Fruit takes campaign to Canada, calls for working-class solidarity
MONTREAL — Over three days here, Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, met with Canadian National rail workers as they prepare for a possible strike; brought her solidarity to the picket line of recently locked-out Rona hardware store workers, members of the Confederation of National Trade Unions; and spoke to 32 people at a special Militant Labor Forum May 9.
The meeting was chaired by Katy LeRougetel, Communist League candidate in the upcoming Montreal federal by-election.
“I am honored to be invited to speak in Montreal, among working-class fighters who have been on picket lines big and small over the last few years seeking to defend themselves against the bosses’ drive to make us pay for the crisis of capitalism,” she told the crowd.
“I and my running mate for vice president, Dennis Richter, a veteran of many union struggles, are campaigning on the program of socialist revolution.
“Ours is an international program, so it’s important for us to come here and learn from you, for us to share ideas and experiences, to build an international movement,” she said.
“The world capitalist economic crisis is bringing devastation and war to millions. The future of humanity depends on the U.S. working class taking power away from the capitalist rulers and starting down the road to make a socialist revolution.”
More and more workers “are in the mood to fight,” she said, not just in the United States, but around the world, including in Canada. She pointed to the recent strike of 600,000 Quebec government workers and an overwhelming strike vote by rail workers and a similar size vote by Montreal port workers against the port bosses’ latest contract offer.
“There are 16.2 million U.S. workers who are in unions today,” she said. “They are a powerful force, but they’re only 10% of the working class and many millions more need to be organized. And so do our allies among small producers, like small farmers, independent truckers and fishermen.”
What is needed to mobilize and unite working people, “is a political party independent of the boss parties. We call for a labor party based on the unions that can organize the whole working class to fight together, a social movement, in a struggle to replace capitalist political power with a workers government.”
Fruit pointed to the example of what Cuba’s workers and farmers have accomplished since their 1959 socialist revolution, and the consistent record of the SWP in defending that revolution ever since.
In defense of Ukraine and Israel
“Both Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the Oct. 7 pogrom by Hamas against Jews in Israel have huge stakes for the working class worldwide,” said Fruit. “The decisive stand of the Socialist Workers Party and the communist movement internationally in the fight against Jew-hatred and in defense of Ukrainian sovereignty places the party on the front lines at a turning point in world politics.”
Fruit explained how the party’s positions on these struggles are rooted in its political continuity with the revolutionary perspectives and actions of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin that led the 1917 Russian Revolution, and of Leon Trotsky’s defense of Lenin’s course against the counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin.
Centrality of fight against Jew-hatred
Fruit said that in the experience of SWP members going door to door in working-class neighborhoods, or talking to workers on picket lines and at demonstrations, most “overwhelmingly express horror at the Oct. 7 savage attack by Tehran-backed Hamas against Israel and its people.”
“As one worker on the Molson Coors strike picket line in Fort Worth, Texas, told us: ‘If I heard my daughter went to one of the pro-Hamas protests, I’d pull her out of school. I didn’t send her to college to become an antisemite.’”
In the discussion period one participant asked about U.S. President Joseph Biden’s threat to deny weapons to the Israeli army if it moves into Rafah to defeat Hamas. Fruit answered, “This helps to expose the reality that Washington has no interest in defending Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people. It is acting in the economic and political interests of the capitalist rulers in the U.S. who are looking to ensure stability and profitable relations with Arab capitalist regimes in the Middle East, as well as Iran.”
After the forum, Canadian National train conductor Giulio Archambeault told the Militant, “I learned things here I didn’t know about the wars that are going on. Rail workers here need to show solidarity with rail workers all over North America, the U.S. and Mexico. This was an important aspect of the discussion.”
Retired teacher and union activist Josette Hurtubise told the Militant the Pathfinder book Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity “shows that things are always changing and that it is possible for us to change the world. When you understand this, then the next question is, ‘Where do I fit into this process?’”
Fruit answered this question appealing for all those present to endorse and support the SWP campaign and to join the Communist League. “There is no better thing you can do with your life.”
