Supporters of Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, are taking the party’s campaign to workers on their doorsteps, at union rallies and actions called to fight Jew-hatred. The campaign gets a hearing as working people face economic and social attacks.
SWP campaigner Vincent Auger discussed Fruit’s campaign with painter Jessie Olvera at a United Farm Workers solidarity rally in Sunnyside, Washington, March 24, where SWP campaigners set up a literature table.
“Which presidential candidate is more labor friendly, Biden or Trump?” Olvera asked.
“Neither,” Auger replied. “Biden showed that when he and Congress forced a contract on rail workers that they had voted down. The SWP’s campaign says that unions need to break from the two-party shell game to make advances in our wages and conditions, and to fight against all their policies, domestic and international, that aim to divide workers and weaken us.”
Fruit wrote in the Militant, “The labor movement is made up of unions representing millions of workers today,” and unions need “to build a labor party capable of fighting for our class interests in the political as well as economic arena.”
Olvera told Auger he also thought that neither the Democrats nor Republicans were for workers’ rights.
Griselda Mendoza Azevedo, Olvera’s companion, joined the discussion. She is an apple warehouse worker and said she was interested in knowing more about workers’ rights and how an amnesty for immigrants in the U.S. can be won.
She got a subscription to the Militant and the books The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark; In Defense of the US Working Class by Waters; and Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution.
Each title is on offer as part of this spring’s eight-week international campaign to win 1,350 new Militant readers, sell 1,350 books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries and raise $165,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund. The campaign of the SWP and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. runs through May 7.
Sara Lobman, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, and Willie Cotton, the party’s candidate for U.S. Congress, went to Effy’s Café in Manhattan to express solidarity with the owners and staff, after the restaurant was hit with antisemitic graffiti March 16. Vandals spray-painted “Free Gaza” and “Form line here to support genocide.”
Solidarity with café after attack
As news about the attack got out there wasn’t an empty seat in the restaurant as customers came to show support, while neighbors joined in scrubbing off the Jew-hating graffiti.
“The vandalism of Effy’s Café, an Israeli-owned eatery in Manhattan, must be condemned,” Lobman wrote in a press statement the SWP candidates brought to the restaurant. “Hamas’s slaughter of Jews, the rape of Jewish women, and kidnapping of infants and the elderly have nothing to do with defending Palestinians.
“Vandalism, thuggery, ‘shut ‘em down’ actions targeting Jews and Israel’s right to exist are not about social justice. They remind us more of Hitler’s jackbooted fascists, who began by smashing Jewish shop windows, and then proceeded to physically crush the German trade unions and working-class political parties,” she said. “The labor movement must stand against Jew-hatred.”
In Montreal, Katy LeRougetel, the Communist League candidate for parliament in the city’s LaSalle-Emard-Verdun riding, sat down in a coffee shop March 23 with Mohammed Mutlak, a co-worker and fellow member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union, to discuss Israel’s war to defeat Hamas.
“The Arab governments don’t care about the Palestinians,” Mutlak said.
“They have totally different class interests from those of working people in the region,” LeRougetel said. “And governments in Ottawa and Washington maneuver for their own interests — not to protect Jews or Palestinians.”
“Jew-hatred is a big problem in the Middle East but also here,” LeRougetel said. Mutlak agreed, pointing to a poisonous antisemitic stereotype he came across. “I saw a guy on Facebook who said to watch the Jews, they have the money.”
LeRougetel and Mutlak discussed how workers could chart a way forward. “I am relaxed about the future, big things are coming,” Mutlak said.
“We have to prepare for the future by building a revolutionary party, being part of union battles, standing up for democratic rights,” LeRougetel said. “And if we don’t fight Jew-hatred, we will never build working-class unity.”
To continue the discussion, Mutlak sent LeRougetel a video on British intervention in the Israel-Palestine conflict and bought the Arabic-language versions of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun, which is available in English in New International no. 12. Both titles are by Barnes.
To join campaigning for Fruit and other SWP candidates, contact the campaign office nearest you listed in the directory.
