Join Socialist Workers Party campaigning in Albany!

BY TERRY EVANS

NEW YORK — “It’s tens of millions of workers, not Donald Trump, who are the target of the relentless efforts of liberal politicians and newspaper editors, backed by the petty-bourgeois left, to invalidate the election,” said Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Albany mayor, at a Militant Labor Forum here May 26. She spoke alongside Osborne Hart, SWP candidate for New York mayor.

Trowe described the broad assaults working people have faced over years, altering our conditions of life in unprecedented ways. The active working class has shrunk, as the bosses’ economic crisis has pushed millions out of the workforce. For the first time in decades, life expectancy for workers is falling, birth rates are going down, and young workers are stuck living with their parents longer and longer. The only thing going up is deaths from an epidemic of opiates and suicides.

“The propertied rulers sense workers’ growing refusal to accept this,” said Trowe. “This is what the liberals see behind the election of Trump, so they demonize us and try to push us out of politics. They’re determined to drive Trump out of the White House, but their real fear is action by working people,” she said. “They try to paint Trump as a trigger-happy warmonger — it’s the opposite. He acts to meet the needs of the capitalist rulers — talking to the Chinese to press North Korea, seeking stability for imperialist interests in the Mideast.

“Democrats talk admiringly about the so-called ‘deep state’ — the FBI, the CIA and the unelected federal bureaucracy — correcting the ‘problem’ of Trump’s election,” she said. “It’s a dangerous witch hunt, because it’s aimed at the working class and its vanguard.”

“Every labor battle breaking out today is important,” she said, describing how party members in Albany have gotten to know strikers at Momentive, in nearby Waterford, who beat back a union-busting assault by the bosses. She encouraged meeting participants to back the strikes by 175,000 construction workers in Quebec and silver miners in Mullan, Idaho.

“We want to win workers to seeing that the Cuban Revolution is a powerful example for the coming American Revolution,” Trowe said. She and Hart were both participants in the recent May Day march in Havana.

Trowe urged participants to join her in taking advantage of growing openings to campaign for communism, to introduce SWP candidates, and to expand the distribution of the Militant and books by SWP leaders.

She invited everyone to come to Albany to help campaign for the SWP in July and August, and, as they campaign, to gather well over the 1,500 signatures required to put the party on the ballot.

The Albany campaign, she said, will be an opportunity to deepen collaboration with the SWP branch in New York and the Communist League branch in Montreal.

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