Across the U.S., Socialist Workers Party members and supporters of the Militant are spreading the word about today’s union struggles, discussing why the fight against Jew-hatred and Israel’s moves to destroy and dismantle Hamas are crucial to defending workers’ interests and what can be done to end the root cause of the capitalist crisis. They point to the need to build a party that acts on workers’ capacities to take political power into our own hands.
The Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. are part of the effort.
The international campaign has the goal of selling 1,300 Militant subscriptions, and the same number of Pathfinder books by party leaders and other revolutionaries, between Sept. 20 and Nov. 18.
The SWP’s work is financed solely by contributions from working people. This campaigning includes the SWP’s Party-Building Fund with a target of raising $140,000.
Edwin Fruit writes from Minneapolis that the party branch there has raised its quota from $5,500 to $6,700.
In Parsippany, New Jersey, Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of the state, and other party members campaigned door to door Oct. 19. They sold five subscriptions to the paper and two books.
They met a family of immigrant workers who wanted to discuss why anti-immigrant attacks are increasing.
“The government isn’t trying to drive out 11 million undocumented workers,” Kuniansky said. “It’s trying to make them more vulnerable, the better to impose the bosses’ demands for lower wages and to divide the working class.” That’s why the SWP calls for amnesty for workers without papers, she said, and urges unions to back protests against deportations.
Taking the Militant and the party’s campaigns door to door in working-class neighborhoods is at the heart of the fall effort.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, Kayne Reles, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Militant subscriber, met Katy LeRougetel, Communist League candidate for mayor of Montreal, and campaign supporter Dan Grant Oct. 19. Reles asked what he could do to raise union consciousness among workers he knows.
“We have to point to the more than 100,000 workers on strike in Canada,” LeRougetel said. “Many workers are looking to use their unions.” Through such struggles workers gain confidence in themselves and their unions and begin to broaden their horizons.
“What’s needed is a revolutionary party that can lead working people in the struggles that lie ahead to take power from the capitalists into our own hands,” LeRougetel said. Later, she and Reles visited picketing British Columbia General Employees’ Union members to show support for their fight.
Reles renewed his subscription to the Militant and bought five books. These included The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark; New International no. 10 on Imperialism’s March Toward Fascism and War; and The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
So-called No Kings marches were held around the country Oct. 18 by liberals and middle-class radicals who point to Republican President Donald Trump as the problem. They aim to boost support for the U.S. imperialists other main party, the Democrats. Some participants, looking for serious answers to what workers face, were interested in the SWP’s call for workers to break with both of the bosses’ parties.
Alissa Belcher came up to the SWP campaign table at the action in Seattle after reading the sign, “Fighting Jew-hatred is a working-class issue.”
“I’m a Jew who feels threatened in this world,” she told Jacob Perasso, SWP candidate for Seattle mayor.
Perasso explained the SWP backs Israel’s defensive war to defeat and dismantle Hamas. The fate of the Jewish people is bound up with the working-class struggle to replace capitalist rule, he said, especially here in the U.S. Belcher signed up for a subscription to learn more.
SWP members sold six subscriptions and three books at the action. Party campaigners at similar protests in Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Fort Worth, Texas, sold 13 subscriptions and 26 books.
To help get the Militant and books on revolutionary working-class politics into more people’s hands or to make a contribution to the SWP Party-Building Fund, contact a distributor.
