MINNEAPOLIS — “I know you! I already voted for you,” Timothy Frankland called out to Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, after seeing her walking the picket line Oct. 1 in support of his union, the American Postal Workers.
“The Socialist Workers Party, you’re the only ones who put forward a program for workers,” Frankland said. Since then he mailed in his endorsement of the campaign and a contribution.
They were part of some 50 workers from around the state gathered outside the post office in Eagan, Minnesota, to push their demands for more staffing and a new contract, one of 90 rallies around the country that day.
Chris Pennock and Tim Bash of the National Association of Letter Carriers came to show support to fellow APWU postal workers. NALC members have been working without a contract for over 500 days. Both unions are barred from striking by the federal government.
“Neither of the two parties that have access to power stands for the working class,” Bash told Fruit. “I wish there was a working-class alternative.” The SWP campaign explains that workers need to build a party of labor based on the unions, to organize all working people in their millions.
Fruit also spoke at a well-attended rally Oct. 1. She described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and how its consequences are turned into a catastrophe for working people as a result of the profit system. “Over 225 deaths and rising, neighborhoods flattened, millions lost power,” Fruit said.
“This is not a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ event,” she said. “This social catastrophe will last for years.”
Fruit addressed the broader devastation confronting working people worldwide as a result of the capitalist crisis and the growing threat of more wars.
The U.S. rulers “seek to expand their economic, military and political control throughout the world, just like their competitors do,” she said. “For decades they’ve deployed tens of thousands of troops, warships and jet fighters across the Middle East to protect their own imperialist interests,” Fruit said.
In Congress, she continued, “both Democrats and Republicans are discussing how much to raise the military budget. It’s now at $883.7 billion and bigger than the war budgets of the next nine largest countries combined.
“The drive toward war and plunder is inherent to imperialism,” she said. “No new capitalist world order is possible that would make the world any safer or more peaceful.” But the fight for workers power will open the door “to ending the exploitative and oppressive conditions that are the source of the capitalists’ wealth.”
Many workers ask, “Is this a realistic perspective in the U.S.?” Fruit said.
She pointed to the hundreds of thousands of workers who have walked picket lines in the last couple of years. “They’re fighting the skyrocketing costs of food, shelter, medical care, child care and elder care, as well as deadly working conditions.
“They see each other for the first time in a new light. They see their capacity for solidarity,” she said. “Many say they’re not fighting primarily for themselves but for future generations. Through union battles we learn there are no individual solutions. This is the beginning of our consciousness as a class.”
Fight for constitutional freedoms
Fruit pointed to the proud record of the toiling classes in the U.S., from the War of Independence, to the Second American Revolution that abolished slavery, “to the working-class uprisings that led to the organization of the industrial unions in the 1930s and that brought down Jim Crow segregation” decades later. These accomplishments show what the U.S. working class is capable of and bode well for future struggles, she said.
“All workers’ struggles are political struggles,” Fruit said. “What’s needed is a political party to mobilize and unite working people. It must be based on the unions and organize the whole working class to fight together to replace capitalist political power with a workers government.”
In the course of that struggle, Fruit pointed to the importance of defending constitutional protections. Both Democratic and Republican parties “are engaged in dangerous attacks on rights that working people need today,” she said. They target their opponents in capitalist politics. “If they use the entire state apparatus, they will surely find something they can prosecute you for. The frame-up is the stock-in-trade method for going after working-class fighters.”
She pointed to the number of indictments and FBI probes by Joseph Biden’s Justice Department, which claims political opponents are “agents” of foreign governments.
“So, the stakes for us are high. We seek ways to defend freedom of speech, assembly, worship, the right to bear arms and the right to due process. They will be critical to future battles. It is the working class that will have to fight to defend these protections — and defend them for everyone, including our political opponents and enemies — against infringements by the federal government.”
Fruit returned to the question of how revolutionary leadership of the working class will be forged. “There is only one way for working people to be exposed to the lessons of the international working class. That is through the Militant and the books by Socialist Workers Party leaders that SWP campaigners distribute,” and as they use their unions to take on attacks by the bosses and their government and get to meet and know party members.
She pointed to the party’s continuity going back to the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in 1917 and Cuba’s socialist revolution. “In both cases working people defied the most powerful forces on earth and won,” she said. The Cuban Revolution shows “how social relations get changed and how people change. And we fight like hell to defend it.
“Working-class political power is the way we can begin to take our future into our own hands, to begin to solve all national oppression and to open the road to women’s emancipation,” Fruit said. “We hope you will endorse our campaign and join us.”