Rachele Fruit: ‘We need to build a party of labor’
BY SARA LOBMAN
NEW YORK — “The fight over which class rules is the central question facing working people everywhere in the world,” Rachele Fruit told the 48 people at a public meeting here Sept. 8. “The U.S. working class is decisive in that fight.”
The meeting and reception was the culmination of a two-day tour here. On Sept. 7 Fruit participated in the New York Labor Day Parade, where she spoke with dozens of workers and was interviewed by a reporter for Fox 5 NY. That afternoon she headed uptown to the Harlem Book Fair where she met people who came by the Pathfinder Books booth.
Throughout the weekend she found workers interested in a working-class campaign that is an alternative to both of the capitalist rulers’ main candidates — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And provides an explanation of why working people need to decisively break with the Democratic and Republican parties and build our own party, a party of labor, that we can use to fight in our millions to advance our own class interests. Fruit urged all those she met to endorse the campaign and get involved. More than 15 did, including several who were new to the party.
The world capitalist economic crisis is bringing devastation and war to many millions, she told the meeting, pointing to the watershed developments of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Iran-sponsored pogrom by Hamas that killed 1,200 people, most of them Jews living in Israel.
While weakened, the U.S. is “still the most powerful imperialist power, and it seeks to expand its economic, military and political control throughout the world, just like its competitors do. No new world capitalist order is possible that would make the world any safer or more peaceful.
“As conditions of life for the working class deteriorate and wars escalate, millions of workers are being drawn into politics,” she said.
“We put the fight against Jew-hatred as well as the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty at the heart of what we raise with workers everywhere,” she said. My campaign really began on Oct. 10 when I attended a rally against the bloody Hamas pogrom in Israel three days earlier and spoke out against it for the SWP.
“The fight for workers power” is the only road to “open the door to ending the exploitative and oppressive conditions that are the source of the capitalists’ wealth,” Fruit said. “This is a revolutionary perspective. It will take a disciplined movement of millions of working-class people determined to create a new world.”
We call for a party of labor
“We call for a party of labor that is based on the unions but that can organize the whole working class to fight together,” for jobs for all at wages that are automatically adjusted to cover rising prices, a government-financed public works program to put workers to work at union-scale wages building things workers need, like schools, hospitals, child care and affordable housing.
Most important, such a party could lead “a social movement in a struggle to replace capitalist political power with a workers’ government,” she said. “It could expose and fight against every outrage, every crime the capitalist rulers commit against us.”
“I know many workers agree,” a meeting participant said in the discussion. “But most union officials don’t seem to be heading in that direction — they mostly endorse one of the capitalist parties. How do we change that?”
“Among workers I speak with,” the need to organize a party of labor independent of the bosses and their parties is “enormously popular,” Fruit said. And objectively, “it is what needs to happen.” But real momentum in that direction will only come as workers join in struggles and gain confidence in ourselves as a class. “In every city I go to,” Fruit said, “I’m able to meet and talk with workers, walk picket lines and offer solidarity.”
She described many she has met — hotel workers who struck from Boston to Honolulu over the busy Labor Day weekend; Teamsters at the Molson Coors brewery in Fort Worth, Texas, who fought being forced to work 16-hour shifts; warehouse workers in Montreal; as well as railroad workers and Amazon workers in the United Kingdom who are fighting for a union.
The most critical question people ask her, she said, is how can we be sure we’re capable of taking all this on? Hundreds of thousands of workers in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere have fought for pay you can live on, schedules that allow you to have and raise a family and safe conditions at work, Fruit said. Workers change in the course of these fights. “We begin to see each other in a new light — our humanity and capacity for solidarity. Through these union battles we learn that there are no individual solutions. It is our collective action that counts. This is the beginning of our consciousness as a class.”
“We have a revolutionary history in the United States,” she said. “The historic accomplishments of the working class, fought for in the war for independence from Britain, the Civil War against slavery, the gigantic workers’ upsurge that led to the organization of the industrial unions in the 1930s, and the proletarian social revolution that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the South in the 1950s and ’60s prove what the U.S. working class is capable of.
“We point to our continuity. Two mighty revolutions have won power in the imperialist epoch, in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, and again in Cuba in 1959 under the leadership of Fidel Castro.
“We can do it right here in the U.S.,” she said.
Need to unite the working class
A nurse from the Albany area asked Fruit to address the question of immigrant workers. He said he finds co-workers who are immigrants scared to join the union or go on strike
“We’re for amnesty for all immigrant workers living in the U.S.,” Fruit said. “All workers need the same rights. We’re not ‘American’ workers. We’re workers, of all nationalities, in the U.S.” This is a life-and-death question for the working class. Without fighting along these lines, the working class will be torn apart.
Fruit noted that striking hotel workers in California forced the companies to agree not to use the federal government’s E-verify system to try to catch workers who don’t have the paperwork the rulers say is necessary. “This was because of the strength of the workers.”
She pointed to the example of 55,000 school workers in Canada who struck in 2022 even though the government had passed a law declaring the strike illegal. “Other workers supported them and they ended up winning.”
A home health attendant in the audience explained that in Venezuela she had been a doctor. But even then, “all my friends were workers at the hospital — janitors or elevator operators. In Latin America we have an expression, she said, ‘The union makes us strong.’”
Opening guns of World War III
“It has been over 30 years since the Socialist Workers Party explained the U.S. war against Iraq was the opening guns of World War III,” Fruit said. “Today, millions hear those guns getting louder.”
“Imperialism is not a policy that a government chooses,” Fruit said. “The drive toward war and plunder is inherent to it. It can only be ended by organizing a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers to take state power and overturn capitalist rule.”
“We are not bourgeois pacifists,” Fruit said. “Our program is not for peaceful coexistence. We are for organizing the working class to fight in our class interests. We are for the Ukrainians defeating the Putin regime. We are for Israel” — the only government with a stake in defending Jews — “defeating Hamas.”
“And we oppose U.S. troops, bases and armaments anywhere in the world,” she said. We know the U.S. military is never used to advance the interests of working people here or abroad. It is always used to advance the predatory interests of the U.S. ruling class.
“The governments in Ukraine and in Israel are capitalist governments and they depend on fickle imperialist allies that put their own interests first,” Fruit said. “But if they win the wars they are fighting for their survival, the working class there will have more space to organize, to unite and to reach out to their allies in the working classes of other countries.” Ultimately, she said, “the solution is tied to building a revolutionary working-class party of all nationalities in every country,” Fruit said — including in Israel and Ukraine — “that fights for workers power.”
That’s what the Socialist Workers Party is working to do here, she said. “We invite you to join us.”
In response to an appeal from John Studer, the SWP’s national campaign director, meeting participants gave $3,634 to help finance the final nine weeks of the campaign.
Click here to contact the campaign.