The Socialist Workers Party is launching a national slate of candidates in 2025 — a bold working-class campaign that points a road forward for the growing number of workers repelled by the pro-boss politics of the Democrats, Republicans and handful of also-ran so-called independent parties, tied to lesser-evil bourgeois politics. The SWP’s goal is to organize working people in our tens of millions to fight to take political power into our own hands.
On Jan. 19 the Ballot Access News reported that with its 2024 presidential campaign of Rachele Fruit for president and Dennis Richter for vice president, the SWP became only the fifth party in U.S. history to run presidential candidates in every election for over 75 years.
Starting in the 1948 presidential election with Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the Teamsters over-the-road campaign, the party’s candidates have advanced a fighting class-struggle program, championing striking workers and battles for independence and socialism worldwide.
Dobbs, who ran as the party’s presidential candidate in four elections, helped build support for the historic Montgomery bus boycott. He drove down the first station wagon donated to fighters there and told the truth about the boycott everywhere he went. In 1960 he went to Cuba to see the unfolding socialist revolution, and returned to defend it from Washington’s attacks and point to it as an example for workers in the U.S. to emulate.
In 2025 so far, the SWP has announced campaigns in California, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. (See box below.) Next up will be an announcement of the party’s candidate for mayor of New York City. These campaigns give the SWP the broadest opportunity to win workers to the need to break with the bosses’ two-party trap and launch our own party, a party of labor, to fight to take power.
Socialist Workers Party candidates explain that all labor and social battles today are political, where the two major social classes confront each other — the capitalist ruling families versus the millions of workers and others exploited and oppressed by capital.
The world’s imperialist ruling classes are marching humanity toward deeper crises, trade conflicts and wars, including the threat of a third world war.
SWP candidates explain that a key battleground today is the fight by Israel to defeat and demobilize Hamas and defend Israel’s existence as a refuge for Jews. Jew-hatred is rising in the world, a threat to the unions and the working class.
The SWP campaigns stand on the front lines of today’s labor struggles and social battles, explaining the consequences in them for workers everywhere. To win more allies to join in solidarity with these fights, to make a difference.
Every political question today is a class question. Class consciousness and self-confidence will grow, and a clearer picture of the need for a socialist future.
‘Amnesty for immigrant workers’
On Feb. 4 the SWP in Fort Worth, Texas, filed petitions for the ballot for Alyson Kennedy for mayor and Hilda Cuzco for City Council in District 11.
Two days earlier, Kennedy and Cuzco marched with thousands in Dallas to defend immigrant workers in the U.S. facing attacks by the government, carrying signs reading “Amnesty for immigrant workers! No deportations!”
Kennedy is a member of UNITE HERE Local 23 and a cleaner at LSG Sky Chefs at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. Cuzco, a bakery packer in Grand Prairie, is a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 111.
In Oakland, California, SWP candidate Eric Simpson is on the ballot in the April 15 special election for mayor. Simpson is a chocolate factory worker and member of BCTGM Local 125.
Simpson and his campaign supporters are distributing a statement, “Amnesty for immigrants working in the U.S.: A life–and-death question for the labor movement,” as they knock on doors in workers’ neighborhoods, on the job and at strike picket lines and other protests.
He explains that the capitalist ruling families “profit from having a layer of workers they hope will accept worse conditions because they fear deportation. This is used to drive down wages of all.
“Joe Biden left office with deportation orders against over a million. Trump claims he will deport many more,” Simpson says. “Neither party aims to expel the mass of undocumented workers, but to frighten them and intensify their exploitation.
“In times of economic crisis, anti-immigrant voices get a hearing from some workers fearing competition for jobs. Every worker needs a job. Unions need to fight for a government-funded public works program to hire and train millions to build infrastructure, homes damaged by fires, child care centers, hospitals and more.”
Tony Lane, SWP candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh, and campaign supporter Candace Wagner met Joyce Ferrari, a member of the Mail Handlers Union, while campaigning door to door. “We’re advocating for a union-led fight to prevent the bosses and their government dividing the working class, pitting immigrant against native-born workers,” said Lane.
“My boyfriend’s mother is from Japan,” said Ferrari. “Luckily she’s a citizen, but it makes you think about these raids.” This is a fight for the whole working class, Lane said.
Campaign at Anne Frank exhibit
On Feb. 9 SWP members Sara Lobman, Willie Cotton and Seth Galinsky set up a campaign table outside the Center for Jewish History’s “Anne Frank The Exhibition” in New York City. The exhibit is a re-creation of the hidden annex where Frank wrote her diary while her family was hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944.
“People need to see this,” one of the people coming out told Galinsky. “Especially people who are not Jewish.” Organizers of the exhibit say they have made plans for 250,000 area students to visit. Interest is high, and the center has announced the exhibit will remain in the city through Oct. 31.
“A Holocaust could happen again,” said another woman. Galinsky replied that there are more people speaking out against Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel, and that Israel has struck some significant blows to the Nazi-rooted Hamas and Hezbollah. This shows the possibilities to take on Jew-hatred.
They found real interest in the new Pathfinder Press book, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class, selling two copies. They also sold two copies of the Militant and passed out over 60 copies of the SWP statement “Oppose Jew-hatred! Defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews!”
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