OAKLAND, Calif. — “When the working class starts to stand up, as they’re doing today, everything changes. More workers start to think, what can I do?” Laura Garza, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from California, said at a Sept. 22 Militant Labor Forum here. “Opportunities to strengthen the unions and build the Socialist Workers Party open up.”
A day later, supporters of Garza and Margaret Trowe, SWP candidate for Congress in District 12, fanned out around Oakland, distributing the party’s program, petitioning to put Garza on the ballot and urging support for striking United Auto Workers members.
The effort was also part of an eight-week international campaign by the SWP and the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. to expand circulation of the Militant and books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries. The SWP has also launched its annual party-building fund to raise $140,000. International goals for the fall propaganda campaign are 1,350 subscriptions to the Militant, and 1,350 books. The campaign runs from Sept. 23 to Nov. 21.
“What workers are experiencing here is the result of the crisis of capitalism that is worldwide,” Garza, a rail conductor and a SMART-TD union member, told forum participants. “The campaign will be an opportunity to discuss with workers what is the answer to capitalism’s wars and the threat of nuclear destruction. And to discuss the crisis at home that’s reflected in the growth of drug addiction, the rise in maternal deaths and life expectancy going down.”
Alongside building support for union struggles, Trowe told participants she’d sent a letter of solidarity to rabbis at synagogues in Fremont and Los Altos Hills protesting bomb threats against their congregations. There have been 49 such threats in 13 states since mid-July.
“Jew-hatred will grow as the capitalist crisis deepens,” she said. “The rulers will give the green light to rightists who scapegoat Jews. This threat can only be ended by a revolutionary working-class struggle for power.”
Over the weekend 92 workers signed Garza’s petition, bringing the total to 150. Campaigners won 14 new subscribers to the Militant and sold 12 books.
SWP literature tables were set up at the Walmart parking lot in San Leandro. Dozens of workers stopped, responding to signs backing the UAW strike and defending constitutional freedoms. School maintenance worker Antonio Maravilla told Garza he is a registered Democrat, but there are problems with both parties. “Everyone is trying to point fingers at each other,” he said.
“The fundamental division is the working class on one hand and the bosses on the other,” Garza said. “The task is to unite and organize workers to fight for our rights, but also to get to the point where we can take power out of the hands of the capitalists.”
In Hayward, SWP campaigners knocked on the door of Lizbeth Flores, a child care worker, and discussed the UAW strike. When they mentioned the union’s fight for wages to go up automatically as prices rise, she said, “that’s what we need. With the rents here, it’s hard to keep up.
“I remember Occupy,” Flores added, referring to the Occupy Wall Street protests following the 2008 financial crisis. “But nothing came of it.”
“The forces leading Occupy put their energies into electing Democrats,” SWP campaigner Jim Altenberg said. “So nothing changed. Our power has to start with organizing workers independent of both capitalist parties. Our campaign is raising the need for a labor party, based on the unions.”
At a barbecue that wrapped up the weekend, Garza described the strike by the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. “Bosses had a strategy of starving out the writers, but they didn’t count on it being a summer of labor in Los Angeles,” she said. “Hotel workers joined the writers’ picket lines and Teamsters at UPS and nurses joined in. All these fights helped each other. Workers gained strength from the solidarity that was given.”
To join in campaigning with SWP candidates or get involved in the fall propaganda campaigns, contact party branches.
Deborah Liatos contributed to this article.