3,169 people sign so far to put SWP on NJ ballot
UNION CITY, N.J. — “With 3,169 people signing up so far to put the Socialist Workers Party on the ballot, we’ll easily go over our goal of 3,200 before we file,” Joanne Kuniansky, the SWP candidate for governor of New Jersey, told campaign supporters here May 11. That target is well over the state requirement of 2,000.
Kuniansky was joined at a campaign rally the night before by Craig Honts, the SWP candidate for lieutenant governor, and Paul Mailhot, the party’s candidate for mayor of New York City. The event capped five weeks of campaigning, with party members talking to thousands of working people in cities, towns and rural areas across the state, introducing the party and its program.
“Working people sense that rising trade and military conflicts pose the danger of wider wars,” Kuniansky told the rally. “The U.S. rulers will not hesitate to use their military might to preserve their place at the top of the imperialist world order.”
Many workers responded positively to the party’s explanation that workers needed to take political power, she said. “Some are attracted to the SWP, a party that tells the truth about capitalism and what workers are capable of doing. They want to know, what is to be done? We present a working-class road forward and say, ‘Join the SWP!’
“Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom the SWP has been unequivocal in our support of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jews,” Kuniansky said. This includes Israel’s right to defend itself “and deal a decisive military defeat to Hamas and to carry out targeted attacks to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons production facilities.
“Both steps by Israel to stop another Holocaust should be backed by working people,” she said. One nuclear bomb hitting Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem would be a Holocaust and “a huge blow to toilers worldwide.”
“President Trump’s deal with the Houthis, to stop U.S. airstrikes in return for a halt to attacks on Red Sea shipping is not an agreement to stop attacks against Israel,” Kuniansky said. Washington is acting for the interests of the U.S. imperialist rulers as it negotiates with Tehran, seeking to curb but not end its enrichment of uranium. But this can have only one purpose — getting nuclear weapons to target Israel.
“Washington has no interest in protecting Jews, advancing the national aspirations of Palestinians or the interests of working people anywhere. We call for U.S. troops out of the Middle East,” she said.
‘This is not like last year’
“This is not like last year,” Mailhot told the rally. World events are drawing working people into politics. “There is more interest in our program, what we are for,” than last year. In the course of the ballot fight 139 people subscribed to the Militant, while 466 got copies of the paper, and 112 books by leaders of the SWP and other revolutionaries have been sold.
“There are no New York City or New Jersey solutions for what workers face,” Mailhot said.
He pointed to the “serious military clash between rival nuclear-armed capitalist governments in India and Pakistan, an indication that the opening guns of World War III are growing louder.” The capitalist rulers across the world plan to profit from such conflicts, he said, regardless of the consequences for working people.
Working people in Ukraine are defending the country’s sovereignty against Moscow’s invasion, Mailhot said. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to “position U.S. imperialism to benefit from the outcome of the war. Our campaign calls for all U.S. troops and nuclear weapons out of Europe.”
“The working class in Russia increasingly opposes Vladimir Putin’s war and is the biggest potential ally of the Ukrainian people’s struggle,” he added, “To the Putin regime, workers in Russia are just cannon fodder. But if organized and led, they are a powerful force that can stay the hand of the rulers in Russia as they pursue this war.”
A third world war is not inevitable, Mailhot told the rally. In the way is the one revolutionary class, the working class, “capable of taking power in country after country, disarming the war makers, and organizing society based on human solidarity, not private profit,” he said.
In his presentation, Honts described what was behind the recent failure of the air traffic control system at Newark airport. It resulted from capitalist cost cutting and overworking of air traffic controllers operating an archaic system at a busy hub, he said.
Honts also responded to the campaign of lies by New Jersey Transit bosses who claim rail workers are overpaid, an attempt to undercut support for a possible strike by locomotive engineers May 16.
In 2022, Honts added, the Biden administration used the reactionary Railway Labor Act to spearhead a bipartisan attack on the rail unions’ right to strike. This shows why workers should break from “all the parties of the ruling class and build a working-class party seeking to lead the struggle for political power.”
Appreciated a working-class party
Kuniansky discussed the party’s program with Ginette Chavannes at a grocery parking lot in Hillsdale May 11. Chavannes said she appreciated meeting a working-class party and liked the party’s backing for the fight to reverse the deportation of SMART union member Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
She told Kuniansky her cousin had been kidnapped and held for ransom by a gang in Haiti. When her family couldn’t pay the ransom, he was murdered. She explained that rich families arm and finance the gangs.
Chavannes said she knew about volunteer Cuban doctors who worked in Haiti during cholera outbreaks, earthquakes and other crises. Their efforts are a product of the working-class internationalism advanced by Cuba’s revolutionary government.
She bought The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class after reading what Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin, one of the authors, wrote about working people’s revulsion at the massacre of Jews orchestrated by the czarist regime in Russia. She wanted her daughter to read the book.
Chavannes also subscribed to the Militant and got Revolution and the Road to Peace in Colombia: The Example of the Cuban Revolution by Fidel Castro and We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara, a leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso.
“This is the real thing,” Dylan Suarez, an engineering student, told this Militant correspondent at a Walmart parking lot in Teterboro May 8. He got a subscription to the Militant after signing to put the SWP on the ballot. Suarez liked the paper’s coverage of union battles, its defense of immigrant workers, and the SWP’s opposition to the U.S. rulers’ preparations for more wars.
We discussed the long record of struggle by working people in the U.S., from the fight to uproot Jim Crow segregation led by Black workers in the 1950s and ’60s to the earlier sit-down strikes that led to the organization of industrial unions in the 1930s and what these struggles showed about the revolutionary capacities of working people.