Fruit: ‘Two strikes on the front line of class struggle’
UNION CITY, N.J. — “Fuel prices are so high that truckers see little income and farmers get even less from what they produce,” Paul de Leon, a truck driver from Elizabeth told Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, as she campaigned at a truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike Sept. 27. There needs to be a way to earn a living, he said.
“This will be the way it is until workers run the country,” and we are capable of doing it, Fruit said. “Today workers are standing up. We build solidarity with these fights.”
“What are your ideas about bringing workers together?” de Leon asked. “I don’t see how you get across that bridge.”
“We are for a working-class movement, a party of labor, a political party to defend our interests,” Fruit said. “The Democrats and Republicans will never defend working-class interests. They are the bosses’ parties. Change starts on the picket line. When you see the 33,000 Machinists on strike at Boeing you can feel the power that our class has. Solidarity is key.”
To learn more about the party’s views, de Leon got a copy of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark.
The following day Fruit told a campaign meeting here that “for the last six months we have been talking about September as the month when 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association, 33,000 machinists at Boeing and 200,000 postal workers were facing contract deadlines. And now, here we are.
“As workers go through these fights, they gain experience and confidence to push harder for what’s needed,” she said. “After the nurses at three Pittsburgh hospitals won raises and better nurse-to-patient ratios, Katie Kiesel, a nurse and member of the SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania union, told the Militant it was only the start. Only when all nurses and hospital workers in the area stand together, Kiesel said, ‘can we completely transform heath care in this region. We’re committed to building a movement that achieves that.’”
In the past two years prices on food, rent, gas and other basic necessities have soared. As conditions of life deteriorate, and wars escalate, millions are being drawn into politics, looking for ways to fight for our survival. That’s why more workers today are organizing unions and using their unions.
“What is needed is a political party to mobilize and unite working people, independent of the boss parties,” Fruit said. “It must be a party based on the unions, that can organize the whole working class to fight together in a struggle to replace capitalist political power with a workers government.
“It’s a fight that can be won,” Fruit said. “That’s the single most important thing we have to learn from the Cuban Revolution.”
Capitalists’ crisis, not nature
“In the past 48 hours we’ve seen the devastation that comes as Hurricane Helene tore through the Gulf of Mexico, through Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and on up,” Fruit said. She pointed to the rising number of deaths and the 4 million without electrical power.
“Events like this affect our class worldwide, but there is only one country where the working class has been mobilized and organized to try to prevent the loss of life in disasters like this. And that’s in revolutionary Cuba where the working class is in power,” she said. The government ensures no one is abandoned during hurricanes, in stark contrast to the U.S. rulers’ conduct when storms hit here.
“The Cuban toilers — under the greatest of odds, facing an imperialist embargo — have shown the world what can be achieved, how social relations can change, how human beings will change. And the Socialist Workers Party fights like hell to defend their revolution,” Fruit said.
“We are a few days from the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre carried out by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad with help and direction from the reactionary capitalist government of Iran,” Fruit said.
That pogrom slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly Jewish civilians, left more than 5,000 wounded and seized 250 hostages. Rape and sexual violence were organized against women, and men — strategic, deliberate, celebrated and documented by the perpetrators.
“Oct. 7 was a moment of truth, a test for every political current and party,” Fruit said. “As we campaign in our unions and in working-class communities, we explain that Jew-hatred — a reflection of the crisis of capitalism — is a life-and-death question for the working class. We have to act against every move to slander, scapegoat and attack Jews.
“We defend Israel, which is a capitalist country, as a refuge for the Jews from anywhere in the world,” she said. It is the only country that will fight, arms in hand, against the slaughter of the Jews. “But Israel can’t solve the problem.”
Fight Jew-hatred, join Oct. 7 events
“The solution is tied to building a revolutionary working-class party of all nationalities in every country — including in Israel, and most importantly, in the U.S. — that works toward workers taking power.”
Fruit pointed to the remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.N. on Sept. 27. “My country is fighting for its life,” he said. “Israel yearns for peace, but our enemies seek our annihilation. … We will win because we don’t have a choice.”
He said there was a choice “between a historic reconciliation between Arabs and Jews or the tyranny and terror of more Oct. 7s.” Many U.N. representatives walked out during these remarks.
Fruit urged everyone at the meeting to join upcoming events marking the Oct. 7 pogrom.
“No new capitalist world order is possible that would make the world more peaceful,” Fruit said.
“Across Africa, governments are massively indebted to lenders like the World Bank, Washington and more recently to the rulers of China,” she pointed out. One participant in the campaign meeting asked about the debate at the United Nations over whether to give Africa, with 54 countries and some 1.5 billion people, two permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, but without veto power. “Is this an obstacle to getting solutions?” he asked.
“The U.N. came out of World War II and it’s a body of capitalist governments,” Fruit said. “They are the problem, contending to steal all the wealth from working people.
“Workers need to organize ourselves, tackle our problems like Thomas Sankara led working people in Burkina Faso to do,” she said, pointing to the 1983-87 popular democratic revolution in that West African country.
Join, build the SWP campaign
“There are five weeks left in this campaign,” John Studer, the Socialist Workers national campaign director, said during the discussion. “Workers know there is something deeply wrong with the economy. They abhor the Oct. 7 attack on Jews in Israel.
“The biggest discussion is whether the working class is capable of doing something about it. The SWP thinks it is and we want to discuss that with as many workers as possible. We want workers to break with the capitalist parties, endorse the SWP campaign and become part of it. Join with us at actions Oct. 1 to support postal workers and on Oct. 7.
Joanne Kuniansky, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, contributed to this article.
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