Thousands of workers open to discussing SWP program
NEW YORK — Paul Mailhot, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York, and Craig Honts, SWP candidate for lieutenant governor in New Jersey, shared the platform at a Militant Labor Forum here July 12. “We are gearing up to meet new opportunities to discuss the working-class program of the party with thousands of workers over the next several months,” Mailhot said.
“We get a hearing when we explain workers need to break with the two parties of the bosses, the Democrats and Republicans, and fight to take political power into our own hands,” he said. “Our experience shows workers welcome that discussion.”
The big-business papers — from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post — are full of articles giving their spin on the victory of Democrat Zohran Mamdani, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, in the recent primary, Mailhot said. “Mamdani is a reformist candidate. He says economic inequalities need to be addressed, but in no way are his proposals aimed at altering the relations between capital and labor. In fact, they are aimed at diverting real struggles by working people and deepening illusions in the capitalist system.
“Mamdani’s mission is to rebuild the Democratic Party,” Mailhot said. “His success in winning more middle-class and young layers to the Democratic Party is one of the reasons his campaign is getting publicity and support from capitalist forces in the city, while at the same time others in the ruling class are determined to sink his so-called socialist campaign.
“What Mamdani represents is the opposite of what the working class needs,” Mailhot said. “We need a working-class party. And that is what the Socialist Workers Party seeks to advance.”
Honts described the response of workers to the SWP campaign in New Jersey. The party was recently certified on the ballot for governor after gathering 3,200 signatures on petitions. “Co-workers especially are excited to see a working-class alternative. One told me he read about my campaign in the papers. I asked which one? He said it was the Militant he had gotten from his brother. He said it was a great newspaper.”
The day after the forum Mailhot and Honts took the SWP campaign to the South Bronx. Derrick Miles stopped by the party’s campaign table and Mailhot showed him a copy of the Militant newspaper.
“I know the Militant,” Miles said. “We discussed articles in that paper in our classes at City College back in the day. I know that Malcolm X spoke highly of it.”
He was one of a number of workers interested in meeting and speaking with Mailhot about the SWP’s program to organize a working-class movement of millions to end capitalist exploitation and oppression once and for all.
When Mailhot asked him about his opinion on recent events in the Middle East, Miles explained he is “against the U.S. funding Israel. Isn’t that genocide with all those people being killed?” He added, “I’m for a two-state solution.”
“To understand what’s going on, you have to look deeper,” said Mailhot. “I defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jews. It’s a defensive war they are fighting. Hamas is responsible for the killing that has taken place since its Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel.”
“And they couldn’t have done that without a lot of funding from Iran,” added Miles.
Mailhot told Miles, “Like everywhere else in the world, the solution is for workers to build our own parties, revolutionary parties, that fight on all questions for the interests of working people — Jewish, Palestinian, Arab — all working people.”
Miles said he didn’t think much of Mamdani, nor of former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani defeated.
Miles thanked the socialist candidate for campaigning in the South Bronx. “This is a neglected area,” he said. “We need people who will come here and have these discussions.” Miles subscribed to the Militant and purchased Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
Mailhot stopped in at some small shops in the neighborhood, talking with workers. One visit was to El Rincón Boricua, a recently opened Puerto Rican restaurant run by Daniel Alvarez. He had posted SWP campaign flyers in the store’s front window earlier that day.
“Our candidate for New Jersey governor, Joanne Kuniansky, just testified at the United Nations in favor of independence for Puerto Rico,” said Mailhot. Alvarez replied, “That’s going to be a tough one for us to accomplish, unless they get Donald Trump out of there. I won’t lie, I did vote for that guy.”
Alvarez said he has witnessed a decline in vendors who are immigrants on the streets and small shops since the beginning of the year. “There are so many immigrants who work hard, who do good things. Even citizens are getting picked up, and people with green cards. Trump said he is deporting criminals, and I do see some bad things happening on these streets, but a lot of those taken away are hard-working people.”
Amnesty for immigrant workers
“The bosses’ government wants immigrants to feel fearful of being picked up, of being deported, to stop us from mobilizing to fight around the rights of all workers,” Mailhot said. “My campaign points to the need for our unions to back amnesty for immigrant workers without papers in order to unify working people to better be able to defend ourselves.”
Other SWP campaign supporters introduced the party’s program to workers in the East New York/New Lots area of Brooklyn. Some expressed interest in inviting Mailhot to visit their homes and to introduce him to their friends. One was Olga DePusoir, a retired pharmacy worker, originally from St. Kitts.
Expressing her opposition to the government’s immigration raids and deportations, she pointed to the importance of workers responding against the moves by the capitalist rulers to divide working people. “This isn’t new,” she said, recalling the way in which Black workers migrating from the South to northern states years ago would be accused of taking away jobs and services. “When workers come together in struggle, color doesn’t matter,” she said.
To join in the Socialist Workers Party campaign, see the directory.
Tamar Rosenfeld and Róger Calero contributed to this article.
