Socialist Workers Party wins new hearing

‘Workers need to break from the two parties of the bosses’

By Roy Landersen
Vol. 89/No. 41
November 17, 2025
Joanne Kuniansky, candidata del Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores a gobernador de Nueva Jersey, trajo solidaridad a protesta de auxiliares de vuelo en aeropuerto de Newark.
Militant/Jane HarrisJoanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New Jersey, brought her campaign and working-class solidarity to flight attendants’ rally at Newark airport in March.

SWP candidates point road forward for working class

WEST NEW YORK, N.J. — “The Socialist Workers Party and all of its candidates are part of the working class. Workers uniting to act in our class interests is the only way to change this system of capitalism, which is not fixable by reforms,” Joanne Kuniansky, SWP candidate for governor of New Jersey, told Laura Ingle in a live interview on NewsNation Nov. 2. NewsNation is a cable news network that reaches 65 million households across the U.S.

The SWP, which was founded in 1938 to continue the program of the Bolshevik Party in Russia against the counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin, has an unbroken record of providing a voice in the interests of working people. In the 2025 elections, the SWP candidates stood out in presenting an independent working-class alternative.

The working class lacks any sizable party of its own today. As rising union and other working-class struggles run up against the bosses’ monopoly of political power, working people increasingly see the need to break with the bosses’ parties and build a mass party of labor. One that can fight for the working class to challenge which class rules, to take political power into its own hands.

Paul Mailhot, left, SWP candidate for mayor of New York, at May Day rally. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor reflects growth of antisemitic, meritocratic middle-class radical layers. His campaign drew disaffected youth back into the Democrats, one of U.S. rulers’ two parties.
Militant/Mike ShurPaul Mailhot, left, SWP candidate for mayor of New York, at May Day rally. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor reflects growth of antisemitic, meritocratic middle-class radical layers. His campaign drew disaffected youth back into the Democrats, one of U.S. rulers’ two parties.

The only way forward for working people, Kuniansky said in the interview, is “breaking from the Democrats and Republicans and organizing a political party that fights in our interests for a workers government to prevent another world war.”

Ingle introduced the SWP candidate as a “union fighter” who worked in oil refineries and Walmart. Kuniansky added that she had recently brought solidarity to picket lines across the state during strikes by nurses and longshoremen.

“Two key issues that we get a big response to,” the SWP candidate said, are “the possibility of another world war” and the “complete devastation of workers’ wages and conditions” under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They rule over mounting assaults by the bosses and government attacks on constitutional protections.

Kuniansky pointed to Washington’s dispatch of warships, bombers and troops around Venezuela where they are “acting as judge, jury and executioner” and threaten the people of Cuba. She said she backs the courageous fight by Ukrainian working people against Moscow’s brutal invasion, as well as Israel’s defensive war to decisively defeat Hamas and prevent another Holocaust. Demolishing the jihadist group, she added, “will push back Jew-hatred, which is not just a Mideast question, it’s an international question.”

New Jersey has had the third highest rate of antisemitic attacks in the U.S., the SWP candidate noted. “This is right across the river from New York City” where Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic Party candidate for mayor. His campaign “has been part of normalizing antisemitism,” she said.

The SWP explains Jew-hatred is a deadly threat to the working class. Antisemitic attacks are used by the rulers to try to deflect workers’ attention from the real enemy — capitalism — and in times of sharp capitalist crisis, to turn to fascism as their rule is threatened.

Today, workers face Stalinist and other middle-class leftist anti-working-class  currents in an unfolding polarization. Violence against political opponents and Jew-hatred are being normalized.

“Many workers tell us life is worse” today, with speedups on the job and the erosion of working conditions, the SWP candidate said. “Kids can’t move out of the house and start a family and have a job where they can afford to spend time with their family.”

A key question is the demand for amnesty, “the only way to stop the pariah status of immigrants today” and unite the working class. SWP campaigners talking politics with people on their doorsteps in working-class communities or among unionists on picket lines get a good response, she said.

Ingle cited an Axios survey of college students’ opinions, which said 60% preferred socialism to 40% who preferred capitalism. She asked what the SWP candidate would say to voters who are confused or worried by this.

“We’re not ‘socialists’ like the Democratic Socialists’ Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders,” Kuniansky replied. “What they’re doing is trying to draw more young people back into the Democratic Party,” which, she noted, is the oldest party of the U.S. capitalist rulers.

The SWP ran its own candidate for mayor of New York, Paul Mailhot.

“We’re not for a big welfare state,” which is what the Democrats advocate, she said. The SWP is “for jobs, good jobs and the union movement fighting for that. We’re for a public works program to provide jobs at union wages led by the union movement.

“We fight for cost-of-living increases in contracts so that your wages go up with inflation,” Kuniansky said. “We fight for jobs that pay a wage high enough to afford a family and have a schedule where you can spend time with your family.

“The working class is capable of acting in its own interests,” the SWP candidate concluded. “We put forward a course of action to fight” along a road for working people of town and country to come to power and end the evils of the capitalist system.

Kuniansky’s interview can be found at: https://pilot.latakoo.com/asset/22170735?share=svtoi5nowub4vwgyzsubdxpwzi4k7ntb