New Jersey, New York SWP candidates explain program
UNION CITY, N.J. — “Every four years the Socialist Workers Party has a special opportunity to contest with the capitalist rulers’ candidates to become president of the United States, the highest office of the most powerful and last world imperialist power,” Joanne Kuniansky, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, told 24 people at the SWP campaign hall here April 6.
Rachele Fruit, the party’s candidate for president, “presents the working-class alternative on all the big political issues today,” Kuniansky said. “Millions face unlivable conditions as the world capitalist crisis deepens, assaults on the rights of working people mount, and wars and Jew-hatred spread.”
Kuniansky introduced fellow candidates Lea Sherman and Willie Cotton, SWP candidates for Congress from New Jersey and New York respectively. Several at the meeting had been part of a weeklong team presenting the party’s program and activity across New Jersey and collecting signatures to get Fruit and Kuniansky on the ballot.
“We’ve made a strong start toward our goal of collecting 1,700 signatures, more than double the number required to get on the ballot,” Kuniansky said. By the end of the first week 648 signatures had been collected for Fruit and 768 for Kuniansky.
“Workers are in the mood to fight,” Kuniansky said. She invited participants to join a nationwide day of action by flight attendants at airports around the U.S. and abroad April 11. Rail workers in the U.S. and Canada are discussing ways to defend themselves as the bosses impose punishing and dangerous work schedules, Kuniansky said. She pointed out that 21 Canadian rail workers had been killed and 110 seriously injured on the job in the past 10 years.
Cotton spoke about the toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last year; a series of crashes and near disasters involving Boeing planes; and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after it was hit by a huge container ship whose power had failed. “All of these disasters arose from the capitalists’ drive for profit,” he said. “That’s why the fight for union control of safety and other work conditions is so important.”
Neither of the two ruling parties, nor “independent” capitalist candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr., provide any solutions to the crisis workers face, Kuniansky said. “The Democrats fear Donald Trump will win the election. They’re trying to bankrupt and jail him to keep him off the ballot, violating constitutional freedoms along the way.
“Their real target is the workers who elected Trump and who may do so again,” Kuniansky said. These are the working people Hillary Clinton derided as “deplorables” in 2016 and Biden calls “semi-fascist MAGA Republicans” today.
The SWP campaign calls for a labor party based on the unions, she said. “A labor party would be able to unite the working class and represent its interests irrespective of language or national differences.”
The SWP explains “why working people must take political power as the only way to solve today’s crisis of capitalism,” Sherman said. She had joined the weeklong campaign team and described the interest campaigners found among workers in discussing the party’s defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews and the widespread abhorrence of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack to “murder, rape and terrorize Jews. It was the greatest nightmare the Jewish people had experienced in their lifetimes,” she said.
The reactionary assault was backed by Iran’s clerical capitalist rulers, she said. Tehran and its allied forces across the Middle East are for “finishing the job Hitler started, what he called ‘the Final Solution,’ the annihilation of the Jewish people.
“After the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia the forces of reaction were defeated by the Bolsheviks, who brought pogroms against Jews to an end,” Sherman said. “Such a revolutionary force needs to be built by the working people of Israel, Palestine and the whole Middle East.”
Cotton pointed to the deepening drive by capitalist forces worldwide in response to new conflicts and wars, including the Iranian regime’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. “The danger of nuclear conflagration is closer now than in decades,” he said.
This poses “which class should rule as the question for humanity,” he said. “Working people need to take power out of the hands of the capitalist warmakers to ensure that spreading wars and the potential of nuclear conflict are brought to an end.”
“The decisive stand of the SWP in the fight against Jew-hatred, as well as the party’s defense of Ukrainian sovereignty,” Kuniansky concluded, “places it on the front lines at a turning point in world politics.”
Many people that SWP members spoke to during the weeklong team were attracted to the party’s campaign.
In Pompton Lakes, in northern New Jersey, Jack Dixon and nurse Kristin Trainor told SWP campaigner Tony Lane that they can’t afford to buy a house to start a family. “We have no student debt,” Dixon said. “But we don’t have money for a down payment, let alone interest rates. We have more education and higher paying jobs than our parents did 40 years ago, but they had union jobs.”
Both signed up to put Fruit and Kuniansky on the ballot. Dixon got a subscription to the Militant, and the books Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes.
Sara Lobman, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, contributed to this article.
