‘We need to build a party to take political power’
SEATTLE — Eric Simpson, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Oakland, and SWP campaign supporters joined with hundreds of trade unionists April 12 at a labor parade and festival in San Francisco marking Cesar Chavez Day. Chavez had been a founder of the United Farm Workers union.
Alongside contingents of carpenters, letter carriers, longshore workers, electrical workers and others was a large contingent from the Amalgamated Transit Union, including transit workers recently on strike in San Jose, California.
Many participants were interested in the Militant article “Unions take up the fight to defend the rights of immigrant workers,” which describes the efforts to win the return of sheet metal union apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia to this country after his “mistaken” deportation to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador.
“The growing labor support defending the rights of immigrants is crucial to building the unity workers need to take on the bosses,” Simpson told union roofers he marched with on the parade.
“Discussions at the SWP table were nonstop,” party campaigner Betsey Stone told the Militant. “We distributed flyers explaining that the attacks on workers and our unions, as well as today’s wars, have their root in the world economic crisis of capitalism. And that workers need to replace the rule of the capitalists with a government of our own.”
Participants purchased seven subscriptions to the Militant and nine Pathfinder Press books on revolutionary working-class politics, including two copies of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward; Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; and Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution.
A question and answer with Simpson was published on the front page of the April 9-15 Oakland Post, an African American newsweekly.
“Boom-and-bust cycles, downturns when millions lose their jobs and homes are permanent features of capitalism,” Simpson told its readers. “So is war — using the wealth produced by workers and farmers to build up a war machine that threatens humanity.”
The origins of the SWP, he said, start “in 1919 with the example of the Russian Revolution. We stood against Stalin’s counterrevolution and welcomed the Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro. This is a party of workers with a record of integrity and leadership.” The special election was April 15.
Boost to Militant Fighting Fund
Campaigning for the SWP candidates and program is strengthened by the party’s eight-week spring campaign, along with the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K., to win 1,300 new readers to the Militant, get out the same number of books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders and to raise $165,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund.
“I’m glad to help,” wrote Mike Sanchez, a retiree and former member of Carpenters Local 14 from San Antonio, with his contribution. Sanchez had initially pledged $500, but mailed in $800. “It’s the least I can do. I hope we reach our goal.”
The Militant is written, distributed and funded solely by working people.
In Seattle, SWP campaigners Barry Fatland and Rebecca Williamson met Ryan Oak, a third-generation Boeing worker and recent subscriber who had picked up the paper when he was on strike last fall.
“When I heard we were going on strike, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ I felt I was doing this for my father, and grandfather too. The company took the pensions, they threatened to take production away for some airplanes if we didn’t vote for what they were offering, then they took them away anyway.”
Williamson pointed out how workers change when we go through strikes and other struggles.
“Yes! Everything changed!” Oak said. “I didn’t follow the news until we were on strike.” When he did, “I couldn’t believe it. It was ‘fake news,’ all lies” about the union’s fight. Oak said he appreciated the Militant’s coverage and its calls for solidarity.
“Everything we win, the bosses immediately try to figure how they can take it back,” Williamson said. “Ultimately, millions of working people will have to mount a struggle for political power to change society, to end the wars and other social crises that the capitalists have no solutions for.”
A few days later, the SWP campaigners called back and Oak renewed his subscription for a year and got the four-volume Teamsters series by Farrell Dobbs. The books describe the strikes and organizing drives that transformed the Teamsters in the 1930s and paved the way for the rise of the CIO.
To join in campaigning for the SWP candidates, contact the party branch nearest you.
To contribute to the Militant Fighting Fund, send a check to the Militant at 307 W. 36th Street, 13th floor, New York, NY 10018 or donate online at www.themilitant.com.