Vol. 77/No. 6      February 18, 2013

“I make $9.25 an hour and get $150 taken out of every check in taxes,” Payne said. “What are you going to do for the people who work?”

“I’m a worker just like you,” responded Hawkins. “I work in a factory not far from here. I think we need to fight for a massive public works program to put millions to work building and renovating schools and hospitals and to build a nationwide network of medical clinics, not close them down.”

“You’re right,” Payne responded. “Instead, they close schools and build more jails.”

“Neither the Democrats nor Republicans propose anything to solve the unemployment crisis,” stated Hawkins. “The socialist campaign is different. We join every struggle of working people for jobs, against attacks on our wages and unions, for the rights of Blacks, women, and immigrants.”

“We oppose all taxes on working people,” Hawkins continued. “We should not be the ones to pay for the crisis of their system.”

Construction worker Glenn Fisher was just leaving work repairing a floor at a house in the neighborhood when he greeted Hawkins. “It’s going to take people standing up and not being afraid any more,” Fisher said, as he bought a copy of the Militant, the campaign newspaper.

“That’s what my campaign is about, people standing up and fighting back,” Hawkins said. “Working people also need to organize politically, independent of the two capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Ultimately, through many struggles to come, it will be possible and necessary to build a working-class social movement that can wrest political power from the capitalist exploiters.”

On Jan. 23 Hawkins participated in a Martin Luther King Day panel discussion at Chicago State University hosted by the Chicago Council on Black Studies, CSU African American Studies Program, and the student African American Studies Association. The focus of the discussion was the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign entitled “Whose Legacy Is This? Obama, Poverty, and the Fiscal Cliff.”

More than 70 people attended the event. Speakers included Minister Michael Muhammad of Torchlight Ministries; David Lowery, founder and CEO of the Living and Driving While Black Foundation; and Jonathan Jackson, professor at CSU and national spokesman for the Rainbow/Push Coalition. All voiced criticism of the Barack Obama administration’s failure to confront the problems facing African-Americans.

“The root cause of the fiscal cliff is America’s funding for war all over the world but she will not fund a war on poverty,” Muhammad said.

“We’ve let ourselves become puppets of the Democratic Party. Obama doesn’t care about us, he cares about what he can get out of the corporations,” said Lowery.

“I’m proud that President Obama is in office even if I don’t agree with all his positions,” Jackson said.

“Not just Obama, but the capitalist system is responsible for unemployment, poverty, and the violence workers face at the hands of the cops,” said Hawkins. “Our power is in the streets—on the picket lines and mass demonstrations. We have to organize it, rely on it and mobilize it.

“Only the working class organized in struggle can push this back. We have to fight to unify our class, the employed and unemployed, Black, immigrant, Caucasian, women and men.

“Examples right here include the fight in North Chicago to fire and convict the cops guilty of using Tasers on Darrin Hanna, who died in 2011, and the ongoing fight to win the release of the more than 100 victims of police torture who are still in prison,” said Hawkins.  

 
 
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