As the November elections in the U.S. draw closer, working people facing a choice of Donald Trump clones vs. middle-class, woke “socialists,” like Democratic Party candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, are looking for an alternative. Many who hear about the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party want to learn more about them.
Kevin Dwire, a member of the UNITE HERE union and the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Minnesota, and his campaign supporters got a good response from workers at the Labor Day picnic in Saint Cloud Sept 7.
Dwire showed Jay Hart — group chair of Steelworkers Local 1259 and a union safety director who works at a local box plant — the recent Militant article on how Department of Homeland Security agents targeted unionists and others who helped organize large, disciplined protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “Metro Surge” raids, arrests and deportations of immigrants in Minneapolis.
Hart said he backed the protests by the community and unions that succeeded in limiting mass arrests of Somalis and other immigrants in the area. “This is a fight we are not going to give up,” he said.
After looking at Dwire’s campaign flyer, Hart said he was disgusted with both Republicans and Democrats, but was thinking about giving the Democratic Socialists of America’s local candidate a shot.
“The DSA’s goal is to win workers, youths and others back into supporting the Democrats,” Dwire said. “Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans of any stripe have solutions for working people. They tell us to rely on them, not on our power as a working class. Our campaign says workers need to act independently of both parties.”
Attracted to the labor coverage in the Militant and interested in learning more about the party, Hart got a subscription to the paper.
‘I’m interested in your campaign’
“I’m interested in your campaign,” Austin Vaile, a teacher and caregiver, told Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of California, Sept. 3. Trowe, along with SWP members Betsey Stone and Andrea Morell, had set up a campaign table at the Fruitvale BART rail station in Oakland with signs opposing Washington’s criminal blockade of Cuba.
After looking over the Militant article, “Organize, build protests to demand US hands off Cuba,” — an eye-witness report from an international solidarity conference in Havana marking the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth — Vaile bought a subscription to the paper. He also got a copy of Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. It explains how education under capitalism is geared to prepare children for a life as exploited wage laborers, serving the interests of the bosses and their politicians.
Tom Schneitter, a tour guide, came up to the table wanting to know how the politics of the Socialist Workers Party differ from those of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Unlike the PSL, which champions Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel, as well as the reactionary regime in Tehran, “the SWP,” Trowe said, “opposes Washington’s war against Iran, supports the mass struggle being waged by workers and oppressed nationalities in Iran, and defends Israel’s defensive war to prevent the destruction of the only refuge for Jews in today’s reality of rising Jew-hatred.”
Schneitter was interested, saying he was troubled by the PSL’s longstanding support for Bashar al-Assad, the now overthrown dictator of Syria. His eyes lit up after looking over Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, George Novack and Mary-Alice Waters, a materialist and class explanation of history. He bought the book and got a subscription to the Militant.
To join upcoming campaigning teams as the Militant begins its fall campaign to publicize the SWP candidates, and expand the reach of the paper and books by SWP and other revolutionaries, from Cuba and elsewhere, contact the distributor nearest you.