Vol. 72/No. 12      March 24, 2008

Calero campaigned at the University of Illinois Chicago March 7. Several students signed up to be contacted about campaign activities. One of them said, “I really want you to get in touch with me. I’m a socialist myself and I think capitalism is wretched and has to go.”

“My running mate Alyson Kennedy and I are following through on our pledge to go wherever those in struggle invite us,” said Calero at a campaign event that evening. He told the audience that he had been invited to speak at a workshop called “Elections and Immigrant Rights” at the Midwest Convention in Defense of Immigrant Rights the next day.

The need for independent labor political action was the axis of the debate at the workshop. Sharing the panel with Calero were Shaun Harkin of the International Socialist Organization and Green Party candidate for Congress in Illinois’s 4th District Omar López.

In the workshop Harkin argued for “pressuring Clinton and Obama.” López said that the movement for immigrant rights should “support candidates that support the immigrant agenda,” adding that none of the leading Democratic and Republican candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain, fit that criteria. López said that the movement for legalization had failed in the legislative arena since Congress has not passed immigration reform legislation.

“We have to bust through the illusion that you can make the changes we need within the framework of the two-party system,” said Calero. “If you’re disillusioned with Congress, it’s because you had illusions in Congress to begin with.

“U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn from South Carolina, for example, says supporters of legalization should try an ‘incremental’ approach to immigration reform,” said Calero. “He says that’s how civil rights legislation was won in the 1960s. But Jim Crow segregation was uprooted by Black workers and their supporters marching, sitting in, standing up to cops with their dogs and fire hoses. Waiting for ‘friendly’ politicians couldn’t end Jim Crow and it can’t win legalization.”

Calero pointed to the emerging working-class vanguard and the place of immigrant workers within it as reflected in mass mobilizations the last two years on May Day and in union organizing efforts. He said that along the road of increasing class struggle workers can transform the trade unions into fighting instruments that throw their weight into movements of social protest by working people, like the fight for legalization.

“We need a new class party—a labor party based on fighting unions, independent of the parties of capital, that can be a vehicle for working people to fight in the political arena,” Calero said.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Workers will transform ourselves through fights’
SWP candidate addresses Minnesota students
Seattle-area warehouse workers organize against firing of socialist campaign supporter  
 
 
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