from the peninsula. They point to the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution and why the fighting people of that country are defending the interests of working people worldwide.

Above all, working people need to count on our own strength through an independent political movement that can fight for the necessary measures to defend our livelihood as the economic and social crisis deepens. Through these struggles workers and revolutionary-minded young people can begin to understand the capitalist system as a whole, and draw the revolutionary conclusion that there is no way to make any piece of this dog-eat-dog system work for the toilers--the vast majority of humanity--and, more importantly, that working people are capable of reorganizing and running society in the interests of humanity.

A vote for the socialist candidates is a vote that recognizes the need to replace the current big-business regime--from City Hall to the White House--with a government of workers and farmers and to build a new socialist society based on human solidarity.

The Militant urges readers who decide to go to the ballot booth to vote Socialist Workers. And to continue this same political campaign effort year round by joining in the front ranks of the struggle, telling the truth about the system of exploitation and oppression, getting the needed books, pamphlets, and socialist periodicals into the hands of tens of thousands stepping forward for whom hell is one more day of capitalism. If you want to make a revolution, join the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists!  
 
 
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