Why you should endorse, join the SWP campaign
Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, and her running mate, Dennis Richter, speak for the historic line of march of the working class, explaining workers need to rely on ourselves and our capacities to fundamentally change the conditions we face.
In stark contrast, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris say working people should pick one of them to rely on, along with the two parties that have served the ruling capitalist class for decades.
Tens of millions of workers sense there is something deeply wrong with a social system that has led to falling life expectancy, plunging birthrates, widening class inequality, the madness of “woke” values, more world instability and the threat of more and deadlier wars. They want to discuss the root cause of the crises we face today and what the road forward is.
The SWP candidates tell the truth about the two most important questions workers confront:
• Every working-class struggle is a political struggle — class against class. To meet and overcome today’s crises we need to break with the bosses’ parties and build our own party, a party of labor. It will work to strengthen every union struggle, to unite all workers — organized or not — and draw all those exploited and oppressed by capital to fight for our common interests.
• The SWP candidates say that the working class in the U.S. can build the leadership we need and deserve out of our struggles and take on the most powerful ruling class in history. Workers can take political power into our own hands, and join fellow toilers worldwide in the fight to build a better world.
This perspective gets a hearing today because workers have seen hundreds of thousands of people just like them use unions in strikes and contract fights in recent years, winning solidarity, making gains against the bosses, gaining self-confidence and class consciousness.
The SWP campaign offers workers an opportunity to campaign for what you’re for, not who you’re against. Join us! Sign up to endorse Rachele Fruit for president! Introduce the campaign to your friends, family and co-workers.
Both of the bosses’ parties have taken steps to stabilize themselves, to try and present a more united and confident image. Donald Trump has united the Republicans, saying he and running mate J.D. Vance can lead a party that will stand for working people.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz claim to be the “unified, happy party,” anointed by Barack Obama. They do not mention the Biden administration, instead presenting themselves as the candidates of “change,” much as Obama did.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a fervent admirer of the Democratic Party ticket, gushed over their potential to win support outside the liberal urban metropolises. “MAGA voters surely live there,” she said, “but so do multiracial, college-educated Americans of all ages, orientations and ideals.” This points to what is increasingly the social base of their party, dominated by the millions-strong upper-middle-class “enlightened meritocracy.” When Walz gave his first speech on the campaign trail in Philadelphia Aug. 6, he made no mention of the economic crisis workers face, but focused on gun control, student debt, the environment, entitlements, reproductive freedom and attacks on Donald Trump that were followed by audience chants of “Lock him up!”
Harris and Walz both point to Harris’ career as a prosecutor and California attorney general as a great strength. But many workers have experiences with the capitalist “justice” system, and don’t consider the people who run it as heroes.
The “lock him up” euphoria reflects the yearslong drive of the Democrats to deal blows to constitutional rights in their lust to put Trump behind bars and ruin his family.
The Socialist Workers Party says defense of these rights, won over centuries of political battles, is one of the central issues in the class struggle today.
Trump offers no alternative
Trump says he speaks for the interests of the working class, but argues the way to create jobs is to strengthen the hands of U.S. bosses. And he says the biggest obstacle to jobs for “Americans” is immigrant workers. This is false, serving only to deepen divisions among workers, weaken our class and our unions.
Trump told an Aug. 8 press conference, “We are very close to a world war” and Biden and Harris “don’t know how to handle it.” His platform calls for “peace through strength” and ensuring the U.S. military is “the strongest and most powerful in the world.”
The threat of wider wars amid today’s conflicts around the world is very real. But the U.S. rulers aren’t a bulwark against war. They’re a central actor in the conflicts among imperialist powers, moving to strengthen and use their military might to defend the capitalist rulers’ markets, profits and spheres of interest against all rivals.
The Democrats and Republicans have differences over foreign policy, but they rest on common capitalist interests. Time and again they united behind foreign interventions — in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and more.
The working class needs our own foreign policy, based on our common interests here and around the world. The road to ending the U.S. rulers’ drive toward a third world war is by building parties capable of leading working people to replace dog-eat-dog capitalist rule with a workers government.
Key to this perspective today is the fight against Jew-hatred.
“The Socialist Workers Party is part of the continuity in the fight against Jew-hatred that goes back to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Socialist should never support any crime against humanity in the name of revolution,” Rachele Fruit told the press three days after the murderous Hamas anti-Jewish pogrom left over 1,200 people dead in Israel.
“Working people cannot rely on the imperialist democracies to protect Jews,” she said. “Washington and London closed the door on Jewish immigration before, during and after the Second World War. That fact, and the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities by the Stalinists in Moscow and elsewhere, led to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution.’ That’s why Israel had to be and has to be a refuge for the Jews.”
The Socialist Workers Party campaign is looking to win more endorsers for the Fruit-Richter campaign. They are looking beyond the November election, toward building a powerful working-class party that can end capitalist exploitation and oppression once and for all. This is a movement to get involved in! Contact the campaign headquarters nearest you, listed in the directory.
