PAULSBORO, N.J. — “I thought it was ‘We, the people’ who are supposed to be in charge,” trucker Santiago Corpus told Dennis Richter, Socialist Workers Party candidate for vice president, when he campaigned at a long-haul truck stop here Sept. 22.
“But who are ‘We, the people?’” Richter asked. “We, the workers, or ‘we’ the billionaires?”
“It’s ‘we the workers,’” Corpus said. “We’re the ones who keep things moving.” Corpus is an owner-operator, driving cross-country out of Portland, Oregon. He described some of the conditions facing working people that he has seen.
“If you miss a mortgage payment they come after the house, or you can lose your car,” he said. “The banks own everything. On the freeways the garbage is piling up. In Portland the shelves in the stores are locked up because everything is being stolen.”
“The Democratic and Republican parties say they are going to fix everything,” Richter said. “But they haven’t, and they will not. That’s why we need a party of labor based on the unions, a step toward working people taking power from the capitalists and into our own hands.”
“Yes, we need the working people to decide,” Corpus said. “We’ve got to break the chain to make a change.”
“‘Breaking the chain’ is what I call a making a revolution,” Richter said.
“Yes, that’s right!” Corpus replied.
He told Richter he had been in prison. Since then, he’s been driving a truck as he gets his life back together.
“Look at Malcolm X,” Richter said. “He ended up in prison where he disciplined himself to read,” on the road to becoming a revolutionary leader of the entire working class.
“In prison you do read,” Corpus said, “and what you read you will absorb. I graduated from high school in prison.” Richter showed Corpus the Militant and told him about the paper’s fight against an unconstitutional ban on an issue of the paper by prison authorities in Malone, Florida. He decided to get a subscription.
“We work our whole lives and what have we got?” Nelson Salgado, another owner-operator, told Richter. “It’s unfair. I haul all over the country. I see that common respect, morals are breaking down. And I think welfare makes it worse.”
“Workers need jobs, not welfare,” Richter replied. “The SWP calls for a mass public works program at union-scale pay to put people back to work. We need to build a movement of working people to take power.”
“I agree,” Salgado said. He said he would read the campaign material the socialist candidate gave him and “do what I can” to help spread the word.
Richter also spoke with a trucker originally from Gambia.
“The Palestinian people were oppressed for so long,” he told Richter. Now “they’re paying the price for Hamas’ attack on Israel.”
“Hamas is not leading the Palestinian people to liberation,” Richter said. “They knew Israel would have no choice but to go after Hamas, after its Oct. 7 massacre of Jews. Hamas says they will not coexist with the state of Israel.” Hamas is a deadly enemy of Jews the world over, as well as the exploited and oppressed Palestinians of Gaza.
To win the struggle against the oppression of the Palestinians, the SWP candidate said, they must join with working people of all religions and nationalities across the region in revolutionary struggle to take state power and end capitalist rule.
The most important allies of workers in Israel are workers and farmers in Iran, Richter said. He pointed to widespread opposition there to the Iranian rulers’ bloody efforts to extend their clout across the Middle East.
The driver decided to get the book The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark.
“I’m interested in learning more about what the SWP is doing,” he said.