Socialist Workers Party candidates around the country are meeting workers involved in fights against worsening working conditions and wages you can’t live on, and they’re pointing to the need to expand solidarity with union battles.
They’re discussing why the assaults workers face today are a result of the crisis of capitalism, which drives fierce competition among capitalist powers worldwide. These rivalries fuel economic and military conflicts, deadly Jew-hating violence and the rulers’ march toward a third world war.
The SWP candidates are discussing the central questions in politics, starting from Israel’s war to defeat Hamas and why it’s necessary to stop another Holocaust.
SWP campaigners are also finding interest in the party’s defense of the Ukrainian people from Moscow’s murderous invasion and the SWP’s call for the U.S. imperialist rulers to get their military forces out of Europe.
Everywhere they go the party’s candidates are presenting a road forward for working people to build the leadership our class needs to replace capitalist rule with workers power. And they’re explaining why workers should join the SWP — to be on the front lines of the class battles that will make that possible.
In Miami, Laura Anderson, SWP candidate for mayor, met Jamal Dowling, a 30-year longshoreman and member of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1416, at his home Aug. 13.
“Working people need to organize independently of the Democrats and Republicans. They govern to maintain the capitalist class in power,” Anderson said.
“I was raised to vote for Democrats,” Dowling replied, “but I stopped.” He pointed out he’d met “SWP campaigners outside the ILA hall in the past and I’ve gotten some books, including this one,” he said, pointing to Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
Anderson told him she had walked the union’s picket line during the ILA’s strike in 2024.
“The press vilified us because we wanted a raise,” Dowling said, “but the cost of living is sky high. And every quarter the shipping companies announce record profits. In the five-year contract we got — taking into account inflation — the raise is about a dollar per year. It’s not enough.”
“The ILA stood up and fought, and set an example to other workers,” Anderson said. “My SMART Local 1138 refused to cross your picket line. Your strike was followed closely by working people.”
Class struggle transforms workers
Dowling said he’d participated in solidarity trips by his union in the early 2000s to support striking meatpackers in the Carolinas and restaurant workers on strike in Las Vegas.
“This experience helped me see that whether you are in the ILA, AFSCME, TWA or the SEIU, that when the call goes out we have to go, whether it is your day off or whatever, we have to support other unions. When some of us fight back it affects all of us.”
“The boss class will always find a way to push back the gains workers win,” Anderson said. “That’s why our party’s program explains that workers need to take political power into our own hands, we need to make a socialist revolution.
“A central question today is defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge against Jew-hatred and pogroms and why Hamas must be defeated to prevent another Holocaust,” she explained.
“I’ve followed the aftermath of what happened on Oct. 7, but I really didn’t follow how it started,” Dowling said.
“You should consider reading this book,” she said, handing him a copy of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. “It explains the roots of Hamas going back to the Nazis and why the fight to defeat them is in the interests of all working people.”
Dowling read the back cover of the book. “OK, I want to get this,” he said, paying for it. Anderson told him she’d like to continue the discussion and would let him know about the next union action or strike that she and party members plan to join.
“Good,” Dowling said, “maybe I’ll bring other ILA members with me too.”
In Paterson, New Jersey, this worker-correspondent and SWP member Lea Sherman introduced the party’s campaign to truck driver Devon Graham on his doorstep Aug. 10. He’s one of some 200,000 people in the area who were left without drinking water after a water main burst Aug. 8.
“They’ve set up free bottled water distribution centers, but the queues are very long,” Graham said. For days city authorities urged residents not to wash cars or water their lawns, and to take shorter showers. Drinking water came back on a week later.
“The fact that there’s no backup supply tells you something about the priorities of capitalist governments,” I said. “The only way to prevent disasters like this is for workers to run society.”
Hamas aim is expanding pogroms
The discussion turned to Israel’s war to defeat Hamas. “It’s necessary to stop Hamas from carrying out its goals of destroying Israel and killing Jews,” Sherman said.
“Yes, but what about the starvation facing Palestinians?” Graham asked, something that is a central feature in the media today.
Hamas’ rule is the biggest obstacle to Palestinians getting aid supplies, Sherman said. “The press campaign about ‘starvation’ in Gaza is based on ‘facts’ supplied by Hamas. It’s aimed at generating pressure to get Israel to back off from defending itself and from preventing another Holocaust.
Graham didn’t say whether he was convinced, but he was interested in reading the Militant’s coverage on the war.
He said he’d heard about the Freedom Convoy organized by truck drivers in Canada in 2022 to protest government COVID mandates. When the SWP campaigners pointed to the paper’s coverage of the fight against the frame-up of the truckers’ leaders in the Canadian courts, Graham decided to get a subscription, as well as a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.
To learn more about the SWP and help get the Militant around, contact the area nearest you listed in the directory.
Mary Martin in Miami contributed to this article.
