Question: I’m John Hancock, president of the California Channel. With me now is Joel Britton, an independent candidate for governor of California. Welcome Mr. Britton.

Answer: Thank you.

Q: In 60 seconds, who is Joel Britton?

A: I’m a retired meat packer. I’m also a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and a longtime activist in the trade union movement, having been a member of both the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union when I was working in a couple of oil refineries in Southern California, and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union when I was working in meatpacking and meatprocessing plants in the Chicago area.

Q: Why are you running for governor?

A: I’m running to present a revolutionary, working-class point of view that working people need who are fighting every day, especially in factories where the offensive of the bosses is the most severe. They’re fighting to defend their union, their working conditions, and for a better life. And I believe I can articulate, I can represent the aspirations of people in this situation who are facing a terrible attack right now on wages, working conditions, union rights. …

Q: How do you feel you are qualified?

A: I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting for what I currently represent…. I have a lifetime record…in building the kind of movement that can be part of working people achieving our own government—workers and working farmers.

Q: What do you see as the most important responsibility of being governor?

A: To use the office to promote the fight of working people for a better life, which would include, even though this is a state and not a federal office, …campaigning and urging others to join me in opposing the military adventures of Washington abroad. I would join the millions of people around the world calling for U.S. troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, being opposed to Plan Colombia in South America. The federal government, which is the government of the employing class of this country, is hell-bent on revolutionizing the armed forces of the United States, reorganizing them to try to save the system for the wealthy and I am opposed to that. I would use the office of governor to promote that point of view.

Q: What are your views on campaign finance reform? Do you believe reformation is necessary and if so what would you propose?

A: What I believe goes under that category is not useful. It’s a sham. Common Cause and the other organizations that have put forward these various tinkerings with the system have done nothing to change the essential nature of electoral politics in the United States, which is run by a two-party system, both of which represent the wealthy class in this country, the class that owns the capital, that owns the banks and so forth. I don’t support their tinkerings with that at all. I’m for the labor movement getting into electoral politics in its own interests instead of supporting mostly Democrats and an occasional liberal Republican as well. The labor movement should promote independent working-class political action, and if that were to happen I would not favor restrictions on spending….

Q: How are you funding your campaign?

A: I’m asking working people and students to contribute. So far the contributions have ranged from $1 to $200. Among the young people that I’ve explained my campaign to are some of the 84 young people from Los Angeles who went on the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange this past summer…. They got a chance to look at a country where working people have taken control out of the hands of big business—both Cuban business and U.S. and other foreign business interests. A number of them have expressed interest in joining my campaign actively as well as contributing a dollar or two or five dollars, ten dollars, in that range.  
 
There are two Californias
Q: What do you feel should be the defining issues of this election?

A: The interests of working people. There is no such thing as California interests. There is a “we” and a “they” that we have to consider. Working people need to recognize in political life as they do in many cases in their personal life that this is a class-divided state and country and world. And working people need to join together in solidarity with each other and fight for a new system—a system based not on exploitation and oppression but on freedom, equality, and human solidarity.

Q: So if elected what would be your top three priorities and how would you get those accomplished?

A: Given the high unemployment in the state of California, an immediate priority has to be promoting a fight by working people, and anyone who is willing to join in, for a massive public works program to rebuild the housing, schools, clinics, childcare centers, hospitals, anything else we need, making jobs available to all through this massive effort at union-scale wages and with equal treatment for all and affirmative action measures for people who have been held out of the work force in a discriminatory manner.

Also part of this picture is supporting the fight for equal treatment of immigrants. Anyone who is here in California should be treated equally. That means the right to drive a car; the right to work; the right to medical care; the right to education for their children and themselves. So I’m supporting the effort to highlight these immigrant rights issues by supporting the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride that’s taking place. It’s leaving Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle on September 20, and heading for Washington, D.C., Liberty Park in New Jersey, and New York City for a big protest to highlight this issue.

Q: And a third priority?

A: The defense of women’s rights is extremely important. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 in Roe v. Wade for the privacy rights that allow women to have the choice of bearing children or not. I’m as opposed to forced sterilization as I am in favor of the right to terminate a pregnancy and the right to abortion.

Q: What do you see as the key factors that will shape California’s economy in the future?

A: Again, these are not just California factors because California is part of the United States and the United States is part of a big capitalist world. Overproduction is one, that is, not overproduction in terms of what people need in the world in terms of food, a roof over our heads, usable drinking water and electricity and so forth, but in terms of what can be made or provided at a profit under capitalism. So it’s overproduction in that sense. And this is a problem that is always there. It goes in different cycles, but it’s always there as long as capitalism exists. Another is inflation. We’ve had some years of relatively low inflation but there are tremendous potential developments that can lead to rampant inflation that can wipe out working people’s savings, retired people’s modest nest eggs and so forth.

Q: What is, in your view, the state’s role in economic development? How do you balance the need to create jobs with the need for business to be conducted in a fair and an open manner?

A: I don’t have a balanced view on that. I’m for building a strong enough movement of working people so that we have a workers and farmers government. Working people will be the ruling class, like now we have a class of capitalists that rules over us. So, I don’t consider it to be a balancing of interests. I think there are antagonistic interests and I’m for the working-class side in that fight, which is inevitable and will not go away as long as capitalism is with us.

Q: We have in California an environment where utility costs are rising, where unemployment rates are rising, workers’ compensation rates are skyrocketing. Many California businesses are seeing greener pastures in other states. As governor, how would you convince them to stay put in California?

A: There’s all this weeping and wailing about workers’ compensation. The bosses, if they want to spend less on workers’ compensation, they could consider slowing down the assembly lines, they could consider slowing down the rate at which hogs go by us in the slaughterhouses, which cause injuries, unnecessary injuries. These are not injuries caused by carelessness of workers. These are injuries caused by the pace of work and the pressures of work. There’s a tremendous amount of pshysical pressure as well as psychological pressure in industry today. So, that would be step one. And then, workers’ comp should be part of a broader social security system so that insurance rates on small businesses, for example, shouldn’t be a crushing burden. I’m against small businesses being driven out of business by these kinds of expenses and pressures. If this was handled as one big social security system, then it would be possible for that burden to be lifted off of small business people.  
 
‘I look back to the Paris Commune’
Q: In light of recent budget battles, and predictions that we start the next fiscal year with a $12 billion deficit, how would you propose to balance the state budget?

A: Working people need to recognize, this is not our budget—this is not our government. So, we have to stay strong in opposing the burden of this crisis. There is a crisis of sorts, but it’s not of our doing, and it’s not our crisis. And, the burden of this crisis should not be on our backs. The two alternatives that the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties and most of the other candidates are presenting, one alternative is more taxes, and even when they say it’s going to be mostly on the rich and so forth, the whole trend is toward more regressive taxation on working people, the very people in the worst position to be able to pay for it. Everything from sales tax to all kinds of income tax. Or they say we have to cut services. I’m opposed to cutting any social welfare services or workers’ comp or anything that’s in the interest of working people.

Q: Are there specifically any areas where you feel expenditures should be reduced or increased?

A: Well, I’m not for tinkering. If people want to study the kind of government I’m for, it wouldn’t have the kind of bloated bureaucracy and massive numbers of armed men and women to protect and serve the interests of the capitalist class that this government has. I look back to the Paris Commune, which is the first time the working people in the world actually took power and held power for a time— in 1871 in France; the Russian Revolution in 1917, where in the early years of that revolution you had a revolutionary workers and farmers’ republic. It later, under Stalin, degenerated into a bureaucratic regime, but even with that, to this day, the capitalists haven’t been able to restore capitalism in those huge areas of the world. And then, most refreshingly, in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Revolution, where it was proven that working people in our epoch can take power and hold power and wield power on behalf of working people not only in Cuba, but in solidarity with the struggles of working people in other parts of the world, as they showed by sending hundreds of thousands of volunteers to fight in Africa against the racist South African government, from the mid-70s to the late ’80s, for example.

Q: What steps do you think should be taken to ensure that Californians have access to affordable housing?

A: This would be part of the massive public works program that we working people need to fight for, and force the powers that be to agree to, to accept. That there be a massive housing construction program so that nobody lives in substandard housing. And it should be affordable. We should emulate what the working people of Cuba did in the very early days of that revolution, which is why Washington began to get so hostile toward Cuba, which was to slash rents to a small fraction of what they had been before the revolution.

Q: What about energy? How do we guarantee that Californians have access to an affordable energy supply adequate to their needs?

A: Again, the “we” in this case, I would say, should be that working people should fight to force U.S. imperialism, which represents big oil interests and the big oil industry—which I used to work for, which I noted at the time contributed financially to both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, and U.S. Senate and so forth—that we should fight for U.S. imperialism to be out of the oil-producing regions of the world. No military troops, no controlling of those resources. That’s not “our” oil. That’s the oil of the peoples of those regions. And that would be step one. To just get a basic station identification of who we are and where we are in the world. And a workers and farmers government would be more than able to organize trade with those countries that have oil.

Q: Without referencing opponents, why should Californians vote for you to be our next governor?

A: Because they have an opportunity to vote for someone who stands for the interests of working people. That stands for the same things now, as a retired meat packer, and leader of the Socialist Workers Party, that I stood for, when I first realized in my youth, when I was 20 years old, that we needed revolutionary socialist change and not Band-Aid solutions. Not just reformist tinkering with the system.

Q: What are your positions on Proposition 54, the so-called racial privacy initiative? Do you disagree or agree with this controversial initiative banning governmental agencies from collecting racial data?

A: I think there’s a great deal of fakery on both sides of this issue. You have someone who’s been leading the fight against affirmative action claiming to be for a color-blind society. We’re not going to have a color-blind society as long as we have capitalism. And unless you are building a movement that can be part of leading a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, you’re doing nothing toward that end. And on the other hand, the liberals of all different varieties, including civil-rights figures, are campaigning for a “no” vote on the basis that unless this measure is defeated, we can’t fight for affirmative action, or we can’t have fights against racist discrimination, discrimination medically and the other ways. That’s totally false. We can lead a fight around all these things without promoting the government keeping all these statistics.

Q: In the 30 seconds or so remaining—Governor Davis has indicated that he intends to sign AB 205 by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, which would give same-sex couples virtually the same rights and responsibilities as marriages. As governor, would you sign that?

A: I haven’t seen the bill. I’d have to see it. I and the Socialist Workers Party are for equality, in terms of civil unions, whether it’s men-women, men with men, women with women.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers candidate for California governor addresses U.S. soldiers abroad
Vote Socialist Workers!
The revolutionary potential of U.S. working class
Socialist Workers gubernatorial candidate discusses record of communist activity
 
 
 
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