https://themilitant.com/2018/09/08/swp-we-need-independent-working-class-political-action/
SWP SPEAKS WITH, FOR WORKING PEOPLE
SWP: We need independent working-class political action
By Emma Johnson
Vol. 82/No. 34
September 17, 2018
Alyson Kennedy, left, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas, met Uber
driver Jesus Alvarado on his doorstep in Grand Prairie, Aug. 20. He said
he almost became homeless after losing his job in 2008. “Working people
need to unify to fight bosses’ attacks,” Kennedy said.
Militant/George Chalmers
Alyson Kennedy, left, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas, met Uber
driver Jesus Alvarado on his doorstep in Grand Prairie, Aug. 20. He said
he almost became homeless after losing his job in 2008. “Working people
need to unify to fight bosses’ attacks,” Kennedy said.
Members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. and
sister Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K.
build their political activity around reaching out to working people on
their doorsteps in cities, towns and rural areas. They find real
interest in discussing the historic changes and imperialist decay
worldwide and how to chart a way forward for the working class and the
labor movement.
The party is stepping up campaigning, speaking out as tribunes for the
oppressed and exploited. It stresses the need to unite working people
across all the divisions the capitalist rulers foist on us.
The heart of these conversations is that workers must chart a course of
independent political action to gain the confidence and experience to
overturn the capitalist system.
SWP Candidates“Working people must be independent of the capitalist
rulers, their parties and their state. We must build a revolutionary
movement capable of taking power and organize a society that is not
based on profits,” Alyson Kennedy, an SWP member in Dallas and the
party’s candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas, told Jesus Alvarado as
they met Aug. 20 on his doorstep in Grand Prairie, west of Dallas.
Alvarado told Kennedy he lost his job at a fabrication company in the
2008 capitalist economic crisis.
“I almost ended up homeless,” he said. “Now I’ve been an Uber driver for
two years.”
“Yes, the economy is growing now,” Kennedy responded. “You see hiring
signs everywhere. But to improve stagnant wages and increasingly
dangerous conditions, we need to build a movement of working people.
Nothing will be given to us.”
Alvarado decided to get Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? by SWP
National Secretary Jack Barnes, one of five books on special, saying he
liked the title. (See ad below.)
Marysol Ipina, who lives across the street from Alvarado, signed up for
the Militant after hearing what the SWP stands for. She told Kennedy she
has worked 15 years as a maintenance worker. Now the company told them
that with a new president coming in there will be more pressure to check
papers, targeting immigrants.
“The Trump administration represents the wealthy capitalists who want to
keep immigrant workers in fear of fighting for their rights,” Kennedy
said. “But this is nothing new. William Clinton signed the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, which has
underpinned the anti-working-class raids and deportations every
president since then has carried out, Democrats and Republicans alike.
“There is no sweeping ‘swing to the right’ by Trump, much less by the
workers who voted for him, seeking change,” said Kennedy. “His foreign
policy moves in Korea, the Mideast and elsewhere, no matter what his
intention, can open up space for working people to gain confidence to
fight and build the labor movement.”
Kennedy got a chance to come back to this theme when she met Jose
Contreras in Irving, Texas, Sept. 3. They talked about Korea and the
summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“They hide a lot of stuff,” Contreras said. “There’s a war between North
and South Korea that’s hidden. There was no South Korea or North Korea,
it used to be one country.”
“Yes, they hide that Korea was forcibly divided by the U.S. and the
Soviet Union after World War II and why the U.S. brutally invaded North
Korea during the Korean War,” Kennedy said. “Today there are tens of
thousands of U.S. troops there to enforce that division. Just think what
it will mean if the threat of war is gone, the threat of nuclear
missiles gone in that part of the world.”
Amnesty for unity
On Aug. 28, more than 300 immigration cops raided trailer manufacturer
Load Tail in Sumner, 100 miles northeast of Dallas, arresting 160
workers, charging they didn’t have papers the rulers’ consider proper.
“They came and raided from every entrance there was,” Dennis Perry, a
Load Tail worker, explained in the Aug. 28 Dallas Morning News. “They
drew their guns and told everyone to hit the ground. Some workers went
running. They were tackled. A few workers hid by shelves but were
quickly discovered.
Perry watched as dozens of his co-workers were taken away in buses.
“They are trying to support their families,” he said. “I couldn’t call
anyone on them. In my work, you get to know a lot of these guys.”
Kennedy and other SWP supporters traveled to Paris, 12 miles east of
Sumner, the day after the raid to talk with workers there.
“My brother was picked up by ICE,” Raciel Mozo told them. He’s in a
detention center in Oklahoma. They told us we’d have to come up with
$7,500 to get him out on bond.” Mozo said that a local church is
organizing support for the families.
The following day Kennedy spoke at a protest against the raid in front
of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Dallas.
“The bosses use attacks on immigrant workers to exploit their labor and
drive down wages and working conditions for the whole working class. And
the bosses and their parties, the Democrats and Republicans, blame the
‘Mexicans’ for stealing jobs and lowering wages,” she said. “Fighting
for amnesty for all workers without papers in the U.S. is a
life-and-death question for the labor movement and our fight for unity
and solidarity.”
‘Is the Labour Party the answer?’
“The Labour-Tories shell game is a trap,” Communist League member Pamela
Holmes told care worker Colin Johnson in Harlow, U.K., Sept. 1. “We need
a revolutionary workers party.”
Militant/Jonathan Silberman
“The Labour-Tories shell game is a trap,” Communist League member Pamela
Holmes told care worker Colin Johnson in Harlow, U.K., Sept. 1. “We need
a revolutionary workers party.”
“The government doesn’t care for working-class people,” Colin Johnson, a
retired care worker, told Communist League member Pamela Holmes when
they met Sept. 1 on his doorstep in Harlow, near London. “I’ve always
voted Labour as the lesser of two evils. But they seem much of the same.
It looks like they want to make us vote on Brexit again and again, until
we vote the way they want.”
“The Labour-Tories shell game is a trap, it gives the appearance that
workers have a choice,” said Holmes, a production line worker at a
nearby pharmaceutical plant. “Labour is also a capitalist party. It
pushes the line that workers should be looking to the capitalist rulers’
state for care and protection. But we need a political course completely
independent of the capitalist state, and a party that can lead a
revolutionary movement of millions to overthrow capitalist rule and
establish a workers and farmers government.”
Holmes explained that the Communist League is comprised of and led by
workers themselves. This struck a chord with Johnson.
“Sometimes you get a ‘leader’ who says popular things and gets into
government only to then act like those before him — and for himself!” he
said. “You see that in other countries too.”
He signed up for a Militant subscription and got a copy of Are They Rich
Because They’re Smart?
Knocking on doors in North Long Beach, California, SWP members Dennis
Richter, left, and Bill Arth met Jessica Herrera, who spoke about ICE
raid at 7-Eleven she works in.
Militant/Deborah Liatos
Knocking on doors in North Long Beach, California, SWP members Dennis
Richter, left, and Bill Arth met Jessica Herrera, who spoke about ICE
raid at 7-Eleven she works in.
While knocking on doors Aug. 22 in North Long Beach, California, Dennis
Richter, SWP member and the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate from
California, met 26-year-old Jessica Herrera. She told him that she works
at a 7-Eleven store that was raided by immigration cops. She said one of
her co-workers was arrested and others fled.
“We can win most workers to the fight for amnesty,” Richter said. “They
don’t like factories being raided and their friends, neighbors and
co-workers being picked up by immigration cops.”
Herrera got Are They RichBecause They’re Smart? and her sister, a
student at a local community college, chose another book on special,
“It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The
Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class. She said
she is interested in conditions working people face in prison. They also
kicked in a contribution towards the party’s work.
To join in the SWP’s door-to-door discussions with fellow workers, or
learn more about the party, contact the nearest branch in the directory.
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In This Issue
Front Page Articles •‘Advance the revolutionary mobilization of workers’
•Veterans fight delays in gov’t disability benefits
•SWP: We need independent working-class political action
•Steelworkers at ArcelorMittal, US Steel protest concession demands
•Liberals disrupt Senate hearing in furor over Trump nomination
•Protest ‘Militant’ censorship by Florida, federal prison officials!
Feature Articles •Grenada Day participants hunger for revolutionary books
Also In This Issue •Indonesia: Teen jailed for abortion wins her freedom
•California protest demands ‘End solitary confinement!’
•Free Ukraine director on hunger strike from Siberia jail!
•Washington state teachers strike over pay, conditions
On the Picket Line •New Zealand bus drivers walk out over low pay, safety
Books of the Month •The history of the belated, bloody birth of US
imperialism
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