‘Best response to SWP in years’ at the Los Angeles book fair
LOS ANGELES — The annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books drew thousands to the University of Southern California campus April 26-27. Sales at the Pathfinder booth, featuring books by Socialist Workers Party leaders and other revolutionaries, were 50% higher than last year, a reflection of the growing interest among working people in the SWP, and its program and activities, amid the deepening world economic and social crisis of capitalism.
Norton Sandler, the party’s candidate for governor of California, helped staff the booth.
“Do you really believe enough people can overcome their prejudices to bring about real change?” Middka Vicencio asked.
“Yes, absolutely,” Sandler replied. “We have confidence in working people’s capacity to transform ourselves as we fight to change the world. And when working people begin to struggle together, anti-social behavior goes down. History has given us many examples, from the Minneapolis Teamsters strike in the 1930s to the Cuban Revolution, to union picket lines today.”
Museum worker Vicencio picked up Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity, a book that explains that capitalism, like slavery and serfdom before it, had a beginning and will have an end, and what working people can do to make that possible. She also got Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women.
“I agree with what you are saying,” Sergio Becerra, an office worker at a local community college, told Sandler, “but wouldn’t it be easier to run as a Democrat or an Independent? You’d get a broader hearing.”
“We run as who we are. The SWP is the party more working people are looking for today,” Sandler said. “The best way to break with the Democratic and Republican parties is to support the SWP campaign. We take on the capitalist parties’ monopoly in politics and California’s undemocratic election laws. We explain the working class needs to take power into its own hands.”
Becerra is an officer of the American Federation of Teachers College Staff Guild Local 1521A and was looking for books to start the local’s book club. He said he’s “looking for ways to help young people see the union differently and engage in the union movement.”
He chose 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, and Teamster Power by Farrell Dobbs for the club.
There is no capitalist ‘lesser evil’
“Workers need to break from the parties of the rich,” Sandler told Joel Segura. “The first step is to stop voting for the so-called lesser evil.”
“Definitely,” Segura said. “It doesn’t change anything.” Segura works as a teacher’s aide and isn’t in a union, but used to work part time at UPS and was a member of the Teamsters.
“I’m all for the unions,” he said. “but there was no future in part-time work.”
“Well, organize a union where you work now,” Sandler suggested.
Segura bought Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada. The book describes Guevara’s efforts in the early years of the Cuban Revolution to organize working people to lay the economic foundations of a society free from the horrors of capitalism.
A young longshoreman got a Militant subscription and six books, including The Fight Against Jew-Hatred in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. Thirteen copies of that title were sold altogether, many after long discussions.
Overall, readers cleaned the booth out of all the titles by Evelyn Reed on the origins of women’s oppression, bought all 26 copies of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us and all 16 copies of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. The booth’s best seller was Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women, with 31 sold.
All told, 317 books were sold, up from 219 last year. Seventy-six people subscribed to the Militant.