‘Why should I sign for the Socialist Workers Party?’
MINNEAPOLIS — “Hello! If this has anything to do with elections, I want to know what you are doing,” said Layla Bashir, waving Rachele Fruit over to her car outside a Target store here July 22.
Fruit explained that she is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president. The SWP calls for building a party of labor to organize and mobilize working people, union and nonunion alike. “Our class, the working class, needs to break with the two-party system and all of the capitalist parties,” she said.
“Wow, you’re right!” said Bashir, who is a nurse. “My eyes were really opened yesterday when they forced the president out of the race. They just pulled their money and changed the candidate without us even having a vote. The Democrats are all bogus. I’m going to spread the word about your campaign to everyone I know.” Bashir joined hundreds of others here signing a petition to put Fruit and SWP vice presidential candidate Dennis Richter on the ballot. She took campaign flyers to distribute and a copy of the Militant.
The SWP has kicked off a 16-day effort by campaign supporters to take advantage of the interest in a working-class alternative to the bosses’ parties and to introduce the SWP program. Campaigners plan to collect well over the 2,000 signatures required to put the party’s ticket on the Minnesota ballot.
“Despite their rhetoric about ‘hard-working families,’ neither the Republicans nor Democrats are interested in defending the lives and livelihoods of working people,” Fruit told those at a public meeting here July 20. “They are in business to ensure that the capitalist ruling families are securely in power, and that the military is strong enough to defend U.S. imperialist interests in the world.
“The working class continues to feel the squeeze from high prices and difficulties getting decent, well-paid full-time jobs,” she noted. “Neither Bidenomics nor Make-America-Great rhetoric can change this reality. That’s why more workers are joining and organizing unions to fight for higher pay and cost-of-living protection against the ravages of inflation.”
Fruit cited a recent report that one of the few remaining birthing centers in southern Alabama, in rural Clarke County, will be closing next month. Already Alabama has a maternal mortality rate of more than 64 deaths per 100,000 births, nearly double the national average. For women who are Black the rate is 100.7. “This staggering statistic reflects the continuing oppression of the Black nationality in the United States, which can only be overcome by struggle and the fight for workers power,” she said.
The ruling class is beginning to face the fact that the low point of labor resistance is behind us, she said. That was clear at the Republican Party convention. “Trump’s appeal from the beginning has been his willingness to talk about the carnage facing working-class communities across the country,” she said. “But having Sean O’Brien, the head of the Teamsters union, address the Republican convention is something new.”
O’Brien’s speech did not break in any way from capitalist politics. Instead, he presents working with so-called friends of labor in both of the bosses’ parties. But his talk demonstrated that the ruling class sees a need to convince workers that they have a stable choice among the capitalist parties.
“We want them to consider the Socialist Workers campaign as the road forward,” Fruit said. “It shows how big the openings are for us to get a hearing, as we build solidarity through our unions and take our campaign to every workers’ struggle we can.”
Imperialism’s world disorder
“The world capitalist economic crisis is bringing devastation and war to many millions,” Fruit said. “The fight over which class rules is the central question that matters for working people everywhere in the world. The U.S. working class is decisive in that fight.”
Washington “is a weakened imperialist power, but still the most powerful, and seeks to expand its economic, military and political control throughout the world just like its competitors do — both its allies and enemies,” she said. “The NATO summit in Washington was a step toward preparing for the wars to come with ever more terrible weapons.”
In 1916, Bolshevik revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin noted that imperialism “is not a policy that a government chooses,” Fruit said. “The drive toward war is inherent to capitalism in the imperialist epoch. It can only be ended by organizing a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers to take state power and overturn capitalist rule. And that’s what the Bolsheviks did.
“The first two imperialist world wars came at a cost of nearly 100 million lives,” she noted. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the Tehran-backed massacre of Jews in Israel by Hamas Oct. 7 have sharply accelerated imperialism’s world disorder today.
“There is more danger than ever that some capitalist regime — maybe in Iran, Russia, the United States or China — will resort to the use of nuclear weapons,” she said. “Only socialist revolutions can bring the danger of a world nuclear conflagration to an end once and for all.”
After the meeting, several participants endorsed Fruit’s campaign and signed up to help collect signatures over the next two weeks. “I think capitalism today is not good for the workers,” said Tyler Hurtgen, a young bakery worker who joined in campaigning for Fruit the next day. “I liked what she said.”
“This is the only campaign putting forward the need to fight to end the wages system,” said Chris Pennock, a shop steward in the Letter Carriers union, as he signed an endorser card after the meeting. “This campaign is not about opposing Trump. Looking across the landscape of the left that is all you see.”
“I do think what Trump has said and done in some cases is criminal,” said Pennock’s co-worker, Andrew Hagan, who also attended the meeting. “But I’m glad I came, I’m always open to new perspectives.”
SWP campaigners “explain that Jew-hatred, a reflection of the crisis of capitalism, is also a life and death question for the working class,” Fruit said at the meeting. “We have to act against every move to slander, scapegoat and attack Jews.”
Answer modern Holocaust deniers
It’s important to explain what Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom was, she said, “in order to answer the 21st century Holocaust deniers. Like Roger Waters, from the band Pink Floyd, who is getting prime time exposure to say that those who claim that rapes occurred are ‘filthy disgusting’ liars.”
Campaign supporters are having many discussions on this question as they talk with working people. Several have bought copies of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
SWP campaigners Betsy Farley and Kevin Dwire met a large group of farmworkers outside the Walmart in Bloomington. They came from all over Mexico, from Guadalajara to Veracruz, for temporary work on a nearby farm.
One worker told Farley he was very pleased to hear about the SWP, a party “for the working class” in the U.S. He was especially happy to see the article in the Militant about common actions by U.S. and Mexican truck drivers for better wages and conditions. He explained he had been part of union organizing in Mexico. The farmworkers took several campaign flyers in Spanish and a copy of the Militant to pass around.
Daily teams will campaign across the state through Aug. 4. If you’d like to help, contact the branch of the Socialist Workers Party in your area.
