Jabari Ashe, 23, is an auto technician at a car dealership in the San Francisco Bay Area. He said he joined the Young Socialists here because “I want to learn how to be a better organizer and Marxist and join others who think the way I do.”

Ashe said he first met the SWP and Young Socialists at a Martin Luther King Day event in Houston in 2004. More recently he ran into socialists again at the May 1 immigrant rights march in San Francisco. Ashe said he went to the rally with some trepidation on how the largely foreign-born workers would treat an African-American. But he was elated by the enthusiasm with which the protesters embraced him. After the action, some of his co-workers asked why he attended the march since he is Black, he said, giving him a chance to explain why the fight to legalize all immigrants is in the interests of all working people. Ashe said he wants to get the Militant around more at work and sell subscriptions to his fellow members of the International Association of Machinists.

David Arguello, a 29-year-old worker at a guitar factory in San Diego, also joined the YS here. “I was in the YS eight years ago when I was a college student at the University of California in Santa Cruz,” he said. “Then I went to Mexico and dropped out of activity. I decided to rejoin because of the impact of the immigrant rights protests. It’s not enough to go to marches, I had to be part of a movement. Now I will attend classes in Los Angeles as part of a summer school on Marxism and collaborate with the party and Young Socialists there.”

“I had been thinking of joining the Socialist Workers Party for a while,” said Christian Castro, a 27-year-old technician and YS member in Chicago who joined the SWP here. “This was a good opportunity. I was attracted to the Cuban Revolution and didn’t see any other party organizing to emulate its example in the U.S. That was the starting point for me. Attending Militant Labor Forums helped.” Along with other YS and party members from around the country, Castro joined the May 20 march in Washington demanding “Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba.”

Sam Cole, attending his first convention, also joined the party. “I had been looking for a socialist organization for a while when I found the SWP,” he said. A 31-year-old nursing student at Lawson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama, Cole said he had read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and other socialist literature since high school. In March he began looking for communist organizations. “Once I went to the Militant Labor Forum, it all came together,” he said.

Gabriela Moreano, 26, organizer of the Young Socialists in St. Paul, Minnesota, joined the party too. “I first met the SWP at a Cinco de Mayo event in St. Paul and subscribed to the Militant,” she said. “I came to the party convention last year and joined the YS last fall after the World Youth Festival in Venezuela.”

Others did not become members of the party but strengthened their commitment to help build the communist movement.

Howard Allen, a retired seaman and member of the Seafarers International Union, was among them. Allen found out about the party last September when Militant supporters came to New Orleans to learn the truth about how working people responded to the social catastrophe they faced following Hurricane Katrina. He bought a subscription to the socialist newsweekly at the time and later helped distribute the paper among neighbors.

“I had a great time,” Allen said of the convention. Its deliberations “answered a lot of my questions about socialism, and straightened out all the lies they tell in the press.” He said he especially enjoyed a class he attended on “The Jewish Question: The Danger for the Workers Movement of the ‘Israel Lobby’ Conspiracy Theory.” Allen said he plans to go to New York in July to help campaign for the SWP ticket (see front-page article).

He’ll be campaigning along with Matilda Hernández-Miyares, a 17-year-old high school student in New York, who was attending her first convention and joined the Young Socialists here. “I had thought socialism was a good idea but it couldn’t work,” she said. “So when I found out more about the Cuban Revolution, especially through reading Our History Is Still Being Written by three Chinese-Cuban generals, it changed my mind. It’s the biggest example of where things have changed.”

Michael Italie contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party 44th convention marked by ‘irreversible strengthening of working-class movement’
Scope and speed of mass working-class actions for immigrant rights caught U.S. rulers by surprise
Message to Communist Party of Cuba
Socialist Workers Party National Committee  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home