MIAMI — Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, spoke to dockworkers, members of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1416, here outside their union hall Feb. 25. The sign on her campaign table read, “Safety on the job and the fight against Jew-hatred are union questions.”
“We are asking you to support our working-class campaign against the Democrats and the Republicans. Just as we need our unions to fight the employers, we need our own party in the political arena,” Fruit said.
Many workers greeted volunteers on the team. Supporters of the Militant have been campaigning here for years. Some made a point of welcoming us saying “Shalom,” acknowledging the party’s support for the existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people and for the fight against Hamas.
Crane operator Henry Reagan, an ILA worker on the docks for 40 years, told Fruit that what Hamas did to the Jews was murder. “The world today is in chaos,” he said. Fruit said that the capitalist rulers must be replaced or there will be no end to the wars we see unfolding today.
“The witch hunt by the Democratic Party against Donald Trump is an attack against the millions of workers who want to vote for him,” she said. “Trump will be on the ballot,” Reagan said, adding he would read in the Militant he bought about the SWP program and activities, and “really give it some thought.”
This Militant worker-correspondent spoke with a porter who stopped by the table. He picked up a copy of The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon. “I can’t believe how they came in and murdered those people in Israel,” he said. I explained how Leon’s book traces the history of the Jews from biblical times to the onset of the Holocaust in the 1940s, when Leon was captured by the Nazis and killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He bought the book, along with February 1965: The Final Speeches by Malcolm X.