"Our campaign is presenting a fighting, working-class alternative to the parties of the ruling billionaires, the Democrats and Republicans and other pro-capitalist parties," Koppel said in an interview. "To workers and farmers who are engaged in the stiffening resistance to the assault by the bosses and their government, to young people who are attracted to these struggles, we say--this is your campaign."
New York, Koppel said, "is often portrayed solely as Wall Street and the home of wealthy bankers and capitalist corporations. But it is also the home of millions of working people--garment workers, truck drivers, transit workers, meat packers, restaurant and hotel workers--who produce the wealth in this city and who are fighting: against cuts in their wages, for the right to organize into a union, against brutalization by the police, to demand equal rights for all immigrants and a halt to deportations, for the right to decent housing, and many more struggles big and small.
"That is who we are bringing the socialist alternative to and in whose interests the campaign speaks," emphasized Koppel, who is the editor of the Militant and its sister publication in Spanish, Perspectiva Mundial. Socialist Workers supporters are campaigning in working-class areas from Manhattan's Garment District, where tens of thousands of workers labor in clothing shops, to Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. They are meeting fellow workers at factory gates and at street corners, and setting up campaign tables with the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and books on revolutionary politics.
The slowdown in the world capitalist economy and rising unemployment is already hitting working people in the United States and having a devastating impact on workers and farmers in the semicolonial countries. "Strikes, such as by auto workers in Mexico and South Africa; protests against draconian austerity moves across South America; the resistance of the Palestinian people and the Sahrawi fight for independence in Western Sahara; and struggles by coal miners, dock workers, auto workers, and others in the United States are all examples of the resistance of working people to the capitalist onslaught," he said.
"As this crisis deepens, the conflicts between Washington and the various imperialist powers in Europe will sharpen," Koppel pointed out. "The U.S. rulers will step up both their assault against the rights, union organization, and wages and working conditions of working people at home, as well as the devastating drive against workers and farmers around the world through use of the military might and the economic domination of finance capital.
"Our campaign points to a different road: one of revolutionary struggle of workers and farmers to take power out of the hands of the superwealthy ruling class and to replace it with a government of our own."
Koppel and other socialist campaigners are joining the September 8 Labor Day parade here. The event is expected to be marked by labor struggles such as the campaign to defend the Charleston Five--longshore workers battling a frame-up by the ruling class in South Carolina because of their efforts to oppose the use of nonunion labor on the Charleston docks. Koppel has joined the call for dropping all charges against the five members of the International Longshoremen's Association, which stem from a January 2000 cop assault on a dockworkers' picket line.
"The defense of these five unionists deserves the active backing of the labor movement and of all working people," Koppel said. "By standing up for their rights, the Charleston dockworkers have struck a chord. They have tapped the resistance and the growing hunger for solidarity among workers and farmers around the country."
The socialist campaign will be joining and supporting other struggles by working people, from the protests by the Carpenters union and others against union-busting with the now-familiar giant inflatable rats, to the fight in Long Island to defend immigrant workers from deportations and ultrarightist thugs, to actions in defense of a woman's right to choose abortion.
One of the main supporters of the Koppel-for-mayor campaign here is the New York chapter of the Young Socialists, a nationwide revolutionary youth organization. Local chapter organizer Bill Schmitt stated, "We're going all out to campaign for the socialist candidates. It's an exciting opportunity to meet other revolutionary-minded young people--and we're meeting quite a few--and win them to the perspective of joining the fight to build a mass working-class movement that can make a revolution in this country and join the worldwide fight for socialism. That's what the Young Socialists is about.
"For young people who are reacting against the exploitation, the racism, the inequality of women, the wars that are normal features of capitalism," Schmitt said, "there couldn't be a clearer difference between the various capitalist candidates and what the Socialist Workers stand for."
The real 'us' and 'them'
Koppel noted that "the big-business candidates--from Democrats Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer to Republican Michael Bloomberg--are working overtime to convince working people that they are going to be 'a mayor for all New Yorkers.' They say 'We must fix our broken schools' or 'We must never go back on crime.'
"But all the talk about 'our city' and 'our country' is a giant lie," the socialist candidate said. "Working people have no interests in common with the tiny class of ruling billionaire families, or with the Democrats and Republicans who serve them. We as workers and farmers produce the wealth. And they maintain their power and their profits by driving down our wages and social gains, restricting our rights, and sending us to fight in wars to protect their class interests.
"But we have everything in common with fellow workers and farmers both in this country and around the globe," he said.
A clear example, the socialist candidate said, is the Israeli regime's accelerating war drive against the Palestinian people. "Working people in the United States have a big stake in opposing the U.S.-backed Israeli assault and standing with the Palestinians fighting for a homeland," he stated. "The fact that the Palestinian people refuse to be crushed into submission made that struggle a feature of the recent United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa--one that got too hot for Washington and its junior ally, Israel, who had to pack their bags and leave."
Many of the other issues debated at the UN conference highlight the fact that imperialism has no solutions to the problems faced by hundreds of millions around the world--whether they be working people in the semicolonial countries or the exploited and oppressed in the major industrialized countries .
"It is imperialist domination by Washington, Paris, London, Tokyo and other major capitalist powers that is responsible for perpetuating the oppression and super-exploitation of the semicolonial world, where the vast majority of humanity lives. Racist and chauvinist prejudice is one way they justify this plunder and underdevelopment. Similarly, racist prejudice and discrimination is inherent in capitalist rule both within the United States and other capitalist countries. It is used by the wealthy rulers to try to pit working people against each other.
"Working people must fight every manifestation of racist discrimination and champion demands that unite working people around our common interests, from affirmative action to defense of rights of immigrants."
War abroad and at home
Koppel said the U.S. rulers' growing reliance on military might to strengthen their class interests abroad--from their expanding intervention against Yugoslavia to the initial moves toward developing a space-based missile shield--is a war against fellow working people abroad that is intertwined with the deepening assault on workers and farmers at home.
Over the past decade this offensive has meant a record increase in heavily armed cops on the street, longer prison sentences, and reduced protection against arbitrary search and seizure by the cops and courts.
"In New York, all the Democratic and Republican candidates are tripping over each other to be 'tough on crime,'" Koppel noted. "They praise the Giuliani administration for its police crackdown on working people, and offer their own suggestions for 'proactive policing,' as Ferrer recently put it."
Koppel argues that police violence against working people is not an aberration. "Brutalizing workers and farmers is simply part of their job of serving and protecting the rich. That's what the cops are for in this capitalist society."
By December, Koppel noted, "the federal government will cut nearly 39,000 working-class families off Aid to Families with Dependent Children in New York City alone--and hundreds of thousands more nationwide. They face the five-year cutoff decreed in the law signed by William Clinton in 1996 to 'end welfare as we know it.'
"Under that callously brutal measure, these workers, mostly single women with children, are left jobless or pressed into often degrading, minimum-wage jobs. That indignity led a group of workers here to demonstrate last month to demand the government guarantee 'real work and real pay,' an action I salute.
"Today, more working people are unprotected by unemployment benefits, health insurance, and other social guarantees. With continuing signs of an economic slowdown, even more people will become vulnerable," he pointed out. Already, the number of homeless workers in New York has been rising sharply. "Applications for city shelters are running 30 percent higher than last year, while soup kitchens around the city now serve half a million people a month!"
The dismantling of the federal welfare system is part of a broader offensive by the employer class to squeeze more and more out of the hides of working people. Koppel pointed out, "Workers in the United States worked nearly a full workweek longer in 2000 than they did a decade ago. They now put in longer hours than workers of all other imperialist nations.
"This lengthening of the workday, brutal speedup, downward pressure on wages, and other employer attacks are accompanied by probes against workers' social wage, which the assault on welfare paved the way for. The bipartisan debate today on Social Security is entirely in the framework of accepting a breach in its character as a universal entitlement. In the name of 'saving' Social Security, Democrats and Republicans argue that it depends on whether there is 'enough money' and that cuts may be 'necessary' if the so-called budget surplus runs out--whether by raising the retirement age, reducing pension benefits, or shifting toward individual private savings accounts.
"But this whole debate is a fraud," Koppel said. "For one thing, the capitalist government has always 'dipped into' funds that should be guaranteed for Social Security. Its budget priorities put interest payments to billionaire bondholders above the needs of working people.
"For working people, our job is not to figure out for the bosses how to divide up the 'budget.' Our starting point is that Social Security is a question of social solidarity and that working people have a right, not just to an individual wage but to a social wage that includes guaranteed retirement pensions, lifetime health care, and other basic needs."
Uniting workers, farmers in struggle
Koppel said that working people "do not have to accept a 'lesser evil' among the capitalist politicians and their pro-boss solutions. Our unions need to stop pouring funds and resources to keep the parties of the bosses in office under the guise that they are 'friends of labor.' Our campaign points to some basic demands that the labor movement needs to wage a fight for--demands aimed at uniting workers and farmers to defend our conditions and solidarity in face of growing unemployment, rising indebtedness, and attacks on our hard-fought social gains." He outlined the following demands:
"We should join with working people in Latin America and the Caribbean in opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas and other imperialist-controlled institutions," Koppel added.
"Workers in this country should reject the protectionist arguments of the employers to defend 'American jobs,' which pit workers here and abroad against each other. Instead, we need to fight together against our common enemies--the employers and their government, from Washington to New York City Hall."
Need a revolutionary organization
Koppel argued that "a successful fight for these demands points to the need to organize a movement of millions to take power out of the hands of the billionaire minority and establish a workers and farmers government, contributing to the international struggle for a socialist world.
"Revolutionary Cuba today is a living example that a socialist revolution is not only necessary, but it can be made. That's the perspective that the Socialist Workers campaign offers to fighting workers and young people today. With the growing mood of resistance among workers and farmers throughout this country, we are finding a greater interest in considering the socialist alternative.
"I am urging these militants to read and study the Militant and books that give a scientific explanation of world events and point the road forward." He emphasized Path-finder's Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, and "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," contained in issue 11 of New International.
"Those who want to bring about a revolutionary change need to be part of a revolutionary organization. That's why I urge them to join the Socialist Workers Party or the Young Socialists. I know of nothing more rewarding than being part of this fight for a socialist future."
Boston--Sarah Ullman, garment worker
Cleveland--Eva Braiman, meat packer
Detroit--Osborne Hart, meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW)
Houston--Tony Dutrow, meat packer
Miami--Mike Italie, garment worker
New York--Martín Koppel, editor, The Militant and Perspectiva Mundial
Pittsburgh--Frank Forrestal, coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers of America
Seattle--Ernie Mailhot, meat packer and member, UFCW
St. Paul--Tom Fiske, meat packer
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Meat packer runs for mayor of Houston
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