Vol. 71/No. 23      June 11, 2007

The news came after an eight-day petitioning effort in which 1,300 registered voters, more than double the 500 required, signed their names to put the socialist candidate on the ballot. SWP campaign supporters distributed the socialist platform throughout the city—from the Black communities of Roxbury and Dorchester, to South Boston, East Boston, and a big street festival in Jamaica Plains. During petitioning, 15 people also subscribed to the Militant.

The Boston SWP ticket also includes Betsy Farley, who is running for City Council District 1 as a write-in.

Estrada is a meat packer and Farley is a sewing machine operator and member of UNITE HERE Local 187.

Both candidates spoke at a Militant Labor Forum here May 12, at the end of the petitioning effort. Several workers from East Boston, where the campaign headquarters is located, attended the event.

Following presentations by the candidates a lively discussion ensued. Questions included: How did unions in the United States become as weak as they are today? What do socialists mean when they talk of transforming them and how can that be done? How can working-class political action independent of the capitalist parties be advanced, as the candidates indicated?

Estrada explained that at the center of the SWP campaign is support for workers’ struggles to organize trade unions and to use and extend union power to defend themselves and other working people from the bosses’ assaults. “We must break from the twin parties of the capitalist rulers—the Democrats and Republicans—and build a labor party based on the unions that fights in the interests of working people here and abroad,” he emphasized.

The SWP also calls for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of U.S. and all “coalition” troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and all the theaters of Washington’s “war on terrorism,” the socialist candidate pointed out.

“Today the main obstacle the U.S. rulers face to their wars abroad and profit drive at home is resistance by working people,” Estrada said. Actions like those by workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to protest an immigration raid at the Michael Bianco leather plant and the May Day demonstrations here and across the country to press for legalization of the undocumented point to demands the labor movement must champion, he said.

“It’s along this road that working people can strengthen the unions and chart a course toward a break with not only the Democrats and Republicans but all capitalist parties, and toward building an independent labor party,” Farley added.

On May 19 Estrada and a supporter joined more than 100 people at the 20th annual Malcolm X awards and memorial breakfast sponsored by the Roxbury-based Black Community Information Center and Roxbury Community College.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home