Across the country, supporters of Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party 2024 candidate for president, are widely circulating the Militant carrying her working-class program. They’re discussing it with workers on their doorsteps, at plant gates, actions against Jew-hatred, in protests against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and at union strike picket lines and rallies.
“The future of humanity depends on building a leadership, a party, that can mobilize the working class in our millions to take state power away from the capitalist rulers and place it into our own hands, to start down the road to a socialist revolution,” Fruit says. “This will open the door to ending the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalist rule worldwide.”
“The labor movement is made up of unions representing millions of workers today,” Fruit states in her campaign program. “The unions need to break from the political parties of the bosses — Democrats and Republicans alike — to build a labor party capable of fighting for our class interests in the political as well as the economic arena. To speak as a tribune for all those exploited and oppressed by capital.”
As Fruit says, “We are human beings who can take action to shape our future.”
This campaign goes hand in hand with the eight-week spring drive to win 1,350 new Militant subscribers. The paper is the voice of the SWP campaign and the best source anywhere for news on issues and battles in the interest of the working class. This Militant campaign is accompanied by selling 1,350 books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries and raising $165,000 for the continuing production of the paper.
Supporters of the Socialist Workers Party campaign in New Jersey wrapped up the first part of the efforts to put Fruit and the New Jersey candidates — Joanne Kuniansky for U.S. Senate and Lea Sherman for Congress — on the ballot.
“We got well over double the signatures needed to put Sherman on the ballot,” Terry Evans told the Militant March 17. “On March 31 we’ll start talking to working people about Fruit’s challenge to Biden and Trump and her working-class program. We aim to gather 1,700 signatures for Fruit and vice presidential candidate Margaret Trowe, and another 1,700 for Kuniansky, by April 21.”
This is the first of a number of ballot drives the SWP will carry out to put Fruit on the ballot across the country.
In Miami supporters of Fruit’s presidential campaign joined with 300 protesters at a March 10 “Rally for Education” action against the Florida state government’s attack on public-sector unions.
A new union-busting law known as SB256 will require the recertification of all school workers’ unions, which must show at least 60% of the employees want to be members, SWP campaigner Steve Warshell told the Militant. “This means more than 30,000 educators and staff in Miami are threatened with losing their union,” Karla Hernández-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade, told the rally.
Fruit’s supporters introduced her campaign. One African American teacher stopped by and mentioned she had gotten and read Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
“I read it with a great deal of interest,” she said. “There were arguments in there that I’ve never heard before or since. Sadly, these ideas are not widely discussed among teachers these days.” She got a copy of the Militant.
Communist League candidates
Hundreds of Russian nationals living in the U.K. filled up a half-mile-long line in London at noon on March 17 to cast votes at the Russian Embassy against Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine, as thousands of other Russians had done at home and around the world. Several carried Ukrainian flags and other signs of opposition to the Putin regime. Across the street hundreds more gathered for a rally.
Joining protesters was Pamela Holmes, Communist League candidate for Parliament in the Tottenham district. She addressed the rally and talked with those lining up to vote.
“As the world economic crisis and instability deepens, working people need to rely on our own strength and independent organization to take power out of the hands of the war makers and exploiters and take political power into our own hands,” she told the crowd.
Communist League members campaigned in Borehamwood, north of London March 17. “We certainly need a workers’ party,” David Lawless, a retired electrician told CL member Debra Jacobs. “We’ve got to relearn how to use the unions.”
Lawless said his great-grandfather “came to the U.K. from Latvia. Like many he was driven out by pogroms. Now Jews are again facing attack.” He was interested in the Militant’s coverage of the fight against Jew-hatred and bought a subscription, as well as The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation by Abram Leon.
Leon explains there is “no solution to the Jewish question under capitalism, just as there is no solution to the other problems before humanity.”
To get involved in the Fruit campaign or campaigns of the Communist Leagues, contact the campaign office nearest you.