Vol. 80/No. 31 August 22, 2016
Working people in Utah welcome SWP campaign
Kennedy, who worked as an underground miner in Utah, West Virginia and Alabama, was a leader of the widely known 2003-2004 Co-Op miners’ strike in Huntington, Utah. She has campaigned here several times over the past month. Supporters of the SWP have been going door to door throughout the state engaging in discussions with working people about the deepening capitalist depression, the class conflicts on the horizon and why the working class needs to think socially and act politically.
“I’m glad to hear Alyson Kennedy will be on the ballot in Utah,” said Bob Fivecoat, a retired miner from East Carbon. “She is very respected here and also she is very respectful. I am urging others to support her campaign.”
“As a former co-worker of Alyson Kennedy at the Co-Op mine, I worked with her and many other underground coal miners in the struggle to win union representation with the UMWA back in 2003,” wrote Bill Estrada Aug. 10. “Alyson played a central role in our efforts for better working conditions, dignity, respect and in building solidarity for our union fight.
“In July, I joined Alyson in knocking on doors in Carbon and Emery counties collecting signatures to get her on the ballot. There are many workers, including coal miners, that we talked to who remember our union fight and supported it.”
“Neither Trump nor Clinton offer any proposals to address what working people are facing today — wars, high unemployment, deteriorating working conditions and declining wages,” Kennedy said as she landed in Utah Aug. 9 for a press conference when state officials confirmed the SWP will be on the ballot. “We are getting a hearing when we explain there is another road through the fight for workers power and why we need to overthrow this rotten capitalist system.”
Campaigners have been making extensive use of the new book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. More than 220 workers, young people and others throughout the state bought the book from door-to-door campaigners in the last five weeks.
Dissatisfaction with the choices the two major capitalist parties have put forward has spurred additional bourgeois candidates to enter the presidential race in Utah. The most recent is McMullin, who is backed by William Kristol, the anti-Trump editor of the National Review and a number of prominent Republican Party leaders. McMullin, who is a member of the Mormon church, says his candidacy is fueled by the widespread loss of faith “in the candidates of both major parties.” He criticizes Trump’s scapegoating of Muslims, saying it sets back the fight against terrorism.
Some two-thirds of Utahns are Mormons, who form the backbone of the Republican Party here. Trump’s calls for a religious test for immigrants and a ban on Muslim immigration is a reminder to many Mormons of the fierce persecution the church faced in the 19th century.
Founded in western New York in 1830, the Mormons came under attack as heretics and were driven from the state. They moved to Missouri, where they were met with violence and a call from the governor for residents to exterminate them. They fled to Illinois, where a lynch mob shot and killed Joseph Smith, the group’s founder. They then moved to the Great Salt Lake Valley, which was not yet a state at the time.
Additionally, Trump’s “America First” demagogy does not sit well with many Mormon believers, who promote their religion worldwide. Every year thousands of youth go abroad on religious missions. The type of American nationalism fostered by Trump — equally promoted as a centerpiece of the Clinton campaign — flies in the face of the international experiences and contacts many Mormons have made over the years.
Thousands of refugees — many from Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia — have made Utah their home.
With more and more working people here weighing alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties, the Socialist Workers Party gets a good hearing posing a clear class alternative. “The capitalists have two parties,” Alyson Kennedy said. “The SWP sees the working class not only as the class that is bearing the brunt of the capitalist crisis, but also as the only class with the power to end the dictatorship of the capitalist system and fight for a socialist world to end the exploitation of working people.”
“I think that is about right,” said John Bell, a retired construction worker who was talking with SWP members on his doorstep in Taylorsville about how none of the capitalist parties offer solutions for working people. “The work you are doing out here is needed.”
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