“Whether the Democrats or Republicans win control of the Senate or House this year, workers will lose,” said Paul Mailhot, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New York, speaking at a campaign event Oct. 31.
“Capitalist politicians band together when it comes to maintaining the system of exploitation and to push their economic crises onto the backs of working people. We can expect the bosses will be emboldened in the coming period to impose lower wages and more dangerous working conditions to help wealthy capitalist families boost their profits.
“High prices will continue to make life for working people and our families more difficult. And both Democrats and Republicans will call for an ever larger war budget as competition among capitalist rivals over resources, markets and labor power pose the danger of new and more destructive wars.
“The working class needs the Socialist Workers Party. The only party in the United States today whose purpose is to educate and organize the working class in order to establish a workers government, which will abolish capitalism in the U.S. and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism,” Mailhot said.
Over the last week, 141 new readers got Militant subscriptions and 153 books by SWP and other revolutionaries were sold. The international campaign by the SWP and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia and the U.K. to sell 1,150 Militant subscriptions and an equal number of books continues through Nov. 17. To date $73,863 has been collected toward the $140,000 SWP Party-Building Fund, which will help cover the party’s work.
Jamal Dowling, a dockworker in Miami, member of the International Longshoremen’s Association and longtime reader of the Militant, attended the Militant Labor Forum Oct. 31 to hear the Socialist Workers Party candidates.
“I’ve read the Militant since the early 2000s, and it’s the best newspaper,” he told campaign supporters. “It has information you can’t get anywhere else about the labor movement and what’s going on in the world.” He purchased Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary Víctor Dreke.
A campaign team sold three Pathfinder titles and several copies of the Militant earlier in the day at the ILA union hall, where workers get their job assignments.
A campaign supporter who works as a hotel housekeeper in Miami told the Militant some of her co-workers had recently gotten a number of Pathfinder titles. One worker from Colombia bought The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. Her Jewish grandparents had been pressured to leave Spain and her daughter was worried about the sharp rise in Jew-hatred. “We must educate ourselves to understand what is going on in the world,” she said.
Another co-worker from Grenada bought New International no. 6, featuring The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop by Steve Clark. “I saw the corruption, the treachery of Bernard Coard, and what they did to our extraordinary leader Maurice Bishop,” he said. “Cuba stood by us through our struggle, what a people. What the U.S. government is doing to them is criminal.” He said he wanted the article because “I want the analysis of what happened.”
Oppose Washington’s wars!
Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of California, campaigned with supporters at the Día de los Muertos Festival in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland Nov. 1. An annual event for more than three decades, this year’s theme was defense of immigrant workers: “The struggle continues: We are here and we’re not leaving.”
“We’re opposed to Washington’s wars,” Trowe told JoAnna Varela, a teacher’s aide who stopped at the campaign table with her family. “We call for a massive jobs program, a cost-of-living adjustment to raise wages and benefits when prices go up, and amnesty to change the legal status of millions of immigrant workers.”
“It’s important that you are campaigning for the working class,” Varela told Trowe. “I worry about the future our children face. Artificial intelligence is being used to destroy jobs and undermine literacy.”
“But AI, like any technology, is just a tool,” Trowe said. “In the hands of the capitalists it can be tremendously destructive. But when workers take power we will use science to benefit humanity and enrich, not undermine, our culture.”
Varela bought a subscription to the Militant and Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Participants at the festival overall got four Militant subscriptions and 12 Pathfinder books.
Rebecca Williamson, SWP candidate for Congress in Washington state, and Michele Smith, a party member, campaigned door to door in Tukwila, outside Seattle, Oct. 27.
“Its really hard right now for working people,” Ebrima Sallah, an Amazon warehouse worker, told them. While Amazon makes billions, he said, “if I don’t work overtime, I can’t pay the rent.”
Sallah subscribed to the Militant and bought Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. “I want to get them because of the information you brought me,” he said. “You have a lot of books behind what you’re saying. You don’t hear this anywhere else.”
The Communist League in Australia launched its campaign in the March 2027 New South Wales state elections at a Militant Labour Forum in Sydney, Nov. 1. Robert Aiken, a forklift driver, is the Communist League candidate for the Legislative Council.
“Our campaign starts with what working people are capable of doing,” Aiken said. “We can chart a course to take political power and reorganize society from top to bottom in the interests of the working majority, that is what the toilers in Cuba showed was possible. We will be getting out the truth about Cuba and defending its socialist revolution and its record of internationalist aid to liberation struggles worldwide.”
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