SWP looks to wrap up NJ ballot fight, expand support
UNION CITY, N.J. — “We’re closing in on our goal of signing up over 3,200 people across New Jersey to show their support for the Socialist Workers Party being on the ballot,” Joanne Kuniansky, the SWP candidate for governor, told the Militant May 6.
“The sharpening pace of world events, with big stakes for the working class, is drawing millions into politics,” Kuniansky said. “And when we introduce the Socialist Workers Party and its efforts to organize working people in their millions to take political power into our own hands, they’re interested.
“That’s true of the party’s response to the protracted and unresolved crisis in the Middle East, our unequivocal defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews,” Kuniansky said.
She pointed to the statement by Iran’s foreign minister May 3 that Tehran intends to continue enriching uranium. “That can only have one aim, to build a nuclear weapon to use against Israel, to unleash another Holocaust.
“More and more people see the SWP as the party working people need,” Kuniansky said.
“The party also gets a positive response when we raise the need for an amnesty for workers without papers in the U.S. in order to unify and strengthen the fighting capacity of the working class,” she said.
“The sweeps in working-class neighborhoods and factories by immigration police, and calls on workers without papers to ‘self-deport,’ pose the importance of the labor movement rejecting all attempts to criminalize and scapegoat immigrant workers,” Kuniansky said.
To date, SWP campaigners in New Jersey have collected 2,740 signatures and sold 121 subscriptions to the Militant, 102 books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries and 370 copies of the paper. The party is required to submit 2,000 signatures to get on the ballot.
SWP campaigners got a good reception among participants at a May 1 march in Newark organized by the immigrant rights organization Cosecha.
Folere Larame was part of a group of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 members who joined the action. “The world is becoming increasingly dangerous, with more trade conflicts that can become military conflicts,” Kuniansky said. “The working class is the only force that can stop this.”
“Imperialism cannot hide any more,” Larame agreed. “The world is seeing it for what it is.”
This system will not fall of its own accord, Kunianksy said. She pointed to the examples for working people today of revolutionary leaders like Fidel Castro, Malcolm X and Thomas Sankara. Larame knew about Sankara and the popular revolution he led in Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987. It was overthrown by a military coup.
Need for revolutionary leadership
“They can kill revolutionaries, but their ideas survive,” Larame said. She got a subscription to the Militant and bought We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Sankara and The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.
SWP campaigners also discussed the fight against imperialism and war with participants at a May Day event in Bloomfield. Adam, who didn’t want to give his last name, told this Militant correspondent he’d been in the U.S. Army in Kuwait. “I’m opposed to the global war on terror,” he said. “It was done for the interests of the business class.”
The U.S. military intervention in the Middle East today is carried out to prop up the U.S. rulers’ waning domination of the world imperialist order, I said, “not for the interests of the peoples of the region, nor working people here.”
“What is the U.S. doing bombing Yemen? That war has never been voted on,” he said. He got copies of Washington’s Assault on Iraq: Opening Guns of World War III and Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun, articles featured in New International nos. 7 and 12. They explain the origins of the deepening crises facing workers worldwide.
The potential of what working people can do together to change the worsening conditions we face and to break from the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties underlies much of the interest in the SWP today.
“Workers need to have their voices heard,” Monique Smith, a Teamsters member, told SWP campaigners at a Walmart parking lot in Saddle Brook April 2. “The rich keep getting richer, while we’re just struggling to survive,” Smith said as she signed up to put Kuniansky on the ballot and got a subscription to the Militant.
Kuniansky will speak at an open house in New York May 9 and a rally in Union City May 10, along with Craig Honts, the SWP’s candidate for lieutenant governor, and Paul Mailhot, the party’s candidate for mayor of New York. Both events start at 7 p.m. See locations in the directory.