In the days following Washington’s heavily armed incursion into Venezuela and its increasing threats against Cuba’s socialist revolution, members of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. are reaching out to discuss the way forward with workers and youth.
They have been going door to door in working-class neighborhoods, discussing how Washington’s attacks stem from the deepening crisis of world capitalism today. The growing conflicts over resources, markets and labor are accelerating the imperialist rulers’ march toward a third world war. The SWP members explain the only way to prevent this is for the working class to take political power out of the hands of the ruling class here and around the world.
SWP campaigners present this revolutionary perspective as they join protests against Washington’s invasion of Venezuela, rallies against raids and deportations of workers without papers, and actions in solidarity with the growing mobilizations against the reactionary cleric-led regime in Iran.
In Forest Park, Georgia, SWP member Lisa Potash and Susan LaMont, who was the party’s candidate for mayor of Atlanta, campaigned door to door on the day U.S. forces landed in Caracas. They met a young roofer, originally from Honduras, whose first response was that what the U.S. did seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was good.
But as the discussion went on, he grew more interested in what the SWP members had to say about the need for working people everywhere to oppose U.S. imperialism’s violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty. He bought a Militant subscription along with The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class in Spanish.
Wearing signs demanding Washington get out of Venezuela and end the blockade it has imposed today against Cuba, SWP members John Benson and Marklyn Wilson participated in a protest in Atlanta against the U.S. invasion of Venezuela Jan. 3. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an interview with Benson, identifying him as a SWP member “handing out flyers celebrating the Cuban Revolution and denouncing the attack in Venezuela.”
In Miami, SWP members Rachele Fruit and Laura Anderson joined an annual event Jan. 12 to commemorate the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Some 175 people came to the event to demand the extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. It’s due to expire Feb. 3, making Haitian immigrants liable to arrest and deportation. Members of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ and UNITE HERE Local 355 also participated.
Fruit met Oslaude Rousseau, a worker in Miami Beach, who had visited both Cuba and Venezuela. “Let me tell you the Venezuela of Maduro is not the Venezuela of Chávez,” he said when Fruit explained her opposition to the U.S. rulers’ violation of Venezuelan sovereignty.
“And the Venezuela of Chávez is not the Cuba of Fidel Castro. Workers in Cuba took political power into their own hands,” Fruit said. She showed Rousseau Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Víctor Dreke, which he decided to buy. It describes one of the most important anti-colonial struggles after World War II and provides a firsthand account of Cuba’s decisive political and military aid in that battle.
Socialist Workers Party members visited the Port of Oakland in California Jan. 6 to offer solidarity with truck drivers targeted as part of the federal government’s anti-immigrant attacks.
Truckers targeted by ICE
Over 100 drivers who are immigrants have been arrested in the government’s “Operation Highway Sentinel” sweep in the state. Another 20,000 had their Commercial Driver’s Licenses cancelled by the California Department of Motor Vehicles at the end of last year.
SWP members spoke with Harshit Khosla, a driver who knows others who’ve lost their license. The government “says they are making the roads safe again,” Khosla said. “But they give no proof immigrant drivers are especially prone to accidents and a threat to others. They are taking away what these workers need to support their families.”
Truckers visiting a lunch truck at the port got copies of a statement, “Amnesty for undocumented workers — It’s in the interests of all working people,” issued by SWP candidates Norton Sandler for California governor, Margaret Trowe for U.S. Congress, and Laura Garza for Los Angeles mayor.
“Employers profit when there is a layer of workers forced to accept worse conditions because they fear deportation,” SWP member Betsey Stone told an Afghani trucker after he described the abuse port drivers face at the hands of the companies. “That’s why the union movement needs to oppose the raids and deportations and demand an amnesty for immigrants in the U.S.”
Revolutionary leadership needed
In Montreal almost 4,000 people marched Jan. 10 backing protests in Iran against the reactionary regime there.
Reactionary forces supporting the return of the son of the former shah had called the action. Communist League campaigners Katy LeRougetel and Annette Kouri discussed the way forward for working people in Iran and internationally with a number of participants.
“Sanctions hurt the people more than the government, but it’s the cheapest way to hurt the regime,” Ali, who asked not to use his last name, told LeRougetel after she explained her opposition to the sanctions imposed by Ottawa and Washington.
The shah’s hated dictatorship was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1979. Gains made by workers, farmers and oppressed nationalities as a result of that massive struggle were pushed back in a counterrevolution led by the clerical forces of the current oppressive regime.
Ali wasn’t convinced by what LeRougetel said but took a statement issued by Joe Young, the CL’s candidate in Quebec’s provincial election.
Parsa Ahmadi had been studying in Iran during wide-ranging protests there in 2022. He also questioned LeRougetel’s refusal to choose between the son of the former shah and the present counterrevolutionary regime after she explained working people needed to organize independently of the capitalist rulers.
“Wasn’t it a good thing that the U.S. and U.K. invaded France to fight the Nazis” in World War II? Ahmadi asked.
LeRougetel explained workers should look to their own forces to take on and defeat the fascists, not the imperialist governments. “Hitler could have been defeated before he came to power,” she said, but the Stalinist regime in Moscow and the parties that looked to it sabotaged revolutionary openings that could have united the workers movement against the Nazis.
“To build the leadership working people need today, the CL encourages fighters to join us,” she said. Ahmadi signed up for a Militant subscription. To join the campaigning, contact the area nearest you.