Rachele Fruit: ‘The SWP points the way forward for the working class’
LOS ANGELES — “I am running for the office of president of the United States — the highest executive office of the most powerful and last imperialist empire,” Socialist Workers Party candidate Rachele Fruit told an audience at a campaign meeting here March 30.
Fruit is a hotel worker in Miami and member of UNITE HERE Local 355. The event was attended by campaign supporters, as well as people who learned about the party on recent strike picket lines and at a rally to oppose Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The world capitalist economic crisis is bringing devastation and war to millions,” Fruit said. “The fight over which class will rule is the central question that matters for working people everywhere in the world. The U.S. working class is decisive in that fight.”
Fruit pointed to the hundreds of thousands of workers who have marched on strike picket lines in the last couple years — auto and hotel workers; bakery workers, nurses and teachers; actors and screenwriters, all demonstrating their union power and capacity for solidarity. These fights “are built on the historic accomplishments of the U.S. working class, from the American Revolution, the Civil War, the gigantic labor battles in the 1930s and the proletarian social revolution that brought down Jim Crow segregation, proving what the U.S. working class is capable of.
“The fight to defend constitutional freedoms that were won in these revolutions is critical in our class battles today and in the future. They’re liberties held dear by the working class.”
“But the Democratic Party left is leading the charge against our rights,” said Fruit, “calling working people ‘deplorables’ and ‘MAGA Republicans’ — working people who are paying the price for the crisis of capitalism, who resist being told how to think and live, and for whom the Democrats have no solutions other than to try to criminalize them. The Democrats are driving to expand the use of the secret police, especially the FBI.”
Noting the six construction workers who died in the March 27 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Fruit said workers are told to accept that these jobs are “inherently dangerous. Safety conditions continue to deteriorate in every industry as the capitalists drive for profit. Working people must take control over safety and production.”
Workers in a mood to fight
“Workers are in a mood to fight,” she said, pointing to the example of hotel workers in Los Angeles who recently won union contracts at 34 hotels, with 28 left to go.
“The union rallied hundreds and hundreds of hotel workers for months. They got crucial support from other unions. And in the end, they won a $10 per hour pay increase over the four years of the contract, which will expire just in time for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.”
“Sixteen million workers who are in unions is a formidable force, if united and acting together. But that only represents 11% of the working class. And only 6% of workers in private industry are organized. What about the rest?” Fruit said. “What we need is to build a political formation independent of the boss parties, a labor party based on the unions, that organizes the whole working class to fight together. A social movement that can attract all those who want to fight for a future for humanity. A party that could expose and fight against every outrage, every crime the rulers commit against us.
“A labor party would unite and represent the interests of all workers regardless of language or nationality. The global increase in immigration, greatest here in the U.S., is because working people find conditions in many parts of the world are unlivable. Facing lack of jobs, or mob violence tied to capitalist drug cartels and wars, the toilers are forced to relocate. A labor party would demand amnesty with equal rights for all those in the U.S.”
Fight Jew-hatred
“Our campaign will, first and foremost, defend the Jewish people,” she said. “The Oct. 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, with help and direction from the reactionary capitalist rulers in Iran, unleashed a firestorm of Jew-hatred around the world. It was absolutely imperative to stand up against this, without hesitation. A moment of truth. A test for every political current and party.”
Fruit explained how she and her party joined a rally of 3,000 at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach Oct. 10. Fruit held up a picture from 1919, after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, of V.I. Lenin using a gramophone to call on workers and peasants to fight anti-Jewish pogroms.
“The Holocaust took place because ‘democratic’ imperialism cared nothing for the Jews and because of the betrayals of the Stalinists who prevented the fighting working classes in Europe from taking power. That’s why Israel had to be and why it has to be today.
“Since the Oct. 7 pogrom, Maggie Trowe, my running mate, and other candidates of the SWP have joined debates at city council and other public meetings. Laura Garza, here tonight, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate, spoke at a meeting of hundreds in Pasadena last week. She was greatly outnumbered, but clear and confident. We are once again becoming known as the socialists who oppose Jew-hatred.”
Norton Sandler, who chaired the meeting, also introduced Eric Simpson from Oakland, the SWP’s candidate for U.S. Congress in the 12th District there.
During the discussion period, one person said it seems to him that Israel is answering Hamas’ attack by attacking hospitals, schools and housing. “Many Palestinians have died. I feel bad for them.”
“Israel is not at war with the Palestinian people but with Hamas. The conditions were set up in Gaza by Hamas that led to this. When they came to power in 2007, they destroyed infrastructure and concentrated on building tunnels and other military outposts,” Fruit answered. “War is terrible, yes. But the only way to prevent yet more pogroms is for Israel to finish off Hamas. The demand for a cease-fire is nothing more than a demand for Israel to surrender to continued murderous attacks by Hamas, which it has pledged to repeat until all Jews are either killed or driven out of the region.”
Another meeting participant asked about a two-state solution. “Nobody supports a two-state solution. It’s a dream. There is no ‘leadership’ among Palestinians that doesn’t want to destroy Israel,” Fruit said. “The alternative I point to is to make a working-class revolution based on a leadership that unites all working people in the region to take power.
“An Algerian Muslim rail worker from Canada recently told the Militant, ‘I’m not for a two-state solution at all. I’m for one state, Israel, and we can fight for our rights there.’
“The U.S. rulers have their own imperialist interests at variance with Israel. That’s becoming more clear. Fighting Jew-hatred is not their concern and never has been,” she said. “They don’t defend Israel as a refuge for the Jews. Most working people in the U.S. support Israel’s right to exist.”
Putin’s war against Ukraine
In her presentation, Fruit took up the war by the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia against Ukraine, a war described by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Moscow’s attempt “to erase our history, erase our country.”
Fruit said, “Ukrainian workers and farmers have been conducting a courageous fight to defend their national sovereignty and independence for the last 10 years, since hundreds of thousands of working people across the country set up tents and barricades to oppose the pro-Kremlin government in Kyiv in the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan.
“The Socialist Workers Party responded to the Maidan by sending three Militant reporting teams to meet and learn from the fighters involved, including coal miners, nuclear workers at Chernobyl and Enerhodar, rail and steelworkers and other defenders of Ukrainian sovereignty.
“The Militant has led in getting out the truth about the Ukrainian people’s battle for independence, as well as the struggles by the country’s working people in their own class interests.
“The decisive and clear stand of the SWP and the communist movement internationally in the fight against Jew-hatred, as well as in defense of Ukrainian sovereignty, places the party on the front lines at a turning point in world politics.
“These two historic confrontations are accelerating the weaknesses and breakdowns of the imperialist ‘order’ and the danger of spreading wars. They have accelerated tensions between working people on the one side and reactionary forces of bourgeois politics on the other.
“There is more danger than ever that some capitalist regime — maybe Iran, Russia, United States, China, who knows — will resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the face of extreme pressure. The SWP says, ‘Only socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries can bring the danger of a world nuclear conflagration to an end once and for all.’
“We don’t call for nonproliferation or arms treaties or disarmament. Our founding program, drafted by Leon Trotsky in 1938, said, ‘Disarmament? But the entire question revolves around who will disarm whom. The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers.”
Treachery of bourgeois liberalism
“It is important to absorb the depth of the treachery of bourgeois liberalism. And with it the origins and role of the United Nations,” Fruit said. “The entire middle-class left has become unabashed cheerleaders for Hamas. They don’t see the working class as the force that can and will advance humanity.”
“Workers are trying to figure out what is going on and why. They are the ones coming around with an interest in learning more about the party. They ask, ‘What’s a pogrom? Where did Hamas come from and what do they stand for? What was the Holocaust? Why did Russia invade Ukraine?’
“We play an invaluable role explaining the real history and providing a working-class perspective.”
“The physical extermination of the Jews is the banner of reaction against proletarian revolution in the imperialist epoch. It is the working class that has a vital interest in standing up against Jew-hatred. Imperialism’s march toward fascism and war can only be stopped by a revolutionary working-class movement that charts a course to take political power out of their hands,” said Fruit.
“The governments in Ukraine and in Israel are capitalist. They defend the exploitation of the working class, but we support their efforts to win the wars they are fighting today. If they do, the working class will have more space to organize, unite and find allies, both inside and beyond their own countries. We need that space.”
Fruit pointed to the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution. “The Cuban toilers have had, under the greatest of odds, 65 years to show the world what can be achieved, how human beings will change. And we fight like hell to defend it. As Raúl Castro said in January, ‘We have overcome our problems by fighting, and it has been worth it.’”
“Capitalist production has drawn hundreds of millions of people into the working class — from Asia to Africa and Latin America — and they are being drawn into world politics in a new and urgent way,” she said. “They’re open to discussing why workers need to see our class as an independent political force with common interests the world over.
“More workers are using the unions to fight, walking picket lines, learning confidence in one another, working to win solidarity, and gaining vital class-struggle experience that we need for the deeper class battles ahead. They are beginning to see our class as a social force with immense potential power.
“We exist to win these workers to the banner of socialist revolution and to the Socialist Workers Party. Join us. There’s no better thing you can do with your life.”
Fruit urged everyone there to sign up as endorsers of the SWP campaign and to join in campaigning.
A delicious dinner was prepared for meeting participants who contributed $1,760 to advance the national campaign.
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