UNION CITY, N.J. — In the opening four days of the fight to get the Socialist Workers Party on the ballot in New Jersey, 650 signatures were gathered, as well as 23 subscriptions to the Militant and 24 books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries were sold.
“We’ve had a good start to the campaign to put the SWP on the ballot,” Joanne Kuniansky, the party’s candidate for New Jersey governor, told 30 people at the April 5 launch of the campaign. The effort to win ballot status is an opening to get the word out about the party’s working-class program across the state.
Also on the platform were Paul Mailhot, SWP candidate for mayor of New York, and Craig Honts, the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor in New Jersey. They were joined by Karen Rutledge, a member of the Communist League in Canada.
Philip Murphy, the Democratic Party governor, recently “signed a bill that more than doubled the signature requirement,” Kuniansky said, “in an effort to tighten the Democrats’ and Republicans’ political monopoly.” She pointed out that the SWP has been on the ballot in New Jersey since 1948. “We won’t be pushed back now!”
SWP campaigners are collecting 3,200 signatures, well over the 2,000 required, as they introduce the party’s program and ask people to join the effort.
“Today’s economic crises, trade conflicts and shooting wars — including the threat of nuclear war — are an inevitable product of the workings of capitalism,” Kuniansky said. “The U.S. rulers will use their military might to preserve their weakening but dominant place at the top of the fragmenting imperialist world order.”
She pointed to Washington’s decision to send “a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East to safeguard the U.S. rulers’ imperialist interests.
“Israel is on the offensive to deal a decisive military defeat to Hamas, which carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, Nazi-inspired pogrom against Jews. Israel is also looking to carry out a targeted attack to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity, which Tehran hopes to use to destroy Israel.
“Both steps by Israel should be backed by working people,” Kuniansky said. “They’re necessary to stop another Holocaust, which would be a huge blow to toilers in the region and worldwide.”
Kuniansky described the response to her campaign among postal workers she met when she joined a National Association of Letter Carriers rally for a better contract in Springfield, New Jersey, March 23.
She talked to two postal workers who are African American. They told her they knew Malcolm X had rejected supporting either the Democrats or Republicans. “As they signed my petition, more letter carriers came over, asking, ‘Is that a petition?’”
She told them it was “to put the SWP on the ballot. We’re a working-class party that is for a class break with the Democrats and Republicans. We’re for workers power.”
“A line formed to sign,” she said.
“The SWP has a long record of running in elections,” Mailhot told meeting participants. “In New York, the party ran James P. Cannon for mayor in 1937.”
A wider hearing for fight for power
“Why does the SWP run in elections, since the party holds the view that fundamental change is not possible under capitalism through elections?” Mailhot said. “It gives us a broader hearing and is part of the fight for legal protection for the party.”
“If we didn’t run, we would cede the field to the capitalist class and its parties,” the SWP leader said. “No other party uses elections to reach out to mass struggles with a program pointing to the need for the working class to take power.”
Mailhot pointed to a New York Times article, “A Fresh-Faced Socialist’s Strategy to Be Mayor.” This was not about me, he said, but Zohran Mamdani, “a pro-Hamas Democratic Party politician,” who wants to strengthen the two-party system with a program to reform capitalism.
“He wants to bring his Jew-hating program to the mayor’s office. In contrast, the SWP fights against Jew-hatred and for workers power, which is the only effective weapon workers can use to battle all forms of oppression we face under capitalism.”
Rutledge described her participation in a march two days earlier in Montreal of 8,000 day care workers and their supporters, during a province-wide strike for better wages and more hiring.
In this fight “the union movement is taking on a huge social question,” she said. Day care workers’ wages are as low as 22 Canadian dollars an hour ($15.50), alongside the lack of affordable child care for millions of working people. “This shows how the capitalist crisis bears down on workers and our families and why the fight for women’s emancipation must be led by the working class.”
Honts described the wide-ranging political discussions among co-workers in the locker room at the factory where he works. “We call them town halls, where everyone shouts out their concerns. They reflect what’s taking place in workplaces and working-class communities across the country.”
One co-worker told him he thought that wages would rise as a result of government moves to deport some immigrants.
“I said that wasn’t the case. That the deportations are aimed at forcing those who remain here into even worse wages and conditions. Having a section of our class paid much less puts downward pressure on all our wages. What’s needed is a fight for an amnesty for workers without papers in the U.S.”
‘Working class is international class’
The day after the rally, Kuniansky campaigned at a parking lot in Kearny and introduced the SWP campaign to Antonio Cardona, a member of Teamsters union Local 863.
Cardona wanted to discuss the tariffs imposed by Washington on its competitors. “We need jobs, but all those jobs that went overseas, are they going to come back?” he said. “They went overseas where they pay lower wages. If they come back, are they going to pay higher wages?”
“We can’t look at workers in other countries as our enemies,” Kuniansky said. “We’re part of an international class. Our class has to join together to fight for the jobs, wages and other things we need. The rulers’ trade wars can become shooting wars.”
“I think we could be heading to World War III,” Cardona said.
“That’s why we think the working class needs to take power and get rid of capitalism, the only way to prevent another world war,” Kuniansky replied.
Cardona told Kuniansky he was in Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He and his family helped out their neighbors by bringing food and water. “The government didn’t do anything to help. There were warehouses full of food, water, tents that they didn’t distribute.”
The solidarity Cardona’s family showed their neighbors “shows the capacities of working people when we organize in our own interests,” Kuniansky said, and why we need to fight for a government of our own. Cardona signed to put Kuniansky on the ballot and got a subscription to the Militant.
Throughout the campaign for ballot status, the SWP will be looking out for workers who want to help out and introduce the campaign to their friends, families and co-workers. Along the way, they’ll learn more about the party’s program and activity. Over $1,300 was raised at the rally to help fund the campaign.