UNION CITY, N.J. — Socialist Workers Party members are winning support to put the party’s candidates, Joanne Kuniansky for U.S. Senate and Craig Honts for U.S. Congress, on the ballot in New Jersey. Many workers are pleased to sign up and interested in discussing why our class needs to break from the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties and build a party of our own to lead a fight to take political power into our own hands.
In the first 12 days of the ballot drive, 1,331 signed for Kuniansky and 181 for Honts. The goals are 3,200 signatures for Kuniansky, well over the requirement of 2,000, and 400 for Honts, more than the 250 needed.
As they’ve won support, SWP campaigners have sold 55 subscriptions to the Militant and 55 books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders and 216 copies of the paper.
“Why is the U.S. fixated on the Mideast?” Tahjj Hemby, a patient care coordinator, asked Honts when he campaigned at a parking lot in Bloomfield April 5. “There’s enough oil on this planet, enough natural resources, to make sure everyone has enough to eat. They can’t tell me that it’s running out.”
“It’s a question of who controls those resources,” Honts said. “As their system spirals into deeper crisis, the capitalists are in ever-stiffening competition with each other to seize resources and shore up their profits.”
“They have no morality,” Hemby said. “Yes, that’s true,” Honts replied. “Cuba’s socialist revolution is a living, fighting example of a different, working-class morality that starts from the needs of the toilers of the world.” He showed Hemby the book, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Víctor Dreke, who led Cuban combatants during their internationalist mission there.
Hemby bought the book and signed the petition to put the SWP candidates on the ballot.
“I’ve been reading about communism and Mao,” Duran Rogers, 37, an IBEW apprentice electrician, told Honts. “What do you think about taxing the rich?” he asked.
“Workers shouldn’t have to pay taxes,” Honts replied. “But we can’t tax our way to socialism.” He pointed to the need to organize the working class to fight for its own interests. “Our party aims to be part of leading working people to make socialist revolutions in every country. Revolutionary Cuba shows this is possible,” said Honts.
Rogers signed the petition, asking the candidate to “stay in touch.”
Outside a grocery store in Clifton, SWP campaigner Seth Galinsky spoke to a Black woman who said she didn’t know who Joanne Kuniansky was and wouldn’t sign until she knew more.
Galinsky said the Democrats and Republicans are parties of the capitalists and workers need our own party. “We make the buildings, we pick the crops, but we don’t make the decisions,” he said. The woman started reading the SWP campaign brochure and asked, “Why is there so much on Israel and the Jews?”
“Because we’re in a period similar to the lead-up to World War II,” Galinsky replied. “The capitalist rulers will use Jew-hatred to try to take our eyes off the real enemy, the capitalist system of exploitation.
“We know where that ended up,” Galinsky added, “with 6 million Jews murdered in Hitler’s gas chambers, the unions and working-class organizations smashed, and a world war that was a disaster for humanity.
“We need to build working-class parties that unite workers no matter what their religion or nationality is — Jewish, Muslim, Christian. That’s the only way to fight for our common interests.”
“I agree with that,” the woman said and signed the petition.
Lisa Rottach contributed to this article.