Vol. 80/No. 16 April 25, 2016
Help Socialist Workers Party get on ballot and campaign
“Winning ballot status is an indication of the party’s reach and defends the legal status of the party and protections against government intrusion,” SWP National Campaign Director John Studer said April 12.
Another key party-building activity is the spring drive to win readers and financial supporters of the party’s paper, the Militant, and promote books that bring to life the lessons of working-class struggles and revolutions.
At the end of the first week of the six-week campaign, 328 people — including six workers behind bars — have subscribed or renewed, putting the SWP and Communist Leagues slightly ahead on the road to the 1,550 quota. More than $4,800 has come in for the $110,000 Militant Fighting Fund, reports fund director Lea Sherman.
Party supporters will talk to thousands of workers at labor actions, protest rallies and on doorsteps and in living rooms about the crisis of capitalism and the capacity of ordinary workers to solve that crisis by mass revolutionary action.
“Campaigning in Louisiana is a confirmation that wherever you go, you meet working people who are very concerned about what is happening to our class,” John Benson, SWP organizer in Atlanta and director of the party’s ballot drives in Louisiana and Tennessee, said in a phone interview April 12.
Socialist Workers Party members from Miami, Atlanta, New York and Minneapolis, along with party supporters in Louisiana, have been campaigning door to door in New Orleans, Belle Chasse, Gonzales and Lafayette, working to put the SWP presidential ticket of Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart on the ballot.
Gonzales is near Geismar, where an explosion at the Williams Olefins chemical plant three years ago killed two and injured many. “Workers are facing dangerous working conditions, two-tier wages, police brutality and other assaults by the bosses,” Benson said. “They listen when we explain that these problems come from the capitalist system, and that’s what has to be changed.”
Dean Hazlewood and Jacquie Henderson knocked on the door of a young government worker in Gonzales who is African-American. “His face lit up when he looked at the Militant’s front-page articles reporting protests against the police killing of Jamar Clark, a Black youth in Minneapolis, and LaVoy Finicum, a Caucasian rancher in Oregon,” Hazlewood said. He said they helped him see that cop brutality was aimed at the whole working class, and decided to subscribe to the paper.
Teams will spread out across Louisiana and New Jersey over the next two weeks and in Tennessee beginning April 28.
“I want to invite you to join our ‘Justice Monday’ protests against police brutality at the U.S. Attorney’s Office” in Newark, New Jersey, Shelia Reid told Sara Lobman when they met at her house April 10. One of Reid’s sons, Jerame, was killed by Bridgeton, New Jersey, police in December 2014.
Lobman told Reid about a delegation of family members of people killed by the police that is visiting Cuba in May to learn about the revolution there.
Reid is among the 14 presidential electors for the party in New Jersey.
“I thought there were only Democrats and Republicans. I didn’t know anything about your party,” Armando Castellano, a plastics factory worker, told Kennedy and Jacob Perasso, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in New York, when they were campaigning in Wisconsin during the run-up to the recent primary elections there.
Castellano had gone to the “Day Without Latinos and Immigrants” rally of 20,000 in Madison Feb. 18 to protest a law that would give police more power to check workers’ immigration documents. “We defeated the law. Now we are going to fight for the right for everyone to get driver’s licenses,” he said.
“It’s out of struggles like this that we get stronger as a class,” Kennedy said, “more capable of making a socialist revolution, taking power out of the bosses’ hands and reorganizing society and production on the basis of solidarity.”
To volunteer for these efforts, or to join the Socialist Workers Party in labor protests and other activities, contact a party branch listed on page 8. Contributions to the Militant Fighting Fund can be sent to the Militant, 306 W. 37th St, 13th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
Related articles:
We need to overthrow the dictatorship of capital’
Communist League in UK: No road to ‘fair capitalism’
SWP: Workers control needed for nuclear safety
Solidarity with Verizon strikers!
Help get the Socialist Workers Party
presidential ticket on the ballot!
Spring subscription drive April 2-May 17 (week 1)
Militant Fighting Fund April 2-May 17
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