“I’m a Democrat, but I don’t agree with a lot of what’s going on, including what’s in the media, whether it’s CNN or Fox News. You can’t trust either side,” Hamza Hassan told Joel Britton, Socialist Workers Party candidate for California governor, when Britton knocked on his door in Hayward, July 16.
“Whether they say it’s Republican versus Democrat, CNN versus Fox, red states versus blue — it’s really a class divide,” Britton said. “Neither party has answers to inflation and the attacks on workers today. We need to do everything we can to unite working people, to build our unions as fighting organizations that can build a labor party and fight for a workers and farmers government.”
Hassan welcomed recent efforts to organize unions at Amazon. “The SWP is preparing for bigger struggles in the future,” Britton said. “We are helping to build the leadership that is needed.”
Hassan renewed his subscription and got Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power along with Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity and The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning.
Convincing Militant subscribers to become long-term readers of the paper is at the center of a five-week drive by SWP members in the U.S. and Communist League members in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. The goal is to win 300 renewals from subscribers and sell 300 books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders to them.
Defending workers and our families
When Walmart worker Kerline Marcelin got a flyer about the SWP campaign in Miami she recognized one of her co-workers, Steve Warshell, was the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate.
“Some things you say, I don’t know about,” she told Warshell, “but one thing for sure I agree with is what you say about families. I am a new mother and sometimes we don’t know how we’re going to make it. We barely have enough money for rent.”
“What the SWP raises is tied to fighting for conditions that make supporting a family affordable,” Warshell said. “We need jobs, protection from skyrocketing prices, affordable child care, access to family planning including abortion.” Mercelin got a copy of the Militant.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Gio Akpaglo told Samir Hazboun, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Ohio, and party member Amy Husk that his family has “been having a lot of discussions about abortion,” when they visited him July 16.
The fight for women’s rights, including access to abortion, is part of the broader fight to defend working-class interests, the SWP members said.
“Families are having a harder time today with bosses forcing many workers to work hours that make it impossible to raise a family, especially without affordable day care,” Hazboun said. “We need to support fights like the FireKing strike in Indiana, where Teamster members are striking for better health care for their families and a living wage.”
“Women in Cuba have been able to make tremendous strides forward because of the revolution in 1959,” Husk said. The revolutionary government “advanced programs that benefited women and families, like child care centers and training programs for women who had worked as domestic help.”
Akpaglo renewed his Militant subscription and bought the books The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record and Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? His sister, Reva, purchased Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution.
“So what is the solution to inflation?” bakery worker Joseph Osagie asked Communist League members in Manchester, England, when they knocked on his door July 20.
“We must fight through our unions for cost-of-living adjustments so that whenever prices rise so do our wages and benefit payments,” CL member Hugo Wils replied.
“It’s the same in Nigeria where I come from,” Osagie said. The annual inflation there was 18.6% in June. “Putting two square meals a day on the table is hard.”
“We have to build a working-class party through union struggles that can lead us to take power,” Wils said. Osagie renewed his Militant subscription and purchased The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party and New International no. 12 with the article “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun.”
Help distribute the Militant and campaign for SWP candidates. Contact the nearest SWP branch listed in the directory.