SWP Vice Presidential candidate Richter:
‘Defending Israel’s right to exist is in the interests of the world working class’
LOS ANGELES — “Hamas’ so-called Al-Aqsa Flood — their name for the deadly pogrom they carried out in Israel a little over a year ago — was a declaration of war,” Socialist Workers Party vice presidential candidate Dennis Richter told a public meeting here Oct. 13.
“This is a war with the intended goal of destroying Israel and the Jews, orchestrated by the bourgeois clerical regime in Iran,” Richter said. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the other Iranian government-sponsored groups are attacking Israel from seven different directions. They share the goal of killing and expelling Jews from the region.
Richter and SWP presidential candidate Rachele Fruit explain that the state of Israel was established in 1948 after imperialist rulers in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere following World War II barred their doors to Jews who had survived the Holocaust. He also detailed the Nazi roots of the political forces that founded Hamas.
He described the blows Israel has made against Hamas in Gaza and more recently against Hezbollah. In response to this progress, the Iranian government launched 180 ballistic missiles into Israel Oct. 1. Not all of them were shot down, showing the danger to Jews there from the reactionary rulers in Tehran, Richter said. He also pointed to reports that the Iranian government is close to having enough enriched material to prepare four nuclear bombs.
“Israel is the only country in the world that provides a refuge for Jews and will defend that refuge arms in hands,” the socialist candidate said. “Defeat of Israel’s right to exist would be a brutal setback for Jews, Palestinians, toilers across the Middle East and workers of the world.”
He said the fight against Jew-hatred can only be resolved as working people of all religions and nationalities join in the struggle to end capitalist rule. And there will be no progress toward working people taking political power without a fight against all expressions of Jew-hatred.
The Biden administration tells Israel not to attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites, nor its oil-producing capacity. The U.S. imperialist rulers only care about defending their own economic and political interests. They want “stability — for their oil profits in the region and protection of their maritime shipping,” Richter said.
The 2024 election, like all elections under capitalism, is designed to mask the class nature of bourgeois society. They tell workers, who they look down on, you have no choice but to pick the lesser evil of their candidates. And that workers can’t do anything about the blows that are, and will be, struck against them by the bosses and their government as the rulers face stiffening international competition for markets and resources, and declining profit rates.
Richter said Donald Trump and Kamala Harris try to appeal to the working class for votes. Trump now claims the Republican Party is a party of the working class. He picked James David Vance as his vice presidential candidate, who emphasizes his roots growing up in poverty in Ohio and Kentucky. Vance says less about the millions he’s made since as a Yale Law graduate and venture capitalist.
“Harris’ running mate, Timothy Walz, paints himself as a regular guy who likes to hunt. He went out on the first day of pheasant season for a photo op,” Richter said. “But videos show he didn’t know how to load a shotgun.”
Richter noted the pitch both presidential campaigns are making to workers who are Black. He said former President Barack Obama has berated Black men for their allegedly backward views about women.
“I’m speaking to men directly,” Obama scolded an audience Oct. 10. “You just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That condescending attitude toward working people is common to the upper-middle-class meritocratic layers that Obama and Harris are part of.
Union struggles: a sign of the times
Richter gave examples of union struggles he has participated in as he’s toured across the country and internationally, the solidarity he’s seen being extended by workers to one another, and the self-confidence that workers acquire in the course of these fights. This is a sign of the times, he said, different from a few years ago.
The SWP candidates “are campaigning on a straightforward and realistic program,” Richter said, “for workers and our allies to defend ourselves and to advance toward taking political power into our own hands.
“The working class has the strength necessary to become the class that rules America. What’s necessary is to understand our power and to use it.” Cuba’s socialist revolution “showed the capacities of working people. It stands as a powerful example for us today.”
Richter said he and Fruit explain that workers and our unions need to build a party of labor, so we can “go into politics on our own account — class against class — not simply on election day, but to lead a social movement 365 days a year.”
In the discussion that followed his talk, one participant asked about the International Longshoremen’s Association’s battle with the shipping companies over automation. “The problem is not automation or artificial intelligence,” Richter said. “We are not opposed to making work easier. We don’t want to go back to using hooks to unload ships.
“The question is how to protect the working class in the face of capital’s assault on jobs, wages and working conditions,” he said. “Everyone should have a right to a job.”
Another participant said it seems that young workers today don’t understand what a union is.
“For years the unions were shrinking and there were fewer big labor battles. But this is changing today,” Richter said. “Young workers in union situations are increasing being pushed to fight and seeing that ‘an injury to one is injury to all.’ This will accelerate as working-class struggles expand.”
During his presentation the socialist candidate described how revolutionary leadership emerges from class struggle battles in the U.S., pointing to the example of Farrell Dobbs. He was a young worker in a Minneapolis coal yard in the early 1930s.
“He was part of the ‘people from nowhere,’” Richter said. And he became “the central organizer of the strikes and organizing drives that brought hundreds of thousands into the Teamsters union in the Midwest. He went on to become the Socialist Workers Party national secretary.”
More like Farrell Dobbs will emerge as the class struggle deepens, he said.
