http://themilitant.com/2017/8129/812904.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 29 August 7, 2017
SWP takes campaigning deeper into working class
BY ELLEN BRICKLEY
RAVENA, N.Y. — “The rulers’ political crisis is deepening,” Margaret
Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Albany, told
Danielle Sitterly, after knocking on her door here July 22. “Neither
Democrats nor Republicans have a solution to the economic decline, and
millions of workers are losing confidence in both of them, and in the
political swamp in Washington. Only the working class has a solution —
to organize a movement of millions that can end the dictatorship of
capital.”
“To me it’s more like a tyranny,” said Sitterly, a disabled worker who
cares for her three children.
Trowe underlined the importance of organizing the unorganized and
supporting unions to strengthen the fight against growing boss attacks
on workers.
But sometimes unions don’t do enough to support workers’ struggles,
Sitterly responded. “My husband works at a big plant where he’s forced
to work massive overtime,” she said.
“In many unions the officials don’t organize the kind of fight necessary
to take on the bosses’ attacks,” Trowe said. “They tell us to rely on
the Democrats to protect us. But this is a deadly trap. We need to
organize ourselves, to strengthen our unions into democratic, fighting
organizations capable of taking on the employers and both their
political parties, the Democrats and Republicans.”
Sitterly told Trowe that she was concerned with the radicals and
liberals on the campuses who “are intolerant of any point of view they
disagree with. They shout down people with different ideas or try to get
them fired.”
Trowe described how she and other SWP members recently went to
Middlebury College in Vermont after some students there shouted down
conservative academic Charles Murray and physically attacked him and the
professor who invited him to speak.
“We debated with students, explaining how suppressing free discussion
always hurts the working-class movement,” said Trowe, showing Sitterly
the book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and
Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, which
contains a polemic against Murray’s book, The Bell Curve.
“We need to debate with people like Murray, who say there is an
intelligent ‘cognitive elite’ that is rich and in power because they’re
smart,” Trowe said.
“Behind the election of Donald Trump as president, the rulers see the
working class beginning to discuss how they can assert their class
interests against the growing carnage of capitalism they face,” said
Trowe. “They increasingly fear the working class because they expect
growing class battles where workers learn our worth and capacity to
build a successful revolutionary fight for political power.” Sitterly
got the book and subscribed to the Militant, and said she wants to stay
in touch.
SWP members and supporters around the country are stepping up their
efforts to get out to workers’ neighborhoods as well as strike picket
lines and social protests to discuss what our class faces today and the
party’s program.
In doing so, we introduce workers to Are They Rich Because They’re
Smart?; The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record; Malcolm X, Black
Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, all by Jack Barnes, and Is
Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.
❖
Campaigning in North Minneapolis July 22, David Rosenfeld, Socialist
Workers Party candidate for Minneapolis mayor, met Catrice Lynch, a
preschool teacher’s aide who goes to college part time. “I can’t afford
health care even though I’m working 40 hours a week,” she said.
“Insurance is designed to make profits and prevent you from going to the
doctor,” responded Rosenfeld. “The solution is to fight for health care
for all, not health insurance for profit. We can make gains on this as
we organize to unify our class and fight for political power, like they
did in Cuba with their revolution in 1959.”
Last week campaign supporters in Minneapolis organized teams throughout
the area to introduce the party, selling 12 Militant subscriptions and
11 campaign books by party leaders. They gathered 164 signatures for a
total of 331 out of the 750 needed to go well over the filing
requirement to place Rosenfeld’s name on the ballot.
❖
While visiting the Skyway neighborhood just south of Seattle, Mary
Martin, SWP candidate for Seattle mayor met Elisa, a house cleaner who’s
originally from El Salvador.
“There are real problems in every country including in my home country
and here in the U.S.,” Elisa said, pointing to the growing drug trade
that preys on working people.
“The drug trade is a big business under capitalism,” Martin said. “And
this won’t end until the working class removes the capitalist class from
political power through a socialist revolution. One of the first things
the revolutionary government in Cuba did after workers and farmers took
political power there was to close down the gambling, drug and
prostitution trade that devastated the lives of many.” Elisa purchased
the Spanish edition of Are They Rich Because
They’re Smart?
To join SWP members campaigning in your area, contact the branch nearest
you listed on
page 4.
Tony Lane in Minneapolis and Edwin Fruit in Seattle contributed to this
article.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home