Rachele Fruit: ‘Workers in the US, UK face common enemy’
LONDON — Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, ended her weeklong visit to the U.K. at a public meeting here Aug. 24, organized by the Communist League’s London branch. Fruit had visited Coventry the day before to meet Amazon warehouse workers and learn about their fight for a union.
“Everywhere I’ve campaigned, I’ve had similar experiences,” she told the meeting. “It’s a reflection of a new mood within the working class.
“I went to the refuse depot in Redbridge, east London, where I spoke with Unite members who were due to strike. They told me they’d just voted to accept a new offer of improved sick pay, reduced hours, paid overtime and a commitment to maintain their trucks — a key demand to reverse speedup and the erosion of safety.
“As workers find ways to resist, they’re bumping into the reality that to be successful, they have to address politics,” Fruit said. “Rival capitalist parties — Democrat and Republican in the U.S., Labour and Conservative in the U.K. — are responding to the crisis of their system in the only way they know, by making working people pay.
“We’re finding openness to the need for a political break, the need to forge a party of labor that charts a course of independent working-class political action in both domestic and foreign policy.
Such a course involves seeing that the working class is an international class, Fruit said. “We have to counter the efforts of the employers and their parties to get us to think of exploited producers in other countries as enemies.” She read from a strong statement of solidarity sent to striking rail workers in Canada by Jim Hopkins, branch secretary of the train drivers’ union, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, at Longsight in Manchester.
“Such solidarity is a great example,” Fruit said. “This is one of the issues that union leaders at Amazon in Coventry have also had to deal with. To build the union, they had to overcome divisions along national lines promoted by the company; they put out literature and held meetings in different languages. Winning 1,400 workers to join the union depended on this.”
Another expression of international solidarity, Fruit reported, was a London demonstration of 200 in solidarity with strikes and protests in India following the rape and murder of a trainee doctor there. Fruit talked to Vilya Navarayan, a doctor in London, at the action. After protests in the past, the Indian government promised to create safer conditions for women, Navarayan said, “but nothing has changed.”
“The fight for women’s emancipation will never be joined by capitalist governments, let alone solved by them,” Fruit told the meeting. “We have to look to the working class, the only class with no stake in exploitation and oppression of any kind.”
Among the 38 people present at the meeting were participants who had come from Belgium, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. A two-person delegation from the Cuban Embassy in London, press officer Arístides Hechavarría and his soon-to-be replacement, Orestes Martínez, attended the meeting.
Fight against Jew-hatred
“As the rulers seek to divert anger away from capitalism as the source of our problems, more are pointing the finger at Jews,” Fruit said. “This has grown significantly since the deadly Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel carried out by Hamas, part of the Tehran-led ‘axis of resistance.’” Fruit reported that she’d been interviewed by the Manchester-based Jewish Telegraph and Jewish News in London.
A lively discussion followed Fruit’s presentation. “Is it possible to simultaneously defend Israel’s right to exist and the right of Palestinians to self-determination?” one person asked.
“Our campaign defends Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews,” Fruit said. “There’s no other country that will fight arms-in-hand as a refuge. People on the left of capitalist politics paint Hamas as some sort of liberation movement. It’s the opposite. Its roots lie in alliance with the Nazis. Its goal is the destruction of the Israeli state and the extermination of Jews.
“Defeating Hamas and rendering it militarily incapable is a precondition for addressing the national aspirations of the Palestinians,” she said. “Hamas treats working people in Gaza as sacrificial fodder and human shields. It fights any action by working people, especially across national lines. It denies women’s rights, steals food from convoys, engages in arbitrary detention and tortures political opponents.
“But defeating Hamas is not sufficient. There can be no real safe haven for Jews under imperialism. Both the Jewish national question and the national aspirations of the Palestinians will only be resolved as working people of all religions and ethnic roots across the region join in revolutionary struggles to take state power and end capitalist rule,” Fruit said.
Responding to a related question, she said that in the U.S. and other imperialist countries “those hailing Hamas and its worship of violence will be pushed back as the class struggle expands and as unions and mass organizations of the oppressed become weightier in the leadership of political battles.
“History shows that national enmities can be overcome. But that takes revolutionary struggle and leadership,” Fruit said, pointing to the example of the Russian Revolution.
“We look to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. We’re building a party in their image — proletarian in program, composition and habits of conduct. And we look to Cuba’s socialist revolution and Fidel Castro’s insistence that ‘to be a revolutionary means more and more to be a communist.’”
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